Gone Wandering 3: Wrestle Mania

Gone Wandering[1] 3: Wrestle Mania

© 2011, Robert J. Elder, Pastor

Genesis 32:22-31 Sunday, July 24, 2011

We have come some distance so far in our short series of readings from Genesis for the summer. We began with the birth of Isaac’s twin sons, Jacob and Esau, moved last week to Jacob’s dream at Bethel of the heavenly stairway with angels ascending and descending. This week we bypass stories of the bait and switch pulled by Jacob’s Uncle Laban when Jacob married first Leah, thinking she was Rachael, then finally married Rachel. As we re-enter the story today, Jacob is on his way to meet with his twin brother Esau. Because he snookered Esau out of his first-born birthright those years ago, Jacob was understandably anxious about the coming meeting. He sent presents on ahead in hopes to appease the long-simmering anger of his brother. He lay down next to the river for a fitful sleep before the next day’s meeting, and it was there, on the banks of the river, that he wrestled with God, who gave him a new name. He had, all his life, carried the name Jacob, which in Hebrew means “one who grabs by the heel,” as he had done, emerging from Rachel’s womb, contesting Esau’s right to be called firstborn. Now, following his struggle at the river Jabbok, he received a new name, “Israel,” which means “the one who strives with God.”

We wonder about all the struggle chronicled in the stories of Jacob. We wonder if, by the end, he will be different than he was at the beginning. Will he always be the same, grasping, conniving person, or will he finally become a person who can be real with others, whose life can be honest and forthright, and satisfied.

Israel: the one who strives with God. Probably that would be a good name for many of us. Few people in my experience come to faith as an easy, simple matter. For most of us there is some element of struggle, whether it is for understanding, or a sense of calling, or a desire to experience the presence of God more directly. We all struggle with God, seeking God’s blessing, some word from God about the purpose, the meaning of our lives.

I recall hearing a story about a pastor in his earliest ministry, when he served a very poor little church in rural Tennessee.[2] The church had been in existence about fifty years but had never had a called pastor. The lives of the people were filled with tales of the sort of hard-scrabble existence that once characterized a good portion of the population of the South, and still does in many places. When the pastor came to that poor little church and community they wanted to celebrate his arrival by decorating their small one-room frame church building. They had no beautiful art to hang above the pulpit behind the preacher, so they had a contest for something to hang on the wall as a centering point for their worship. One of the children won the contest. She had found, in a magazine, a close-up picture of the face of a bulldog. That picture won the contest, and it was put on the wall above the pulpit in the sanctuary, with the following words written underneath it:

Get a good grip on your faith and don’t turn loose!

The people of that poor little country church were saying to God what Jacob said to the angel. “We will not turn you loose until you bless us.”

Sometimes faith has to be like that: tenacious, unyielding. Sometimes faith has to be gripped so as not to let it slip from our grasp, leaving us without faith, without hope, without purpose. Do not turn loose of God until you are blessed, be insistent about it, like the psalmist who cried, “Rouse yourself! Why do you sleep, O Lord?... Rise up, come to our help.”[3]

One thing is sure. No one comes away untouched from grasping after God. Jacob found that he had a limp in his gait from that day on, a persistent, step-by-step reminder in his hip socket that once upon a time he had grasped after God and perhaps had found more than he bargained for.

What led to his grasping for God?

Remember that twenty years before, Jacob had cheated his brother Esau out of his birthright as the eldest son of Isaac. He had run away to Haran from the anger of his brother, where he arrived with only his walking stick and his life. While he was there he worked for Laban, his uncle. He earned two wives from this sharp dealing relative (perhaps it takes one to know one!), as well as amassing an Old Testament version of a sizable fortune in oxen, donkeys, flocks, slaves, wives and children. Now he prepared to return home to encounter his brother. Word was out that Esau had put together a small welcoming party of 400 soldiers. What would you do? How would you feel?

After sending all his entourage and his goods across the Jabbok River, Jacob remained behind, where he spent that famously restless night which turned into a wrestling match.

Have you ever had a sleepless night? Of course you have. You toss and turn, items from the troubles of the day rolling through your mind. The problem isn’t that you are sleeping. The problem is that you are very much awake when you should be sleeping. You worry, you fret. Small problems loom large. What am I going to do about the mortgage payment when there’s nothing in the bank? Where did I leave that memo that was supposed to be on my boss’s desk by this morning? How can I possibly clean the house in time for company when I have to work until 5:30? In the quiet of the night when our defenses are down, thoughts return to us, unbidden, until we find we cannot sleep. We are wrestling with our anxieties, if not with angels.

Consider Jacob’s guilty reflections. I can imagine Jacob thrashing back and forth until he bid God to help him in his worried sleeplessness. And God came, not as a host of angels or a menacing thundercloud on the mountain, but in a form unbidden, as a man who would wrestle with him until together they had made peace for Jacob. One writer asked, “How could Jacob even stay in the ring with God?”[4] But this was not God in all God’s glory. Here God took human form to encounter Jacob at his own level. The man who wrestled with Jacob – whom Jacob was entirely convinced was God – could not defeat Jacob any more than Jesus sets out to defeat us when we encounter him. It is not his purpose. God’s purpose is transformation, which is why God could transform Jacob’s name into “Israel,” while Jacob could not fathom the name of God. Staying perfectly in character, Jacob demanded a blessing from those he engaged. As he demanded a blessing from his brother, his father, his father-in-law, so here he demanded a blessing from God.

