To Bathe in the Sheep Gate Pool

 To Bathe in the Sheep Gate Pool

Robert J. Elder, Pastor

                  First Presbyterian Church, Vancouver, Washington

                  Ash Wednesday: 2-13-2013

John 5:1-9 (NRSV)

After this there was a festival of the Jews, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. Now in Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate there is a pool, called in Hebrew Beth-zatha, which has five porticoes. In these lay many invalids—blind, lame, and paralyzed. One man was there who had been ill for thirty-eight years. When Jesus saw him lying there and knew that he had been there a long time, he said to him, “Do you want to be made well?” The sick man answered him, “Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up; and while I am making my way, someone else steps down ahead of me.” Jesus said to him, “Stand up, take your mat and walk.” At once the man was made well, and he took up his mat and began to walk. Now that day was a Sabbath.

Everyone who reads the papers knows what an “unprovoked attack” is. Among the anxieties of modern life there is the fear that we may be walking alone one night, or resting quietly in our own home, and suddenly, out of the darkness, a stranger attacks us with malevolent intentions. Scoundrels have always been able to use the element of surprise to accomplish evil ends.

But what about an act of “unprovoked grace”? I recall a blossoming of bumper stickers years ago calling for a bit of unprovoked graciousness through “random acts of kindness.” Perhaps you have been on the receiving end of a randomly kind act, say when struggling to manage two large full grocery bags and a stranger stepped forward and opened the door for you.

When we are on the receiving end an act of unprovoked graciousness, we won’t have expected it, that’s the delight of it, isn’t it?

It was so for the man who lounged for 38 years by the pool called “Beth-zatha” or “Bethesda.” For 38 years, he had in mind one goal only: to get to the pool any time the waters were stirred and receive the healing that everyone said would be available only momentarily for the lucky few who could jump in time. That pool must have been something like those call-in contests on the radio: “We will offer this prize for the correct answer from caller number 10!” Caller number 9 and caller number 11 are no closer to winning than caller number 243. It isn’t fair necessarily, just a random chance in a dialing sequence. Today could be your lucky day, but very likely it won’t be. The air stirs, the aroma of fresh water invades the stagnant atmosphere around the cisterns of the Bethesda pool, and everyone realizes it all at the very same instant. There is a rush like nobody’s business until that all-too-brief moment has passed. A missed opportunity means more endless waiting until a magic moment occurs again.

38 years. Perhaps in that first year the man remained beside the pool with nerves on edge, waiting, waiting, waiting until, WHAM! the instant arrived when healing was only a fleeting few ticks of the clock away. But others were faster. Then, that opportunity having been missed, there remained only more waiting on edge. But for 38 years? By the time 38 years of waiting go by, we have spent so much time biding our time that waiting itself has become our whole life’s work. Day after dreary day, his focus had become waiting. Hour by hour he waited. Days stretched into weeks and months, until he could hardly remember a time of his life not characterized by endless waiting.

Then, one day, a voice startled him from his usual stupor into an unaccustomed state of alertness. He looked up. He was blinded by the sun silhouetting the stranger’s face. “Do you want to be healed?” the stranger asked. What a cruel, silly question! Hadn’t he devoted almost his entire life to waiting for an opportunity to be healed? So his answer sounded ambivalent, explaining that he had no one to help him. He had almost forgotten the whole reason behind lying beside the pool. It had been so long since he had really thought of the effect of the healing waters that he had come to think only of getting in them.

We have all known the secret pleasure that can characterize a temporary illness, which requires that we stay home, leaving the real tasks of life unfinished, unattended for a while, giving us the luxury of temporary unaccountability. For the man by the pool, means had become ends. Getting into the water had become the whole life’s goal. Getting a handout from passersby had changed places with the original target of actually becoming mobile enough to work. What healing meant, what work is, these had been forgotten, maybe somewhere around the 24th year of his endless waiting.

Do you want to be healed? What a question! But after 38 years … interim answers, lesser answers offer themselves when our lives involve waiting. “Perhaps he has never been well. Perhaps he doesn’t know what it is to be well.”[1] Abraham waited all his life for a son. Job waited endlessly for an interim answer to his questions about suffering.

It has occurred to me that a lot of us throw away a pretty good portion of our lives believing that waiting for real life is our task, when the fact is that real life is only what we have right now. Life today is not a practice for some future time of real living. Sometimes chronically ill patients have reported that one of the key adjustments to life with their disease was to discover who they were called to be now that disease is a given in their life. The person they had been is gone. A new goal and task to life need to be discovered, or else the remainder of life could seem only that: a remainder, a time of endless waiting.

Congregations can do this too. Members of churches may sit year after year waiting for the church to turn into the church they really wanted it to be, withholding themselves from real work on behalf of the church until that far-off time when their vision of what the church should have been will be realized.

Me? Healed? The man beside the Bethesda pool said, “No, I want to get into the water, but no one will help me.” We may respond, saying, “I haven’t had anyone provide a church for me the way I have really needed a church to be. I know what I’m looking for in a church, and I’ll just wait to be healed until that comes along, thanks.”

Jesus bent over, got close enough to the man’s face that he could smell what he had had for breakfast, looked right into his eyes and said “Stand up, take up your mat and walk.” Nothing further about pools of water and a thousand other excuses. Just, “Get up and walk.” Unprovoked grace! And the man did. And so may we.

