God Chose

Sunday, March 11 2012

Lent 3B

Jerusalem Baptist Church (Emmerton), Warsaw VA

Text: 1 Corinthians 1:18-31

¹⁸For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. ¹⁹For it is written, “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.” ²⁰Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? ²¹For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God decided, through the foolishness of our proclamation, to save those who believe. ²²For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, ²³but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, ²⁴but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. ²⁵For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength. ²⁶Consider your own call, brothers and sisters: not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. ²⁷But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; ²⁸God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are, ²⁹so that no one might boast in the presence of God. ³⁰He is the source of your life in Christ Jesus, who became for us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification and redemption, ³¹in order that, as it is written, “Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.”

Imagine that Manju Ganeriwala was a member of Jerusalem Baptist Church. THE Manju Ganeriwala. Do you know who she is? She is the treasurer of the Commonwealth of Virginia. Wouldn’t that be something if she and her family were members of Jerusalem?

It’d be pretty cool, don’t you think, someone of that stature to be a part of our community? But why stop there? Imagine that Governor McDonnell was a member, heck; while we’re at it let’s imagine that President and Mrs. Obama, Malia and Sasha made their way here each Sunday morning.  I think they could be here pretty quickly in Marine One, and there’s plenty of room for them to land behind the parsonage.

Cliff would have two additional members in the class, not counting the Secret Service detail, and Malia would be in the youth class, while Sasha would be with Jane in the older children’s class for Sunday School. They would be welcomed among us.

It is cool enough to think of President Carter still teaching Sunday School each Sunday after all these years as an expression of his faith, but to be able to welcome the President … arguably the most powerful individual in the world … as a member of a little country church in rural Virginia … it would certainly make for interesting fellowship meal conversations.

The community in the church at Corinth was an interesting mix. Something we really can’t QUITE connect with today is to wrap our heads around slaves living and working alongside everyone else. There were slaves in the congregation at Corinth. There were also laborers, indentured servants, probably the equivalent of street people, as well as folks from the other end of the societal spectrum – the city treasurer was a part of the community. For a city of its size and importance both strategically and economically, that was a VERY significant position to hold.  There were also wealthy members of the society: merchants, business owners, folks who could afford the finer things of life at the time.

That combination of factors – the wealth and power of some in the church alongside the poverty and powerlessness of others – made for the conflict that Paul addresses in his letters to them.

There was still, despite what they had been taught by Paul when he established the church, an innate inclination to recreate the church in the image of the society around it – import the ranking and privileges from outside into the community and into the way they behaved with each other.

What resulted, unsurprisingly, was a church that was rife with conflict, with bitterness and discord. Wealthier people were taking advantage of the fact that they could begin to gather earlier in the day, since their schedule allowed for more freedom, and were beginning the celebration of communion before the whole of the community had gathered. Communion for them was a full-blown meal, not simply a piece of bread and some wine, but meat, bread, vegetables, fruits, and LOTS of wine. So much so that by the time the rest of the community showed up, they were drunk. And the saddest part of it was, they felt justified in doing what they did, since they were now ‘free in Christ’, not bound by the norms and morals of the prevailing society.

Paul begins his argument not so much against one faction or another in the church, but more FOR the need for unity within a congregation. That regardless of their position in society, regardless of their wealth, power, or other outward sign of success, the people within the community of believers in Corinth were in every sense of the word, equals because of what God had done for them in Christ’s crucifixion, death, and resurrection.

We like to hold up our society as one that is as egalitarian as it can be – that is, that all are equal under the law. To a degree this is the case, especially taken in comparison to other societies around the world today. But I have seen enough and read enough to know that we are not quite as equal under the law as we would like to think. George Orwell’s phrase ‘some are more equal than others’ comes to mind, if you have the wherewithal to hire or employ a raft of attorneys, almost anything is possible, up to and including declaring a corporation to be a person.

In truth, our society is as prone to stratifying itself as any around the world. We may not see it as such, we may call it by a different name, but the fact is, we do think of ourselves to belong to different castes, and carry on our lives accordingly. And we don’t really seem to let that ‘all men are created equal’ sink in all the time.

And it is doubly sad when it bleeds over into the church.

