The Apostle Paul was proud of many things – and he came to value the love of Jesus more than any of them.
Here’s a transcript:
I’m thinking about the third chapter of the Apostle Paul’s letter to the Philippians (Philippians 3:4b-14).
Paul began this section by listening some of the reasons he had for confidence. Confidence of his worth as a human being. Confidence of his place in society. Confidence of his value to God.
Paul’s first attributes were those that he was born with, that he was born amongst the people of God, the Jews. He was even born into the tribe that had provided the House of David. Some of the other attributes were things that Paul had worked for. He had studied in order to gain position amongst the Pharisees. He had exercised his zeal on behalf of the Jewish faith in trying to suppress this dangerous Christian movement. And, he wrote, as to keeping of the law he was “blameless.”
Now we might consider that Paul exaggerated a little bit. We might consider that Paul’s zeal in the light of his later conversion might not have been such a great thing. Paul’s point was that he had left all of these behind his place in the world, even his value to God because he had been embraced, and had embraced in return, Christ Jesus.
The faith of Christ Jesus said to Paul that these other things, these expected things, these ordinary things, these accomplished things of life no longer had any value relative to being accepted into the community of Jesus’ faith. To be known by Christ, to be embraced by Christ, to be called by Christ was worth far more than any of the rest.
That kind of valuing of the things of life versus the things of faith continues to be a struggle for Christians to this very day. We are told that a lot of things are important in the world, and some of it is status, and some of it is accomplishment, and some of it is wealth, and some of it is… and it goes on and on and on. It is outrageously difficult for us to look at all those things and say to ourselves, “But you know what? I’m loved by Jesus, and so the rest of this I can set aside.”
Now, the Apostle didn’t leave everything aside. His learning to become a senior person amongst the Pharisees is obvious throughout his letters. So also is the faith, the core of the faith that was taught to him as a child and as a young adult that continued to inform him all through his ministry as a Christian evangelist.
What is also abundantly clear through all his letters, not just here but everywhere, is that even as he used what he had been given, he embraced more and more fully this invitation from God that came through Jesus. He valued that far more than anything else in life.
So I suggest, may we.
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.
It was Monday. Just the second day of the week. Already, however, Jesus had created an uproar in the precincts of the Jerusalem Temple.
It had started the day before, on Sunday. Jesus had ridden a donkey into the city, and a crowd had gathered to welcome him with cries of “Hosanna!” “Save us!” Although most in the crowd wouldn’t have recognized it – very few people would have Zechariah’s prophecy about a king riding a donkey because very few people could read – they had given him a royal title. “Son of David,” they shouted. That was a very dangerous thing to say when the Roman Governor was in town.
Jesus hadn’t stopped there. He’d gone all the way to the top of the city, the summit of the mountain, where the Temple stood. He’d entered it, and he’d driven the moneychangers and dove-sellers out of it. He’d accused the Temple leadership of allowing it to become a place where people were robbed.
Then a crowd of people seeking healing had flooded in, many of them crying “Save us!” “Hosanna to the Son of David!”
The priests had urged Jesus to stop them. Why? Matthew didn’t say, but – right next door to the Temple was the Antonia Fortress, home to Jerusalem’s resident Roman legion.
So the next day, when Jesus returned to the Temple, the angry and furious priests wanted to know: By what right do you do these things, which threaten the peace of the city, which disrupt the established workings of the Temple, which disregard our authority which comes from the Law of Moses itself?
By what right, Jesus?
As Amy Frykolm notes at JourneyWithJesus.net, “There is a sneer in these questions: Who do you think you are, day laborer, nobody, know-it-all, rabbi of the rabble?”
(I rather like rabbi of the rabble.)
As Ira Brent Driggers writes at Working Preacher, “The chief priests and elders are apparently expecting the name of a teacher; a human association that will help them better understand Jesus’ actions. If you can identify someone’s teacher, then you can better grasp what they’re all about. More to the point, they are prepared to counter any and all claims to human authority with their own authority. At least as far as the local Jewish status quo is concerned, there is no claim to human authority that they cannot trump. They are the temple leaders.”
Jesus decided not to answer the question directly. He offered them a challenge. Answer my question, and I’ll answer yours. Ready? Here it is.
I’m surprised they fell for it. Their question was proper, legitimate, and immensely important. They had the authority to ask it. They had the duty to ask it. They had no need to answer any questions from a rabbi of the rabble.