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[1] “Hazards of Healing,” by Margaret Guenther in Christian Century, May 10, 1995, p. 507.

Veiled Attempts

Veiled Attempts

Sunday, February 10, 2013

Exodus 34:29-35           

Moses did not know that the skin of his face shone

because he had been talking with God.

“Moses did not know that the skin of his face shone.” I like this line, I don’t fully know why. Someone walks into my office and says, “God has been speaking to me,” and sometimes, fearful, I think to myself, “What does that have to do with me?” and like the Israelites I am afraid to come near them ... They may have been in touch with something big, something dangerous.

But then, I think how often in the study at the church or at home, alone with the Bible and a few trusted commentaries that surround me on my desktop like old friends – and maybe a paper prepared by one of my preaching friends from our annual meetings in January on sermon texts – I make a study of these passages I preach on every Sunday.

Over my career in ministry, in my sermon preparation times, as I have considered the implications of a scripture reading, I frequently remark to myself how often I find some nugget, some insight, some arresting observation among all the words written in commentaries by men and women wiser than I, that makes me stop in my tracks — things, as they used to say, that make you go “hmmm.” It might be a single word, repeated in an unusual way, or an alternate translation that suddenly makes it seem as though someone turned the light on in the room.

A couple of days go by, and then I get to the day for writing the sermon, and often all the shine seems to have gone from my nifty insights, I can’t seem to find the same gear I had when I was meeting with my fellow scholars. The light switch is overhead, just out of reach. My face was maybe shining in scripture study days or weeks or months ago, but by some Thursdays, I’m behind the old veil again. The world has undone my proximity to the voice of God one more time, and I have to work at finding my way there once again, to the place where the veil can be removed and I can sense the nearness of God that makes my face begin to glow like moving just a little too close to the campfire.

Maybe you have been there too. I suspect some of you have. I hope many of you have. Maybe you have found times in your life when the puzzle pieces snapped together for an instant, when the sense of something very important to you suddenly became evident in a way it never had before. Still, the lifting of the veil, the shining of the face lasts but a short time, and all too soon, back behind the veil we go, back to the mundane, insightless lives we know all too well. Why must it always be so?

I recall that Phillips Brooks[1] once said, “Humility doesn’t come from counting up our sins, it comes from standing our tallest and measuring ourselves against that which God intends for us.” But we can so easily lose sight of our tallest selves, and especially the selves God has in mind for us to be.

I think this story about Moses running up and down the mountain of meeting represents something like that in the life of Israel. They were beginning to be made to see not only that God was willing to save them from the slavery of Egypt, but that God was willing to believe in them, was willing to stay beside them even when the great danger had passed, even when – and this always comes as a great shock to people who beat themselves up at avery available opportunity – even when they knew they had failed God, had let God down. Even then, God believed in them, which in some ways is harder to take than if God had simply thrown up his hands and walked away. God wanted more from them, found more potential in them than they knew they had, and caused them to begin to stand their tallest and measure themselves against that which God intended for them.

How can it be otherwise for us, who follow the Savior?

I remember the very first wedding we celebrated in the spanking new sanctuary of the church I once served in Port Arthur, Texas. One of the distinguishing features of that sanctuary was that up at the peak of the roof, clerestory windows ran the entire length of the room, made up of stained glass panes of various colors. Our first wedding was at 11:00 A.M. on a Saturday, a couple of weeks after the sanctuary had been dedicated, and I will never forget that as the bride made her way toward the chancel, the colors from those clerestory windows were displayed along the entire length of the center aisle. No one had anticipated the effect. Her white dress changed colors with every step, transfigured: one moment it was white, the next moment green, the next it was so red it appeared to be on fire, then yellow, purple, and so on. By the time she reached the front of the sanctuary, we were all absolutely transfixed. I could hardly bring myself to speak the words to begin the service. It was as if the architect and the sun had conspired to provide us with a truly heavenly light show.

One great claim of the Christian faith is that while we may be in the dark about many things, on the ultimate issues of human life there is light. Paul once said, “For now we see in a mirror, dimly.”[2] Some things, many things, we don’t know. We really don’t know the complete answer to all questions that begin with “why.” The answers we do have shine in the face of Moses, in the face of Christ, on our own faces, and can change us more fully, more gracefully than that wedding dress ever changed that bride or any of us.

What happened on that holy mountain when Moses came back to deliver the tablets to the children of Israel? When they say that his face had a certain glow about it, what does it mean? Was it like the glow your hands feel when they have been warmed by a fire? How do we describe such things? One preacher says there is no describing them, that if you are going to talk about a bear, the best thing to do is bring in a bear. But how can we bring in the shining face of Moses?

It is as hard to describe what happened on that mountain top as it is to give an accurate description of what goes on in our dreams.

The question for us is not so much whether we have ever experienced a transfiguration the likes of the one that came over Moses, but whether we may ever have been an agent to help God bring one to pass. In southeast Texas, where I once served, there is a special school – the Hughen School – for very sick children, most of whom have few or no motor skills. One very sick boy lived at that school, dying by degrees. Tragic as that could be, that is not the reason for telling this story. Children get grievously ill every day. It is one of the unhappy yet constant facts of human life on earth. But this little boy had the good fortune to be living in the same community with some faithful believers who took the story of God’s own shining in the world to be their story. God’s glory lived in them to the degree that they carried it with them where they went. A group of these people joined together to go to that child every day and read to him. Knowing that he was slowly dying, unable to move or read for himself, it was the only activity that comforted him.