One of the hardest things I’ve ever heard about an experience in church was from a dear, gentle man who shared of a time when, in the context of a somewhat contentious business meeting, as he began to stand and speak, another member of the church stood and told him to sit down and be quiet, that he was nobody and came from a family of nobodies.

I can’t imagine anything being more antithetical to the gospel than that.

The single most radical aspect of the gospel is this: God is no respecter of persons. In other words, nobody gets a special table, special treatment, for being someone – or NOT being someone.

We find that in Jesus’ telling his disciples that ‘the first shall be last and the last, first’ when they ask for those special seats at his right and left hands once he comes into power.

The point Paul is making in the passage is exactly the contrary of what was and continues to be the norm around this broken world of ours: God intentionally CHOSE this foolishness of a Savior and Redeemer of the world to be nailed to a cross and killed AND STILL BE our Savior and Redeemer despite that fact. God intentionally CHOSE a bunch of uneducated backwoods fishermen, a couple of religious fanatics, and a tax collector among others to take his message to the rest of the world.

God intentionally CHOOSES frail children of dust to proclaim the immeasurable riches of his grace not because they are eloquent or convincing or geniuses, able to argue the opposing viewpoint into submission, but precisely because they CAN’T.

It’s the whole reason it is called FAITH that we are called – that we ANSWER our call from Christ to follow. Not because it is reasonable and logical, but because it isn’t. It doesn’t quite make sense in the eyes of the world, this whole believing that a man who lived two thousand years ago was God in human flesh, going about the business of reconciling the world to God’s self.

What does this mean for Jerusalem Baptist Church at Emmerton?

It means we are called to proclaim our faith in humility and trust in the one about whom the message is. Part of the pilgrimage of faith through the season of Lent is to practice humility.

But rejection of humility is epidemic in the modern world, from Marx to the defenders of capitalism, from Freud to Nietszche to Ayn Rand. Why be humble? Humility is un-American. What about our Yankee know-how, our get-up-and-go? Humility denies the glory of rational, scientific humankind. Humility is born of a monastic hatred of the body. Humility is a phony posturing. “When you’ve got it, flaunt it.”

For too long Christianity has advocated groveling, self-hate; all that posture has ever created is neurosis. Humility is an inferiority complex turned into a virtue.

But when Paul exhorts to humility, he is not advocating neurosis. He is calling for the very opposite of a neurotic distortion of reality.

The call for humility is a call for simple realism; an inferiority complex is just that – a complex, a false assessment of oneself. A guilt complex is just that – a neurotic reading of events narcissistically focusing blame on oneself. However, when an Albert Speer at Nuremberg confesses his guilt, he has no guilt complex; he is guilty. The sinner humbled before God is not sick: he is coming to health.

Paul exhorts people to humble themselves because humility is an honest and objective reflection of our real relationship to God. The fact is that we are dependent. All that we have comes from God -- our lives, our salvation, our hope, our Christ. God has given all; nothing is our own. God gives; God will take away; God will give again. To be humble is not an act of self-effacement best cultivated by spending years in a monastery. It is a simple, objective recognition of the reality of God. Humility isn’t even a virtue, any more than to recognize that the sky is blue is a virtue. If God is God, then we are God’s creatures. To be humble toward God is to acknowledge what is both the most obvious fact and yet the most difficult admission: we are not God.

As Christ followers, we must never be taken in by worldly attacks on humility – not only for our souls’ sakes, but for the sake of the world itself. A prideful Christian is perhaps the world’s most dangerous citizen. We are God’s people. Without humility, this statement - which ought to fill us with awe before the wonder of God becomes the basis for the most unspeakable arrogance before God and ultimately before our neighbor. How fanatical Christians become when they put the stress on “we”: we are God’s people.

Only in objective awareness of our dependence on God can we hope to be delivered from judging and thus despising and thus oppressing – our neighbor.

I would remind you of the exchange between Jesus and the Lawyer in the 10^th chapter of Luke, when asked what he needed to do to inherit eternal life, Jesus asks him to answer it for himself, and he does, saying “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.” And Jesus, somewhat dismissively, replies, “Yep. That’s it. Go do that.” But the lawyer has another more probing question. ‘Who is my neighbor?’

And Jesus answers with the parable of the Good Samaritan, which presents us with a picture of how God sees us over and against how we see each other. The man who was attacked was left unconscious, naked and nearly dead. 

