Parson to Person -- by Rob Elder

Tuesday, July 29, 2008

Together for Good

Here is a big claim, which could make us wonder if Paul’s hat band was a bit too tight when he wrote it: “We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose.”

Paul begins in this, one of the most well-loved passages from his letter to the Roman church, speaking of the way or ways in which our own faltering and insufficient prayers are nevertheless made sufficient by the Spirit who “helps us in our weakness,” interceding for us “with sighs too deep for words.”

I once read an interesting account1 of something that happened to J.B. Phillips, acclaimed author in the tradition of C.S. Lewis and considered a protégé of Lewis. In the last book he wrote before his death2 he recounted something that had happened to him at the pinnacle of his career in ministry. He was, at that younger age, a highly acclaimed author, sought-after speaker and teacher. Then, without understanding what was happening to him he began to feel a sudden distance from God, his self-confidence evaporated, his abilities at writing and speaking vanished, and his sense of God’s presence seemed totally absent. It was a dark night of the soul for him. He knew “at the top of his mind” that God was present, but at “the bottom of his heart” he couldn’t feel it any more.

One day, as he sat in his study pondering it all, he had a vision of his mentor, C.S. Lewis, who had been dead for many years. Phillips was speechless, and at last Lewis broke the silence, saying “It’s difficult to smash the image, isn’t it, J.B.” and he vanished.

What was the meaning of this visitation? Earlier in his career, Phillips had written a book many of us probably have read and may still have on our bookshelves, titled Your God Is Too Small. In the book Phillips described the caricatures of God to which we often fall victim, and the utter emptiness of heart which follows from it, and now he was living out this very reality.

What’s important to take away from this is that while we all may experience dry periods of doubt when our prayers seem to bounce back at us from the ceiling, perhaps feeling we have lost touch with the God and Father of Jesus Christ, this God — Abba as Jesus called him — this God has never lost touch with us. While we may stop being on speaking terms with God, God never fails to be on speaking terms with us.

It’s important to remember that prayer is first of all God’s movement toward us much more than our own movement toward God. Any distancing we may feel, any restless yearning, these are evidence of God’s activity in our hearts.

Perhaps thinking on these very sorts of matters, immediately following his encouraging words on the sufficiency of our insufficient prayers, Paul exclaims in our text for today: “We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose!” It is an amazing declaration when you parse it out.

So many traumas come immediately into our homes by way of our newspapers and TV screens — our grandparents and great grandparents never had to put up with so much of it cascading down on them in great undifferentiated quantities: earthquake here, outbreak of famine there, political turmoil in Serbia or Kosovo, crime and brutality right here in Las Vegas, they come at us one right after another — disaster here, insoluble problem there — no wonder we so often feel ourselves to be at loose ends, pulled this way and that until we find that nothing much touches us deeply anymore, whether it is in the realm of joy or of sorrow doesn’t really make much difference. Our senses become dulled by the sensational that clamors for our attention. No one could be blamed for feeling that it takes quite a leap of faith to believe that God is God of all the world, that his purposes are working themselves out despite all appearances to the contrary.

If all the good we do can be undone by the acts of people with evil intentions, or the acts of a madman, why do any good at all?

The signs and wonders which Paul reports led him to believe that sooner or later, one way or another (but most likely another), those things that are out of line, that in our day are crooked and misshapen, the good in the world which is now hidden, will all be made right. It is a rather staggering conclusion to come to when you think about it. In light of the shipwrecked lives and nations and hopes and dreams that lie scattered all around the world, what on earth led him to such a crazy deduction? Being a cynic is easy, no challenge for a person of even middling intellect, since the world offers so many signs of its own self-destructive potential. Many may not believe in God, but even a freshman course in World History will convince any thinking person of the sinfulness of humanity, believing in sin is a cinch. So what would cause someone like Paul to find reason for such groundedness, such solid hope in the face of a world so filled with trouble and woe? Paul believed in a gracious God, one who would go to any lengths to set things right, especially when our own resources for doing that fall short. But why?

There’s no use saying Paul was simply daffy, a gadfly, just a cock-eyed optimist. Anyone who knows his story of suffering for the gospel knows that as he recalled Psalm 42 in this Roman letter he wrote from his own experience as much as from scripture:

For your sake we are being killed all the day long,
we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.

Paul knew what it was to suffer, and he knew it personally, and he knew it often. It’s so amazing to me that the very item that people often throw up in our faces as a reason they choose not to be believers is the very thing that Paul embraces as a sign of God’s faithfulness! So many folks will say they cannot believe in a God who permits suffering in the world. Paul takes his suffering as the very scene of Christ’s victory. After all, Jesus didn’t die in bed, he was crucified. And it was in his cross, in his suffering, that his greatest victory was achieved. Paul senses that in his own suffering, the victory of Christ is already coming to pass. He offers it not as a prescription — go out and find some suffering for yourself that you may know Christ — but as another sign that even in this Christ is Lord and we may rest confidently in his lordship, that even in suffering, all things will begin “working together for good.” It is a brave affirmation; either brave or daffy! Anyone can follow a lord who seems in charge in rosy circumstances. Paul declares that not only rosy circumstances, but even tragic, awful, terrifying circumstances are so filled with the presence of Christ that they cannot be all there is, that even the worst that can happen to us cannot set us outside his presence and his purposes for us.

What shall we do with our suffering? I don’t have some list of complete answers to such profound questions. I confess to you that I am as often bewildered and angry and lost in the midst of human suffering as you may be. But I do know this. When the disciples were on the lake when the storm blew in, when Peter lost confidence and began to sink, when people came to hear Jesus and were prepared to go hungry in order to do it but he fed them somehow anyway, when people’s children were healed, when things were about to fall apart and people knew that their own resources just could not take them any further, that is when Jesus could be counted on in the gospels to reach out a hand and take hold and not let go. The saving grace of God does save.

We cannot be separated. That’s what Paul says, and you have to admit that it is a pretty amazing claim to make. What couple, after years of marriage, has not been assaulted in the night by thoughts of what it might be like when he is gone, how will I cope when her familiar voice has been silenced, when separation becomes that unavoidable reality of mortal human life? How will it go, how can we face it? I don’t honestly know. But I do know that Paul discovered a gift which he gives to us, a gift of presence, a gift and a promise that no matter how else it might look, Jesus will not leave us. Do we believe it? Sometimes we do. Sometimes we just can’t see how it can be so. It doesn’t matter either way. Our seeing how it can or cannot be so is, after all, much less important than the fact that God has declared that it is so. The truth of the everlasting presence of Christ is not dependent on our believing or not believing it. It is a gift, and that’s how it is with gifts. Whether we believe, understand, accept them or not does not change a true gift in any way.

