Sunday, September 23, 2012

With Gentle Good Works


With Gentle Good Works
25th Sunday in Ordinary Time 
Robert J. Elder, Pastor           
September 23, 2012            

James 3:13-4:3, 7-8

Who is wise and understanding among you?
Show by your good life
that your works are done with gentleness born of wisdom.

What do you suppose would characterize gentle good works? James suggests that they are works that are “born of wisdom.” But how is one to know when the good we do is “born of wisdom”? James suggests that there is one kind of wisdom that is earthbound, and another kind of wisdom that is “from above.” He knows that our spirits are at war within us because we have a desire for the things of the world, and the wisdom of the world teaches us to want – even to crave – these things. Yet it is through gentle works on behalf of others – works that set self aside in favor of the good of others – it is by this that we can live lives characterized by a different sort of wisdom, a wisdom from above.
James identifies two kinds of wisdom. We know what they both are, if we just stop for a moment to think about it. The first kind of wisdom is the kind with which we are entirely too familiar. It is what James thinks of as earthly wisdom, worldly wisdom. This is not a philosopher’s “straw man” wisdom, some obviously phony wisdom that James sets up for a fall from the beginning, like someone who is the obvious, scripted villain at a professional wrestling match, someone we know to jeer from the beginning. This is not something about which we can all nod our heads knowingly, having long since grown beyond it into fully mature Christian wisdom. James knows the reality of life in the world is never that simple and straightforward. He knows that conversion to the way of Christ requires conversion, turning, over and over again, time and again. It requires hundreds of little conversions from an earthbound existence which seems entirely too normal for us to see it unless we are given new, gospel glasses to see it for what it is. And even then, we often fail to see it. James knows this, and we do too.
James knows there is double-mindedness even among those who long to be the friends of God, followers of Christ. The wisdom of the world is not easy to avoid, much less abandon. A friend of mine once said that in today’s world, it is as if the radio station virtually everyone listens to has these for its call letters WIFM – “What’s In It for Me?” The percentage of Americans who consider themselves to be happy peaked somewhere in the 1950s, and has been decreasing ever since. In an era less threatened by nuclear destruction than in the 1950s, and more wealthy by anyone’s material measure, why is this so?
I grew up in Oklahoma, was just there July for a High School reunion after having been away for probably 25 years, and I had almost forgotten the reverence with which Will Rogers is still held there. Remember his brief thought on the self-justifying mental gymnastics we can do when it comes to the amount of money we think we need to be happy? He said, in his characteristically concise way, “Whenever someone says, ‘It’s not the money, it’s the principle of the thing,’ it’s the money!” We can be self-serving even when we try to fool ourselves into thinking we are not. About a dozen years ago, the late Meg Greenfield wrote in a Newsweek article that the most dangerous people in our world are not the ones who lust for money or sex, but the ones who lust for “greatness,” for power and influence, for notice by “history.” Some such people will subvert democracy, will destroy other people, and often are so singlemindedly dedicated to their cause that they cannot regard as truth anything that did not come from their own mouths.
This is “What’s in it for me” raised to a level that passes for worldly wisdom. It confronts us every day, and is seductive in part because it is so familiar, seems to be so true in its context. It is inscribed not only in the things we read, see on TV, and hear in conversation in the surrounding culture, but also because it is in our very hearts.[1] When we feel ambiguous about our faith, when some of the basic tenets of our faith strike us as “not realistic,” or “too lofty,” we can be sure we are being seduced by worldly wisdom, and James knows it is not easy to sluff it off. We must be converted to the wisdom of the ways of Christ over and over again, because there are so many times when we fail to see it as wisdom at all, and fall back on a more familiar, more earth-bound wisdom instead.
James declared that most of the difficulties within the fellowship of Christ, not to mention in the world at large, come from the conflict between our own internal cravings for things we do not have, and our higher, more altruistic, better nature. When our cravings for the material things of the world take over, we look into our spirits, sense an emptiness there, and presume that we can fill it with the goods we can obtain. James called this adultery, not in a sexual but in its theological sense, as a primary love for something other than God is always described in the Old and New Testaments, a love for other than the One to whom we have promised our devotion. The only way to fill our hearts by our own power is first to forsake the power and presence of God.
 “Complete consistency in life is not given by a first commitment. It is slowly and painfully won through many conversions.” This helps us better to understand “what James means by faith being tested through many trials (1:2-3), and why it should be counted as all joy when such trials occur. Each...test is a possibility for growth and new conversion from the measure of the world to the measure” of the kingdom.[2]
James demonstrates that envy leads directly toward murder, as, earlier, he had said that desire gives birth to sin; and when sin comes to full term it brings forth death (1:15). Modern American advertising culture is virtually chained to the logic of envy, by which you buy cottage cheese because you want slim legs like the model in the commercial, or a new Lexus because you want the girl in the commercial talking on the phone with her friend about her blind date to gaze, slack-jawed at you, as you step from the car. We live in a time in which “to be” seems almost synonymous with “to have,” and to have more means to be more, guaranteed to generate a “certain sorrow” when someone else has something that we do not, accompanied by the desire to do whatever is necessary to acquire what is not possessed. When children murder each other for a pair of athletic shoes or a team logo jacket, we see James words about envy leading to murder coming true with a vengeance, all in a culture of manufactured need to which we are blind most of the time.
The antidote to all this worldly wisdom is a wisdom that comes from above, and we begin to acquire this wisdom as we move toward doing works which give evidence of the things we say we believe. Gentle good works, the kind that do not require trumpet fanfares or award ceremonies or any notice at all. Gentle good works will never win the Nobel Prize, but they are the stuff of wisdom that comes from above.
The Martyred Salvadoran Archbishop, Oscar Romero, placed it in perspective for me in a prayer he wrote before he was murdered in his church by those who sought a more earthbound submission from him:
A Prayer of Archbishop Romero[3]
It helps, now and then, to step back and take the long view.
    The Kingdom is not only beyond our efforts,
    it is even beyond our vision.
We accomplish in our lifetime only a tiny fraction of
the magnificent enterprise that is God’s work.
Nothing we do is complete,
    which is another way of saying that
    the Kingdom always lies beyond us.
No statement says all that should be said.
No prayer fully expresses our faith.
No confession brings perfection,
    no pastoral visit brings wholeness,
No program accomplishes the church’s mission.
No set of goals and objectives includes everything.
This is what we are about.
We plant the seeds that one day will grow.
We water the seeds already planted,
    knowing that they hold future promise.
We lay foundations that will need further development.
We provide yeast that produces effects far beyond our capabilities.
We cannot do everything.
    and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that.
This enables us to do something,
    and to do it very well.
It may be incomplete,
    but it is a beginning,
    a step along the way,
    an opportunity for the Lord’s grace to enter 
       and to do the rest.
We may never see the end results,
    but that is the difference
    between the master builder and the worker.
We are workers, not master builders,
    ministers, not messiahs.
We are prophets of a future that is not our own.

