Steadfastness and encouragment

• Isaiah 11:1-10
• Romans 15:4-13
• Matthew 3:1-12
• Psalm 72:1-7, 18-19

Some of you know that once a month or so I meet over lunch at B’nai Israel Jewish Center over on Western Avenue with Rabbi Ted, and Mia, his associate, and two or three other clergy from different faith communities on the West side of Petaluma.  We had our December gathering on Thursday, and it was Rabbi Ted’s idea that we might open our meeting up this time, and invite folks to join us from the wider community, to share our concerns and our hopes about making Petaluma a place where all kinds of people can live together in harmony.  It wasn’t so long ago that many of us assumed that this was a goal that most people share, but it appears recent events in town and in the nation have shaken that confidence.  Because people came out in response to our invitation: from the synagogue and the Episcopal, and Unitarian, Methodist, Lutheran, and Catholic churches; from the Islamic Center of Petaluma; from six or seven different social service agencies and community organizations; from the police department and the city council.

Rabbi Ted emailed our little clergy group early in the week and offered to facilitate the meeting, and we gave him the green light, and on Thursday it became clear pretty quickly that we’d made the right decision.  Not just because the meeting was his idea, or because he was our host.  And not just because he is the most experienced spiritual leader among us.   But also because of the moral authority he had when he spoke of what it means to him and his congregation when people start talking about of mass deportations, and registries of religious minorities, and internment camps.   And the moral authority with which he can tell stories from the experience of his own community about attempted arson, and breaking of windows, and swastikas painted on their building over the years.  And this helped us all put our meeting in the right perspective—to feel the urgency of this moment, to be sure, and the need for vigilance and initiative; but also to remember that the struggle to learn to live together is nothing new.  It has been going on for a long time, in Petaluma and everywhere.

As St. Paul is winding up his long instruction to the church at Rome, about how to be a single faith community of Jews and Gentiles, with all the tensions that entails, he tells them that even though it is not easy, they shouldn’t give up hope.  Because, he says, their being able to live together in harmony, and give glory to God with one voice, is what the mission of Messiah Jesus is all about.   It is what God sent Jesus to make possible.  It required him to put the interests of others before his own.  So it wasn’t easy for him either, to say the least, but he gave himself to the task with perfect faithfulness because he loved us, and had hope that God would find a way. 

And here I think that if you read between the lines you can see that Paul might also be talking about himself.  This isn’t one of those passages like you find elsewhere in Paul’s letters where he holds himself up explicitly as an exemplar of imitating Christ, and talks about all the hardships and suffering he has endured for the sake of the Gospel.  But in all his letters Paul writes from the heart of his own experience, and his own struggles and victories of faith are never far from his mind.  I think this is one of those places where Paul is speaking of, and to, himself, as much as he is speaking to his intended audience.  So when he says that the God who will help the Romans to live together in harmony is the God of steadfastness and encouragement, he’s talking about the spiritual consolation that has come to him and helped him at times when his own hope was wearing thin.

Paul’s encounter with the crucified and resurrected Jesus, a man he’d never met and used to despise, somehow made him a leader in this unlikely mission; a mission to create a new humanity, in which there is no longer male nor female, no longer Jew nor Greek, no longer slave nor free.  This mission has cost him everything, and in particular it has cost him his religion.  Not that he has ceased to be a Jew, or has converted to a different faith.  But his experience of Christ tore down to the foundations his understanding of what it meant to belong to the covenant people of God, and to be an heir of the promises made to the patriarchs. 

It was only through the grace of God, and his faith in Jesus, and the signs he saw of the Holy Spirit at work in the communities to which he was sent, that Paul could gradually build his religion up again, according to a radically different design.  This was a long, painful process, and it didn’t help that it made him an outcast and a blasphemer in the eyes of the people he used to think of proudly as his own.  So if Paul speaks in the name of a God of steadfastness and encouragement, it’s because he knows that he himself would not have made it this far without that God.

And Paul also gives the church in Rome a recommendation for where to turn to find the encouragement and hope that they need.  It the same place he goes, which is to say the scriptures.  He even gives a little demonstration, citing some of his favorite Bible verses—the ones he knows by heart, and that he turns to when he needs encouragement to remind him that he is not on some kind of fool’s errand, but is doing the will of God. 