Perhaps even more so when we cannot believe that it is so, when our prayers seem to bounce back at us from the ceiling, when our own energy can no longer sustain our believing, perhaps that is when the gift of the presence of Christ is most obviously the unexpected, unearned gift that it is and will always be. We don’t require suffering and separation to know that it is so, but we can know even in those desperate times, perhaps especially in those desperate times, that Christ does not leave us, no matter the height, the depth, the things to come, the threat of war or death, the petty gods that our world offers, in all these things it is Christ who makes us conquerors just when we thought we were finally defeated. The Christ who died and was raised raises us just when we thought we were sunk.

Are you feeling a hunger which you find you cannot satisfy? You don’t have to leave the presence of Jesus to satisfy it. Now that is what the church has to say to the world, and it is a risky thing to say, but that is what we have to say. Actually, when you think about it, it’s about all we have to say. But it’s enough. Are you seeking something in life but can’t find it? Are you angry at God? Have you just about heard all the trivialization of Jesus on gospel TV shows that you can stand and want to hear no more? No matter how lost, how lonely, how very confused, how set apart from any human comfort we may feel, we need not go away. Jesus’ presence does not depart from us, even if we curse God and die, as Job was once counseled to do. If nothing can separate us from that source of life and love, as Paul discovered, then Jesus’ presence and promise can survive even the worst we can muster up against him. His presence will be stronger than our absence, we can count on it.

In the Lord’s Supper, it is not bread we eat, it is the presence of Christ. It is not wine we drink it is the symbol of the very blood of Christ, showing to what lengths he is willing to go to be with us and for us. If Christ is for us, who can be against us? He is as near and as humanly necessary to us as the sustenance of our very next meal. He is as willing to go the limit for us, even to die for us as we are willing to pour water from a pitcher to quench our daily thirst. Christ’s presence. How much more plain can Paul make it? He wants to stay with us. The world, even the disciples, would send us packing, but no, Jesus wants to be with us longer, never to let us go, never to leave us, finally, to our own devices, to our own meager resources.

As we sit in our pews this morning, he is as near as the hymnal, as close as the breathing of a friend sitting near by, as intimate as the food digesting in our stomachs, as filled with promise and hope as the morsels that come from his table. He is so close. Who can separate us from such love?

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1 “What If Prayer Becomes a Burden?”, a sermon by Dr. Elam Davies, preached at 5th Avenue Presbyterian Church in New York City, 2/2/88.
2 Letters to Young Churches, by J.B. Phillips, (MacMillan, 1953).

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Sunday, July 20, 2008

Pain and Gain

All this flesh and spirit stuff that Paul writes about, what does it amount to for us really? “We’re not debtors to the flesh, we should not live according to the flesh, we should live by the Spirit...” what does it all mean? If we are being advised to live by the Spirit, how do we go about doing that? Starting at breakfast tomorrow morning, how will my life look different if I choose to live by the Spirit instead of by the flesh? Will I choose Cheerios over Raisin Bran? A bagel over eggs and bacon? Will I walk to work instead of driving?

What are the decisions lying before me that are the more spiritual choices about my life, and how have I been failing to see them so that I could find myself trapped into a life lived, as Paul says, “according to the flesh”? I am struck by the observation in my own life that decisions appear more ambiguous than that, and I don’t think I am alone. Every life choice does not appear to boil down to “flesh or spirit.” We eat, we bathe, we sleep, we awaken, we love our families and friends, we play, we work. Is there hidden in all these daily activities the secret of choosing Spirit over flesh? How many times per day? A dozen? A hundred? A thousand?

I read once that a man who committed suicide in New York left behind a note which said, “I’m not really needed, nobody gives a hang for me. I’m just a peanut at Yankee Stadium. I’ll step on myself once and for all.”1 Is this the comment of a person who lived life according to the flesh? Is the question of our personal value a spiritual question which this man saw only in the flesh?

If we dare to ask who we are and what our life’s value is, we will find some brightly lit markers in the New Testament. To the Roman believers Paul says, “it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ.” To the congregation of Thessalonians he said, “You are all children of light.”2 Writing to Galatian Christians he declared, “because you are children, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts.”3 Of the Corinthians he inquired, “Do you not know that you are God’s temple?”4 Peanuts on the ground at Yankee Stadium? Hardly. Indeed, we are, if Paul is to be believed, children of God, children of light, heirs of God, the very temple where God dwells.

Some say they have a difficult time believing in God. How much more difficult must it be to believe the New Testament’s estimate of us! Acknowledging the dark side of human nature is a cinch. We see its evidence all the time, just watch a single evening of news.

Playwright Tennessee Williams once said of the human condition, “We all live in a house on fire, no fire department to call, no way out, just the upstairs window to look out of while the fire burns the house down with us trapped, locked in it.” Albert Einstein declared, “It is easier to denature plutonium than to denature the evil spirit of man.” Oscar Wilde’s take on human nature was this: “It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.” Karl Kraus, critic of early 20th century German culture as it moved toward World War I, wrote, “The devil is an optimist if he thinks he can make people meaner.”

Clearly, Paul disagrees with these dour statements, claiming for humanity a God-granted nobility which is not always readily apparent. While Paul calls us by elevated names, there is no shortage of witnesses to the dark side of human nature. One writer said it’s as if we are three-storied kinds of creatures. We live on the first floor, but there is a higher floor that beckons us to be more than we are, to be, as the psalmist said, “a little lower than the angels.”5 That is the side, perhaps, for which Paul makes his appeal. But there is also a basement level where we can actually stoop below ourselves, find ourselves in sin, rebellion, disobedience, estrangement, like the man who thought he was as low as a peanut in Yankee Stadium.

So Paul writes of living according to the flesh — I take that to be the basement level — and living according to the Spirit — which I take to be life on the upper floor. Most of us find ourselves living most of the time here on the first floor, with the doorway to the basement standing open, its musty odors finding their way up the steps into our living room. The stairway to the upper floor beckons us to a higher place that we know is there because we have been there from time to time. Yet here we are, stuck on the first floor, neither fully spiritual, nor fully demonic, just living life as best we can in between pure Spirit and pure flesh. How can we find our way to the spiritually fuller life that Paul describes?

