Faithful Responses

Sunday, September 30, 2012

Ordinary 26/Pentecost 18B

Jerusalem Baptist Church (Emmerton), Warsaw VA

Text: James 5:13-20

¹³Are any among you suffering? They should pray. Are any cheerful? They should sing songs of praise. ¹⁴Are any among you sick? They should call for the elders of the church and have them pray over them, anointing them with oil in the name of the Lord. ¹⁵The prayer of faith will save the sick, and the Lord will raise them up; and anyone who has committed sins will be forgiven. ¹⁶Therefore confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another, so that you may be healed. The prayer of the righteous is powerful and effective. ¹⁷Elijah was a human being like us, and he prayed fervently that it might not rain, and for three years and six months it did not rain on the earth. ¹⁸Then he prayed again, and the heaven gave rain and the earth yielded its harvest. ¹⁹My brothers and sisters, if anyone among you wanders from the truth and is brought back by another, ²⁰you should know that whoever brings back a sinner from wandering will save the sinner’s soul from death and will cover a multitude of sins.

So this morning is our last foray into James’ letter to his congregation… or congregations… we’ve gotten a clear sense over the last few weeks (at least I HOPE we have) of how practical James is in approaching his folks with the ‘how’ of living the life of a follower of Christ.

This morning’s passage, for US anyway, may seem to hit a little off center on first read. There is just enough in it that goes against our western, science-based worldview that it seems a little too … ‘out there’ … too … faith-healy and supernatural for us to feel completely comfortable with it.

I would invite us to set aside the specifics and look at what James is encouraging his folks to do in the broader sense of the word.

Going verse by verse: he goes through a series of situations and answers them with the appropriate responses.

Are you suffering? Pray. Are you happy? Sing! Are you sick? Ask for the elders – in our context, these would be our deacons – and have them come and pray and anoint you with oil.  He then goes into a commentary on that specific topic. But there is an interesting twist to it: after his initial comment, he goes on to say “and anyone who has committed sins will be forgiven.” He is categorizing illness and sin together, it would seem.

It gives us insight into our current view of various sins as forms of addictive illnesses. If we were to approach our sins in that fashion – not ONLY as allowing our wills to cave in to the temptations we might be faced with at any given moment, but as symptoms of an illness … it fills out another aspect of what it means to be slaves to sin, doesn’t it?

He follows with a word of encouragement: the prayers of the righteous are powerful and effective (availeth much, is what we might be replaying in our minds from the King James), and BECAUSE they are powerful and effective, all the more reason to follow Elijah’s example and pray for a miracle. The encouragement is in the fact that by this time, Elijah the prophet has reached mythic proportions in the pantheon of Hebrew prophets, an almost-unattainable level of faithfulness and obedience to God. But James, in just a few words, brings him down to the same level as the folks that he’s writing to: ‘Elijah was a human being like us,’ and then he goes on to present exactly how ‘powerful and effective’ Elijah’s prayers WERE.

His final entreaty in the passage speaks clearly to what I think has been his intent all along:

¹⁹My brothers and sisters, if anyone among you wanders from the truth and is brought back by another, ²⁰you should know that whoever brings back a sinner from wandering will save the sinner’s soul from death and will cover a multitude of sins.

What is the image we get here? It is of brothers and sisters caring enough about each other to reach out to each other and reconnect – to remain in relationship – to maybe instruct, persuade, or point out – however you want to phrase it – when someone you love and care about is … misdirected? Straying? Lost? Confused? James’ wording here is comfortable for us if we’ve grown up speaking Christianese, but probably not so much if we’ve not – or if we are trying to communicate this idea to someone who was not raised speaking the same language of this subculture we live in.

