Sermons from Eastminster United Presbyterian Church in Toledo, Ohio

The weakness of power (Luke 4.1-13)

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The Weakness of Power (Luke 4.1-13)
Eastminster United Presbyterian Church, Lent 1C, Kirkin’ the Tartans (March 10, 2019)
Tom James
Back in the 1980s, there was an anti-drug campaign that used the line, “Just say no.” Some of you may remember the ads. For people in my generation who were deluged with this message, it was probably not very effective, and it also became something of a joke. We would use the line to talk about trivial things: “Just say no” to leg warmers, or high-waters, or big hair. “Just say no” to stupid songs or goofy ads. But of course, the “just say no” campaign was about something much more serious: “just say no” to drugs, and to peers who try and push them on you. Just say no to chemicals that can take over your life, that can diminish your abilities, that can make you susceptible to life-threatening accidents or injuries or overdoses. “Just say no” was about resisting things that could damage or destroy or enslave.
There’s actually something very important about this simple act, even if it seemed silly to me and my peers at the time. It isn’t just about saying “no” to things the government doesn’t approve, but, much more deeply, of learning to say “no” to things that harm us. Sometimes, in fact, it means saying “no” and standing firm in our “no,” against any and all social pressure that would demand that we conform and submit. “Just say no” can be a way of refusing the demand that we stay quiet about the truth about ourselves our about the world as we see it. “Just say no” was what Martin Luther was doing when he refused to bow to the pressure of bishops to recant his truth, what Rosa Parks was doing when she refused to sit at the back of the bus, what independently-minded Scots have done for centuries in the face of English dominance, what teachers are doing now when they are told they have to accept terrible working conditions and inadequate resources. We discover over and over again what power there is in saying “no.”
In Luke, Jesus begins his ministry with three opportunities to “just say no.” We call these “the temptation story.” In the first “temptation,” Jesus resists the urging to turn stones into bread. Now, we know from the rest of the gospel story that Jesus has the power to do it, and that he doesn’t mind doing it when the need is great. Remember the feeding of the five thousand? But here it is a matter of whether his hunger will have power over him, whether he will succumb to the urging to use his gifts to satisfy his own private need. And he says, “no.”
In the third temptation, Jesus resists the suggestion of trying to coerce divine intervention to protect him from his own reckless actions. Later in this same chapter, we find him actually doing something like that when he denounces leaders in his own hometown, leading them to try to throw him off a cliff. But, here, it is a matter of whether he will make his own rescue an end in itself—whether he will seek to show that he is invulnerable to physical injury and death. It is a question of whether he will be bound by his need for safety and security. And Jesus says, “no.”
But it is the middle temptation, I think, that cuts to the heart of the matter. In his second temptation, Jesus is shown all the kingdoms of the world and asked if he would rule them. This one is key to the story of Jesus, because Jesus in the gospels is announced as the “Christ,” the anointed one, and the “anointed” one is what you would call someone who has the authority to reign. As the “anointed one,” Jesus is supposed to be the one who will finally bring all the nations into the commonwealth of God. It would seem here that the tempter is offering him precisely what his goal is, or should be.
But Jesus knows that it isn’t that simple. He knows that the way he will reign is not by means of the same kind of coercive power by which states and governments keep their people in order. Make no mistake, Jesus embraces the role of “Messiah,” and to be a messiah is to be a political force that will challenge the authority of the empire, but the force of Jesus does not take the form of the strong force of armies, or of coalitions or parties that seek to gain control of legislatures and parliaments. This strong force, this force of militarism and statecraft, the force that we often think is the most powerful thing in the world, is precisely the force that is offered to Jesus by the tempter. It is the force that seems inevitable. It is the force that seems to be required to get anything done, even something good, or great.
But this kind of power is also the force that the great twentieth-century theologian Karl Barth said is “evil,” because it is not subordinated or put to work in the service of love. Force without love is the force of the Roman empire, which achieves a lot by expanding its territory by constantly waging warfare and by gobbling up resources and people. And it is just this kind of force that Jesus refuses to acknowledge as ultimate.
Let’s be clear, though: by not worshipping the tempter, by not bowing the knee to the lie that says imperial power is the only real power there is, by resisting and refusing the ideology of the ruling powers, Jesus is already fated to be crushed by those ruling powers. Saying “no” here in the wilderness already sets him on a path that leads to the cross. But here is the thing: Jesus knows that this is his path. Jesus begins his ministry with these temptations, he begins his own Lenten journey, as it were, already headed toward Jerusalem, not to reign in the strong power of Caesar, but to make manifest a different kind of power altogether. It is what philosopher John Caputo calls “weak power,” what Paul in 1 Corinthians calls “the power made perfect in weakness.” It is the power of insistent love.
What is this, if not the gospel in a nutshell? Our own anxieties to control our lives, anxieties that so often tempt us to try and control others, that get amplified in our collective lives together and lead to wars, and oppression, to misunderstandings and to brutalities, to massive inequities and to concentrations of resources in the hands of the few, to apathy toward others as we seal ourselves off in our secure neighborhoods and enclaves, all of these anxieties fail to have ultimate power over us. Jesus freed himself from them in those forty days in the wilderness, and as we are joined with him, we are freed from them, too.  
We often think of Lent as a time for curbing our appetites, of reigning in our desires, maybe even giving up something that we enjoy or value. These things are part of what Lent has meant to Christians over the centuries, to be sure, but there is something deeper, a more joyful possibility that is made real during these forty days. The good news is that Jesus unites us to himself, and that means that he unites us in his own resistance to the inevitability of those forces that crush love and justice. Lent is time for us to practice the joyful “no”-saying that union with Christ makes possible for us.
But it’s important to understand that “just saying no” in Lent isn’t just negative. It also means saying “yes” to God. Saying “no” to the strong forces of power is also saying “yes” to the weak force of love. And we can do that in very practical ways. We can add practices to our lives during these weeks. We can learn more about prayer, and we can try on new habits of prayer. Prayer, by the way, is weak because, by its nature, it does not try to control and manage—rather, it teaches us to give our lives, with their burdens and cares, into the hands of God we are learning how to trust. We can practice contemplative reading. We can mediate. We can engage in various kinds of service. All of these are types of activity that are unproductive. They are all ways to resist the temptation to cram our lives with accomplishment and useable value. They are also ways to say, “Yes, God, these sacred symbols and stories, these promises of Scripture, these calls to love our neighbor as ourselves, are valuable to me, even if they do not produce tangible results.” They are ways of interrupting our ordinary routines and obligations and general busy-ness with moments of recognition that we are not in control, that we are embarked on a joyful adventure of faith.