But a blessing from God never leaves us unchanged. God’s blessings are the very stuff of change, and Jacob discovered as dawn broke that the stiffness in his leg wasn’t his arthritis acting up. He was going to be sporting a limp in his walk from that day forward. Each step of the rest of his life would serve as a reminder of the One who, in blessing him, also transformed him into someone more human than he had been before.

Jacob went to Esau, limped up to him as it turns out, and did not make demands of him but simply invited him to share in the bounty which he now recognized had been showered on him, not by his own craftiness, but by the undeserved grace of God.

What Jacob learned at last – and maybe the limp he had to carry through his life was to serve as his daily refresher course – was that it is never by our strength alone that we do what we do and become what we become. The miracle in this story is not that Jacob finally came to terms with the fact that he was a sly deceiver – which he likely knew already. The miracle is that God recognized that quality in him too but loved him anyway.

What was true for Jacob can be true for us. As we limp along through our lives, finding daily reminders of our own shortcomings, we may rest in the assurance that God loves us enough to transform us, enough to save us, enough to wrestle with us through all the failures we throw in our own way, and his, contending with us through the man Jesus, who – like a mysterious wrestler in the night – came to us so that we might come home to God.

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[1] Third in a series of five sermons on the Jacob/Esau cycle in Genesis.

[2] From a Southern Folk Advent Service, Candler School of Theology, Emory University © 1994.

[3] Psalm 44:23.

[4] Terrence Fretheim , New Interpreters’ Bible, Volume I, Abingdon, 1995, p. 568.

Rung by Rung

Rung by Rung

© copyright 2011 Robert J. Elder

July 17, 2011

Genesis 28:10-17

Romans 5:12-19

Perhaps you have heard this old story by Matt Suhey, running back for the Chicago Bears. If you have not heard of Matt Suhey, it is probably because you are much more likely to have heard of his more famous, and faster, teammate, Walter Payton, a superstar running back in the 1970s and 80s. Anyway, Matt Suhey and Walter Payton were once on a camping trip together in Alaska. Matt Suhey awoke to find Walter Payton lacing up his running shoes. “What are you doing?” asked Suhey. “There’s a bear right outside our tent, and I’m getting ready to run.” “You can’t outrun a bear!” said Suhey. Payton replied, “I don’t have to. All I have to do is outrun you!”

So much for team solidarity. The story has a point, though, that ties in with our reading about Jacob. As you know, Jacob made his early life’s work a continuing effort to cheat his older brother out of the family inheritance. Once he was finally successful, Esau was understandably perturbed. So while the cover story for Jacob in our morning reading was that he was sent out of the country by his mother to search for a suitable wife, we know that in reality, he was also fleeing the wrath – and probably the superior aim – of his brother. Jacob was on the move. It might be less poetically stated by saying he was on the lam. He didn’t have to outrun a bear, all he had to do was outrun his brother, Esau. But he couldn’t outrun his fear of being in a strange place, his loneliness as he left behind all the familiar people and places of his life, or his guilt for what he had done to his brother.

Jacob thought that being on the move was a thoroughly horizontal proposition. We all suffer from the same delusion. Get out a road map and plan a route, say, from South Dakota to Indiana, and we’ll probably think of the whole drive as a long itineration along a surface that is mostly as flat as the pages in the atlas, more or less. Only a meddlesome person would take the trouble to remind us that we would be traversing the surface of the earth, which is a sphere, a globe, so that there is no truly direct way from South Dakota to Indiana, unless we were prepared to bore a hole in the ground and travel through the earth in order to maintain that straight line.

On a more spiritual level, though Jacob thought of his trip as a pretty straightforward journey, he was soon to discover that God had in mind another dimension for all his moving to and fro. Probably Jacob’s dream is the most graphic reminder there ever was that our journeying in this life is more than moving on the horizontal. God has in mind a vertical dimension for our lives. He made that abundantly clear to Jacob while the young fugitive lay near a rock and dreamed of the angels of God running up and down a heavenly escalator to be about God’s bidding in the world.

This is a truly revolutionary dream, because for all our suspicions that heaven and earth have little to do with each other, Jacob’s dream declared to him and to us that God has continuing association with earth, that earth and heaven are not separated by some great divide, but joined by the unfathomable purposes of God.

All of us harbor our own stories of the road. A light-hearted decision made, a mate chosen, a career almost accidentally embarked upon, a friendship casually engaged, so many events in our lives – which we would have thought existed in a more or less horizontal dimension – have developed into deep experiences which reverberate profoundly throughout our lifetimes and have influenced every action since. We are spiritual creatures, no matter how seldom we pause to think of ourselves in that way, and anything we do is riven with spiritual implications, touched by the purposes of God.

I remember once receiving a little Sears Roebuck guitar for Christmas. I didn’t much play it after I got it because in a few short days I discovered that it wouldn’t play itself, that I would have to go through the digit numbing pain of learning where to place my fingers and when to strum in order to make anything resembling music come out. All in all, it seemed like too much trouble. The little guitar sat in a corner for a few weeks, until my older brother got it in his head that he could teach himself to play, and before you knew it he was doing just that. But after all, it was my guitar. I couldn’t let that happen. So I began the arduous process of teaching reluctant muscles to work together to make music. As things stand, I would appreciate it if you would help maintain the secret that my brother remains my superior in guitar playing to this day, but my initial and hardly commendable motivation to stay even with him, forced me to learn, and kept me from missing the opportunity to expand myself in those learning-filled adolescent days, learning how to play a guitar so that my singing could be accompanied by my own playing. But, having learned that, what became of that ability?