The social workers were amazed. Just being read to by three ladies, taking turns, one every day, transformed him from a depressed and despondent child into a responsive person whose spark of life, though soon to leave him, grew brighter, not dimmer. The boy died eventually, as we all must die. But his life had been forever transfigured by the ministry of caring Christian people. Their lives had been changed as well. I can assure you, with my own eyes I saw them glowing.

When do we find that the veil of the mundane lives we live has been lifted? Paul worried that people might miss the fact that Christ has lifted the veil from our eyes. He said, “And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord ... are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another.”[3] All of us. Transformed.

William Willimon, a Methodist bishop and former chaplain at Duke University, once wrote,

“A few weeks ago I had a bad day, the culmination of a bad week. The congregation didn’t like my sermon, didn’t care for my pastoral care. The Institute on Religion and Democracy sent another batch of spiteful e-mails. The electrical relay to the organ gave out. I was depressed.

Then, preparing for a sermon, reading a text I had worked on many times before – Galatians 2 – I noticed something. A little Greek word, eis. Paul says ‘a person is righteous not by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ.’ But eis can be either translated ‘in’ or ‘of.’ Is it the faith ‘in’ Jesus Christ – Jesus is the object of our faith? Or can it also be the faith ‘of’ Jesus Christ – we are to have the same faith, that same suffering, obedient unto death, boldly trusting faith?”

Bishop Willimon went on, “Suddenly the latter possibility glowed before me, lit up my imagination, transfigured my previous understandings of faith. Our being right with God is not so much our belief in Christ as it is our believing like Christ. What matters is Jesus, moving toward the world as he moved, living and believing as Jesus, ‘Jesus only.’

I wanted to preserve that moment of exegetical insight forever. But I couldn’t. I had to go back down and be a pastor, answer the mail, visit the sick and construct a sermon. Still, my face shone because, like Moses, I had been talking with God. The rest of that day some people needed sunglasses just to look at me.”[4]

There are those days when I know just how he feels. I pray that you do too.

Copyright © 2013 Robert J. Elder, all rights reserved

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[1] An American clergyman and author, briefly served as Bishop of Massachusetts in the Episcopal Church during the early 1890s. In the Episcopal liturgical calendar he is remembered on January 23. He is known for being the lyricist of "O Little Town of Bethlehem".

[2] I Corinthians 13:12

[3] II Corinthians 3:18

[4] “Come On Down” by William Willimon Christian Century,  February 10, 2004, p. 19.

Net Results

Net Results

© Robert J. Elder, Pastor

Luke 5:1-11

January 27, 2013

...they caught so many fish

that their nets were beginning to break...

With one pull of the fishing net, Peter and his fishing friends went from having nothing to having more than they could handle. Living as we do in the era of get-rich TV programs and lottery jackpot amounts dangled tantalizingly at the counter of every convenience store, we spend lots more of our time as a culture considering what we don’t have and how much more we might like to have, than we do thinking on the downside of what it would be like to have more than we can handle.

I remember speaking once with a friend of mine who is an accountant. He said that he had never seen an instance when a young person – someone under 30 years of age – had inherited a large estate in which that money was then wisely used. Sometimes an overwhelming bit of good luck can turn out to be just that: overwhelming. Witness the many stories of lottery jackpot winners who have considered that time following their lucky day to have been the most overwhelming portion of their lives. Many emerge bankrupt or worse. Fights, both legal and physical, break out among those who have joined forces to buy a winning lottery ticket. Sometimes gaining a windfall means that other things must fall as well, unaccustomed things, perhaps even cherished things.

It was Peter who first recognized the enormity of what they had experienced. It wasn’t just their nets that were beginning to break as they pulled them into the boat, it was that their view of the world and their accustomed place in it was being broken and re-made right before their eyes, and they were powerless to stop it. “Go away from me, Lord,” he said, “for I am a sinful man!” Yet he did not go away, and within the space of a few verses, we find the fishing nets draped, neglected, on an old worn piling of a lakeside dock. Through the webbing of the nets you can see that immense pile of fish, steaming in the sun, but no people. The scene looks like an abandoned town, and all you hear is an occasional slap of the tail fin of a dying fish, and the gentle lapping of waves alongside the dock. They’ve all gone off to be with Jesus. It is a magnetic story, it just draws me in every time I read it. The loads of fish, a first century version of a small fortune for the fishermen, just left there along with the unrepaired and discarded nets.

Jesus made them “fishers of men” as the old versions have translated it, people catchers. They would no longer need nets, they would be the net.

Here is a truth we can remember, and which should carry us all forward in our discipleship, whether we are officers in the church, pastors, musicians, members: We do not manipulate the net, we don’t own it, it is not ours, we do not mend it, tend it, or haul it in; rather, by the grace of Christ, we become the net.[1] It is we who are heaved over the side of the boat called the church, out into the waters of our world, and it is we who can return with the sort of catch that defies description if only we will remember to be the net.

I have had conversations with other pastors, and among us we know something is going on which pastors are generally loath to admit. Attendance, participation levels in our churches, are off in the past few years. Over time, we have seen a gradual decline in attendance at worship and in other activities around our churches. What do you suppose is going on?