To put it in terms that (hopefully) don’t immediately set off judgment alarms in the ears of those with whom we are trying to communicate simply due to the word choice:

‘Brothers and sisters, if someone you love and care about is doing things that are ultimately self-destructive and unhealthy and chaotic for their spirit and their life, and through your persuasion or presence in their lives they begin to get their life back on track, back in the direction of wholeness and integration, back towards acknowledging that God is God and they are not, and that Christ is Lord and that he is MORE than just savior, you will have saved them from a death that they would have experienced long before their heart stopped beating, and you will have put them on track to correct wrongs that were going far beyond simply themselves.

That last, I think, is the greater task – the much greater task. To be able to relate not simply to each other – that is hopefully understood to be a baseline for us – but to also be able to relate to those who are either on the periphery of our community or who are part of the greater community that surrounds us – we have that designation on our prayer list, if you’ve noticed – people who are not necessarily directly connected to us but of whom we are still aware and for whom we still care and most importantly, whom we still love.

What does this mean for Jerusalem Baptist Church at Emmerton?

This is where our faithful responses come into play. Whatever situation we find ourselves in – whether we are suffering, or cheerful, sick, troubled, angry, whatever it is – because we have this family that we are a part of, this community of faith, this band of pilgrims with whom we’ve chosen to travel this voyage alongside, all of these experiences are experiences that we do not face alone, that we do not bear in solitude, that we are actually CALLED to share in the life of the community.

Insofar as we allow the walls that society tells us to build between us to stand, it is to that degree that we are diminishing the Kingdom’s ability to shine through in the way we live together. So James’ admonition is, just like Christ’s, to make this way of living so compellingly brilliant (in the ‘shiny’ sense of the word) that it would draw people in to that central light of Christ just as it has drawn us in.

Let’s pray.

From The Same Mouth

Sunday, September 16, 2012

Ordinary 24/Pentecost 16B

Jerusalem Baptist Church (Emmerton) Warsaw VA

James 3:1-12

Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers and sisters, for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness. ²For all of us make many mistakes. Anyone who makes no mistakes in speaking is perfect, able to keep the whole body in check with a bridle. ³If we put bits into the mouths of horses to make them obey us, we guide their whole bodies. ⁴Or look at ships: though they are so large that it takes strong winds to drive them, yet they are guided by a very small rudder wherever the will of the pilot directs. ⁵So also the tongue is a small member, yet it boasts of great exploits. How great a forest is set ablaze by a small fire! ⁶And the tongue is a fire. The tongue is placed among our members as a world of iniquity; it stains the whole body, sets on fire the cycle of nature, and is itself set on fire by hell. ⁷For every species of beast and bird, of reptile and sea creature, can be tamed and has been tamed by the human species, ⁸but no one can tame the tongue—a restless evil, full of deadly poison. ⁹With it we bless the Lord and Father, and with it we curse those who are made in the likeness of God. ¹⁰From the same mouth comes blessing and cursing. My brothers and sisters, this ought not to be so. ¹¹Does a spring pour forth from the same opening both fresh and brackish water? ¹²Can a fig tree, my brothers and sisters, yield olives, or a grapevine figs? No more can salt water yield fresh.

James is continuing the conversation – the instruction, as it were, on what constitutes true religion – pure and undefiled. Here he is tackling an issue that is still as relevant today as it was two thousand years ago – bridling the tongue.

In many ways, the observations he makes about what the tongue is capable of – and just to be clear, when we read ‘the tongue’, what we are talking about is the words that come out of our mouths – echoes passages we are familiar with from Paul – when he speaks in his letter to the Romans, in chapter 7 about doing things he doesn’t want to do, and yet does them anyway, and DOESN’T do what he WANTS to do… at least I HOPE it echoes some of the same thoughts …

The issue with our words is that, we only have one mouth. It would’ve been helpful if God had given us two mouths – one out of which to speak kindness and grace, and the other for judgment and hatred, for unkind words and spirit-tearing barbs. But we are what we are. We were only given one mouth. We were not consulted in our design.