Copyright © 2012 Robert J. Elder




[1] New Interpreters’ Bible, Abingdon, p. 212.
[2] New Interpreters’ Bible, Abingdon, p. 212-213.
[3] Source: Bottom Drawer meeting Note 3242 by Max Glenn on Ecunet.org.

Sunday, September 16, 2012

Look One Way, Speak Another


Look One Way, Speak Another


Mark 8:27-38            
Twenty-fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time
September 16, 2012

There is probably only one sure way to approach an understanding of this reading from Mark, and that is to take it one step at a time, almost living through it phrase by phrase, as the disciples themselves had to do. To skip too quickly to the end is to miss the startling points that Jesus addressed to those with whom he ultimately entrusted the continuation of his ministry.
To start with, the geography of the passage shouldn’t be overlooked. Jesus and the 12 had marched through his healing ministry and up to the villages of Caesarea Philippi, which were located in the foothills of Mount Hermon (now in the present-day Golan Heights, just a few miles from the Lebanese border). From this elevated perspective, they could look back toward the South, over the region of Galilee and beyond the horizon toward Jerusalem. Here Jesus invited his disciples to take a figurative look back over the Galilean ministry and ahead to Jerusalem.
Jesus’ discussion with his disciples was really a matter of answering three questions, and then determining what the answers implied for living in this life as disciples. Jesus asked all three questions, and the second two build upon the foundation provided by the first. “Who do others say that I am?” “Who do you say that I am?” and finally – although he didn’t really say it this way – his words answered a third question, “Who do I say that I am?”

