According to Jesus, the two greatest commandments are to love God and to love your neighbor. Neither is easy. Both are necessary.
Here’s a transcript:
I’m thinking about the end of the twenty-second chapter of Matthew’s Gospel (Matthew 22:34-46), which describes events during Holy Week, that last week before Jesus’ crucifixion.
Jesus had been teaching in the Temple. Somewhat more accurately, he had been responding to challenges from the established religious leadership gathered in the Temple. As this passage begins, Jesus had just silenced the Sadducees, most closely associated with the Temple leadership, when they had asked a question that they thought he could not answer.
At this point, the Pharisees stepped up and they asked him a question: Which is the greatest commandment?
Jesus actually answered this question — sometimes he answered questions with questions, but he answered this one. “The greatest is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength. And the second is like it, to love your neighbor as yourself.”
These are challenging commandments.
They also are found in more or less those words in the Law of the Old Testament. Jesus did not make these up.
Is it difficult to love God? It is difficult to love God with the thoroughness, with the commitment, with the loyalty of which Jesus spoke. And what about loving our neighbors as ourselves? In the passage in Leviticus from which Jesus quoted (Leviticus 19:15-18), there is more specificity to this commandment. To be protective of your neighbor, and also to correct your neighbor when they are in danger of infringing on the law.
How many of us are really willing to protect our neighbor against the dangers of the world? And how many of us will really dare risk that kind word to a neighbor to let them know that they are running afoul of trouble? Some of us do, and it’s a wonderful thing, and some of us hesitate, and it’s not such a wonderful thing.
Love God, love neighbor: the two greatest of the commandments. May we fully love one another and our maker.
That’s what I’m thinking. I’m curious to hear what you’re thinking. Leave me your thoughts in the comment section below. I’d love to hear from you.
You could argue that things had gone very well. Very well indeed. Better than anyone could have expected.
A large group of people – how many people is one of the things that Exodus scholars argue about – had escaped slavery in Egypt. Mass escapes from bondage are pretty rare in history, and successful escapes even rarer. Enslaved people from Africa called the Maroons successfully established and maintained regions in Jamaica in the 18th century. According to the National Geographic Society, some historians estimate that the American Underground Railroad freed around 100,000 people between 1810 and 1850, but that wouldn’t have been all at once. But most attempted escapes or rebellions by enslaved people have ended badly for the people seeking freedom.
These people, the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, had done very well. They were out of Egypt. They had survived a vengeful army. In the dry wilderness of the Sinai peninsula they had water. They had bread. They even had meat – poultry.
They had these things because of the clear intervention of God, the same one who had guided their ancestors of the past. God had first recruited a leader – Moses. God had performed a series of signs for the Egyptians to persuade them to let the Hebrews leave, a series of signs that, I’m sorry to say, got steadily more drastic as Pharoah “hardened his heart.” God had parted the sea for them to escape from the Egyptian army. God had given them drinkable water not once but twice. God had provided the bread. God had provided the quail.
And then God had provided something else. God had given commandments, the foundations of law, the structure not for a band of escapees, but for a nation. Not just a nation, but a holy nation, a priestly kingdom. This disorganized band, homeless in the wilderness, would be one established to strengthen people’s relationships with one another, and with God.
It was going very well.
Then it was going sideways. Moses, the leader who had dealt with Pharoah and led them through the sea and brought forth the water and the food when they complained, Moses was missing. He had gone up a mountain they were forbidden to climb – and given how much thunder they’d heard from it, they had no interest in climbing – and he’d been missing for a long time. The text says he was there forty days and forty nights (Exodus 24:18), but don’t take that too seriously. For centuries, Jewish writers used “forty” as a figure of speech, basically meaning, “a long time.” Which, if you’re a group of traumatized people scraping together their food and water each day, might have been forty hours.
“Make us gods,” they said to Aaron, Moses’ brother – they were still relying upon the same leadership family. Or they might have meant, “Make us God.” You see, the Hebrew word for some generic deity, a god, was “El.” But when they wrote about the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, they used the plural form: “Elohim.” Which is the word used in verse one. “Make us gods,” or “Make us God.”
Mind you, they’d already heard the ten commandments. They knew not to have any other gods before God. They also knew not to create any idols. The question is somewhat meaningless. Breaking one commandment really isn’t much better than breaking two. When God saw it, God was not happy.
“The LORD said to Moses, ‘Go down at once! Your people, whom you brought up out of the land of Egypt, have acted perversely; they have been quick to turn aside from the way that I commanded them; they have cast for themselves an image of a calf and have worshiped it and sacrificed to it…” (Exodus 32:7-8a)
God was ready to abandon the whole project of a holy nation, or rather to start over again with a single person: Moses. “Of you,” God said, “I will make a great nation.”
Callie Plunket-Brewton writes at Working Preacher, “In vv. 11-13, he [Moses] speaks to God of the divine promises to the ancestors of the people, thus implicitly urging God to be faithful to those promises. He also speaks of the terrible waste represented in bringing the people out of Egypt just to destroy them. Granted, he puts it in terms of being bad public relations, but I think it is clear that Moses is reminding God of the tremendous investment God has made in saving the people. Thus, Moses serves to remind YHWH of God’s own character, a character spelled out in 34:6-7: ‘slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness … ‘”
Moses argued with God. And… in this argument, Moses won. The nation would be formed from these people, not just one person.