I’m being facetious – I’m teasing, of course. The point that James is making is that we tend to be duplicitous beings – two-sided. The same mouth that speaks or sings praises to God for his goodness to us, thanks him for his blessings, and CAN speak grace and kindness into a given situation can, quicker than the blink of an eye, turn and speak words that totally contradict all we DO hold dear in our heart of hearts – or that can uncover true feelings regarding a situation or a person, to their destruction, and ours as well.

How often have words come out of our mouths that we have regretted, that we wish we had held back, that we wish had never been uttered?

James took Jesus’ five words that summarized the Hebrew Law: You Shall Love Your Neighbor As Yourself – and expounded on them in this letter.

How do you love your neighbor? Here are some ways:

He’s has tackled hypocrisy, in dealing with the wealthy in his congregation, as well as the treatment of the poor and the needy – specifically, the widows and the orphans – folks who in first century Palestine had no standing in society – none – zero, nada, zilch, goose egg. And now he is taking on how words are used.

One of the things discovered in the field of psychology is how words influence how thoughts and attitudes are formed. This is not about how words affect the ones who hear them, but the ones who speak them. I only took one psychology course in college, and the single phrase that stands out in my mind from that class is this: Fallible Human Being. The professor made that distinction on the first or second day of class. He abbreviated it FHB. He asked us to replace what we might usually call someone with whom we had an issue with those letters, and it really did make a difference.

If, instead of referring to someone as an ignorant fool, or a stupid idiot, we referred to them as that – a fallible human being – we would be reminded of the fact that we are all more alike than different, when it comes to stuff like this. That simple change of word choice – from one that sets us above the person with whom we have a disagreement to one that sets us alongside them – gives us a perspective that allows us to relate to them in a completely different way – as equals – as equally susceptible to making mistakes and coming to wrong conclusions as they are.

What it boils down to is this: we are capable.

We are capable of extreme cruelty.

We are capable of extreme generosity.

We are capable of extreme indifference.

We are capable of unbelievable grace.

And overwhelming kindness.

We can, each of us, make an incredible impact on how the world is perceived by another person. Whether through our actions or our words, we have the ability to transform perceptions.

The question for us, as it was for the congregation that James was writing to, is, how will we choose to affect those perceptions? More to the point, will we submit our speech to the Lordship of Jesus Christ?

Will we choose to further the notion that everyone is out for themselves? That looking out for number one is the order of the day? Or will we be standard bearers for the proposition that we are called to live in community, and that living in community involves caring for each other, tending TO each other, working together to overcome differences with love, and to allow grace to dictate our words and our actions rather than pure self-interest or greed?

Included in that ‘caring for each other and tending to each other’ part is speaking of each other with caring words, words intended to uplift and encourage each other, not words that tear at a person’s reputation or relationships, that are designed to put someone down in the eyes of others, but which, in love, place the speaker next to the one being spoken of – acknowledging that we are all capable (again) of making poor choices as well as good, Godly ones, that we are each capable of doing that which pleases God rather than the opposite, that we can be instruments of light as readily as we can be part of the darkness that infects the world.

For us here at Jerusalem Baptist Church in Emmerton, this means we are called to a diligent submission – to each other, to the Holy Spirit and to Jesus Christ. It means that we are to be living examples of circumspect humility, that when we speak, our words not be intemperate – immoderate, extreme, or hotheaded – but that they be thoughtful, caring, measured words – words that have been thought through, that reflect the father’s love for his children, that bring healing, that communicate love. That transfer Grace.

Let’s pray.

So Speak And So Act

Sunday, September 9, 2012

Ordinary 23/Pentecost 15B

Jerusalem Baptist Church (Emmerton), Warsaw VA

James 2:1-17

My brothers and sisters, do you with your acts of favoritism really believe in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ? ²For if a person with gold rings and in fine clothes comes into your assembly, and if a poor person in dirty clothes also comes in, ³and if you take notice of the one wearing the fine clothes and say, “Have a seat here, please,” while to the one who is poor you say, “Stand there,” or, “Sit at my feet,” ⁴have you not made distinctions among yourselves, and become judges with evil thoughts? ⁵Listen, my beloved brothers and sisters. Has not God chosen the poor in the world to be rich in faith and to be heirs of the kingdom that he has promised to those who love him? ⁶But you have dishonored the poor. Is it not the rich who oppress you? Is it not they who drag you into court? ⁷Is it not they who blaspheme the excellent name that was invoked over you?

