After learning things in Sunday School and worship, our series on the things you can learn in church in just one day marches on through Confirmation class. We meet every other Sunday following worship.
The first lesson in last Sunday's class was how fun and tasty church could be. Following our Latin American themed service we had south of the border snacks for fellowship. Our Confirmation students got to sample fresh-made chips, salsas, and various dips and nachos. They saw plenty of people gathering and laughing and lining up to eat...a powerful lesson about the joy being together brings us! We had plenty of fun in the classroom seeing who could stand the super-hot salsa.
After that it was time to get down to work. After going through the Old Testament last year, this year we're talking about Jesus and the effect he had on the world. This Sunday we discussed his early ministry, the temptations in the wilderness and the Sermon on the Mount.
We learned how Satan tempted Jesus at his weakest point, after 40 days and nights of fasting in devotion to God. We heard about the three temptations: making bread from stones, bowing down to receive control over the world, leaping from the temple roof to prove God would save you. We heard Jesus reject all three, renouncing the devil three times just as we do at our baptism. We also covered the positive affirmations that Jesus showed us by his resistance: God will provide for us. We do not have to use our power selfishly, to feed our own desires or in slavery to our needs. We already have the gifts we need to live and prosper. We don't have to bow down to other powers to try and gain more. Those powers only bring us more emptiness and a longing that will never be filled. We do not have to prove God to ourselves or anyone. We can't. All we can do is trust him and live our lives accordingly, knowing that we are his.
We learned that after Jesus emerged from the wilderness he began doing four important things: preaching the Word of God, teaching people what it meant, healing their illnesses, and forgiving their sins. We still do those four things in his name when we gather together, especially in church!
In the section on the Sermon on the Mount we first learned that the story was told twice, in the gospels of Matthew and Luke. Matthew has Jesus preaching from a hilltop. Luke has him speaking from the bottom of a dell, like an amphitheater. It's probably called the "Sermon on the Mount" because that sounds better than "Sermon in the Dip".
In this sermon Jesus shared with his followers the basic things they'd need to know in order to live out God's Word.
1. The world considers certain people "blessed", or favored by God. God doesn't see things on the world's terms. He doesn't favor the rich more because they're rich or the powerful because of their influence. God reaches out to and takes care of the poor, the humble, those who cry and mourn, those who are picked on and reviled because they do good. His heart goes out to people in need.
2. We are to love our brothers and sisters. If we do not care about them we are not doing our best to serve God, for they are his children too. We are to love even our enemies, not with a mushy feeling but in Christ's name.
3. If someone does evil to us we are not to respond in kind, as if evil were powerful. Instead we are to respond to evil with good in order to show its power.
4. We are not to pray or live out our Christian lives with arrogance to show the world how good we are. Instead we are to talk to God humbly and pray that he will show the world how good he is.
5. We do not have to worry. God knows our needs and will provide, even as he provides for the lilys of the field and the birds of the air. God will uphold and comfort us.
6. In everything we are to do unto others as we'd want them to do unto us, not living by our selfish, base instincts and fears but living in God's mercy.
7. Those who hear these words and base their lives on them are building their house on a solid foundation. What they do will endure. Those who base their lives on anything else are building on sand. Whatever they construct will eventually fall apart.
We talked about the last moments of life, hearing people talk on their death bed. In all my years of sitting with people at their moment of passing, I have never heard anyone say, "I'm so proud I had that fancy car and made tons of money." The only thing people look back on--the only thing that matters--is whether they loved and were loved...whether they built grace-filled relationships and felt they did good in the world. The Sermon on the Mount shows us how to do that.
Confirmation class is always profound, but this session in particular always gets me. Jesus' words here are so heartfelt, simple yet far-reaching. It's a good reminder for us in a world that seems to pull us in a hundred different directions and gives us a million commitments to cement us to each. No matter where we go, no matter what we do, only one thing really matters: living out a godly life.
It's amazing how your life can change in just one day at church.
--Pastor Dave (pastordave@geneseelutheranparish.org)
Showing posts with label theology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label theology. Show all posts
Wednesday, October 30, 2013
Tuesday, October 29, 2013
What You Can Learn From Church in Just One Day: Part 2
Today we continue our look at things you can learn in church in just one day. The day in question was last Sunday, October 27th. In our last post we talked about Sunday School. We move to worship in this post.
The 27th was Reformation Sunday, the day when we honor the folks who have reformed our church throughout the ages. In Lutheran churches this is normally accompanied by selections from Martin Luther and his grand, old German hymns plus some cheerleading for being Lutheran. This year we decided to mix it up a little bit, talking instead about the theological reforms gifted to us from the Latin American church of the 20th century. Not only was this a different flavor, it allowed us to define our church as still reforming, in the growth process instead of the end-product of it.
Obviously it would be impossible to cover multiple centuries of Latin American development in a single sermon (or blog post). Instead we took a broad sweep across history that led to a couple of key theological inspirations in the 1940's and 1950's.
Latin America contained some of the world's oldest cultures...amazing, brutal, heirs to all the good and ill of humanity. When explorers from Spanish-speaking nations discovered and then colonized Latin America they ran into, conquered, and transformed these indigenous cultures. As was true of most European-indigenous culture clashes, two themes ended up dominating:
1. Those native folks were sitting on top of tons of natural resources.
2. The natives had not heard of Jesus Christ or his Gospel.
In the colonization environment, these two themes intertwined. Missionaries and "civilized" folks brought religious and cultural reform to the indigenous people, changing their society. Establishing a European religious and cultural framework paved the way for European access to the economic resources of the region.
We can debate all day whether such missionary impulses were right or wrong, helpful or destructive. No matter what we decide, it still happened. The end result of this religious-societal-economic chemistry was a strong strain of Catholicism throughout Latin America, Catholicism which tended to value authority and upholding the status quo, including that dominant (and in some ways exploitative) economic and social framework.
In the mid-20th century several theologians re-examined the assumptions under which their church had operated for centuries. Latin America continued to be heavily influenced by church authority and the will of a few privileged folks over and against the poor masses who labored for them. In most circles the authority of the church and will of the economically privileged were assumed to be congruent, if not exactly the same. The wealthy promoted and supported the church. The church upheld the system that made gathering such wealth easy. The relationship was cozy. Few outside of it had the means or status to cry against it. What right or standing would a poor, uneducated person have to challenge the church?
In response to this situation a courageous group of theologians bucked the trend. Their collective movement would come to be known as "Liberation Theology". As with the history, we can only hope to give an oversimplified summary here, but basically Liberation Theology asserted that God did not exist to make us comfortable in the world, but to set us free from everything that oppresses us. God's work does not confirm us as much as it transforms us from death into life.
This transformation centers around the notion of justice. The world judges by certain criteria. Rich and powerful folks are favored, poor folks are despised. God loves all his children, rich or poor. God does not look on the imbalance between powerful and oppressed folks and smile. Rather he moves to correct it, lifting up his children who have been short changed and calling down the ones who have benefited by oppressing others. Folks looked upon wealthy men and a correspondingly wealthy church and said, "God favors them!" These theologians argued that God was actually working harder for the folks who had been left out in the cold by this system. If you wanted to see Jesus at work, you needed to pay less attention to the gold and more attention to the folks crying out for help and the folks without hope.
In the traditional system, church membership meant going along with the flow. The church existed, in part, to support the dominant culture which in turn would support it. The goal of a good church-goer was to make as few waves as possible. Political and economic concerns had little to do with faith. Liberation Theology argued that the church should not confirm inequity, but fight it. Faith was only lip service unless it also resulted in working for justice and true peace in the world. Faith mandated political and economic action. If you saw someone suffering you were supposed to approach them and try to fix the inequity...not because those people were inherently entitled but because that's where God was at work and that's what he was doing.
A necessary extension of this theology: a church is not validated just by existing as an institution. Its spirit is shown most truly by the work it does in the world. No longer is something right just because it benefits the church. Rather the church itself serves a greater right, the will and word of Our Lord.
Practicality mandated that the people the church should pay most attention to (and respect) were the people who gave the most to it...allowed it to exist. This ended up being the rich. More money equals more influence in the church and being credited with a closer connection to God. Liberation Theology stood this on its ear. It claimed that if we wanted to find God most clearly at work, we shouldn't look towards the people who seemed most blessed by the world's standards. Rather we should seek out those who needed God most...by definition those who were doing without. Poverty was not holier than wealth, but if a father had six children doing quite well and one going hungry, he was going to devote his energy to feeding the hungry one before he feasted at the table of the other six.
No theology gives a complete picture of God, but Latin American Liberation Theology exposed many practical weaknesses in the church tradition. The theologians who risked their reputation, standing, and in some cases their lives to bring it to us gave us a great gift...shaking us out of our complacency and our complicit alliance with the ways of the world that appeared to benefit us. They helped us to see that in the name of serving God and preserving his church, we were actually steering farther and farther away from him.
We don't have to look far to see how our own churches and the dominant American culture became aligned whether or not that was in accordance with God's teachings. We, too, suffer the temptation to go along in order to benefit ourselves. We find it inconvenient to immerse ourselves in, and be led by the needs of, the poor and oppressed instead of staying comfortably in the world of the privileged. We'd rather have a church where everybody gets along, where folks don't make waves, where we don't have to fight (or do) much out in the world, and where "peace" is defined as the absence of talk about justice instead of the end result of fighting for it. We're good with the church as long as it doesn't disturb the rest of our life much.
Liberation Theology has a message for us as well. The things we are trying to embrace and preserve end up empty. God is headed in another direction than we instinctively want to go. Even today, half a century later, it remains a wake-up call for the church of the Reformation...a church which hates to contemplate that it might still be reforming. How have we worked for justice? Have we taken a stand for those outcast, impoverished, slighted and disadvantaged? If not, are we really doing the work of the Lord who ate with sinners or are we doing our own work and appending God's name to it in order to justify ourselves?
Another thing to think about and learn from just one day in church!
--Pastor Dave (pastordave@geneseelutheranparish.org)
The 27th was Reformation Sunday, the day when we honor the folks who have reformed our church throughout the ages. In Lutheran churches this is normally accompanied by selections from Martin Luther and his grand, old German hymns plus some cheerleading for being Lutheran. This year we decided to mix it up a little bit, talking instead about the theological reforms gifted to us from the Latin American church of the 20th century. Not only was this a different flavor, it allowed us to define our church as still reforming, in the growth process instead of the end-product of it.
Obviously it would be impossible to cover multiple centuries of Latin American development in a single sermon (or blog post). Instead we took a broad sweep across history that led to a couple of key theological inspirations in the 1940's and 1950's.
Latin America contained some of the world's oldest cultures...amazing, brutal, heirs to all the good and ill of humanity. When explorers from Spanish-speaking nations discovered and then colonized Latin America they ran into, conquered, and transformed these indigenous cultures. As was true of most European-indigenous culture clashes, two themes ended up dominating:
1. Those native folks were sitting on top of tons of natural resources.
2. The natives had not heard of Jesus Christ or his Gospel.
In the colonization environment, these two themes intertwined. Missionaries and "civilized" folks brought religious and cultural reform to the indigenous people, changing their society. Establishing a European religious and cultural framework paved the way for European access to the economic resources of the region.
We can debate all day whether such missionary impulses were right or wrong, helpful or destructive. No matter what we decide, it still happened. The end result of this religious-societal-economic chemistry was a strong strain of Catholicism throughout Latin America, Catholicism which tended to value authority and upholding the status quo, including that dominant (and in some ways exploitative) economic and social framework.
In the mid-20th century several theologians re-examined the assumptions under which their church had operated for centuries. Latin America continued to be heavily influenced by church authority and the will of a few privileged folks over and against the poor masses who labored for them. In most circles the authority of the church and will of the economically privileged were assumed to be congruent, if not exactly the same. The wealthy promoted and supported the church. The church upheld the system that made gathering such wealth easy. The relationship was cozy. Few outside of it had the means or status to cry against it. What right or standing would a poor, uneducated person have to challenge the church?
In response to this situation a courageous group of theologians bucked the trend. Their collective movement would come to be known as "Liberation Theology". As with the history, we can only hope to give an oversimplified summary here, but basically Liberation Theology asserted that God did not exist to make us comfortable in the world, but to set us free from everything that oppresses us. God's work does not confirm us as much as it transforms us from death into life.
This transformation centers around the notion of justice. The world judges by certain criteria. Rich and powerful folks are favored, poor folks are despised. God loves all his children, rich or poor. God does not look on the imbalance between powerful and oppressed folks and smile. Rather he moves to correct it, lifting up his children who have been short changed and calling down the ones who have benefited by oppressing others. Folks looked upon wealthy men and a correspondingly wealthy church and said, "God favors them!" These theologians argued that God was actually working harder for the folks who had been left out in the cold by this system. If you wanted to see Jesus at work, you needed to pay less attention to the gold and more attention to the folks crying out for help and the folks without hope.
In the traditional system, church membership meant going along with the flow. The church existed, in part, to support the dominant culture which in turn would support it. The goal of a good church-goer was to make as few waves as possible. Political and economic concerns had little to do with faith. Liberation Theology argued that the church should not confirm inequity, but fight it. Faith was only lip service unless it also resulted in working for justice and true peace in the world. Faith mandated political and economic action. If you saw someone suffering you were supposed to approach them and try to fix the inequity...not because those people were inherently entitled but because that's where God was at work and that's what he was doing.
A necessary extension of this theology: a church is not validated just by existing as an institution. Its spirit is shown most truly by the work it does in the world. No longer is something right just because it benefits the church. Rather the church itself serves a greater right, the will and word of Our Lord.
Practicality mandated that the people the church should pay most attention to (and respect) were the people who gave the most to it...allowed it to exist. This ended up being the rich. More money equals more influence in the church and being credited with a closer connection to God. Liberation Theology stood this on its ear. It claimed that if we wanted to find God most clearly at work, we shouldn't look towards the people who seemed most blessed by the world's standards. Rather we should seek out those who needed God most...by definition those who were doing without. Poverty was not holier than wealth, but if a father had six children doing quite well and one going hungry, he was going to devote his energy to feeding the hungry one before he feasted at the table of the other six.