Unfortunately for those of us who were hoping that access to that upper floor would be pain free, Paul describes the spiritual life in terms that include the possibility for the sort of worldly suffering which Christ knew. Not that we all will be crucified or persecuted for our faith, but that some things we have believed to be of overriding importance will have to be set aside if we are to attain and remain on the upper floor; and setting them aside is painful not only for us, but often for those around us who do not or will not see the sense in it.

We are not the first generation of believers to wonder these things about Paul’s words concerning flesh and Spirit. One of the wisest of the early church leaders, a man named Origen, wrote,

“Putting to death the deeds of the body works like this: Love is a fruit of the Spirit, but hate is an act of the flesh. Therefore hate is put to death and extinguished by love. Likewise, joy is a fruit of the Spirit, but sadness is of this world, and because it brings death it is a work of the flesh. Therefore it is extinguished if the joy of the Spirit dwells in us. Peace is a fruit of the Spirit, but dissension or discord is an act of the flesh; however, it is certain that discord can be eliminated by peace. Likewise the patience of the Spirit overcomes the impatience of the flesh, goodness wipes out evil, meekness does away with ferocity, continence with intemperance, chastity with license and so on.”6

Yes we all find ourselves living mainly on the first floor, with occasional trips to the basement as well as the upper story. But, unlike the cynics whose words were quoted early in this sermon, Jesus knew that the basement was not all there is to us, knew we were not all to be remembered by the worst moments of our lives but by the best. He knew what it was to be spat upon, to be crushed with the burden of his own cross, to see his meager garments divided up among his tormentors, all because of betrayal and denial and the reptilian actions of people responding according to the work of the flesh. But he also knew that within each person — even among his tormentors for whom he prayed forgiveness — there was something which could be related to God, that within the heart of every human being there is a place for an angel to be made. Wordsworth once wrote in his own elevated way,

There’s not a man
That lives, who hath not known
his godlike hours.

There was something in the prodigal son, something in the Christ-denying Peter, in the tax collecting Zachaeus, something in them which attracted Jesus to them. Within each, where the world might have seen only sin and shortcoming, Jesus saw potential for a love-driven relationship with God.

Paul wants nothing much more than to remind the Romans — and us — who we really are: people who can let the flesh follow rather than lead our lives, people who are so precious in the sight of God that the apostle can call us God’s children, even God’s heirs, as though we are placed on an equal footing with Jesus himself by his own gracious action. And we are. And we are.

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1 Myron J. Taylor in Pulpit Digest, May/June 1995, p. 49 ff.
2 I Thessalonians 5:5.
3 Galatians 4:6.
4 I Corinthians 3:16.
5 Psalm 8:5.
6 Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture, Gerald Bray, ed., Vol. 6, InterVarsity Press, p. 214-215.

Sunday, July 6, 2008

What I Want and What I Do

What I Want and What I Do

© copyright 2008 Robert J. Elder

Romans 7:15-25a
14th Sunday in Ordinary Time: July 6, 2008

Remember the famous quotation of one of our country’s most taciturn presidents, Calvin Coolidge, who often attended church by himself, and, when asked by Mrs. Coolidge what the sermon had been about one Sunday said, “Sin.” When she persisted, asking how the minister had addressed the subject, the president replied, “He’s against it.” 17th century French playwright, Molière could have been writing for modern celebrities and political aspirants when he wrote a line for one of his characters, saying, “It is public scandal that constitutes offense, and to sin in secret is not to sin at all.” Simone Weil said, “All sins are attempts to fill voids,” and poet W.H. Auden said, “All sin tends to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is what is called damnation.”

Paul wrote about sin in the passage we share today. There it is, we have said it, a word that is enormously unpopular in today’s culture, because no one wants to speak of themselves and of sin in the same breath, much less the same circumstance. But, inescapably, the passage is about sin, and even worse, it is about our inability in the face of sin to will ourselves into doing what is right. This may offend our sense of independence, but we can easily see in our own world the truth of what Paul says.

Perhaps it crosses your mind, as it does mine, that it is an especially unhappy thing for our world – not to mention our witness – that nominally Christian people can be observed behaving in such unchristian ways. You know exactly what I mean, I suspect. The Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland were at each other’s throats off and on for centuries; in the 1990s our attention was drawn to the Balkan region, where Orthodox Christian Serbians and Roman Catholic Christian Croatians sought an advantage over one another in a struggle begun over 1000 years ago when the Roman pope colonized the Balkans with Catholics in hopes of overrunning the Orthodox. Meantime, Muslim Bosnians and ethnic-Albanian Kosovars – first converted to Islam by the Turks around the 6th century – apparently felt the contempt of both Christian groups, and the feeling appears by all outward measures to have been mutual.

Paul believed evil is far more than bad things we “do” or fail to do. Paul addressed the frightening reality that humanity may be deceived into thinking we are serving God when in fact we are serving evil. We are called to remember this sad truth in our own time, and sadly, illustrations of its truth come readily to mind: Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Idi Amin, Milosovec, Mugabe all thought themselves to be serving the good when in reality they were used by evil to slaughter thousands, even millions of people.

On Independence Day weekend, it is perhaps good to remember that our nation is de-pendent upon the workability of our cultural diversity. It has been that way from the beginning, we have simply had to get along with people not like ourselves in order to cohere as a nation, there has never been enough of a majority in one single ethnic or religious group to completely dominate the rest. A friend of mine recently reminded me of a line written by an 19th century pundit named Dr. Charles F. Browne, who was better known by his pen name Artemus Ward. He wrote, “The Puritans nobly fled from a land of despotism to a land of freedom, where they could not only enjoy their own religion, but could prevent everybody else from enjoying his!” While it is not as prominently recognized in American life as religious liberty, religious intolerance has never been effectively erased, it just lies beneath the surface of the liberties we do enjoy. A healthy goal for our commonweal in this 21st century would be an enhanced effort to end intolerance of all sorts, but especially religious intolerance on the right, left, and in the middle.

Appreciation for diversity is the good that we would do, to think of it in Paul’s terms from Romans. Yet, of course, we have failed miserably at times throughout our own history, as we all know. We need only remember a laundry list of things that people do to each other out of hate for those who are unlike themselves in color or lifestyle. For all our diversity as a nation, we have our own problems with intolerance, despite the fading guidance of a Judeo-Christian moral code in the general culture.

Now, within the culture of any of these groups, we could ask whether they understood Paul’s words:

I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me.

