Parson to Person -- by Rob Elder

Sunday, June 13, 2010

Believing What You Heard

Does God supply you with the Spirit
and work miracles among you
by your doing the works of the law,
or by your believing what you heard? NRSV

One phrase from our Galatians passage tends to stay with us because of its directness: “If justification comes through the law, then Christ died for nothing.”

Christ died for nothing? It has a terrifying sound to it. In our faith we are devoted to the Christ that Paul names here, so the suggestion that Christ could have died for nothing should be very alarming to us if we are paying attention. Just that word: nothing has an emptiness to it, a sort of hollow, absence about it. Recall Paul’s words in the well-traveled 13th chapter of I Corinthians, when he says, “...if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing ... if I give away all my possessions ... but do not have love, I gain nothing.” Jesus made a declaration about this as well, when, in the gospel of John, he instructed his disciples saying, “I am the vine, you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing.”[1]

Nothing. Is there a word that is more helpless, more hopeless? We stand just outside the door in the ICU, the doctor comes to us with a glum expression, putting words to our worst fears, “There is nothing more we can do.” Nothing. Nothing at all. How heavy that empty word can sound. After a frantic search for a lost child at the shopping mall, the security officer shows the palms of his hands to the anxious parents. “Nothing,” he says, shaking his head.

Now, this sort of line of thinking doesn’t get much reflective attention in our modern whiz-bang world, where, with distractions aplenty, we fool ourselves into thinking that our lives are dedicated, 24 hours-a-day, to something. One of my all-time favorite nobody-who-wants-to-become-somebody advertisements was one in which a young mother picked up a baby sitter, who through her blunt adolescent chatter pronounced the young mother old enough not to need to worry about being cool any more. Of course this stops the attractive young mother in her tracks. Madison Avenue’s solution to this challenge of nothingness from the mouth of an innocent? Get a new car! Of course, why didn’t I think of that? Existential angst can be resolved by signing a lease on a new vehicle! One sought-after antidote to the nothingness periods of our lives is the urge to do totally irrelevant shopping! But we know it for what it is without even a very long period of reflection. Soon enough the new car becomes the old bomb, and we are in fresh need of a new way to prove to ourselves that nothingness will not have the day, that we are somebodies, that this world is about something.

So much of the time our lives are dedicated to avoiding the fear that our very existence doesn’t really amount to all that much. One of me or you, more or less, is not going to make or break the world. Much as we want to challenge that hollow, echoing word nothing, we know that we long for some indication that our lives have some purpose beyond purchasing another new car, or getting ourselves involved in another television reality show. Where is the real meat of life? Where can we finally discover that we are not just a few bits of protoplasmic irrelevance, but that we are somebodies of some significance?

Bob Dylan recorded a song many years back which comes to my mind. I always hesitate just a moment when I use the words “Dylan” and “song” in the same sentence, since his car-needs-new-brake-pads voice can sometimes grate on us before he gets to the first chorus. Anyway, his lyrics are the things that have always made his songs go, like “Blowin’ in the Wind.” The song I’m thinking of had this refrain in it: “You got to serve somebody.”

And we all know intuitively, Bob Dylan is absolutely right. Everybody has to serve somebody or something. If it is personal freedom that is our life’s main goal, then we serve that. If it is career, or children, or family, or education, or fame, or being the best golfer or tennis player in the city, then we serve one of those things. None of us gets to go through life without putting something first, even if by accident. So it’s maybe a good thing to take a look now and then to see which things in our lives appear to be in first place, and see if that’s the way we want to leave it. If that young mother went out and bought that new sports car, then we could say she was responding to that advertiser’s suggestion that a way to stay young is to get in a snazzy new set of wheels. But couldn’t that mean she is rendering a good portion of her life’s service to that image of herself? You got to serve somebody.

