Gentle Among You

Sunday, October 23, 2011

Ordinary 30A

Jerusalem Baptist Church (Emmerton), Warsaw

1 Thessalonians 2:1-8

You yourselves know, brothers and sisters, that our coming to you was not in vain, ²but though we had already suffered and been shamefully mistreated at Philippi, as you know, we had courage in our God to declare to you the gospel of God in spite of great opposition. ³For our appeal does not spring from deceit or impure motives or trickery, ⁴but just as we have been approved by God to be entrusted with the message of the gospel, even so we speak, not to please mortals, but to please God who tests our hearts. ⁵As you know and as God is our witness, we never came with words of flattery or with a pretext for greed; ⁶nor did we seek praise from mortals, whether from you or from others, ⁷though we might have made demands as apostles of Christ. But we were gentle among you, like a nurse tenderly caring for her own children. ⁸So deeply do we care for you that we are determined to share with you not only the gospel of God but also our own selves, because you have become very dear to us.

I want to start today with a confession.

I sometimes have to fight with that part of me that would rather turn inward and keep to myself, sometimes we refer to it as ‘introversion’, sometimes it ends up being perceived as aloofness, but either way, it is not always compatible with the duties and responsibilities that have become associated with being a pastor. 

There is a particular person, a member of our community, that for a number of reasons it has been a challenge for me to visit as a part of my weekly routine.  The question of whether I have a routine is open for discussion, though with Leslie’s help and insistence, that seems to be becoming more and more a reality in my life.  To my shame, at times weeks if not months would go by without my going to see him.  A few weeks ago, I finally found myself driving down the road on my way to his house.  Part of the dynamic that happens as you try to convince yourself that you need to go see this person is that you begin to imagine how that initial conversation is going to play out.  And you create these images in your mind of these conversations being awkward, being pointed and angry, being frustrated, and as someone who like most of us doesn’t particularly enjoy confrontation, the imagination does more than enough to dissuade one from going into that situation where you THINK there might be a confrontation.  As I got closer, I was wondering how the visit would go, and I got a little anxious.  I knew what I needed to do.  I was already praying for grace during the visit, so I asked God to help me see the man through his eyes, not mine, nor my own perceptions of him.  Show me how YOU feel about him.

What came over me as I made one of the last turns before reaching the house, was this deep yearning, a longing to spend time with him that I don’t remember ever experiencing before. 

It was such a strong emotion that I began to cry.  By the time I reached the door to the house, I couldn’t wait to get inside and speak to him and see how he was doing and what he’d been up to. 

It wasn’t particularly outstanding in content – as it turned out, nothing extraordinary was happening in his life.  Well, there were a couple of things, but nothing out of the ordinary for a normal Christian’s life.  Some health issues, which are to be expected in a person of his age, but otherwise, a routine visit. But for me, the visit turned out to be one of the most meaningful and sweet experiences of my life.

What made it different was how I ended up approaching it.  I didn’t go into it with a sense of ‘this has to happen because it hasn’t happened for so long’ – though it WAS the case – but I believe that God answered my prayer really quickly that afternoon.  He made it so that I could tap into HIS heart, and in tapping into his heart, I found where my heart needed to be.

***

We know from other references in the New Testament that Paul was able to spend at most a month – most likely just three weeks – with the people who became the church in Thessalonica, so the depth of the emotion that he conveys in his letter to them can seem in some ways disproportionate.  Usually, you become close to people when you spend a lot of time with them, not a short amount of time. 

But that can vary considerably. 

A crucible is, for lack of a better term, a pressure cooker.

I experienced that, as I’ve shared with you before, during my time in training before going overseas as a Journeyman to Spain.  The sixty-five people that I went through those five and a half weeks with, even though we don’t keep in touch that often, we have that shared connection, that shared bond, that was formed over those brief weeks, twenty-six years ago, and we still pick up where we left off.  I’ve heard countless similar stories from people who’ve gone through various, intense experiences as a part of a small group.  The shared experience – and hardship – does something to the group dynamic that bonds them in ways that would normally not happen in a stress-free setting. 