If we were to ask if these words were understood, we might hear some say yes, some say no, but chances are good that few would have the capacity for self-examination to recognize their own behavior in regard to their religious or cultural “enemies” as in any way violating the very faith they claim and claim to cherish. This, even though Jesus declared quite plainly and unequivocally that we are to love our enemies and do good to those who persecute us. Some might want to do this, might even commit themselves to doing this, but in so many tragic circumstances, the very people Christ has called to be his disciples fail miserably in obeying his direct instruction to love enemies. They might even will to do what is right in this regard, but in the end they cannot do it; it is not the good that they want but the evil they do; in the end, it turns out that our wills and our good intentions rarely have the wherewithal to be in control of our behavior. This is what Paul was getting at. The sin we do is part and parcel of something in the universe that will not have things God’s way. The only champion capable of addressing this overpowering enemy – which is sin – is God himself, and he has done so through the blood of Jesus.

This is the place to which Christian people come, in the end, as did Paul. We know we are saved from sin, and yet we are not perfect, we continue to sin. So we find ourselves again and again at the table of the Lord, considering the death of One whose sinlessness has overcome evil ultimately, though the battle is far from finished. It is at this table where we recall the body broken, the blood shed for us, where we remember the power of sin that was overcome not by any herculean human effort, but by the very gift of God to us in Jesus Christ.

Sunday, June 29, 2008

No Laughing Matter

The word sacrifice is one that we toss around rather casually in our day. Someone is said to have sacrificed for their family, another is reported to have sacrificed a night’s sleep in order to stay up with a worried friend. I recall that in my college years, as most of us do when we are young, I had to make decisions whether to take up one thing, and in so doing, preclude the possibility that I could do another. Somewhere between high school and our mid-twenties, we are forced to realize that while all possibilities may lie open to us, they don’t stay that way, we cannot pursue all of them. We must choose. I remember choosing to join the rally squad at my college in my sophomore year. It was a fun thing to do, leading cheers, learning stunts, throwing girls in the air and then seeing about catching them. By Spring I realized that commitment would preclude trying out for a lead in a musical in the drama department. I sacrificed something I loved for something that was fun. It wasn’t a tragedy, but I still recall thinking of it as a sacrifice.

An interesting word, that word sacrifice. We seldom use it in its original sense these days. It is entirely Latin in its roots, from sacrare, meaning sacred/set apart + facere, to make or to do. The basis of this word we often tend to use rather casually is to make sacred/set apart. So when we think of animals offered up on the altar in the Temple in Jerusalem, we think in terms of the word sacrifice. Something done in order to make something sacred. In this case, an offering of an animal in order to set things right with God again, a sort of rebalancing of the scales.

But, as I mentioned, sacrifice is a Latin word, the Hebrew of Genesis knows nothing of Latin. The Hebrew word used in our Genesis reading is ‘ola, “burnt offering.”

Burnt offering. What can be the meaning behind such a term to modern people, when the closest we come in our use of a word like sacrifice may mean nothing more than doing without a latté or a dinner out at the end of the month? And burnt offering, well, I don’t suppose we have much of any way to understand such a concept.

Or do we?

We at least know the word offering if we have been paying any attention at all when churches talk about their stewardship emphasis. The idea of a burnt offering takes the whole idea of an offering to God to another level. An offering in an envelope, a check to pay a tithe, those are things that have utilitarian purpose. But a burnt offering? There is no utilitarian purpose in taking a perfectly good lamb or goat, killing it, and tossing it on an altar to be burned into charcoal. And the absence of a utilitarian purpose reminds us that only God has created out of nothing, that all the things we see in the world that God has made are present through the action of a creating God for God’s own purpose, and not merely for our utilitarian purposes. So at the very least, a sacrifice by means of a burnt offering is a reminder in Genesis that all gifts are of God, and those who receive them are meant to serve God and not the gifts themselves. Even a gift such as long-awaited Isaac, the son who was born to a man who waited 100 years to have a son, even this gift does not replace the call to serve God first and foremost. It seems such a hard word here, unbelievably hard, which is why many do not believe it. But sometimes artists are able to help us see more clearly when theologians and scholars cannot.

One of the many biblical stories to which the 17th century artist Rembrandt was drawn was the sacrifice of Isaac. All the elements would challenge the imagination of any artist: the terrifying command of God to Abraham to sacrifice his own son as a burnt offering, the last-minute reprieve in the form of a ram, the hand of Abraham raising a knife over his only son. During his lifetime Rembrandt depicted this story several times, and it is revealing to mark the difference between the way he portrayed the story as a young man and the way he presented it in his old age. The young Rembrandt rendered the story with dramatic intensity. Abraham has Isaac on the altar, the boy’s head pulled back and the flesh of his neck exposed and vulnerable. The knife is drawn, and Abraham’s muscular arm is prepared to strike. Abraham is a man who is confident that he knows God’s will and is prepared to do it. The angel who intercedes has to muscle the knife away from Abraham.

When he was older, however, Rembrandt returned to this story as a subject for a painting. This time, though, he painted a sadness in the countenance of Abraham as he prepared to do what he believed God had instructed him to do. He covered Isaac’s eyes so that the boy would not see what was about to happen. His arm was not flexed with determination but limp with reluctance. Abraham’s face is not fixed with fierce zeal but instead softened with grateful relief as the angel simply touches his arm gently and the knife is depicted as immediately falling away. Rembrandt had learned over the years that what we fervently believe in the heat of the moment that God demands does not always, in the end, turn out to be God’s will at all. A Jewish saying has it that the proof of a true prophet is that when he prophesies doom upon the people he prays like mad that he is wrong.1

Recent years have been rough ones for children whose parents have a religious vision, or at least a vision of life without their children. Who can forget Andrea Yates who drowned all five of her children in Houston, Texas several years ago. Trouble for children came closer to home for me at the time when former Jehovah’s Witness Christian Longo killed his wife and children on the Oregon coast and then tried to hide their bodies in the bay. There aren’t many days that go by without such accounts in the newspapers. The stories have become almost common.

These were and continue to be very disturbing stories, tragic stories, but, unfortunately, not all that remarkable. Sometimes in these cases, there is an element of religious vision, the murdering parent claiming that God directed them to do what they did, as in the case of Andrea Yates, who testified that she killed her children out of fear that if she let them live they would go to hell. What reason God gives for asking such things of people they often do not say, they just respond to some direction they believe they have received.

The world is filled with kooks and thugs who take shots at public figures or fly airplanes into buildings or plot the destruction of thousands of anonymous lives for any number of reasons, often claiming they are following some self-perceived divine command, unconfirmed by others. But the face-to-face slaughter of innocent children is probably one crime for which there is more outrage than any other.