In our affluent culture, we can all benefit from an occasional reminder that if we want to be somebody in the New Testament sense of the word, we need to prepare to give ourselves away. It is the strange logic of the gospel, which Jesus announced himself, that it is those who want to save and hoard their lives who will lose them to nothingness in the end, while those who are willing to lose their lives for Jesus’ sake in their service to others will know what it is to have life.

If you want to be somebody, serve somebody. And we don’t have to go to faraway places to do this. To be prepared to serve somebody means a willingness to be like Jesus, who washed the feet of those whom the culture around him would have supposed to have been his inferiors.

Anyone can throw themselves into the task of toadying up to the folks who are just like ourselves. Dedicating ourselves to a life of service from which we hope to reap great material reward is not really serving somebody else. It is just a roundabout way of serving ourselves. No, to know the joy and pain of this New Testament kind of service, there must be an aspect of selflessness, where payback is not an option.

One year when our youth group from a former church I served was finishing up building a house for a family in Mexico, I remember one of the teary-eyed owners of the new little home who asked me for my address. He wanted to send a letter of thanks, even mentioned how wonderful it would be if he could visit us and our church some time. I realized, as if for the first time, who it is we had been serving. It was someone who was about to move into a new home built in four days with a concrete floor, two small rooms, altogether about the size of a one-car garage. It struck me that this person might not be very comfortable in our community, might not know what to do in a home with wall-to-wall carpeting and two or three TV’s gracing the living spaces. It was somebody who had only one set of clothes to wear and wore them every day. It robbed me of my pride of service in knowing just how little I knew of this person, and how many worlds apart our two worlds were.

I once read a convicting story about a Baptist preacher named C. Roy Angell. I recall reading that Roy “was a fine man who for many years was pastor of the Central Baptist Church in Miami, Florida.” Roy Angell preached 60 or 70 years ago now, but is remembered for “the sweet spirit he exuded in the pulpit...

“...A strong-tempered minister out in Fort Worth, Texas, named J. Frank Norris, who was what we would call a ‘militant fundamentalist’ and who was always hitting out at somebody about something he didn’t agree with, put Roy Angell on his list and often denounced him. You have known preachers like that – they wouldn’t have anything to say if they had to speak kindly of others. Well, the story was that Roy Angell and J. Frank Norris were in the same city one time to attend a meeting, and Norris was having a rally in the park, trying to stir up people against the other personalities there for the meeting. Angell knew that Norris had been attacking him, but the two had never met; and out of curiosity, he decided to attend the rally.

“As Angell joined the crowd in the park, he heard Norris blasting him ... A cold wind began to blow, and the rain began coming down in buckets. Angell felt so sorry for the pathetic figure up on the platform that he slipped up the steps beside him and laid his own raincoat over Norris’ shoulders. Then he stood there holding his umbrella over Norris’ head as the angry preacher continued to denounce him. Norris was of course completely unaware of who it was that was sheltering him from the elements. I am not sure if Roy Angell ever introduced himself.”[2]

Who was Frank Norris serving? Or Roy Angell? Perhaps at its best, the church is like Roy’s umbrella, with room underneath even for those who find themselves sometimes in violent opposition. I hope to God it is.

Paul asked those Galatians, who had begun to believe they could work their way into the kingdom, whether they thought they received the Holy Spirit by performing the works of the law, or by believing what they had heard about Jesus Christ. “You foolish Galatians!” he wrote to them. “Having started with the Spirit, are you now ending with the flesh?”

The presence of the Holy Spirit in our lives and in our church is the true sign of the new life that Christ brings. Where the Spirit breaks in and brings new life, a lot of ecclesiastical rules and mumbo-jumbo go out the window. There are no second class seats on the train bound for glory, because Christ has saved us all and our tickets are punched already. Once God has come into our lives, yours and mine, looking at rules and regulations takes a back seat to welcoming one another to take up our seats in the kingdom.

Copyright © 2010 Robert J. Elder, all rights reserved
Sermons are made available in print and on the web for readers only.
Any further publication or use of sermons must be with written permission of the author.