⁸You do well if you really fulfill the royal law according to the scripture, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” ⁹But if you show partiality, you commit sin and are convicted by the law as transgressors. ¹⁰For whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become accountable for all of it. ¹¹For the one who said, “You shall not commit adultery,” also said, “You shall not murder.” Now if you do not commit adultery but if you murder, you have become a transgressor of the law. ¹²So speak and so act as those who are to be judged by the law of liberty. ¹³For judgment will be without mercy to anyone who has shown no mercy; mercy triumphs over judgment.

¹⁴What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith but do not have works? Can faith save you? ¹⁵If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, ¹⁶and one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill,” and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that? ¹⁷So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.

One day in the spring of 1989, we had a guest lecturer in E. Frank Tupper’s Theology class in seminary. His name was Will D. Campbell. I had heard of him, and knew he’d done some writing, but I did not really know that much about him. One of the drawbacks to not growing up here. Few cultural references. I should have been clued in when I got to class and there were people standing around the edges of the lecture hall – people were sitting on the floor. Every seat was taken. Other professors – WITH THEIR CLASSES – were there.

So I went reading, and this is what I found out about him:

Born in 1924 in Amite County, Mississippi, he was the epitome of what one would call a Son of the South. He was 17 when his home church – a little Baptist church made up mostly of family and extended family – ordained him to the Gospel Ministry. He began his college career at Louisiana College, but withdrew and enlisted when WWII began. After the war, he returned and continued his studies – first at Tulane, then on to Wake Forest and finally Yale Divinity School.

He served for a couple of years as a Pastor in Louisiana, but moved from there to work as the Director of Religious Life at the University of Mississippi (Ole Miss). He began that work in 1954. Somewhere along the way early in his life he understood the intrinsic value of human life – regardless of the color of your skin. Early in his academic career he realized that this was going to have real consequences for him if he was going to keep living in the south.

As he began to speak out more for desegregation, he became something of a lightning rod – a target. He finally had to resign his position at Ole Miss in part because of all the death threats he was getting in response to his stand on the equality of all human beings.

From Ole Miss, he took a position with the National Council of Churches, as a field officer. During that time, he worked with most of the leaders of the civil rights movement in the south – in fact, he was one of four people who escorted black students when they integrated the public schools in Little Rock, Arkansas. And he was the only white person who was present at the founding of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.  Despite that track record, he doesn’t consider himself to have been an activist. He was simply doing what seemed to be what was naturally in line with what his beliefs were.

 As he matured, Campbell had the uneasy feeling that he hated those redneck bigots who hated. He discovered how easy it was to play favorites and to oppress the oppressors. Strange, he thought, how he enjoyed thinking that God hated all the same people that he hated. He realized that he had created God in his own image, and after his own personal and political likeness. Through a series of encounters with unlikely "teachers," Campbell came to admit that after twenty years in ministry he had become little more than a "doctrinaire social activist," which was different than being a follower of Jesus.

The key? "I came to understand the nature of tragedy. And one who understands the nature of tragedy can never take sides." Campbell saw how he had played favorites and taken sides; he had subverted the indiscriminate love of God for all people without conditions, limits, or exceptions into a ministry of "liberal sophistication."

           

Acting upon these convictions, he started sipping whiskey with the Ku Klux Klan. He did their funerals and weddings, and even befriended the Grand Dragon of North Carolina, J.R. "Bob" Jones. When they were sick he emptied their bedpans. And then the hate mail came from the liberal left. In a 1976 interview for an oral history that he gave to the University of Southern Mississippi, he joked, "It's been a long time since I got a hate letter from the right. Now they come from the left."