I

First, Who do others say that I am? Jesus was not the first nor the last religious figure to ask questions about public opinion. In fact, it’s fair to say that some modern religious figures are a bit overly-concerned about it. For instance, some of us may remember the emergence of the so-called ‘moral majority’ back in the 1980s – whatever happened to that idea? ­– a name that implied that numerical superiority in some way blesses this or that religious opinion. In fact, the name never really was even close to being true, only a single digit percentage of the general population ever claimed any affiliation, far from a majority. But somehow just saying it seemed to make it so. A series of exposés about the organization led to its downfall by the middle of the 1980s.
Some might say, “But who would listen to a religious minority?” The historical answer has been, plenty of folks. The church started with 12 people who held a minority opinion in a minority culture in the middle of an ancient Roman civilization that really represented a minority of the world’s population then as now. There is more to be said for holding the minority view than we usually admit. Jesus asked the question, not to go begging after public approval, but to begin to help the disciples learn who he was.
Jesus had raised the question so inescapably that even ... ordinary people, people who made no pretense of being disciples – had found themselves not only asking it, but forced to admit that Jesus must be some great figure indeed, John the Baptist or one of the great prophets risen from the dead.[1]
People all around the disciples were answering the question before it was asked. Jesus was doing things that demanded an answer, and the likely explanation presented itself to a people who had lived in expectation of a Messiah for centuries. They began saying that this must be the forerunner of the one for whom they had waited. Probably they all had varying images of who the Messiah was to be, and since Jesus did not fit those images exactly, they thought he might be the Master of Ceremonies, the one who would make the introductions. A Messiah who has not yet come leaves our preconceptions intact, makes no demands on us. But a present Messiah we could find disturbing, because a Messiah who is already here would call for an altered image, an altered view of who we are and what we should be doing about it. We would have to begin to change our comfortable patterns: much easier to continue the wait than to give in and begin to follow.

II

Jesus’ first question inevitably led to the next, just as surely as “Don’t you just love the leather seats in this car?” leads to, “and which payment plan do you prefer?” Jesus knew what some of those plain folks were saying about him. He wanted to know if the disciples had heard it. They had. So he put the next question to them. “Who do you say that I am ?”
Now the disciples hadn’t been asleep during the ministry of Jesus, and they knew that there was more to him than the ordinary bumpkin in Galilee would have guessed. Peter spoke for them all when he said that Jesus was the Christ, Christos, the Greek word for Messiah. Then the interesting thing happened. Instead of slapping him on the back and giving him a cigar for arriving at the right answer, Jesus commanded them to silence. And when he next referred to himself, he did not call himself “Christ” or “Messiah,” but went back to that mysterious title he seemed to prefer, “Son of man.” Why? Because of what was yet to come. Jesus cannot be appropriately understood apart from the cross and his suffering on our behalf, and the disciples, as yet, knew nothing of this. When they called him Christ, Jesus knew that they had no idea what they were saying. So he began to tell them. And it was a beginning that took the rest of his ministry for them to understand.
Through almost 8 chapters in Mark, Jesus’ power and authority had been emphasized. In this story, Jesus shifted the emphasis. From here to the cross, his suffering and death would receive all the attention. It was not an emphasis that the disciples enjoyed any more than our culture does, which is demonstrated every Spring when tiny Good Friday services are followed by extra large services on Easter Sunday. But Jesus’ warning is clear to all: the way of the Christ, before it can be the way of resurrection and life, must be the way of suffering, rejection, and death. A handful of people at a Good Friday service are closer to an appreciation of it all than hundreds crowding the pews at Easter.
Jesus had to suffer because his understanding of the will of God ran counter to that of the religious authorities in Jerusalem, the members of the governing councils, the Pharisees, the scribes, the television preachers, the denominational authorities, almost everyone with a stake in seeing the religious life of Israel remain as it had for hundreds of years. What is ironic is that it also ran counter to Peter who, acting on behalf of all the disciples, “took him” – the word implies an assumption of authority – as one would “take” a naughty child from the room for discipline. Then he “rebuked him.” In a word, Peter called him down as Jesus had called down the demons in his healing ministry.
III