______________________________________________
[1] John 15:5
[2] “Paul and the Fundamentalists,” by John Killinger Pulpit Digest, July/Aug. ‘96, p. 43 ff.

Sunday, June 6, 2010

An Apostolic Identity Crisis

June 6, 2010

Galatians 1:1-24

And they glorified God because of me. NRSV

In 1983 I had the privilege of attending a portion of the meeting of the General Assemblies of the United Presbyterian Church, USA, and the Presbyterian Church U.S. in Atlanta. It was the last time our now-united denomination would meet as two churches that had been separated since the Civil War. While I was at that assembly I heard speeches about our impending unity, grand salutations were sent back and forth across hallways from one assembly to the other. After that historic vote was taken, we would not be calling to each other across hallways any more, we would be meeting face to face. Warts and all.

Now, twenty-seven years later, all this may sound pretty far removed from our everyday experience as Presbyterians in Vancouver. But we might try to remember one of the things that always begs resolution in the Presbyterian Church (USA), or in any church body. It is the answer to the question, “Who’s in charge here?”

If anything has caused a rise in the blood pressure of Presbyterians ever since there were Presbyterians, it has had to do with questions of authority. So, who gets to be in charge? Well, the small answer, unsatisfying as it may be, is simply, “It depends.” It all depends on context. Our denominational church constitution, the venerable Book of Order, is our agreed-upon authority on these things, declaring who gets to be in charge in what circumstances. For matters of local ministry and mission, it is the Session of the church, the elected elders meeting together. For regional concerns among churches in a common geographical area, it is the Presbytery, pastors and representative elders from the churches meeting together. And so on.

The same question can be asked on a larger scale. Many around the world ask who speaks for the United States. Is it the president? Is it the Congress? Individual members of Congress on fact-finding missions overseas? Do the people of the United States speak for themselves? Often, people who are angry with the United States will say something such as, “We have no quarrel with the people of the United States, just the government.” Can one make such a distinction? Our constitution declares that it is the people who are sovereign, not their government. Who has ultimate authority in our country? Who should?

The question of authority also can be asked on a small scale: who is in charge of this friendship? This service club? This park by the river? This stretch of freeway?

Consider the position of the Apostle Paul, founding father of churches all over the Gentile world northwest of Palestine. We might assume an apostle was a figure of unquestioned authority, but Paul used the story of his own identity crisis to instruct the Galatians about the proper quest for authority in the lives of their churches. He said, in effect, that he knew all too well who he was and where he was going before he became an apostle: “I was ahead of most fellow Jews of my age in my practice of the Jewish religion,” he said, “and was much more devoted to the traditions of our ancestors.”

The search for personal identity is one of the great preoccupations of our age. Variations on the phrase, “I need to find myself” have become a veritable mantra of modern life. I used to have a sign on my church office door which read, “I have gone out to find myself: if I should come in before I return, please keep me here until I get back.” All too often we have acted as though such things as personal identity were sitting like berries on a bush somewhere, waiting to be plucked, or a golden nugget in a river bed, ready to be grasped. We forget that who we are is mostly either what we have made of ourselves or have been made by others... or by Another.

In Paul’s time it was assumed that people knew who they were. Our great search for personal identity was unknown. So, when everything that Paul had spent his life becoming was called into question one day on a trip to Damascus, he was anything but prepared for it.

Paul knew from his youth what he was cut out to be. He studied hard to follow the path of and to become a good Pharisee, a Rabbi. He was righteous. He obeyed all the laws. He persecuted those who were unclean and blasphemous as he had been taught to do. The picture of Paul before his call from Jesus is anything but a portrait of a tortured soul thirsting for direction in life. On the contrary, Paul knew all too well the direction he intended to take. And he took that direction with a vengeance, laying the budding new Christian communities to waste in order to preserve the identity he had struggled so hard to achieve. But all that certainty and well-formed identity evaporated away one day when Jesus spoke to Paul from the sky, an experience Paul refers to in Galatians this way: “God ... was pleased to reveal his Son to me...” an experience of the power of God which, according to Luke, went this way:

Now as Saul (Paul) was going along and approaching Damascus, suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him. He fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to him, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” He asked, “Who are you, Lord?” The reply came, “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting. But get up and enter the city, and you will be told what you are to do.” ... Saul got up from the ground, and though his eyes were open, he could see nothing; so they led him by the hand and brought him into Damascus.[1]

Paul received a special vision by which he claimed to be an apostle. We have become rightfully wary of those who claim to have had a special vision and thereby a right to tell us what to do. Yet for Paul this was not merely a private revelation. In his revelation of Christ he received no new information which no one else possessed, mysterious, unearthly truths unavailable to other mortals. No, what Paul came to know others had already learned. Paul’s revelation may have been painful, dramatic, but it was human and understandable to him. He could not be part of Christ before. Now he could. It was that vision that gave Paul the authority to go into the world of the Gentiles, to establish churches, and to admonish and correct those who deviated from the Gospel.

Generally when someone, looking around in the church, asks “Who is in charge here?” the answer comes back, “the pastor,” or “the Session,” or “tradition,” or “scripture.” But Paul points beyond these to an even more original authority: nothing has more authority than the one Gospel, the one standard against which all else must be measured, even scripture, the traditions of the church, and the apostles themselves. Everything must be measured against the norm of the Gospel.

So what is the Gospel if it is none of these? Paul points out three striking features:

First, it is Christ’s Gospel. Not mine, not yours, not the Presbyterians’ nor the Baptists’ nor the capitalists’ nor the socialists’; it is not the Pastor’s nor the Elders’, but Christ’s. The Gospel came from Christ and is about Christ, and there is no need to hyphenate it with contemporary, catchy adjectives – Biblical-Christianity, Contemporary-Christianity, Pre- Post- or Prelapsarian-Dispensationalist-Christianity – to make it relevant. It will assume its own relevance if we will set it free in our world.

Secondly, the fundamental nature of this Gospel of Christ is grace. This is where the Galatians, like many of us, wander into trouble. They had found the unaccustomed freedom that grace brings to be just a little frightening. They were offered the security of Jewish law and practice to demonstrate physically that their salvation had been purchased. It wasn’t necessary. Not only was it not necessary, but to submit to external proofs of salvation defeats one of the purposes of the Gospel... it is in fact what Paul called another gospel, certainly not the Gospel of Christ. Paul declared that those who are willing to abandon free grace for the security of fixed laws and dogma desert not mere doctrine but Christ himself.

The authority of the Gospel means much more and much less than our typical notions of authority, which are likely to focus on someone else’s ability to tell us what we may and may not do. The authority of the Gospel of grace means increase, augmentation, freedom, not limitation and regimentation. Paul said elsewhere in this letter, “It is for freedom that Christ has set us free.”[2] Where we do not see such freedom, we do not see the authority of the Gospel at work.

The third striking feature of the Gospel is addressed to those who are leaders of God’s people. Such persons must be more aware than anyone of the human tendency to confuse the message with the messenger. It is a reminder to anyone who speaks a word of witness to another. Paul raised this question loudly enough for us to overhear: “Am I now seeking the favor of men or of God?” It is a good question to raise anytime. And it is a striking question to raise when the issue is authority, for to ask whether we are striving to please other people or to please God exposes immediately our pretense – which can be painful – and at the same time sets us on the path of true freedom once again, the path of God’s purpose.

Paul went three years as a new believer before meeting with any of the apostles in Jerusalem. Yet he knew the Gospel and its demands for him. Paul’s authority was made manifest not in giving new life to the dead. He was even more helpful to us through his capacity to give new life to the living... a “resurrection to new life in Christ.”