And yet, for all our revulsion at such stories, we have right under our noses a story of such an attempted case of child violence in the Bible. It has troubled readers for centuries, Jews, Christians and Muslims, everyone from Augustine to Kafka to Kierkegaard to Karl Barth. Knowing the story ahead of time, readers and hearers of the story know from the beginning that God was merely testing Abraham, seeing if he loved the gift of his son more than he loved obeying God. But while we are privileged to know the outcome ahead of time, it’s likely that Abraham didn’t, Isaac clearly didn’t.

Novelist Frederick Buechner said, in a wry understatement, “From that day on Abraham’s relationship with Isaac was never close.”2 Small wonder. But I have come to differ with that conclusion. To be sure, the relationship was forever changed, resting from that point on absolutely and completely on God’s promise. Which is another way of saying that the relationship between Abraham and Isaac from that point on rested where all relationships should rest: in God’s benevolence and promise. Any promise of God is a gift, a pure gift. The scene of Abraham and his son, poised on the edge of an unspeakable barbarity, represents a sort of divine madness which is never totally separated from a throw-your-children-off-the-bridge kind of madness. The test for Abraham was whether he trusted the promise of God for its own sake, or only because of the gift. If the gift were removed, would the trust depart as well? Abraham proved that it would not.

The meanings of this disturbing passage are difficult, but they are not beyond our ability to understand them.

Abraham’s trial demonstrates that God’s promise to us, in whatever form, lies outside our control, that’s the bad news ... but well within God’s control, that’s the good news. We also discover that understanding God’s promise, or even believing it, is impossible apart from a radical kind of obedience which may be beyond what we are willing to give to God.

The promise of God is a promise available to those willing to endure anything in order to be faithful to that promise. This is where Abraham differed from the mad or calculatingly sociopathic people who kill their children. They have it turned around the wrong way. Abraham was willing to suffer anything for the sake of the promise of God, while deranged and misguided folks are mainly attempting to relieve their own psychic suffering by throwing away the very promise that lived in their children. Abraham – and, when you think about it, Isaac too – acted in faith. The murderous ones act either in fear or calculation.

When Isaac asked his father, “Where is the lamb for the sacrifice?” though God had provided the ram, he had to wait along with the rest of humanity for several hundred years for the ultimate answer, when John the Baptist, standing with two of his disciples, pointed out Jesus and said, “Behold! the Lamb of God!”3 God is a providing God, though we must love God more than we love his provision. That is the hardest thing. To love God more than we love his manna, his provided ram.

As we look to God’s promises in our own lives, we realize that no promise is without its danger, even suffering for the sake of the promise. And yet God’s promise is the light for our eyes of faith. For God’s ultimate promise is the gift of himself in Jesus Christ.

____________________________________________

1 Thanks to Tom Long for steering me to observations about Rembrandt’s work in Journal for Preachers , Easter 2001, pp. 33-40.
2 Peculiar Treasures: A Biblical Who's Who, by Frederick Buechner, Harper & Row, 1979.
3 John 1:36

Sunday, June 22, 2008

Dead or Alive

Dead or Alive

© copyright 2008 Robert J. Elder

Romans 6:1b-11

June 22, 2008

Any of you who found yourselves seated near the front when I have conducted a service of baptism here may have noticed that I believe in the liberal use of water to make baptism an observable act of the church. If we are going to carry physical elements in here — water, bread, wine — then I believe we should take advantage of the symbolism they bring by making them as visible as possible. It is the reason we use a whole loaf of bread to break at communion and pass around, the reason we pour out the wine in order to hear it was well as taste it. So I believe in using lots of water in baptism.

A couple of years ago, after I had given one youngster in my confirmation class a good sloshing, someone said to me on their way out of the church, “Too bad you spilled that water during the service, but thank goodness it doesn’t stain the carpet, so no harm was done.” I should probably have responded – especially in light of what Paul has to say in Romans 6 – that it was not a spill, not an accident; when I slosh water during baptism, we are – all of us together – engaged in an act that, while it is a happy celebration, is also very serious, and very intentional.

In our culture, many of us have grown up with some curious and even non-biblical ideas about what baptism is. I have sometimes heard it referred to by Presbyterians as “christening,” which, while I would never say that is an unacceptable term, I would share with you that that word has mostly to do with naming, which is why we use it when we christen or name ships, and why I prefer to say we baptize believers and their children.

One writer, commenting on the subject of baptism, said that it is a sacrament which demands enough water to die in.1 While it is said that people have died in an inch of water, most of us would agree that enough water to die in would demand a significant amount. Why enough to die in particularly? Because Paul has spoken of our baptism in Christ, saying, “Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?” Have you ever thought of baptism, that sweet sacrament we celebrate so often with infants as well as youth and adults, in quite this way, as an initiation of sorts into the death of Jesus?

Culturally, baptism is often conceived as a sweet, sentimental sort of action, while the New Testament sees it as nothing of the sort. Someone once said that the knowledge of Christ imparted through baptism is the bath house variety, it is something almost too uncouth to bring up at the dinner table, because situations demanding polished social manners cannot bear too much talk of earthly things. In Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, on being informed that her two grown nephews were soon to be baptized, the noble auntie objected that such a thing must be regarded as gross and irreligious. If the bath house Christ, with sloshing pales of water down in the front of our otherwise orderly and tidy sanctuary, leaves us uncomfortable, then it could just be that that is precisely what it should do. Remember that Jesus himself had a rather consistently unsettling effect on most of his contemporaries.

So baptism, in the way Paul speaks of it here, is not so much a christening, that is, not a naming, and certainly not a modest “dampening” with a thimble full of water, not a sweet little entitlement of childhood. One other thing it clearly is not. It is not exclusively an event of the distant past. For many of us, our own baptism may be an unremembered act, performed on our behalf long before we were of an age to have any idea what was happening, by an adult who then presented our parents with what may now be a dusty certificate lying all but forgotten in the bottom of a remote drawer in a neglected cabinet somewhere. Others of us, who may have been baptized after reaching what is commonly referred to as “the age of reason,” if there could possibly ever be such a thing, may remember their baptism as a significant moment in their lives, but one that is in the past, set now among dozens of others of life’s significant moments. But this passage from Romans helps us see that baptism is a life long calling. To paraphrase Martin Luther, baptism is a once-and-for-all sacrament that takes your whole life to finish.