One preacher[2] once declared flatly that it would make life easier for us all if the reading for today had stopped with verse 6. By the end of verse 6 we have the sort of lesson we may have come to expect in church: If at first you don’t succeed, try again. But this is not a lesson about trying harder. It is a lesson about being caught up in something bigger than we are, it is about becoming catchers ourselves. Sometimes we forget the disciples’ central task, to become fishers.

Anyone who has spent much time in the church knows that lots of fishing nets turn up empty. Walk around these halls, you might well catch bits of conversation like these:

“Pastor, I once taught Sunday School for six years here and not one person ever said ‘thank you.’”

“Pastor, I worked as a mentor for an elementary school student, met with him every week, but he still flunked!”

“Pastor, We worked for six weeks to get that study group started, and in the end, only two people showed up, two people!

We all know about discouragement, about the frustrations of working in volunteer organizations and developing simple church programs in a world that has sold its soul to the high energy, big budget entertainment industry. We all know how frustrating it is to throw that net in the same pool of people time after time and come up with little or nothing. But perhaps it’s that pool of people that is part of our problem. With a look at membership statistics in many churches, it doesn’t take an advanced degree in math to discover that many people don’t leave their congregation to go elsewhere, they simply stop going to any church. It is not just their own participation that is missed when they are gone, but their willingness to reach out to others in their schools, neighborhoods, and at their workplaces with the simple invitation to come and see what goes on at church. As they have gone, the disciples’ net has developed a hole. We can only repair that hole by taking their place, by being that part of the net, and then casting it into a larger body of water than we’d thought we could.

Typical Presbyterian thinking about outreach by the church into the community often goes this way: We know that the fish are out there; yet, often we think we have done our job if we carry an aquarium to the edge of the sea and wait for the fish to jump in.

Here is a phrase which can be easily memorized and used in about any circumstance when we find ourselves talking with someone about our church. If they express interest, we can just say, “Well, could I come by and pick you up for the service next week?” Practice it. Say it with me now: “Can I come by and pick you up for the service next week?” Don’t say, “Let me draw you a map to the church,” or write down the address, or give them the web page, or express a hope that they will find their way here sometime. That is to act as if we were the owners of the net. That is carrying that aquarium to the sea and waiting for fish to jump in. Outreach requires invitation. “May I come pick you up at 9:00 next Sunday?” is the statement of someone who has recognized Jesus’ call to be the net.

Now this may be a bit frightening. If you've ever been recruited from doing something you’re already satisfied with, into a position you don’t feel qualified for, then you probably know how Peter and the others felt. All of us may be a bit afraid of words like “evangelism,” or “witness.” But Jesus made a promise, and he started his promise in a most interesting way: “Do not be afraid;” he said. I like it that when Jesus is coming at us with something we don’t expect, something completely out of our frame of reference, he so often begins by telling us that no matter how it appears, there is no reason to fear. “From now on,” he said, “you will be catching people.” You will be the net.

Now we may actually want to be afraid of that charge, we may want to be people who hope other folks will be the net and we can be maybe net managers, or net number criticizers, or net observers in the outreach movement of the church. But that is not the call that Jesus gives to disciples from the start. He says, “from now on you will be catching people.” Often we emphasize a different word in the sentence, We say, “from now on you will be catching people.” But I think it also needs to be read, “from now on you will be catching people.” That’s right. You. And you and you and you. And don’t bother being afraid about it, because it is the most natural thing in the world for someone who has received good news to want to share it, so that is what you will be doing. On that score, C.S. Lewis once reminded his readers that “the work of a Beethoven, and the work of a charwoman, become spiritual on precisely the same condition, that of being offered to God, of being done humbly ‘as to the Lord.’”[3]

With today’s scripture, we remember that Jesus’ call by the sea to be the net is not made to pastors, or elders, or deacons only, though certainly it does come to them. It comes to us all. It is part and parcel of discipleship, not an   alternate choice from a menu of ways to serve.

So, go this day and be the net. Your net results will surprise you, I promise!

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[1] “Amateurs and Rookies,” by Frederick Niedner, Christian Century, 1/24/01, p. 9.

[2] “The Dangers of Fishing with Jesus,” by William Willimon, preached at the Duke University Chapel, February 5, 1995

[3] The Weight of Glory.

Comings and Goings

Comings and Goings

Sunday, January 6, 2013

           

Isaiah 60:1-6                   

Ephesians 3:1-6

Matthew 2:1-6                                      

 I know where you’re coming from.

It’s a common, homely phrase, and it is a bit handier than the more grammatically correct, “I know the place from which you come.” It’s an affirmation that we might use to let others know that we appreciate their position, that we are listening, that we are trying to see how things look on their side of their own eyeballs.

“I know where you’re coming from.” But do we? Where are we coming from, and knowing that, will it help us get wherever it is we are headed? One task of our religious faith is to move us, to get us along on our way. All three Bible readings today refer us to comings and goings, each in its own way. And each brings alive a new perspective on the fact that no matter where we’ve been or where we are headed, God comes to us.

God Comes

If we think on Advent-themed readings in Isaiah, we ought at least to know where Isaiah was “coming from.” A pretty good five letter word for it would be gloom. After years of captivity by their enemies, far from Palestine, in exile in Babylon, the people of the promises had just about become the people kept on the premises. Many Israelites were entirely ready to sink down roots in Babylon and just get on with whatever life was to be had there. Two generations of Israel’s children had been bom never having seen the promised land.

