Jonah: Dove of God
First in a Series of Four Sermons on Jonah

© 2009, Robert J. Elder, Pastor
Second Sunday of Easter, April 19, 2009

Jonah 1

Now the word of God came to Jonah ...
But Jonah set out to flee ... from the presence of the Lord.

This is the first part of a series of four sermons on one of the most charming stories in the Old Testament, at least in my view. Probably it’s not as familiar as a lot of Bible stories except for the King James mistranslation of “fish” as “whale,” and children’s musicals with titles such as “A Whale of a Tale.” Parenthetically, I think it’s an odd story to choose for a children’s musical in many ways, because if we read it with even a small degree of understanding, it’s a pretty terrifying story.

Sometimes, when I preach from a story or passage in the Old Testament, people will ask me why I am not using the New Testament, especially in these next Sundays that the church refers to as the Sundays of Easter. Well here is a little New Testament connection and quiz for those who enjoy Bible games. Can you think of the man in the New Testament whom Jesus called “Simon bar-Jonah”? I’ll give you more of a hint than that. Simon bar-Jonah means “Simon, son of Jonah.” I hope this helps some cranial lights to come on. He is the Jewish man who, according to Acts, was in the coastal town of Joppa — incidentally where Jonah’s ocean voyage began — and who had been praying peacefully up on the roof when he came down for lunch and fell into a trance. In that trance he was instructed to be receptive to folks who, before, as a faithful Jew, he would have thought were unclean. He had no sooner come out of this dreamlike state, when representatives of a Gentile Roman centurion named Cornelius knocked at his gate. Who was this rooftop pray-er, named for the reluctant Old Testament prophet sent to the Gentiles in Nineveh by way of Joppa? It was none other than Peter, foremost of the disciples, the rocky apostle on whom the church was to be built.

So, Jonah is a story well-fit for fans of the New Testament as well as the Old.

About today’s sermon title: in Hebrew the word Jonah means “dove.”1 And what is a dove but an albino cousin of the common pigeon, something, colloquially speaking, that Jonah apparently was attempting not to be, a sucker, a dupe who travels on a one-man mission to Israel’s bitterest enemy to deliver a prophecy. To hear the name Nineveh the way the first readers of Jonah would have heard it, think “Berlin” for a mid 20th century Jew. Why wouldn’t he try to flee the task that God presented, to prophesy to the bitterest enemy Israel ever had? We shouldn’t forget, though, that it was a dove that Noah sent from the ark looking for land after all the wicked people of the earth were destroyed in the flood story. There’s more to this dove business than we might think. A dove is a sign of hope on tiny wings, which is the way hope often appears, tiny, vulnerable, and seemingly powerless, yet possessed of a power most often misunderstood by the world.

One of the very first examinations that I had to take in my very first semester of seminary was in an Old Testament class. The question was “What is the point of the story of Jonah?” It’s a really good question. What do you suppose this story of Jonah is really about, anyway?

I have discovered over the years that there is no one answer to that question, which is one of the reasons this little book is so much fun. To determine what a passages says, difficult as that is, is not impossible; there are ample highly trained translators who spend hours deciphering such things for us. But what is the point of the story of Jonah, what does it mean? Today and over the next three Sundays I’m going to talk about what I think the story means, but remember that it is supposed to mean something special, something unique to each of us as well as to all of us. Here are some starters:

• Some would say that this is a story about God’s judgment. “Indiana Jonah and the Temper of Doom.” That’s really what it was, you know: a message of doom. Straightforward and dangling out there like an exposed nerve. No “Telling them what they want to hear,” so that the Ninevites might be more inclined to hear a pasteurized word of judgment and accept it. Lord knows, in the end Jonah had very little interest even in their hearing his message, let alone their being moved to repentance by it. Still, it obviously worked on the Ninevites. In fact, the message of doom, which comes on week 4 for us, worked better on the foreigners in Nineveh than it ever had back home in Israel. But since the narrative spends so much time on board ships, and in a fish’s tummy, and elsewhere, it is easy to lose track of the central message that Jonah was called to proclaim, which was — there is no getting around it, even in a Sunday after Easter — that God was upset with these people, and they were going to suffer for it.
• Others might agree, up to a point. But they would add that judgment tells only half the story. Since the outcome ultimately was a happy one for Nineveh, they say the story is about disobedience and repentance. Disobedience, of course, brings on the wrath of God in the first place, but then the repentance brings about his broad mercy. Never mind such nagging little details as how the Ninevites were supposed to know what they were disobeying since they hadn’t been privy to the Hebrew covenant with the Lord in the first place. They were apparently just so bad that anyone should have known it.
• Some might say the story is for sailors. Notice the subtle irony in the story that one outcome of the sailors’ encounter with their trouble-making guest was that, though they were pagans in the minds of Israelites, they were moved to offer a sacrifice to the Lord of Israel, even using Israel’s most sacred name for God, and promised to serve him. The chosen prophet of God couldn’t be counted on to head East instead of West, but so able was he at his unchosen profession that he converted even those who threw him overboard. Which brings us to another related interpretation.
• Some folks might want to say that the story is about one of the greatest missionaries of all time. Without meaning to, he converted a whole shipload of pagans.
• There are other interpretations. Some say it is nothing more than a fairy tale about a man named Jonah. Others say it is strictly a moral lesson about God’s mercy. I say it combines something of all these interpretations, but that it receives its most perfect interpretation from the preaching of Jesus.

Mark records that when Jesus came into Galilee preaching the gospel of God, his preaching could be summed up in one short verse: “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent, and believe in the gospel.”

Jonah preached a one point sermon which we could sum up, if we want to bother to sum up seven words, by saying “You’re going to get it.” Jesus said essentially the same thing, but added, “Repent and believe.” The fact is, the Ninevites did repent, and they were spared. God’s mercy is not simply a New Testament idea any more than judgment is solely a feature of the Old Testament. Any time the word of God is faithfully preached, there is an element of decision involved. The time is up, decision time is here, whether it is a decision to follow Christ made for the first time, or a decision to reaffirm, or a decision to hear the word of God to us today, as we have heard it in the past, and be renewed by his Spirit.