So. First mistake.
Jesus’ question was: “Did the baptism of John come from heaven, or was it of human origin?” John, you remember, offered baptism that, combined with the repentance of the person being washed, granted them forgiveness of their sins.
Washing had been for some time an important ritual practice for Jews, but around issues of purification from uncleanness. That wasn’t the same thing as sin. People became “unclean” in lots of ways, and rarely through any fault. Handling the wrong kind of food could make one unclean. In Jesus’ day, entering the house of a Gentile made one unclean. The response to these was ritual, not sacrificial. Sometimes they waited a prescribed length of time. Sometimes they washed.
When they wanted to be forgiven for a sin, for having done something that was actually wrong, they went to the priest, and they brought an animal for sacrifice – what animal was determined by the infraction and by their level of wealth. The animals were present on the Temple grounds so that people could purchase one there for sacrifice and avoid the problems of keeping one sound while traveling to Jerusalem. Those sacrifices supplied at least some of the diet of the priests.
A baptism for the forgiveness of sins was a problem for the priests.
Nobody had to bring an animal – or money for an animal – to John. John’s baptism was free (at least in money; let’s not forget that repentance can be costly). That meant that the merchants in the Temple didn’t get business, and they probably paid rent to the priests. Further, the priests didn’t get the meat from the sacrifices.
Do you see why a baptism for the forgiveness of sins might have been a problem for the priests? Do you see why, a good couple years after John’s execution, Jesus’ question was still a sensitive one for them?
On the one hand, few of them would have supported John’s baptism ministry in the first place. They couldn’t with honesty say that they believed God had authorized John to forgive sins. Remember – that was the job they believed God had given them. Matthew speculated that they also feared Jesus’ follow-up question, which they may have. Some among them may well have appreciated John’s ministry. In Matthew 3, we hear that Sadducees came for John’s baptism. Some of those Sadducees might have been in the group that challenged Jesus. Most of them didn’t. Most of them hadn’t believed in John.
So they really couldn’t say they’d believed God authorized John’s baptism.
But if they said what they believed, there were others listening beside Jesus. Those were the ones still coming for healing. Those were the ones who’d been shouting “Son of David” the day before. Those were the ones who had been the poor and the desperate and the outcast and the displaced. Those were the ones who’d gone to John the Baptist. Now they stood, rank on rank, behind Jesus. Lots of ones. Too many ones for the priests to say what they thought.
No, Jesus, we won’t answer your question.
No, priests, I won’t answer yours, either.
Even though it is the essential question of Christianity: where did Jesus’ authority come from?
Ira Brent Driggers continues: “For the church, then and now, everything depends upon the source of Jesus’ authority. If it is ultimately ‘from humans’ (Greek: ex anthrôpôn), then Jesus is really no different than the next charismatic leader (except for maybe his more pathetic death), and the church will be forced to define itself only as a human institution among other human institutions. In other words the church will be forced, like Jesus’ opponents, to compete against perceived rivals, reducing its mission to the quest for power, even if it purports to use that power for doing ‘good’ in the world.”
Christians have maintained, as you well know, that God was, is, and will be the source of Jesus’ authority. But where do we see that? What tells us that it’s true?
It’s what Jesus did.
In the story he told, Jesus savagely criticized the religious leaders of Jerusalem, priests and elders, for their failure to do what they said they would do. They were supposed to act not just as intermediaries between people and God, they were supposed to ease the process. They were supposed to guide and support the people as they sought to approach God. They were supposed to help.
Jesus didn’t think they were helping very well. He thought they were raising new obstacles rather than clearing old ones away. He thought they were enriching themselves at the expense of people coming to sacrifice. He thought they were maintaining their power and position, satisfying the Roman overlords, rather than advocating for the people in their care.
They were the one who said, “I’ll do it,” and didn’t.
In contrast, Jesus went and did it. He didn’t just give people hope, he fulfilled that hope. He healed the people that flooded into the Temple. He challenged the power-hunger of the priesthood. And when they came to arrest him, he stopped his followers from committing violence in his defense. He faced his accusers. He faced his judges. He carried his cross. He was crucified, died, and was buried.
That’s one who said, “I’ll do it,” and did it.
That’s what tells us that Jesus drew his authority from God – that he did what God directed.
Mind you, we have some additional confirmation in Jesus’ resurrection. Without that, I grant you, we might simply think of Jesus as a faithful martyr, which is quite a high title, but not Messiah. Anointed One. Blessed and Blessing of God.