That action forced the asking of the 3rd question. “Who do I say that I am?” The real issue at that moment was, as it is today: Who is in charge? If we call Jesus the Christ, we give up the right to define for him what that name means. We hand him the authority to name himself. Peter tried to behave like the big shot who gives his money away to endow some showy thing or other and then raises a fit if his name isn’t engraved at the top of the program for the annual meeting. Peter acted more like a patron than a disciple. Like us, he wanted to do what God himself would do if only God were in full possession of the facts.
Through Peter, Satan tempted Jesus to think that God’s anointed one could avoid suffering, rejection, and death; that God’s rule can mean power without pain, glory without humiliation, election without service. Satan’s agent in this tempting pattern of thought was Peter, whose thinking was human, perfectly understandable, a devilishly good idea. But wrong.[2]
The task of discipleship is not to guide, protect, or possess Jesus, but to follow him. Answering “Who do you say that I am” we must eventually ask what his being the Christ means for our discipleship.
Peter, for all his brashness and faults, was out ahead of most of us. He could begin to see the writing on the wall. If Jesus was the Christ, and if they were his disciples, and if even the Christ was going to be called on to suffer, to give up his life so that others might have life, well what would that mean for his followers? Could they be called upon to do less? He could see coming what Jesus was about to say, and he tried to block him. But Jesus would not be deterred from his faithfulness to his calling. And so, the inevitable logic of what they had been hearing bore fruit in Jesus’ next statement, which was made not only to the disciples, but to the multitude and, ultimately, across the centuries to us: “If any would come after me, let them take up their cross and follow me.”
This statement might strike us as familiar, but it ought never to lose its impact for a people accustomed to humming along when Frank Sinatra sang, “I did it myyyyy waaaaay.” What statement of autonomy is more familiar to a parent experiencing the fresh grief of an empty nest than a child’s declaration: “It’s my life!” Jesus’ words fly in the face of all these assumptions about whose life we are living. He says that no one has the capacity to raise the price that would buy his or her life as a secure possession.
 “Whoever is ashamed of Jesus now in the common pressures of life will feel the shame of Jesus in the end, when those who wanted to save themselves stand before the One who did not.”[3]
Finding comes through losing, living comes from dying, I find out who I really am by discovering who Jesus is, the way to fulfill myself is to set self aside. The call of Christ then, as now, was filled with such paradoxes.
Jesus’ words are a challenge to any group or person, no matter whether conservative or liberal, religious or atheist, believer or doubter. To churches that doze along in a comfortable pew piety, Jesus’ call is clear to get up, take up a cross and follow on the hard way; to those who occupy themselves telling people to “get saved,” Jesus offers a rather stern warning about a preoccupation with saving one’s self; to radical movements for liberation, Jesus warns against identifying the assertion of any group’s economic and political agenda with the self-emptying work of the kingdom; to those who because of self-interest are opposed to movements to free people, Jesus issues afresh the challenge of self-denial.
Not everyone who responds is a plastic saint, either, but often is simply the woman whose self-interest is set aside in order to rear a houseful of homeless children, or the man whose devotion to his mentally ill wife is the one constant in her life, or the neighbor who sets aside her own plans to lend a hand in the church school, or the one who offers the cup of cold water to the thirsty stranger.
I Gotta Be Me may well be the anthem of the self in every age. Jesus is also concerned for self-fulfillment. But his way is more challenging, and, ultimately, more fulfilling: “Whoever seeks to save his life will lose it; but whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it.” Shall we wear the cross or the crown? In the end, it must be both.
Copyright © 2012 Robert J. Elder, all rights reserved


[1] Saint Mark, D.E. Nineham, p. 224.
[2] This paragraph thanks largely to Lamar Williamson in his commentay Mark, p. 153.
[3] Ibid. p. 155


Monday, September 10, 2012

A Vintage Tale


A Vintage Tale

copyright © 2012 Robert J. Elder, Pastor
Twenty-second Sunday in Ordinary Time
September 9, 2012

Mark 12:1-12

A man planted a vineyard,
put a fence around it, dug a pit for the wine press,
and built a watchtower;
then he leased it to tenants and went to another country.