No theology gives a complete picture of God, but Latin American Liberation Theology exposed many practical weaknesses in the church tradition. The theologians who risked their reputation, standing, and in some cases their lives to bring it to us gave us a great gift...shaking us out of our complacency and our complicit alliance with the ways of the world that appeared to benefit us. They helped us to see that in the name of serving God and preserving his church, we were actually steering farther and farther away from him.
We don't have to look far to see how our own churches and the dominant American culture became aligned whether or not that was in accordance with God's teachings. We, too, suffer the temptation to go along in order to benefit ourselves. We find it inconvenient to immerse ourselves in, and be led by the needs of, the poor and oppressed instead of staying comfortably in the world of the privileged. We'd rather have a church where everybody gets along, where folks don't make waves, where we don't have to fight (or do) much out in the world, and where "peace" is defined as the absence of talk about justice instead of the end result of fighting for it. We're good with the church as long as it doesn't disturb the rest of our life much.
Liberation Theology has a message for us as well. The things we are trying to embrace and preserve end up empty. God is headed in another direction than we instinctively want to go. Even today, half a century later, it remains a wake-up call for the church of the Reformation...a church which hates to contemplate that it might still be reforming. How have we worked for justice? Have we taken a stand for those outcast, impoverished, slighted and disadvantaged? If not, are we really doing the work of the Lord who ate with sinners or are we doing our own work and appending God's name to it in order to justify ourselves?
Another thing to think about and learn from just one day in church!
--Pastor Dave (pastordave@geneseelutheranparish.org)
Monday, June 3, 2013
Important Lessons Week: Dealing With Failure
Over the last month I've had lots of opportunities to have unusual conversations with people. It's like a whole theological world has opened up via e-mail, websites, in person...all of a sudden everybody is talking about life and God and church all at once. As I was going over all this in my mind on Sunday afternoon I decided that this week should be Important Lessons week on the church blog, covering some of the topics folks have been talking about all around us. We'll look at all the ways these things relate to life, faith, and church.
Dealing with failure seems like an odd place to start but it's becoming a lost art today. That's a shame because it's a critical part of success!
This train of thought started while I was talking to one of our fine youth about video games. We were sitting down to play together and all of a sudden I went Grandpa on him with a "Back in the Day" speech.
Nowadays everybody plays video games in their living room on a video game console. You buy the game and expect to play it for at least 30-40 hours over the course of its lifetime. You can save your progress along the way so when you quit and start again, you just pick up where you left off. Saving your game also helps when you make a fatal mistake and lose. Instead of starting from the beginning you just re-load from wherever you saved last. If you play long enough you're going to win the game. You may have to re-load a hundred times to do it, but it'll happen. Everybody wins eventually. This is what you expect when you buy a game. If you can't win you call the game "too hard" and get mad at the people who made it.
This was NOT the story back when I was a kid. Only the rich people had game consoles in their homes and even then they weren't very good. The real action was in the video game arcade. You dumped quarters into a machine in order to play. One quarter equals one game. If you lost you didn't re-load. You stuck another quarter in and started from the beginning, doing it over and over until you either learned how to play or ran out of money.
And believe me, the purpose of those games was to take your money. They didn't want you getting so good that you could play for an hour on one quarter. They wanted you dumping another quarter in the machine every three minutes max. So those games were HARD. They would whup you up one side and down another, especially as you progressed. There was no such thing as "winning". Every quarter ended in a loss sooner or later. You judged the experience by how much fun you had and how much you learned while losing your quarter.
These repeated failures taught us something...not just how to play a video game but how to learn, interpret, anticipate, strategize, and make value judgments about whether something was worth continuing or whether it was time to give up and try something else. (Just imagine, our parents thought these games were ruining us! Quite the opposite!)
Nowadays we live in a world of helicopter parenting, grade inflation, and money-back guarantees on everything. If you don't get an "A" something's wrong. If a product is otherwise fine but just doesn't live up to your expectations you want the store to take it back, no questions asked. Every child is a genius and every piece of their doodle artwork should be hanging in a museum. All the big lumps in life are still there--sickness, aging, death, accidents, etc.--but we don't get the daily lessons anymore. We've adopted the expectation that life will be a series of near-perfect experiences, meeting our standards and satisfaction.
This expectation has some good side effects. People support each other more than they used to. In general kids are kinder. And hey...it's nice to be able to take back those curtains because they didn't match with your carpet as well as you thought.
But this expectation also costs us. Nothing important in life is ever perfect. No marriage, no family relationship, no job, no political choice, nothing will ever live up to our standards, nor should it! Our standards aren't perfect, after all.
It's not so much that we don't understand this. Few of us find a life that's flawless. Having the way paved for us so smoothly has robbed us of the ability to deal with imperfection well. In a world where a store refusing to take back an item without a receipt is a cause for a temper tantrum and a major rant on a blog, we're becoming less capable of judging between minor infractions and major issues. The consequences in the retail sales world are small but transferred to, say, a romantic relationship that lack of judgment becomes a big deal. Folks find themselves incapable of sustaining relationships because small disagreements become huge problems. Conversely, some folks who probably should pay attention to red flags waving everywhere think maybe it's a minor deal, their own fault.
Being out of practice in dealing with (and overcoming) failure also robs us of success. I don't know anybody who succeeds wildly without risking wildly, and thus failing wildly, somewhere along the way. If you never do it wrong, how do you figure out what's right?
Recently a long-time pastor asked aloud why the church is so content with mediocrity. The answer to that is pretty simple. People don't want a church that succeeds wildly...or really does anything wildly. Somewhere along the line the definition of "good church" became "nothing goes wrong". But if nothing ever goes wrong nothing ever goes right either! We end up living in some mushy middle that everybody can sort of agree on and where nothing ever changes. It's really convenient because you can just go for an hour and be done with it, no investment required. There's no real Spirit required either.
We mentioned helicopter parenting above. How many of our clergy regularly engaging in helicopter pastoring, making sure that ministry stays contained in safe, approved programs that won't offend (or challenge) anybody? We don't get rewarded for allowing things to go daringly right. We get praised when nothing goes wrong.
Our own liturgy speaks against this kind of thing from the get-go. The first thing we do in every service is admit that we fell short and went wrong! Confession and forgiveness is integral to our expression of faith and our lives. Another way to look at the absolution God gives us every Sunday is, "I hear you and you did do wrong. But I love you, I can cover that with forgiveness, and I want you to go out and try again." Somewhere in the midst of that daily struggle things end up going right, or at least right enough for great ministry and faith to happen. If the message from God was, "Stop doing anything that fails!" our week--and our faith lives--would look quite different. We'd be called into inaction instead of action, the opposite of our mission as people of faith.
It's worth remembering that the greatest success in all of history--God's salvation and gift of eternal life shown on Easter morning--followed right on the heels of humanity's greatest failure and tragedy: the cross.
When raising our children, dealing with society, negotiating our relationships with each other, and living out our mission in the church we need to hold up the value of--and grant wide permission for--failure. Everything going right is not the barometer of faith. It's better to fail at one worthwhile endeavor than to succeed at a hundred inconsequential things. No life ends up more anemic and pale than the one in which nothing goes wrong.
--Pastor Dave (pastordave@geneseelutheranparish.org)
Dealing with failure seems like an odd place to start but it's becoming a lost art today. That's a shame because it's a critical part of success!
This train of thought started while I was talking to one of our fine youth about video games. We were sitting down to play together and all of a sudden I went Grandpa on him with a "Back in the Day" speech.
Nowadays everybody plays video games in their living room on a video game console. You buy the game and expect to play it for at least 30-40 hours over the course of its lifetime. You can save your progress along the way so when you quit and start again, you just pick up where you left off. Saving your game also helps when you make a fatal mistake and lose. Instead of starting from the beginning you just re-load from wherever you saved last. If you play long enough you're going to win the game. You may have to re-load a hundred times to do it, but it'll happen. Everybody wins eventually. This is what you expect when you buy a game. If you can't win you call the game "too hard" and get mad at the people who made it.
This was NOT the story back when I was a kid. Only the rich people had game consoles in their homes and even then they weren't very good. The real action was in the video game arcade. You dumped quarters into a machine in order to play. One quarter equals one game. If you lost you didn't re-load. You stuck another quarter in and started from the beginning, doing it over and over until you either learned how to play or ran out of money.
And believe me, the purpose of those games was to take your money. They didn't want you getting so good that you could play for an hour on one quarter. They wanted you dumping another quarter in the machine every three minutes max. So those games were HARD. They would whup you up one side and down another, especially as you progressed. There was no such thing as "winning". Every quarter ended in a loss sooner or later. You judged the experience by how much fun you had and how much you learned while losing your quarter.
These repeated failures taught us something...not just how to play a video game but how to learn, interpret, anticipate, strategize, and make value judgments about whether something was worth continuing or whether it was time to give up and try something else. (Just imagine, our parents thought these games were ruining us! Quite the opposite!)
Nowadays we live in a world of helicopter parenting, grade inflation, and money-back guarantees on everything. If you don't get an "A" something's wrong. If a product is otherwise fine but just doesn't live up to your expectations you want the store to take it back, no questions asked. Every child is a genius and every piece of their doodle artwork should be hanging in a museum. All the big lumps in life are still there--sickness, aging, death, accidents, etc.--but we don't get the daily lessons anymore. We've adopted the expectation that life will be a series of near-perfect experiences, meeting our standards and satisfaction.
This expectation has some good side effects. People support each other more than they used to. In general kids are kinder. And hey...it's nice to be able to take back those curtains because they didn't match with your carpet as well as you thought.
But this expectation also costs us. Nothing important in life is ever perfect. No marriage, no family relationship, no job, no political choice, nothing will ever live up to our standards, nor should it! Our standards aren't perfect, after all.
It's not so much that we don't understand this. Few of us find a life that's flawless. Having the way paved for us so smoothly has robbed us of the ability to deal with imperfection well. In a world where a store refusing to take back an item without a receipt is a cause for a temper tantrum and a major rant on a blog, we're becoming less capable of judging between minor infractions and major issues. The consequences in the retail sales world are small but transferred to, say, a romantic relationship that lack of judgment becomes a big deal. Folks find themselves incapable of sustaining relationships because small disagreements become huge problems. Conversely, some folks who probably should pay attention to red flags waving everywhere think maybe it's a minor deal, their own fault.
Being out of practice in dealing with (and overcoming) failure also robs us of success. I don't know anybody who succeeds wildly without risking wildly, and thus failing wildly, somewhere along the way. If you never do it wrong, how do you figure out what's right?
Recently a long-time pastor asked aloud why the church is so content with mediocrity. The answer to that is pretty simple. People don't want a church that succeeds wildly...or really does anything wildly. Somewhere along the line the definition of "good church" became "nothing goes wrong". But if nothing ever goes wrong nothing ever goes right either! We end up living in some mushy middle that everybody can sort of agree on and where nothing ever changes. It's really convenient because you can just go for an hour and be done with it, no investment required. There's no real Spirit required either.
We mentioned helicopter parenting above. How many of our clergy regularly engaging in helicopter pastoring, making sure that ministry stays contained in safe, approved programs that won't offend (or challenge) anybody? We don't get rewarded for allowing things to go daringly right. We get praised when nothing goes wrong.
Our own liturgy speaks against this kind of thing from the get-go. The first thing we do in every service is admit that we fell short and went wrong! Confession and forgiveness is integral to our expression of faith and our lives. Another way to look at the absolution God gives us every Sunday is, "I hear you and you did do wrong. But I love you, I can cover that with forgiveness, and I want you to go out and try again." Somewhere in the midst of that daily struggle things end up going right, or at least right enough for great ministry and faith to happen. If the message from God was, "Stop doing anything that fails!" our week--and our faith lives--would look quite different. We'd be called into inaction instead of action, the opposite of our mission as people of faith.
It's worth remembering that the greatest success in all of history--God's salvation and gift of eternal life shown on Easter morning--followed right on the heels of humanity's greatest failure and tragedy: the cross.
When raising our children, dealing with society, negotiating our relationships with each other, and living out our mission in the church we need to hold up the value of--and grant wide permission for--failure. Everything going right is not the barometer of faith. It's better to fail at one worthwhile endeavor than to succeed at a hundred inconsequential things. No life ends up more anemic and pale than the one in which nothing goes wrong.
--Pastor Dave (pastordave@geneseelutheranparish.org)
Thursday, May 23, 2013
Doing What is Best
As I'm running around trying to get all my "stuff done" today I'm reminded of this passage from Luke, Chapter 10:
The moral of this story isn't that sitting around is better than running around. Rather it's a matter of priority: what comes first.
Most of us define our lives--or let our lives get defined for us--by the series of tasks we have to do today. "Have" should be in quotes there. For most of us the true "haves" accumulate their own set of sub-tasks which themselves carry further assumptions about more things we "have" to do. We start out with one or two "have to's" which leads logically to three more. If we're going to be good at those we also need to do X, Y, and Z. Each of those has six more parts to them. Voila! Our schedule is filled for the next six months and really we only set out to do a couple of things!
The whole system mushes together, developing a gravity from which we find it difficult to escape. The bigger and more important that system feels, the more gravity it attains and the more "important" it seems. In turn we feel more important for being a part of such a big and weighty system. That's how we draw our identity, defining ourselves by being enslaved to a huge, important set of things.
Can you picture Martha here? "Jesus is here at MY house! What a big deal this is! Think how much this says about me and my home, my identity, the importance of my work! Ohmygosh I must dust and sweep and prepare a meal and wash and iron and..."
If we're people of faith we'll also let God into our busy lives. Perhaps we'll find a few minutes for a prayer or devotion. Or we'll just pray, "God be with me today!" Both are good impulses but neither are sufficient. The first is like Martha saying, "Whew! OK, I'm going to spend a couple minutes with you Jesus before I get back to work!" The second reads, "Hey Jesus, why don't you grab a broom and help me here?"
There's nothing wrong with Martha's work. Jesus isn't praising Mary because she's not working, nor suggesting that sitting is superior. Jesus is reminding us of our priorities. Namely, "How do you know what you're supposed to be doing today if you haven't asked God about it first?"
We assume the "have to's" in our lives as givens, God time as a special luxury. Our daily tasks are the broccoli and nutritionally-balanced wheat bread that sustain us while our devotions and prayers are like a little chocolate delight at the end of the day. That's backwards. God is our sustenance and life. The fact that we also get to do occasionally-important things in his name is our treat and delight.