Moses had argued with God more than once. He’d argued with God about the summons to free the Hebrew people. He lost that one, but he’d successfully negotiated a fair amount of support. I’m not sure that I would call some of Moses’ conversations with God about water and food arguments, because they usually sound to me like complaints, but Moses did get God’s help each time. Nor was Moses the only one to argue with God. Adam and Eve had – badly. Abraham had – rather better. Jacob argued with everybody, including God, and after a memorable wrestling match had received a new name: “Israel,” “One who struggles with God.”
The tradition of arguing with God continued after Moses. Gideon did. King David did. The prophet Jeremiah called God, “a deceitful brook.” And, of course, the most famous arguer with God of all was: Jesus. “Let this cup pass from me.” I grant you, it’s not an angry argument, but Jesus certainly did ask God to reconsider the course before him.
So should you argue with God?
Christianity has, for the most part, discouraged it. Judaism, I must say, hardly encourages arguing with God, but can’t help noting that most of those closest to God and God’s will have done so. But should you?
Sara Koenig writes at Working Preacher, “…the Old Testament gives us examples of humans who understand prayer to be a conversation, and God to be a relational God who actually listens to humans. To settle here does not deny that God is God, but clarifies that God is a God for us and with us.”
Prayer can be a conversation. I’d venture to say that from time to time, prayer should be a conversation. It’s a funny thing. So many people have been taught that prayer is a one-way thing. I’m talking to God. God is listening. Okay.
But prayer can be more than that. Prayer can be a relationship. Prayer can be responsive. Prayer can be an argument. Prayer can make change. The first step toward this kind of prayer is to do something that we’ve been trying to persuade people to do for millennia with uneven success: Listen.
People aren’t all that good at listening to people. But oh, how wonderful it might be if people listened to God. And as I’ve been told in active listening workshops for decades, the first step to effective listening is: stop talking.
I know that doesn’t sound consistent with effective argument with God. But how will you explain yourself to God if you don’t listen to what God has to say to you? Moses listened. God responded. Moses argued. God took another direction. So when you pray, make pauses in your prayer, and listen. Listen.
Note as well why Moses’ arguments were persuasive. Yes, he sounded like a public relations manager, but what did he remind God of? God’s promises. Moses went directly to the remarkable characteristic of Israel’s God: faithfulness. Dependability. Steadfast love.
Moses asked God to be God.
“’In God there can be no wrath,’ 14th century visionary Julian of Norwich wrote in her A Revelation of Love, the first book that we know of written by a woman in the English language.” Amy Frykolm writes of Julian at JourneyWithJesus.net, “During Julian’s day, the wrath of God was everywhere… And yet she was insistent that, no matter how hard she tried, she could not see wrath in God because there was no wrath in God. The reason is simple: God is all love. ‘Wrathfulness and friendship are two contraries,’ she writes. Where one exists, the other cannot exist.’
“If that is the case, then where does all of this talk about God’s wrath come from? Julian’s answer again is simple: it comes from us. We are the wrathful ones. We project that wrath onto God, who is all love.”
If you believe that God is all love, then you can approach God with anything, any feeling, any need. I don’t know how God will respond. I do know that God will listen, and God will respond.
The way to argue with God is to start.
Amen.
by Eric Anderson
Watch the Recorded Sermon
Pastor Eric makes changes while preaching, so the text as prepared does not match the sermon as delivered.
The image is L’Adoration du Veau d’Or (The Adoration of the Golden Calf) (ca. 1633-1637) by Nicolas Poussin – The Yorck Project (2002) 10.000 Meisterwerke der Malerei (DVD-ROM), distributed by DIRECTMEDIA Publishing GmbH. ISBN: 3936122202., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=157563.
When they built the golden calf, God got very angry, but remained true to the promises that had been made to them. We worship a God who keeps promises.
Here’s a transcript:
I’m thinking about the thirty-second chapter of Exodus (Exodus 32:1-14), in which Moses learned about the golden calf.
Moses had already received and delivered the Ten Commandments to the people, not the tablets of stone,. God had informed Moses of what the Ten Commandments were down in the camp. Moses in turn had communicated those commandments to the people. These were the broad outlines, the foundations of their relationship with one another and of their relationship with God. Moses had ascended the mountain to learn more, to get more detail, to get more instruction.
At the bottom of the mountain, the people got frightened with Moses gone so long. And they wanted to make their God tangible, they wanted to make their God more real. So they did what people of that age did, they made an idol. People of our age are more likely to invest or build a house or have something that they can touch.
Moses’ brother Aaron — well, he did what they asked, he made them an idol, a golden calf.
Up on the mountain, God saw it and God was angry. They have already broken all the laws that I commanded them, God said to Moses. So what I’m going to do is I’m going to leave these people to die in the wilderness and I will make a nation from you.
I imagine it might have been a tempting offer, but Moses would not go there. Moses said to God, You promised. These people know what you promised. I know what you promised. The world knows what you promised. Can you be seen as a God who does not keep divine promises? “And God changed his mind about the evil that had been prepared.”
God is a God of promises. The promises of Exodus, the promises of First and Second Samuel, the promises of Isaiah and Jeremiah and Ezekiel, the promises of Jesus. Despite what we do that hinders our covenant with God, that damages our relationship with God, despite the sins that we commit before God, God’s promises remain and God remains faithful to those promises.
It is a startling thing. What greater love could anyone have than to love through all the misdeeds and the mistakes? All the errors and omissions.
All the things that we do day-to-day to place something else between us and God might not be a golden calf, but if you think about it, you know what it is. And God loves us still.
That’s what I’m thinking. I’m curious to hear what you’re thinking. Leave me your thoughts in the comments section below. I’d love to hear from you.
Who’s in? Who’s out? Who’s us? Who’s them? Who gets the benefit of the doubt? Who gets doubted without benefits?