Now, make whatever you like of that small illustration, but that simple journey toward musicianship, begun almost as much in competitive spite or sibling rivalry as with any more admirable motivation, has over the years resulted in uncountable hundreds of opportunities before wonderfully diverse gatherings of people in varying states of appreciation for my musicianship; fellowship, in my growing up years, with dozens of other fellow-travelers who like to play guitar together; zillions of campfire sing-alongs with the faces of young people and old folks smiling and singing, people who – even though some of their voices have now gone silent – remain more real to me at this very moment than many of the folks who populate our more run-of-the-mill dreams; and many evenings in which the only audience for my playing was myself and the angels who must have needed some musical accompaniment while they made their way on that heavenly escalator back and forth into my growing-up world.

All of us have similar stories. Things we thought we did for only the most pedestrian of reasons, we later may have discovered were experiences that have enriched our lives, breathed into us the very breath of life. Perhaps a casual conversation started at a dining table in school was transformed into courtship and a life-long conversation over breakfasts and dinners; or a childhood choice one day to read instead of play baseball was transformed into a decision to major in English and teach others to love reading; or a fascination with toy trains became a first step toward a lifetime of engineering or public works; or any of a hundred other decisions, once made and for whatever reasons, have turned into life-transforming journeys.

Jacob’s dream was granted to him to tell him what we all know in our bones if only we stop to think about it long enough. It is that the God who created us loves us still and will make of our own common experiences something holy, something truly redeemed. It is perhaps summed up in the phrase which typifies God’s dealings with Jacob and everyone of us ever since. “Behold, I am with you, and will keep you wherever you go.”

It was a promise that God would have to repeat several times through the years before humanity would begin to really believe it, if we ever really have.[1] That is why it is one of the names for Jesus that we hear most often at Christmas: Emmanuel. God with us. Jeremiah reports that God gave the assurance of his presence to his troubled people in just these words that Jacob heard no less than 6 times as they were being assailed by armies they could neither defeat nor understand.

“I am with you.” It is the heart of the story – the heart of any story worth anything more than a good cry, when you get right down to it. All good love stories have that element. Juliet promised to be with Romeo, even unto death. And, as it turns out, that plot wasn’t invented by William Shakespeare. The very same promise was God’s promise to his people, and Jesus lived and died that very promise for us. Says Paul in his letter to the people in the tiny church in Rome, “For if many died through one man’s trespass, much more have the grace of God and the free gift of that one man Jesus abounded for many.”

New Testament scholar, Paul Achtemeier says, “thus does grace triumph over evil, by burying evil in an avalanche of grace.”[2] I really respond to that image! Think of the little things we have entered into, the small decision to take up the guitar, the tiny misstep from which we have learned immeasurable lessons. To shift metaphors, the tiny specks of our little life’s choices are bobbing on the ocean of human existence, until God picks us up on a mountainous wave and we find ourselves cascading atop the foaming water on our way toward the shore of his purpose.

Perhaps Paul was able to see it more clearly than anyone before him. From the time of Adam we have been on the move, yet the one evil we have never outrun is our sinful selves. But one day, Jesus appeared on the road of our aimless wanderings and things took on such a direction that the world has never since been the same.

Since I began with a story about two friends, perhaps I can end with one. There is an old Asian story[3] that one day a man found his neighbor on his knees, searching for something. “What are you looking for?” came the obvious question. “My key. I’ve lost it.” Both men proceeded to take to their knees and continue the fruitless search. After a while the neighbor said, “Where did you loose it” “At home.” “Then why are you searching for it here?” exclaimed the exasperated neighbor. “Because there is more light here.”

If we have found ourselves – like Jacob – tempted to wander far afield, leaving home looking for something to fill the emptiness of our lives, we can be sure that as earnestly as we may search, God is as near at hand as our next heartbeat, as present to us as our restless dreams, as ready to define our lives into purpose and meaning as he is to suffer and die on the cross for us.

Dear friends, as we scurry about the level places of our lives, we may be reminded that there is a ladder, extending to heaven, and that earth and heaven have met in Jesus Christ. We need never be alone and lost again, no matter where we are.

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[1] Genesis 26:3, 26:4, Isaiah 41:10, 43:5, Jeremiah 1:8, 1:19, 15:20, 30:11, 42:11, 46:28, Haggai 2:4, Matthew 28:20, John 13:33.

[2] Romans, by Paul Achtemeier, John Knox Press, 1985, p.102.

[3] The Song of the Bird, Anthony de Mello, S.J., Gujarat Sahitya Parakash, Avand, India, 1982.

Gone Wandering 1:

Living in Tents and Other Quiet Pleasures

First in a series of five sermons

on the Jacob/Esau cycle in Genesis

© Robert J. Elder, Pastor

15th Sunday in Ordinary time: July 10, 2011

Genesis 25:19-34

Today we embark on something that preachers aren’t supposed to do during the summer months, at least according to common ecclesiastical wisdom: we are starting out on a five-week series of sermons! Not only is this considered the “low season” for church attendance – an odd time to expend the extra effort required to put together a coherent series – but all this effort is dedicated to an Old Testament character. Still, over the next several weeks, I will try to walk us through the story of Jacob, patriarch of Israel, to see the ways in which the record of his life speaks to the activity of God in our lives today.

Why would a sermon series about Jacob be of importance today? He was a man born of a time and place so different from ours that we might suspect that we could do just as well attempting a sermon series on the minds of alien invaders from another galaxy.

I’ll tell you a couple of reasons why I think it is important to encounter Jacob and his strange Old Testament world. His other Bible name was “Israel;” biblical tradition traces all the Jewish people who once called Israel home back to this man. To understand Jesus’ ministry in Israel, we must understand Israel, and to understand Israel, we must understand the one in whom the story about the nation of Israel first began to take shape, the man named Jacob.