A few days ago on Ash Wednesday, I repeated a call that is printed in our Presbyterian Book of Common Worship, a call to a “holy Lent.” There is much about the season that is a “downer.” We repent. We acknowledge our mortality. We stop saying “Alleluia” (oops). The culmination of these forty days is a holy week in which we reflect on the Last Supper before Jesus’ trial and execution. But, at the end of the day, to observe a “holy Lent” means to practice our union with Christ. It means to learn how to live a life which is victorious and filled with joy. It means to embark on a journey of forgiveness in which we learn how to be free from guilt and recrimination, in which we can learn how to be a peace with ourselves and each other. It is to practice the weak force of God, the weak force of an insistent love. And when we do that we are learning how to be God’s companions, in suffering and hope. In the name of God, our creator and redeemer. Amen.

The mountaintop and the valley (Luke 9.28-43)

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The mountaintop and the valley (Luke 9.28-43)
Eastminster United Presbyterian Church, Transfiguration Sunday C (March 3, 2019)

Tom James
Have you ever been to the mountaintop? I’m not much of a hiker, but when I was a kid, I did a little mountain climbing. Now, this was in North Carolina, and my wife Michelle says there are no mountains there. She spent part of her summers in Colorado, where the mountains are a little more impressive, I’ll admit. But I think there were mountains in North Carolina. Or, at least, my aching feet told me there were by the time I got to the top of one.
For those of you who have followed a trail up steep inclines, often heavily wooded, and then broken through at the last to a clearing, and a view of the valley below, and know that you’ve reached the summit, you know how satisfying it can feel. And, if you are lucky enough to spend some time up there and just take in the sight (my Dad would always say, “Whelp, are you ready to head back down?”), you might be struck by the beauty of it, with the gentle mountain air and the misty clouds, sometimes well below, and the bright sun, and all the lush greenery down in the valley, partly covered with shadows cast by the mountain, and the awesome silence.
I can see why they call a moment of deep religious feeling a “mountaintop” experience because it gives you a sense of the grandeur and beauty of things and puts your little worries and obsessions in a much-needed perspective. The “mountaintop” can also be a time when your thoughts are elevated by some ideal. Martin Luther King, Jr. began one of his last sermons talking about having been to the mountaintop, where he could see across the land and witness the ways in which God was opening the door to desegregation and equality for African-Americans. We also may think of Moses on the mountain top, communing with God and, at the end of his life, looking out on the land of promise, knowing, as Dr. King must have, that he would not get there himself, but believing that his people would, because the promises of God could be trusted.
On the last Sunday before Lent, we traditionally climb the mountain with Jesus, metaphorically speaking, as we read one of the gospel texts that describe how he took a select group of disciples to the top of what would have been for them a “high mountain” and was “transfigured” before them. The story is supposed to remind us of how Moses also went to the mountaintop, and how the glory of God transfigured him, too. For us, it comes just as we are about to enter Lent, when we walk with Jesus, metaphorically speaking, toward Jerusalem, another sort of mountaintop (people would talk about going “up” to Jerusalem because of its elevation) where he will confront the Temple authorities and offend religious leaders and frighten the Roman governor and end up on a cross.
But the disciples who were with Jesus didn’t know anything about what would come after. On the mountaintop, they were awakened from their near slumber to be dazzled and enthused by what they saw. Peter, doing the “Peter” thing as always, let his enthusiasm get the better of him and gave Jesus exactly the wrong advice. “Let’s build some buildings!” “Let’s make a shrine.” “Let’s raise a temple,” or a “sanctuary.” This little detail makes me wonder, by the way, what was going on when it was written down, some decades later. Were the earliest Christian communities, who had been meeting in each other’s homes, thinking about building separate spaces for worship, so that they could have impressive structures like their pagan counterparts, or like the Jewish temple? Did Peter in the story give voice to what Christians were later thinking about? I ask this because, clearly, Christians much later down the road had those conversations. Clearly, Christians throughout history have tried to capture the enthusiasm and the mountaintop excitement of their experience of grace in buildings and structures. As we know, many of our best church buildings were built during a what seemed a high point in American Christianity—when seemingly everybody wanted to be in church, when we seemed to have incredible influence on society, when people and resources were flowing in, when we had to compete with other churches but never with the rest of society for people’s attention on Sundays. And, as we know, most of our buildings across this country have become something to worry about rather than to celebrate. They cost money. They are hard to heat. They keep needing to be repaired or updated. But we hold on to them for dear life. It as if they are a monument to a great moment in the past, but in many cases also a tombstone marking the passing of that moment.
In any case, it turns out that Peter had it wrong. This mountaintop experience wasn’t a place to stay—it wasn’t something to cling to. It wasn’t anything that even had value in itself: it only had value because of what was to come next.
I mentioned, somewhat bitterly, that my Dad was always ready to turn around and head back down the trail as soon as we got to the mountaintop. I would have liked to spend the whole day there! But, of course, he knew that there were other things to do. For him, getting to the top of the mountain was one stage in the hike and not the end of it, one highlight of the day and not the whole day. And, so, for Jesus, the mountaintop and the impressive transfiguration that happened there only had meaning because they were part of a larger story and a longer journey. In other words, the mountaintop had no meaning apart from the valley—where the real ministry happened; and, if the truth be told, where you and I spend most of our lives.
In the valley, we confront sickness. Jesus found a boy there who was mentally ill, we would say today, and a father who was desperate to find help for him. Illness of all kinds is all over the valley, where we frail human beings really live. It is where we struggle with problems, and sometimes with people. It is where we find poverty. It’s where we find abuse, and exploitation, and oppression, and unkindness. It’s also where we find forgiveness, and strength, and courage, and compassion, and heart. After all, what would be the point of those things if we were all basking in the glow on the mountaintop? In the valley, all the resources we have been given to live the Christian life in the real world have to be brought to bear. It is also where you and are confronted not only with our weaknesses but our shortcomings and our failures. It is where we are exposed for being weak in faith, or lacking in compassion, or lazy about justice, or overbearing with our felt wants and needs. The valley is where we find the need to repent, to use an old Christian word that we will hear again during Lent—to turn around and begin moving in the right direction, to forsake exaggerated love of self for the sake of loving our neighbors and loving God.
None of that is very comfortable, of course. I’m with Peter in Spirit—let’s stay on the mountaintop and build a shrine and try to remember how good it feels to bask in the mountain air and the feeling of God’s embrace. Let’s not leave this place and descend back into the realm of human suffering and constant problems and feelings of forsakenness.
But here’s the thing. When the disciples were at the mountaintop, they had an awesome vision but were not at all that awed by it. They were confused and confounded—they were enthused and maybe even made to feel good by what they were seeing and hearing, but it is clear from their actions that they do not know quite what to make of what is happening to them. And, so, Peter tries to fill the awkward emptiness of the moment by trivialities, by being busy doing things that will not advance Jesus’ mission a single inch. It is as they descend to the valley with Jesus, when they witness him confronting human brokenness with the love and power of God, that we read that everyone one is “awed at the greatness of God.”
Seminary professor Claudio Carvalhaes writes: “Unless we get out of the fortress of our worship spaces, and rebuke the unclean spirits of the powers that be, and shed light into the lives of the poor of our communities, we will never know what transfiguration means. Glory will be an unknown word and experience. We can have a sound theology and say that in that passage, Jesus is the point of beginning and end, the past and the future giving weight to our present, the conciliation of opposite poles, the connection between the shadow and the light of God, the incarnation of the most divine glory. However, if in the name and by the grace of God we cannot heal the boys and girls of our own people and give them back to their parents we will never know what transfiguration means, what shared glory looks like and we will never be “astounded at the greatness of God.”[1]
It’s not about our encampments, our structures, our buildings, our places of sanctuary and refuge—our fortresses. The greatness of God is not built to impress in that way. Instead, the greatness of God is what we find when we are on the move, when we descend to the valley of human suffering and need, when we get real and focus with people on what really matters, when we let go of the moments and the memories of past glories just a little, at least enough to awaken to the moment we are in. The greatness of God is God’s power to heal and renew and give hope where there has been none. The greatness of God is not on the mountaintop but in the valley. It’s not behind us, friends, but in front of us. In the name of God, our creator and redeemer. Amen.