Then comes this enchanting word of Isaiah: “Arise! Shine! for your light has come!” Eight times in chapter 60, Isaiah uses the word “glory.”[1] Now, that’s a much misunderstood Bible word. Ask an average person what “glory” means, and you are likely to see head scratching before you hear an answer. It’s a floor wax; it’s something a football star gets; it’s the name of an old movie about the War Between the States.

But the Old Testament most commonly uses the word “glory” to refer to times when people sensed God’s presence in a special way. Now the dead last place anyone expected to find even a hint of God, let alone a shred of the glory of his presence, was in the midst of their exile in Babylon. Yet, there it was. No need to set out in search of the enlightenment of God. It has come to us. It was an early sense of what believers have come to know over the generations: no matter where we may be, or be coming from, God comes to us as redeemer, as savior, as one who can make even the most hopeless situation new all over again.

How does God come to us? Often, not as we might expect. Tucked away in the 3rd and 6th verses of Isaiah’s prophecy are these words,

And nations shall come to your light,

and kings to the brightness of your rising.

They shall bring gold and frankincense,

and shall proclaim the praise of the Lord.

It is one of many clues in the Old Testament that the glory of God is not reserved only for chosen people, but that chosen people are the vehicles by which the glory of God might come to all people everywhere. It is because of this Isaiah text that we sing “We three kings...” Matthew  doesn’t mention kings at all. God comes, we know that. Isaiah affirms it. But where are we going once he has touched our lives? For that, we can turn to Ephesians.

God Comes to All

Paul’s word in Ephesians confirms emphatically what Isaiah’s prophecy had only  suggested. The coming of Christ was such an important event, it couldn’t be reserved for the people of Israel alone, but was destined to be the means by which all people, Jews and Gentiles, might come to know the glory of God’s redeeming presence. While the New Testament problem in Paul’s time was to get Jewish Christians to make room for Gentile Christians in their gatherings, it is certainly not our problem. In our time the problem is getting Gentile Christians to make room for other Gentiles!

Am I right about this? Just consider that the old mainline Christian denominations have been dwindling away rather pathetically during the last thirty-five years. We can be thankful that some churches have found ways to maintain their membership over the last decade, but these churches have been the exception. And some of the denominations which have grown dramatically have not been without a host of their own troubles and strife. What has been lost in the shuffle? People. People have been lost when churches and denominations place institutional survival above serving the people God places around them. Does God need lots more Presbyterians? Well, I believe God could use lots more Presbyterians, but not half as desperately as God seeks out more people who have felt the tug of the gospel good news to bring that news to others from deeply convicted hearts.

There is an old story about a king named Ebrahim ibn Adam. Ebrahim was wealthy according to every earthly measure. At the same time, however, he strove sincerely and restlessly to be wealthy spiritually as well.

One night the king was roused from sleep by a fearful stomping on the roof above his bed. Alarmed, he shouted: “Who’s there?” “A friend,” came the reply from the roof. “I’ve lost my camel.” Perturbed by such stupidity, Ebrahim screamed: “You fool! Are you looking for a camel on the roof?” “You fool” the voice from the roof replied. “Are you looking for God in silk clothing, and lying on a golden bed?"[2]

Where are we going to go once God has found us? Where are we coming from? From the comfort of the pews of this beautiful church, of an unstudied religious faith that we may not have bothered to probe for a quarter of a century (this is a subtle boost for adult Christian education!)? From the comfortable point of view of people who are safely “in the kingdom” while thousands in our own community haven’t yet found the front door of a church?

From a prison cell where he was sent for the crime of proclaiming his faith, Paul suggested in the letter to the Ephesians that we might find God more readily if we accepted that our calling as Christians includes a responsibility to tell others about the Word of Life with conviction.

In Coming, God Prepares Us To Be Sent

One last story, then I’ll stop. Our third passage, from Matthew, reminds me of one old legend about the three Magi who came seeking Jesus. In it the three of them are drawn together by their common vision of the beautiful star that bids them to seek a newborn king. They follow this star across deserts, mountains, and plains, until it stands over a grotto in Bethlehem. But when they look into the grotto they see only a young peasant woman and her husband with a newborn child. They turn away in disappointment. After they have gone some distance, however, they discover they have lost the star and with it the memory of where they have been. They are lost between a forgotten homeland and a vanished destination.

Overwhelmed by a sense of despair, they realize they have allowed their earthbound  judgment to lead them astray from finding the new thing God would bring to pass. Despondent,  they come upon an old well. It is a well known to the local people by the brilliant reflections it  produces. They collapse in despair at the side of the well until one of the three, hoping to quench his thirst, looks into the depths of the well and there finds the reflection of the lost star! Looking back into the sky, they see the star again. They are led back to the grotto where they pay homage to the hidden king, born where the standards of the world would least expect to find him.[3]

This is the king we serve. No matter the land, the culture, the life experiences from which we come, this is the king who joins us on our journey to wherever we are going. He comes. He comes to all. And he opens in us a new possibility for fuller life through ministry in his name.

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[1] Walter Burghardt, "From Gloom to Glory", Interpretation, October 1990, p. 396.