In Moby Dick, Herman Melville’s classic novel, Father Mapple, the preacher at Whaleman’s Chapel in New Bedford, specifies “willful disobedience” as Jonah’s sin. He declares that God more often commands than seeks to persuade because what God wants of us is too hard for us — if we must obey God then we must disobey our own desires, and it is in this disobeying ourselves that the difficulty of obeying God is found. The sailors, agnostic as far as Jonah’s God is concerned, still managed to behave so much better than the lone-ranger prophet. Together they have a conscience, while, on his solo flight West when God commanded him to go East, Jonah finds his sense of right and wrong too easily influenced by his own willfulness. It is a continuing theme that will play itself out over the next three sermons. By the way, for those keeping track, the four sermon series will finish in five Sundays, interrupted on Mother’s Day so that we can have a word perhaps more specific to that day.

So who is Jonah to us? In our world he is likely to be the one who does not bother to list Iraqi casualties while making daily newspaper tallies of our own. He is apt to be the person who exits the church services scratching his head and wondering why “there wasn’t a personal message for me today.” He is the person who sees in the sacrifice of Jesus only a personal salvation with little regard for all the others in the world who have not responded, or even who may have responded badly.

What is Nineveh to us? It is whatever person, nation, or force that threatens all the things we hold most dear, a terrorist with bombs strapped to her waist, a character assassin who belittles us at every opportunity, anyone who scorns and laughs at our most deeply-cherished beliefs. And no sooner do we start thinking about what that might mean than we realize this is precisely the sort of place to which God will direct his prophet, this person who perhaps had the absence of mind to have said once, “Here I am, send me.”

Yes, Jonah is a masterpiece of writing, and it is both captivating and terrifying in what it suggests about the nature of God, the nature of human life, and the nature of our call to serve God’s purposes no matter what. No wonder he headed West when God said East. Who among us, left to our own devices, would have been likely to have done any differently?

Copyright © 2009 Robert J. Elder, all rights reserved

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1 slang. Pigeon: One who is easily swindled; a dupe.

We Have Waited for Him

copyright © 2009, Robert J. Elder, Pastor
Easter day, April 12, 2009

Isaiah 25:6-9, Mark 16:1-8

It will be said on that day,
Lo, this is our God;
we have waited for him, so that he might save us.

It seems that every year when we gather following Good Friday to celebrate the death of death on Easter, we have to admit that death has not taken much of a vacation. It’s not something we like to think about really, but it remains true, death stalks the world as it always has, whether from roadside bombs in Iraq, collapsing coal mines, traffic accidents and disease, or the simple slipping away at the end of life. Since we last thought about the death of death on Easter a year ago, death has not ceased to stalk the world.

When Isaiah declared, “we have waited for [God], so that he might save us,” exactly what did he mean? If we are waiting, how will we know when the saving of God has arrived? What will that arrival look like? Are we saved from something, or for something? Or both? If death continues to stalk the earth, what does it mean to be saved? What are we waiting for? The women who arrived at the tomb on Easter day didn’t wait around all that long to find out, according to today’s gospel anyway.

I have always been attracted to Mark’s account of the resurrection. Its ending is so completely different from the other gospels, it simply leaves you hanging, almost in mid-sentence. “So [the women] went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.” That’s it. That is “all she wrote.”1 It’s even more abrupt than the tidy version that translators give us. In the original Greek it simply says, “afraid they were, for.” Is that anyway to end a paragraph, much less a gospel? My high school English teacher, Mrs. Lanier, would not have been pleased. Still, I think I am drawn to Mark’s gospel because it reflects how natural it is for us to react to shocking circumstances the way these women did. They dropped everything and ran from the tomb the same way it appears Mark dropped his pen and ran from his writing desk. Whereas the other gospels report positive reactions on the women’s part (they ran to tell the other apostles what happened, what they had seen and heard) here in Mark they are overtaken by fear and they can say or do nothing other than just run from the empty tomb in a kind of panic. Who among us can say we would have behaved any differently?

Is this any way to end a gospel? It is hardly the best setup for a triumphant singing of Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus. One New Testament professor shared a story of a student who memorized the whole of Mark’s Gospel in order to present a sort of one man show before live audiences using nothing but the actual words of the gospel. After thorough study, he determined to stay with the original, abrupt ending we heard today, as the most authentic. At the first performance, after he spoke that dangling, final verse, he stayed onstage, standing awkwardly for what seemed like an eternity of silence. He was through, but like most of us, the audience knew other, more satisfying endings of the Easter story and simply were not aware that he was finished. Anxious seconds ticked by until he spontaneously added, “Amen!” and made his exit. The relieved audience applauded appreciatively. Still, as he thought about it further, he recognized that his addition of “Amen!” had actually betrayed the dramatic intention of the text. So at the next performance, after delivering the final words: “they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid,” he simply paused for a brief moment and then left the silent audience to contemplate for themselves what that meant. “The discomfort and uncertainty within the audience were obvious,” his former professor reflected later, “and as people exited ... the buzz of conversation was dominated by the experience of the nonending.”2

The women at the tomb that first Easter morning weren’t weak or cowardly. They alone had watched the crucifixion on Friday, Mark makes no mention of male disciples at the cross. They were long gone. So here were these women alone again on Sunday morning. Do you suppose they were looking forward to handling a corpse, dead for some 36 hours? These were not giddy women, easily frightened. They were brave, courageous even, in their commitment to do the right thing. In the end, though, the last word was that they were afraid. Even though later manuscripts contained additions to Mark’s original, trying to tidy up that abrupt ending, all the earliest copies have the ending just the way we heard it today. They fled from the tomb in fear.

Now, all these centuries later, as with the women at the tomb, isn’t it true for us that our experience, particularly our fear, gets in the way of understanding more often then we’d like to admit?

I read of two people who sat next to each other on an airplane. In the few minutes before takeoff, they introduced themselves to each other. One was a minister who was taking his first airplane trip. He was as nervous as could be. He kept opening and closing a small copy of the Bible he had with him, wiping his brow with a handkerchief; he was unable to sit still.

Seated next to him was a businesswoman who traveled a lot and wasn’t scared at all. She was reading the Wall Street Journal, totally relaxed, and could not help but see the minister’s anxiety. Finally, she asked him what his problem was and he admitted his fear of flying.