In the course of learning about this man, we may begin with bright hopes of sharing a story about a person of high character. But it won’t take very long to find such hopes disappointed. We may take him or leave him, but in the end, Jacob will strike us as a figure characterized by the sort of ambivalence that marks any real human being. One scholar (Terry Fretheim, New Interpreter’s Bible, Volume I, Abingdon Press, 1995, p. 516.) said that, take him or leave him, we will discover him to be sometimes simple, other times complex, sometimes positive, other times negative, sometimes clear and other times ambiguous. In the end of the story, the biblical miracle is that God takes him, just as he is. This is the story which sets the tone for the whole history of Israel, and which sets the reconciling stage for the work of Christ and his ministry. If God takes on one such as Jacob, the thinking will go, then why would there not be hope for me? I may be no better than he was, but I am certainly no worse!

In this story, then, we have the gospel in a nutshell. We may be self-serving, ambitious, scheming, capable of tawdry little episodes in our lives, but God knows we are also capable of high morals, clear values, good works. In any case, God takes us, will have us, just as he had Jacob.

So scene one in our story for this first week in the series opens on the front porch of Isaac’s and Rebekah’s house. Both are praying for children. In scene two, after the same sort of barrenness which her mother-in-law, Sarah, experienced, Rebekah was given a difficult pregnancy. We are startled to learn in a blunt way that she is to give birth to twins, when the narrator flatly declares, “The children struggled within her.” Children? That’s the first we know there is to be more than one child born.

Right away, Rebekah questioned the purpose of life. We might think that to be an overreaction, but the word used for “struggle” can be literally translated “crush.” Anyone who has ever felt a baby move knows the trampoline effect of even a single child in the womb. With twins, using the word “crush” might not be an overstatement. Even before birth, these two boys were engaged in a struggle, contesting with each other, trying to crush one another, vying for the all-important first place in the birth order. In a literal way, when it came to inheritance in those days, the last one out was a rotten egg, or at least as good as. The contest in Rebekah’s womb was an omen of a life-long struggle to come between these two boys and the nations to which they would give rise. By the time Rebekah was on the gurney, heading to labor and delivery, she was more than ready either to die or to have the boys’ conflict out in the open.

Scene three is the delivery itself, an all-important moment in a society that promised everything in inheritance to the first-born son. By the social standards of the time, whichever son emerged first would inherit Isaac’s birthright, along with the promises God had made to Abraham, and through him to Isaac and the nations to come from them.

No wonder that when the boys came out, and hairy Esau came first, Jacob came along right behind, clinging to him by the heel. Years later, when Jacob would wrestle with an angel, I wonder if it reminded him of the intrauterine wrestling match with his twin brother.

Then the scene shifts abruptly. The boys are grown. Esau has become a hunter, a man with a subscription to Field and Stream and a gun rack in the back of his pickup truck, more often than not to be found in the wild, stalking game, sleeping under the stars. In contrast, Jacob was “a quiet man, living in tents,” tending to the front lawn and the morning paper, enjoying a more domestic, settled life than his brother.

At last comes the critical scene in this little piece of the drama that was Jacob’s life. The paragraph starts innocently, “Once when Jacob was cooking a stew,” it says, “Esau came in from the field, and he was famished.” It is easy to see what is coming. Esau, a man of the hunt, preferring to live in the fulfilling present than sit around awaiting a secure future, Esau gave up his privileged position as first-born son, future heir, in favor of stew for lunch. Short-term satisfaction was bartered away for long-term entitlement. While Jacob seems to be a bit of a schemer in this, there is not much of a kind word for Esau in the passage. In the end, five verbs describe what he did in simplicity itself: he “ate, drank, rose, went away, despised.”

But what does this make Jacob? A schemer, to be sure. Opportunistic. Clever. Patient, even. In his quiet tent-living, Jacob had apparently had plenty of time to consider a way to wrest the birthright away from his brother. When the moment came, he seized it without hesitation or second thought. At this moment, he doesn’t seem like much of a model of religious faith, does he?

Here, then. we have a plain word about the way God works in the world. God does not wait for plastic saints to be born before taking action. God’s purposes can be accomplished even through the lives of scheming, clever, quiet tent-dwellers like Jacob. That his mother favored him over Esau surely was a leg up for him, and demonstrates again that God chooses to work in and through human actions and choices, our participation – even our bad decisions and off-center intentions – are redeemable by God as he creates the future. By granting Rebekah the “insider” information that the elder son would serve the younger – making this a text favored by the babies of families everywhere – God helped plant within her the kind of predisposition toward Jacob that would help bring God’s desires to pass.

Both boys come off looking less than saintly, and to try to make just one of them the villain is to misunderstand what the story is about, as well as to misunderstand what it is like to be human and alive in a world filled with confusing choices and opportunities. Jacob took advantage of his brother in need. And Esau came off as the most careless of sons, so casually despising his birthright. Why would God choose either one of these two to carry forward the promises he has made to Abraham and Isaac?

It seems to me that this is the question of the hour not only for this passage, but for us in our struggle to walk in faith. Why would God choose me? Or you? No one is more aware of our own shortcomings and failures, our dull bad-choice moments as well as our scheming hearts than we are. No one is more able to see the manifold reasons why we are bad candidates to carry forward the work of God’s kingdom than we are. And yet, God has chosen us! Some days we may doubt it, but we are seated here this morning, more than for any other reason, because we are responding to some call to us. Even if we are aware of it only in the vaguest way, even if we came to worship today almost by accident – as an afterthought – we are here, and God’s plan is now prepared to make use of our awkward commitments even if it beats us to see how or why.