But Paul seems to have bonded with the people of the church in Thessalonica in such a way that he needed to touch base with them again. 

We have only these two letters as a testimony to that ‘touching base’ in scripture.  Many scholars believe that what we call the first letter is the only letter we have that was actually written by Paul himself.  It is a tantalizing question as to whether he wrote other letters to them, letters that have been lost to history.  But we DO have these.  And this is what we go from. 

A few weeks ago I reconnected with a childhood friend.  He was the person I considered my best friend growing up.  Our parents were fellow missionaries, and we went to school together, though he was a year and then two behind me. 

In the years since we graduated from high school, we maintained some connection as younger adults, but hadn’t spoken in nearly ten years.  His father passed away a few weeks after Hannah was born, and we traveled to go to his funeral, but since then, we’d pretty much dropped out of each others’ lives. 

Our mothers talk periodically on the phone, so I was able to keep up with him at a distance.  I knew he’d been in and out of rehab, struggling with drug and alcohol addictions.  But on this particular day I was on the road, and I had his number loaded in my phone.  I knew I was going to be driving for a while, so I called and spoke briefly with his wife, and then he came on, and it was a conversation like we’ve never had.  It was from the heart. 

We had heart to heart conversations as teenagers, but you know how that can go.    

He sounded … so  … grown up, so mature, so centered.  Before, he was always goofing around, even when the topic of conversation was serious.  This conversation consisted of us sharing from our hearts.  We apologized to each other for not keeping in touch.  He shared with me about his work as a lab technician in a local hospital, and how much he loved it, but that his supervisor was excessively controlling… nothing new there.  About how he’d like to be a part of an MK reunion that we’re hoping to put together in the not too distant future, about how his family is, his sons and his wife. 

The emotion that came along with that conversation is one that I don’t really know how to put into words.  The bond, the connection, the LOVE that was I guess rekindled is probably the word for it, because it was there before.  It’s not that it WASN’T … it didn’t just LEAVE… it didn’t disappear.  There has always been an affection and a love in our relationship, but it was just kind of put on a back burner and left there for a long time. 

As older teenagers we had our disagreements, we had our fights.  There was a time when we didn’t talk.  Intentionally didn’t talk out of anger with each other, but that was all gone on that Saturday. 

The reason I’m sharing this kind of sappy stuff is because when Paul writes “we were gentle among you like a nurse caring to her own children” that struck a chord.  It underscored for me how important it is to handle each other with kid gloves, but it also pointed out the fact that we are people who will fly off the handle.  That’s part of our nature.  With some of us words spoken in anger are words that bring profound regret.  I know there are words spoken to my children that I would give anything to take back.

And yet it still comes back around to the grace of being able to say ‘I love you’ and receive that love back in return. 

I would encourage us all to tread lightly, to tread gently but TO tread; to BE in each other’s lives. Because that what it means to be family, that what it means to be community, that’s what it means to BE the body of Christ. 

That what we say and what we do expresses care and concern always, and always, love. 

Let’s pray.

The Worth of the Gift

Sunday, October 16, 2011

Jerusalem Baptist Church (Emmerton), Warsaw VA

Matthew 22:15-22

To what do we ascribe value, and to whom do we give it?

¹⁵Then the Pharisees went and plotted to entrap him in what he said. ¹⁶So they sent their disciples to him, along with the Herodians, saying, “Teacher, we know that you are sincere, and teach the way of God in accordance with truth, and show deference to no one; for you do not regard people with partiality. ¹⁷Tell us, then, what you think. Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor, or not?” ¹⁸But Jesus, aware of their malice, said, “Why are you putting me to the test, you hypocrites? ¹⁹Show me the coin used for the tax.” And they brought him a denarius. ²⁰Then he said to them, “Whose head is this, and whose title?” ²¹They answered, “The emperor’s.” Then he said to them, “Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” ²²When they heard this, they were amazed; and they left him and went away.

Tony, have you stopped beating your wife?

How are you supposed to answer that question?  You answer ‘no’, and it sounds like you still spend some part of your day using your wife as a punching bag.  You answer ‘yes’, and it is an only marginally better answer, since it seems as though, by implication, you DID, at some point, beat your wife. 