Mary's not going to sit at that couch forever. She's listening to God so she knows what's truly important, letting his word guide her tasks rather than letting her tasks overwhelm his word. Martha's doing all the things she assumes are important and hoping God will agree and follow.
You don't have to dig very far into our church, our family relationships, or our professional life before you find Martha-like assumptions guiding us. In all three venues we define success by tasks completed, often forgetting the relationships those tasks are meant to serve.
I was at the store the other day when an employee all but shoved me aside to get their cart full of stuff past and unloaded. Their "important task" was stocking the shelves. That the shelves were there for the sake of the customer rather than the customer for the sake of the shelves escaped them.
If Careen and I get Derek off to school on time, get decent food in the stomach of our kids, and manage to keep them from damaging themselves or each other then we usually define our day as "successful". Those tasks take plenty of time and energy, but are they at the heart of our definition as parents or the relationship we're supposed to have with our children? I can't count the number of times I've asked Derek to clean his room and then realized that I haven't spent any time playing with him and helping him make that mess on the floor. Am I really a good parent because his task is done, because the floor is clean?
Church gets defined by tasks more than any other institution I know. It's simple and keeps unpleasant things like reflection, change, transformation, and conflict at bay. A "good church" has services on time, does worship well, gets enough people to fill in support tasks like cleaning or setting up for services, and never bothers you otherwise. It's easy, sanitary, and we don't even have to think in order to make it work.
You can see Martha's footprints in all these examples. The truth is, nobody had to do any of these things, at least not in the manner and time in which they were done. The "have to's" didn't lead us into importance, they led us away from what was important.
It's so easy to become the busy one, getting stuff done. The immediate rewards are tangible but then end up thinner and cheaper than the rewards gained from letting our tasks be guided by God first. Every task has a follow up. Martha will never be done with her work. The floor will need to be swept again tomorrow. That's how the gravity takes hold and the system perpetuates itself. You never get to be satisfied; you never get to be whole and at peace. But Mary...what she has will never be taken away from her. Peace, wholeness, guidance, and importance are given to her first and then she goes out to pursue the tasks of her day. That makes all the difference in the world.
--Pastor Dave (pastordave@geneseelutheranparish.org)
38 As Jesus and his disciples were on their way, he came to a village where a woman named Martha opened her home to him. 39 She had a sister called Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet listening to what he said. 40 But Martha was distracted by all the preparations that had to be made. She came to him and asked, “Lord, don’t you care that my sister has left me to do the work by myself? Tell her to help me!”
41 “Martha, Martha,” the Lord answered, “you are worried and upset about many things, 42 but few things are needed—or indeed only one. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her.”Here we have the story of two sisters. Martha spent all her time in Jesus' presence bustling and preparing the house. Mary spent her time at Jesus' feet, listening. When Martha objects--getting a wee bit passive-aggressive and needling her sister to get her rear in gear and help--Jesus affirms Mary's contemplation over Martha's hurry.
The moral of this story isn't that sitting around is better than running around. Rather it's a matter of priority: what comes first.
Most of us define our lives--or let our lives get defined for us--by the series of tasks we have to do today. "Have" should be in quotes there. For most of us the true "haves" accumulate their own set of sub-tasks which themselves carry further assumptions about more things we "have" to do. We start out with one or two "have to's" which leads logically to three more. If we're going to be good at those we also need to do X, Y, and Z. Each of those has six more parts to them. Voila! Our schedule is filled for the next six months and really we only set out to do a couple of things!
The whole system mushes together, developing a gravity from which we find it difficult to escape. The bigger and more important that system feels, the more gravity it attains and the more "important" it seems. In turn we feel more important for being a part of such a big and weighty system. That's how we draw our identity, defining ourselves by being enslaved to a huge, important set of things.
Can you picture Martha here? "Jesus is here at MY house! What a big deal this is! Think how much this says about me and my home, my identity, the importance of my work! Ohmygosh I must dust and sweep and prepare a meal and wash and iron and..."
If we're people of faith we'll also let God into our busy lives. Perhaps we'll find a few minutes for a prayer or devotion. Or we'll just pray, "God be with me today!" Both are good impulses but neither are sufficient. The first is like Martha saying, "Whew! OK, I'm going to spend a couple minutes with you Jesus before I get back to work!" The second reads, "Hey Jesus, why don't you grab a broom and help me here?"
There's nothing wrong with Martha's work. Jesus isn't praising Mary because she's not working, nor suggesting that sitting is superior. Jesus is reminding us of our priorities. Namely, "How do you know what you're supposed to be doing today if you haven't asked God about it first?"
We assume the "have to's" in our lives as givens, God time as a special luxury. Our daily tasks are the broccoli and nutritionally-balanced wheat bread that sustain us while our devotions and prayers are like a little chocolate delight at the end of the day. That's backwards. God is our sustenance and life. The fact that we also get to do occasionally-important things in his name is our treat and delight.
Mary's not going to sit at that couch forever. She's listening to God so she knows what's truly important, letting his word guide her tasks rather than letting her tasks overwhelm his word. Martha's doing all the things she assumes are important and hoping God will agree and follow.
You don't have to dig very far into our church, our family relationships, or our professional life before you find Martha-like assumptions guiding us. In all three venues we define success by tasks completed, often forgetting the relationships those tasks are meant to serve.
I was at the store the other day when an employee all but shoved me aside to get their cart full of stuff past and unloaded. Their "important task" was stocking the shelves. That the shelves were there for the sake of the customer rather than the customer for the sake of the shelves escaped them.
If Careen and I get Derek off to school on time, get decent food in the stomach of our kids, and manage to keep them from damaging themselves or each other then we usually define our day as "successful". Those tasks take plenty of time and energy, but are they at the heart of our definition as parents or the relationship we're supposed to have with our children? I can't count the number of times I've asked Derek to clean his room and then realized that I haven't spent any time playing with him and helping him make that mess on the floor. Am I really a good parent because his task is done, because the floor is clean?
Church gets defined by tasks more than any other institution I know. It's simple and keeps unpleasant things like reflection, change, transformation, and conflict at bay. A "good church" has services on time, does worship well, gets enough people to fill in support tasks like cleaning or setting up for services, and never bothers you otherwise. It's easy, sanitary, and we don't even have to think in order to make it work.
You can see Martha's footprints in all these examples. The truth is, nobody had to do any of these things, at least not in the manner and time in which they were done. The "have to's" didn't lead us into importance, they led us away from what was important.
It's so easy to become the busy one, getting stuff done. The immediate rewards are tangible but then end up thinner and cheaper than the rewards gained from letting our tasks be guided by God first. Every task has a follow up. Martha will never be done with her work. The floor will need to be swept again tomorrow. That's how the gravity takes hold and the system perpetuates itself. You never get to be satisfied; you never get to be whole and at peace. But Mary...what she has will never be taken away from her. Peace, wholeness, guidance, and importance are given to her first and then she goes out to pursue the tasks of her day. That makes all the difference in the world.
--Pastor Dave (pastordave@geneseelutheranparish.org)
Wednesday, May 15, 2013
Bible Study Reflections: Healing on the Sabbath
We finished our year of Women's Bible Study with a strong May, looking at some of the words and actions of Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew. Among the passages we studied this week: Matthew 12: 9-14.
Then here comes Jesus, who meets a man with a shriveled hand on the Sabbath. The Pharisees, not his biggest fans anyway, think they have him dead to rights. They've heard he's a healer. They ask what he's going to do about this man. If Jesus refuses to help him then Jesus seems small and petty, his power taken away. But if Jesus does help him then Jesus has broken God's Law about working on the Sabbath and therefore reveals himself as unfaithful.
You can almost hear the Pharisees gloating about the dilemma Jesus is in. Except there was no dilemma. Jesus healed the man. End of story. In doing so he invited the people around him to examine not just the letter of the Law, but its purpose.
The Pharisees were using God's Law like a rulebook by which they kept score. The Law was its own purpose, existing for its own sake, defining who was right and wrong. By its strictest letter they behaved right and other people behaved wrong, which is why they liked it.
Jesus gave us a different definition. The Law doesn't exist to separate right people from wrong people. The Law defines compassion and pushes us towards it. It's there so we know how to be kind and good to each other. If we're not showing compassion we're voiding the Law instead of fulfilling it. When Jesus saw the man with the withered hand, he healed it and thus fulfilled the Law. This was true even when the healing happened on the Sabbath, the day of holiness.
The Pharisees had the rulebook memorized but didn't act compassionately, so they broke the Law even when they appeared to fulfill it. Jesus acted compassionately so he fulfilled the Law even when he appeared to break it.
It's easy to flip back to Leviticus, pull out three verses of Law, and say, "This is what God says and I'm right and you're wrong and God's on my side and not on the side of those people who break this law! God's word say it right there!!!" That's cheap, immature, thoughtless, and gravely mistaken theology. Even calling it "theology" is probably a mistake because that word means "study of God" and there's neither study nor much God in that process. It's all about being right, preserving your prerogatives, justifying your judgments. The Law doesn't justify any of us. It shows us where we've fallen short that we might learn to treat each other better. Using it to treat each other worse is the height of irony.
Jesus didn't do this. He didn't treat the Law that way nor did he treat his friends and neighbors that way. Jesus showed the compassion that the Law is supposed to lead us to: healing the sick, feeding the hungry, sticking up for the poor and oppressed and condemned...especially those oppressed and condemned in the name of God's Law.
Unless you're Jewish, the only way you have access to the Law in the first place is through Christ. If it wasn't for Jesus bringing you into God's family you'd just be another non-Jewish person to whom the Law was not given. He makes the Law part of your heritage. He's the only reason you can call the God of the Law your God as well. Therefore the only way we, as Christians, are allowed to interpret the Law is as Christ did...as compassionate healers instead of self-righteous judges.
Every time you're faced with a legal/moral matter and you're tempted to say, "But God said..." you should stop, re-read this passage, and then ask yourself if you're trying to follow the letter of the Law into judgment or whether you're following its Spirit into compassion. Not everything is lawful. Not all things are good. But condemnation and an air of righteousness are not faithful responses to sin. The only truly lawful, truly faithful response to sin is to do as Jesus did, filling the space in question with God's love, compassion, and healing.
--Pastor Dave (pastordave@geneseelutheranparish.org)
9 Going on from that place, he went into their synagogue, 10 and a man with a shriveled hand was there. Looking for a reason to bring charges against Jesus, they asked him, “Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath?”
11 He said to them, “If any of you has a sheep and it falls into a pit on the Sabbath, will you not take hold of it and lift it out? 12 How much more valuable is a person than a sheep! Therefore it is lawful to do good on the Sabbath.”
13 Then he said to the man, “Stretch out your hand.” So he stretched it out and it was completely restored, just as sound as the other. 14 But the Pharisees went out and plotted how they might kill Jesus.These verses tell us everything we need to know about how God views the Law. From the time of Moses these words stood tall: "You shall do no work on the Sabbath." The Pharisees understood this, followed it to the letter. That was God's command.
Then here comes Jesus, who meets a man with a shriveled hand on the Sabbath. The Pharisees, not his biggest fans anyway, think they have him dead to rights. They've heard he's a healer. They ask what he's going to do about this man. If Jesus refuses to help him then Jesus seems small and petty, his power taken away. But if Jesus does help him then Jesus has broken God's Law about working on the Sabbath and therefore reveals himself as unfaithful.
You can almost hear the Pharisees gloating about the dilemma Jesus is in. Except there was no dilemma. Jesus healed the man. End of story. In doing so he invited the people around him to examine not just the letter of the Law, but its purpose.
The Pharisees were using God's Law like a rulebook by which they kept score. The Law was its own purpose, existing for its own sake, defining who was right and wrong. By its strictest letter they behaved right and other people behaved wrong, which is why they liked it.
Jesus gave us a different definition. The Law doesn't exist to separate right people from wrong people. The Law defines compassion and pushes us towards it. It's there so we know how to be kind and good to each other. If we're not showing compassion we're voiding the Law instead of fulfilling it. When Jesus saw the man with the withered hand, he healed it and thus fulfilled the Law. This was true even when the healing happened on the Sabbath, the day of holiness.
The Pharisees had the rulebook memorized but didn't act compassionately, so they broke the Law even when they appeared to fulfill it. Jesus acted compassionately so he fulfilled the Law even when he appeared to break it.
It's easy to flip back to Leviticus, pull out three verses of Law, and say, "This is what God says and I'm right and you're wrong and God's on my side and not on the side of those people who break this law! God's word say it right there!!!" That's cheap, immature, thoughtless, and gravely mistaken theology. Even calling it "theology" is probably a mistake because that word means "study of God" and there's neither study nor much God in that process. It's all about being right, preserving your prerogatives, justifying your judgments. The Law doesn't justify any of us. It shows us where we've fallen short that we might learn to treat each other better. Using it to treat each other worse is the height of irony.
Jesus didn't do this. He didn't treat the Law that way nor did he treat his friends and neighbors that way. Jesus showed the compassion that the Law is supposed to lead us to: healing the sick, feeding the hungry, sticking up for the poor and oppressed and condemned...especially those oppressed and condemned in the name of God's Law.
Unless you're Jewish, the only way you have access to the Law in the first place is through Christ. If it wasn't for Jesus bringing you into God's family you'd just be another non-Jewish person to whom the Law was not given. He makes the Law part of your heritage. He's the only reason you can call the God of the Law your God as well. Therefore the only way we, as Christians, are allowed to interpret the Law is as Christ did...as compassionate healers instead of self-righteous judges.
Every time you're faced with a legal/moral matter and you're tempted to say, "But God said..." you should stop, re-read this passage, and then ask yourself if you're trying to follow the letter of the Law into judgment or whether you're following its Spirit into compassion. Not everything is lawful. Not all things are good. But condemnation and an air of righteousness are not faithful responses to sin. The only truly lawful, truly faithful response to sin is to do as Jesus did, filling the space in question with God's love, compassion, and healing.
--Pastor Dave (pastordave@geneseelutheranparish.org)
Monday, May 6, 2013
Forgiving Sins?
A friend and I were talking the other day and they asked about the order for confession and forgiveness at the beginning of our worship services. We went over several interesting things but the main question revolved around the forgiveness. When I pronounce forgiveness of sins, are people's sins really forgiven?
Folks have a hard time wrestling with this concept. "How can you, Pastor Dave, forgive people's sins? You're just a person, right?"