“How come?” she asked. “You’re a person of faith. Doesn’t your Bible have Jesus saying something like, ‘I am with you always, even to the ends of the earth?’ What have you to fear?”

The minister thought deeply about what she had said, reflecting on the woman’s point and knowledge of scripture, and then he replied, “That is very helpful, but, you didn’t get the quote exactly right. Jesus says, ‘Lo, I am with you always ... Lo(w)!’”

Fear can do that to us, make us unreasonable, impervious to a word of hope or help. We often choose familiar ways, even though they are painful, disappointing, self-limiting, because we know what to expect and for many of us, the pain, the disappointment, the failures we know are less fearful than the uneasiness of a future that is open but filled with uncertainties.

The women at the tomb that day were thinking just the way we do, contemplating the physical realities of our living and dying. They went to the tomb the same way we would go to the cemetery, not with notebooks and pencils, hoping a crucified Jesus would awaken and continue to teach them. They brought no one to the cemetery for healing. What they brought, the gospel tells us, were spices, traditionally used to anoint the bodies of the dead. They expected the tomb still to be sealed the way we expect to arrive at the cemetery and still find the graves of our loved ones covered in earth or stone. They anticipated no encounter, no voices, and certainly no instructions to greet them there.

Of course, as we heard, upon arriving at the tomb they found all of these unanticipated things:

• a rolled-away stone, some living presence sitting in a tomb where no one would expect to encounter anything alive,
• the absence of the body for which they had gone to the trouble to gather and carry all their anointing spices,
• A firm instruction about where they were to go, who they were to tell, who they were going to see.

It turns out that the unlikeliness of everything they encountered, along with the very emptiness of the tomb will frustrate our every attempt to possess the man from Nazareth rather than be possessed by him. In order to see Jesus, we must do what the women, the disciples had to do. Go to Galilee. Galilee, the most distant, least interesting district of ancient Israel, represents to us the challenge of the whole world lying beyond the tiny circumference of Jerusalem, the tiny circle of our own experience, it represents leaving behind old thoughts of what is holy, and realizing that Jesus’ dying has sanctified every place, not just sanctuaries and cemeteries but sidewalks, and offices, and buses, and bridges.

Mark leaves his story with us. No neatly packaged ending here, we are challenged to help determine how it will come out. We are invited to become part of the story of the Gospel. No written conclusion could contain Christ, any more than any tomb could. He always goes before us, always beckons us to a new appearance in Galilee of the nations, Galilee of daily life, where there is work to be done, truth to be told, compassion to be manifested, healing to do, justice to be established, Galilee of the other 364 days of the year beyond Easter.

Easter is not a call to believe something. It is a call to do something. And as if to provide an example we can’t refuse, Jesus has already left town to do something himself. Go to Galilee if you’d like to sign on.

Copyright © 2009 Robert J. Elder, all rights reserved

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1 Factoid: The standard theory about the phrase “That's all she wrote” is that it arose during World War II referring to "Dear John letters" received by many service personnel from sweethearts back home bluntly announcing the end of their relationships
2 I am thankful for Tom Long’s sermon, “Dangling Gospel,” in Christian Century, April 4, 2006, for the reminder of this story from the late Professor, Donald Juel.

A Day the Lord Made

Passion/Palm Sunday, April 5, 2009
Copyright © 2009, Robert J. Elder, Pastor

Psalm 118:1-2, 19-29
Mark 14:1-11

This is the day that the Lord has made;
let us rejoice and be glad in it.

I remember the day Gene Pitney died a few years back. Some will recall that he was a teen idol pop singer of the early 1960s, a sort of cross between Bobby Darin and Frankie Avalon. These were teen idols who were in a kind of leftover generation from the music, style, and fashions of the late 1950s, and their world rolled to an abrupt stop when the Beatles brought their music across the Atlantic from Liverpool and a revolution in popular music and culture was fully underway.

The day I heard that Pitney had died, I felt a little twinge of sadness, I had liked some of his music, especially his ballads. My two college roommates and I exchanged e-mails about his passing, one of them remembered a record I bought in our freshman year of Pitney’s greatest hits. I know I still have that record somewhere, though I no longer have anything that I can play it on.

Our little e-mail exchange got me to thinking about the portability of our lives, or the lack thereof, and the useless junk we cart along with us. My story is common in mobile America, having lived in six different cities since I left home for college. Every time I’ve moved, I’ve done what we all have done at one time or another, sorted through all that stuff we drag along with us through life, deciding what to keep and what to let go. The only certainty is that whoever is following us won’t want it left behind, and certainly won’t bother to keep any of it, they will be bringing their own mounds of junk. I can’t think that anyone living any place where I’ve lived before would want my old Gene Pitney 331/3 rpm record.

There is something cleansing about moving though, deciding what goes and what goes away. It is a cleansing feeling really. You never really liked that old painting over the hutch anyway. Thank goodness for a reason to let go of that horrible tie, or that summer suit that hasn’t fit you since 1981. Too bad we can’t have that same choice with other things that burden our lives: the bad memories that won’t ever change, no matter how often we remember them; the injuries we have suffered over time, both physical and emotional; the losses we have known.

Well, “this is the day that the Lord has made,” said the psalmist, and today it’s time to pack for a one-week trip to and through a land called Holy Week. One thing we should carry is the story from Mark.

There is a story in John’s gospel1 about Mary who anointed Jesus’ feet in the home of Lazarus, spreading the ointment with her hair. Today we heard what may be Mark’s account of the same event, or perhaps a different event altogether. Some details differ. Mark, characteristically, pays scant attention to the names of other people present, most remaining nameless: those who complained about the apparent waste of the expensive ointment, the woman doing the anointing, though Judas is named in both accounts.

Because a good understanding of first century Jewish meal customs is not one of the things most of us have packed around with us since Jesus walked the earth, the scene set by Mark does not shock us, though it certainly would have shocked its first readers, for several reasons.

First, a woman appeared in the room where men were eating. There is no way I could get you to look as shocked as those early listeners to the story would have looked. Remember, in those days, men and women had very little contact with one another socially. Women basically stayed home, men ate with other men. To shock you as much as those first listeners, I’d have to say something like, “a woman entered the room with snakes for hair and smoke coming out of her ears.” Men were eating and a woman came in. That in itself was a shocking thing for those folks. It was something which, as my little grandmother used to say, “simply isn’t done.”