To them, it was that kind of question.  

The disciples of the religious leaders and the men who supported the rule of the Herods – each of them (hence the name) – those who had a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, and their own positions of power and influence, of course, could only conceive of two possible answers, ‘yes’ and ‘no’. 

They figured, if Jesus answers ‘yes, it IS lawful to pay taxes to Caesar’ then he’d lose the base of support of everyone who was itching for a fight with the occupying forces, who could, potentially, cause a LOT of problems for THEM if Jesus just put out the word that it was time to take up arms against the Romans.  If he answered ‘no, it ISN’T lawful to pay taxes to Caesar’, it was a simple matter of treason, and they could dispose of him based on THAT charge. 

What they didn’t understand was that Jesus understood that place from which the question originated.  Something they themselves probably weren’t even aware of until this confrontation. 

It’s that place where we all live when we try to figure out at any given moment in our day how we translate our spiritual convictions into real life living. 

Almost everyone here today was born in this country, under this flag (US flag to the right).  But part of why we are here in this room this morning is because, at some point in our lives, we have accepted the one whom THIS flag (Christian flag on the left) represents as our Lord and Savior, we have pledged ourselves to HIM. 

But we still live in this world and in this country and under this flag and all that that entails.  

Part of what I think makes this passage a little harder for us to grasp in it’s original impact is that we live in a country where we enjoy – where we benefit from – the separation of Church and State. 

Even now, two hundred years and more into this grand experiment of a country, we are still living in the exception to the rule when it comes to how the State and the Church functioned in society throughout history.  Centuries before Jesus, and through the vast majority of the last two thousand years, cultures the world over have joined the two together into a seamless unit.

It was no different in the Roman Empire.  Caesar, the emperor, was, by definition, a self-proclaimed divinity – a god, to be worshipped and revered along with all the other gods in the pantheon of gods that the Romans had picked up through their expansions and annexations of territory.  His very title, Caesar, meant ‘Lord’.  When you exclaimed ‘Hail Caesar’ you were literally saying ‘Praise the lord!’ and it carried with it both a political AND a religious connotation.  In other words, you were stating a political allegiance AND a spiritual conviction at the same time. 

THAT is why early Christians got into so much trouble when, before they were baptized, as we have heard in this sanctuary or at a baptism at the river, they were asked to proclaim their faith, and their response was three words, the same that we hear today when we celebrate a baptism:  “Jesus is Lord.” They were making not ONLY a spiritual statement, but a political one as well.

Because we live in a country where those two spheres of influence have been separated (and rightly so), we don’t hear our faith terminology as political, we hear it as simply … words that express our faith.  It doesn’t register that we are making statements about our political convictions – and sometimes we don’t think of them as that – as well as our convictions of the Spirit because of the gulf that exists between the sanctuary and the county seat, or the state capital, or the national capital. 

But that wasn’t the case when these people approached Jesus and tried to trick him into that yes or no answer.  In that day and age, to speak of religion was to speak of the empire – and the emperor.  

That is why Jesus’ response was so brilliant.  He knew they were trying to trick him.  He knew they were trying in some way to get him give them an excuse to validate their view of the power structure and their place in it. 

But Jesus didn’t give them the satisfaction.  He knew that, at its heart, the question was REALLY about ultimate allegiance. 

And that question applies as much today as it did then:  Who are we going to let define who we are.  Who establishes our value, our worth?

When he asked them to show him a denarius, what would be as common as a quarter in today’s currency, they had one available and presented it. 

Keep in mind, this is happening in the temple, these were folks who considered it a matter of pride to adhere – to STRICTLY adhere – to the letter of the law.  Including the first two of the Decalogue – the Ten Commandments.  The first is ‘You shall have no other Gods before me’ and the second is ‘You shall not make any idols to worship’.  The denarius of his day carried the image of Caesar – the ‘lord’ – along with his face in profile – his image. 