These are not new questions in the United States, as you well know. The history of Americans’ opinions of people from different national and ethnic backgrounds has some real ugliness in it, and some real bright points. We live far more companionably with people of different sexual orientations than I ever expected – I never thought I’d see legal marriage for LGBTQ relationships, and for now, at least, they’re both legal and generally accepted in many places.
It was once illegal for people of different races to marry in some US states; those prohibitions have crumbled. American immigration law is, I’m sorry to say, a horror show from its origins with the Chinese Exclusion Act, relentlessly racist and, in these days, enforced with cruelty that’s been encouraged at the highest level.
These questions are older than the Hawaiian Kingdom or the United States or any government of the world. The Book of Ezra describes the rebuilding of Jerusalem when the Persian Empire permitted Jewish exiles to return around five hundred years before Jesus’ birth. The exile lasted around seventy years – nearly three generations – so the people had learned to think of at least some of those around them as neighbors. As the children grew into young adults, they began to marry among these neighbors, even though intermarriage was discouraged. Ezra, a priest, announced that the non-Jewish wives would have to go back to their families’ homes in Persia.
If you want to read something heartbreaking, read the tenth chapter of Ezra. It not only says that those families were broken up. It lists them. By name.
Curiously enough, at near the same time another prophet took up the pen. His work ended up as part of the Book of Isaiah, which is a composite work of at least three different authors writing at different times, and also includes a few chapters of Second Kings. Chapter 56 is considered by scholars as the place where this post-exile writing starts. And how did this writer begin?
Thus says the Lord: Maintain justice, and do what is right, for soon my salvation will come and my deliverance be revealed. 2 Happy is the mortal who does this, the one who holds it fast, who keeps the Sabbath, not profaning it, and refrains from doing any evil. 3 Do not let the foreigner joined to the Lord say, “The Lord will surely separate me from his people,” and do not let the eunuch say, “I am just a dry tree.” 4 For thus says the Lord: To the eunuchs who keep my Sabbaths, who choose the things that please me and hold fast my covenant, 5 I will give, in my house and within my walls, a monument and a name better than sons and daughters; I will give them an everlasting name that shall not be cut off. 6 And the foreigners who join themselves to the Lord, to minister to him, to love the name of the Lord, and to be his servants, all who keep the Sabbath and do not profane it and hold fast my covenant— 7 these I will bring to my holy mountain and make them joyful in my house of prayer;
I read there some sections our lectionary editors omitted. The Torah did place limits on who could enter the religious assembly – a worship service, basically – which included men with injuries to their genitals. I really don’t understand why that should be relevant to anything, but then I don’t understand why a lot of things were considered relevant. Leviticus 21 bans someone who is blind from serving in religious leadership. Well, I’m rather pleased that we’ve discerned that that wasn’t a meaningful issue, given that my daughter Rebekah is blind and was ordained as UCC minister this year.
Human history around disability isn’t that good.
As Samuel Giere writes at Working Preacher, “Isaiah 56-66 returns to a basic question: With the diagnosis and the renewed promise both in view, what now? The first movement in this ‘what now?’ is Isaiah 56.1-8. It addresses the reality that God’s blessing spills over the boundaries assumed by God’s people — the insiders.”
At much the same time Ezra was breaking up families – which was not, in fact, required by the Law of the Torah – someone we’ll call Isaiah spoke another vision. He proclaimed God’s welcome not just in the city, not just in the community, but in the place of worship. He proclaimed God’s welcome not just for those foreigners who hadn’t been banned in the Law, he proclaimed it for eunuchs who had been banned in the Law. Isaiah envisioned a realm of God that was greater than the precincts of a Temple, that was wider than the walls of a city, that was more extensive than the boundaries of a nation.
Let it be a great gathering.
The great gathering did have qualifications. “Maintain justice, and do what is right.” This had been the refrain of Israel’s prophets for generations. As Joel B. Kemp writes at Working Preacher, “For the writers of Isaiah 56, admission into God’s community is contingent upon a few ethical (rather than ethnic) requirements.”
Here I invite you to a choice. The Bible was written by many people over hundreds, even over a thousand years. They didn’t believe the same things about the world as we do, and they didn’t believe the same things about the world as each other. They didn’t believe the same things about God as one another. As we’ve heard today from Ezra and from Isaiah, they could and did believe radically opposite things about what God considered right and good and proper at the very same time.
So we have a choice.
We can go with Ezra. We can choose an ethnic group or national heritage and hold that as the highest allegiance and the source of what is good and right. We can be Swedish or Norwegian or English (to start with my own background) or Japanese or Hawaiian or Chinese or Okinawan or American (whatever that means) or Micronesian or one of a host of identities. We can say, “I’m in, you’re out, and there’s nothing you can do about it as long as we hold the power to keep you outside.”
Ezra 10 says we can do that.
We can also choose to form a community made up of people of many ethnicities, many heritages, many backgrounds. We can choose to form a community made up of people we’d previously chosen to ignore or dismiss, like those with disabilities or like those with a sexuality different from our own. We can choose that, knowing that it’s the more difficult way. It requires discussion and debate and discernment about what is good, and right, and fit.
Isaiah 56 says we can do that.
Which will we choose?
So what did Jesus do?
He did… both. Which is awkward.
He refused to aid this Canaanite woman’s request to heal her daughter, and he did it with an insult that wounds us even in translation. He called her and her daughter dogs, and that was exactly as insulting as it sounds. And then, she turned the insult back on itself brilliantly: even the dogs eat the crumbs from the children’s table.
Jesus told her that his community would be Ezra’s community. Her reply reflected Isaiah’s community. She seems to have changed his mind. Suddenly the blessings he was bringing could be shared with those outside of Israel. Suddenly a new world had opened.