[1] http://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?commentary_id=2756

Love is a strategy (Luke 6.27-38)

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Many of us remember the Beatles song, “All You Need is Love.” Originally released in 1967, it had all the optimism of the mid-1960s, before the calamities that occurred, at least in our country, in 1968. Here are some of the words (I won’t sing them!):
There’s nothing you can do that can’t be done
Nothing you can sing that can’t be sung
Nothing you can say, but you can learn how to play the game
It’s easy
Nothing you can make that can’t be made
No one you can save that can’t be saved
Nothing you can do, but you can learn how to be you in time
It’s easy
All you need is love
All you need is love
All you need is love, love
Love is all you need
From our point of view, many years later, after several unwinnable wars and economic collapse and declining standards of living and terrorist attacks and failed attempts at reform, it may not look so easy, or so simple. Is love really all you need? We might be inclined to say you need a little more than that. You need power. You need some rough justice. You need to be willing to stick it out through a hard slog with uncertain results. In other words, our world today seems to call for much more than love, love, love.
We all know this, no matter what our politics or our religion, no matter what part of the country we come from or our class background. We have rejected the sentimentalism (or at least we think we have) of previous eras. Now, we may still like the Beatles’ old song, and we may think of love as an ideal that is impossible fully to realize but that should at least be tried. We may still believe that love, or a least some facsimile of it, is an essential ingredient in livable human relationships. We know that, without something like love, human life can descend into a series of cold transactions or else a brutal competition that creates misery everywhere. But, most likely, we recognize love as an ideal rather than a practical possibility—we no longer think of it as easy or simple—and we may even excuse ourselves knowingly for our failure fully to embody that ideal in our words and actions. I know I really should love so-and-so, but, at the end of the day, everybody has to protect their own, don’t they? Who’s going to look after my own interests if I don’t?
I mentioned the calamities of 1968. One of them, of course, was the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. We are at the end of Black History Month, and I always try to read something from Black history in America during the month of February. This year I read parts of Dr. King’s collection of sermons, The Strength to Love, published in 1963. There’s a lot of soaring rhetoric in those sermons, but one thing there is not much of is lofty idealism that thinks anything is easy or simple. Dr. King was influenced by the Christian realism of protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, and Niebuhr taught American Christians to become aware of the stubborn fact of what he called “collective egotism,” which made any attempt to establish more just and humane society very difficult. Simply put, there would be people with vested interests in things like racial segregation and white supremacy, and making the reforms necessary to enable equality for African-Americans was going to be anything but “easy” or simple, because they would be fought with every weapon available to segregationists, including the media and popular culture as well as law enforcement. “All you need is love” wasn’t going to cut it. And no one knew this more intimately than Dr. King.
But Dr. King also knew the verses we read this morning from Luke six. He knew that Jesus said to “love your enemies,” to “pray for those who abuse you.” Now, there is long Christian tradition that has gone to great lengths to finesse these words. St. Augustine, in the fifth century, suggested that we love our enemies by killing them sorrowfully, by not taking delight or pleasure in perpetrating the violence against our enemies that is necessary. But King took Jesus’ words a little more seriously than that. And what Augustine missed, it seems to me, is that, for Jesus, love was not an ideal or an interior state of soul that could coexist with violent acts—love wasn’t something in the heart that had nothing to do with what we do with our hands. Instead, love was a way of life that was to be directly embodied in our actions. Love was not just some kind of vague end goal that we hope we can somehow get to someday. No, love was a means. It was a practice. It was a strategy.
One of the things about our text from Luke that we may miss amid all the striking language about loving our enemy is Jesus’ concern over “reward” and “credit.” Traditionally, we have taken this as relating to some kind of afterlife. Love your enemies, because even though that will get you nowhere on earth, God is going to make heaven a little sweeter for you if you do. But the word “heaven” doesn’t appear here, nor is there any reference to an afterlife. I suggest, in fact, that “credit” and “reward” should be taken as something that occurs here and now. In the cultural context of Jesus, honor and shame were tremendously important. How much power or influence you have had a lot to do with how much honor you accumulated with others around you and how much shame you avoided. Throughout the gospels, Jesus calls this honor and shame system into question and often turns it on its head—when he calls us to honor those whom society throws away. But, here, it seems to me that “credit” and “reward” have everything to do with honor and prestige. There’s nothing noteworthy, Jesus says, about loving the people you are expected to love. There’s nothing special about acts of kindness to people who are already your friends. That’s what you would be expected to do because your friends are those who have already shown kindness to you. It doesn’t move the ball down the field, if you will, it doesn’t change anything to keep up these normal transactional relationships in which you do something nice for me, and then I do something nice for you.
What really changes the game is when we offer respect, and even love, toward those who haven’t shown any inclination to love us in return. But here’s an interesting piece of that. When Jesus says to turn the other cheek, we tend to hear that as “don’t resist someone’s meanness toward you. Be a doormat.” We may occasionally give lip service to “turning the other cheek,” but of course very few of us find that an attractive way to live, so it remains an empty ideal. But here’s the thing: think about what turning the other cheek must mean. It means insisting on being struck another way—by a different hand. In Jesus’ context, it mattered which cheek you were struck on. If someone struck you on the right cheek (assuming that they were right-handed), it meant that they struck you with the back of their hand. That’s the way a master would strike a slave. Now, let’s assume the person who would do such a thing at least “outranks” the other person in terms of prestige or honor. If the person who is struck turns the other cheek, what they are saying is, “No, it’s not ok to strike me that way. I refuse to be your inferior. That’s not the relationship that I want to have with you. Strike me with an open hand, as an equal.” What would that do? It puts the relationship back on equal footing. It is way, without violence, to insist on your dignity and respect.
Martin Luther King was a pioneer in the strategy of what he called “nonviolent resistance,” and it was very much like the love strategy we find in Luke six. Of course, there’s nothing “easy” about that. We can not only get slapped but stolen from, abused, persecuted, threatened. It’s not a question of not resisting—there’s no call and no value in being a doormat. The question is how we resist. And the question is not just, what’s the most moral way to resist or the “nicest” way to resist. Instead, it’s, what’s the most powerful way to resist? How do we resist in such a way that we might actually move the ball down the field, change the game? And the most powerful way to resist—the way that will actually increase our power to change human relationships for the better—is to resist with the force of love: love of self and love of the other. The most powerful way to resist evil is with the ironclad affirmation of one’s own dignity and the dignity of the other because in that way, we can show those who are watching what is possible and what is the most compelling way to live human life.
Well, what can you and I learn from Dr. King’s strategy? In what way can love be a practical strategy for us? You and I probably don’t have to resist evils that affect us as systematically as King and many of his followers did. We do have to deal with people who are being jerks, though. We have to find ways to get along in a world in which there are people who are abusive, who manipulate or control, or who simply make us mad. And, if we are followers of the one who tells us to love our enemies, we have to find ways to stand up for ourselves that honor the humanity of those we must oppose. Can love be a strategy for us? I think we’ll find that it can.
And, can love be a strategy for the church? I’m going to say something that I’ve said before though maybe not in this way: the churches descending from Europe, the white churches, have been flirting with a heresy, a basic betray of Christian faith for a long time. We have become used to being the ones in power or at least with access to power, and that experience has taken us a long way from the original experience of Christianity because it has taken us a long way from the experience of Jesus. We have gotten ourselves caught up in defending structures of inequality from which we benefit, including those that not only marginalize but materially harm those who do not look like us or who do not share our culture. And this has hurt us, too, because we have acquiesced in a system that isolates everyone and locks us into a cycle of brutal and alienating competition. No wonder, living in and accepting a world like this, we are forced to think of Jesus as a lofty idealist who has lost touch with reality?