That's exactly right.
The key point here is that Dave isn't standing up there pronouncing these powerful words and making them come true by his strength, power, and grace. My strength wouldn't suffice. But Pastor Dave stands as a representative of God in that time and place. The words I speak are not my own. I'm simply declaring what God is saying to us all when confronted with our sins.
This explanation doesn't assuage people's worry when they define "Pastor" as a title of authority for its own sake. "So you're a pastor! What right does that give you to say those things?" Again this is correct. Too often "pastor" is just a badge, a self-contained, self-referential position much like a Facebook status. "Pastor" becomes the center of the proceedings. The congregation exists to acknowledge/respect/attend him. That's when we start talking about "rights".
Pastor is supposed to be a position of service. I don't stand up there as the center of worship for my own sake. Rather I stand in service to God and to the people around me. Instead of all the honor and work flowing from the congregation towards me, God's service and gracious gifts flow outward to the congregation. Forgiving sins is not a matter of my personal authority. ("I have the power!") It's a recognition of the need for service. ("We need to hear that our sins are forgiven today so they won't hold sway over us or our worship and so we can stand before God with clean hearts.") Authority is necessary so that you'll understand that God's forgiveness isn't a matter of random chance or personal choice, that he really means it and he intentionally sent someone to tell you about it. But the authority only exists to enable that service.
In other words, the power to say, "Your sins are forgiven" is not about me, it's about the gracious relationship God has with each of us. I stand in awe of, in need of, and under the power of those words every time I speak them just as everybody else does.
Astute observers may notice that I usually change the words of the absolution from what's written in our hymnal. The official text reads:
In my experience, though, leaning that hard on the authority side of the equation brings up the response my friend had--"Who are you to say this?"--more than it assures people who might be wavering. It causes raises doubt than it relieves. That's why I alter the words to:
In any case, describing the process of forgiveness--Christ's grace flowing through the witness in that moment--seems more accurate and faithful than describing an unchanging, non-transferable authority vested in the pastor.
This language change also reminds us that forgiving others isn't just about us, our own feelings, or our rights to hold an offense against another. If the pastor does something solely because of his authority as a pastor then by definition nobody else can do it. But if the pastor does something because he's leading the way in following Christ then by definition everybody else has a responsibility to do it. Our forgiveness begins each week in that central moment with the pronouncement by the pastor but it doesn't end there.
You, too, witness God to the world as you forgive people. You also have to overcome your personal misgivings and imperfections in order to do so. You become the pastor in the world when you engage in this process.
We like to think of forgiveness as a mushy, interpersonal process to which we commit all our feelings and which leaves us feeling completely better when we're done with it. Anyone who's actually had to forgive someone knows that this isn't true.
It's easiest to see this with siblings, I think. Siblings are often close but also tend to wound each other, particularly as they grow older. We usually feel bad when we don't forgive our parents but we're OK resenting brothers and sisters. But eventually the Thanksgiving rolls around when we decide to bury the hatchet. Do we feel warm and fuzzy about doing it? Not usually. Is everything magically better afterwards as we're reunited in a glorious hug-fest followed by a perfect life? No. We forgive them because they're family, because we love them, and because it's the right thing to do. We have to serve something beyond just our feelings in order to make this happen and we do, just like the pastor does on a Sunday morning.
This is also true of forgiving spouses. It's often true when we forgive our children too. When your 3-year-old just spilled permanent ink on your best dress you don't feel like forgiving him...ever. And you're not, really...at least not when judging by your personal feelings. You're going to say, "It's OK" at some point but you're going to be mad at him for a long, long time. You don't forgive because you're you. You forgive because you're mom. That's what moms do. That's where your mom authority comes from...not inside or from your feelings and desires but from following something greater than yourself into a forgiveness you know is necessary for the sake of you and your child both. Again, this echoes the pastor on Sunday morning exactly. Your mom mantle is your version of the pastor's robe. "It's OK" is your version of "In true and faithful witness to the gospel of Christ I therefore declare to you the entire forgiveness of all your sins".
If somebody didn't do this for us boldly and publicly in worship we wouldn't have the pattern, nor feel the authority and ability, to get beyond our own selves and forgive others as God forgives us. This is why the process of forgiveness and the authority behind it are important, not only to our worship lives but to our life period.
--Pastor Dave (pastordave@geneseelutheranparish.org)
Folks have a hard time wrestling with this concept. "How can you, Pastor Dave, forgive people's sins? You're just a person, right?"
That's exactly right.
The key point here is that Dave isn't standing up there pronouncing these powerful words and making them come true by his strength, power, and grace. My strength wouldn't suffice. But Pastor Dave stands as a representative of God in that time and place. The words I speak are not my own. I'm simply declaring what God is saying to us all when confronted with our sins.
This explanation doesn't assuage people's worry when they define "Pastor" as a title of authority for its own sake. "So you're a pastor! What right does that give you to say those things?" Again this is correct. Too often "pastor" is just a badge, a self-contained, self-referential position much like a Facebook status. "Pastor" becomes the center of the proceedings. The congregation exists to acknowledge/respect/attend him. That's when we start talking about "rights".
Pastor is supposed to be a position of service. I don't stand up there as the center of worship for my own sake. Rather I stand in service to God and to the people around me. Instead of all the honor and work flowing from the congregation towards me, God's service and gracious gifts flow outward to the congregation. Forgiving sins is not a matter of my personal authority. ("I have the power!") It's a recognition of the need for service. ("We need to hear that our sins are forgiven today so they won't hold sway over us or our worship and so we can stand before God with clean hearts.") Authority is necessary so that you'll understand that God's forgiveness isn't a matter of random chance or personal choice, that he really means it and he intentionally sent someone to tell you about it. But the authority only exists to enable that service.
In other words, the power to say, "Your sins are forgiven" is not about me, it's about the gracious relationship God has with each of us. I stand in awe of, in need of, and under the power of those words every time I speak them just as everybody else does.
Astute observers may notice that I usually change the words of the absolution from what's written in our hymnal. The official text reads:
As a called and ordained minister of the church of Christ and by his authority I therefore declare to you [the forgiveness of your sins...]Notice how they rested on the authority part. There's nothing inherently incorrect about that. Likely they were thinking, "We really, really, really want people to understand that this is real so we're going to emphasize the authority and power behind this!" Perhaps they were considering folks in the pews who might be wavering about whether their own sins were really forgiven and wanted to leave no doubt.
In my experience, though, leaning that hard on the authority side of the equation brings up the response my friend had--"Who are you to say this?"--more than it assures people who might be wavering. It causes raises doubt than it relieves. That's why I alter the words to:
In true and faithful witness to the Gospel of Christ and by his authority I therefore declare to you...Notice the authority is still there. These words are both true and faithful...as solid as anything you'll find. Both truth and faith are assumed to be higher than any one of us, though. It's not my authority or even the church's. This comes from something bigger than us all: Jesus Christ dying on the cross for us that our sins might be forgiven. Few of us would think to say to Christ, "Who are you to say this?" If we did, he'd just quietly point to the cross and back to himself, then raise an eyebrow at us.
In any case, describing the process of forgiveness--Christ's grace flowing through the witness in that moment--seems more accurate and faithful than describing an unchanging, non-transferable authority vested in the pastor.
This language change also reminds us that forgiving others isn't just about us, our own feelings, or our rights to hold an offense against another. If the pastor does something solely because of his authority as a pastor then by definition nobody else can do it. But if the pastor does something because he's leading the way in following Christ then by definition everybody else has a responsibility to do it. Our forgiveness begins each week in that central moment with the pronouncement by the pastor but it doesn't end there.
You, too, witness God to the world as you forgive people. You also have to overcome your personal misgivings and imperfections in order to do so. You become the pastor in the world when you engage in this process.
We like to think of forgiveness as a mushy, interpersonal process to which we commit all our feelings and which leaves us feeling completely better when we're done with it. Anyone who's actually had to forgive someone knows that this isn't true.
It's easiest to see this with siblings, I think. Siblings are often close but also tend to wound each other, particularly as they grow older. We usually feel bad when we don't forgive our parents but we're OK resenting brothers and sisters. But eventually the Thanksgiving rolls around when we decide to bury the hatchet. Do we feel warm and fuzzy about doing it? Not usually. Is everything magically better afterwards as we're reunited in a glorious hug-fest followed by a perfect life? No. We forgive them because they're family, because we love them, and because it's the right thing to do. We have to serve something beyond just our feelings in order to make this happen and we do, just like the pastor does on a Sunday morning.
This is also true of forgiving spouses. It's often true when we forgive our children too. When your 3-year-old just spilled permanent ink on your best dress you don't feel like forgiving him...ever. And you're not, really...at least not when judging by your personal feelings. You're going to say, "It's OK" at some point but you're going to be mad at him for a long, long time. You don't forgive because you're you. You forgive because you're mom. That's what moms do. That's where your mom authority comes from...not inside or from your feelings and desires but from following something greater than yourself into a forgiveness you know is necessary for the sake of you and your child both. Again, this echoes the pastor on Sunday morning exactly. Your mom mantle is your version of the pastor's robe. "It's OK" is your version of "In true and faithful witness to the gospel of Christ I therefore declare to you the entire forgiveness of all your sins".
If somebody didn't do this for us boldly and publicly in worship we wouldn't have the pattern, nor feel the authority and ability, to get beyond our own selves and forgive others as God forgives us. This is why the process of forgiveness and the authority behind it are important, not only to our worship lives but to our life period.
--Pastor Dave (pastordave@geneseelutheranparish.org)
Friday, May 3, 2013
The Fallacy of Closed Communion
Over the last year I've had several private discussions about the practice of Closed Communion. As you probably know, our church practices Open Communion, meaning that we commune those who come forth to the table. As people experience Closed Communion--the practice of only giving the body and blood of Christ to vetted participants--they tend to ask why. They comment that they were hurt or angered by it. Sometimes they just remark that they're glad we're "nice folks" in our church.
In an effort to answer some questions, ease hearts, and dispel some mistaken impressions we're tackling the subject of Closed Communion today. In this discussion I'm referencing Lutheran churches. Other churches have different communion theologies to which they are held accountable. Some of these things may still apply and you could probably transfer this to some Protestant churches. But it's not kosher to hold Catholics accountable to Lutheran doctrine, for instance. That's a whole different discussion.
Why do some Lutheran churches practice Closed Communion? Instead of answering for them, I simply zipped over to the website of such a church and lifted their explanation. I'm not going to list that site because I don't want to give the impression that I'm railing against that particular congregation. Their explanation pretty much mirrors the standard of Closed Communion churches everywhere. Here's how they explain it.
Let's start at the beginning. What is the assumed relationship between God and his people in this church's statement? Where is God? Who has him? Clearly this church believes that both God and the right knowledge of God lie with them. Their role is first gatekeeper of the altar--determining who is truly worthy to receive and who is not--and then dispenser of Christ.
Already we have an issue. God is with them, not with everybody else. God is localized, reduced to a possession. The bread and wine of communion--the physical elements--become the most integral part of the process. They can be possessed, controlled. God's Word and Spirit, the things that make communion unique and effective, take second place. Word and Spirit follow the bread and wine rather than bread and wine following Word and Spirit as they flow forth. We're backwards. The most important facets of the process get shoved to the side while the least important take center stage. Communion isn't a question of where and how God is working, rather who gets the goodies today and who doesn't.
If God's Spirit were active among those present already, there would be no reason to deny communion to anyone. Therefore reducing Christ to a commodity is a necessary prerequisite to the Closed Communion theology, else what would the chosen ones be gatekeepers of? The God they present is necessarily quite small.
The first question I always ask when I hear someone is practicing Closed Communion is, "Is this the God who broke the ancient boundaries of time and space, transforming life and death in order to save his children? Is this the God for whom temple curtains ripped, graves flew open, skies changed, and earthquakes shook at the moment of salvation?" It sure doesn't seem like it if he's confined back there behind the rail with theological bouncers guarding the access door.
Closed Communion starts with the premise of denying the Spirit's presence and work. From that beginning, anywhere else it goes is going to be wrong.
When confronted with Closed Communion I remember stories of Jesus' ministry among prostitutes, tax collectors, sinners, women at wells--outcasts all--while the chosen church people simmered about it. I rehearse the story of a Samaritan helping out a beaten stranger while priests and Levites passed by uncaring and unwilling to get their hands dirty. I recall how Jesus spoke to those who were so sure they had a superior relationship with God that they denied God could be present in the same way with "lesser" people who knew less and behaved worse. He was not very happy with those people, as I recall. In fact he stood up for all those lesser people and told the superior ones that they had it all wrong.
In Closed Communion the basis for (presumed) superiority lies in the words "believe" and "have faith". If you have taken the right classes and learned the right things, you are capable of correct understanding. "Belief" is defined as holding the right things in your head. Proper education is the difference between believing correctly and not. Thus we read: We take it for granted that a member of our denomination knows how to examine and prepare him/herself for Holy Communion. If you're one of us, you know and do it right. If you're not, you don't.
Just like God was earlier, here faith is reduced to a possession, a commodity. "Have faith" is taken quite literally. You earn it, carry it in your pocket. Your preparation, your work, your examination, your class-taking, your declaration of belief and membership are the righteous and proper works which give you the right stuff that makes you worthy to approach the altar. Those who haven't put in the same work can't be assumed to have the same stuff. Thus their faith is in question and they are denied.
Oddly enough in one of the most famous passages of the Small Catechism, explaining the work of the Holy Spirit, Luther writes:
The words "come to him" in Luther's quote can be taken quite literally as the walk between the pew and the altar rail to receive Our Lord. I cannot walk that aisle on the basis of my own preparation. I cannot walk that aisle on the basis of the reasoning that goes through my head. I cannot walk that aisle on the basis of already having the right "faith stuff" so I'm worthy to approach. If I already have all that's necessary, why do I need to walk that aisle in the first place? I've already got what communion is supposed to offer! Going up on that basis makes the whole thing a show at best, a sham at worst. Yet this is what Closed Communion mandates.
Closed Communion says you have to pass the test before you can come to God. But I can't pass the test unless God has already come to me!