Expanding into that world became one of the most noteworthy features of the new Christian Church following his death and resurrection. New life for Jesus became new life for Jews and new life for Gentiles as well. Apostles like Philip and Paul began working with Gentiles to create new Christian communities around the Mediterranean. The foreigners were warmly invited into the Way of Jesus.
As Debie Thomas writes at JourneyWithJesus.net, “Right now, we are living through times so fraught and so tenuous, everything depends on exactly how good the Good News really is. It’s not good enough if it’s good just for me, or for the people who look and think like me, or for the people I already happen to like and love. Is it Good News yet for those dying of Covid? Is it Good News yet for the starving and the incarcerated and the unemployed and the homeless? Is it Good News yet for the people across the border? Is it Good News yet for the people you’ve been conditioned all your life to ignore?
“If the answer is no, then we have work to do. Remember, Jesus himself has gone ahead of us, widening the gates and throwing open the doors to welcome the voice of a despised foreigner.”
So there’s your options. A community which accepts some and denies many, or a community that welcomes as many as we can.
You can have either one and claim the Bible justifies it. It does.
I know which one I’d rather live in. Give me Isaiah, not Ezra. Give me Jesus – at least after he’d heard the wisdom of the Canaanite woman.
I’d like the Great Gathering, please.
Amen.
by Eric Anderson
Watch the Recorded Sermon
Pastor Eric writes sermons in full, but he tends to make changes while preaching, some of which are intentional.
Who is included in God’s vision of community? More people than we tend to think.
Here’s a transcript:
I’m thinking about the fifty-sixth chapter of the book of Isaiah (Isaiah 56:1, 6-8).
Isaiah appears to have been an assembled work. There’s a lengthy section that is primarily the work of a prophet named Isaiah, who lived in Jerusalem in the 700s before Jesus. There’s also a lengthy insertion, which is literally copied from the book of Second Kings. And then beginning about chapter 40, we get another writer.
Isaiah scholars believe that this one appears to have been an exile in Babylon, so hundreds of years after the initial Isaiah. He brought different concerns, and he brought a different sense of God’s promises. This part of chapter 56 is concerned with the restoration of the nation, which had been conquered by the Babylonians in 587. And here in chapter 56, it’s very clear that Isaiah expressed God’s promise that the exile people would at some time be able to come home.
But would there be anyone with them?
This portion of chapter 56 is very clearly answering the question, “Could others then Jews become a faithful part of the restored nation?” God’s answer was a clear, unequivocal, “Yes.” Those who wanted to be a part of the community and who would act according to its rules and its standards and its laws: they would be welcome. They could come and sacrifice in the rebuilt temple of God, and their prayers would be heard.
I don’t need to tell anybody that these are fractious days, days in which division and separation is very much the way of things. If you look through the Scriptures, you will find plenty of support for the notion that we should be separating people into little bits and bobs of communities. But Isaiah heard from God that that was not how it had to be, and many years later, along came Jesus, who in a conversation with a foreigner initially rejected her plea for healing, for her daughter, but was persuaded, was persuaded, and let his power find its way to a sick little girl.
Which will we choose? Will we choose the fractures of division and embrace the ways of dissension, even hatred, or will we be persuaded as Jesus was, as Isaiah was, to welcome the stranger and celebrate with them, and all of us together be faithful to God?
That’s what I’m thinking. I’m curious to hear what you’re thinking. Leave me your thoughts in the comment section below. I’d love to hear from you.
If you’ve been trying to count the Scripture passages I say are among my favorites, well, add another one. Or maybe I’ve already mentioned it. In any case, it’s true. This section of Romans includes some of the words that ring most true in my soul.
I’ve known what it is not to know what or how to pray because the sadness and the hurt go so deep. I’ve been in places where prayer itself has seemed impossible – although God had supported me through many stresses and trials, I simply couldn’t find not just words, but even a direction for prayer in the sorrow of my soul.
How important it is to know that in those profoundly disconnected times, the Spirit helped me in my weakness, interceding with groanings too deep for words.
Sometimes I became aware of that. Other times, I didn’t. It didn’t matter. The Spirit was there, groaning with me whether I knew it or not.
As Israel Kamudzandu writes at Working Preacher, “The inarticulate moans or groans of the Holy Spirit are not oriented to the human conscience but they are directed to God on behalf of a believing faith community… The reality is that human beings run out of words, especially in moments of sickness, death, hunger, poverty, and whenever life confronts us with pain.”
It doesn’t stop there for me. That next verse about all things working together for good for those who love God – well, I know there’s some problems there. Let’s face it, not all things work together for good period. There are plenty of people who do evil and seem to delight in it. There are storms and earthquakes and although they have no conscious intent to harm, harm they do. The history of these islands, going way back or staying recent, reveals both evil intent by human beings and evil impact by impersonal force or human accident.
But still. I read that verse with relief. Maybe everything doesn’t work for good, but God does. God doesn’t set the world into the courses of evil. God acts to mitigate the harm, to transform it into something else. When human hubris and arrogance crucified Jesus Christ, God brought forgiveness in Jesus’ own words and then resurrection in Jesus’ own life. If God was willing to transcend the rejection of God’s most precious gift, then what will God refuse to transcend?
I can’t think of anything.
As Erin Heim writes at Working Preacher, “In Christ, God does not meet our human violence with divine violence or retribution but, rather, takes on our human violence and overwhelms it with God’s self-giving love (8:32–34). In Christ, God promises to bring justice and wholeness through God’s overwhelming love. In Christ, God’s love has had the final word, and in Christ, the ending is sure.”