Jesus didn’t answer their question with words. He answered it with action. He answered it with faithfulness. He answered it with his life, with his death, and with his resurrection.
Amen.
by Eric Anderson
Watch the Recorded Sermon
Pastor Eric makes changes while he preaches, so the sermon as prepared does not precisely match the sermon as delivered.
The image is Jésus se promène dans le portique de Salomon (Jesus Walks in the Portico of Solomon) by James Tissot (between 1886 and 1894) – Online Collection of Brooklyn Museum; Photo: Brooklyn Museum, 2007, 00.159.177_PS2.jpg, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10957468.
Some years ago, my children’s godfather said something that I just didn’t get. My children and his were playing together and one of them came up to us and asked for something that they just couldn’t have. As they departed, disappointed but not surprised, their godfather reminded them of the children’s theme song. “The children’s theme song” went right over my head, so I had to ask.
“You can’t always get what you want But if you try sometimes, well, you just might find You get what you need.”
John was more of a Rolling Stones fan than I’ve ever been, but I had to admit: he was right. Those lyrics are the theme song of children everywhere: you can’t always get what you want.
In Jesus’ story, there seemed to be a lot of people who couldn’t get what they wanted. These were the people who spent various amounts of the day in the marketplace looking for work – some were hired early, some later in the morning, some at the end of the day. These people were doing what could be done to earn a living. They didn’t own land. They didn’t have a specialized skill. They worked the fields and vineyards. It wasn’t steady work. They relied on a farmers sending their managers to the marketplace to find them, hire them, and at the end of the day, pay them.
Pablo Jimenez writes at his blog, “Most Jewish people in the first century were peasants. A good portion of the agricultural land was owned by absentee landlords. Such farmland was cultivated by laborers just as the ones depicted in the parable. Their economic reality was characterized by poverty, subemployment, heavy taxation, and dispossession.”
They hoped to be hired at the beginning of the day. When that didn’t happen, they hoped against hope that somebody would need more labor later in the day. If that didn’t happen, they stayed in the marketplace hoping against desperation that somebody would pay them a pittance for as much work as was left before sundown.
The first workers in Jesus’ story would have thought themselves relatively fortunate. The later workers would have thought themselves pretty lucky, too. The last ones would have been somewhat relieved, but also wondering: on the little they’d be paid for the day, how would they make rent, buy bread, or get fuel for the fire? They’d be behind, and probably not for the first time.
The surprise of the story, of course, is that at the end of the day none of them were behind. All of them got the daily wage. Everyone went home, not with what would enrich them, but with what would keep them going for at least another day.
This situation of a few haves and many have-nots is specifically prohibited by the Hebrew Scriptures. As D. Mark Davis writes at LeftBehindAndLovingIt, “It is a result of debts not being forgiven every seven years or forfeited family lands not being returned every fifty years or the prohibition of “joining land to land” not being observed, and so on. (See Ched Myers for an explanation of the term “Sabbath Economics” at www.chedmyers.org/catalog/sabbath-economics). The mere presence of a place where the landless gather in search of day labor is itself a testimony that the imperial economic structure is contrary to the Sabbath Economics of the OT.”
That alone would be a reason for Jesus to tell that story. It would be a reason for us to hear this story with distress, because we have also maintained an economic system that permits employers to pay less than a living wage. I know we keep hearing all these complaints about “nobody wants to work.” But why would anyone want to work for people who will pay you less than what you need to keep the lights on and the car repaired and the refrigerator stocked? And people do work. They work multiple jobs. They work long hours. They work for uncertain pay. They get labeled as unambitious, unskilled, unsuccessful, unworthy, unimportant.
A few years ago they were the ones required to break quarantine and go to work. It turned out they were essential.
Our economy could learn something from Jesus.
I don’t actually think Jesus spoke entirely about the immoral economics of his day. I’m not sure he spoke primarily about it. “The kingdom of heaven is like,” he said, not “the kingdom of earth is supposed to be like.”
I do think the kingdom of heaven is pretty good model for what the kingdom of earth might be. It’s worth working for.
Jeannine K. Brown writes at Working Preacher, “Are God’s ways really like this? Is this kind of maddening equality, regardless of what one has contributed to God’s kingdom, really a part of the new reality God is inaugurating in Jesus? For Matthew’s Jesus, the answer is ‘yes.’ God’s generosity is an affront to those who think about God’s benevolent rule in categories of status, privilege, and what one has earned.”