In the end, we do make a difference in the work of the kingdom, and even our compromised, stumbling attempts to discern God’s will and do his work are honored by him, refined by him, made whole through Christ in such a way that our lives have meaning far beyond any meaning we might have imagined for ourselves. Jacob, standing in the shadow of the doorway to his tent, watching his brother Esau slouch away, rubbing the remnants of his afternoon stew from his beard, Jacob probably was unaware of a potential for fulfillment of God’s purpose dwelling in that moment. But his lack of awareness of it did not make it any less real.

Neither does our lack of awareness of God’s immediate purpose in our lives mean that there is none, only that we have not yet begun to see it. God is still working on the future that we may create together in relationship with him in Jesus Christ. That is the legacy of Jacob and the promise which has continued through the faithful people who have called him father right up to the present day. We are in their number. God has chosen us and has plans for us, too. Praise be to God.

Spiritual Variety

Spiritual Variety

A Communion Meditation

© 2011 Robert J. Elder, Pastor

June 12, 2011

I Corinthians 12:1-13

Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit.

Diversity is meant to be a given in the church. It has been since the beginning. In fact, diversity is in the very nature of God, whom we have come to know in our own faltering human thinking as three-in-one, one God, three persons: Creator, Spirit and Savior. Diversity exists right within the Holy Trinity. In our reading from Paul’s letter we have the earliest reference to the Trinity in the New Testament. We believe in one God, yet we see the manifestation of God in widely diverging ways. Within the person of God there is diversity. Since this is so, why would diversity not then be a hallmark of God’s church?

When we ordain and install new officers in the church, when a new pastor is called forward to be ordained to serve the church of Jesus Christ, these, or words like them, are the opening phrases of the service of ordination:

There are different gifts,

But it is the same Spirit who gives them.

There are different ways of serving God,

But it is the same Lord who is served...

Each one is given a gift by the Spirit,

To use it for the common good...

In Paul’s first letter to the church at Corinth, with the help of the community, all members were and are encouraged to discover the gifts we have received and use them for the upbuilding of the church of Christ and for service in the world.

So, clearly, diversity marks the nature of God and God’s provision of gifts and abilities to the church.

Paradoxically, unity is also a characteristic of God and is meant to be a mark of the church in the world. I remember reading these words somewhere:

“You think because you understand one you must understand two,

because one and one makes two. But you must also understand and.”1

There is truth in the assertion that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. If you piled all the unassembled pieces that make up an automobile into a heap on the ground, then put another set of those same exact pieces next to the pile, only this set as an assembled car, who could deny that the whole car is greater than the sum of its parts? The church is more than its individual members, sitting in our homes leading our separate lives. There is something essential about the nature of God that God’s diversity is at work only when it is at work in unity. We think because we understand one we must understand two, because one and one makes two. But we must also understand and. What is it about being the church together that makes us more than a sum of disparate individuals?

By the 14th chapter of First Corinthians, Paul is arguing that the gifts the Spirit gives are useful only if the church, rather than the individual, benefits. To ask, for instance, as we take part in a commitment program for the church, gathering together our treasure for the common good, “Yes, but what’s in it for me?” is to inquire by means of a non sequitur. “What’s in it for me” is, in the end, irrelevant to the Christian enterprise except inasmuch as what is “in it” for everyone, may include me.

Believers differ from each other, but each has been given a gift by the Spirit, the very first of which is the ability to confess that Jesus is Lord. These gifts are not granted for individual use or control, but so that the whole body may prosper. For someone to say they can worship God on a mountaintop is to miss the entire point. Worship isn’t about us and our private experiences of God. It is about the community into which God has placed us and the contribution of our own gifts which we can give the community.

Now, sometimes people look at Paul’s list of gifts and think quietly, “Well, I certainly can’t do any of that.” He mentions such gifts as the “utterance of wisdom,” “the utterance of knowledge,” and “gifts of healing,” and the “working of miracles,” “prophecy,” “discernment of spirits,” “tongues...” Let’s see, was it Tuesday or Wednesday last week that I was uttering knowledge and discerning spirits...?

I’m not putting those things down, and the fact is, Paul was pointing to activities that were prevalent in the Corinthian church. We have our own gifts and fascinations. Everyone has a gift to share. Perhaps it’s compassion, or, yes, knowledge, or a strong arm, or a good idea — the church can always use a good idea! Gifts don’t have to be dramatic or esoteric to be gifts. And one that is under-appreciated in most congregations I’m familiar with is the gift of financial giving. I know that the annual stewardship conversation of our congregation is half year or so away. But it never hurts to offer a reminder about it near the half-year point! Every year there are households in our church and most other churches which pledge or give nothing. Likewise, every year there are households that pledge and give generously. Paul praised those who gave liberally in Corinth. Still, maybe it’s not everyone’s gift to give liberally, but it’s important just to join in, just to be a part of it: diverse, but also unified in Christ’s body.

One old pastor said once that if being a Christian has not had an impact on our lifestyles, then it is possible we are believers but not yet disciples.

Today, Pentecost Sunday, we celebrate the diversity of our gifts before God in our celebration of the Lord’s Supper, Jesus’ good gift of himself to the church. And we might think about ways we can respond to Jesus’ amazing gift of himself to the church, by seeking means by which we may also give of ourselves. Today is a day to be thankful for the untiring work of the Spirit among us, continually celebrating our diversity and making us one.

Thanks be to God.

copyright © 2011 Robert J. Elder, Pastor

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[1] Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World, by Margaret J. Wheatley, (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 1994) p. 9.