The question that has occupied a lot of Christians over the last two thousand years is: for whom is this ending sure? That is, once God’s love has had the final word, for whom has God spoken?
It’s a knotty problem.
The plain sense of the English translations with which we’re familiar uses the word “predestined.” A lot of theologians and Bible scholars have concluded, based on that word, that God has chosen some people to become Christians and to be saved in advance. Some theologians and Bible scholars have further concluded, based on this passage, that God has chosen other people not to become Christians and not to be saved. Among those who believed this were Augustine of Hippo and John Calvin. Calvin was one of the Reformation thinkers behind our own Reformed tradition. Our church was more influenced by Calvin than by Martin Luther.
Did the Apostle believe that some people were blessed ahead of time and some people were cursed?
I don’t think so. The reason I don’t think so is found in the purpose of Paul’s letter to the Romans in the first place. When he wrote the letter, Paul hadn’t visited Rome. He seems to have known something about the leaders there, and he seems to have known at least a little about conditions for the Christians in Rome. But he hadn’t been there, and… he planned to visit.
He planned to visit on the way to Spain.
Why was he going to Spain? For the same reason he’d toured around the cities of the Anatolian peninsula, modern Turkey. For the same reason he’d visited the cities of Macedonia and Greece. He was introducing the news that Jesus Christ had lived, had taught, had died, and had rose again for the blessing of humanity. He firmly believed that embracing that truth brought eternal life to those who did so. So he set out to bring that word to a horde of strangers he’d never thought to meet. He set out in journeys fraught with risk and hazard – in his Second Letter to the Corinthians he mentioned that he’d been shipwrecked no less than three times. Now he proposed to take the longest sea journey of his ministry from the eastern Mediterranean to the western.
That’s an enormous amount of effort for someone who believes that God has predetermined it all. If God has set it all out ahead of time, what difference do the actions of any human beings matter? God has set it. It’s determined. It’s done.
Paul couldn’t have believed that and done the things he did.
In Paul’s day, people believed in big powerful deities and in local gods whose influence was limited to small areas or whose concern was limited to particular nations. In contrast, Paul taught of a God who could exert power in many places, but who was concerned for and extending grace to people of many backgrounds, even every background. As Michael Fitzpatrick writes at JourneyWithJesus.net, “Class, race, sexual orientation, wealth, fame, gender, religion, marriage, political party — none of these categories by which we carve up humanity into various tribes counts for or against a person in the Kingdom.”
Paul’s travels and labors were in service of a first century quest for diversity, equity, and inclusion in the Church of Jesus Christ and the Realm of God. “How much grace did God have?” people might have asked him. “It’s bigger than you think,” Paul would have replied. Paul did reply: “For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
It’s bigger than you think.
These are days of factionalization, of separation into my group and your group, of division between the “We’re entitled” and “You’re nots.” It’s not the first time in human history; it won’t be the last. Isn’t it obvious that such thinking feeds the violence of the automobile attack on a Pride parade in Berlin yesterday, or the wars in Iran, Palestine, Ukraine, and more? Doesn’t it buttress the fears of women who receive no justice when they are assaulted?
In contrast, Paul taught of a church in which male or female, Jew or Greek, slave or free – the most significant categories of his day – no longer mattered. God’s grace was for all. Did Paul fully recognize the implications of his own thinking? I don’t think so. He was still a person of his time, as we’re people of our time, and there were limits to his imagination just as there are limits to our imagination.
God’s grace is bigger than we think.
Of all the things I try to teach you from this pulpit, of all the things I try to convince you of from this pulpit, of all the things I try to persuade you of from this pulpit, this is the one I most earnestly want you to remember, to believe, and to live from:
God’s grace is bigger than we think. It’s for you. It’s for me. It’s for them. It’s for everybody. It’s for the ones we don’t think it’s for. It’s bigger than you think.
Amen.
by Eric Anderson
Watch the Recorded Sermon
Pastor Eric writes sermons in full, but he tends to make changes while preaching, some of which are intentional.
If God is for us, who can be against us? wrote Paul. I wonder if God is for all the people who have ever been and ever will be.
Here’s a transcript:
I’m thinking about the eighth chapter of Paul’s letter to the Romans (Romans 8:26-39).
Unlike most of the other letters of Paul which have survived to become part of our New Testament, the letter to the Romans was sent to people that Paul had not yet met. Some of them he clearly had heard about. He clearly expected that they had heard about him. He planned to visit Rome on his way to Spain, so he wrote a letter to introduce himself and to ask for their help and support as he planned that great journey.
As a result, the letter to the Romans is more expansive than some of Paul’s other correspondence. Paul had more to say about the extent of his thinking and his theology. In his letters to the churches in Corinth and in Galatia, Paul focused more on specific concerns arising within those congregations. In his letter to the Romans, he was trying to describe who he was and how he thought and what he believed about Jesus. And so we have not just the longest of Paul’s letters, we have the one in which he had the most to say.
This section of the eighth chapter is just packed with Paul’s thinking about salvation and about God’s role, not just in creation, but in the extent of God’s love for creation. “If God is for us, who can be against us?” The God said that sent Jesus, the God who was willing to sacrifice Jesus, the God who was willing to let the human beings do what they wanted to Jesus, is a God who will respond with grace and with mercy.
In Paul’s thinking no power on earth could step between God’s mercy and those to whom God chose to provide it. Paul called them God’s elect and indeed that’s true, those whom God has chosen. I do wonder if we can assume that God chose a small number. Paul worked diligently to increase that number.