I have often thought that churches in other traditions have a good idea in placing water at entry points into the sanctuary. That way, every time a worshiper enters the sanctuary, he or she is immediately reminded of the fact that their baptism still stands, that they are in the midst of the household of faith that is drawn together around the baptismal bowl. On the other hand, other traditions have a good idea with their immersion tanks built right into the sanctuary. In such places there can be no mistake that baptism can require enough water to drown in.

One pastor friend of mine has settled on a method for helping members of his congregation recall their own baptism whenever the sacrament is celebrated. After the person is baptized, the congregation sings a hymn while he walks up and down the aisle of the church, dipping his hand into the bowl and flinging a light spray of water over the worshipers. The reaction of the unsuspecting at this moment is amazing to behold. Some duck for cover, some worry about the pages of their hymnal but most see the sense of it. This gives the sacrament a sense of constant presence among the people. The baptismal font in my previous congregation was given to the church in 1909 by the Steusloff family in memory of Johanna, almost 100 years ago. It was so long ago, no one remembers her or her family in the church today. No one, that is, except for the One who is the Lord of baptism. I always enjoyed reflecting on a vision of all the thousands of people presented at that font from that time to this, all lined up at that font in a line that would stretch out the door and down the street and around the block, people who had been received – one by one – as precious subjects of God’s love right at that very font. The thought reminds me of the presence of the great cloud of witnesses described in the letter to the Hebrews in the New Testament.

Some in our world think it strange that we keep a cross and a baptismal font in the sanctuary, but Paul shows us that cross and baptism are intimately related. Why should baptism demand enough water to drown in? To reveal what Paul said to us: “...we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.”

Death to the old, giving life for the new. Paul seems to have a curious view of death. We tend to think of it as a finality, an end of the road. But Paul carries around the idea that death leads to something else, and not just a life after a physical death. Paul suggests that we go through deaths in this life, that we might be more alive, still in this life. When we baptize sweet little babies on a Sunday morning, who among us is led to thoughts of death? But in this way the Bible is realistic about life in ways that our own culture seems not to be. In a pessimistic moment, we acknowledge that all of us are born to die. Our culture would want to deny that, want to see baptism only as a sweet, quaint little rite of passage, a harmless little ritual.

The symbolism of death with Christ suggests that with him we die to so much that the world holds dear because we want to be in touch and in line with what Christ holds dear. So we die to the world that we may live to Christ.

I took part in home-building missions in Mexico for ten days every summer for almost 15 years. The world might wonder why anyone would set aside their own life for ten days of discomfort sleeping on the hard ground, with days of hard labor. But the body of Christ knows that in attending to the needs of others, and especially of the poor, we attend to that which is close to the very heart of God. We die to this tiny portion of our lives that we may live to Christ. I remembered that death to our own lives one summer when we baptized one of our church’s beautiful young people there in Mexico.

Once, during the turbulent course of the Viet Nam war, a college chaplain I know was conversing with a group of students on campus when one, thinking of that war, said, “There is nothing in the world that is worth dying for.” To that, the chaplain replied, “Well then, since we all must die, that will mean that you will one day be confronted by the absolute necessity of dying for nothing.”

It was a hard word but an honest one. If the only good any of us ever did in the world was to spend a few weekends building a Habitat house, or spending a few summer days in Mexico trying to help lift up some of those who are down-trodden, or to encourage through financial gifts or prayer those who are more able than we are to face the rigors of mission work in far-off places as well as near, if the only good any of us ever did was something like this, then ever after it could never be said of us that we had given our lives for nothing. Today we might do well to remember people in our own Presbyterian Church USA who give their lives for work in Christ’s name in Asia, South America, Africa, on reservations with Native Americans and in remote Amazon jungles. We celebrate them not just because they doo good and helpful work. We celebrate because these missions represent a baptismal reality in the church in which people literally die to their own lives for a time that they might live to the mission and ministry of Christ.

Praise be to God then who gives us his work to do in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ.

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1. Aidan Kavanaugh: The Shape of Baptism: The Rite of Christina Initiaton, Liturgical Press, 1991, Page 179.

Sunday, June 8, 2008

Get Up and Follow

As Jesus was walking along,
he saw a man called Matthew sitting at the tax booth;
and he said to him, “Follow me.”
And he got up and followed him.

This is the sort of title that can easily be misread in the bulletin: “Get Up and Follow Pastor Elder,” it could be read. Or, “Get Up and Follow, Pastor Elder...” The second rendition, with the added comma, is better, more in line with our text for today too.

A pastor’s call, every believer’s call, is to help people learn to follow Jesus. All people, every sort of person. It is part of a pastor’s job to help believers discover that they have a calling to the faith, that it’s not just a matter of personal choice or preference like a supermarket spirituality, but rather that Jesus calls, and we respond. He is the initiator and we are the ones he moves. At least that is the way it is supposed to be.

One of the most frequent questions asked of every pastor usually has to do with our sense of calling. I can stand up here and tell you that every believer has a calling, and I believe it is true, but there exists within lots of people a sort of suspicion that pastors receive a special sense of call, a kind of high-octane summons from God. “How did you know you were called to be a minister?” people will ask, or “How did you decide to become a pastor?” How did we begin singing “Standing on the Promises,” when before we had simply been sitting on the premises?

The fact is, for many pastors, decision had little to do with it. For most of us, there has been some sort of resistance, some doubt, some question, often a question which follows us right into our ministries: “Is this what I am really supposed to be doing with my life?” And despite some appearances, for most there has been no opening of the heavens, always there remains some question, some curiosity about our own call to ministry. I suspect the same is true for most believers. It is easy for us to envy people who have what Barbara Brown Taylor once called “a spectacular sense of call.”1 She wrote,

“I once had a job that involved reading applications for admission to a Methodist seminary. One of the questions on the standard form was, ‘Why are you applying to this school of theology?’ The answers were often fantastic, many of them involving car wrecks in which the applicant’s narrow escape resulted in a call to preach...”

That would be a report of a dramatic call to ministry, like Paul’s famous blinding light when he was on his way to Damascus to persecute the Christian community there. Dr. Taylor recalls once interviewing a man who was in prison for an adolescent incident in which he was involved in an armed robbery. He became a believer while in prison and had served enough of his sentence without incident and with good behavior that when he informed his parole board of his desire to pursue a call to ministry in the church, they had told him if he was accepted as a candidate for ministry, they would let him out. During his interview with the application committee, he pulled up his shirt to show his inquirers where a bullet had gone in his stomach and out his back. “That was my burning bush,” he told them. Dr. Taylor goes on,

“Sometimes I think that those spectacular call stories in the Bible do more harm than good. At the very least, I suppose, they are good reminders that the call of God tends to take you apart before it puts you back together again, but they also set the bar on divine calling so high that most people walk around feeling short...If you walk into the average Christian church to explore your purpose, chances are that you will come out with an invitation to...volunteer at the soup kitchen on Tuesdays. It is almost enough to make you envy the guy with the bullet hole.”