What, after all, does God give us?
To start with the most obvious, life. Life itself. God gave us a world, indeed a universe, so full of marvels that we actually get bored by them – what a strange thing that is. Ten years ago, I first drove down Waianuenue Avenue from the hospital and saw Hilo Bay gleaming beneath me in the sun. I promised myself that I would never come down that way and fail to appreciate the beauty of that sight. I’ve done my level best to keep that promise.
Life and beauty, which is not limited to vision but includes sounds and scents and sensations. Company. Challenge. Learning. Growth. Small people. Middle-sized people. Big people. People who are dark complected, light complected, with hair that runs long or short, bright or dark. People who are new, people who we’ve known for decades, people to whom we matter. People. God gave us people.
Most of all, God gave us love. God loved us in the creation of the species, in the guiding of our ancestors. God loved us to set slaves free and bring exiles home. God so loved the world that we received God’s only begotten son so that whoever believes in him may not perish, but have everlasting life.
At the end of the story, at the end of the day, I don’t see coins in the hand of the manager. I see love presented by the landowner. I see full inclusion of all who came into the vineyard. I see no hierarchy of welcome. I see a love given fully and freely to everyone, every last one.
How can anyone receive more than the love of God? How can there be grades and differences and pay rates to the love of God? What else is there than the love of God?
Elisabeth Johnson writes at Working Preacher, “God, it turns out, is not fair. God does not play by our rules. God does not give us what we deserve. And thank God for that! For if each of us got exactly what we deserved, where would we be? In fact, God lavishes grace and mercy on all of us, no matter how late we have come to the vineyard.”
God loves us. God loves you. God loves me. God loves them. God loves the them that you find it difficult to love. God loves the them who don’t care much for you. God loves us, whether we deserve it or not.
Isn’t that the kind of love we hope for? Isn’t that the kind of love we credit to Jesus? Isn’t that the kind of love that is our faith and our hope? Isn’t that the kind of love that we can say, with Paul, “the greatest of these is love”?
Yes. It is.
Love isn’t fair. Any small child knows that. Love means the polite child and the rude child eat the same dinner. Love isn’t fair. Love means the family celebrates the doctor’s degree and the GED. Love isn’t fair. Love means that the one who staggers home after wasting his inheritance receives a feast because we’re so relieved he survived. Love isn’t fair.
Thank God for that. Because given a choice between God being fair to me for the things I’ve done or not done, or God being generous and loving to me, I’ll take love.
Any day. Every day. To the end of time.
Amen.
by Eric Anderson
Watch the Recorded Sermon
Pastor Eric makes changes to his sermon while preaching – sometimes intentionally, and sometimes accidentally. The sermon as you read it does not precisely match the way he delivered it.
The image is “The Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard” by an unknown artist in an 11th cent. Byzantine gospel. Paris, National Library. Ιστορία του Ελληνικού Έθνους, Εκδοτική Αθηνών. Αθήνα 1980. Τόμος Η’, σελ. 202., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9472307
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.
If we planted fields and gardens the way Jesus’ sower scattered seed, it wouldn’t work well. But if we scatter God’s love that way, it might work very well indeed.
Here’s a transcript:
I’m thinking that you might be wondering about the bandage. I did just have to have some skin surgery. It was minor and everything that needs to be removed is removed. You can expect that there will be a bandage (somewhat smaller as the weeks go on) on my brow for the next few weeks.
I am also thinking about the thirteenth chapter of Matthew’s Gospel (Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23). This contains one of Jesus’ best known parables, the Parable of the Sower. It also contains something that is a little less usual for one of Jesus’ parables, that is, an explanation.
Most of the time, Jesus let his stories stand by themselves. In this case, Jesus’ disciples wanted to know what he meant by describing someone who went out and scattered seed in the most unlikely of places. And in some of those places, the seeds simply could not grow or could not thrive. In other places, the seeds sprouted and produced astonishing yields.
Jesus compared the seeds to the Word of God. In some places, the Word of God is simply rejected or choked out. In other places, the Word of God finds fertile ground and bears much fruit.