But if God sent God’s Son into the world, not to condemn the world, but so that the world might be saved through him (as John, the gospel writer, later put it), well then how much of the world did God intend to save? And if there are no powers that can stand between God and God’s mercy, how many people will God preserve at the end of time?
I do think that I can’t entirely remove the possibility of condemnation for some. Between the freedom of God and the ability of human beings to make pretty catastrophic mistakes, I think that possibility is always there. I also think that God’s intent was, is and will always be, to welcome all humanity into that place of light and beauty and love that God has prepared. Jesus said, “In my Father’s house, there are many mansions, and I go to prepare a place for you.” How many mansions have been prepared for us and for those we know and for those we do not know?
The answer to that question lies in the gracious heart of God.
That’s what I’m thinking. I’m curious to hear what you’re thinking. Leave me your thoughts in the comment section below. I’d love to hear from you.
Psalm 86 is a song of an individual person. What I mean by that is that it wasn’t written to be said together in a big worship service, or chanted by a procession through the streets. It describes the spiritual place that one person was in thousands of years ago. It doesn’t tell us a lot – the writer wasn’t very specific about things – but that does help make it accessible to any of us. The themes of the poem are familiar to us, though the events which prompted its writing might not be.
The poet’s first concern was, well, concern. The very first words are: “Incline your ear, O LORD, and answer me, for I am poor and needy.” The psalmist wrote from a “day of trouble.” They had opponents, they had enemies. “O God, the insolent rise up against me; a band of ruffians seeks my life, and they do not set you before them.”
The need for help is not just a common theme in the Psalms. It is a common reality in human life. Sometimes our need is the result of other people’s actions. We might be targeted for crime. We might be discriminated against in employment or housing. We might be suffering from an injury or illness which doesn’t just test our health but also our financial resources and the support of our family and friends. We’ve all been through a global pandemic, when a shortage of human contact made it even harder to endure economic hardship and the fear of dangerous disease.
We know what need is. We know what it is to pray out of our needs.
Curiously, the Psalmist did not just pray out of their need. There’s no shame in doing that; there are Psalms that really do concentrate on the cry for help. This writer, however, spent roughly as much time on a second theme as on their concerns and distress.
The second theme was thanks and praise.
“I give thanks to you, O LORD my God, with my whole heart, and I will glorify your name forever.” A lot of the Psalms praise God. You could make a case that, in some way, they all do, but there are a good number that focus on praising God. About half of Psalm 86 praises God for being merciful and generous, for being great and powerful, for abounding in steadfast love.
We know what it’s like to pray in thanksgiving. We’ve enjoyed successes, we’ve received gifts, we’ve celebrated the beauties of the world. We’ve rejoiced at weddings, we’ve welcomed births, we’ve completed difficult things and received rewards. Out of these and more we pray with thanks.
This is a Psalm which simultaneously praises God’s goodness and seeks God’s aid in some pretty deep distress. It’s a Psalm that knows both pain and exultation, both sorrow and celebration. Which made one line really stand out for me:
“Give me an undivided heart to revere your name.”
In a Psalm that is divided between opposite themes, the writer asked for “an undivided heart.”
I think some people do have the notion that the life of faith is supposed to feel like one thing and one thing only. Once you’ve made the commitment, somehow your faith is supposed to keep you in a similar state of mind from day to day. A read through the Book of Psalms would tell you, to the contrary, that the life of faith is filled with different feelings. A read through one of the Gospels reveals that Jesus himself, though a remarkably consistent person, displayed a range of emotions and reactions on different occasions.
I’m not sure why anyone thinks that Christian faith means our internal life is supposed to be just one thing, but some do.
You don’t have to. At any rate, you don’t have to worry about it when you find that your mind keeps changing and your feelings keep changing from one day to the next. That happened to the prophets. It happened to the Psalmists. It happened to Jesus himself.
So how can this Psalmist call for a unified heart?
“Heart” means a lot of things to us. We think of the heart as the center of feelings. Unity of feelings is really unusual in human experience. It happens, but it happens relatively rarely and in pretty intense situations. I can think of a few occasions, mostly while driving, when the only emotion I was aware of fear. I can also remember times when I was overwhelmed with joy, to the point where other emotions simply weren’t present. That just hasn’t happened all that often, though, and frankly that’s a good thing. Overwhelming emotion is overwhelming. Even the most joyous moments in my life were better as moments than they would be as an ongoing reality.
I’ve also mentioned more than once that our feelings aren’t under our direct control. We can do things to influence our feelings – I’ve found that a good meal reduces my anxieties pretty effectively – but it’s really difficult to tell yourself, “I want to feel happy” and then actually do it. So the deepest understanding of the truth of God, for which the Psalmist prayed, isn’t going to give us a unified heart. We’re still going to feel what we feel, and most of the time that’s a mixture, isn’t it? A mixture of feelings about what’s right in front of it and the things on our mind and the things that linger, good and bad, in our memories.
Did the Psalmist actually mean a unified mind?
I don’t think so, and not just because of the use of the word “heart.” The whole Psalm argues against it, because it’s a Psalm about both need and praise. The Psalm itself is divided in mind.
How do we resolve the paradox of the unified heart in a divided Psalm?
Debie Thomas writes at JourneyWithJesus.net, “It’s not that we hold paradox; it’s that paradox holds us. We are held in a deep place. An ample place. A generous, sufficient, and roomy place. Though we might fear paradox, God does not, and it is in God’s soil that we are firmly planted. We’re safe, even in the contradictions. Messy and weedy for sure, but safe.”