But here’s the gospel: love your enemies. It’s really possible. Not only is it possible, in fact, but it is the only way to be fully attuned to reality. Here’s the good word: pray for those who threaten and do harm. Turn the other cheek. In other words, there is a way out of the brutalities and the artificialities of a coldly transactional world. There’s a way to get beyond the tit-for-tat, mutually accusing, permanently litigious, forever suspicious way of life that we have created for ourselves. The church can repent of its heresy of accepting race privilege as its birthright. We can break through the alienation and suspicion that imprisons and we can create community and friendship through the power of the Spirit who makes all things new. In the name of God our creator and redeemer. Amen.

This Sunday, February 17th

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There is a popular TV show (actually, a Netflix original that’s only available on the streaming service) that talks about a place called “the upside down” (the show is called “Stranger Things,” in case you are wondering). Well, the upside down isn’t actually a place so much as a hidden dimension that is always present though invisible. They call it the “upside down” not because everything is reversed or because people and houses and everything else are literally upside down—they call it that because of a metaphor that one of the characters uses to explain it to his friend. But the gospel of Luke has another kind of “upside down,” and Jesus calls it “the kingdom of God.” This week, we’re going to talk about the ways that Jesus’ ministry turns things on their head: the way he seems to reverse everyone’s expectations and even their values. In our passage from Luke 6, the rich and the well-fed and the happy are declared miserable, while the hungry and the poor and the persecuted are called “blessed.” Why did Jesus say this, and what does it mean for us? How does our faith continue to reverse our expectations and even our values? How can we live in this “upside down” world? Do we even want to?