When Called by a Panther

© copyright 2011, Robert J. Elder, Pastor

Seventh Sunday of Easter: June 5, 2008

I Peter 4:12-14, 5:6-11

The panther is like a leopard,

Except it hasn't been peppered.

Should you behold a panther crouch,

Prepare to say Ouch.

Better yet, if called by a panther,

Don't anther. — Ogden Nash

Sometimes we pick up the newspaper or turn on the television news only to see sights or hear reports that our grandparents would have found unthinkable much less printable or viewable. We hear news of atrocities and murder, violence, and we may say, to ourselves and others, that it is shocking. But are we shocked? Try this experiment. The next time you are watching the news or reading the paper and there is a shocking story, look at the faces of those who are watching the news with you, or check their reactions when they get to that same story in the paper. Do they look shocked? Really shocked? Are they covering their eyes and ears, running from the room in utter disbelief? Not likely. In fact, most of us have become so accustomed to reports of the violent cruelty of our world that we only half listen even to the most horrible reports. Perhaps that is because each of them is invariably followed by “And now this...” after which we hear about antacids, new cars, or fast food.

Our news is trivialized by the very media which bring it to us; more than that, its impact is compromised by the sheer frequency of reports of the world’s horrors. Still, when tragedy or injustice strike us personally, or diminish some member of our family, then we are still capable of a state of disbelief. “How could this happen? If only I had seen it coming...”

The writer in 1st Peter expresses some thoughts on the extreme social and family costs that were incurred by new Christian believers in the first century, yet he found nothing strange in fiery ordeals that overtook the people of the first churches. After all, the author of the Petrine letters was weaned from family, career, home, and even the faith of his parents by his own emerging commitment to Christ. The letter is written from experience: “Don’t be surprised,” it says, “as though something strange were happening to you.”

How about that? Commonly, people take any suffering we endure as a sign of God’s absence, a strange and unexpected signal that God has turned his back on us, that our prayers have been ineffective. The writer in1st Peter says, “Don’t be surprised.” If we have read the paper, seen the news, how can we be surprised at further evidence from our own experience that life can be cruel, that people are perfectly willing to betray and torment each other, that those in authority can casually turn to vicious reprisals with no more thought than it takes to make the morning coffee?

But here the author of 1st Peter and common wisdom part ways. Common wisdom might say we should not be surprised at the cruelties of humanity, because that’s the way human beings are. But our scripture expresses more than that. It describes the events of human experience in the world as a contest of sorts. Goodness and evil do not emerge into an otherwise neutral world. Rather, the emergence of one lays claim to moral territory previously assumed to be in thrall to the other; acts of goodness bring upon themselves reactions from those who stand to profit by evil. Moral neutrality is not an option, as far as the first letter of Peter is concerned.

When people call on the name of Christ in faith, we can be sure that such an appeal to the goodness of God does not appear in a morally neutral world, but rather exists as a challenge to those who believe they stand to lose wherever goodness stands to gain. The assertion of the good comes as a challenge to those whose existence has been secured by habitual resort to evil.

One distant example: if the drug warlords of Mexico and Central and South America were left alone to ply their trade, we might not hear much about it except for the evil effects on drug addicted people here in the states. Yet, inevitably, when a citizen or a judge or a prosecutor or law officer emerges to challenge the hegemony of the power of local drug lords, violence is threatened and often brought against them. Judges who dare to dispense justice are murdered in the streets, prosecutors and their families are executed. The assertion of goodness never comes into a neutral world, but will inevitably be perceived as a threat to those who have organized their lives around some other loyalty. “Don’t be surprised...as if something strange were happening to you...” The advice sounds strangely modern. There is nothing strange or particularly modern about suffering and evil.

If – for the sake of our children, for the sake of our beliefs about the trustworthiness of God’s purposes – we would resist the encroachment of gambling halls and state-sponsored games of chance into our communities, we could be called prudes or racists or worse. Would we be shocked? 1st Peter says not to bother being shocked. A resort to name-calling is only the gentlest reaction we might expect in asserting a need for some moral standard. In the first century, Christians were persecuted, even executed, for the “crime” of calling on the name of Christ. One early bishop named Justin wrote an eloquent protest over the execution of three believers who had not been guilty of any illegal or immoral conduct, only that they bore the name “Christian.” Another early church leader named Tertullian wrote “No name of a crime stands against us, only the crime of a name.” Who says, “Sticks and stones may break my bones but names can never hurt me?” Peter knew that claiming the name of Christ can cause the eruption of “fiery ordeals” for believers.

1st Peter creates a telling image for the sort of feeling we may get when in the middle of an ordeal for our faith. He said that our faithfulness may be challenged by one who strikes with the ferocity of a roaring lion on the prowl, looking for dinner. It’s difficult to imagine a more powerful image for the terror that evil can cause, or for the feeling of helplessness that might be the result. Yet, amazingly, verse 9 gives us this encouragement: “Resist him”!

Resist a lion? Doesn’t the very image of the prowling lion call to mind the powerlessness of the early believers, thrown to hungry beasts in the gladiatorial arena in Rome? Yes, but doesn’t it also call to mind the believers in the lions’ den in the book of Daniel? “Resist!” What an instruction! And, of course, the natural question to follow is: “Resist with what?”

Here’s what. It’s the only “what” that we have been given, but what a gift it is. 1st Peter says, “You know that your brothers and sisters in all the world are undergoing the same kinds of suffering.” The power of resistance is intensified exponentially once we remember we are not in this alone, that the power of the gospel asserts itself around the world, and no temporary, local setback will extinguish its light.