Even a cursory glance at scripture will show you that our own understanding has a small place in this process. The first communion (at the Last Supper) was received by a group of guys who didn't understand what was about to happen at all. The Words of Institution tell us that the sacrament began "on the night of his betrayal". The disciples ate the bread, drank the cup, and then proceeded to abandon Jesus to arrest, denying him multiple times in front of witnesses They failed to defend him in front of the priests or to counter the crowd who yelled, "Crucify him!" Then they watched with helpless tears as Jesus was executed like a criminal.
Despite all that Jesus still gave his body and blood for them on that cross. He rose again as the first fruits of salvation three days later because of a power beyond their understanding. They didn't help the process at all...not with their goodness or their belief or their intentions, certainly not by any of their works. God did it all FOR them when they couldn't do it themselves.
Paul says in Romans 5: 6-8
Imagine you're a mom with a wonderful husband and three wonderful kids. One day you get a phone call. Your husband and children just got killed in an accident on the highway. When you get around to considering your relationship with God after that, how does it feel? What's going on in your heart? What questions are you asking in your head as you approach that altar? You are full of anguish, doubt, remorse, anger...even to the point of being angry at God. Is there any way in heaven or earth that you're ready to walk forward and say, "I believe without a doubt that there is a God," let alone confess that God is good?
In an effort to answer some questions, ease hearts, and dispel some mistaken impressions we're tackling the subject of Closed Communion today. In this discussion I'm referencing Lutheran churches. Other churches have different communion theologies to which they are held accountable. Some of these things may still apply and you could probably transfer this to some Protestant churches. But it's not kosher to hold Catholics accountable to Lutheran doctrine, for instance. That's a whole different discussion.
Why do some Lutheran churches practice Closed Communion? Instead of answering for them, I simply zipped over to the website of such a church and lifted their explanation. I'm not going to list that site because I don't want to give the impression that I'm railing against that particular congregation. Their explanation pretty much mirrors the standard of Closed Communion churches everywhere. Here's how they explain it.
Our practice of Closed Communion is intended to protect the communicant from receiving the Sacrament to his/her damnation. Dr. Martin Luther wrote: “Who receives this sacrament worthily? Fasting and bodily preparation are certainly fine outward training. But that person is truly worthy and well prepared who has faith in these words: ‘Given and shed for you for the forgiveness of sins.’ But anyone who does not believe these words or doubts them is unworthy and unprepared, for the words ‘for you’ require all hearts to believe.” We take it for granted that a communicant member of [our denomination] knows how to examine and prepare him/herself for Holy Communion.Before we dig in to all the things that are wrong with this, they're not making up Luther's quotes here. When speaking of communion Luther did say that those who receive communion believing in Christ eat it to their salvation while those who receive despising Christ receive it to their damnation. We do not deny this statement. We believe it to be true, just not in the self-serving way that leads to Closed Communion making sense.
Let's start at the beginning. What is the assumed relationship between God and his people in this church's statement? Where is God? Who has him? Clearly this church believes that both God and the right knowledge of God lie with them. Their role is first gatekeeper of the altar--determining who is truly worthy to receive and who is not--and then dispenser of Christ.
Already we have an issue. God is with them, not with everybody else. God is localized, reduced to a possession. The bread and wine of communion--the physical elements--become the most integral part of the process. They can be possessed, controlled. God's Word and Spirit, the things that make communion unique and effective, take second place. Word and Spirit follow the bread and wine rather than bread and wine following Word and Spirit as they flow forth. We're backwards. The most important facets of the process get shoved to the side while the least important take center stage. Communion isn't a question of where and how God is working, rather who gets the goodies today and who doesn't.
If God's Spirit were active among those present already, there would be no reason to deny communion to anyone. Therefore reducing Christ to a commodity is a necessary prerequisite to the Closed Communion theology, else what would the chosen ones be gatekeepers of? The God they present is necessarily quite small.
The first question I always ask when I hear someone is practicing Closed Communion is, "Is this the God who broke the ancient boundaries of time and space, transforming life and death in order to save his children? Is this the God for whom temple curtains ripped, graves flew open, skies changed, and earthquakes shook at the moment of salvation?" It sure doesn't seem like it if he's confined back there behind the rail with theological bouncers guarding the access door.
Closed Communion starts with the premise of denying the Spirit's presence and work. From that beginning, anywhere else it goes is going to be wrong.
When confronted with Closed Communion I remember stories of Jesus' ministry among prostitutes, tax collectors, sinners, women at wells--outcasts all--while the chosen church people simmered about it. I rehearse the story of a Samaritan helping out a beaten stranger while priests and Levites passed by uncaring and unwilling to get their hands dirty. I recall how Jesus spoke to those who were so sure they had a superior relationship with God that they denied God could be present in the same way with "lesser" people who knew less and behaved worse. He was not very happy with those people, as I recall. In fact he stood up for all those lesser people and told the superior ones that they had it all wrong.
In Closed Communion the basis for (presumed) superiority lies in the words "believe" and "have faith". If you have taken the right classes and learned the right things, you are capable of correct understanding. "Belief" is defined as holding the right things in your head. Proper education is the difference between believing correctly and not. Thus we read: We take it for granted that a member of our denomination knows how to examine and prepare him/herself for Holy Communion. If you're one of us, you know and do it right. If you're not, you don't.
Just like God was earlier, here faith is reduced to a possession, a commodity. "Have faith" is taken quite literally. You earn it, carry it in your pocket. Your preparation, your work, your examination, your class-taking, your declaration of belief and membership are the righteous and proper works which give you the right stuff that makes you worthy to approach the altar. Those who haven't put in the same work can't be assumed to have the same stuff. Thus their faith is in question and they are denied.
Oddly enough in one of the most famous passages of the Small Catechism, explaining the work of the Holy Spirit, Luther writes:
I cannot by my own reason or strength believe in Jesus Christ, my Lord, or come to Him; but the Holy Spirit has called me by the Gospel, enlightened me with His gifts, sanctified and kept me in the true faithI cannot by my own reason or strength believe in Jesus Christ my Lord, OR come to Him! No matter how many classes I take, how many words I confess, how much examination I do, or how much I prepare myself, I cannot make belief happen. Both belief and faith are gifts from God. They depend on God's work, not my own. Belief is not knowing the right things. Faith is not carried in your pocket or pinned on like a badge. Belief and faith flow from a living relationship with God in which he gives and we receive.
The words "come to him" in Luther's quote can be taken quite literally as the walk between the pew and the altar rail to receive Our Lord. I cannot walk that aisle on the basis of my own preparation. I cannot walk that aisle on the basis of the reasoning that goes through my head. I cannot walk that aisle on the basis of already having the right "faith stuff" so I'm worthy to approach. If I already have all that's necessary, why do I need to walk that aisle in the first place? I've already got what communion is supposed to offer! Going up on that basis makes the whole thing a show at best, a sham at worst. Yet this is what Closed Communion mandates.
Closed Communion says you have to pass the test before you can come to God. But I can't pass the test unless God has already come to me!
Even a cursory glance at scripture will show you that our own understanding has a small place in this process. The first communion (at the Last Supper) was received by a group of guys who didn't understand what was about to happen at all. The Words of Institution tell us that the sacrament began "on the night of his betrayal". The disciples ate the bread, drank the cup, and then proceeded to abandon Jesus to arrest, denying him multiple times in front of witnesses They failed to defend him in front of the priests or to counter the crowd who yelled, "Crucify him!" Then they watched with helpless tears as Jesus was executed like a criminal.
Despite all that Jesus still gave his body and blood for them on that cross. He rose again as the first fruits of salvation three days later because of a power beyond their understanding. They didn't help the process at all...not with their goodness or their belief or their intentions, certainly not by any of their works. God did it all FOR them when they couldn't do it themselves.
Paul says in Romans 5: 6-8
6 For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. 7 For one will scarcely die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die— 8 but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
For the ungodly Christ died. Not for the most righteous nor for the best nor for the ones who knew the most. Christ gave himself up for those who needed him most.
It's ironic, then, that the tenets of Closed Communion deny Christ to the people who need him most today.
Imagine you're a mom with a wonderful husband and three wonderful kids. One day you get a phone call. Your husband and children just got killed in an accident on the highway. When you get around to considering your relationship with God after that, how does it feel? What's going on in your heart? What questions are you asking in your head as you approach that altar? You are full of anguish, doubt, remorse, anger...even to the point of being angry at God. Is there any way in heaven or earth that you're ready to walk forward and say, "I believe without a doubt that there is a God," let alone confess that God is good?
What if you're mentally disabled? What if you have a stroke? How about Alzheimer's? What if you were sexually abused all throughout your childhood? What if you just got diagnosed with cancer? What's going through your head then as you come to communion?
We need God most among the lowest moments and greatest injuries in our lives. Yet these same things make it impossible for us to do the work, speak with the surety of belief, and approach the altar with the certainty that Closed Communion requires. Properly, then, we should be denied and asked to come back when our faith is stronger and our heads are back on straight again.
As a side note, almost every pastor of a Closed Communion church would say, "There's no way I'd deny communion to a person in that condition!" This should tell you something. Even they know that they can't follow through with their standard. That means this isn't really about theology. What they're really doing is deciding whose trauma and suffering are great enough and whose don't clear the bar. The standard they're falling back on in the absence of "special consultation" is whether a person is a member of their church. Nobody else's suffering and need are assumed to be valid enough to merit an exception.
Luther describes one of the main benefits of communion as forgiveness of sins. Why, then, is communion limited to the people who presumably sin the least? A friend once asked what would happen if an atheist alcoholic came up to receive, the assumption being that they don't belong. But who needs Christ more? Consider the story of the meal in Matthew, Chapter 9:
10 As Jesus reclined at table in the house many tax collectors and sinners came and were reclining with Jesus and his disciples. 11 And when the Pharisees saw this, they said to his disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?” 12 But when he heard it, he said, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. 13 Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, and not sacrifice.’ For I came not to call the righteous, but sinners.”
Are we to somehow believe that when we get to the most important meal of all, Jesus changes his mind and makes it about your worthiness instead of his mercy? Suddenly those who are most well benefit while those most in need have to hang back? Once again we have to flip everything backwards if we are to believe in Closed Communion.
This is why it's important that when you see the words "faith" and "belief" you think first of trust. Trust is not internal, but part of a relationship. Trust is not a matter of control but surrender. You don't have to think the right thing first in order to trust. Trust is what you fall back on when you know you can't think the right thing or make the situation right. Therefore we read Luther's quote as, "But that person is truly worthy and well prepared who trusts in these words: ‘Given and shed for you for the forgiveness of sins.’"
Now consider: How does one express trust? It's not by filling out a card with check marks or making some kind of prescribed confession. It doesn't happen in a class or at admission to membership. All of those things deny the need for trust. In each of those acts you're saying, "Hey...I got this! I got it right!" Where does the trust part come in?
You show trust by approaching the altar and lifting your hands out. That's the only thing that makes you worthy to receive.
By approaching you're not saying you have it right. You're not saying you understand God. You're not saying you're perfect or free from sin. You're not saying you're better prepared than the person sitting next to you. In fact you may not get it at all! You may not have even thought about God until today. Maybe you spent your whole life running away, denying him, doing wrong stuff. By coming forward and lifting out our hands you and me and that dear old saintly lady who's been part of this church for 100 years are all saying the same thing, on the same ground, with the same motion:
"I don't understand, Lord. I can't contain you in my head or codify you in a set of beliefs. I can't convince myself that you're there all the time, or sometimes that you even exist. I can't always feel your presence. I don't always see my part in your plan. I don't do right. I've failed you often. I'm not worthy of you and I really, really don't get why you still love me so much. But I trust that you do, even though I don't understand all this. I trust that you're going to fill in what I need. I'm going to put my hands out now. I hope you'll be there."
And God replies, "Yeah, I'm here. Always."
And that's what "The Body of Christ, given for you" means.
-------
I shouldn't have to say much more than that but Closed Communion folks are going to say, "What about the damnation? Luther spoke about the damnation and you just ignored it!" So bear with me through one more thought.
Closed Communion folks say, "Our practice of Closed Communion is intended to protect the communicant from receiving the Sacrament to his/her damnation.". It's as if that bread and wine were poison if you touch it while thinking wrongly. The chalice needs a big "Mr. Yuk" sticker on it warning people of the danger. That would be crass, so Mr. Yuk is embodied by the pastor and the church rules on communion.
On a common sense level the idea that we need protection from God should strike you as odd. It's a strange way to conduct church, especially in the face of the resurrected Christ. Also, why in the world would God just leave poison sitting up there on the altar when people might accidentally eat it and get damned? It seems a little irresponsible, especially since the people who are supposedly benefiting from it don't actually get that much benefit. They already did all the righteous work in the classes and in their heads, believing the right things and getting faith and such. Communion itself is just a pat on the back for them, the diploma at their faith graduation ceremony. The upside of them taking it rightly is far less than the downside of the rest of us taking it wrongly.
Here's an even better question: The way Closed Communion folks construct their theology, isn't a person who doesn't believe in God correctly damned anyway? Are people going to believe wrongly their whole lives then get to Judgement Day only to hear God say, "You totally messed up...but did you take communion?"
"Nope! Never!"
"Whew! You can come in, then! If you had eaten that bread, though, you'd have been damned!"
If the wrong thinkers are going to be damned anyway, what harm in letting them receive the sacrament? What worse will happen?
There are only two ways keeping people from the sacrament Would make sense:
1. If you'd somehow be damned sooner, the instant you received. But their gate-keeping process can't be perfect and I don't see many people keeling over dead at the altar or the floor opening up and swallowing them into the depths as soon as they receive the bread and wine.
2. If you'd be damned irrevocably in a way that could never be undone. I'd hope that few, if any, Closed Communion folks would claim that. Not only does it put way too much weight on this one act, it's also really problematic for the pastor in charge to be making those decisions. Forget the communion card, they better have a final exam before every service. Plus anybody who messed up even once should be kicked out as beyond redemption. (P.S. Claiming this kind of power is one of the things that made Luther really mad at his church leaders.)
If neither of these things are true then the risk of giving an unworthy person communion is far less than the risk of denying a worthy person. You're not harming the unworthy person any more than they're already harmed or in any way that can't be corrected as they come into a better relationship with God. You could be harming the people who need that relationship can't get it because you keep them out.
As you can see, Closed Communion makes little sense even according to its own theology. Fortunately we don't have to deal with those silly questions because Luther's declaration about damnation is properly understood as part of the sacramental cycle of life, death, and resurrection.