[2] Walter Burghardt, Still Proclaiming your Wonders: Homilies for the Eighties.

[3] From Presbynet, 12/17/90

Opposite the Temple

Opposite the Temple

Mark 13:1-8

Thirty-third Sunday in Ordinary Time

November 18, 2012

When Mark wrote that, following his foray to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, Jesus sat “opposite the Temple” on the mount of Olives, he was describing not only what was – and is – literally true. The Mount of Olives was, and still is, opposite the Temple mount, the one is across a small valley, the Kidron valley, from the other. They are two hillsides facing one another, the Mount of Olives standing actually somewhat higher. In a way it is similar to the fact that, for years, the Presbyterian church I once served in Salem stood where the Labor and Industries building stands today in the same sort of relationship to the capitol building: “the Presbyterian church opposite the capitol,” though we might not have phrased it that way. Mark wrote these words as a similar description of a location, but also more than that.

Mark was describing what, in a few years, would also have been theologically true. The Temple was destroyed in the first century, never to be rebuilt. The mountain from which Jesus ascended, the Mount of Olives, stood opposite, representing a new truth about the way God could be worshipped. For generations, the people had worshiped God on the holiest site they knew, on the mount where a Temple had stood for generations, three different Temples, as a matter of fact:

·    First the much heralded Temple of Solomon which was destroyed by the Babylonians;

·    Then the Temple built in the time after Israel’s exile in Babylon, the Temple of Zerubbabel;

·    Finally, in Jesus’ generation, it was a new Temple, which was begun under Herod, 20 years before Jesus’ birth and was not finished until after his crucifixion, made of massive stone blocks, huge stones, some the size of semitrailer trucks. Some of the hewn stones from that Temple form the foundations of the temple mount on which today the Mosque of Omar – the Dome of the Rock  – stands, part of those foundations are commonly called the “Wailing Wall.”

The sight of Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives was and remains one of the most spectacular views of the city, visited by virtually every tourist who travels there, and in Jesus’ day, it offered an unparalleled view of the magnificence of the Temple building, a building which, as Jesus spoke of it with his disciples, was a brand new structure. When they were visiting the city, Jesus had told them that the Temple, built of the massive stones that they could see before them, would be “thrown down.” Later on, they asked, understandably, from the elevated perspective of the Mount of Olives, “when will this be?” I’m sure they also wondered how this could be; anyone looking at those massive stones, that immense structure, might have wondered at Jesus’ words.

The Temple was enormous and opulent, a walk around its perimeter would have been about 2/3 of a mile. Its marble-clad walls were 150 feet high, and each block weighed many tons. Outside there were columns of 40 foot high marble. The outer courts were entered by ten different gates, each of which was covered in silver or gold plate. Records show that two of the doors stood 45 feet high, and the one famously called “Beautiful Gate” in Acts[1] was cast of bronze brought from Corinth in Greece. The eastern face of the Temple and parts of the side walls were plated in gold, which along with the white marble, caused the Temple to glow as if on fire in the rising sun of morning, much as the golden Dome of the Rock does today. But the Temple, unlike today’s much smaller mosque, completely dominated the mount visually, as well as the city around it.

Today we know that it was about 70 AD, some 40 years after Jesus’ crucifixion, when the unimaginable happened and the Roman legions came into an increasingly restive and rebellious Jerusalem to do just what Jesus had said they would do, tearing the Temple down to the extent that what remained amounted to little more than a pile of rocks. Then all Jews were barred from from Israel, from Jerusalem, and from the Temple grounds for about 19 centuries. These things he wanted them to understand as he sat on the little mountain “opposite the temple,” the Mount of Olives so well-known by Christians as a location where there was once a garden in which Jesus was betrayed, where nearby in Bethany there once had been the house of Mary and Martha, the location of some of Jesus’ most profound teaching, and where also there was a hilltop from which the disciples watched the resurrected Christ rise into the heavens. It became, in many ways, a new mount for believers, the old one with its Temple having been cast down without one stone remaining on another for about 2000 years now. The new place, the new mount was ultimately where faces looked toward heaven, opposite the lower hillside where downcast eyes revealed only the ruins of the old Temple.

The Temple had certainly been made of solid earthly stuff, as solid and expensive as could be found, but the deeper foundation which Jesus sought, as with the foundations of our own lives, was the foundation of deep faith. That is why anyone who heard Jesus’previous comment on a poor widow’s two half pennies placed in the Temple offering box being a gift greater than anyone else’s[2] would have caused building committee folks to scratch their heads in wonder. Tiny donations do not build immense, magnificent buildings. But they can reveal a deeper foundation than the foundations of buildings, a foundation of deep faith. Humility, service, commitment to the message Jesus brought will outlast columns of marble and doors plated with gold.

There must have been despair in the disciples’ hearts at the thought of a wrecked Temple, but there was to be a future hope on its way as well.