When missionary teacher Ben Wier was imprisoned by Shiite militants in Lebanon, he reported that one of his chief comforts during those dreary months of captivity was to take a saved bit of his weekly bread ration, and on Sundays, in his solitary cell, break and eat it while remembering that Christian brothers and sisters all over the world were doing the same as they celebrated the Lord’s Supper. The knowledge that others celebrate with the same Lord overcomes fear, reminds us that our trials are temporary, that we may call at will on the power of One who is eternal.

1st Peter tells us that God will restore, support, strengthen, and establish us. I think I understand what is meant by the use of “restore, support and strengthen,” but I was intrigued by that word, “establish”. What does it mean in 1st Peter that we will be “established?”

The very word used there, translated here as “established,” is the one Jesus used when he spoke about the difference between a house with a foundation built on rock and one founded on sand;1 it is the word John used when he spoke about the foundation stones of the heavenly city in Revelation;2 it is the word Paul used when he told the believers in Corinth that the call of a church planter is to lay the right foundation, namely Jesus Christ.3

What are we to do, then, when we are surrounded by lions? We are to remember the very thing on which our faith, our very lives have been built: Jesus Christ. And we are to fly to the strength and support that we can draw from belonging to that very body of Christ which is his church. There is no greater way to be established in our faith, to be supported, strengthened, and restored, than to be part of a mutually responsible fellowship of believers, and to find ourselves in the midst of our family of faith. When we cannot be in the family of faith, even the memory of it can strengthen us.

A friend of mine spoke to me several months ago about his continuing struggle with drug problems. He said he had been sober for 3 weeks, and this time he was going to “make it.” He has been through twelve-step type programs before, including A.A. I asked what sort of mutually responsible group he was part of to help him get through this. He declared that he had tried that, but this time he was going to make it on his own. In honesty, I think we both knew what we didn’t have to say: that neither he nor I gave him much chance of success on his own. Strength is available to us when we take responsibility for each other in a way that individuals can seldom know on our own. This is especially true of the Christian fellowship. Over and over the Bible virtually declares that it is impossible to be believers by ourselves. If we are not in the community of faith, even the memory of that community can be so powerful that we can find strength there.

During the War of 1812 a British warship arrived in Massachusetts to send five boats full of soldiers to take an undefended town. The commander on the warship knew that their success depended on the unpreparedness of the townsfolk to defend themselves. But as the boats came near to land they heard a fife and drum on shore. In those days, everyone knew that a fife and drum were used to rally a local militia to defense. Cursing his luck, the commander called back the boats to the warship and they sailed away. In fact, there had been no militia, just two young daughters of the lighthouse keeper playing fife and drum after the rest of the townsfolk had fled in the night. A roaring lion may look like an unbeatable adversary, but the memory of our fellowship of faith can provide enough foundation to sustain us, to “establish” us. Even the memory of the community, continuing to do what we have been called to do, can help redeem what had seemed to be impossible situations.

Anyone who has ever run livestock knows that a single lamb or cow is vulnerable to the attack of predators in a way that livestock in a group is not. If we are confronted with the ravening lion, we may find our strength, support, our very foundations of faith within a community of faith such as this church. It is not a new idea. It comes highly recommended by the apostles themselves.

Are you surrounded by lions of strife, anxiety, family woes, grief, employment worries, failed friendships? Take the advice of the apostle, and remember the community of faith which sustains faith. Take that gift to heart. And give that gift of this community of Christ to others.

© copyright 2011 Robert J. Elder, all rights reserved

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1. Matthew 7:25 (also Luke 6:48).

2. Revelation 21:14.

3. I Corinthians 3:10-12.

Account for the Hope In You

Account for the Hope In You

© copyright 2011 Robert J. Elder, Interim Pastor

Sixth Sunday of Easter: May 29, 2011

I Peter 3:13-22

Always be ready to make your defense to anyone who demands from you

an accounting for the hope that is in you.

What are you afraid of? People are afraid of different things and have different reactions to their fears. There was a story told about a couple fleeing in their night clothes to a bomb shelter while their block was being flattened during the blitz in London in World War II. They had just reached the street when the woman turned to go back to the house, and the husband, frantic at his wife’s erratic behavior given the circumstances, shouted at her, “Where are you going?!”

“Have to go back,” she replied, “forgot my false teeth.”

To which her husband replied, just able to make himself heard above the din of falling bombs, “For God’s sake! They’re not dropping sandwiches you know!”

Different people fear different things. One man’s fear of German bombs was matched only by his wife’s fear of being seen in public without her teeth in place. Different priorities, yet one thing in common: Fear.

What are you afraid of?

Verna Dozier, Episcopal lay woman, biblical scholar, and African-American activist, set the biblical studies world ajar 20 years ago when she wrote in her best-known book that “doubt is not the opposite of faith, fear is.”1 That is a phrase that stays with a person, especially any among us who has known fear.

The opposite of faither is fear. There is no sense trying to claim to be fearless people. We all know fear, and we all have fears, some that haunt us only on occasion, others that are with us hour by hour. Some may live with the fear that the business will go badly this year, that the medical bills will not get paid, that there might be a continuation of the economic downturn into next year and money in the family kitty will dry up. We may have a gnawing fear that we’ll not have enough money to live on throughout retirement, that we won’t get into the college we choose, that the fan belt we have nursed through four years of our car’s life will finally go bad on our next trip east of the Cascades.

There are big fears and little ones.

A big fear usually involves things beyond our control, like the state of the economy, or violence in the streets or the fear of world-wide political chaos, a loss of income, or insurance, or a job, random shootings on city streets.

Little fears have their day too. But at least they appear to be in some ways within our control, or nearly so. We may be afraid:

· that we won’t get the promotion we want...