Hearing the word (or not), Isaiah 6.1-13

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Hearing the word (or not), Isaiah 6.1-13
Eastminster United Presbyterian Church, 5th Sunday after Epiphany C (February 10, 2019)
Tom James
Maybe you’ve heard the story about a conversation between a lawyer and her client. She told him, “I have some good news and some bad news.  Which do you want to hear first?”  Her client replied, “Give me the bad news first.”  “The bad news is that the DNA tests showed that the police found your blood all over the crime scene.”  “Oh, no,” her client mourned, “What could possibly be good about that?”  “The good news is that your cholesterol is down to 130!”[1]
The Bible is a sort of a bad news-good news book. There are times when the biblical story can seem like an emotional roller coaster. The people of Israel are freed from slavery in Egypt! But now they’re in the desert with nothing good to eat. Jesus is the Messiah we been waiting for! But the Messiah has to die. But then he’s raised again! But then he goes away and leaves us to do the work. But he sends the Holy Spirit to empower us! But then that means that we speak boldly and make enemies, and then get persecuted for it. But, we win in the end! But, in the meantime, we are called to bear the cross…  You get the idea. There’s almost no good news that doesn’t bring with it something challenging and perhaps difficult to bear. On the other hand, there’s almost no bad news that doesn’t point to some remarkable way that God is renewing and transforming us. Good news and bad news, in fact, are sometimes hard to pull apart.
Our text from Isaiah is remarkable in many ways. It’s another “call” story, somewhat like the one we read from Jeremiah last week. There’s good and bad very closely intertwined here, too. There’s the incredible vision that Isaiah has—the amazing display of God’s glory. What a privilege to have such a vision! And, yet, the very sight of it brings Isaiah face to face with his deep personal flaws and the flaws of his people. One of the great theological works in our Presbyterian tradition starts off by saying that knowledge about God and knowledge about ourselves are deeply related to each other: when we gain a glimpse of God’s perfection, God’s holiness, we find ourselves exposed. We see ourselves more clearly, and all that is imperfect and unholy comes to light. Our love for neighbor, we might say, looks a little paler, maybe even filled with opportunism and more than a hint of selfishness, when compared with God’s. So there’s good news (God is great!) that brings with it some bad news (we are not God, we are not all that great).
And yet, of course, that’s not the end of it. The good news is that the goodness of God is good enough to overcome our not-so-goodness. God reaches out to Isaiah, through the angel, and touches him, cleansing him from his sin, making him worthy of the sight that he beholds, and making him a fit messenger for the word. In other words, there’s forgiveness. We are exposed by God’s greatness as being not-so-great, but we then quickly find that God’s greatness is great enough to meet us in even in our not-so-greatness, that our sin is no barrier to God, and that God and can heal us of our moral diseases and our cleanse us of our unrighteousness.
By the way, our pattern for worship is drawn directly from this passage. What do we do when we gather in this sanctuary? We sing a hymn that celebrates God’s greatness and God’s goodness. We concentrate on who God is and what God has done. You might say that, in our call to worship and our hymn of praise, we are lifted a little bit out of ourselves and invited to catch a glimpse of the glory of God. But that does something to us. It makes us realize how we, in our actual lives, fall short of what we glimpse in our heavenly vision. As one of my seminary professors once put it, “God is great. Oh, and I guess I’m kind of a jerk, now that I think about it.” And, so, we confess our shortcomings. The high that lifted us up has also now brought us down. We are humbled enough to be honest with ourselves before God and each other. But, of course, that’s not the end of it. As soon as we confess our shortcomings, we find that God’s greatness and God’s goodness are not limited by our failures, but that God reaches out to us to free us from our bondage to the past, to liberate us from guilt and forgive our sin.
So, all’s well that ends well, right? I sometimes think that the high point of the service is the declaration of forgiveness and that we should just close up shop for the day and all go home after that. Someone once said that the three phrases that everyone wants to hear are “I love you,” “You’re forgiven,” and “Let’s eat.” Well, it seems like once the declaration of forgiveness has been made, the first two are taken care of, and we might as well go have lunch.
But, of course, that’s not the end of the service, is it? And why not? It’s because there’s more for us to hear; there’s more for us to say. There are things about our lives that we have to understand and there are challenges to face. I’ve said before, I believe, that the book of Isaiah was written in three parts, possibly by three different authors. In this first part, Isaiah preaches to the people during the last years of the kingdom of Judah, much like Jeremiah did. Throughout the first 39 chapters of Isaiah, the prophet preaches hard words, words of judgment and warning, exposing the people’s complicity in a reign of injustice that exploits the most vulnerable and condones idolatries.
I’ll repeat what I said last week and say that a good way to characterize Judah’s spiritual downfall is to call it a succumbing to what Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann calls “royal consciousness.” As I said last week, “royal consciousness” is a mentality that undergirds monarchy and the centralization of power and wealth that it embodied in the ancient world. Royal consciousness was akin to what we might call “imperialism” today. It was a mentality that valued domination and control of one people by another. The insidious thing about royal consciousness, of course, is that it can take over the hearts and minds of people that it doesn’t actually benefit. We can fall into a sort of “Stockholm syndrome,” giving support and even love to a regime or a way of life that actually violates us. For Judah, royal consciousness supported a monarchy that imposed unjust policies that further concentrated wealth and power but offered a psychological compensation in the form of a wealthy king and impressive standing army that the people could symbolically identify with. In other words, their lives may have been getting worse, but look at the splendor of the nation: look at the temple; look at the palace; look at the king! Isn’t that great? Aren’t we great? Never mind the fact that all that splendor was funded by taking from our own pockets.
Royal consciousness is not done menacing God’s people, it seems to me. We Christians, for some reason, seem to be especially susceptible to impressive displays of power, even if those powers threaten our values and our very lives. During the centuries in which the church was being persecuted by the Roman empire, many leaders in the church came to the point where they no longer rejected imperial power, like Jesus and his early disciples did, but began to claim it for themselves. And, ever since, we have had this tendency to sell out our faith for the sake of identifying ourselves with those in power.
Isaiah’s message was and is, watch out. For those who have power will not always have it, and the kingdoms and the standing armies we devote ourselves to will not dominate the earth forever. Judah’s kingdom was about to fall, and its corruptions and its exploitation of the poor and its violence against the most vulnerable were going to be exposed for what they were. History was going to do just what Isaiah’s vision of God’s glory did for Isaiah—it was going to show the kingdom what it was made of, what it stood for, whom it benefitted and whom it destroyed; it was going bring its failures to judgment.
Once again, though, there’s a mixture of good news and bad news. The good news is that God was sending Isaiah to speak the truth about Judah. And speaking the truth is an act of love. For, whenever the truth is spoken, people are invited to come back to reality, to see their situation for what it is, and to take steps to make things better. There was going to be, you might say, an intervention. The word would go out! A prophet had been sent. And, therefore, the future was still open. The judgment might be suspended, and Judah might survive.
But, of course, even in the initial words of the prophecy we see that the word will not be heard. People are too caught up in their own heads. People are too enslaved to royal consciousness and to its psychological compensations. They are too in love with the symbols of power to even see that they have become powerless.
You see, this is why preachers don’t always like to preach the Old Testament. Because here is where it ends. There are upbeats and downbeats, and our passage ends frustratingly on a downbeat. And we have to wait a long time for the next change of tone. But maybe that’s just as well. Maybe it’s good to sit with some discomfort for a while. We Christians should never lose sight of the good news and should never forget that the kingdom of God prevails, even when the kingdoms of the world falter and fail. But maybe it’s not a bad thing to take stock of our complicity in the kingdoms of the world, to recognize our tendency to sell out our faith and our values, to betray God’s calling, for a nation or for an ethnic identity or for a feeling of cultural superiority or for an economic system—all of which, as great as they may seem to us, are as dry grass in a wildfire, as far as God is concerned. Maybe it’s not a bad thing to be called once again, by this voice from an ancient past, to open our ears, straining if need be, to hear words about ourselves that we have a hard time hearing, that we are conditioned not to hear, so that we might be opened once more to the work of God, who speaks from beyond the disasters of our life together and calls us again and again to be the people of God that God longs for us to be. In the name of God, our creator and redeemer. Amen.


