Ransomed, Redeemed, Rejoicing

Sunday, October 28, 2012

Ordinary 30/Pentecost 22B

Reformation Sunday

Jerusalem Baptist Church (Emmerton), Warsaw VA

Text: Jeremiah 31:10-14

¹⁰Hear the word of the Lord, O nations, and declare it in the coastlands far away; say, “He who scattered Israel will gather him, and will keep him as a shepherd a flock.” ¹¹For the Lord has ransomed Jacob, and has redeemed him from hands too strong for him. ¹²They shall come and sing aloud on the height of Zion, and they shall be radiant over the goodness of the Lord, over the grain, the wine, and the oil, and over the young of the flock and the herd; their life shall become like a watered garden, and they shall never languish again. ¹³Then shall the young women rejoice in the dance, and the young men and the old shall be merry. I will turn their mourning into joy, I will comfort them, and give them gladness for sorrow. ¹⁴I will give the priests their fill of fatness, and my people shall be satisfied with my bounty, says the Lord.

How would we go about identifying with an exiled people? How can we, citizens of this nation, in the 21^st century, living in relative ease (compared to too many people across the globe), hope to gain an understanding of what it means to be involuntarily removed from everything you know and HAVE known as your home for as long as you can remember and as long as your oldest relatives can remember and be transported hundreds if not thousands of miles away to be forever, as far as you know, separated from your homeland?

In one very straightforward sense, we can’t. It is not within the scope of our life experience to understand what that does to you. To my knowledge, none of us in this room this morning have suffered through that experience.

However, on other levels, in other ways, there are plenty of confluences of experience and emotions that approximate the feeling of living in exile.

There is not simply the physical experience of exile. There is the emotional one as well.

How many of us have felt the exile of a broken relationship, whether with a family member or a friend, someone we care deeply about suddenly separated from us – whether by disagreement or death – that sends us into a bleak territory of the heart, unfamiliar and strange? Where we once were surrounded by familiar green pastures of flourishing friendship and loving relationship, we seemingly overnight find ourselves in a much more barren inner landscape, characterized by loneliness and even despair in the absence of that person?

How many of us have felt the exile of the loss of identity that is associated with the loss of employment – again either by voluntary or involuntary separation or retirement? One day we are held together by an integrated awareness of who we are in our relationships and in our daily labor and have become accustomed to an almost unconscious ‘wholeness’ that comes from having the different parts of our life prop each other up like the proverbial three-legged stool, only to have that sense of security and stability that informs who we are so well come crashing down when that one leg disappears?

How many of us have felt the exile of depression, brought on through life events or chemical imbalances, that devastates as nothing else can … that makes it a struggle to get out of bed in the morning, and pulls us into an existence that resembles the driest of deserts – far from any nourishing spring of life-giving relational water? That inner exile that isolates us from each other, that sucks the marrow out of our bones and leaves us husks of who we once were, seriously considering why anyone would miss us if we were to simply disappear?

There are many more forms of exile than those that have been recorded in the histories of nations and peoples, leaders and individuals condemned for actions taken and reprisals of one country on another, or against a given leader. But the sentiment – the emotion – can be very similar in all of them: isolation, sorrow, grief, mourning, a struggle to regain a sense of identity after you have been separated from that from which you DREW your understanding of who you WERE, and the sometimes overwhelming challenge of finding out who you are APART from that.

Jeremiah was communicating God’s promises to a people who were in exile – in every sense of the word – physically, emotionally, spiritually to a degree – a people who were overwhelmed with questions that they were not prepared to ask and even less prepared to answer – Why did God let this happen to us? Are we still the chosen people? Has God abandoned us? Will God receive us back as his children if we do ‘X’ or ‘Y’?

Questions like that will come with any form of exile we may experience: Physical, emotional or spiritual. They are not unique to any one of the different forms of exilic existence.