Whose vineyard is it, anyway? It’s a question put by Jesus – by means of a parable – to those who questioned his authority. Isn’t a parable an odd sort of way to address a question about authority? Maybe. But I’m guessing, since it’s Jesus doing the teaching, not in this case.
To understand Jesus’ parable, the first thing we have to think about is what it means to be tenants. Some of us probably rent homes or apartments. Some others of us probably own our homes...or imagine we do, until we have to send in that monthly mortgage check to the people who really own our homes. We may be more like tenants than we like to think, unless the house is completely paid off. And even if it’s paid off, just try withholding property taxes for a few years and see whose house it is then.
I have been a renter and I also have “owned” 6 different homes in my lifetime. Though, I have to admit, I never really owned any of them, don’t really own the one I live in now, the mortgage lender always has and still does own a pretty large interest in my home. In many ways, I am a tenant on someone else’s property.
These random musings about ownership of property might help us begin to make connection with Jesus’ teaching on authority through the parable of the wicked tenants in an absentee owner’s vineyard.
I remember my first years of ministry, living in what Presbyterians call a “manse.” Methodists and others call them “parsonages.” Whatever we call them, they are church-owned homes in which pastors are invited to live during the time they are serving a particular church. In the last half century, many churches have sold their manses in favor of a housing allowance for pastors. Still, when ministers gather, even if it’s been years since they occupied a manse or parsonage, there is almost invariably a time when tales of woe from bad experiences in the church manse are shared. I recall the story of a pastor friend whose wife had the audacity to move the sofa in their church manse from one room to another, only to suffer the wrath of church members who had collectively donated the sofa specifically for the room from which she had moved it. A great uproar ensued, and eventually the pastor and his wife moved the sofa back where it had been. Then, as soon as possible, they found another church to serve that did not have the “benefit” of a manse.
That little fracas involved, of course, a question of authority. Whose manse was it anyway? The title deed had the church’s name on it, and the church authorities had charge of the stewardship of it, and only by their leave did the pastor and his or her family live there. “By what authority are you moving that sofa?” the elders wanted to know. And, of course, they held all the cards, the authority over property in the church was theirs to exercise. “By what authority are you doing these things?” the priests, scribes, and elders asked, after Jesus had come riding triumphantly into Jerusalem, moving the moneychangers’ furniture on the Temple grounds. Jesus wouldn’t say, instead he told this story.
God’s kingdom is something like a vineyard, Jesus said, which an owner planted, improved with a new fence, wine press and watchtower. Then he leased it to some tenants and for reasons all his own, he went to another country, which is to say, out of sight and, judging by the rest of the story, pretty soon out of mind.
A few years back the newspaper carried a front page story about a California company, Premier Pacific Vineyards, that had purchased and developed six vineyards in Polk and Yamhill counties here in Oregon, as an investment on behalf of the retirement system for California public employees. Now I doubt that any of the front office folks at Premier Pacific come up here on a regular basis to cultivate and water the vines in their vineyards. My guess is that they hired vineyard managers who, in turn, hired workers to till and cultivate the vines. My guess is also that if a day dawned when the vineyard managers and their workers decided that they could just keep all profits from those vineyards for themselves, the parent company would put a quick end to their folly.
But that’s not how it went in Jesus’ parable. In his story, the tenants enjoyed the vineyard and all the owner-financed improvements for a while, and then began to develop a proprietary sense about the place. It wasn’t their vineyard, never was. They didn’t purchase the ground, had made none of the original improvements on it. They enjoyed the fruits of a vineyard established by someone else, who had invited them to live and work there on his behalf. That’s how things stood until that day, that seemingly normal day like other days, when the owner sent someone to collect the rent that was due to him for the benefits they derived from his property and its improvements.
Incredibly, the tenants in the story responded as if they were owners rather than renters. They shamelessly beat the representative the owner sent to collect the rent. The incredibly forbearing owner sent another unsuspecting servant to collect the rent, money which was clearly due him. What did the wicked tenants do? They pulled out the brass knuckles and baseball bats, beat him, and, for good measure, added insults to his injuries, and tossed him out the gate.
Unbelievably, the long-suffering owner sent a third unlucky servant to collect the rents, but now feeling empowered in their evil, they killed this one. Jesus said, “so it was with many others; some they beat, and others they killed.” By now, we may recognize the servants as representations of the Old Testament prophets, and the land owner as a representation of God.