I think that one of our roles as Jesus’ disciples is to take on that of the Sower. That is, to scatter the Word around. Now, if we were gardeners, and I am not one, but if we were gardeners or farmers, we would be careful about where we placed the seeds. We want each seed to have the best opportunity to produce a plant, to grow, to flower, and to bear fruit. But for the Word, for the grace of God, for the blessings of God, for the description of our loving God, well, for that, the guidance is different, isn’t it? The guidance is: describe the love of God to everyone, whether it seems like they might be thorny soil or rocky soil or good soil, whatever they are.
We will find out who they are by what happens when the Word tries to take root.
We scatter the words. We scatter the love of God. We proclaim the love of God. We display the love of God anywhere and everywhere, so that the love of God may grow around us and bear fruit.
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.
Jesus’ travels through Galilee disturbed him. D. Mark Davis, writing at LeftBehindAndLovingIt, translates verse 36 as, “Yet having seen the crowd he was wrenched with compassion about them that they were having been harassed and tossed aside like sheep not having a shepherd.” Then he writes: “This verse is chock full of strong language. Jesus’ reaction is not just a sweet feeling of kindness, as if he just saw a flock of cute baby lambs. It is a visceral reaction, as the definition of σπλαγχνίζομαι suggests. I think it reads best as a gut reaction, something like ‘furious compassion.’”
“Furious compassion.” You’ve had that feeling, haven’t you? That’s the feeling when you see that somebody has been misled or abused and you’re not only concerned for them you’re angry on their behalf.
People feeling furious compassion tend to tell others about the feeling. They tend to gather people to witness and understand what’s happening. They tend to organize them to do something about it.
That’s what Jesus did. From a larger group of followers, he selected twelve to take on roles not just as learners, but as leaders. He selected twelve to take on the same work that he had been doing. It was no small commission. “As you go, proclaim the good news, ‘The kingdom of heaven has come near.’ Cure the sick; raise the dead; cleanse those with a skin disease; cast out demons. You received without payment; give without payment.”
Every bit of that charge is laden with challenge. The easiest part seems to be first part: proclaim good news. Good news. Who could object to people proclaiming good news?
Well, the first people who object to good news are usually the people who are benefiting from the bad news. They’re the ones setting the rules that protect their wealth and power from the ones without wealth and power. They’re the ones who accused Jesus of healing people’s demons with the power of demons. They’re the ones who eventually got him executed as a rebel – since when you tell people the good news that God is in charge, not the people who say they’re in charge, it is a rebellious act.
Jesus wasn’t done. “Cure the sick” – I’m afraid that’s not one of my skills. “Raise the dead” – I can’t do that. “Cleanse those with a skin disease” – I can put a bandage on it. “Cast out demons” – maybe I can; I’ve never tried. “You received without payment; give without payment” – how ironic is it that tomorrow is payday?
Matthew only gave us Jesus’ side of the assignment here, but my goodness. The disciples must have been saying something along the lines of, “Who me? No way.”
If they said it aloud (Matthew didn’t tell us), I’m pretty sure Jesus said something like, “Yeah, way.”
Christian discipleship – the Way of Jesus – is Assignment: Mercy.
As Debie Thomas writes at JourneyWithJesus.net, “Go and proclaim the good news of the kingdom. Go and cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, and cast out demons. Go and touch. Go and heal. Go and resurrect. Go and make peace. Go and render believable the compassion of God.”
Assignment: Mercy.
As our myna hopefully learned this morning, mercy doesn’t have to be grand and glowing. Mercy begins with basic consideration. Mercy welcomes others to join in the feast. Mercy steps in to decrease the temperature of a dispute. Mercy. Is attentive to everyone’s safety.
During this weekend’s ‘Aha Pae’aina, called together with the theme of building bridges, there were more than a few exhibits of basic mercy. We greeted one another warmly, with hugs and smiles and aloha spoken and unspoken. We feasted together – my, how we feasted. I’m not sure when I’ll have room to eat anything else again. There were items of disagreement on the agenda, and we addressed them with respect and consideration for the people on either side of the question. And if I can summon up a personal example, while delivering my workshop I froze my feet in their places for a minute or two, because a nine-month old baby was crawling around next to me and I was not going to step on her fingers.
Mercy is also bigger than that. I kept my feet still to avoid hurting a baby. Why can’t the nations of the earth keep our militaries still lest they harm the infants of another nation? Why are we told that it is a virtue to use force ruthlessly and mercilessly? Why are we told that we don’t have the courage to take territory from another nation, instead of being told that our sense of morality prevents us from taking territory from another nation?