What Jeremiah was communicating to the people of Israel were the promises of a God who had not abandoned them, who had not forgotten them, who in fact, still loved them as much as God ever had. If we back up a few verses to the third verse of chapter 31, the description of the relationship is not in political or even spiritual terms, but in familial terms - I have loved you with an everlasting love; therefore I have continued my faithfulness to you. Love … faithfulness … those are terms used in describing a bride and groom, aren’t they?

What God was communicating to the people in exile was not something having to do with the political and military causes of their current situation, it had everything to do with how God was expressing his desire to be in relationship – in a familial relationship – with his chosen people.

He didn’t excuse or explain away their choices or how those choices resulted in their exile, he didn’t tell them it wasn’t their fault. There is an understanding that it is a given – their situation of exile is as a direct result of the choices made and decisions taken.

Sometimes those are the harsh realities of life that we would rather not acknowledge. We want the blame to be diffused, to spread it around and consider that to one degree or another, there is blame to go around – certainly if not blame, then at least responsibility.  That makes it easier to bear … or even easier to shirk, to discard, to slide out from under, if it is shared by all the participants.

The reality is, while there may be shared responsibility, there is more often than not a point at which a choice WAS made, a decision WAS arrived at which, if it had been different, could very well have led to a significantly different outcome. And the truth is that blame CAN be assigned. Responsibility DOES lie with one more than with another or both.

But the fact that blame MAY be assigned, that responsibility MIGHT be weighted more with one than another does not change a critical fact – that apportionment of blame or that understanding of responsibility does not diminish the fact and the reality of God’s love for any given individual in ANY given situation.

Let me repeat that: in ANY given situation.

If we were to take that to heart, it might take us a LONG way, a REALLY REALLY LONG way, towards understanding what grace, forgiveness and love really mean.

What does this mean for Jerusalem Baptist Church at Emmerton?

A question: when I went through the examples of alternative exiles, did one of those resonate with you? Did one of those descriptions strike a cord inside you that then triggered the thought that identified that feeling you’ve been wrestling with putting into words as ‘exile’?

If it did, or if it has, then hear the words of Jeremiah for what they are – a call of a loving God who more than anything wants to remain in relationship with you – who wants you to know that his love for you has not changed one iota – whether it’s been a week, a month, a year or a decade – maybe even several decades – He is still there, waiting to infuse you with such joy that you will find yourself wanting to dance just like those young women – to break out in song like those young men and their elders … who even in their old age could appreciate when it was appropriate to set aside decorum and just belt it out from the bottom of their hearts and the top of their heads – however that sound came out, on key or not, it was infused with such a profound sense of joy that there was no question about the place from which it was originating – the joy of a reconciled child of God coming back into relationship with him.

May we be that joyful and that limber – no matter what our age!

Let’s pray.

Not To Be Served

Sunday, October 21, 2012

Ordinary 29/Pentecost 21B

Jerusalem Baptist Church (Emmerton), Warsaw VA

Text: Mark 10:35-45

³⁵James and John, the sons of Zebedee, came forward to him and said to him, “Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask of you.” ³⁶And he said to them, “What is it you want me to do for you?” ³⁷And they said to him, “Grant us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory.” ³⁸But Jesus said to them, “You do not know what you are asking. Are you able to drink the cup that I drink, or be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?” ³⁹They replied, “We are able.” Then Jesus said to them, “The cup that I drink you will drink; and with the baptism with which I am baptized, you will be baptized; ⁴⁰but to sit at my right hand or at my left is not mine to grant, but it is for those for whom it has been prepared.”

⁴¹When the ten heard this, they began to be angry with James and John. ⁴²So Jesus called them and said to them, “You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. ⁴³But it is not so among you; but whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, ⁴⁴and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all. ⁴⁵For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.”

“Truth or Dare!”