Since God doesn't play favorites, Campbell concluded, neither should he.

His uncompromising theology has led him to keep his distance from political movements. He has insisted that "anyone who is not as concerned with the immortal soul of the dispossessor as he is with the suffering of the dispossessed is being something less than Christian" and that "Mr. Jesus died for the bigots as well"

We are not without our prophetic voices – even today.

The necessary connection between claiming to love God and proving that we love our fellow human beings became so embedded in the early Christian traditions that this teaching is repeated almost verbatim by Paul (in his letter to the Romans (13:8–9), and to the Galatians (5:14)), here in what we’ve just read, and again, what we heard from John last week and the week before: "If anyone says, 'I love God,' yet hates his brother, he is a liar. For anyone who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen. And he has given us this command: Whoever loves God must also love his brother" (1 John 4:20–21).

As I’ve shared with you before, I am a fan of Facebook. I love the way I’ve been able to reconnect with childhood friends who are now spread all over the world, and to keep up with extended family and friends, whether they are across the ocean or at the other end of the county. Anything from the mundane to the sublime can be found on any given day.

One of the things that has been trying, though, has been how to handle – how to respond to – political postings, as well as postings where people whom I love are making extreme statements on one side or another of an issue. In some cases I find myself reacting in agreement, in others, in disagreement; and my friends and family members span the entire spectrum of both politics and social issues, and I DO mean the ENTIRE spectrum.

Especially these last few months, as the campaigns for the upcoming elections have been ramping up, I have had to detach myself from posting or sharing things that I may agree with, but which when left in their original form – whether it was a sarcastic meme or an acerbic quote, cause pain to people who might hold the view in question. A dear friend pointed out to me that there were times when she came very close to unfriending me because of some of the things that I had repeated – or reposted. And I began to take more critical note of what is being said – and repeated – about any given candidate and realized there is an awful lot of untruth being shared and retold and spread in the name of one or the other political party – and worse – under the banner of Christ.

There is an understanding in James that Will Campbell got after nearly twenty years in ministry – that if we follow the one who died for all of us – every single last one of us – and treat one person differently from another based on their social standing, or on what they can or cannot do for us, or on whether they share our political stances or social and moral conventions, we are missing the point of what it means to be a follower of Jesus.    

It is that simple. We betray the spirit of the Gospel if we select whom we apply it to.

¹⁵If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, ¹⁶and one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill,” and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that?

Let’s pray.

Live In Love

Sunday, August 12, 2012

Ordinary 19/Pentecost 11B

Jerusalem Baptist Church (Emmerton), Warsaw VA

Ephesians 4:25-5:2

²⁵ So then, putting away falsehood, let all of us speak the truth to our neighbors, for we are members of one another. ²⁶ Be angry but do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger, ²⁷ and do not make room for the devil. ²⁸ Thieves must give up stealing; rather let them labor and work honestly with their own hands, so as to have something to share with the needy. ²⁹ Let no evil talk come out of your mouths, but only what is useful for building up, as there is need, so that your words may give grace to those who hear. ³⁰ And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, with which you were marked with a seal for the day of redemption. ³¹ Put away from you all bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander, together with all malice, ³² and be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you. 5 Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children, ² and live in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.

For the last month, we’ve been following the readings from Paul’s epistle to the Ephesians. As we’ve moved through the letter, Paul’s focus has changed. It began with his talking about how the walls that divide the human race have been torn down in the person of Christ, about how having a relationship with God is now no longer dependent on whether or not you belong to a particular group of people, or whether you follow a certain creed, worship a certain way or on a certain day, or practice  a certain set of rituals or not. Christ made that relationship accessible to anyone who enters into relationship with HIM.