There was no way either of the first two men who walked by could tell if the man was of any repute or not. He was naked, so they couldn’t tell from his clothes. He was unconscious, so they couldn’t ask him who he was. He was a conundrum, a riddle without a ready answer. So rather than risk exposure and vulnerability, they chose to keep to themselves.

God did not choose to keep to God’s self.

May we go and do likewise.

Let’s pray.

Carrying Crosses and Following

Sunday, March 4, 2012

Lent 2B

Jerusalem Baptist Church (Emmerton) Warsaw VA

Text: Mark 8:27-38

²⁷Jesus went on with his disciples to the villages of Caesarea Philippi; and on the way he asked his disciples, “Who do people say that I am?” ²⁸And they answered him, “John the Baptist; and others, Elijah; and still others, one of the prophets.” ²⁹He asked them, “But who do you say that I am?” Peter answered him, “You are the Messiah.” ³⁰And he sternly ordered them not to tell anyone about him.

³¹Then he began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again. ³²He said all this quite openly. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. ³³But turning and looking at his disciples, he rebuked Peter and said, “Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”

³⁴He called the crowd with his disciples, and said to them, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. ³⁵For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. ³⁶For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life? ³⁷Indeed, what can they give in return for their life? ³⁸Those who are ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.”

For us here this morning, these words are, for the most part, familiar territory. ‘Take up thy cross and follow me, I heard the master say’ is already echoing in our minds before we finish that phrase in the text. We are familiar with the image, with the words, with the way we occasionally joke about just what the crosses that we bear ARE.

In all honesty, I think it is a good thing that we are THAT familiar with the words. It means they come readily to mind when we think about following Jesus. They are right there – just below the surface – and have an easy and sometimes inconvenient way of popping up, sometimes when we least expect them to.  When we find ourselves wrestling with an issue that is confronting us in our faith pilgrimage.

So I don’t really mind that we can joke about something as serious as a phrase that reminds us of the fact that in the last hours of his life, Jesus, after being beaten and scourged to the point of near-death was made to pick up the crossbeam of his cross and carry it towards Golgotha – the first century Roman equivalent of digging his own grave.

I don’t mind it because even though it is a part of our vocabulary of glibness now, it is close by. And sometimes the things that are closest to us can become our best teachers.

When he first spoke these words to his disciples and the rest of the crowd that had gathered and was listening in, there was no understanding on their part that Jesus was talking about himself. There was no point of reference.

After all, crucifixion was the way a slave was executed – there was no dignity in it, no honor, no redemption. There was no way that this teacher and the one they had just finished equating to John the Baptist (by the way, that one has always puzzled me, since Jesus and John the Baptist were, for a while at least, contemporaries – after all, they WERE cousins…) or Elijah, or one of the other Prophets … I have to interject another thought here … this sounds suspiciously like reincarnation – channeling at the very least … I’ve always wondered, what does Hebrew theology have to say about that? Anyway, back to the scene: this disconnect between what Jesus was saying about himself and how the people and his disciples were understanding it – or not, as the case may be – was so profound that Peter, after hearing him say it, pulled him aside and basically told Jesus “That’s crazy talk!”

And we’re familiar with Jesus’ response:  even that gets used as a punch line on occasion: “Get thee behind me, Satan!”

He tells Peter to toss the traditional, human understanding of who the Messiah is and open his mind and his heart and his eyes to who the Messiah really is – the one who is standing in front of him and speaking the truth about what is going to happen in order for people to begin to understand exactly what God is capable of doing in order to reestablish that relationship that humanity keeps finding ways to sever.

For us, post-crucifixion, post-resurrection, this teaching makes sense. We UNDERSTAND that Jesus was talking about being willing to give his own life for the sake of the Gospel and for the sake of the Kingdom. That is part of what it means to have perfect historical vision – 20/20 in hindsight. It’s obvious.

For the folks he was talking to at the time, not so much. This was some time before things started heading south – literally as well as figuratively. So before Jesus starts telling them about HIS death, he tells people about THEIR death – death to self – to self-interest, to self protection, probably health and well-being. And he frames it in this image of something that they are all familiar with – shudderingly so – And it is a cold slap in the face to folks who are struggling to keep a roof over their heads and clothes on their backs and food in their stomachs. Hmmm… that doesn’t seem to have changed much over the centuries, has it?