Paul’s authority – and we would pray it is the source for the authority in our own church – was not accomplished through hard work or the force of a competitive personality, which Paul clearly possessed. It came through his unmerited yet grace-filled call from God to be about his work; it was totally unexpected, unearned, undeserved, and yet Paul received it and lived it and became the most powerful of all the apostles. The decision about what to be in life is not ultimately our own. Life’s calling is not our own to be fretted over. It is God’s. If we are open to his leading, he will certainly take us where we need to be, as individuals and as a church.

Paul closed this vigorous defense of his apostleship by telling his readers that those who had once feared him – the Christians of Judea – upon learning that he had joined them in the faith, began to praise God. He said, “And they glorified God because of me.” It is an epitaph worthy of Paul. Indeed, that it could be said that “they glorified God because of me,” would be a life’s goal worthy of any believer.

There are those around us who could glorify God even because of us. May we make ourselves available to them so that it may be so.

[1] Acts 9:3-8a, alt. NRSV

[2] Galatians 5:1 NRSV

Sunday, May 30, 2010

Hope Filled

Trinity Sunday, May 30, 2010

Romans 5:1-5

Since we are justified by faith

we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ...

and hope does not disappoint us,

because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit.

In these computerized times, when what was once called typing has become a potentially error-free sort of thing we refer to now as “word processing,” I remember the old days when writing term papers and graduate theses meant dealing with typewriters with ribbons, and those maddening little bits of white, chalky paper which could be found in any office, and which could blanch out mistyped letters and words. I remember spending a good deal of my time while seeking higher education also seeking well-used little slips of correcting paper for blank spots to eradicate those term paper typos. One task I never even tried to master, though I knew secretaries who were very adept at it, was justifying the right hand margin of a typescript page.

Now justifying the left hand margin is no big trick. Unless you accidentally hit the tab key, the old typewriter carriage would always return to the same spot on the left hand side of the page. But the right hand side is a different matter. For those extra-special documents that some people wanted to look as crisp and finished as possible, secretaries had to master the multiple tasks of typing out a rough draft with a ragged right edge, counting spaces on lines of typescript, then retyping while adding enough additional spaces to make the right hand margin look as even as the left. These were no small tasks, and one little misspelled word could ruin a whole page, along with an entire afternoon’s work.

Now, with computers, justifying margins, right or left, even centering – which was for me the most thankless of all tasks on a typewriter – is no big trick. It can be done automatically, accomplished with the click of a button. So I’ve often thought it was strange that computer word processing programs include fonts by which documents can be printed in an undetectable imitation of a typewriter, including the option for the old ragged, non-justified right hand margin of typewriter days. Why this deliberate regression? Actually, though I use a computer every day, I have gone back to using the ragged right hand margin, I just kind of like it. I have supposed that those who send us clever solicitations in the mail with a typewriter-type font probably do this to try and make us think that their letter was hand-typed especially for us. I wonder if anyone is really fooled by this any more? If a company actually wanted to send out hand-typed letters today, where would they go to find such a machine? Or people who could operate them?

Anyway, in the old days, justification in the printing business had to do with lining words up in a right relationship with the page on which they are printed and with each other. Frederick Buechner once reminded his readers that the religious sense of the word “justification” is very close to this old print-shop jargon. Being justified means being brought into a relationship which can best be described as “right,” correctly lined up.

When Paul was still a Pharisee named Saul, and still believed that the rumor about Jesus rising from the dead was just that – a rumor, he was knocked down one day while on his way to see about locking up some of these new Christians. And though the voice that spoke to him that day belonged to the One whose resurrection he had disbelieved, the One whose church he had taken up wrecking, the One who had every reason to fry him on the spot, what he heard the voice saying to him was not “And now you’re going to get what’s coming to you, you wretch!” but, instead, “Now I need you as a witness.”