But that wasn’t the half of it. If they were shocked to see her appear, imagine their shock as she:

1. Cracked open an alabaster jar of extremely costly ointment; This would have been a very expensive jar, which together with its very expensive contents was likely to have been worth more than the house in which they were dining, about year’s wages;
2. Poured the contents on his head. Anointing on the head was something reserved for royal anointing, as when the prophet Samuel anointed David to be king over Israel

In one stunning succession of events, this woman broke the taboo of women being in the presence of men who are gathering socially, and declared by her action that when they sat with Jesus, they were sitting with royalty. When the Bible says she “broke open” the jar, the Greek word is much stronger, it mean she literally smashed it to bits, it is the same word used in the Greek version of the Exodus story of Moses smashing the tablets of the law when he came down from Sinai and saw the golden calf.

Mark reports that some of the reactions to the woman were filled with anger, anger about the waste, the lack of concern for the poor, the sheer inappropriateness of the entire sequence of events. The one who seems not to have been troubled at all was Jesus. As they fumed and fulminated, Jesus said not a word until after their scolding, when he said enough is enough, this woman has done something good for me.

This is a funny week for the life of faith, isn’t it? We have this day that most of us associate with the laying of palms before Jesus as he entered Jerusalem, though only John reports the actual use of palms, and we know that palms didn’t grow naturally in Jerusalem, it was too dry. But that triumphant ride down the hill from the Mount of Olives rests right alongside these stories of Jesus at table, Jesus anointed as a king would be anointed, Jesus being betrayed by one of his own chosen disciples into the hands of those who wanted to do him harm. The triumph of Easter, which is yet to come, is set right up alongside the hard reality of suffering and death. We’re all in favor of the former, not so sure about the necessity for the latter, if attendance at most mid-week services in most churches during Holy Week is any indication.

The psalm for today places together the same sort of thoughts that we might normally think would be at odds with each other: the triumphant “This is the day which the Lord has made, let us rejoice,” set alongside “the stone that the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone.” That psalm, which the pilgrims repeated as Jesus made his way into the city astride his colt, carries alongside the note of triumph an equally loud note of foreboding.

Verse 22 in particular gnaws at the sense of triumph and disables it. The stone is not to be used until first it has been rejected. Everything around that note concerning the stone has an air of celebration, but this line suggests that before there is triumph there must be denial. The context of rejoicing carries within it the seeds of a prior sorrow to be endured before rejoicing can predominate.

On this day which the Lord has made, we probably all carry our own jars in need of smashing to let the anointing of the Lord happen in our hearts. There are folks who need to smash the jar of addiction.2 There are many of us who have probably arrived yet again at a time in our lives when we need to decide what we will carry forward with us in our lives, and what we will leave behind. Go ahead and keep storing away your GI Joe action figures or your 78 rpm records, or the dress you wore to the prom if you want to. But you and I both know, there are things in our lives that we can lay aside, leave behind. We will box our things up, and they may look so precious as they go in, but sometimes, at the end of months or even years, when we get around to opening those cartons, all we find in them is trash, things no longer filled with life, things that need to be smashed open, and used to anoint the one who comes to bless who we are, not what we’ve been or what we have, but who we are and who we can be, now that the day which the Lord has made has arrived.

Let us rejoice.

Copyright © 2009 Robert J. Elder, all rights reserved

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1 John 12:1-11
2 Thanks to Anna Carter Florence and her sermon, “Smashing Beauty” Journal for Preachers, Pentecost 2004, pp. 18-22, for this and some other images in the sermon.

Clean Heart, Right Spirit

copyright © 2009, Robert J. Elder, Pastor

5th Sunday in Lent, March 29, 2009

Psalm 51:1-12
John 12:20-36

Create in me a clean heart, O God,
and put a new and right spirit within me.

The core of Psalm 51 is in this 10th verse, which marks the center of the psalm both as literature and as theology. It is the cry of every human being honest enough with themselves to admit that we have fallen short, we have disappointed, we have wounded others and ourselves, we have compromised what is good by our attraction to what is less than good by either a short or long shot, doing what is wrong in hopes that it will somehow turn out right, the way some folks for centuries hoped to be able to produce precious gold from baser metals.

The venerable Sir Isaac Newton, mathematician, physicist, astronomer, author of much that we know as modern science, was also much less than modern in that he was attracted to the ancient belief in alchemy; the man who invented calculus, who correctly derived the law of universal gravitation, also sought the secret to the ancient and secretive pseudo-science bent on turning base metals into gold. He was convinced not only that gold could be made from simpler, less-expensive materials, but also that ancient alchemists had actually done it by some now-lost process which he hoped to recover. All he needed to do, he believed, was to unearth their secret processes. He never succeeded, of course, because — well — it was an idea that didn’t “pan out,” if you’ll pardon the Gold Rush pun. Gold, we now know, cannot be made from anything but ... gold. It is an element, not owing its existence to any other combination of elements.

We know that, and we realize it is foolish to try pursue an alchemist’s path to making precious gold out of other things that are not precious. Just so, a clean heart, as desired by the psalmist, is similarly pure, elemental, and not derivable by any means other than a right spirit, the natural home of a clean heart.

Having lost such a thing as a clean heart, how could it possibly be recovered? Can we, by our own effort, somehow magically erase all hurt we have caused, all guilt we have known, all shortcuts we have taken in the process of discovering that bad means lead to equally bad ends? Apparently we cannot, which is the clear reason why the psalmist’s prayer asks not for the power to become right-hearted by some sort of auto-correction, but asks God for a new act of creation, literally as transforming as the first Creation, which fashioned a world out of a watery chaos. Truly, his prayer is that God will act again in his spirit, as God acted in the very creation of the world, and make possible a clean heart, a right spirit in the place where an unclean heart and a wrong spirit now live.

I remember my days in seminary, occasionally traveling from the Princeton Seminary campus to the university campus a block away, to use their library. I also remember that very often, the books or periodicals I went looking for weren’t there. It was infuriating, knowing that a professor had assigned some reading and placed the volume on hold, only to discover that someone had removed it without going through the bother of checking it out, which is a polite way of saying, they had stolen it. When I asked one of the librarians what was going on, she said, “You’re from the seminary, aren’t you?” Wondering how she knew, I said that yes I was. She told me that readings set aside for seminary students had the highest theft rate on the campus.