When we are baptized our old, sinful selves drown in the water and we are raised to new life. Baptism embodies death and life, an ending and a new beginning. This is why we reference it not only during a baptismal service, but at funerals where the final death has occurred and new life awaits.
This cycle is echoed in communion. Even as we come forward and reach our hands out in trust, part of us doesn't understand and doesn't want to depend on God. It's the same part of us that ultimately doesn't want to die because it considers the self the center of everything. That part fears the sacrament--particularly the dying part--and fights against our trust.
We don't bring shiny, unstained hearts to the altar rail. We bring fear, doubt, selfishness, sin. We are powerless to rid ourselves of these things, which again is why our part of the communion relationship is trust and not perfection.
As we receive Our Lord in communion our fearful, mistrusting, selfish selves are crucified with Jesus. This is why we say he took all of our sins upon him on the cross. No matter how that self-centered, sinful part of us tries to escape the looming cross it's done away with despite its protestations (and ours). Communion does not leave us unchanged. We die and are raised anew, transformed by Christ despite our wishes and wills.
Luther is precisely correct. Those who eat unworthily eat to their damnation. And we all eat unworthily. Our old selves perish into nothingness at that altar rail. We kneel down and are dealt the blow which we most fear. Then our new selves rise up again and go out into the world to do God's work.
When Closed Communion folks claim to protect us from God, they're literally doing what they say: keeping us apart from him and everything he has planned for us. By trying to stop death at the altar rail they also stop the new life.
In order to justify these actions they can't feel that they die or are in any way damned when they come to the altar. That's why participation in the sacrament depends on your preparation and perfection, not on God's intention to work terrifying and glorious salvation in (and despite) you. Closed Communion ends up being another of humanity's old and tiresome attempts to avoid dying by finding away around the cross through one's own works...grasping at God and life eternal without suffering and dying...getting to the garden by climbing over the fence instead of walking through the gate. Anyone who's ever had a sniff of Luther will understand how anti-Lutheran that is.
So you see, our policy of Open Communion has nothing to do with us being "nice" or "tolerant" or "more accepting". It's because Closed Communion is a bald denial of the Christ who comes through the sacrament. And yes, you should feel hurt and angered when you experience the rejection that comes along with Closed Communion. It's not just a personal hurt, like somebody said you're not good enough. That's part of it to be sure, but none of us are good enough and we can admit that. The deeper wound comes from people telling a deep, intolerable lie about God, reducing him to a puppet, injuring others in his name, robbing the sacrament of its power and meaning, and denying the Good News of his overflowing grace to those who desperately need it.
In Matthew 16, Peter confessed Jesus as the Son of God. Jesus praised him and told him that upon this rock he would build his church. Then Jesus began to explain that being the Messiah meant suffering at the hands of the priests and scribes, dying, and rising again. Peter responded to him, "Far be it from you, Lord! This shall never happen to you!" In Peter's protest you can hear every argument Closed Communion has to offer. "Why would you need to die, Lord? You need not give yourself up to the unworthy, nor be touched by anyone unclean! You have us! Stay alive and rule with your good and faithful disciples! We'll keep all those other people away."
And Jesus responded, "Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me. For you are not setting your mind on the things of God, but on human things."
Amen.
Amen.
--Pastor Dave (pastordave@geneseelutheranparish.org)
Wednesday, April 24, 2013
"My Church" Part 2: Practical Applications
In our last post we discussed the phrase "My Church". We talked about the proper definition: "The community in which God's mission for me is revealed and lived out." We also talked about other definitions that creep in to our detriment: "Place where I'm comfortable, where people agree with me, where I've always been" or "place that I own and have control of because of my special contributions". Today we're going to look at practical ways to avoid the bad definitions of "my church" and encourage the good.
The first and easiest step to avoid bad definitions of church ownership is to stop thinking of church in a physical sense. The more you define church as a "place where" the more you get bound up in buildings and property and physical elements. Physical things are always owned in our society, usually exclusively. You own the rights to your property, the air space above it, the mineral rights beneath it...top to bottom it's yours. If you think of church like more property you will inevitably come to think that you possess it. You'll also feel threatened and frustrated when someone else evidences any sign of ownership...like moving that flower vase you set out or leaving crumbs on your floor.
Church is a living web of relationships between God and his people to which we're all connected. A spider web can't stand if there's only one string. It'll just blow away in the wind. Each strand is distinct from the next but all the strands rely upon each other to make a cohesive whole. My relationship with God supports your relationship with God and vice versa. Church forms the center connecting point of that web, the place where we're closest together. It's comprised of all of us without being owned by any of us. Relationships can't be possessed in the same way that physical things can.
The church does have physical elements, of course. But those physical things are there to serve the relationships, not vice versa. This is where the "old school" perception of church gets backwards. Once upon a time people assumed we were all there to serve the church, particularly the building. Keeping up appearances and getting the color of the carpet right were BIG DEALS. In reality the building only exists because it's hard to gather and worship when you're getting snowed on. The carpet's there to keep our feet cushy. Tables and pictures and kitchen utensils are meant to be moved based on the needs of the ministry. None of them matter as entities unto themselves. Their use determines their value. "Owning" them (in the sense of freezing them in place) destroys them.
Another handy tip to avoid the bad connotations of ownership: Ask how many times you hear "YES" in your church. Churches that are owned in the bad way hear the constant refrain of "NO". No, we can't do that. No, don't touch those. No, we do it this way here. No, things will fall apart if we try. No, nobody cares about that. No, we need to do this instead. Churches that live out mission resound with "YES". Yes, let's try it! Yes, that could be valuable. Yes, go ahead and move those around. Yes, your voice matters to us. Yes, you have something to contribute!
Churches that do this well don't even need to hear that many "Yes" answers. People just go ahead and do! Decisions aren't regulated by a bureaucracy or a small cadre of insiders whose approval you need (and seldom get). Decisions are made at the ground level by the people actually doing the work. Everybody else learns, celebrates, and follows. The church gets bigger every time a different person leads us in a new direction. People experiencing the good kind of ownership are not only free, but eager, to take us on those journeys.
Beware of phrases like "good member". Beware of the instinct to introduce yourself by sharing how long you've been a member. In fact have a healthy suspicion of the concept of membership in general. Dividing people is a covert way to establish (bad) ownership. Watch how you create "us" and "them" groups in your church. Tenure, gender, age, ethnicity, background, economic status, profession, political persuasion, beliefs...any criterion you use to separate out others makes you the owner by default.
Pay attention to your response when you disagree with something that people say or do, when you get annoyed or offended. The bad, fearful sense of ownership makes you insist upon your own way and sends you scrambling to justify all the reasons you should get it. "I've been here longer, invested more, understood God's teachings the right way!" The good sense of ownership simply acknowledges that you're walking on a different portion of the web than somebody else seems to be. But unless your string is anchored to a point on the other side of center the web's going to fall apart. Besides, there's plenty of room in the middle to gather together anyway.
Gauge how you feel when something changes. Huge changes require discussion and thought. But a different hymn every once in a while, switching liturgies every now and then, the tables moving in the fellowship hall, a fork placed in the "wrong" drawer, or somebody else sitting in "your" pew? Those won't rattle you unless you're assuming that the church is yours and not anybody else's.
During the synod assembly I attended a workshop on stewardship. We explored the definition of the word "steward". Originally the steward took care of the kingdom in the king's name without owning the kingdom himself. Nowadays nobody wants to be a steward because everybody thinks they're a king. The modern world allows us to draw our life circles so small that we've lost our sense of interdependence and thus the need to communicate with anyone outside of our personal kingdom. God's Kingdom is infinite, eternal, and beyond the control of any of us. Nobody can contain or own it. The church is supposed to be the reflection of that Kingdom on earth. It ceases to be that the moment it's owned by anyone, trading in its eternal significance for cheap control, agreement, ease, and compromise with sin and culture. That's not a good trade.
In the end, the most faithful measure of the quality of your ownership is the feeling you get when you hear the phrase "my church". Does your heart fill with love, gratitude, and excitement when you utter those words or does it evoke fear and territorial instincts? One way will leave you feeling that other people are always messing up your church. The other understands that your church can't be messed up, that each new pathway only leads you to a more comprehensive expression of God's love.
--Pastor Dave (pastordave@geneseelutheranparish.org)
Monday, April 22, 2013
What Does "This is My Church" Mean?
This week I want to address faith issues common to (affecting, afflicting?) every level of the church, things embedded so deeply in our instinct or unconscious that we forget to examine them.
The first of these issues: I hear people say, "[Church X] is my church" all the time. Most of them insert the name of their local parish but it's also used to describe Lutheran, Christian, what have you. I wonder what we mean when we say, "The Genesee Lutheran Parish is my church" or "The ELCA is my church body"?
It seems to me there are two senses to "my church", the common and the theologically correct. As you may guess, these don't line up well together.
Most people view the words "my church" through cultural lenses. Church is "theirs" because they've gone to the church forever or because they're comfortable there or because the church espouses a philosophy they agree with. "My church" means "church matches up with me".
The theological shortcoming here is obvious. Church is meant to shape and transform us. To deny this is to assume we're perfect, the Big Biblical No-No. We are meant to transform our church as well, but transformation isn't inherent in these particular "my church" stances. If church is "mine" just because I've gone here forever it no longer feels as much mine when something changes. If church is "mine" because I'm comfortable here I become detached and angry when pushed beyond my comfort zone. If church is "mine" because I agree with its philosophy I feel disenfranchised when that philosophy evolves. In this framework the church becomes less "ours" every time something moves. Over time we become less concerned with discovery, vibrancy, spiritual growth and more concerned with power, prerogatives, keeping things the way they are. Not failing becomes more important than succeeding. Not dying becomes more important than living. Fear replaces courage and we get triggered into fight or flight mode every time something doesn't go our way.
Sometimes this dynamic gets wrapped up with "ownership" in the economic sense. Our society tells us that we have power over that which we own, paid for at the time of purchase, exclusive to us over and above anybody else. If I buy a truck I get to choose where and how to drive it. You don't get to because you didn't pay for it. It's not your truck! Nor can it be your truck as long as it is mine. I might let you borrow it if I'm not using it at the moment. I might sell it to you slightly used someday. But we can't co-own or else the whole idea of paying for it in the first place becomes silly. How many people drop 50 grand on a new pickup then walk over to their neighbor's house and say, "I want your name on the title and you don't have to pay anything"?
Few of us are crass enough to think we own a church outright (or at least we wouldn't admit it in public). It is God's house, after all. But the phrase "my church" is often a clue that people think their contributions--money, time, energy--have purchased a place on the title alongside God's. It's not written on paper. It's maintained by keeping tight control over decision-making processes, preemptively vetoing anything that goes against the grain (a.k.a. "tradition"), threatening to walk out and cease support--thus bringing the church down--if things go awry. It's a clever, and perfectly understandable, way to keep things the same...comfortable...agreeable.
Every time you hear the phrase "That person is a 'Good Member'" your ears should prick up. The most likely translation is, "That person is part of the group that thinks they have ownership of the church based on their various contributions." Just like the truck title, there no room for others no matter what their contributions. This item has been bought and paid for.
Between the not moving, not growing, not exploring, not tolerating anything different, treating God like a commodity, narrowing real membership to a select and unimpeachable few, and horribly mangling the definition of "good", this definition of "my church" gets ugly really fast. You'd think people would be up in arms about it. That doesn't happen as often as it should. This kind of ownership has the side benefit of few things going wrong, few people arguing, few uncomfortable moments, and the assurance that somebody will always support the church and keep it running so it'll never die. To a society pressed for time and money that favors a peaceful church experience that doesn't require more than an hour a week, the trade-off is worth it.
Judging by outward appearance and convenience, the churches owned in the worst ways seem to be functioning the best.
The correct theological definition of "my church" takes more time, thought, explanation. The first hurdle is overcoming cultural bias. How do you explain to somebody in 21st century America that it's good to invest your money, time, energy, and life into something that you do not then control? In a society obsessed with biggest return for least investment and risk, how do you convince folks to devote everything to a community that only functions well when it's in a constant state of trial, discovery, failure, and renewal? How do you keep a straight face when telling someone that the sign of a great church is that you don't always agree with it, that you are forced to go beyond any boundary you thought you had in service to people who will give you no tangible reward...even people whose views you might despise?
Here's what "my church" is supposed to mean. "My church" means "the community in which God's mission for me is revealed and lived out".
Notice that this is just as personal and intimate as the other definition...more so, in fact. The "for me" is still in there. My mission will look different than everybody else's. I bring something distinct, important, irreplaceable to this gathering, for God shows something unique through me. It isn't a church where I do some thing. The mission, the call, and the interactions which stem from them are peculiar to me. The experience isn't interchangeable. Thus I call the church "mine".
Through church I hear God's Word given for me. In church I receive God's body and blood shed for me. From fellow participants I receive encouragement to live out the life God has prepared for me. Among them I get to reflect on the triumphs and challenges I experience along the way. The personalized "me" is all over the joint!
But that personal, intimate connection between God, me, and my neighbor doesn't convey any of the control of the prior definition. Nor does it carry the same baggage. Power isn't conveyed by length of tenure or size of monetary contribution. My own comfort and agreement aren't prerequisites to the experience. Half the time they get in the way as God calls me beyond myself and my old limits. Most importantly, my sense of ownership and connection don't prevent anyone else from having the same ownership and connection in their own way. My church is also your church, always and totally.
I expect that God's mission for you will look different than mine and will lead this community to different places than mine will. I commit to affirming you in your mission even as you strengthen me in mine. Together we make the church bigger, expanding its borders into new individual frontiers while maintaining the fullness of the communal connection. Growth and change don't trigger fights and flights, rather new reasons to celebrate. If I have to sing a new hymn or take out the garbage an extra time a week to make that happen, hey...that's just more of God's mission, right?
Every church, every level of church, should stop for a moment and re-examine the assumptions under which they're operating when they make the claim, "This is my church". It doesn't take long for outsiders and people in need to figure out which definition of ownership you're operating under. It shows up in the welcome, in the variety of interactions, in expressions of celebration and grief, in the practices of leadership, and even in that sixth-sense, spiritual feeling you get when you walk among a people. You may think you're hiding ownership skeletons in your closet. In reality you might as well hang them right up above the altar on the cross in place of Jesus, because people perceive them just that clearly. The only folks who can't see them are the ones who have long since become used to them and accepted them in place of the true work of the Spirit.