Now, beginning in this section that we’ve relatively recently designated as chapter 4, he begins to move into what that adoption - that relationship - looks like; into what the expression of BEING in that relationship is - and it started last week with what it would look like within the body of believers - WITHIN the body of people who HAVE entered into relationship with God through Christ. Today’s text continues in that same vein. Paul is getting down to brass tacks, as it were, with the folks in Ephesus as well as the surrounding towns and cities who he knew would be reading these words as well.

²⁵ So then, putting away falsehood, let all of us speak the truth to our neighbors, for we are members of one another.

This is both a concluding thought from the previous paragraphs, and it serves as a jumping-off point as he moves into other more specific instructions and admonishments:

²⁶ Be angry but do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger, ²⁷ and do not make room for the devil.

Something we’ve touched on before - notice that Paul isn’t saying that being angry is sinful - he is, in fact, saying the opposite - BE angry … there ARE things worth being angry about - things that happen, words that are spoken, misunderstandings or intentional harm that is caused by one person to another, to which the only CORRECT response IS anger. Anger is a part of the gamut of human emotion with which God created us. Anger tells us that something is wrong, and it is usually accompanied with the adrenalin to do something about that which is wrong. Whether that adrenalin fuels an act or provides the courage to respond with words in a situation in which we would normally be hesitant to speak out, THAT is what it’s there for. His middle section of the sentence is a recipe for healthy response - not letting the sun go down on your anger is simply telling us to not nurse anger - to not give it permanent lodging - anywhere - especially in our hearts - to deal with the source, and be done with it. To speak to the issue, the person involved, to make a palpable change happen and be done with it. To let it go. Because if we don’t, we open ourselves up to a quick-forming poison to our spirits.

The next sentence stands out for a number of reasons: the first is that you have to stop and think about who Paul is addressing himself to:

²⁸ Thieves must give up stealing; rather let them labor and work honestly with their own hands, so as to have something to share with the needy.

The second thought is … so this must have been common knowledge among the people who were part of the congregation there? … a friend of mine, Kay Voorhees, a fellow minister, wondered if Paul was referring to people who were stealing in order to eat, which would have been a somewhat more common situation then than it is now (though not entirely), or if he was referring to people in positions of power - tax collectors, for example - who were using their position of power to steal in a manner sanctioned by the authorities.

Whatever the case may be, Paul’s call is away from that way of life and towards a way of life that enables the nobler ventures of the spirit to take hold - and do so for the good of OTHERS - not just oneself.

Before we begin to feel TOO good about ourselves, my friend Kay made another observation about this: she asked: “when was the last time someone like that became a part of your/my church family, and got the opportunity to be completely transformed by following Jesus? Ah, but the rest of us "good" Christians are in need of his transforming power, too -- otherwise Paul wouldn't have to tell us to tell the truth, to not hold a grudge, to not be mean.” and we move on to the next section of instructions:  

²⁹ Let no evil talk come out of your mouths, but only what is useful for building up, as there is need, so that your words may give grace to those who hear. ³⁰ And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, with which you were marked with a seal for the day of redemption. ³¹ Put away from you all bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander, together with all malice, ³² and be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you.

What simple, practical and APPLICABLE instruction! In these few sentences, Paul spells out a way of being - of getting along - of living - that opens us up to the possibilities that God has for us if we just stay away from getting so caught up in ourselves - our envy, our gripes, our mean-spiritidness, our pettyness, and allow the Holy Spirit to express himself through us - in being kind to one another, in being tenderhearted, in forgiving one another as God in Christ forgave us.

Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children, ² and live in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.

How do we first learn? What are the first things we learn? To smile, to open our mouths, to wave, to kiss, to walk, to speak, to say “please” and “thank you”? We learn from our parents. It is in that face-to-face, eyeball-to-eyeball interaction that we learn how to be … human.  