I was shocked. Really, I was. “How is that possible?” I asked.

She said, “I don’t really know, except that you folks over at Holy Joe College (I took that for a deprecatory characterization) believe in grace; which in your cases apparently means that you figure you’re already forgiven, so taking what you want only requires a subsequent prayer for forgiveness to make everything right.”

Hmmm. New and right? Clean, even?

The psalmist was surely on to something. And of course, you and I know, it’s not just seminary students who spend lifetimes getting up to this kind of behavior. I remember a student at the university lamenting to me one day that his classes were so competitive that often, when the professor announced a required reading had been placed on reserve at the library, the race was immediately on to get there first, because, invariably, someone would remove it or hide it elsewhere in the stacks in order to score an advantage over others who arrived too late to find it. I suppose the internet has alleviated some of this behavior, but I doubt it has eliminated the sort of spirit that drives it.

The French philosopher, Simone Weil, once declared that “All sins are attempts to fill voids.” Though we may try to fill the voids in our lives with anything and everything, we remain empty because there is an empty place that is fitted only for God, and which rejects all impostors. Some day, if we are as acutely aware as the psalmist, we may ask God to fill that emptiness, and in the process see a sort of wholly, holy new life to which God is calling us, and find we have hearts that are freshly cleansed, spirits newly right, almost like being born again.

Or, of course, we can always choose to remain in what one preacher called “a wrecked relationship with God and other human beings,” trying desperately to assert our cleanness of heart, rightness of spirit against all evidence to the contrary. Our only hope for recovery is to take the first step, which is to acknowledge that something about us is seriously out of whack, and throw ourselves on the mercy of God’s court, just as the psalmist did before us.

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Moving into our gospel reading, have you ever noticed that in John’s gospel, when someone asks Jesus what appears to be a fairly direct question, he seldom responds with a direct or obvious answer? In today’s passage, there were folks John described as “some Greeks” who told Philip they wished to see Jesus. Philip told Andrew, then they both went to tell Jesus. Something must have gotten lost in the translation, because Jesus’ response seems to bear no connection whatsoever with the request.

Greeks: Hi... Say, Mister, we’re interested in seeing Jesus, what do you say?

Philip: Hm, I’m not sure, let me check it out with someone for you... Hey, Andrew, before you run off to become the patron Saint of Scotland, these guys have a question. They say they’d like to see Jesus. What do you think?

Andrew: Hm, I think we’d better ask Jesus.

Andrew and Philip: Hey, Jesus, these Greek guys want to see you.

Jesus: The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life. Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be also. Whoever serves me, the Father will honor.

Greeks, Philip, Andrew, and First Presbyterians in Cottage Grove all in unison: Huh?

Listen, the Gospel of John is not for wimps, you’ve got to have ears to hear, as Jesus was fond of saying. Eyes to read wouldn’t hurt either. This little dialogue takes place in John just after Jesus had ridden into Jerusalem on a donkey, with shouts and cheers and folks throwing palm branches in his path. Upon seeing this, the Pharisees said to one another, “You see, you can do nothing. Look, the world has gone after him!” (12:19) Then, as if to confirm the Pharisees’ worst fears, the Greeks, representing all the non-Jewish world, approached the disciples about seeing Jesus. This, of course, makes his response more understandable. He takes it for the sign that it is, that he is to become the seed from which will grow an access to God that includes the whole world.

The hour had come for the Son of Man to be glorified, to be the means by which clean hearts and right spirits could be created for all the world’s people. This was no spiritual alchemist’s shortcut to the good by way of the not-so-bad, nor a utopian dream about the innate goodness of all people, rather it was God’s own acknowledgment that people could not become good by their own device, but required an act of God, a new creation to make it happen. That is what Jesus was, and is. The new creation of God, by which our hearts, our selves, are made clean, new, and right.

That is where our Lenten journey is leading us, and not only us, but anyone and everyone who shares with us their desire to see Jesus. Jesus is the answer to the Psalmist’s prayer for a clean heart and a right spirit. He is the answer to all our prayers, in the end. And moreover, even better, access to Jesus is available to everyone, though someone must bring the word, someone must tell, and there is no one to do the telling about the way to clean hearts and right spirits but Philip, and Andrew, and you, and me.

Copyright © 2009 Robert J. Elder, all rights reserved

Drawing Near with Songs of Joy

© 2006, Robert J. Elder, Pastor
4th Sunday in Lent, March 22, 2009

Psalm 107: 1-3, 17-22; John 12:1-11

Gathered in from the lands,
from the east and from the west,
from the north and from the south...
Let them thank the Lord for his steadfast love...
... and tell of his deeds with songs of joy.

As many of you probably know, seminary students of the Presbyterian persuasion, preparing for careers in ministry, all have to take courses and pass exams in the biblical languages: Hebrew and Greek. No other denomination that I know of requires this, though some encourage it. And Presbyterian congregations may be either happier or sorrier for it, depending on how often it is inflicted on them on Sunday mornings — no one wants a linguistics lesson on Sundays instead of a sermon. But like it or not, pastors for this church in the past, present, and foreseeable future will have to have demonstrated some facility in Old Testament Hebrew and New Testament Greek in preparing for ministry. It’s not a requirement that seems destined to go away. The idea is that it helps keep our pastors from being entirely dependent on translators for our understanding of scripture.

And I am glad for that, I have to say. As with the study of any foreign language, study of the biblical languages helps a person realize that translations of the Bible are very often more art than science. If you studied French or Spanish or German, and gained enough facility to read a novel or play in an original language other than English, you will know that it can be a disappointment to have to go back to reading a translation.

Probably every student of French since the 1950s has had to read Le Petit Prince — The Little Prince. One of the most famous lines of that little book ends a dialogue between the prince and a fox. In English translation, the fox’s parting words read, “And now here is my secret ... It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.” It is a lovely thought, but in French it sounds like a lovely thought set to a melody, maybe even in my battered pronunciation: “Voici mon secret ... on ne voit bien qu’avec le ceour. L’essentiel est invisible pour les yeux.”1

Every translation carries with it some imprint of the point of view of the translator. That is one reason why it is important to read the Bible in other than our favorite translation now and then. When we do, it gives us just a hint of the need to take the meanings of the English words in which we read the Bible with some degree of humility about their absolute meaning.