Jesus had the opportunity to start a war. When he was arrested, somebody swung a sword. Jesus could have screamed, “Attack!” Instead, Jesus said, “Enough of this,” and healed the injured man.
Assignment: Mercy.
During this ‘Aha, Conference Minister the Rev. Dr. David Popham told me something I hadn’t known – he knows plenty of things that I don’t, of course. He mentioned that Hawai’i has been closely followed by the disaster response people in the UCC and the Disciples of Christ. We’ve been through a lot, for sure: the 2018 Puna eruption here, the fires on Maui in 2023, this year’s series of Kona low storms. He joked, in fact, that sometimes they would call him and tell him things that he didn’t know, which was probably because the local people who would call the Conference were still busy dealing with the situation in front them, while those whose professions it is to assess disasters were communicating with our national church staff.
The point is that we have friends. We have neighbors who meet the definition Jesus provided to “Who is my neighbor?” Do you remember? “Who is my neighbor” was the question that launched the story of the Good Samaritan – and the neighbor was the one who showed mercy.
Assignment: Mercy.
All right. Have I made that point enough? How are you going to fulfill your assignment?
You do it with everything you’ve got. Yes, that’s a big ask. Yes, it’s a lot to give. And in some instances, yes, it’s not going to be enough.
Assignment: Mercy is a call to stay attentive to the small mercies, to the politenesses, the sharings, the protections. None of us can possibly be aware of everything going on around us, but if we can we can look right and left before crossing the street, we can look right and left to see what’s going on with our neighbors. It’s a call to ask about needs and not assume them. A person in a wheelchair may appreciate some assistance from you on a streetcorner, but they also may not. Be vigilant, and let your vigilance include the simple politeness of asking, “How are you doing?” followed, perhaps, by, “What do you need?”
Assignment: Mercy is a call to stay attentive to the big mercies, to the relief from systemic oppression and suffering, from the prejudices of social pressure and the discrimination of unjust law. Assignment: Mercy is a call to remind the world that war simply isn’t the Way of Jesus, no matter what awful things the Church has said to the contrary in the past. Assignment: Mercy insists that people be held accountable for the harms they bring to others, that they be held accountable through an open and transparent process of law, and that those in power shall have no special influence in the adjudication of the crimes of which they’re accused. Assignment: Mercy further calls us to bring people into society as well as we can, to make sure that neither habit nor desperation are major forces to drive people to criminal behavior.
Assignment: Mercy is a call to show that a loving God has had a powerful and positive influence on our lives. It is a call to testify to the grace that God has demonstrated in the world: in Creation, in guidance, in wisdom, in the poetry of the Psalms, in the restoration of distressed people, in the birth, life, teaching, death, and resurrection of Jesus, in the activity of the Holy Spirit from the first century to the twenty-first.
At this point, I am sorely tempted to parody the opening of an episode of Mission: Impossible. Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to show God’s mercy to a hurting world. If you are caught or captured in this mission, God will not disavow, but will celebrate your actions.
Actually, you want to be caught at this. Let everybody see. Let everybody know. You have accepted: Assignment: Mercy.
Amen.
by Eric Anderson
Watch the Recorded Sermon
Pastor Eric makes changes as he preaches, so the sermon as prepared does not precisely match the sermon as delivered.
Jesus set his closest associates on the challenging assignment of bringing compassion to those who needed it so. We have the same assignment.
Here’s a transcript:
I’m thinking about the end of the ninth and the beginning of the tenth chapters of Matthew’s Gospel (Matthew 9:35-10:8).
This section begins with Jesus’ observation that the people of the villages that he had met were harassed and helpless like sheep without a shepherd. There was more work to be done than he could do himself. He summoned twelve from amongst his followers, and he gave them power and authority.
He appointed them to be ambassadors of the movement, to go out and visit these other villages. There, he directed them, proclaim the good news that the realm of God is drawing near. Cast out the demons, heal the sick, and by the way, make no preparation as you go. Don’t save any money, don’t bring even any extra clothing.
It was, and it is, a tough assignment. I would argue that we as disciples today: we are the heirs of those twelve. We are still asked to do something about bringing the reign of God closer to being in the world. To do what we can for the sick, to comfort those who are pressed by evil spirits, and to assist those who are pressed by evil people. We continue in this long tradition of seeing what is wrong in the world, and bringing good news and good action to those who suffer to those in need.
Proclaim the good news that the realm of God is near. Bring healing and comfort and assurance, and you will be doing the work of Jesus.
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.