 Because the call that Christ has given him to God’s universal mission of reconciliation is not entirely new.  The prophets of the covenant, even as far back as Abraham and Moses had pointed toward the true grandeur of Israel’s vocation.  But it was in Isaiah that this vision came into full view.    In Isaiah we read that as punishment for Israel’s sins, God would permit foreign enemies to come and slash the tree of the Israelite nation and the lineage of David, until nothing but a root remained.  But Isaiah also promised that from that root a new shoot would come, to rule in the Spirit of justice and wisdom.  And those same Gentile nations that once came to conquer and plunder, will come to learn the way of Israel’s God, by which the whole creation will live together in peace.

Maybe it’s just a coincidence, but we find similar imagery of trees and roots in the preaching of John the Baptist.  Like Isaiah’s, John’s message is one of electrifying hope: “the kingdom of heaven is near.”  But it also contains a warning.  John warns the people not to presume that belonging to some religious organization guarantees them a place in that kingdom.   Neither does being born into any particular nation or tribe.  He says “one more powerful than I is coming after me.”  But the one who is coming brings a purifying fire.  It’s a fire that will spread widely and indiscriminately, giving life and power to men and women of every language, and tribe, and family, and nation.  It will inspire them with the wisdom and will of God; but it will also burn up everything in them that is not of God, everything inessential, or has outlived its usefulness—everything that does not bear good fruit.

Each week in church we follow Paul’s advice and turn to the scriptures for encouragement.  And every year at this time, we go all the way back to that moment where the prophets of the Old Testament open the door to the New, the time just before the story of Jesus began.  It’s time again to hear the voice crying in the desert, telling us to turn our lives around because the kingdom of heaven has come near.  It is time to come out of our churches and sects and to go down to the river to confess our sins, to pray that God will cut down and sift out and burn away everything in us that is fruitless.  Now it is time to prepare a way for the one comes to baptize us with Holy Spirit and fire.  We go back to this time as if to clear away all our assumptions and the things we take for granted, all the privileges and prerogatives of being “Christian,” and strip our religion down to its foundation: the radical hope that God will come and teach us, and all the nations, how to live together in peace.   

Revolution of compassion

Ezekiel 34:11-16, 20-24

Psalm 100

Ephesians 1:15-23

Matthew 25:31-46

Some of us here at St. John’s have been meeting since September to study a book about Jesus.  Not Jesus as the author supposes he might have been, but Jesus as people have imagined him, in every era of Christian civilization: Jesus as they have honored and adored him; Jesus, who one way or another has held the key for them to know who God is, and what is good, and beautiful, and true. 

Reimagining Jesus is what Christians have always done.  It’s a process that was already well under way when the four Gospels were written, as you can easily see by comparing them.  Each one presents a different picture of what he said and did, how he died, and what happened to him after that, because each of them arose in a different community.  These little groups that became the church took the traditions that had been handed down to them about him and shaped them to speak to their hopes and fears, their needs, their experiences of the Spirit of Christ, and the signs he showed them of God’s kingdom.   Of course, those differences only serve to make the main character of the stories that much more compelling.  So while we find four distinctive images of Jesus in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, we have no doubt that they are all about the same person.

Jews, Muslims, and Buddhists, even atheists and agnostics, are curious about the person who inspired those stories.  Many admire his teachings and try to understand him better by making comparisons with other prophets, saints, and sages.  But what animates Christian faith is something more than curiosity and admiration.  It is more than the search for an accurate portrait of a historical figure.  It is something more even than the willingness to believe certain things about Jesus.  The heart of Christian faith in Jesus is the desire to know him as he is.  It is living and creative, because it is love infused with hope for oneself and for the world.   

In the great chapter on Christian love in First Corinthians, Saint Paul writes “For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then [we will see] face to face; now I know in part, but then I will know fully just as I also have been fully known.”  Our desire to know Jesus is one with our hope of knowing ourselves and others as we truly are, as we are known and loved by God.  And when we look at those men and women who have cultivated that desire, and have committed more and more of themselves to the fulfillment of that hope, what we see is transformation. 

There is a story, perhaps apocryphal, that on his deathbed Lenin made this confession to a childhood friend who was a priest:

“I have made a mistake. No doubt . . . many people who were oppressed had to be freed, but our method let loose new forms of oppression and murder. You know it, and it is my deadly nightmare to feel smothered in this ocean of blood of innumerable victims. What was needed to save Russia—but now it is too late—was a dozen like Francis of Assisi.”

Whether or not this story is historically accurate, it rings true.  Because it says that no movement to transform the world will ever truly succeed unless it awakens in human beings the hope that they themselves can fundamentally change, and the power to do it.