Folks in Bible studies I have led in the past will attest, I find this to be continually fascinating. Take just one word from our Psalm reading for today. The word is translated “steadfast love.”

Even a casual student of the Bible will recognize that the phrase “steadfast love” occurs multiple times in scripture. And if you have ever noticed that, congratulations on your observant reading of scripture. The Hebrew word is one of the first words that students of biblical Hebrew learn: cheséd. That little word occurs 127 times in the Psalms alone, and some 241 times in the Old Testament. We might not spot it every time in translation, because translators are doing their job of translating the word in context, and no one English word or phrase can do it justice. So it is variously translated as “loving kindness,” “mercy,” “goodness,” “grace,” “kindness,” and, that old favorite, “steadfast love.” In fact, in the phrase of the beloved 23rd Psalm that we remember as “Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me...” the word translated as “mercy” in that context is our old Hebrew friend, cheséd: “steadfast love.” Surely goodness and God’s steadfast love shall follow me.

There can only be one reason why this word is such a favorite in the Old Testament, and in the poetry of the psalms in particular. And that is because it so perfectly captures in a single expression all that God has done for his people, something of the very essence and nature of God.

And the psalm declares at the outset that the steadfast love of God endures. It not only endures, it endures for all time, endures forever.

Here is something worth remembering, when we search for the love of God through the trials of our lives. The phrase does not say “the steadfast love of God lasts forever.” Our trials are accompanied by a God who walks through them with us, so the observation of the Psalmist is that “the steadfast love of God endures forever.” The love of God is not an easy, sunshiny day love, but a love characterized by endurance, of the sort Paul described when he said love “bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.”2 This is a love that bears, tolerates, suffers, undertakes, carries on and presses on no matter what. That is the cheséd of God.

David Livingstone was probably the best-known 19th century Scots foreign missionary, of Henry Stanley’s “Dr. Livingstone I presume?” fame; but perhaps the next-best-known Scottish missionary, especially in the New England states and Eastern Canada, was Alexander Duff. During his trip to the Americas in the 1850s he became so popular that today there are still some half dozen churches in Ontario carrying his name, “Duff’s Churches.”

Duff made a voyage to India with the specific purpose of bringing the gospel to the high caste Hindus, the Brahmins of high social standing, who valued good education. He packed 800 books to take for his library in India. As his ship rounded the Cape of Good Hope, it hit rocks and sank. Passengers and crew managed to escape with their lives, but not much else. A sailor walking the beach a while later spotted an object washed up on the shore. When he picked it up he realized it was a large copy of the Bible and there was also a copy of a Scottish psalm book. Duff’s name was on each volume. When he took them to the place where the passengers had sought shelter, Duff received them and turned immediately to our psalm for today, Psalm 107, reading it in its entirety to those who had been rescued, with all 6 repetitions of God’s “steadfast love.”3

OK, God’s love is steadfast in every sense of the word. But where does the passage from the gospel tie in? Or does it? Well, not all scripture ties together into neat little bundles, but I think the tie-in for this day could go something like this:

God’s steadfast love endures forever. Now that is saying something, because as anyone who has ever been to a funeral knows, forever is not a subject human beings can discuss with any claim to direct experience. There is Jesus, sitting in the home of Lazarus, whom he had raised from the dead, but we all know he would still have to die again some day, he wasn’t raised from death into some superhuman state. He was still mortal.

But everything about the scene in the gospel exudes something of a funereal quality. There is the previously dead Lazarus there. There is the anointing of Jesus’ feet with a costly ointment, something normally reserved in those days for the anointing of dead bodies before burial. And in case we missed the point, John reported that the aroma of the ointment filled the whole house.

Now there are probably a dozen ways to take Judas’ words about the waste of such costly stuff when there were poor folks who could have been fed with the money it cost to buy it. But I take it this way today: The steadfast love of God comes to us in hints and brief revelations throughout our lifetimes if we are looking for it, and in that moment, at Lazarus’ dinner table, the lesson was that when Jesus came to die, it would not mean the end of the steadfast love of God, any more than the death of the kings of Israel meant that God had ceased to care, or that the defeat of the nation when it was taken into exile meant God’s love was no longer steadfast. It just meant that the steadfastness of God’s love was once again to be tested through endurance. God’s love is enduring, through death, loss, disfigurement, dashed hopes, defeated dreams, in any and every circumstance, the love of God will remain steadfast and endure, just the way the love of a parent will endure almost anything for a child, even when all others have given up hope. Only more so.

For John’s gospel, as well as the psalmist, “life is double-plotted ... ordinary events unfold around us but ... hidden among all the mundane props are signs of the eternal. The wine is in the water, the light in the darkness, the Word in the flesh.” The rising is hidden in the dying, the saving is hidden in the losing. The steadfastness of the love of God is hidden in the enduring, even when we could swear from all outward signs that it had disappeared altogether.

Copyright © 2009 Robert J. Elder, all rights reserved

____________________________________________________________

1 Le Petit Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Gallimard, 1946, p. 72.
2 I Corinthians 13:7.
3 Thanks to the Rev. Terri Thomas’ unpublished paper with these words paraphrased from a sermon by Donald A. MacLeod, “Thanks Telling,” preached October 13, 2002.

Zeal For Your House

Copyright © 2009 Robert J. Elder, Pastor
3rd Sunday of Lent: March 15, 2009

John 2:13-22

Zeal for your house will consume me.

Zeal. Zealous. Zealot. The words that derive from the little term “zeal,” have fallen on hard times. They have become synonyms for words like “fanatic” or stand next to unsavory adjectives, as in “crazed zealot.” The primary word — zeal — receives mixed reviews, the second term — zealous — doesn’t fare quite as well, but the noun, zealot, now that has come to have an almost entirely negative modern connotation. A zealot has come to be used of a mindless, fanatical commitment to a portion of the truth as if it were the whole thing. In a 1913 poem called “Absolute and Abitofhell,” — a title that has to be seen written to be appreciated — poet Robert Knox wrote,

When suave politeness, tempering bigot zeal,
Corrected I believe to One does feel.