In exasperation, the owner sent his own son – and now we begin to see the parallel with the story of Jesus – the owner sent his own son to set things to right, but the tenants, consistent in their evil, killed the owner’s son, unceremoniously pitching his lifeless body outside the property. They believed that now, with the owner’s heir out of the way, they would inherit the property themselves, perhaps by squatter’s rights. What would you expect that the owner of the vineyard would do to these tenants? You know the rest of the story, and it wasn’t a happy ending for those tenants
Why did Jesus tell this story? It’s a parable that appears in Mark, Matthew, and Luke, and each reports that it was told in response to a question about authority. By what authority, the presumptive authorities had asked Jesus, do you do these things? But Jesus knew whatever authority they had was only derivative. If the priests, scribes and elders had authority over matters civil and religious in Israel, it was like the authority of the tenants in the vineyard, derived, granted by another, by the God of Israel.
When pastors or musicians select a hymn or anthem for a Sunday morning, we frequently ask ourselves, “Do the people know this hymn? Do they like to sing it? Is it good music?” Rarely do we ask, “What does this hymn say about God? Will God be pleased with our singing of it today?” When we fail to ask these other questions, we are guilty of acting as if this were our church, our vineyard, owned by us and the members who gather here. It goes along with sentences like, “This isn’t the pastor’s church, it’s our church,” or “This church doesn’t belong to the session, it belongs to the people.” In truth it belongs neither to pastor nor session nor people. We are the tenants. God is the owner who has called us to come and till this corner of his vineyard for a time.
If we plan Sunday worship, or anything else in the church for that matter, saying, “What do we want from this worship or this activity,” by the measure of this gospel parable, the questions we ought to be asking instead are, “By whose authority do we do these things that we do? What does God require? Whose church is this, anyway?”
This teaching goes beyond the worship and fellowship life of the church, of course. In our confessions and by our study of scripture, we believe that the whole bountiful, beautiful earth is not ours to use for our own pleasure. We’re all tenants in this garden of delights, in spite of the fact that we often use and abuse the earth and its creatures as if we were gods unto ourselves, owing nothing to anyone else. In the end the church doesn’t belong to elders, pastors, or people, but to God. Easy to say, more difficult to live as though it’s true and we believe it.
Some have called Jesus’ parable of the wicked tenants a parable of judgment, but is it really? Could it be that it’s a story of grace? When we ask ourselves, “What do I want from this church? What do we need to do to keep this congregation going, to make worship meaningful, to keep being faithful?” Ought we not to be asking ourselves, “By whose authority is all this singing, serving, and speaking done?” This is not our church, this place is God’s. This church is ours on loan. The one who created this church paid for it with the death of his Son.[1]
There is grace in this message. A pastor can’t keep a church going. Nor can anyone sitting in a pew in the congregation or choir. This church is God’s. Worship leaders can’t make “it” happen for you on Sunday – whatever “it” is – no matter how hard we work on music, anthems, prayers, sermons. If something worshipful happens, it’s a gift of God. The church is gathered under the authority of God, not as a self-generating society of unfulfilled expectations.
A Methodist friend of mine shared the following story of a family he knew, visiting in a university town in California where the father was teaching for the summer:
When they entered town, they passed by a large, impressive Methodist church. Of course, this story could as easily be about Presbyterians or Lutherans as about Methodists:
The father said to his family, “Let’s go to that church on Sunday.”
On Sunday they got up, got dressed, and walked to church. As they came near to the building, they could hear music, loud music, guitars, drums, emanating from the neogothic building.
 “What kind of church is this?” his son asked. The father replied, “Well, it’s one of ours, you’ve got to remember that we’re in California....”
A smiling usher greeted them at the door. When the door opened, they could see that the service had begun. In the service there was a band in full swing. People were clapping and swaying to the music, people of all ages, of every color of the rainbow.
 “Is this a Methodist church?” they asked.
 “Oh, no,” the usher said. “We rent this sanctuary from the Methodist church. If you like, I’ll take you to the Methodist church.”
And the usher took him around the corner of the building to a small chapel where there gathered a huddled, small group of … people, plodding through a traditional service. On the way back home, as they made their way through a sidewalk filled with people emerging from the larger service around the corner, the father looked back at that emerging throng of all ages, nations, and races, and said to his family, “That was the Methodist church.”
It’s important that we never fail to remind one another that our church is not ours. We just work here in the vineyard for the time being. It’s a vineyard which, if it belongs to anyone, it belongs to God.