I have this picture in my head of Jesus asking for a denarius, and two or three of the guys reaching into their robes for their coin purses, and one manages to get into his faster than the others, and eagerly flips the coin towards Jesus, and as the coin is arching through the air, glinting in the sun, the realization hits this young man that ‘DOH!’  He’s just revealed the emptiness behind the question… something that can actually be read between the lines leading up to the question itself, the insincerity virtually drips off the page as we read,

“Teacher, we know that you are sincere, and teach the way of God in accordance with truth, and show deference to no one; for you do not regard people with partiality.”

As we talked about on Wednesday evening, Jesus could have stopped right there, and walked away. He could have left them hanging.  Everybody in the place realized the obvious moral bankruptcy that the fact of that coin being present in the temple represented.  They weren’t concerned about how the law did or didn’t apply to THEM, they were more concerned with how they could manipulate it for their benefit.  His point would have been obvious to everyone there.  He could have driven the knife in even deeper and asked a very simple question of them that would have left them squirming, twisting in the wind:  “what are you doing carrying around an idol in the temple of the most high God, creator of the universe, of the stars and the planets, the earth and all that is in it?”

But he didn’t ask that.  He let those obvious points be exposed without even mentioning them.   When he DID ask his question, I wonder if they hesitated with their answer:  because here is how it went:

Jesus:  “Whose face is this, and what is his title?”

Herodians: “Uh … the um … well, the emperor’s.”

Emperor and Caesar were interchangeable terms.  To even call anyone other than God ‘Caesar’ in Latin, “Lord” in English, was a sin.   The very utterance of those words within the confines of the Temple would have sounded thin and meaningless in the ears of those standing around, because if they were true Hebrews, they would KNOW that there WAS no way to create an image of God, and that nobody – not even the most powerful man in the world at the time, could be called Lord except God – Yahweh.

So with that thin excuse of an answer ringing in everyone’s ears, Jesus concludes the encounter saying, “Then give to the emperor what belongs to him and give to God what belongs to God.”

For effect, let me rephrase that statement: “Give to the Easter Bunny what belongs to the Easter Bunny, and give to God what belongs to God.” 

He had exposed the fallacy of power.

What was and is being communicated here is not an apportionment plan – Jesus isn’t saying “23% of what you own and earn belongs to Caesar, so give him that, and give God the 10% that belongs to God.” No.  What Jesus has just pointed out is that Caesar is a straw man – that the earthly power structure is a temporary fabrication, that whatever supposed power they wield over us is nothing but a fiction.  They may have the power to take work and property and perhaps even life, but that which is of ultimate value, of infinite worth – to God – is something that can ONLY belong to God – us – our spirits. 

It is so easy for us to talk about something belonging to us or to someone else, the concept of property – private property – is one that has been ingrained into us from infancy.  But Jesus is putting it in perspective.

If we look around and begin to qualify that which surrounds us as belonging to this person or that person, to this group of people or that group, to that organization or to another, … and this may sound extreme, but … go with me … what we are saying is that ‘that person, group, or organization’ is Lord over that item, this place, or piece of furniture, or book, or idea …

Do you see how radical Jesus’ pronouncement is?  He is clarifying a point that we can sometimes so easily forget and it bears being reminded:  A: There is no other Lord but the Lord God, and B: EVERYTHING CAME from him, so, ultimately, everything BELONGS to him.  So we give God that which is most valuable to him of all that.  We give him what he came for:  ourselves. 

The words of the hymn come to mind:  “My life, my heart, my all I bring, to Christ, who loves me so, he is my Master, Lord, and King, wherever he leads I’ll go.”

What does this mean for Jerusalem Baptist Church at Emmerton?

How DO we give to God what belongs to God?  How DO we make an eternal truth a reality in a finite world?  We do it by living counter culturally – against the prevailing culture – against a culture that equates wealth with importance, and poverty with irrelevance, that gives more power to the rich and pays lip service to not say ignores the poor and the hungry, that assigns worth according to fame rather than by virtue of a simple shared humanity.  We do it by rejecting the idea that God cares any less or any more for ANYONE over ANYONE else for ANY reason. 

Scripture tells us, the gospel of John, the verse we all memorized, chapter 3, verse 16: ‘For God so loved THE WORLD’. 

Our task is to do likewise. 

Let’s pray.