The hope of taking revenge on their oppressors is not enough; the hope of taking control of the factory, or of the land, or even the simple hope of having enough to eat, are not enough.  These motivations will carry a revolution for a while.  But if it does not have at its heart a persuasive image of the ultimate purpose of being human, the movement will falter and lose its way.  It will be another promise broken, another dream that turned into a nightmare.   On the other hand, I know of one revolutionary movement that has kept going for two thousand years.  In spite of all its sad and shameful history of selling out and settling for less, of complacency and outright crime, it is still able, with regularity, to turn ordinary people into Francis or Clare of Assisi, into Oscar Romero, or Martin Luther King, Jr.  It can do this because it still carries within it, as its source and reason for being, the living image of Jesus and the desire to know and be known by him.

We have this image because of communities like the one that created the Gospel of Matthew, who saw in Jesus Christ what they most wanted to become, and found in him the power to transform the world.  The irony is that they had nothing of what we would account as power.  They were members of a marginal and vilified ethnic group, the Jews, who had fought and lost disastrously a war to free their nation from the tyranny of Rome.  And this particular little congregation was doubly marginalized.   Because their proclamation that the crucified Jesus of Nazareth was the resurrected Messiah of Israel, and their practice of including Gentiles among them as equals, were scandalous to their fellow Jews.  And though the Gospel never explicitly says so, it leaves clues in the text that they had been thrown out of the synagogue. 

But these painful events did not make them discouraged; they actually strengthened and amplified their hope.  They only confirmed that the things that Jesus had said were true, and that he had said those things for them.  The stories said Jesus promised to return in the glory and power of God, though about that day or hour no one could know.  But they also said that he would be with them where ever two or three were gathered in his Name, and that he would be with them until the end of the age. 

And the stories told them another thing about how Jesus would be present, a promise that was also a warning.  Because they were going to have to live for the time being in a mixed up world, a world like a field of wheat with weeds growing in it.  And they were always going to be tempted to take sides in that world’s arguments.  They were going to hear that there were nations of sheep and nations of goats, people who were favored, and entitled to kill to get what they wanted, and people who were cursed, and deserved whatever they got.  But Jesus told them that the whole human race was mixed up, that every nation was sheep and goats mixed together, and no one could sort them out until the very end, and, by the way, it would be up to him to do the sorting. 

But so they wouldn’t lose hope for the world, and become passive and turn inward, he gave them an image of himself, so they could pick him out in the crowd.  Jesus left us with an image of the ultimate purpose of being human, the same image that God showed him.  And it was not a self-image.  It was an image of God’s beloved, the key to the transformation of the world, and it was not a charismatic healer, a sinless savior, a spiritually enlightened being in a white robe and sandals.  Before he gave himself up to death on the cross, Jesus told us to seek him in the old man in the nursing home whom nobody comes to visit, to desire him in the pierced and tattooed girl on the

sidewalk with her placard and her dog, to love him in the ISIS fighter shaking his rifle and shouting “Death to the Infidels”, to care for him in the Guatemalan child on the bus to the immigrant detention center.

The violence of Matthew’s language of judgment disturbs us, but its purpose is to warn us.  Having lived through the horrors of total war, and the pain of religious schism, Matthew’s community knew well what also need to know—that any vision of our future based on the might of the strong, the wisdom of the intelligent, the purity of the self-righteous, or the prosperity of the rich, will sooner or later prove to be demonic.  And I hope that this threat of darkness won’t keep us from also seeing the light—the light of judgment that Jesus and Francis of Assisi and so many others saw and were transformed by—that when we stand with the weak, the hated, the powerless and destitute and share their hope, we take the part of God in the world.

Rejoice always and again rejoice

Exodus 32:1-14

Psalm 106:1-6, 19-23

Philippians 4:1-9

Matthew 22:1-14

“Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice.”  Rejoicing is the great theme of Paul’s Letter to the Church in Philippi.  But this is not the forced and superficial rejoicing that pretends that everything is sunshiny and rosy all the time.  It’s not the hollow joy of being in denial about what is difficult in life.  This is a letter from a man in prison, a man who does not know whether his captors will permit him to live or condemn him to die.  But in spite of that, Paul rejoices, because of what he calls “the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.”  

Faith in Christ is that pearl of great price for which Paul declares himself happy to suffer the loss of everything.  But his faith is also a promise, a promise that becoming like Christ—in humility and perseverance, in suffering for the sake of the Gospel, in patient trust in the goodness and the justice of God—even to the point of being like Christ in his death, brings with it the promise of being like Christ in his resurrection.  So Paul rejoices, and while he doesn’t tell the church in Philippi to ignore or avoid the realities of struggle and suffering, he does tell them not to worry about it.