That is what the request that James and John make of Jesus sounds like to me. Not that I have a WHOLE BUNCH experience playing ‘Truth or Dare’… it was only the preferred game to play among us MK’s at mission meeting (yes, your Lottie Moon offerings at work) when it was raining and we couldn’t go outside.

It strikes me that the same principle was being applied here. Agree to something – whether saying or doing something – before you know what that is going to be. It sounds childish. Juvenile.

But these were grown men. You would expect more from them.

But they were going against a lifetime of conditioning. If you are conditioned to something it means you are expecting it, you are looking for it, you are locked into it. The understanding is that it is a foregone conclusion that ‘that thing’ WILL COME TO PASS.

In this case, James and John were conditioned to believe in and expect to see a Messiah who embodied all they were used to seeing in a Ruler – a Leader – a KING – up until they met Jesus.

I would propose to you that not much has changed over the last two thousand years in terms of what we look for in a leader. We look for charisma, for dynamism, for strength expressed both physically and emotionally, as well as spiritually. We look for someone who elicits our devotion, our commitment, someone who will stand and be firm in the face of opposition.

Someone who looks like … Caesar.

We are just wired that way.

That is why it is so difficult to shift – to effect the sea-change in our expectations that God had coming in the person of Jesus. His brand, his form, his method of leadership is simply too counterintuitive, too out of sync, too contrary to what we understand as BEING leadership.

When he asked James and John, in response to THEIR request, if they would be willing to drink the cup that he drinks, to be baptized with the baptism that he was going to be baptized with, you can almost SEE the parallel thoughts forming in their minds as they were speaking and hearing the question: Jesus, to whatever degree he was capable, was asking them if they’d be willing the suffer the same fate (suffer being the operative word) that he was pretty sure he’d be facing in the not too-distant future – understanding that it would involve suffering, pain, and death. THAT was what he was asking them.

THEY on the other hand, were hearing something more along the lines of what they were envisioning when they approached him with THEIR request at the beginning of the passage – their thought seemed to be that Jesus was asking them ‘are you willing to “suffer” the ‘trials and tribulations’ that come with being overlords of masses of population, and leaders of armies and navies, suffering by living in governmental palaces and having every whim attended to. In their world, the only way they were capable of envisioning at that point, what Jesus was asking them was overshadowed by the thought that they would have power; raw, complete, total power – over the life and death of all the subjects of the kingdom of Judah. THAT is what was locked into their minds – THAT was what they were conditioned to understand. When they ask about joining Jesus in his glory, they are not asking in the spiritual sense of glory. They are asking in the very earthy, carnal, physical sense of ‘glory’.

By this point in the conversation – which was happening while they were walking along the road to Jerusalem – the other disciples had overheard just enough to understand that James and John were angling for the good seats.

And they were jealous. And they began to argue.  Children often do. I know I did. On 18 hour drives through the desert you run out of reading material pretty quickly – when it is mostly comic books.

But Jesus points them around. It is actually a fairly stark reminder that they are acting contrary to what God had for the people of Israel in terms of governance. He reminds them that they have chosen to structure themselves after the surrounding principalities and kingdoms, not the way God had originally planned for them to govern themselves.

He goes on to underscore the contrariness of their model of leadership according to how he was teaching them: “Whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all ⁴⁵For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.”.

Realize that he is using the word “slave” in a context where it is not a euphemism for a practice and a way of life that has for the most part, thankfully, long since disappeared, with a few notable exceptions, but he is speaking that word into a context where he very likely would have gestured to an actual slave who was walking past them in the other direction, carrying his master’s bags as they traveled in the opposite direction.  

What does this mean for Jerusalem Baptist Church at Emmerton? And I don’t mean the question rhetorically. I’m using ‘church’ in the sense of ‘us who are sitting and standing in this room here this morning’, not ‘the cloud of people who associate with this building on occasion.’ Be thinking what does this mean for ME, for YOU, for US.