Interesting that the poet felt the need to add that adjective to the word zeal, rendering it “bigot zeal.” My dictionary1 goes about defining these related terms in this way:

• “zeal: eagerness and ardent interest in pursuit of something.” Not too derogatory, that definition. But how about the related terms? They do not fare as well in popular understanding, I’m afraid;
• “zealot: A zealous person, especially a fanatical partisan.”
• “zealotry: Excess of zeal; fanatical devotion.”“zealous: filled with or characterized by zeal: missionaries.”

Missionaries? The overworked doctor in the missionary compound dispensing medicine for the suffering villagers gathered outside his door? The committed missionary teacher in the thatched hut, teaching rooms full of children how to read and write? Zealots? That little addition in the definition surprised me, I have to say. Missionaries are committed, faithful, self-sacrificing, yes, but if they are to be called zealous, then we may need to review that word association that connects zealotry with fanaticism.

Have you ever met a zealot? Who was it? How did you know he or she was a zealot? How was it for you? Annoying? Frightening? Disturbing? Usually a zealot is someone who will not be deterred from his or her cause, no matter what, I think we can probably agree on that. And we tend to carry among us the notion that this is almost uniformly a bad thing. Yet, on the other hand, is an equivocating or constantly rationalizing faith always a good thing? Aren’t there aspects of our faith, times in our lives of faith, which call for a complete commitment? Even a measure of zeal?

Here is a difficult thing to realize: If you ever were confronted by an uncompromising zealot who would not back down and who made you uncomfortable and perhaps even a little frightened, then you know how many of those felt who encountered Jesus. This is what makes our passage for today difficult for me. Jesus as zealot. That’s not the Jesus I want. I want sweet Jesus meek and mild, I am attracted to Jesus the lover of my soul, Jesus the wise and wonderful, Jesus the pure expression of the loving and forgiving grace of God, all these characteristics attract me to Jesus. But Jesus as zealot? These days we are likely to think of a zealot as someone who would cut out the heart of a child if it would advance a cause they believed in, marauding Taliban laying waste to obstinate Pakistani villages, wild-eyed fanatics who cannot see beyond their own blind loyalties to their tribe or faction. Yet it is not fair to leave it at that. Not if we read in scripture that Jesus is associated with a term like “zeal.”

The disciples, seeing Jesus in action in the temple, thought of a psalm which makes use of the word “zeal.” “His disciples remembered,” John said, “that it was written, ‘Zeal for your house will consume me.’” Verses from the Old Testament, when quoted in the New Testament, are meant to call to mind an entire passage, not just a random line: as when Jesus uttered from the cross the chilling opening words of Psalm 22, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” We are meant to think of that entire psalm, which speaks of the suffering of a righteous one, and a prayer that righteous one makes that God will come near, that God will save, the sort of prayer any of us would, and likely have made, at some time.

Here, seeing the teacher, whom they have only just begun to follow, chasing the animals from the temple precincts and turning over the money tables, the disciples recall a half-verse from Psalm 69. But they surely recalled the entire psalm, and we are meant to recall it too. It goes like this:

Save me, O God,
for the waters have come up to my neck.
I sink in deep mire,
where there is no foothold;
I have come into deep waters,
and the flood sweeps over me.
I am weary with my crying;
my throat is parched.
My eyes grow dim
with waiting for my God.
More in number than the hairs of my head
are those who hate me without cause;
many are those who would destroy me,
my enemies who accuse me falsely.
What I did not steal
must I now restore?
O God, you know my folly;
the wrongs I have done are not hidden from you.
Do not let those who hope in you be put to shame because of me,
O Lord GOD of hosts;
do not let those who seek you be dishonored because of me,
O God of Israel.
It is for your sake that I have borne reproach,
that shame has covered my face.
I have become a stranger to my kindred,
an alien to my mother’s children.
It is zeal for your house that has consumed me;
the insults of those who insult you have fallen on me.
When I humbled my soul with fasting,
they insulted me for doing so.
When I made sackcloth my clothing,
I became a byword to them.
I am the subject of gossip for those who sit in the gate,
and the drunkards make songs about me.
But as for me, my prayer is to you, O LORD.
At an acceptable time, O God,
in the abundance of your steadfast love, answer me.
With your faithful help
rescue me from sinking in the mire;
let me be delivered from my enemies
and from the deep waters.
Do not let the flood sweep over me,
or the deep swallow me up,
or the Pit close its mouth over me.

I hope you hear in this fuller quotation from Psalm 692 echoes of the cross and Jesus’ suffering on it. Part of what these words foreshadow in our minds, and the minds of the disciples, is the cross to come. It is Jesus’ uncompromising zeal that has done it. His zeal for the truth brings condemnation on him in the end. John quotes the phrase about zeal for the house of the Lord, as Paul quotes the second half of that verse in Romans 15:3, “For Christ did not please himself; but, as it is written, ‘The insults of those who insult you have fallen on me.’” Jesus stands in for God himself, to receive the insults that humanity daily heaps upon him.

A new and perfect sacrifice for the sake of the sins of all people had arrived at the temple. There would be no further need for sacrificial animals. The foreshadowing of Psalm 69 shows that in the sacrifice of Jesus, the need for other ritual sacrifices came to an end. Matthew, Mark and Luke all place the temple cleansing at the end of Jesus’ ministry, while John places it here in the beginning. So scholarly debate has continued on and on over the years as to which placement is right. Was the temple cleansing a precipitating event for Jesus’ arrest and execution as Matthew, Mark and Luke have it, or was it just the second in a long list of acts of ministry, as John seems to have it?

It is the recollection from Psalm 69 of the zeal for the house of God that ties all four gospels together in seeing this as connected with the ultimate sacrifice of the Messiah on the cross. For John, the chronological timing is not so important as the self-sacrificing Messiah-implications that are wrapped up in each event of Jesus’ ministry. So, though it is reported early here, Jesus’ actions in the temple foreshadow the cross coming at the end as surely as zeal for the house of God will bring suffering at the hands of those who despise God and all who seek him.

It is interesting that among most Presbyterians, any time we begin to talk of zeal for our faith, or even the zeal of Christ, we will soon hear someone begin to say that it is the zealots that have caused all the trouble in the world, the fanatics who have so much commitment to their faith that they fail to take into account the rest of the world, the Jim Jones, the Osama bin Ladens, all the cults of darkness that have consumed many people over the years.