Once upon a time folks might have accepted that kind of church, eager to put on appearances and be perceived as one of the good people. The cardinal rule nowadays is simple: nobody respects disingenuous motives and nobody wants to expend that much energy playing pretend...at least not about spirituality. When people talk about the "dying church" they're not talking about the death of the Spirit, nor of God's work. They're talking about the long, slow death of the "owned" church, the kind of foolishness and blindness that nobody sees a reason to put up with anymore.
I don't know about you, but I find that a good thing. It's a warning to those who would preserve their own power but it's also a promise that God's true mission will prevail no matter what else we try to substitute for it.
Next Up: Practical applications for church life!
--Pastor Dave (pastordave@geneseelutheranparish.org)
The first of these issues: I hear people say, "[Church X] is my church" all the time. Most of them insert the name of their local parish but it's also used to describe Lutheran, Christian, what have you. I wonder what we mean when we say, "The Genesee Lutheran Parish is my church" or "The ELCA is my church body"?
It seems to me there are two senses to "my church", the common and the theologically correct. As you may guess, these don't line up well together.
Most people view the words "my church" through cultural lenses. Church is "theirs" because they've gone to the church forever or because they're comfortable there or because the church espouses a philosophy they agree with. "My church" means "church matches up with me".
The theological shortcoming here is obvious. Church is meant to shape and transform us. To deny this is to assume we're perfect, the Big Biblical No-No. We are meant to transform our church as well, but transformation isn't inherent in these particular "my church" stances. If church is "mine" just because I've gone here forever it no longer feels as much mine when something changes. If church is "mine" because I'm comfortable here I become detached and angry when pushed beyond my comfort zone. If church is "mine" because I agree with its philosophy I feel disenfranchised when that philosophy evolves. In this framework the church becomes less "ours" every time something moves. Over time we become less concerned with discovery, vibrancy, spiritual growth and more concerned with power, prerogatives, keeping things the way they are. Not failing becomes more important than succeeding. Not dying becomes more important than living. Fear replaces courage and we get triggered into fight or flight mode every time something doesn't go our way.
Sometimes this dynamic gets wrapped up with "ownership" in the economic sense. Our society tells us that we have power over that which we own, paid for at the time of purchase, exclusive to us over and above anybody else. If I buy a truck I get to choose where and how to drive it. You don't get to because you didn't pay for it. It's not your truck! Nor can it be your truck as long as it is mine. I might let you borrow it if I'm not using it at the moment. I might sell it to you slightly used someday. But we can't co-own or else the whole idea of paying for it in the first place becomes silly. How many people drop 50 grand on a new pickup then walk over to their neighbor's house and say, "I want your name on the title and you don't have to pay anything"?
Few of us are crass enough to think we own a church outright (or at least we wouldn't admit it in public). It is God's house, after all. But the phrase "my church" is often a clue that people think their contributions--money, time, energy--have purchased a place on the title alongside God's. It's not written on paper. It's maintained by keeping tight control over decision-making processes, preemptively vetoing anything that goes against the grain (a.k.a. "tradition"), threatening to walk out and cease support--thus bringing the church down--if things go awry. It's a clever, and perfectly understandable, way to keep things the same...comfortable...agreeable.
Every time you hear the phrase "That person is a 'Good Member'" your ears should prick up. The most likely translation is, "That person is part of the group that thinks they have ownership of the church based on their various contributions." Just like the truck title, there no room for others no matter what their contributions. This item has been bought and paid for.
Between the not moving, not growing, not exploring, not tolerating anything different, treating God like a commodity, narrowing real membership to a select and unimpeachable few, and horribly mangling the definition of "good", this definition of "my church" gets ugly really fast. You'd think people would be up in arms about it. That doesn't happen as often as it should. This kind of ownership has the side benefit of few things going wrong, few people arguing, few uncomfortable moments, and the assurance that somebody will always support the church and keep it running so it'll never die. To a society pressed for time and money that favors a peaceful church experience that doesn't require more than an hour a week, the trade-off is worth it.
Judging by outward appearance and convenience, the churches owned in the worst ways seem to be functioning the best.
The correct theological definition of "my church" takes more time, thought, explanation. The first hurdle is overcoming cultural bias. How do you explain to somebody in 21st century America that it's good to invest your money, time, energy, and life into something that you do not then control? In a society obsessed with biggest return for least investment and risk, how do you convince folks to devote everything to a community that only functions well when it's in a constant state of trial, discovery, failure, and renewal? How do you keep a straight face when telling someone that the sign of a great church is that you don't always agree with it, that you are forced to go beyond any boundary you thought you had in service to people who will give you no tangible reward...even people whose views you might despise?
Here's what "my church" is supposed to mean. "My church" means "the community in which God's mission for me is revealed and lived out".
Notice that this is just as personal and intimate as the other definition...more so, in fact. The "for me" is still in there. My mission will look different than everybody else's. I bring something distinct, important, irreplaceable to this gathering, for God shows something unique through me. It isn't a church where I do some thing. The mission, the call, and the interactions which stem from them are peculiar to me. The experience isn't interchangeable. Thus I call the church "mine".
Through church I hear God's Word given for me. In church I receive God's body and blood shed for me. From fellow participants I receive encouragement to live out the life God has prepared for me. Among them I get to reflect on the triumphs and challenges I experience along the way. The personalized "me" is all over the joint!
But that personal, intimate connection between God, me, and my neighbor doesn't convey any of the control of the prior definition. Nor does it carry the same baggage. Power isn't conveyed by length of tenure or size of monetary contribution. My own comfort and agreement aren't prerequisites to the experience. Half the time they get in the way as God calls me beyond myself and my old limits. Most importantly, my sense of ownership and connection don't prevent anyone else from having the same ownership and connection in their own way. My church is also your church, always and totally.
I expect that God's mission for you will look different than mine and will lead this community to different places than mine will. I commit to affirming you in your mission even as you strengthen me in mine. Together we make the church bigger, expanding its borders into new individual frontiers while maintaining the fullness of the communal connection. Growth and change don't trigger fights and flights, rather new reasons to celebrate. If I have to sing a new hymn or take out the garbage an extra time a week to make that happen, hey...that's just more of God's mission, right?
Every church, every level of church, should stop for a moment and re-examine the assumptions under which they're operating when they make the claim, "This is my church". It doesn't take long for outsiders and people in need to figure out which definition of ownership you're operating under. It shows up in the welcome, in the variety of interactions, in expressions of celebration and grief, in the practices of leadership, and even in that sixth-sense, spiritual feeling you get when you walk among a people. You may think you're hiding ownership skeletons in your closet. In reality you might as well hang them right up above the altar on the cross in place of Jesus, because people perceive them just that clearly. The only folks who can't see them are the ones who have long since become used to them and accepted them in place of the true work of the Spirit.
Once upon a time folks might have accepted that kind of church, eager to put on appearances and be perceived as one of the good people. The cardinal rule nowadays is simple: nobody respects disingenuous motives and nobody wants to expend that much energy playing pretend...at least not about spirituality. When people talk about the "dying church" they're not talking about the death of the Spirit, nor of God's work. They're talking about the long, slow death of the "owned" church, the kind of foolishness and blindness that nobody sees a reason to put up with anymore.
I don't know about you, but I find that a good thing. It's a warning to those who would preserve their own power but it's also a promise that God's true mission will prevail no matter what else we try to substitute for it.
Next Up: Practical applications for church life!
--Pastor Dave (pastordave@geneseelutheranparish.org)
Wednesday, March 27, 2013
The Biggest Reminder From Jesus' Death
Yesterday I wrote a length post about the necessity of Jesus dying on the cross...why he did it and what it showed about God's relationship with us. You'll need to read that post in order to understand this one, in which we talk about the significance of Jesus dying to our daily life.
Jesus' death on the cross settles the argument about faith revolving around righteousness or love. This debate has been going on for centuries. Some folks say we get to heaven based on our righteousness...how good we are. The cross disallows this way of thinking, making it nonsensical. If we were capable of being righteous (making heaven's population more than zero) Jesus would not have needed to die for us. He could have just joined the righteous people in heaven and let the rest pass away into death/nothingness/whatever. Jesus died on the cross, and that death had meaning, because nobody was righteous but him. It was an act of pure and profound love, God's love for us. That shows us the nature of our salvation.
Again, clearly and simply: Salvation and faith revolve around God's love for us, not our righteousness for him. The first is infinite and all-powerful. The second doesn't even exist, at least not in a pure enough form to get us into heaven.
Every time we start to talk about our own righteousness as the basis for our relationship with God we head down the wrong path. Every time we look at scripture and judge that we have fulfilled it, every time we judge that our neighbors have not, we deny Jesus Christ and the need for his act of salvation on the cross. We can call ourselves Christians as we do so. We can quote chapter and verse to justify it. That does not make it true. You cannot use God's words to deny God and still claim to be serving him.
Many people who call themselves Christians are actually anti-Christian in this way. As we discussed yesterday, the whole point of Jesus' life and death on the cross is love. Yet it's the one thing that eludes them.
The judgment seems more powerful to us. It seems powerful in the instinctive sense that young boys have when they think knocking something down is more powerful than building it up. (Some parts of us never grow up.) It also seems powerful to us culturally. We respect those who can enforce their own will, get their voice heard loudest. Judgment is far easier to shout, and is a far quicker message to deliver, than love. Judgment also appeals to our traditional American "church-y" culture. We've been so beaten down that it doesn't feel like "real" church unless somebody's getting yelled at or preached against. We've grown up in a church culture of fear and now fear feels like the only really Godly thing to us.
Someone once said to me, "You've taught me a lot about God's love..." The "..." at the end of that sentence represents how it trailed off into an implication that there was something more, something greater that I wasn't teaching. Like judgment was the secret, powerful reality of God that nobody has the guts to take a stand on anymore.
Garbage.
Judgment is the convenient, weak, and self-serving subversion of God's message. Judgment is your repetition of the very first sin, putting yourself in God's place and denying your need for him too.
Any sense of righteousness and temptation to judgment that you've ever had should have disappeared the moment you saw it getting nailed up there on the cross with Jesus. The only way you can continue judging is to ignore the cross (and thus Christ) completely or to look at it and say, "It's not for me."
Righteousness does exist, but it's not our righteousness before God...as if we were choosing the right way when everybody else isn't. The only true righteousness is God's, shown through his sacrificial love on the cross for all of us. That righteousness cannot be bought or earned. The only way to understand it is to follow in God's footsteps, loving our neighbors just as much as Jesus loved them in that moment when he gave his life for them on the cross.
Judgment also exists, but it's God's judgment. We have all been found guilty. That's why Jesus had to accept the nails and spear on our behalf. There's no doubt about it, no wiggle room. We failed. Jesus took those sins to the cross with him so that failed people like us could be restored to God.
The only question now is whether we'll be thankful for this restoration and live our lives by it or whether we'll act as if it never happened by continuing to judge each other. In other words, you know that Judgment Day that all the quick-judging Christians say is coming to doom the world? That day isn't going to fall on the heads of those who don't know Christ and his sacrifice. Tax collectors, prostitutes, people from far-off lands...Jesus welcomed and loved them all. Judgment is going to fall on the heads of those who deny Christ by co-opting his loving gift into a weapon of power to make themselves seem more privileged and godly than their neighbor. This is the lesson the Pharisees never learned. This is what made them so angry that they ended up killing Jesus. Those who most look forward to the Judgment Day are those who most need to fear it.
On the most solemn, in some ways the darkest day of our entire church year--Good Friday--we also hear the message of purest hope and light: Love, or it's not true. Love, or it's not real. Love, or it's not Me.
As followers of this same Christ through life, death, and resurrection let us carry that message to the world.
--Pastor Dave (pastordave@geneseelutheranparish.org)
Jesus' death on the cross settles the argument about faith revolving around righteousness or love. This debate has been going on for centuries. Some folks say we get to heaven based on our righteousness...how good we are. The cross disallows this way of thinking, making it nonsensical. If we were capable of being righteous (making heaven's population more than zero) Jesus would not have needed to die for us. He could have just joined the righteous people in heaven and let the rest pass away into death/nothingness/whatever. Jesus died on the cross, and that death had meaning, because nobody was righteous but him. It was an act of pure and profound love, God's love for us. That shows us the nature of our salvation.
Again, clearly and simply: Salvation and faith revolve around God's love for us, not our righteousness for him. The first is infinite and all-powerful. The second doesn't even exist, at least not in a pure enough form to get us into heaven.
Every time we start to talk about our own righteousness as the basis for our relationship with God we head down the wrong path. Every time we look at scripture and judge that we have fulfilled it, every time we judge that our neighbors have not, we deny Jesus Christ and the need for his act of salvation on the cross. We can call ourselves Christians as we do so. We can quote chapter and verse to justify it. That does not make it true. You cannot use God's words to deny God and still claim to be serving him.
Many people who call themselves Christians are actually anti-Christian in this way. As we discussed yesterday, the whole point of Jesus' life and death on the cross is love. Yet it's the one thing that eludes them.
The judgment seems more powerful to us. It seems powerful in the instinctive sense that young boys have when they think knocking something down is more powerful than building it up. (Some parts of us never grow up.) It also seems powerful to us culturally. We respect those who can enforce their own will, get their voice heard loudest. Judgment is far easier to shout, and is a far quicker message to deliver, than love. Judgment also appeals to our traditional American "church-y" culture. We've been so beaten down that it doesn't feel like "real" church unless somebody's getting yelled at or preached against. We've grown up in a church culture of fear and now fear feels like the only really Godly thing to us.
Someone once said to me, "You've taught me a lot about God's love..." The "..." at the end of that sentence represents how it trailed off into an implication that there was something more, something greater that I wasn't teaching. Like judgment was the secret, powerful reality of God that nobody has the guts to take a stand on anymore.
Garbage.
Judgment is the convenient, weak, and self-serving subversion of God's message. Judgment is your repetition of the very first sin, putting yourself in God's place and denying your need for him too.
Any sense of righteousness and temptation to judgment that you've ever had should have disappeared the moment you saw it getting nailed up there on the cross with Jesus. The only way you can continue judging is to ignore the cross (and thus Christ) completely or to look at it and say, "It's not for me."