Think of it this way:

For fire to be fire, it has to burn. It has to be hot. If it’s not hot, it’s not a fire. Yesterday at Carolyn’s, we had a fire going on the beach. As the afternoon progressed, a pretty stiff breeze began to blow off the water, and it blew the smoke back towards the trees. But you could stand anywhere around the fire and you could feel the heat – whether you were upwind or downwind, or beside it on either side.

For ice to be ice, it has to be cold. If you hold an ice cube in your fingers for any length of time, you eventually start to feel the discomfort of your fingers beginning to freeze.  If you held something in your hands and called it ice, but it didn’t feel cold, you would know it wasn’t ice.

For a person to be a follower of Christ, he or she has to be a servant – to have a servant’s heart – to be that giving and that submitted – or he or she is not a disciple.

That’s the starkness of what Jesus is telling James and John and the rest of the disciples.

How do you picture what it means to be a follower of Christ? Is it … is it to be in front of hundreds or thousands on a Sunday morning, or is it to be in front of faithful servants regardless of the number?

Is it to be willing to stretch yourself for your neighbor – whether that neighbor is making good choices or not –  in the name of Christ?

Is it being willing to give of your time and effort, and finances, when seeing the result of that giving may not be in our lifetime?

The first shall be last, the last shall be first. 

The “upside-down-ness” of the kingdom is clear in relation to how we have chosen to structure our idea of power.

Let’s pray.

In this season, especially, O God, we are watching as our society plays out this acclaim of leadership and power. And it is a struggle to not model ourselves after it, because it permeates every aspect of society.

But you, O Lord, have called us to a different way: a way of reverent obedience, radical submission, total service.

Make us faithful, O God, even as our Lord Jesus was. For it is through him that we pray.

Amen.

To Such As These

Sunday, October 7, 2012

Ordinary 27/Pentecost 19B

World Communion Sunday

Jerusalem Baptist Church (Emmerton), Warsaw VA

Mark 10:2-16

²Some Pharisees came, and to test him they asked, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?” ³He answered them, “What did Moses command you?” ⁴They said, “Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of dismissal and to divorce her.” ⁵But Jesus said to them, “Because of your hardness of heart he wrote this commandment for you. ⁶But from the beginning of creation, ‘God made them male and female.’ ⁷‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, ⁸and the two shall become one flesh.’ So they are no longer two, but one flesh. ⁹Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.”

¹⁰Then in the house the disciples asked him again about this matter. ¹¹He said to them, “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her; ¹²and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery.”

¹³People were bringing little children to him in order that he might touch them; and the disciples spoke sternly to them. ¹⁴But when Jesus saw this, he was indignant and said to them, “Let the little children come to me; do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs. ¹⁵Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.” ¹⁶And he took them up in his arms, laid his hands on them, and blessed them.

“We’ve only just begun to live … white lace and promises … a kiss for luck and we’re on our way …”

Yesterday afternoon I drove up to Elkwood, half an hour or forty-five minutes on the far side of Fredericksburg, to officiate the wedding ceremony for a young couple who had gotten my name from a friend of a friend of the bride’s mother. We’d been in touch over the last several months via email, and things came together for us in such a way that, other than through email communication, we didn’t meet face to face – in the case of the groom – until I arrived about an hour before the ceremony. I didn’t actually meet the bride until she walked down the aisle and stood next to her future husband. It was a little odd, though made a little less so by having had at least that initial virtual contact with them over the Internet.

The wedding was outdoors, in a clearing in the woods behind a beautiful little cottage set in the rolling hills of the area. There were maybe 30 or 40 people in attendance. And the couple was ‘truly, madly, deeply’ in love. I watched the groom’s face as his bride walked toward him, first through the path in the woods, then down the aisle, then as she stood next to him. He could not stop smiling.

As I began with the words of welcome and introduction, I could hear the bride start to sniffle, and then she started to really cry. It was both a little unsettling and heartwarming at the same time, because they were tears of joy.