Copyright © 2012 Robert J. Elder, all rights reserved



[1] From “Taken and Given to Someone Else,” a sermon preached by William Willimon at the Duke University chapel.

Sunday, September 2, 2012

Biblical Busybodies


Biblical Busybodies
           
II Thessalonians 3:6-13
Rober J. Elder, Interim Pastor
First Presbyterian Church, Vancouver, Washington
Twenty-second Sunday in Ordinary Time
September 2, 2012

We hear that some of you are living in idleness,
mere busybodies, not doing any work.
Now such persons we command and exhort in the Lord Jesus Christ
to do their work quietly and to earn their own living.
Brothers and sisters, do not be weary in doing what is right.
When Paul began detailing the ways in which some of the folks in that early church in the city of Thessalonica were not pulling their weight, I can imagine that many in that little fellowship cringed to hear his truth-telling, no matter how true it was.
“For we hear,” Paul wrote in his letter, which was surely read in the middle of the gathering of that little church, since New Testament letters were designed to edify the whole church and few could read them on their own anyway, “For we hear that some of you are living in idleness, mere busybodies, not doing any work.”
Ouch!
True as such things may be, we often create elaborate ways to avoid such truth, especially in church, because to face it means to have to do something about it. A study of any dysfunctional family will turn up many methods by which all the family members carry on their elaborate charades to avoid confrontation with truth; but not the apostle, not Paul. His hard words of truth remind me of a classic, short, modern parable I once read, and have long remembered, entitled, “The Day Rev. Henderson Bumped His Head.”[1] I can’t resist sharing an excerpt with you:
Leaning down toward the bottom shelf to retrieve his trusty Strong’s Bible Concordance to pursue “new moon” through both testaments, the Reverend Henry Henderson, pastor of Sword of Truth Methodist Church, bumped his head,
 “Darn,” he exclaimed, grabbing his forehead.
This he followed immediately with [a stronger expletive] which was muttered with atypical candor. The rather non-ministerial [utterance] surprised Henderson. He could hardly believe he said it. [Then] he heard himself say [it] again. “This hurts.”
That, so far as the Reverend Henderson could tell, was how it all began – an accidental blow to the brain while reaching for a Bible concordance.
Moments later, the phone rang.
 “Pastor,” whined a nasal voice at the other end, “are you busy?”
 “Not at all...” said Pastor Henderson out of habit. Then, from nowhere he continued, “I’m sitting here in my study just dying for someone like you to call and make my day! No, I am busy. I was working on my sermon for next Sunday. What is it?”
His words paralyzed him. They must also have stunned the whiny voice at the other end of the line, for there was a long, awkward silence followed by “Er, well, I’ll call you at home tonight after work, Pastor.”
 “No,” said Henderson firmly, alien words forming in his mouth as if not by his own devising, “call me during office hours on any day other than Friday. Thank you. Good-bye.”
The receiver dropped from his hand and into the telephone cradle. He felt odd. Yes, quite odd. His head no longer throbbed. Yet he felt odd.
Emerging from his study, he encountered Jane Smith, come to church for her usual Friday duties for the altar guild. “As usual, just me,” she said to Henderson. “They all say they’ll be on the guild, that they don’t mind helping out the church. Yet, when it comes time for the work, where are they?”
 “I think you know very well why they are not here,” said Pastor Henderson. “You gave them only a half-hearted invitation. Everyone knows you love playing the martyr. Their absence helps bolster your holier-than-thou attitude.”
Mrs. Smith nearly dropped the offering plate she was holding, along with the polishing cloth and the Brasso.
 “Pastor! How dare you accuse me of being a complainer! You know how hard I’ve worked to get the altar guild going! If you gave us volunteers the kind of support we ought to...”
… but Pastor Henderson was no longer listening. He staggered down the hall as Mrs. Smith continued her complaint. He was feeling dizzy, unsteady...
...He was a pastor in peril.
Henderson at the hospital that afternoon, Room 344: [found himself saying] “So the doctor tells you your heart problems are congenital? That so? Are you sure the doctor didn’t mention anything about (by my reckoning) eighty pounds of excess fat?”
And in Room 204: “Really? So this is the strain of emphysema that is not caused by smoking? Give me a break! Two packs a day for thirty years, and you wonder why you’re sucking on an oxygen tank for dear life?”...