It is the same way for us as children of God. We have the opportunity and the ability to have that ‘face-to-face’ time with Christ, that ‘eyeball-to-eyeball’ time when we are with each other, when we are in the midst of our brothers and sisters, fellow Christ-followers, and we SEE that kindness, that gentleness, that tenderheartedness that is the mark of Christ - that living in love that infuses everything we do, how we think, how we act, how we reason …

You’ve shown that to me over these last three weeks, as we’ve walked through the experience of losing loved ones and have gathered together in each instance and been the comforting presence of Christ to each other.

May we so live in love that it won’t be a conscious thing, but simply how we ARE.

Let’s pray.

No Fear

Sunday May 6, 2012

Easter 5B

Jerusalem Baptist Church (Emmerton) Warsaw VA

Text: 1 John 4:7-21

⁷Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. ⁸Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love. ⁹God’s love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him. ¹⁰In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins. ¹¹Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another. ¹²No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us. ¹³By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit.

¹⁴And we have seen and do testify that the Father has sent his Son as the Savior of the world. ¹⁵God abides in those who confess that Jesus is the Son of God, and they abide in God. ¹⁶So we have known and believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.

¹⁷Love has been perfected among us in this: that we may have boldness on the day of judgment, because as he is, so are we in this world. ¹⁸There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love. ¹⁹We love because he first loved us. ²⁰Those who say, “I love God,” and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen. ²¹The commandment we have from him is this: those who love God must love their brothers and sisters also.

The logo below the words that are set in a gothic typeface is that of a skull and crossbones, and the crossbones are made of pistons. The ‘No Fear’ company made its debut and rose to popularity in the late 80’s and early 90’s, and became a staple of tee-shirts and window stickers with teenagers and young adults, usually found on the sport versions of cars and trucks. ‘No Fear’ became the official drink of the WEC – World Extreme Cagefighting, one of many extreme sports that the brand chose to associate with that coincided with it’s message – set aside fear when confronting the challenges you face – in this case, challenges having to do with racing downhill at breakneck speeds, with little protection, and with a fair amount of risk to life and limb involved, or in the case of cagefighting, lose your fear of your opponent in order to beat him to a pulp and conquer him. But their name didn’t come from this passage of scripture. In fact, the underlying message seems to be the opposite of what the company would like to communicate – that it is through force and strength that fear is overcome.

In case you were wondering, that is NOT what John is trying to communicate with his words in this morning’s text.

It is a beautiful passage.

Sections of it are ones that have been incorporated into the ‘distilled’ version of the Gospel that has been shared for centuries – that version that puts the gospel into a nutshell – that help us, in a few short minutes, introduce the Good News of Jesus Christ if we happen to be able to have a conversation on the topic, but there’s a lot more going on here. A LOT more.

I’ve been pondering the idea of ‘living without fear’, and have come to the conclusion that I’m not very good at it, to put it mildly.

Yes, as much as I believe it, and as much as I teach and preach that we are not to allow a spirit of fear to rule our lives, I’m lousy at it myself.

I fear that the odds are increasingly against me when I get in the car to drive somewhere, because I have been driving for over three decades and have never been in a serious accident.

I fear the possibility of developing some kind of cancer – skin or otherwise – because of the exposure I received to the sun as a child and an adolescent. There was this one class trip in tenth grade that we took to northern Chile, and we went to the beach and I fell asleep, first on one side and then on the other – and got sunburned to the point of blistering – and I’m just watching to see what shows up … 

I fear for my wife, my mother in law, and my children – and my extended family – for their health, their safety, their future and wellbeing.

I realize this fear is born out of concern and love, but then I read this passage, and I’m thinking, does that apply to what I’m feeling? Are we talking about the same thing?

I step back and read the phrase ‘judgment day’, and my first thought is to that time when we will each stand before the throne – the idea that has been a part of my upbringing and that I’ve heard time and time again referenced in sermon after sermon; that we will each have to give an accounting of our actions or inactions at some point, and there is a degree of fear attached to the thought, because in all honesty, I blank on the inaction part. I’m pretty aware of what I’ve done, but I’m not always aware of what I’ve NOT done. That’s just the way it works. If I’ve NOT done something it’s because I didn’t THINK about it, hence I didn’t DO it, and that by definition makes it harder to REMEMBER it.