[1] https://cep.calvinseminary.edu/sermon-starters/trinity-sunday-b-2/?type=old_testament_lectionary

What the word does (Jeremiah 1.4-10)

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What the word does (Jeremiah 1.4-10)
Eastminster United Presbyterian Church, 4th Sunday after Epiphany (February 3, 2019)

Tom James
Jeremiah has been called “the weeping prophet.” The description is apt—not only is the book of Jeremiah filled with lamentations for a broken and scattered people: its follow-up in the Bible is actually called “Lamentations.”
But what was Jeremiah lamenting? And, maybe much more important for us, does his grief in any way connect with our own experience? Maybe we should ask, first, do we have anything to grieve, like Jeremiah? Can we relate to “the weeping prophet?” Is there any cause for lamentation among us today?
A little background. Jeremiah was a prophet during the reigns of the last kings of Judah, just as their kingdom was falling apart and about to be overrun by the growing empire of Babylon. It was actually a long decline that Jeremiah tracked over many years. Our passage for this morning recalls his call to be a prophet, somewhere around 625 B.C., and the fall of Jerusalem, which he witnessed, does not actually occur until 586 or so. In between, there were some thirty-nine years of painful drama and degeneration, as the vision of Judah as a faithful and independent people deteriorated.
Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann suggests that what was happening during those years was the full flowering of what he calls “royal consciousness.” Now, let me explain what that phrase means. Royal consciousness was a combination of three things. It was, first of all, an economics of affluence in which a few people grew very wealthy while most of the population remained poor—this happened mainly by gobbling up land (the main source of wealth in ancient times) either by conquest or by means of exacting interest on debts and then seizing the land when the debts couldn’t be repaid. And, secondly, royal consciousness involved a politics of oppression that seeks to keep poor people from having any kind of redress by centralizing authority in a monarchy and enlisting the help of a standing army to reinforce differences in power. Finally, royal consciousness involved a religion that was focused on the regularities of the created order. It was the role of the king and his priests to maintain that regularity. The God of such a religion was predictable, controllable, and accessible—not to the people, but to the ruling hierarchy. The nation of Israel had originally been a project inspired by Moses the liberator, and it involved the most passionate rejection of royal consciousness in favor of a whole new kind of faith. Israel was to have an economy of shared abundance rather than hoarded affluence, a politics of emancipation, governed by decentralized tribal councils rather than a centralized monarchy, rather than a politics of oppression, and a religion that believed in a God that was not controllable and not predictable and not accessible in the same way. This last item was especially important because a God who is always predictable can be depended upon to reinforce inequities of power and wealth—such inequities are seen as if they reflect God’s own intentions, as what is natural and inevitable. But a God whose ways are, as Isaiah was to say, “not our ways,” and whose thoughts are “not our thoughts,” could not be relied upon to support a stable order, but instead challenged it and called it to be different.
And so, when the prophets of Israel and Judah cry out against “foreign gods,” it’s not just a matter of religious preference that they are getting so heated up about. What is happening during the time of the kings is that the liberating project of Moses is being slowly but surely replaced by the same kind of oppressive, centralized monarchy to which others in the region had long since succumbed. The land of Canaan had been ruled by urban monarchies, city-states who grew rich by siphoning off the wealth of the land, where rural peasants worked hard just to survive. Israel was supposed to be different, but, as time went on, it wasn’t. And that made people like Jeremiah sad.
So, what was Jeremiah lamenting? It was, first of all, a failure of his people to live up to their calling. It was a failure to grasp the freedom that God had offered them. It was that they had become just like the other nations, characterized increasingly by vast inequalities, by a lack of compassion and justice, by a religion that did not respect the freedom of God but expected God to be at the beck and call of Israel’s most powerful.
We read in our passage that, when God calls Jeremiah to his role as prophet, he tells him that he will be appointed “over nations and kingdoms, to pluck up and pull down, to destroy and overthrow.” Now, how could these words be anything but scary? How was young Jeremiah (he called himself just a “boy” at this point), how was this young Jeremiah going to be somehow “over nations and kingdoms,” and how would those actually sitting on those thrones take to him “plucking up, pulling down, destroying and overthrowing?”
We know from the story that Jeremiah didn’t actually get appointed king in the kings’ places—that’s not what God meant. What God meant was that, somehow, Jeremiah’s words would have this powerfully destructive role. More than that, God’s own words would be given to Jeremiah so that Moses’ project of freedom would have a voice in the midst of Israel’s corruption and decay. And it wasn’t that God’s voice in itself was a voice of destruction, but that the kings and their nobles and their priests—indeed, all those who were purveyors and beneficiaries of royal consciousness—would hear those words as words of destruction. Because God didn’t want to destroy the people, but to create the people again, to renew the project of Moses, to once again liberate the people from their bondage to a way of life that would consume them and destroy them so that they might finally live into the promise of Israel. It was a rescue operation; it was a mission of redemption.
But Jeremiah wept. Why did he weep? First of all, he wept because the nation would not listen. The word rang out with its dreadful overtones of impending judgment and doom as Jeremiah preached and preached, but the power brokers held on and the people did not challenge them and things went on as they had before for so long. Meanwhile, the empire of Babylon sharpened its swords and gathered its troops.
But there’s a second reason why Jeremiah wept. He also wept because he grieved for himself. The message that he had to deliver did not make him happy, because he, too, was in some ways taken in by royal consciousness. After all, it had grown so familiar, like an old house that you don’t want to leave, or like an old pair of shoes you don’t want to give up. The strange fact about human nature is that we all tend to love what is familiar even when it is killing us. Drug and alcohol addictions aren’t the only examples. We can cling to a relationship that is destroying us, or to a job or even a whole way of life that is actually making us miserable. In this case, Jeremiah, too, must have felt the attractions of centralized power and a static religion and a predictable god. Indeed, losing such a god, coming to believe in a God who isn’t constrained by human expectations, a God who may intervene in our lives at any time and ask us to do things differently, who shakes our complacency and calls us to step forward into new territory rather than around and around in comfortable circles of familiarity, can’t help but be felt in some ways as a loss.
How can you and I relate to Jeremiah? I believe that, just like Judah, we are all too easily beguiled today by what Brueggemann calls “royal consciousness.” Of course, we don’t have kings in this country. But we do have a tendency to accept and adopt structures of power that reproduce human pain and suffering, even when they hurt us, too, just because we believe that that is the way things must be. We do have a tendency to fail in our imaginations and in our awareness of our moral resources to change things for the better. And we do, don’t we, have a tendency to shape our religious beliefs and practices, our rituals and habits, in such a way that they guarantee stability and reliability, shielding ourselves from the way the God of Moses may be calling us to leave Egypt behind.
But the words of Jeremiah pluck up that royal consciousness—they tear down that stale religion that tries desperately to keep things always the same—because they point to a way of life, a way of faith, that is always with us and always open to us when we say “yes” to it. The way is the way of Moses, which is also the way of Jesus. It is a way of openness to the Spirit, of speaking words of truth that challenge the power of kings and support and uphold those who are most vulnerable in their struggles for freedom and dignity.
We may or may not be ready for it, but I believe God puts those kinds of words in our mouths today. We are invested with the spirit and call of Jeremiah for our time. When we hear the voice of the spirit, we are empowered to proclaim the reality of a God who calls us to change our hearts, and our lives, and our systems of power as communities and nations.
We are also empowered to grieve. That may sound like a strange kind of power; but it is what prophets must do, in every time and place. Because we see it, too. In word and deed, we Christians preach and preach the love of Jesus that reaches everyone and that heals and forgives and tears down walls of division, and yet the power brokers hold on, and the people don’t challenge them, and everything goes on as it has for so long. Grieving is what those who hear the voice of God, and witness the stubbornness of the nations, must do.
But that’s not the end of the story. Even Jeremiah could look beyond his sorrow and see glimpses of hope for a new beginning from time to time. For him, he imagined a time when the word he was working so hard to preach would be implanted in the hearts of the people so that no one would have to preach. For us, perhaps we can imagine such a world only on a small scale. We get to see, and hopefully be a part of, new beginnings here and there. Maybe there’s a new group or a new community or a new family or a new ministry or a new plan. We Christians started out a small sect, facing down a huge empire. We are accustomed to starting small, against long odds, but not giving up, not calling it quits, not allowing our imagination to fall back into the trap of royal consciousness, but trusting that the work of the spirit goes on. We need to draw on the spirit of Jeremiah for our own time. Because it is time, once more, to tear down, and to build; to destroy, and to plant. In the name of God, our creator and redeemer. Amen.