“Rejoice in the Lord always, again I will say rejoice,” writes Paul; “Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.”  Now I’m like a lot of people in that I tend to worry about things.  Most of them I have no control over whatsoever, but still I dwell on them.  Every once in a while I will add something new to the list of things to worry about, and from time to time I will take something off the list, or at least put it away in the file marked “Not actively worrying about for now.”   But mostly they are the same things that I worry about over and over again, day after day, week after week, year after year. 

It’s a habit, and habits are hard to break, but I have been trying to learn a new habit, and it is exactly the one that Paul recommends to his friends in Philippi.  When I find myself worrying about money, or the prospects for the church, or how I’m doing at my job, about my parents, my brothers, or my wife, about my daughter’s future, or the future of the human race and life on Earth, it makes all the difference in the world if I turn that worry into a prayer.  This immediately shifts my focus from the bad thing I’m afraid of to the good thing I hope for.  It changes the context of the issue from my own weakness and anxiety, to the strength and the peace that are in God.

 

The joy of Paul is confidence in that strength and that peace which surpasses all understanding.  It is also a rejoicing in unity.  Today’s passage begins with a plea to a couple of the women in the congregation at Philippi to work out their differences, and to be “of the same mind in the Lord.”   This also is a recurring theme in the letter.   In fact this is the one thing that Paul asks of the Philippians, something that they can do for him so that the joy that he has in them will be complete—to be of “the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord” with one another.  And again, this unity to which he urges them is not just a sharing in happiness and good fortune.  It is also sharing in suffering and struggle.  The challenges they face together, says Paul, are a gift from God, for in this way they share in the struggle and sufferings of Christ himself. 

Driving back down from Oregon on Thursday, my family and I passed through the fields of Glenn and Colusa Counties, which were teeming with combines, threshing and harvesting rice.  This is the time of year when the long labors of spring and summer bear fruit, and it is also the season to gather in the spiritual harvest of the year, and of years and of lifetimes.  Over the next couple of months the Sunday gospel lessons are teachings from the final week of Jesus’ life.  They are parables and dialogues that ask us with redoubled urgency to consider what, when all is said and done, is of ultimate value.  And this is a season centered on the great Feast of All the Saints, when we rejoice in and hope for God’s harvest of history, with those men and women who, like Paul, counted themselves fortunate to live and die with Christ, and were transformed by him into lights to the world in their generations.   

 

So it is fitting that this is also the time when we observe our annual Stewardship Season at St. John’s.  Because when we talk about Stewardship in the church we are not turning aside from spiritual matters with a wink and a nudge to address the real financial “bottom line” of our life together.  But before the coming of new year at Advent, before we begin preparing again to celebrate the Incarnation of God in Christ, we set aside a season for rejoicing in the Christ that abides and bears fruit in us.  We take time to consider the harvest of blessings that is our life together and to recommit ourselves to this community of saints. 

And if we treat this as more than a perfunctory exercise, it is not without its suffering and struggle, for there are no areas of our lives more fraught with frustration and anxiety, with our moral dilemmas and mortal limitations, than our time and our money.  But while each of us might wrestle in the privacy of our own families and our own consciences with difficult reckonings of how much we have, and what we can afford to spare, and where our gifts are needed most, still we rejoice.  We rejoice because we are of the same mind, making these hard choices together.  We all pray together for God to supply our needs, and for the faith and discernment to make an offering that says something about the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus our Lord.

This year our Stewardship packets contain a new way to rejoice in our life together in the body of Christ.  In addition to the form where you can estimate your 2015 giving of time, talent, and treasure to St. John’s, you will also have the option of completing what I’ve decided to call a Mission Pledge.  This is a confidential card which you can choose to share with me, or to keep entirely between yourself and God.  Its purpose is for you to identify at least one, and as many as four, areas of your life outside of church that you would like to offer on this altar for the coming year, to be consecrated to Christ’s mission in the world.

It can be something public, your job or some civic or social service work that you do.  Or it can be private, a creative discipline or spiritual practice, a significant relationship or family responsibility.  The communion that Christ renews with you when you kneel at this altar—where in your life do you hope it will bear fruit?  Into which of your efforts and struggles will you invite Christ to enter, to make them part his redeeming work?  Which of your worries would you like to turn into prayers and supplications for strength and peace?  Your Mission Pledge is an invitation to ask and answer these questions.  It is your opportunity to take stock of your spiritual challenges and rejoice in them as precious gifts, and then, uniting with your brothers and sisters at St. John’s in a single act of thanksgiving, to make them known to God.