Paul never got over it, the sheer gift of it, the way in which it arrived totally unannounced and clearly without any meritorious acts on his part. This told Paul a lot of things about the person of Jesus Christ, among them was the fact that Christ could use even those who at one time had scorned him, that he was quite willing to put his finger on those who had done nothing to deserve being chosen. It’s more than a little unsettling when we think about it, isn’t it? From Paul’s experience we learn that we are not safe from the call of God even we are deep in a self-declared apostasy, that Jesus will not even disdain those who have made a profession out of disdaining him.

Apparently there is nothing we can do or be to merit this attention from God. It’s on the house. It is justification freely given to those who only need to receive it in order to have it. God has justified us, lined us up, made us right. It’s even a bigger miracle than computers.

Well, this is a great thing to know, but where does it lead us? Paul says being justified by faith leads to peace with God. Now that’s not some little personal, prayer-closet peace which stands for a lack of conflict, but the old Hebrew “shalom,” a peace, a serenity which stands for a life so in relationship with God that no matter what suffering or tragedy, or hoplessness or violence life might bring, there still exists a deep assurance of God’s love undergirding all of life.

The mid-twentieth century theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr, is often credited1 with having written what has become one of the world’s most famous prayers. The first part of the prayer is the part that is familiar as the “Serenity Prayer” to 12 step folks, indeed, to people the world over:

God grant us the grace to accept with serenity the things which cannot be changed,

courage to change the things that should be changed,

and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.

Whether Niebuhr originated that little prayer or not, it is less well-known that Niebuhr finished the prayer with the following, seldom-quoted lines:

Living one day at a time, enjoying one moment at a time, accepting hardship as the pathway to peace; taking, as [Jesus] did, this sinful world as it is, not as I would have it; trusting that He will make all things right if I surrender to His will. That I may be reasonably happy in this life, and supremely happy with Him forever in the next.

Today is Trinity Sunday on the church calendar, so here is some trinitarian thinking to stand alongside that prayer. Ending with only the first sentence of the prayer, serenity or peace could be understood as a sort of indirect affirmation of the power of positive thinking. The second part of Niebuhr’s version of the prayer is so key to understanding that the person who authors the peace that passes understanding is God himself through Jesus Christ. And here we can see the wisdom of thinking of God as Trinity: Father, Son, and Spirit, faith, love, and hope. For the person of God the Father reminds us that we may have faith because God has proven faithful from the very first dawn of creation and the experiences of the people Israel in the whole of the Old and New Testaments; the person of God the Son has expressed the ultimate nature of the love of God by going to the cross for our sakes; the person of God the Spirit expresses the hope that fills us, knowing the God of faith and love will also be the God of hope who moves with us into the future.

Later on in his letter to the Romans, Paul declared that those who live in the relationship of peace and serenity which God has granted can be assured of the love of Christ in any and every circumstance. Such peace can turn the suffering we may know back on itself. Instead of bringing the horrors we may expect suffering to bring, the gift of the shalom of God’s justification means any suffering we may come to know can bring something quite unexpected:

Instead of causing us to live with a perpetually short fuse... unexpectedly, suffering redeemed by God’s shalom could even bring us patience, serenity, and endurance!
Instead of making us into small, mean little people... suffering, infused with God’s shalom, can actually produce good character!
Instead of the despondency and depression we might expect, suffering in light of God’s shalom can actually, serendipitously, bring hope!

None of these possibilities in a life justified by the peace of God are spoken prescriptively. That is, Paul is not unloading a container of guilt on those who in suffering have occasionally felt short-tempered, mean, and despondent. Rather, he is saying that while those may seem like the only possible fruits of suffering, the peace of God can produce a new thing, an unexpected thing. The accent is not on our work but on God’s gift. If Christ can save even someone like Paul, a thug who once persecuted the church, imagine what he might do for us!

As we look into our lives, what is the good news we least expect to hear ever again? Could it be that the gift of God’s life-transforming peace means that that might be just the news that is coming our way? That, rather than despair, our lives might be hope-filled?

1 Justice and Mercy: Reinhold Niebuhr, Ursula M. Niebuhr, ed., Harper & Row, 1974, title pages.