We still strive for just that, on a very basic level: shelter, food and clothing.

And we probably don’t want to forget transportation. It’s good to have a nice ride – at least here in the States. It makes an important statement about who we are.

And might as well not forget entertainment. It’s good to be able to watch the latest movie on that big screen.

And this list of desires quickly becomes a list of perceived needs. If so-and-so has x then I should have it too.

I don’t want to berate the point, but you know the story – keeping up with the Joneses is the driver of our economy and our society.

So I will extend to you the invitation that I have extended in the past. Be cultural atheists. Reject that which our culture has made gods. Wealth, possessions, bling-bling, fame, fortune, even notoriety – that is, fame based on having done either nothing of significance, or fame based on having done something trashy and being proud of it. Living into that reality speeds the already too-easy process whereby we get our priorities confused and end up losing our way.

When you follow Jesus it means putting your own self-survival in the backseat. The first act of following Jesus is totally re-ordering your priorities and principles to the way of the Kingdom. It’s no longer about saving your life.

Following Jesus means that your priority is to lose your life.

And, just in case Jesus’ first audience didn’t get it—because they were scandalized at the thought of dropping those last few pitiful rungs on the societal ladder—Jesus himself follows this up with showing them how it’s done.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in response to what he saw happening in Germany and Europe during WWII wrote: “only a suffering God can help”.

This past Monday afternoon a friend of ours, a nurse midwife at MCV, called us and asked if one of us could come to be with a young woman from Guatemala who was going into labor. It was her first baby and the father was out of the picture. She spoke little or no English. And she had just found out the day before that her baby had died. She had an ultrasound on Friday and everything seemed fine, but she stopped feeling him move Saturday, and she was taken into the ER, where they confirmed that the baby – Diego, she had named him – had died due to a chemical imbalance caused by a rare and difficult to detect pregnancy-induced medical condition that affects the liver of the mother – not caused by anything she did or didn’t do. She was getting prenatal care at a local health department.

Her housemate arrived at the hospital shortly after I did. Cristina was her name. As I visited with them and began to get to know them, Cristina shared that three years ago she lost a newborn son to a congenital heart defect at the age of six months. She has two other children, one older, one younger. When Diego was finally born, what should have been a joyous event, filled with tears, yes, but laughter as well, was eerily silent. There were words of encouragement and comfort through the pushing, and the straining, but when the little baby finally arrived, there was no first breathe, no first cry, no flailing arms and kicking feet. Cristina shared from her heart words of wisdom and comfort that I could not have. When she said ‘I know how you feel’ it was with all the raw, hurting, grief-laden emotion that comes from one who had walked where that young mother was now walking.

“Only a suffering God can help.”

God did not keep himself disconnected from us, from our lives, from our experience. He was born into it and lived it alongside us.

Let’s just admit it.  It’s really only the hard things in this life that end up telling us who we are, what we are made of, and what really matters.  The happy and easy times make life enjoyable, and give us something to look forward to, but it is only the struggles we work through, successfully or not, that teach us the limits and the grandeur of the human experience.  It is only the acceptance of suffering as a necessary part of the human condition that draws us together and unites us as one in our fragile, bodily, humble reality.  It is only in confronting our mortality and placing our lives wholly in the arms of God, that we can finally and truly live.

If Jesus took away our struggles and hard work and suffering, he would simply be taking away the meaning and purpose of our lives, as mysterious and inscrutable as it may all be to us most of the time.  Don’t let Jesus’ cross take away yours.  It wasn’t what he was about, and it leaves you with nothing meaningful left to do. By calling us into the hard work of a life of purpose, sacrifice, and loving others, Jesus gives us back our lives.  He saves us from meaningless days and years of having nothing to do.  He opens us up to see injustice and cruelty in the world and say, “Yeah, I guess if I don’t do something, no one else will.”  He gives us back hard lives that aren’t about our small selves only, but about God’s bigger picture.

And when we hear Jesus say “I know how you feel” we know he speaks from experience.

So here’s the invitation: open eyed, straightforward, no holds barred: take up the cross of human existence – life in a broken world – and let yourself be used by God to begin the process of mending and healing it – beginning with yourself.

Let’s pray.