Bruce Larson once wrote that the neighborhood bar is possibly the best counterfeit there is to the fellowship Christ wants to see in his church. It is an imitation, but a good one, dispensing spirits instead of the spirit, escape instead of what is really real, but one thing is true of such places as we used to see on the old 1980s TV series Cheers: it is a place with a fellowship that is permissive, accepting, and inclusive, where “everybody knows your name.” It is unshockable, democratic, and even confessional, a place where people often tell things to each other that they would never say anywhere else. Such places flourish not because people are alcoholics, though some are, but because we are created by God with a desire to make ourselves known, and to know others, to love and be loved. Probably Christ wants his church to be unshockable, democratic, a place where people can come in where “everybody knows their name” and say, “I’m sunk!” “I’m beat!” “I’ve had it!” Groups like Alcoholics Anonymous and AlAnon have this desperately desired quality. Churches too often miss it.[3]

The qualities Christ seeks in us are not that we be builders of great temples or great fortunes or great reputations, but that we be builders of great fellowships where the lost the least and the last can come and find in one another the presence of Christ, opposite the Temple, standing with those who cannot stand alone.

Of course our reading begins with the words about the Temple, but continues with words about the last things, the final things, what scholars call “eschatology.” One of my friends once said that the word eschatology sounds like a medical term.[4] “How is your eschatology today?” But it’s not something measured on an blood test or electrocardiogram. Eschatology is talk about ultimate things, final judgment, and it is a topic that always appears in Gospel readings as we begin to approach the season of Advent. The four disciples who approached Jesus after his lesson at the Temple stood looking with him at the glittering, brand new Temple from the perspective of a hillside a half mile away, and were inspired to ask a question about last things, ultimate things.

Jesus responded with two points.

First, that there would be a multitude of religious pretenders coming their way who will claim to know not only the purpose of the world, but the finer points of God’s timing.  That was and still is the case. Jesus said to them and to us, “Many will come in my name ... and they will lead many astray.”

Second, religious pretenders notwithstanding, remember that no matter how solid it appears to be, neither this Temple, nor the good old earth itself is going to last forever. As one preacher put it, Jesus seems to be saying, “You never know, so live alertly, live expectantly, live now.”[5] We all know what it means to live in other ways so that we only see what our lives would have meant had we been paying attention:

·   Real life is not living at home and going to high school, real life comes when I get out of high school and go to college or get a job;

·   Real life isn’t this starting-level job, real life is when I get that promotion;

·   Real life isn’t being single, real life is when I find the right someone and get married;

·   Real life is going to start when we have some kids and are a family;

·   Real life will be when our two year-old is finally out of diapers and in school;

·   Real life is when our kids finally get off to college;

·   Real life is when the last tuition payment is made;

·   Real life is when I finally get my retirement;

·   Real life will be after I get that bypass surgery I need...

Author Annie Dillard put this point in the most concise and telling way I have ever heard. “How we spend our days,” she wrote, “is of course how we spend our lives.”

The “holiday season” – as our culture persists in referring to the coming 4 or 5 weeks from Thanksgiving through Advent, Christmas, Hanukkah, and New Years – comes at many of us like a freight train on amphetimines. So much to do, shopping, greeting cards to send, parties to organize or attend. There is nothing wrong with all this, it’s just important to remember to stop and realize, as if Jesus stood beside us to say it, that one day none of these things we are attending to so frantically will remain. Not one will remain standing. Don’t go through the motions of these coming days, but live in them. Perhaps, as a friend of mine once said, this is the holiday when you may think about living enough in the precious moment God has provided to “tap your spoon on the water glass and look at one dear face or all the dear faces across the cranberry relish and say: ‘I’ve been meaning to say this for so long; I love you, and I thank God for you.’”[6]

I encourage you to do such things in the midst of this passing world you love, that is populated by people and places you love, in this church that we all love so much. And I do this myself as I say now to each of you, I love you, and I thank God for you.

In the name of the Triune God who loves us with such unfettered abandon. Amen.

Copyright © 2012 Robert J. Elder, all rights reserved

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[1] Acts 3:2, 10.

[2] Mark 12:41-44

[3] Edge of Adventure, by Bruce Larson and Keith Miller.

[4] Michael Lindvall, in his sermon “The Real Thing,” preached at Brick Presbyterian Church, New York City, 11-16-03.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid.

Avoiding the Sins of the Lips

Avoiding the Sins of the Lips

A Meditation for World Communion Sunday

Job 1:1, 2:1-10         

Robert J. Elder, Pastor

27th Sunday of Ordinary Time: October 7, 2012

Job…

We all hear Job’s name, and we connect it immediately with the biblical story of his abject suffering. Some questions come to my mind:

• Why read from such a book on World Communion Sunday, of all days?

• How is today’s service representative of “the world” gathered at the Lord’s table, and in particular…

• … how does Job’s story relate to the Lord’s Supper?

I reflected this week on the membership of the seven congregations I have served during my ordained ministry, and realized that I have been privileged to serve churches whose members were born in many different countries. Here are a few that came to my mind: The USA, of course, England, Scotland, Germany, Sierra Leon, Australia, Cayman Islands, Laos, Puerto Rico, Canada, Mexico, Holland, Palestine, and, of course, Texas. In a way, over the years, any time most congregations gather at the table, we literally celebrate “World Communion!”

As to my own question whether a reading from Job applies to today’s service: in recalling the suffering of Job, we should be sure to remember the suffering of Christ as well. If Job’s suffering was filled with questioning, Jesus’ suffering was filled with redemption – with the identification of God with the plight of suffering humanity.