This Sunday, February 3rd

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Jeremiah has been called “the weeping prophet.” What was he so upset about? We have tended to imagine that he wept over things that were happening to his country (Judah), or maybe even that he wept because he thought that what was happening to them was in some way their fault. But what if it was something deeper? What if it had to do with his faith being disrupted or even destroyed? This week, we will be looking at Jeremiah’s call to become a prophet (Jeremiah 1.4-10) and ask what it might have meant that he was supposed to “pluck up and pull down, destroy and overthrow.” We will also ask what this has to do with us? Are we called to take up the spirit of Jeremiah today? What would that look like? Would we have any friends if we did? (That last question is only half-joking!)

                I hope to see you on Sunday. In the meantime, I hope everyone is staying safe and warm.

The first miracle (John 2.1-11)

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The first miracle (John 2.1-11)
Eastminster United Presbyterian Church, Ordinary 2C (January 20, 2019)
Tom James

It might seem to us a little strange that a story of such importance, a story that ends with the salvation of the world, should begin with a wedding reception where the wine runs out. I guess you could say Jesus was starting small. Refilling the punch bowl, if you will, is a long way off from something that generations would remember him for. But, you have to start somewhere, after all.
There actually aren’t a lot of miracles stories in John.  There are seven, and while that would be a lot for most of us to perform a period of just a few years, some of the other gospels have a lot more. Luke, for example, has about twenty. John puts his seven together in an order which does seem to build in significance.  This first one may seem like a “miracle of convenience,” you might say.  For those who have heard about some of the miracle stories of the heretical gospels from the second century called “Gnostic” gospels, recently rediscovered, this story may seem familiar. In some of these Gnostic gospels, Jesus has superhuman powers, and he flexes those powers to show that he is not limited to by the confines of time and space like you and I are. He does awesome things, like turning rocks into birds, simply because he can, not to make life better in this world but to show that the world’s rules are irrelevant to him, that natural laws cannot get in his way.
The Greek term “Gnosis,” from which “Gnostic” derives, means secret wisdom or knowledge.  It is more than a way of thinking about Jesus, it is an avenue of hope for human beings.  According to this tradition, if we align ourselves with this secret way, unveiled only to a select few, we are promised that we, too, can make the limitations of the physical world irrelevant. We can escape from its power over us; we can go beyond the tendency for things to wear down and wear out, including our bodies.  
The ancient religion of Gnosticism has drawn attention recently not only because it produced some alternative pictures of Jesus with a bunch of different stories, but because Gnostic faith is in some respects powerfully aligned with a particular kind of human hope that is commonly expressed today. You could say that modernity in the West has been all about trying to make the limitations of nature irrelevant to us.  Technical skill, the new “gnosis,” has become the most prized human virtue:  governance becomes bureaucracy, politics becomes campaign engineering, the art of caring becomes the science of curing, healing is less something to be thankful for than something to be expected, sexuality becomes less and less a practice of love and increasingly a matter of manuals and pills, the world becomes less something to be in awe of than something to be cleared, mined, harvested, or “improved.”  
One of the more dramatic expressions of this hope, perhaps, come to light a few years ago. People began to talk about what they called “designer children,” who would not so much gifted to us by the mystery of life as built by genetic technology, “made” not only free from the tendency toward certain diseases but also genetically predisposed toward intelligence or athletic prowess or beauty—or  toward any other attribute we may choose. Modernity has been about breaking down barriers to the achievement of our ambitions. And, to some extent, we are succeeding. We are making natural obstacles to human desire, whether they be natural genotypes or forests or the effects of aging, disappear before our very eyes. The rules of the world, to some degree, are becoming more and more irrelevant.
This miracle of Jesus looks a lot like those Gnostic miracles, ancient as well as modern. After all, what’s so theologically important about having wine for a wedding party? Why does Jesus do it? What’s the big deal about having quality wine at a wedding reception? (And, we should note, John makes clear that the wine Jesus made was quality.) The reason is so obvious that it may surprise us. And it is the very opposite reason that a Gnostic might give. It’s not because someone has asked for wine, and since nature’s rules don’t effect Jesus, he just snaps his fingers and it’s done. It’s not a matter of simply satisfying every human desire. No, there’s something about this context, this event, that is important enough for one of the seven signs John tells us about. As I say, it’s a pretty obvious thing. It is because weddings matter. 
We know they matter to many of us, of course. That’s why so many people pull out all the stops for a wedding. Many of us have memories—mostly joyful—of our own weddings, or of the wedding of people who are important to us. Michelle’s and my wedding, on Epiphany of 1996, was pretty unforgettable, because, while we were getting married in Louisville, Kentucky, about a foot of snow was falling, and I don’t think a single plow was plowing! (Because it was Louisville, Kentucky!) It was a mess: a fraction of the people we expected actually people showed up, our hotel was a ghost town and the people working there didn’t want to be working there. My brothers from Florida were sliding around in their rental cars, and this Floridian wasn’t doing a lot better. But, still, it was one of the best and most important days in my life, and I’d do it all over again, just the same.