This is one reason I like the story of Matthew’s call to ministry so much. Unlike Paul’s story, complete with a voice from heaven and a blinding light, tantamount to a bullet hole in the belly, Matthew’s call is as simple and straightforward as can be imagined: “As Jesus was walking along,” the gospel says, “he saw a man called Matthew sitting at the tax booth; and he said to him, ‘Follow me.’ And he got up and followed him.”

Ta da! That’s it. Jesus called, Matthew followed. Simplicity itself. The questions Matthew may have had, any self-doubts and worries apparently were to be addressed later, if at all. The main issue is following when called.

Another reason I like the story of Matthew’s call has to do with the person Matthew was and what he represented to those around him. Matthew was what one scholar called a “prototype sinner.” Tax collectors in Jesus’ day were people who were motivated by pure self-interest. They were equated with sinfulness in the way that some say when you looked up the word in a dictionary, you’d see their picture as an illustration. The way “byzantine” has come to mean “complicated,” and “Dickensian” refers to a dark time of social injustice, “tax collector” in Jesus’ day meant really really bad sinner.

This suggests there may more to getting up and following Jesus than just getting up. There is more to our call to follow him than good intentions poorly wrought. And there is certainly more to this call business than being good people, as the story of Matthew’s call amply demonstrates. Matthew didn’t start out as a good person destined for ministry. Jesus called Matthew, and Matthew rose up and followed. That was the test for discipleship, for calling, the getting up and following. Any other necessary qualifications could apparently be added later.

That Jesus called fishermen to be his disciples and to share his work sounds lovely and rural and somehow particularly satisfying in a homespun way. Fishermen like Peter and Andrew were, after all, industrious, hardworking, productive members of their community. Easy enough to agree with Jesus’ decision to call them. But tax collectors? It’s as if Jesus chose to include in his class of disciples Mike Tyson, or the executives of Enron who were willing to sacrifice the welfare and savings of thousands to line their own pockets. The hard truth is that it’s true, Jesus does call such people. But not just such people. Jesus calls all sorts of people, and our names are on his list side by side with them, yours and mine.

It has been said that people do not volunteer to be disciples, they are called to that work. A church is not an association of volunteers, it is a congregation of people who have been called by Christ. In the gospels Jesus was known to reject people who supposed they could become disciples simply by means of their own decision;2 likewise, in our passage today Jesus calls one who would have been rejected by others.3 Rejecting the chosen, choosing the rejected. There is certainly good news for someone hidden in such a gospel story about Jesus. It must have been good news for Matthew and other sinners. He collected a house full of other tax gatherers and assorted sinners to listen to the words of the master.

I think the combination of the story of Matthew’s call with the account of the healings of the little girl and the hemorrhaging woman is insightful for this reason: Jesus responded to his critics that “those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick.” Yet the hard truth is, no one is well. No one. Those who believe they are sinless thereby shield themselves from the grace of Jesus.

How did it feel to be a prototype sinner, like Matthew, despised one day, a disciple the next? How does it feel for any of us, really, to carry the name of Jesus? Probably for Matthew, as for the rest of the disciples, as for us, there is a feeling of being unequal to the task of representing Christ to the world. And still we are called.

Some of you may be familiar with the operas of the great composer, Giacomo Puccini, who wrote such works as Madam Butterfly, and La Bohème. While suffering with cancer he was working on his opera Turandot, which he continued to write at a clinic to which he had been sent in Brussels. Turandot proved to be his final, though still unfinished, work. It is said that he realized he was not going to be able to complete it and asked his students to finish it for him. He left many pages of drafts for a duet and the last scenes of the opera. The completion of the project finally was left to one of Puccini’s students, Franco Alfano, who completed the opera six months after the maestro’s death.

Soon after Puccini died in 1924, the opera opened at the La Scala Opera House in Milan. It was conducted by another of his students, his son-in-law Arturo Toscanini. Toscanini conducted the opera until he reached the point where Puccini's work had remained incomplete at his death. Toscanini stopped the orchestra and singers and put down his baton. He faced the audience and announced, “Thus far the master wrote. Then he died.”4 After a pause, he said, “But his disciples continue his work.” He raised his baton and finished the opera, which was greeted with thunderous applause.

I suppose that disciples of all times know what this sort of story means. Anyone who has ever had a mentor, a figure to whom they have looked for guidance knows the feeling of inadequacy in their presence. I recall preaching in my church once when an invited guest speaker for a renewal event at the church — one of my former seminary professors, a brilliant man who electrified students in the lecture hall at Princeton Seminary — was sitting in the pews, on one side, about three rows from the back. It was nerve-wracking, I can tell you. What a challenge it is to carry on the call to ministry in front of your master! Even so, we recall with Matthew’s story today that Jesus persistently calls disciples, all of whom are made whole through their love of that man, all of whom labor to continue his work.

And it has been this way for those who follow him ever since.

_________________________
1 “True Purpose,” by Barbara Brown Taylor, in Christian Century, February 21, 2001, p. 30.
2 Matthew 8:18-20.
3 New Interpreter’s Bible VIII, Matthew Boring, Abingdon, 1995, p. 235.
4 Source: http://geocities.com/airepuccini

Sunday, June 1, 2008

The Ways of God, and Some Other Ways

The sabbath was made for humanity,
and not humanity for the sabbath;
so the Son of Man is lord even of the sabbath.

A friend of mine, a Christian pastor, told me about an everyday sort of experience with his next door neighbor, a faithful, kosher-observant conservative Jew. My friend is what many would call — in as kindly a way as possible — mechanically-impaired. Buy him all the books about how things work that you want, he just doesn’t get it. So he generally leaves the mechanical things of life to the experts: he tries always to drive a late-model car so he won’t have to worry about mechanical breakdowns, he calls in the plumbers or electricians whenever there is a need and never tries to manage such “handyman” things himself. I don’t think he ever even watched Home Improvement or This Old House.

Early one Saturday morning, my friend’s Jewish neighbor peered out and saw him struggling with a ladder to wash the upstairs windows on their two-story home. The neighbor — whose windows were of the same make — called out to him, “Why don’t you do that from the inside?” These were the sort of windows which, by flipping a lever, you can pull into the house for easy cleaning. “I can’t figure it out,” my friend responded, apparently too proud to admit he was so mechanically klutzy he even needed to hire out this simple task.