Righteousness does exist, but it's not our righteousness before God...as if we were choosing the right way when everybody else isn't. The only true righteousness is God's, shown through his sacrificial love on the cross for all of us. That righteousness cannot be bought or earned. The only way to understand it is to follow in God's footsteps, loving our neighbors just as much as Jesus loved them in that moment when he gave his life for them on the cross.
Judgment also exists, but it's God's judgment. We have all been found guilty. That's why Jesus had to accept the nails and spear on our behalf. There's no doubt about it, no wiggle room. We failed. Jesus took those sins to the cross with him so that failed people like us could be restored to God.
The only question now is whether we'll be thankful for this restoration and live our lives by it or whether we'll act as if it never happened by continuing to judge each other. In other words, you know that Judgment Day that all the quick-judging Christians say is coming to doom the world? That day isn't going to fall on the heads of those who don't know Christ and his sacrifice. Tax collectors, prostitutes, people from far-off lands...Jesus welcomed and loved them all. Judgment is going to fall on the heads of those who deny Christ by co-opting his loving gift into a weapon of power to make themselves seem more privileged and godly than their neighbor. This is the lesson the Pharisees never learned. This is what made them so angry that they ended up killing Jesus. Those who most look forward to the Judgment Day are those who most need to fear it.
On the most solemn, in some ways the darkest day of our entire church year--Good Friday--we also hear the message of purest hope and light: Love, or it's not true. Love, or it's not real. Love, or it's not Me.
As followers of this same Christ through life, death, and resurrection let us carry that message to the world.
--Pastor Dave (pastordave@geneseelutheranparish.org)
Tuesday, March 26, 2013
Why Did Jesus Have to Die For Us?
Since we're in the middle of Holy Week, it seems like a good time to stop and remember why Jesus died for us. This is something we take for granted...one of those things we talk about but don't really think about. I can guarantee you that in our society, and really in most churches, the cross is seen more as a nifty thing to hang on a necklace or a decoration for a church wall than as the instrument of Jesus' death. We talk about Jesus dying for us like we talk about the weather. "Jesus died for us" takes on the same conversational flavor as "It's raining out". Both are true. Both affect our lives...sorta. But neither one is going to change how we go about our day.
While all Christian folk would happily admit that Jesus died to save us, I'd wager that relatively few could explain why or what it means to our faith and daily lives. That being the case, are we really remembering and honoring him?
To understand why Jesus died for us we need to go back to the nature of sin.
Adam and Eve lived in the garden of Eden, a life free from sin and death, eternal and fulfilling. Had they not bitten the fruit in disobedience neither sin nor death would have been part of the human experience. When they bit that fruit, though, they changed the world. Selfishness, mistrust, anger, blame, jealousy, power struggles...that single act wove all of these things into the fabric of creation.
Once that happened, God was in a pickle. He could (and did) forgive them but he could not undo their acts, nor the effects of those acts, short of wiping out everything and starting over with Fred and Judy. He didn't want to wipe out the world and start over because he loved Adam and Eve and was committed to being faithful to them even when they had not been faithful to him.
On the other hand, God could not just let creation go on as before. It was built to be permanent...living forever. That was fine when everything was good, but now the whole world was bent and broken by sin. "Forever" works really well after "love" and "peace". When put after "selfishness" and "mistrust" and "anger" it becomes a horror. Think of all the things that have stemmed from that first sin: war, poverty, racism, illnesses, disease and hunger. To let those go on forever would be cruel, not loving.
This is why God's response to sin had to be death. Many interpret the pronouncement of death as a punishment given in anger. Others interpret it as God's way of saying, "You messed up, now you owe me." Neither is accurate. Death is God's merciful response to the suffering brought on by human sin...his way of saying, "Don't worry, this won't last forever." Nothing impure or evil can last forever without ruining eternity, so God doesn't let that happen.
Born into a world bent by sin, growing up with needs and pains that bend us inevitably to selfishness, all human beings end their lives in death. Not one of us is able to walk up to God and say, "I'm perfect! Let me into heaven!" If we tried, God would have to look at us and say, "What about that thing there?" The slightest imperfection would be enough to deny us admittance to forever, for then that imperfect thing would live forever with us.
Death has claimed every human being since the beginning of time and done so properly, righteously, justly. Death has put an end to our sin and kept the possibility of an unstained "forever" alive.
The problem here is obvious. "Forever" is still unstained but it's also empty...empty of human beings anyway. With none of us able to get in, God was looking at a forever labeled "Heaven, Population: 0". This was not his plan. Remember the whole point of allowing this existence to continue instead of starting anew was that he loved Adam and Eve and all their children, including us. He could not allow evil to live forever, destroying our lives forever. But he wasn't willing to live without us either.
This is why he sent his Son, the Savior who would get us all--humans and God--out of this nasty pickle. Jesus was the only one who ever resisted temptation (remember the wilderness and the devil), the only one who ever lived his life righteously, the only one free from sin. He was the shining example of everything humanity and God were supposed to be.
This meant that finally someone qualified to get into heaven and live eternally. Jesus could have walked up to God and said, "I'm ready to come in!" God would have looked at him, responded with a "Well done!", and the sign would have said "Heaven, Population: 1" forevermore. No death was necessary, nor judgment, nor even much of an examination. It was done! Jesus was the one. Had he desired it, that would have been his fate.
But Jesus looked around him. He saw his disciples: poor, mixed-up guys bumbling around and trying to get it right without a hope of doing so. He saw the woman at the well, the tax collectors and prostitutes, the hungry children, the sick and blind and lame. He saw the Pharisees and Sadducees, he saw the Romans, he saw all the people who wouldn't ever know that God cared about them. He remembered Adam and Eve, the hope that they could one day be redeemed from their mistake, and his father's love for them. He saw all of these people, all of their ancestors and descendants, and he realized that "Heaven, Population: 1" wasn't what he wanted. Given the choice to save himself or remain with them, he chose them. He chose us. He chose love.
But in order to remain with humanity, Jesus had to go where humanity goes...into death. His death was particularly horrible: ritual execution on a cross at the hands of people so blinded by sin and self-interest that they saw his love for the world as dangerous and destructive. The one, sinless person in all of history was destroyed by the sin of everybody else, for fallen humanity could not abide him.
And just like that, Jesus was gone. He had taken the path of millions before and billions after. At the end of his life, he died. Just like us. Because he loved us and would not be separated from us no matter what the cost.
But this moment of death was different than any other. As I said earlier, death was the just and merciful end to human sin. That was its purpose. Death was like a machine, its jaws closing on each sinful person in turn, swallowing them and making an end as it was meant to do. No human could stand before it. Our sin condemned us all. But death could not swallow one who was perfectly righteous, perfectly holy, without sin...one who had loved broken humans so much that he walked willingly with them into its grasp. When death's jaws closed on the rest of us, we broke and ended. When death's jaws closed on Jesus, it might as well have been trying to chew a boulder. It was not designed to end this kind of man, nor could it. When death tried to chomp down on Jesus, death broke and Jesus remained.
There are no words in any language devised on this earth to explain the effect of that moment. It changed the entire course of creation: our history, our destiny, everything.
For those who had been consumed by death before his sacrifice, Jesus broke through like a ray of sunlight beaming into a dark cave. He reached out to Adam and Eve and all their children and said, "It's OK. I've come. You can come home now. Your sin won't trap you anymore. Be made clean." For all of us who come after we now pass through the broken jaws of death as if they were an arch, the gateway to heaven and new life. We, too, see Jesus ahead of us on that path, reaching out his hand to us and saying, "Come! I'm here. Come home." He was the first and only person to break the power of death and sin. He was the first person to walk the path to everlasting life, but no longer the only one. That "Heaven, Population:" sign now reads uncounted numbers because Jesus wouldn't leave without us...because he loved us.
When we get to Maundy Thursday and Good Friday we remember that, had Jesus not loved us and given himself for us, we'd still be walking into the jaws of death without hope. We'd be victims of our own sin if Jesus hadn't chosen to become a victim for us. He did not do it for himself. In fact he took on unimaginable and wholly unjust suffering that he didn't have to experience. He could have walked into heaven and lived forever. Instead he chose the cross, and us.
Tomorrow: The much shorter, but absolutely indispensable, practical faith lesson this story teaches us.
--Pastor Dave (pastordave@geneseelutheranparish.org)
While all Christian folk would happily admit that Jesus died to save us, I'd wager that relatively few could explain why or what it means to our faith and daily lives. That being the case, are we really remembering and honoring him?
To understand why Jesus died for us we need to go back to the nature of sin.
Adam and Eve lived in the garden of Eden, a life free from sin and death, eternal and fulfilling. Had they not bitten the fruit in disobedience neither sin nor death would have been part of the human experience. When they bit that fruit, though, they changed the world. Selfishness, mistrust, anger, blame, jealousy, power struggles...that single act wove all of these things into the fabric of creation.
Once that happened, God was in a pickle. He could (and did) forgive them but he could not undo their acts, nor the effects of those acts, short of wiping out everything and starting over with Fred and Judy. He didn't want to wipe out the world and start over because he loved Adam and Eve and was committed to being faithful to them even when they had not been faithful to him.
On the other hand, God could not just let creation go on as before. It was built to be permanent...living forever. That was fine when everything was good, but now the whole world was bent and broken by sin. "Forever" works really well after "love" and "peace". When put after "selfishness" and "mistrust" and "anger" it becomes a horror. Think of all the things that have stemmed from that first sin: war, poverty, racism, illnesses, disease and hunger. To let those go on forever would be cruel, not loving.
This is why God's response to sin had to be death. Many interpret the pronouncement of death as a punishment given in anger. Others interpret it as God's way of saying, "You messed up, now you owe me." Neither is accurate. Death is God's merciful response to the suffering brought on by human sin...his way of saying, "Don't worry, this won't last forever." Nothing impure or evil can last forever without ruining eternity, so God doesn't let that happen.
Born into a world bent by sin, growing up with needs and pains that bend us inevitably to selfishness, all human beings end their lives in death. Not one of us is able to walk up to God and say, "I'm perfect! Let me into heaven!" If we tried, God would have to look at us and say, "What about that thing there?" The slightest imperfection would be enough to deny us admittance to forever, for then that imperfect thing would live forever with us.
Death has claimed every human being since the beginning of time and done so properly, righteously, justly. Death has put an end to our sin and kept the possibility of an unstained "forever" alive.
The problem here is obvious. "Forever" is still unstained but it's also empty...empty of human beings anyway. With none of us able to get in, God was looking at a forever labeled "Heaven, Population: 0". This was not his plan. Remember the whole point of allowing this existence to continue instead of starting anew was that he loved Adam and Eve and all their children, including us. He could not allow evil to live forever, destroying our lives forever. But he wasn't willing to live without us either.
This is why he sent his Son, the Savior who would get us all--humans and God--out of this nasty pickle. Jesus was the only one who ever resisted temptation (remember the wilderness and the devil), the only one who ever lived his life righteously, the only one free from sin. He was the shining example of everything humanity and God were supposed to be.
This meant that finally someone qualified to get into heaven and live eternally. Jesus could have walked up to God and said, "I'm ready to come in!" God would have looked at him, responded with a "Well done!", and the sign would have said "Heaven, Population: 1" forevermore. No death was necessary, nor judgment, nor even much of an examination. It was done! Jesus was the one. Had he desired it, that would have been his fate.
But Jesus looked around him. He saw his disciples: poor, mixed-up guys bumbling around and trying to get it right without a hope of doing so. He saw the woman at the well, the tax collectors and prostitutes, the hungry children, the sick and blind and lame. He saw the Pharisees and Sadducees, he saw the Romans, he saw all the people who wouldn't ever know that God cared about them. He remembered Adam and Eve, the hope that they could one day be redeemed from their mistake, and his father's love for them. He saw all of these people, all of their ancestors and descendants, and he realized that "Heaven, Population: 1" wasn't what he wanted. Given the choice to save himself or remain with them, he chose them. He chose us. He chose love.
But in order to remain with humanity, Jesus had to go where humanity goes...into death. His death was particularly horrible: ritual execution on a cross at the hands of people so blinded by sin and self-interest that they saw his love for the world as dangerous and destructive. The one, sinless person in all of history was destroyed by the sin of everybody else, for fallen humanity could not abide him.
And just like that, Jesus was gone. He had taken the path of millions before and billions after. At the end of his life, he died. Just like us. Because he loved us and would not be separated from us no matter what the cost.
But this moment of death was different than any other. As I said earlier, death was the just and merciful end to human sin. That was its purpose. Death was like a machine, its jaws closing on each sinful person in turn, swallowing them and making an end as it was meant to do. No human could stand before it. Our sin condemned us all. But death could not swallow one who was perfectly righteous, perfectly holy, without sin...one who had loved broken humans so much that he walked willingly with them into its grasp. When death's jaws closed on the rest of us, we broke and ended. When death's jaws closed on Jesus, it might as well have been trying to chew a boulder. It was not designed to end this kind of man, nor could it. When death tried to chomp down on Jesus, death broke and Jesus remained.
There are no words in any language devised on this earth to explain the effect of that moment. It changed the entire course of creation: our history, our destiny, everything.
For those who had been consumed by death before his sacrifice, Jesus broke through like a ray of sunlight beaming into a dark cave. He reached out to Adam and Eve and all their children and said, "It's OK. I've come. You can come home now. Your sin won't trap you anymore. Be made clean." For all of us who come after we now pass through the broken jaws of death as if they were an arch, the gateway to heaven and new life. We, too, see Jesus ahead of us on that path, reaching out his hand to us and saying, "Come! I'm here. Come home." He was the first and only person to break the power of death and sin. He was the first person to walk the path to everlasting life, but no longer the only one. That "Heaven, Population:" sign now reads uncounted numbers because Jesus wouldn't leave without us...because he loved us.
When we get to Maundy Thursday and Good Friday we remember that, had Jesus not loved us and given himself for us, we'd still be walking into the jaws of death without hope. We'd be victims of our own sin if Jesus hadn't chosen to become a victim for us. He did not do it for himself. In fact he took on unimaginable and wholly unjust suffering that he didn't have to experience. He could have walked into heaven and lived forever. Instead he chose the cross, and us.
Tomorrow: The much shorter, but absolutely indispensable, practical faith lesson this story teaches us.
--Pastor Dave (pastordave@geneseelutheranparish.org)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)