The name “Job” calls to mind a few graphic images for most of us. The phrase, “the patience of Job,” is often used as a description of an especially long-suffering person. It is a cliché at best, a complete misrepresentation at worst. We could believe it to be an accurate characterization of Job only if we had never bothered to read the story, or had “grown weary after reading only the first two chapters.”[1] In the 42 chapters of this most unusual Old Testament book, Job comes across as anything but patient, especially following chapter 2. Like Tevya in the musical Fiddler on the Roof, Job carries on an active debate with God.

Most people with even a passing understanding of Job know that it isn’t a book about patience, but that it has come to be synonymous with the human quest for purpose that lies in obvious and not-so-obvious ways in human suffering. Tom Long of Princeton Seminary once wrote,

“The story looks as though it may deliver something to feed our aching hunger to know why. When we summon the book to provide an answer, though, many readers are deeply dissatisfied, even aggrieved, with the result. The God who finally turns up near the end of the story appears to supply not an answer, but a swagger.”[2]

It is important to remember that Job is a story-teller’s story, meant to illustrate or teach. It will do no good to search through ancient maps looking for the land of Uz, any more than it would be helpful to look through Persian records for another Old Testament Jewish heroine named Esther. These chronicles are not offered by the biblical writers as history per se, they are theology and philosophy turned into stories we can understand through the lens of our own experiences.

When the generic Bible dictionary speaks of Job as one who encounters disaster with fortitude and faith, it is only partly accurate. Clearly there is fortitude, as demonstrated in Job’s determined answer to his wife that he would not curse God and die. In view of the suffering he endures in the story, that is quite a lot. But notice that by the end of chapter 2 it says only that “In all this Job did not sin with his lips.” Chapter 3 begins less auspiciously than chapter 2 ended:  “After this Job opened his mouth and cursed the day of his birth.”

If Job was determined not to curse God with his lips, he apparently felt the terrifying need to curse something. How like most of humanity, that when he could not curse something in the world around him, he turned his curses on himself. It is a classic case of blaming the victim. Before his so-called friends could come and offer him the thin comfort of telling him his suffering must have arisen from some sinfulness in his life, he had already taken to heaping scorn on his own existence.

Why is this? I think it is because any suffering, and especially the suffering of innocents, brings to mind questions of the meaning of our existence. Job “persisted in his integrity,” but immediately he began to ask the “why” questions. If we believe that we were placed here for a purpose, suffering is the sort of experience that calls that sense of purpose into question in a dramatic way.

University of Chicago Divinity School professor Martin Marty once shared a story[3] from a Jesuit priest who told him that, on a visit to Mexico, he happened to observe young people coming to a cathedral on a Sunday morning. As each man approached the church doors he handed his wife or girlfriend through into the nave and then stood on the stairs outside smoking, occasionally looking in to see how things were coming along at the altar. This happened again and again until quite a crowd was assembled. Intrigued, the priest went down into the plaza.

“Good morning, gentlemen.”

“Good morning, Father.”

“I see you escort the ladies to mass and then wait outside.”

“That’s right,” they said.

“You don’t go into the cathedral yourselves?”

“No, not generally.”

“Well, that’s puzzling. Aren’t you Catholics?”

The men looked at him in consternation.

“Of course we’re Catholics,” they said. “But we’re not fanatics.”

They were happy to carry the label of their faith but not its content or its action. Job was willing to carry the content of his faith, even when he no longer saw the sense of it, no longer wished to wear the label. He was willing to cling by a thread of faith, even when he was no longer sure where the other end of the thread was attached.

What drives us, and the rest of the Christian world, to the table on this or any Sunday? Fanaticism? Or perhaps it is nothing more than our desire to avoid the sins of the lips. Perhaps it is only that in the midst of life’s trials and vicissitudes, when we cannot see any trace of the plan or purpose of God, when we have nothing to offer others from our own spent resources, when our needs are so great and our means for meeting them seem so small, that on a day like that we want to have a way to declare that no matter what happens to shake our confidence, we have a means by which we can declare that we still believe. Nothing more than that, just a way of hanging on, of refusing to curse God and die, to say that no matter what lies ahead around curves we cannot see, we believe God’s unseen purpose lies there as well. And perhaps holding on to just that one thing will be enough to see us through. The observance of the Lord’s Supper is not an end in itself, but is a way of reminding believers just how intimately Christ is with us in all the moments of life. Christ is “the divine Son who has fully participated in our human existence and experienced the fullness of human suffering and brokenness.”[4]

With Christ, suffering no longer expresses our separation from God, but rather marks our solidarity with Christ, with God-become-human. In Christ our suffering is his own.

Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard once wrote: “There is nothing of which every man is so afraid as getting to know how enormously much he is capable of – do you want to know? You are capable of living in poverty; you are capable of enduring almost all possible mistreatment. But you do not wish to get to know this; no, you would become enraged at the person who would tell you this, and you regard as a friend only the one who will help you to confirm yourself in the idea [that you are] not capable of enduring, it is beyond [your] power.”

Sometimes enduring is beyond our power, true enough. But nothing is beyond the power of the God who raised Jesus from the dead for us. That is the promise we share as we move to the table of our Lord.

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[1] “Job: Second Thoughts in the Land of Uz,” by Thomas Long,Theology Today, April, 1988, p. 5.

[2] Ibid., p. 6.

[3] In his little periodical, Context.

[4] Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary: Pentecost, Year B, Soards et. al., Abingdon, 1993, pp. 78-79.