...That fateful Sunday service, after a pastoral prayer in which Henderson admitted to God that “Most of us didn’t really want to hear anything truthful you have to reveal to us,” an emergency meeting of the Pastor/Parish Council was called [and the next call was to the bishop’s office]...
We can probably imagine how the end of the story went from there.
It was Flannery O’Conner, I think, who once reworded a familiar Bible phrase by adding a new twist, saying, “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you odd.” Paul never needed a blow to the head to inspire him to declare what was true, but I am certain that more than once his unwillingness to soften the truth of the gospel must have made him a bit odd to those on the receiving end of truths they had made a practice of hiding. I can imagine there were a few sluggards in the Thessalonian congregation who dreaded to see an envelope arrive at the church with a return address bearing Paul’s name.
Their error wasn’t mere sloth, a simple laziness that afflicted some of the believers in Thessalonica. The fact is, there were some in that congregation who had decided that Jesus was going to return very shortly, so soon, in fact, that they determined that they might as well stop working. Why work when Jesus would soon be there to set everything right? By believing as they did, they became a burden on the others in their fellowship. Who was supposed to keep these blissful non-workers and their families from starving?
We may find this a bit quaint, even odd, but I have to say, we still have not yet begun to hear the last of end-of-the-world prophets, they appear in every generation. As books such as the Left Behind and DaVinci Code novels of a few years ago continue to come across booksellers’ counters, don’t be surprised to discover the enduring cultural fascination with people who declare the end or beginning of all manner of things is at hand. Just remember, this is nothing new, and don’t quit your day job. Around 200 A.D., in a region in what is now northern Turkey, a church leader reported to his followers that he had dreams that the final judgment was coming at the end of the year. Many Christian believers in the area abandoned their fields and sold their personal possessions in anticipation of a day which not only did not come by the end of the year, indeed, it has not yet come. It has been happening ever since. Self-proclaimed spiritual leaders have been taking the gullible for a ride for centuries. Just remember Paul’s word: “For you yourselves know how you ought to imitate us; we were not idle when we were with you...but with toil and labor we worked night and day...”
This is not to say that such a “Day of the Lord” is never coming. The Bible seems clearly to suggest that it is. It is to say that we have plenty of word from that same Bible about what we should be doing in anticipation, and none of it suggests we should simply stop doing the good work of God and sit by the side of the road to wait for the end. Paul said, “For even when we were with you, we gave you this command: Anyone unwilling to work should not eat.”[2]
It is a truth, even though it is one that may be hard to hear. “Brothers and sisters,” Paul said, “Do not be weary in doing what is right.” This goes for the righteous, industrious ones who do more than their share as well as the idle ones who do little, if anything. The hard workers must not take the example of the slothful as their excuse to despair in their task, and the slothful ones must not be left in this one of the seven deadly sins, as if it doesn’t matter.
On the weekend of Labor Day, this passage seems like an appropriate reminder of the nobility of work, of committing ourselves to doing some small, useful work, even though we know that other great things may be underway in the world.
In one of his Bible commentaries,[3] our favorite 16th century reformer, good old John Calvin, said, “In vain do persons who are delighted with an easy, indolent life, and with exemption from the cross, undertake a profession of Christianity.” He went on: “The true self-denial which the Lord demands ... does not consist so much in outward conduct as in the affections; so that every one must employ the time which is passing over him without allowing the objects which he directs by his hand to hold a place in his heart.”
Here is a word to us on this Labor Day weekend. Whether we work for peanuts or for millions, scripture is clear in its declaration that we are to work for the betterment of all until that time when the Best of all comes, lays our work aside, and says, “Well done, good and faithful servants.”


Copyright © 2012 Robert J. Elder, all rights reserved



[1] by William Willimon, in Leadership, magazine, slightly altered by RJE.
[2] 2 Thessalonians 3:10
[3] On Luke 14.