Any wedding is a unique celebration because it is a grand “yes” to life—yes, this partnership, with all of the problems that will probably arise within it, is worth entering into. Yes—mysteries of sexuality and procreation are worth embracing and affirming. Yes—life is good, and it ought to be continued. Yes, society, togetherness, partnerships are good, and ought to be blessed. And, so, Jesus’s odd little miracle is not just a miracle of convenience—it is his own affirmation and blessing of human community—of our yearning to be together and to go on together.
There is one little detail of this story that I’d like to single out. When Jesus was looking around for containers for this quality wine that he was about to make, he spotted somewhere in the corner some old, well-used, perhaps unwelcome jars that had probably been shoved aside hastily and rudely. These large jars were made to contain water for purification rites when people would confess their sins and asked to be washed clean from them. There’s no mystery why these jars would have been hastily pushed into the corners. Weddings are not a time for purification jars. Weddings are joyful occasions when we celebrate love and life, and purification rites, by contrast, point to sin and brokenness.  
But I think the purification jars are important to the story, and they tell us something about what Jesus was up to. It tells us something that Jesus begins his ministry by filling purification jars with the finest wine. That “jarring” contrast, if you will excuse the pun, is perhaps the main point of the story. It is as if he is pointing ahead to the time when the mourning of purification will yield to the joy of celebration.
Rites of purification were the precursors to Christian baptism, and the drinking of wine at the wedding feast points to the joyful feast of the people of God which of which partake at the communion table.  The journey that begins at baptism ends at the banquet feast. You might say that Jesus is the life of the party, from beginning to end. 
The way of Jesus does not take us away from or out of the world. Instead, it leads us through miracles at wedding feasts, through diseases and healings, through death and resurrection.
Another word for “sign” is “sacrament,” and we are invited by this story to see a life that is marked by things like weddings, and diseases, and loss, as sacramental through and through.  When we break bread together, at the communion table or the dinner table, when we are full of happy conversation or when we have nothing to say, we are invited to experience the living Christ. When we share a glass of wine or give a glass of water to someone who is thirsty, perhaps we can learn to see that Christ is still at work in the world. When we experience the warmth of friends or family, or when we are alone out in the beauty of nature, perhaps we can be opened to the reality of Christ among us. If Jesus makes a sign out of a bit of wine, perhaps all of life is sacramental—all of life is an expression of God’s love and God’s presence. As John says at the opening of his gospel, the word has been made flesh and dwelt among us.  We need to practice keeping our eyes open at all times, at weddings, when we are alone, when there is need, when there is joy, when we are marking the beginning of a new session and a new board of deacons, that we may see its glory. Amen.

This Sunday, January 27

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I was really hoping to preach on “The first miracle” last Sunday. So, you know what? I’m going to go ahead and preach it this Sunday. Here’s what I wrote last week:
Do you know what Jesus’ first miracle was? I suppose it depends on whom you ask. In John’s gospel, there are only seven (John calls them “signs”), and the first happens when Jesus and his mother are at a wedding feast in a village called “Cana.” Everybody has heard of this miracle: turning water into wine! Sometimes we treat it as a joke, but, this Sunday, we will talk about what this miracle means and why John’s version of the story puts it first. What does it mean that almost the first thing Jesus does is to provide what it takes to keep a celebration going? What do we learn about Jesus, and about God, from this story?

Don’t forget that Sunday is also an important day for the congregation. We have a congregational meeting, with lunch afterward. Also, during worship, we will be installing our new elders and deacons. Also, for those serving on those boards, we will be having our annual joint meeting after lunch. Hope to see you Sunday!

This Sunday, 1/20/19

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Do you know what Jesus’ first miracle was? I suppose it depends on whom you ask. In John’s gospel, there are only seven (John calls them “signs”), and the first happens when Jesus and his mother are at a wedding feast in a village called “Cana.” Everybody has heard of this miracle: turning water into wine! Sometimes we treat it as a joke, but, this Sunday, we will talk about what this miracle means and why John’s version of the story puts it first. What does it mean that almost the first thing Jesus does is to provide what it takes to keep a celebration going? What do we learn about Jesus, and about God, from this story?

Many people have been talking this week about the snow that is (probably) going to hit our area this weekend. Let me take this opportunity to let you know that Session has decided that we will cancel Sunday worship in the event of a “LEVEL 2” snow emergency. So, if you hear that we are at “LEVEL 2,” please stay at home! Also, we will be putting cancellation notices on WTVG, channel 13, and WTOL, channel 11. Finally, if you have doubts or can’t find out, please check your email (I will be sending something out if we have to cancel), or call 567.343.6479. There will be an outgoing message with the necessary information. I really do hope to see you Sunday!