· ...or that we will, and we’ll have to pack the family and move a thousand miles again;

· that since we missed the deadline for filing form 1040, we’ll have to pay a penalty;

· that the car won’t start;

· that the refrigerator will need replacing;

· that the roast will be burned;

· that the water didn’t get shut off before we left home on vacation.

The list of things the human mind can fear is limited only by the amount of time we have for tallying it.

When Peter wrote, “Do not fear what they fear,” he was echoing the prophet Isaiah2 who wrote to the people in Israel during a fearful time. Nations around them were allying together against tiny Israel. Yet Isaiah wrote, “Do not fear what they fear.” He reminded the people of Israel of the very thing we all need to remember but often forget: that God is Lord over all possibilities; God – not the Syrians, Romans, Americans, or Al Qaeda warlords – God is the true ruler of history, no matter how things appear in the short term.

In I Peter, the hard thing for us to swallow may not be that we should avoid fearing all the things we do fear, but that we should save a holy emotion like fear for the one who has real power over life. Peter said, “Do not fear what they fear...but in your hearts sanctify Christ as Lord.”

Dethrone fear of the contingent, the temporary, and instead reverence Christ who rules the world for ever. Don’t reverence, fear, or stand in awe of your tormentors more than you fear God. That certainly is blasphemy. When others seem to have more power to destroy us than God has to save us, it is an overwhelming fear. Peter told his readers and he tells us, decide ahead of time not to give in to such unholy fear. Then, if the time comes, we will be prepared to account for the hope that lives in us because of our faith that Christ truly is Lord of all life.

A sermon which dwells this way on fear in the post-Easter season may come as a surprise. We believe in a loving God, and this sermon was to have been about hope, if we can judge by the title. And there is in fear, paradoxically, something of the essence of hope. Knowing what we fear gives us information about the thing upon which we base our deepest hopes.

Lots of famous people have uttered equally famous words on the subject of hope. Miguel de Cervantes best-known character, Don Quixote, said, “Sanity may be madness but the maddest of all is to see life as it is and not as it should be.”

Elie Wiesel, Jewish survivor of the Auschwitz concentration camp, once wrote, “…just as despair can come to one another only from other human beings, hope, too, can be given to one only by other human beings.” Christians believe this has come to pass for us in the person and work of Christ among us, human as we are human.

Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “If you lose hope, somehow you lose the vitality that keeps life moving, you lose that courage to be, that quality that helps you go on in spite of it all. And so today I still have a dream.”

Theologian Reinhold Neibuhr wrote, “Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime, therefore, we are saved by hope…”

Poet Václav Havel, arguably one of a handful of true twentieth century political heroes, who managed to outlast the crumbling Soviet empire and bring his native Czechoslovakia into the family of free nations, said, “Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense regardless of how it turns out.”

How do you envision the essence of hope, how do you account for the hope that the love of Christ places in you?

Biblically speaking, there are two types of fear about which we often hear: The first fear relates to the love God has for us, yet the second often characterizes the timid response we make to that love. These are fears born of love: of Christ’s ultimate love for us and our inadequate response to his love.

For believers, then, the word hope deals with the deepest longings as well as the most desperate fears within us. It is not a mere sigh, a whim, a casual wish: we hope it won’t be too hot (or cold!) today, that Santa will get to our house next year, that we’ll make the green light at the next intersection; these have nothing to do with biblical hope and aren’t really hopes at all, but fleeting wishes.

“Always be ready to make your defense to anyone who demands from you an accounting for the hope that is in you.” Dr. Scott Hahn3 in his book, A Father Who Keeps His Promises, shared a story from the deadly 1998 earthquake in Northwest Armenia, which claimed 25,000 lives in a single day. It could as well be a picture of the lives of thousands of citizens in Joplin, Missouri this week. After that quake in Armenia, a distressed father ran frantically through the streets to his son’s school. He had always told his son “No matter what, Armand, I’ll always be there.” His heart sank when he got to the school and found nothing but a pile of rubble. Even so, he ran to the corner where he knew his son’s classroom had been and began to dig with his bare hands. A bystander told him, “Forget it, mister, they’re all dead.” Any of us, in the same situation, might have tried to help a grieving father simply face reality. But that father looked up and said, “You can criticize me or you can help lift these bricks.” A few people of generous spirit helped move bricks for a while, but the situation seemed so hopeless, they soon wandered away. Still the father continued to dig. 12, 18, 24, 36 hours went by. Still he dug. Then he heard a muffled groan. He pulled a board back and cried out, “Armand!” From the hole in the wreckage of the building came a weak, shaking reply, “Papa?” They managed to find 14 of the 33 students still alive. When Armand was finally freed he turned to his friends and said, “See, I told you my father wouldn't forget us.” Our hope is like the hope of that son, only more so. Armand’s father is but a small example of the kind of Father we know through Jesus Christ.

The essence of biblical hope – if the words of I Peter are to be believed – rests in a decision that sets aside fear. A decision for the Lord. And that decision remains even when our emotions or our failed circumstances might carry us away from it. It is a conviction that the future and all that will take place in it are already being redeemed by Christ. No matter where our lives may take us, Christ is there ahead of us already, redeeming the times and the seasons in which we live.

© copyright 2011 Robert J. Elder, all rights reserved

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1 The Dream of God: A Call to Return, by Verna Dozier [http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/02/AR2006090200911.html], © 1991, Cowley Publications.

2 Isaiah 8:12.

3 A Father Who Keeps His Promises: God's Covenant Love in Scripture, Charis Books, © 1998 by Scott Hahn. Dr. Hahn is the founder of the St. Paul Center for Biblical Theology.