For this I have two thoughts. One is that there is little danger among the Presbyterians I have had the pleasure of knowing that our zeal for our faith will carry us off very far from our good sense. Born, as our denomination was, from a tradition of Scots common sense theology, we just don’t seem much in danger of wandering off with a Bagwan. The other thought, though, is this. Frightened as the prospect of a real and significant zeal for our faith might make us, it is this very sort of commitment which changes limp, moribund faith into faith that lives. Most young people do not despise the idea of giving their lives for something, it is giving their lives for something insignificant that they despise. If our faith is the most significant thing about us, then why can we not follow the Messiah, give our lives to it, body and soul, and hear the call to do something heroic, even zealous for our faith?

May zeal for God’s house consume us, may we carry forward the zealous fire, not the dusty ashes of our faith.

__________________________________
1 Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary, 1984, Merriam-Webster, Inc.
2 Psalm 69:1-15, NRSV.

Spirit Driven
Communion Meditation

copyright © 2009, Robert J. Elder, Pastor
1st Sunday in Lent, March 1, 2009

Psalm 25:1-10
Mark 1:9-15

As we begin our Lenten journey this week, Mark’s gospel starts us off with the beginnings of the ministry of Jesus.

It is true that Mark is the shortest of the gospels, shortest by far. And it is also true that the other gospels contain many details of Jesus’ life and ministry that Mark does not. As Fred Craddock, teacher of preaching to at least three generations of preachers now, once reflected,1 it is difficult to listen to one gospel passage when the other gospels are in the room talking about the same subject, and often with more detail — and for that reason, in ways that are more familiar. [Mark], writing with such brevity that we could miss the importance of his words if we weren’t paying attention, relates three major events:

• Jesus’ baptism,
• Jesus’ temptation in the desert,
• Jesus’ first preaching good news in Galilee.

The sequence of these three things is significant, not simply because it seems to be the familiar order of things to us, but because as the subject of a new exodus Jesus retraces the journey of Israel:

• His baptism is reminiscent of Israel’s walk through the Red Sea, escaping from slavery among the Egyptians by means of water;
• His 40 days of struggle in the desert recall Israel’s 40 years of wandering in the wilderness;
• The good news he proclaims reminds us of God’s fulfilled promise when Israel entered the promised land.

And though his account is supremely brief, sometimes Mark surprises by what he does write. For instance, in the very brief words about his baptism we hear that “as he was coming up out of the water, [Jesus] saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him,” calling to mind, for the discerning among us, the words of the prophet Isaiah, a favorite of the gospel writers, where Isaiah prays earnestly for God’s holy intervention:

64:1 O that you would tear open the heavens and come down,
so that the mountains would quake at your presence —

2 as when fire kindles brushwood
and the fire causes water to boil —
to make your name known to your adversaries,
so that the nations might tremble at your presence! NRSV

This is exactly what happened to Jesus that day at the Jordan river. As he was coming up from the water, Mark says, Jesus “saw the heavens torn apart...” That tearing of the heavens is described using exactly the same word Mark uses at the end of his gospel when Jesus uttered his loud cry from the cross and the curtain of the Temple was also torn in two.

Here also in our gospel passage for today, we have something unique in Mark’s account of the temptation of Christ that intrigues me every time I run across it. While Matthew records “Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit,” and Luke writes, “Jesus was led by the Spirit,” in Mark, immediately upon receiving loving words from the heavenly voice, the gospel portrays the action of the Spirit in a much sterner and forceful way: “And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness.”

It strikes me a bit like the difference between going along willingly and being dragged kicking and screaming. In fact, the verb that Mark uses of the Spirit driving Jesus to the wilderness is the same one used to describe driving the money changers from the Temple toward the end of the gospel, and the driving out of demons by Jesus in four other places in the gospel (1:34, 39; 3:15; 6:13).

So why does Jesus go? Because Jesus goes to where the news has all been bad to proclaim the news that is good. Mark says “He was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts.” Mark is again thinking of Isaiah as he proclaims the coming of the Messiah, Isaiah who wrote , in a passage that is often read during Advent’s expectation of the coming of the Messiah:

The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad,
the desert shall rejoice and blossom...
like the crocus...
... They shall see the glory of the LORD,
the majesty of our God.

Strengthen the weak hands,
and make firm the feeble knees.
Say to those who are of a fearful heart,
“Be strong, do not fear!
Here is your God.
He will come with vengeance,
with terrible recompense.
He will come and save you.”

No lion shall be there,
nor shall any ravenous beast come up on it;
they shall not be found there,
but the redeemed shall walk there. NRSV

In an account of Jesus’ ministry in which only Satan, wild beasts and ministering angels are with him, by reading and listening for understanding, we discover that we, too, are present there in the desert. We know what it is to be dealing with wild beasts out there in the wilderness of our lives. Rising crime rates, desperate striving to make ends meet in a fast-fading economy, grappling with family problems, the beasts greet us at every turn, and there we are in the wilderness wrestling with them. Then, over the horizon, we see a distant figure coming closer and closer. It is the baptized One, Jesus of Nazareth, driven to our encounters with our own wild beasts by the very Spirit of God. Coming to us, to you and me. Being baptized and having the presence and power of the Holy Spirit granted to us is no insulation against real struggles with the forces of evil. Rather, the presence of the risen Christ promises us we are not alone in our struggles. “He was tempted, as we are, yet without sin,” says the author of Hebrews (4:15). His temptation was as real as ours, and just as deceptive. As Fred Craddock said, “No self-respecting Satan would approach a person with offers of personal, social and professional ruin. That is in the small print at the bottom of the temptation.”

No, here, today we have in this sacrament laid before us and in the stories about him a promise of real help, a real messiah. In the end, baptized and tested, Jesus turns to the world — to us — and says, “the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.”

Copyright © 2009 Robert J. Elder, all rights reserved

1 “Test Run,” by Fred Craddock, Christian Century, February 22, 2003, p. 21.
2 Isaiah 35:1-9 selected verses.
3 “Test Run,” by Fred Craddock, Christian Century, February 22, 2003, p. 21.