In our understanding, but even more so in the use of the Psalmists and the writers of the Hebrew Scriptures, “heart” was not just the seat of emotion. It was also a seat of decision: of loyalty. Of commitment. Of devotion. It’s one of the reasons that we use “heart” when we think about the way people come together in loving relationships – they’re rooted in emotion, but they go beyond that to commitment.
For the Psalmist, I think, the unified heart was able to bring together the needs and the thanksgiving, the feelings of fear and the feelings of joy, the reality of deprivation and the truth of God’s presence, into a foundational reliance upon God. That is, what connects need and praise is that we come to God with both.
Unlike emotion, that’s something that we can choose. We can bring our burdens to God for help and for comfort. We can bring our hurts to God for healing and for renewal. We can bring our uncertainties to God for guidance and for wisdom. We can bring our griefs to God for comfort and for resurrection.
And we can bring our successes to God for thanksgiving and for continuance. We can bring our celebrations to God for increase and for sharing. We can bring our joys to God for blessing and for remembering.
The unified heart is the one that knows that God cares about our joys and sorrows. The unified heart is the one that lifts the voice in praise and in petition. The unified heart is the one that waits in silence for God’s aid and for God’s smile.
Don’t worry that you feel different today than you did yesterday. Don’t worry that you think new things from day to day. Feelings will change, and I earnestly hope that you’re learning things as time goes on.
Do raise your needs to God; do raise your thanks to God. That is the practice and the commitment that makes a unified heart.
Amen.
by Eric Anderson
Watch the Recorded Sermon
Pastor Eric makes changes while he’s preaching, hopefully to improve it, and sometimes accidentally.
The photo shows a sculpture of a world being unified. Taken by Eric Anderson in South Korea in 2013.
The first chapter of Genesis is not the Bible’s only account of Creation. There’s another one in Proverbs 8, in which the figure of Wisdom works alongside God in the building of the world. Probably the most famous additional text is the first chapter of John’s Gospel, which echoes both Genesis 1 and Proverbs 8. You’ll likely recall as well the second chapter of Genesis, which looks very much like another account of creation.
When I think about different ideas about Creation, I’m thinking theologically, not scientifically – Genesis was not written as a book to explain how the world works, it was written as a book to explain God’s interactions with the world. That’s one of the reasons Genesis’ editors, and those who assembled the collection of Bible books later, felt perfectly fine about including more than one account of Creation. It doesn’t worry me that Genesis doesn’t match the geological record, or that cosmological theories don’t line up precisely with the first chapter of John. I also don’t get excited that evolutionary theory sort of follows the order of sea life, plants, and then land animals in Genesis.
To me, it’s the theology that matters. As Cheryl Lindsay writes at UCC.org, “The contrast with other creation accounts of the ancient world is significant and begins the biblical corpus. The Holy One creates not out of pettiness, spite, avarice, or violence. Creation brings order, diversity, and relationship. It flows out of the identity of the Creator. It is progressive from the beginning, and the stage of rest is yet another progressive step. Creation continues. Rest, by nature, is a pause from activity. Because the Holy One is Creator, creation never stops, it rests.”
What matters to me is that all of the Bible’s Creation accounts emphasize both God’s deliberate choice to make a world of living things, and God’s love for that created world. What’s the refrain of this first chapter of Genesis? “And God saw that it was good,” finally stated as “very good.”
You don’t have to believe in God’s creative action to believe that the universe has value. Some atheists do. Some believers in religions that don’t believe in a divine creation do. Christianity itself begins with the assertion that the world is good, that substance is good, that existence is good. The poet and hymn lyricist Brian Wren writes,
Good is the flesh that the Word has become.
Good is the body for knowing the world, sensing the sunlight, the tug of the ground, feeling, perceiving, within and around, good is the body, from cradle to grave…
There are human belief systems that simply don’t accept this. A number of ancient religions did not value the world because they believed it was a divine accident, a by-product of conflict between gods. Some strands of Christianity, I’m sorry to say, have overemphasized soul over body, and as a result have permitted abuses of human bodies and cultures as well as permitting destruction of natural resources and beauty. Some contemporary philosophies, both Christian and non-Christian, stress the primacy of human beings in the universe, and not only tolerate but encourage deforestation, mountaintop removal, and habitat elimination. Just last month an Environmental Protection Agency committee ended review of gas and oil drilling for impact on endangered species in the Gulf of Mexico. Have we already forgotten the Deepwater Horizon accident sixteen years ago? A deepwater well blowout spewed oil for four months.
I don’t think we’ve forgotten. I think there’s a different belief system at work, that says that if certain people benefit, other life on the plant can be disregarded and, if necessary, destroyed.
Whatever some people may think, that view simply isn’t consistent with Scriptural thinking and assertions. Many have stressed that people, in verse 28, receive dominion. OK. Does that imply that human beings can do anything they want? Are human beings who have dominion over other human beings allowed to do anything they want? Is that true of parents? Of community leaders? Of national leaders?
Is it true of pastors? Do you really want me to have unquestioned authority to do anything I want?
If you weren’t sure about that, I’ll help: the answer is no, you don’t. There are provisions in our church bylaws that set limits on the things I can do. There are provisions in the United Church of Christ that set limits on the things I can do.
When we look at dominion in Genesis, the one who exerts power over things is God, and what does God do with that power? God brings order to chaos. God brings light and shape and form. God brings life, and not just life: God brings a system in which life can sustain itself, and other forms of life.
If we assert that we have an unquestioned, unlimited dominion, then exert it in ways that destroy the living systems of God, we are not living out a divine commission. We are tearing at the environment that sustains our lives as well as those of other living things.