Going through the ceremony, they had chosen their own words for their vows and the exchange of rings. In each case, they were simple, straightforward and from the heart. It was a beautiful wedding, full of hope and promises and vows and all that stuff that weddings nowadays are made of.

But in the back of my head I knew that this text was waiting for me for this morning.

It helps to put the comments from our text this morning in context – both socially and politically as well as … theologically.

Socially and politically, here’s what’s happening: in Jewish law, with regards to divorce, there were two traditions, two views of divorce. The more restrictive view, held by the Shammai school of thought, was to say that divorce was only lawful if the wife had committed adultery. The alternate view, held by followers of Rabbi Hillel, saw the issue in broader terms, allowing for many other things to be grounds for a man to divorce his wife. Divorce was a one-way process, by the way. A woman could not divorce her husband – remember, women were considered property. If a man committed adultery with the wife of another man, he was considered to be committing adultery against her husband, not his wife. Where do these different views come from? The root meaning of the Hebrew word, translated "something objectionable," is "nakedness" or "nudity." This led the School of Shammai, as noted above, to conclude that only adultery was grounds for divorce.

A secondary meaning of the Hebrew word is "offensive" or "shameful," which led the School of Hillel to conclude that anything the wife did that offended the man was grounds for divorce.

When two people were joined in marriage in ancient times, it wasn’t so much an covenant between two individuals – really nothing like the wedding we celebrated yesterday afternoon – as it was a business agreement between their parents to join the two families. So there was still an enormous amount of cultural weight going against a divorce, because if it did happen, it wasn’t simply the dissolution of the relationship between the husband and wife, but it was the dissolution of the relationships that their parents had made between THEMselves – it brought shame and dishonor on the entire extended family, not simply on the couple.

But the fact of the matter was that the admissibility of divorce was never in question.

Politically, here’s the back story: John the Baptist has just been beheaded in chapter 6, verses 17 and following, for stating that Herod’s marriage to Herodias was unlawful, since he held to the Shammai school of thought on divorce.  I wonder how THAT came up in conversation?

The religious leaders who were so set on maintaining their control over the correct way to understand and believe what God wanted people to do of course saw Jesus as a threat to that control, so they decided to try to put him in the same situation that John found himself in by asking Jesus the question of lawfulness while he was in Perea – under Herod’s jurisdiction.

Jesus answers their question with a question – which is a time-honored rabbinical practice: he asks them ‘what did Moses command?’ – which is a subtle way to phrase it. Moses had no ‘command’ as such regarding divorce. The provision for divorce in Deuteronomy was, essentially, a concession to the reality of divorce and an attempt to provide structure and guidelines in its wake.

The Pharisees respond that "Moses permitted to write a paper of divorcement and to release."  With the understanding that a "permission" is not the same as a "command", this was true.  Moses had permitted divorce. The Pharisees present an acceptable legal argument based on the Deuteronomy passage. 

Jesus dismisses it with a cutting reply.  "For your hardness of heart" Moses allowed divorce, he says.  The accusation of "hardness of heart"--sklerokardia--is a serious one.  "Hardness of heart" is associated with resistance to the ways of God. It was the same word used to describe what Pharaoh developed in response to the plea of Moses to let his people go. He essentially says divorce is a reality because the world is broken. It is not how it should be.

And Jesus makes the deeper statement: That God’s design was for a relationship between two people to be more – so much more – than something that could be undone by the actions or words of one or the other person. He speaks to the design of God for two people to come together – both of them bearing the image of God – when he quotes Genesis 1:27 – and of two people becoming one quoting Genesis 2:24 – of their lives becoming so entwined that they would stop being part of their families of origin and become a new family, separate and unique. It is a subtle but very pointed statement about the equality within the marriage relationship between a man and a woman – that both are equal partners in it – it is not more one’s than the other’s.

Then comes the private conversation between Jesus and the disciples after they’ve left the crowds and gone ‘into the house’. “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her; ¹²and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery.”