The Jewish neighbor, resting at home on Saturday, his religious Sabbath, called out again, “I could come over tomorrow and show you. What would be a good time?”

“You know what I do tomorrow!?” my pastor friend responded. There is little time for washing windows on a Sunday for most pastors!

“Hmmm,” said the observant Jewish next-door neighbor, perhaps recalling for whom God created the Sabbath in the first place, “wait there a minute and I’ll be over.”

Jesus said that the Sabbath was made for humanity and not humanity for the Sabbath. Most of us, with our exceptionally-relaxed, early twenty-first century understanding of the Sabbath as a day when we might choose to go to church for an hour or so in the morning, and then spend the rest of the day gardening, or catching up on work at the office, or doing a thousand other things, most of us have lost sight of the strict nature of Sabbath regulations for observant Jews. Whether he would have put it this way or not, my friend’s Jewish neighbor was taking to heart Jesus’ own words in such a way as to demonstrate that he knew what it means that God established the Sabbath for the welfare and happiness of humanity, and not the other way around.

In our time-driven culture, where we find too little time for working, sleeping, nurturing relationships, playing, exercising, cleaning the house, entertaining friends, meeting social obligations, in this culture there is an increasing longing for what Jews and Christians call Sabbath, even though many do not know what name to put on it.

The command to observe the Sabbath appears in the Ten Commandments, which themselves appear in two places in the Old Testament: Exodus 19 and Deuteronomy 5.1 In Exodus, the reason given for keeping to a day of rest after six days of labor is that it follows the pattern God set when creating the world, working six days, resting on the seventh. We are reminded by our own Sabbath rest that we are made in the very image of our Creator. In Deuteronomy, the reason given for Sabbath rest is that the Jews were freed slaves. Slaves cannot take a day off from labor. Free people can. No wonder, when extra hours have to be spent at our jobs, we often refer to it almost instinctively by saying, “I’ve been slaving at work for over a week!” To live without Sabbath rest is like slavery!

Now, in Jesus’ world as well as ours, while the Sabbath was defined by many things, the one thing it was not to be was a day for work. Defining what is meant by work has provided full-time employment for religious authorities through the centuries, but about the general principle there is agreement. A day of rest from work provides a weekly reminder that, in the end, it is not human effort that meets the needs of the world, but the providing love of God.

We have probably all heard too many sermons on Jesus’ strong words to the Pharisees concerning Sabbath observance which say something to the effect that the Jews of his day were not much more than a bunch of legalists who missed the spirit of the Sabbath commandment. Perhaps our too-eager embrace of this view has lead to our slovenly Sabbath practice as Christians, where a Sunday appears to be little more than another “day off” during a weekend, which may or may not be punctuated by a short worship service. True Sabbath observance, at its best, has been said to “open a space for God”2 in the middle of the times of our lives.

So what was Jesus’ problem? Why did he get into entanglements with the Pharisees over Sabbath observance? Jesus asked whether it was lawful to do good on the Sabbath, and the silence of his opponents gave him leave to let his actions give the answer. Sabbath is intended for the goodness of humanity. But any time we read a passage of scripture and easily find ourselves immediately on Jesus’ side, we have probably not read the passage correctly, or at least not fully.

Imagine Israel as an occupied country. The Romans had succeeded in subduing many other countries and cultures, and they fully intended to do the same with Israel. It was not just brute force that accomplished this, though Lord knows there was plenty of that. They had somehow understood the importance of cultural transformation. Everyone was required to honor the emperor, subtly substituting his empire-wide image on coins, flags, and statuary for the social cohesiveness formerly provided by local religious customs and practices. Countries all around the former Roman Empire speak versions of Latin to this day: French, Spanish, Italian, Romanian, all testimony to the subversive cultural success of Roman Empire building. No wonder the rabbis were adamant about the provisions of the law of Israel. To retain their uniqueness as a people tremendous effort was required to resist pressures to conform. And among their distinctive traits was the observance of Sabbath every 7th day. To give that up would be to disappear into the generic population of Roman-dominated Mediterranean peoples of the 1st century. Then along came this itinerant preacher, Jesus from Galilee, who appeared to teach that Sabbath observance was an option rather than a requirement of their faith. The opposition Jesus encountered is more understandable when we realize all this.

Yet we also need to remember what Jesus was really doing through his actions on the Sabbath. He was not saying that the Sabbath is irrelevant or even optional. He was simply issuing a reminder that God is Lord even of a religious tradition as sacred as the Sabbath. Our commitment to religious observances concerning God should never overshadow our acknowledgement that God is Lord even of our religious observances.

It is the way of God to be gracious, to work and then provide for rest, to free those who are bound. Our world is designed with such graciousness in mind. Being weak creatures, we are in need of frequent reminders about this. One day in seven is not a bad proportion for reminding us about the grace of God. But we can turn such reminders into a sort of substitute god, forgetting the graciousness of the One who gave them. For this reason, Jesus came not to change the law, but to remind us of the compassionate nature of the God whose law helps keep us gracious.

Jesus did not do away with Sabbath observance. He did not say that everyone is now free to take their Sabbath when and where and in whatever fashion they like, to follow the individualistic approach to faith expression which is one of the chief evils of our lives in the church today. Communion, which we celebrate today, reminds us that our faith is communal, something we do together in community. No, the point becomes clear that Jesus, when asked about what is lawful declared that what is lawful is not nearly so important a question as what is merciful, what is gracious, and, above all, what points to the One who is Lord even over the Sabbath itself.

In our religious obligations we are not free to enslave or starve people in order to maintain some abstract principle of law. When the contest comes to a choice between compassion, food for the hungry, freedom for the captive on the one hand, and an abstract principle on the other, it is compassion, freedom and care which are most clearly the ways of God. Any other way is just some course other than the way of the One who is Lord even of the Sabbath.

Through Jesus’ words today, we are reminded of this God who provides all we need and more. We are reminded of a whole day each week given to us for freedom from work — a tithe of a 7th of our time — by which we celebrate the gift of life itself, given back to God, it’s true possessor. This is really good news we may rely on.

© copyright 2008, Robert J. Elder, all rights reserved

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1 I am indebted to Dorothy Bass' article, “Keeping Sabbath: Reviving a Christian Practice,” Christian Century, Jan 1-8, 1997, p. 13 for ideas in this paragraph.
2 Ibid., p. 14