God values this world. If we follow God’s ways, we value this world. As much as the honu in the sea or the ‘io in the air, as much as the ohi’a on the mountainside or the paho’eho’e as it flows, we are God’s Creation, a manifestation of holy will and love. We are created.
As the twelfth century theologian Hildegard of Bingen wrote, “God says, ‘I, the fiery life of divine essence, am aflame beyond the beauty of the meadows. I gleam in the waters. I burn in the sun, moon, and stars. With every breeze, as with invisible life that contains everything, I awaken everything to life.’”
It’s the sixth day in which God declares all that has been made “very good,” and that is the day of the creation of the animal life of Earth, ranging from the creeping things – I think that’s probably the insects that we don’t like very much – to humanity itself, made in the image of God, “Male and female he created them.”
Male and female are… very good.
There are, again, different ideas floating around as to the relative value of male and female. History is dominated by the idea that men are worth more, that they are more reliable, that they are better trusted with power than women. It’s a curious idea. According to the FBI, people arrested for violent crimes in 2019 were 72.5% men and 27.5% women. Men in government have started nearly every war ever fought on this planet. Would women do better? I don’t know. I do think we’ve run the experiment long enough to say that it’s time to try something else to see how that works.
More to the point, this basic assertion demands that we accord full value and respect for the dignity of women. The claims of “complementarianism,” the idea that women are of equal value to men but that the two sexes are designed for different kinds of social roles, is simply sexism with a slightly softer texture. “Women, you have equal value to myself” is a meaningless expression when it’s followed by, “and because I’m a man, I’m in charge.”
The image of God does not depend on gender. It just doesn’t.
Humanity in God’s image also means that all people have value. Period. End of sentence. Someone of another religion has the same value as you or me. Someone of another nation has the same value as you or me. Someone of a different political party has the same value as you or me. Someone with power has the same value as you or me. Someone without power has the same value as you or me.
That means we can’t use distinctions within humanity to discount, devalue, or disenfranchise other human beings. Legal immigrants? Full value. Illegal immigrants? Full value. Dark skinned people? Full value. Light skinned people? Full value. Gay people? Full value. Straight people? Full value. Republicans? Full value. Democrats? Full value. Politicians? Full value. Teachers? Full value. Road repair workers? Full value. Incarcerated prisoners? Full value.
The Apostle Paul wrote to the Galatians, “There is no longer Jew or Greek; there is no longer slave or free; there is no longer male and female, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” I’d argue that he was right, but the basis is not just in the action of Christ, but in the creative work of God.
Amy Frykolm writes at JourneyWithJesus.net, “We are all, Hildegard teaches, carriers of the divine light. We have interior gardens in which we cultivate these qualities of love, wisdom, and greening inside ourselves. And as love and wisdom flow through us, we participate in the greening of the world. We are, she writes, ‘so entangled with the strengths of the rest of creation that we can never be separated from them.’”
We come into Creation because of the love and grace of God. We come into a Creation already loved and graced by God. We come into a Creation in which we participate in the greening of the world. We come into Creation to celebrate, enjoy, and nurture other people, other creatures, the trees and shrubs, the very flowing fiery rock itself, because all of it, including ourselves, is very good.
Amen.
by Eric Anderson
Watch the Recorded Sermon
Pastor Eric makes changes while preaching, so the text he prepared does not precisely match what he said while preaching.
Jesus arrived after Lazarus had died. It’s a hard moment – Jesus shared the grief – but it turned out that he was not too late, because he was and is the resurrection and the life.
Here’s a transcript:
I’m thinking about the eleventh chapter of John’s Gospel (John 11:1-45), the resurrection of Lazarus.
It is a wonderful and uplifting story. It demonstrates that the power of Jesus was not limited to day-to-day life, but extended beyond life and was, in fact, a power over death. It features perhaps the deepest of Jesus’ “I am” statements: “I am the resurrection and the life.” It offers and reassures the promise of eternal life and resurrection for us all. It’s a marvelous story.
It also contains some truly troubling elements. It is this event that persuaded some of the leadership to seek an occasion where they could arrest Jesus and have him executed. That’s a harsh element of the story.
It is also a story that is marked with grief: the grief of Lazarus’ sisters Martha and Mary. Each of them expressed their faith in Jesus, but each of them also say something along the lines of, “If you had been here, my brother would not have died.” Onlookers say the same thing. If Jesus had been there in time — and John made clear Jesus might have been there in time — Lazarus would not have died.
What explanation we’re given, and it’s not much, is that Jesus saw this as an opportunity to demonstrate his power over death, to demonstrate that he had authority even beyond the veil. It’s not a satisfying explanation. I don’t think it even satisfied Jesus, who stood outside the tomb of Lazarus and wept.
What are we to say? I think we are to take our lead from Jesus’ own tears. We are the followers of one, we are the worshipers of a God, who knows our grief, who has shared our sense of loss. We believe in a God, we trust in a God, who knows how we have felt, who has felt what we have felt.
And whatever we might think or feel about the timing of Jesus’ arrival, it has to be said that for Jesus it was not too late. Yes, he might have prevented Lazarus from dying, and yes, there was some grieving that happened, and grief he participated in, but there was no such thing as being too late for Jesus. Illness was no barrier to him, death itself no barrier to him. There is no such thing as too late for Jesus in our lives.
And there is that marvelous “I am” statement. “I am the resurrection and the life.”
We trust in One who is not the agent of death, we trust in One who is not the agent of suffering, we trust in One who is the agent of life and renewed life.
“I am the resurrection and the life.” And this is the one in whom we trust. This is the one we follow.
That’s what I am thinking. I’m curious to hear with you’re thinking. Leave me your thoughts in the comment section below. I’d love to hear from you.