While this would seem to be a pretty straightforward statement to our ears, it was not to the disciple’s. The first part of it would be stiff, but understandable. The question would seem to be primarily centered around the question of remarriage resulting in adultery, not the question of divorce itself. What is radical for the time is the second part of the statement. To us, it sounds (again, hard, yes.) but only fair. According to Jewish law of the time, it was not possible for a woman to divorce her husband. It WAS by Greco-Roman law, but not Jewish law. The fact that Jesus even made the statement that way ‘if she divorces her husband’ was earth shaking. It again gave value to women such as they had never really had.

So even in this context – in speaking of the terrible tragedy and heart-rending experience of going through the dissolution of the marriage relationship – Jesus is lifting up, is making equal – women and men – stating that both – in a very profound sense have worth as children of God. He is giving a place to the person who was previously without a voice in the marriage relationship – the wife.

So it comes to make a little more sense to me to read that the writer of the Gospel of Mark put the next couple of verses at the conclusion of the discussion on divorce.

This past Wednesday we finished hearing Bruxy Cavey’s series “God’s Library” – talking about how the Bible came together and how it functions in our relationship with God through Jesus, and he made a summary statement about the style of literature that the Gospels are – Greco-Roman biographies – and do you remember how he described them? The writers take events in the life of the person they are writing about, along with statements they’ve made, and put them together thematically, not chronologically. And that is what is happening here.

There is no way to determine if the incident with the children came immediately after the discourse on divorce or not, but here is the tie-in thematically: Jesus has just finished teaching about divorce, and in the process, has enfranchised those who previously had no voice – has elevated women to an equal standing with men within the marriage relationship (albeit in the context of speaking of the dissolving of that relationship).

The very next scene has people bringing children to see Jesus so he can ‘touch’ them. The word that is translated as ‘touch’ (apto) in English is the same word used every other time in the Gospel according to Mark to describe Jesus’ ‘touch’ when a healing occurred.  It is estimated that 60% of children in the ancient world did not survive to their 16^th birthday, and we have ample references to children being sick elsewhere in the gospels that Jesus goes on to heal. In the ancient world, children, like women, were considered property – with no ability to speak for themselves. They were, generally and largely considered to be a nuisance or worse – a burden to families who were living in poverty or at the very least in scarcity. Children were viewed as foolish, without understanding or self-will, inclined to naughtiness and in need of sharp discipline; it was a waste of time for a scholar to spend time with children and more, it was a man’s undoing to speak to a child.

If we layer onto those attitudes towards children the probability that they were not just all that, but also sick – with all the possible variations that might entail – vomiting, diarrhea, fever, coughing, eruptions of all kinds, not to be too graphic, but you can imagine – given the absence of medical knowledge at the time – then it kind of makes sense that the disciples wanted the kids to be removed from the area.

But Jesus’ response underscores what he’s just finished making clear about women – that children have worth in the eyes of God too. That, in fact, it is to such as these that the Kingdom of God belongs.

I used to think that this reference – this scene – had to do with the innocence of children’s trust in God – and I still think it does, to a degree, but I read something that changed the way I look at this passage now. Just as with women, in ancient Palestine, children were considered property as much as women were – perhaps more so – even into adulthood – as we’ve seen in the view of marriage being an extension of an agreement between families – specifically fathers – more than a covenant between two individuals. As such, they not only had no voice, they had no claim on anything apart from their father. So in a very real sense they were completely dependent on their father for everything they had – absolutely everything.

That may be a slightly different view of “whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.”

So our question now becomes this: are we that dependent on God for everything in our life? Do we seek his will, look to him for guidance, sustenance, wisdom, instruction as we live into what it means to be his children?

Specifically for the purposes of approaching the communion table this morning, do we look to him as our model of how to live lives of giving and sacrifice? Because that is ultimately what he is teaching us.

(communion)