But then I step back even further, and realize that that ISN’T what John is talking about in the passage. At the time of the writing of the letter, ‘Judgment Day’ was much more likely to be a reference to that day in the believer’s life when the ruling authorities were going to come to their house, or break into the worship service, or show up at their place of work, and take them in to be questioned, and probably imprisoned, and possibly executed for their beliefs and claims. John was writing to a congregation that was undergoing persecution, or would be, shortly.

That was just the way things were going at the time.

And what are his words to them, in the face of this impending persecution, this forecast of suffering and possible if not probable death?

Love each other. That is how God has provided for us, how God shows God’s self to us, and how we can show God to others. Love each other because God loved us first, and we are able to know God inasmuch as we share that love with each other.

He goes even further, he says that if you DON’T love each other, if you SAY that you love God but DON’T show love to each other, you are … liars.

He doesn’t beat around the bush with that one, does he?

This past Wednesday we heard John Walton, the Old Testament professor at Wheaton College, say this about Genesis 1, and scripture in general, ‘it is written FOR us, not TO us.’ That was a phrase that stood out to me. It helped clarify a distinction that I needed to hear. In the context of his comments, he was talking about integrity of communication, and how the writer understands what he or she is saying and the reader or the listener understands what they are being told or are reading.

He is addressing an issue that is an ongoing one for the church today: how do we apply words that were written thousands of years ago to people thousands of miles away with a REALLY, REALLY different life experience from ours to what WE are living in today’s world?

The answer is both simple and complex. We take the words and internalize them – as much as we can, we explore and understand the context in which they were written and received, and we draw parallels with our experiences. Because even though our contexts are radically different, our environments may be extremely distant from each other, there are still truths that apply in any circumstance, that cross cultural and historical barriers.   

And this is one truth that crosses just about any cultural barrier: if you say one thing and do another, what you say doesn’t amount to much. What you DO, that is what tells how you REALLY feel about something or someone.

And that is a truth that we face every day.

It is a truth that we choose to live by or set aside – that WE have a choice in making a part of our lives or not EACH DAY.

So much of our culture, so much of our environment is informed by fear, and primarily of the unknown – if we’ve experienced something, we actually end up not so afraid of it – BECAUSE we have experienced it – it takes the edge off, so to speak… something we’ve lived through is something that we’ve been able to apply some kind of perspective to – whatever it is – the loss of a job, the loss of a loved one, a serious illness, an accident or an attack of some sort – the fact that we are on THIS side of the experience provides us with a sense that it is not the end of the world. It may still be overwhelmingly painful, and incapacitating, and even devastating, but by the simple fact that we are looking BACK at the experience, there is something that tells us that there is more beyond it – there is still life to be lived, and people to care for and to love, and to be loved by, and it is all a reflection of the love that God has been planted in us.

It is that same love that is able to pick up and carry on, in the face of persecution, in the face of suffering, in the face of death, even. It is that love that faces the worst the world has to give and still responds with open arms and an open heart, that takes the suffering in and begins to heal it, mend the broken, calm the fears, and ultimately show them out the door.

There is NO FEAR in love.

What does this mean for Jerusalem Baptist Church at Emmerton?

For us, it is a prompt, an invitation to examine how we view the world, how we view our neighbors, how we view the community around us, and define to what degree do we respond in love, and to what degree is our response born out of fear … fear of the stranger, fear of being rejected, fear of being taken advantage of, we can go down a laundry list of fears, there’s no shortage of them.

It is for us to take this simple statement: There is NO FEAR in love, and make it emblematic of who we are, how we interact with each other, and with our community, the folks we see every day as we drive up and down History Land Hwy or Mulberry Rd, or any OTHER road, for that matter.

¹⁶So we have known and believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.

May our lives reflect that abiding love.

Let’s pray.

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.