Preaching and Teaching

Western Presbyterian Church
Washington, DC 20037
March 28, 2010

Text: Luke 19:28-40

I was in New Zealand last summer, working with the Anglican Church, and one of the wonderful things that I learned about was the customs of Maori people. The Anglican church seems to have done a pretty good job, with including the diversity of people in New Zealand. They had a strong Maori presence and we worshiped with Maori liturgies. But there was one thing that made the Maori people distinct in their denomination, and that was their funerals. The white Anglicans appreciated a tidy service that lasted about 45 minutes. But the Maoris had funerals that lasted for days. Every family and friend would gather together to sing, and cry, and eat, and sing some more. They would stay awake for nights in a row to be with those who mourned. The grieving rituals were long and elaborate.

My friend, Bruce Reyes-Chow, is the Moderator of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church. He’s from San Francisco, and he’s part Chinese and part Filipino, and his grandfather on the Chinese side just died. He said that there were so many traditions in the grieving process, so many details about what colors to wear and places to sit, and they were so foreign to him and his cousins. When I asked him how they kept all the details straight, he responded that when his grandmother was in the middle of explaining them, he and his cousins started a Google spreadsheet and made lists of everything that they needed to do. I guess every culture has its ways of cherishing its traditions.

I have to admit, when my New Zealand pastor friends told me how difficult it was to spend days grieving, and I heard about the complicated Chinese rituals, I was kind of glad that I was here, in D.C., where our funeral services last an hour. Rituals from the South (where I’m from) can be complicated, but that’s only because you’re trying to avoid the caustic barbs that are thrown on behalf of the ex-wife or the new wife. You almost need a Google doc to remember who’s on which side. But, mostly our grieving process is about going to the funeral, and then attending a big party to consume more fried chicken than you’ve ever seen in your life.

But I wonder if we are missing something. Do we spend enough time with those who grieve? Do we spend enough time with those who suffer? So often when our loved ones go through deep sadness, we don’t like to see them in pain, so we want them to “get over it” quickly. I have seen people look at Kubler Ross’ stages of grief, and treat them like Olympic hurdles that they need to jump as quickly as possible.

When I was a little girl, when I was upset about something, the automatic response from people surrounding me was always, “Don’t cry. It’ll be okay.” They would say it over and over. Then when I got older, I still got the same response when I cried. And I even caught myself saying it to my own daughter the other day. Then, in mid-sentence, I realized that I was saying that, not because I wanted to soothe her. I was saying it because of me. I knew that she had a good reason to cry; I was just uncomfortable. I didn’t want her to have to go through the suffering.

I have heard widows explain that their friends ask them, within months of their spouse dying, “When are you going to get over this?” And that is how we tend to deal with heartache. We like to think about people being resilient, overcoming their hardships, but then we have a difficult time seeing people suffer, especially for long periods of time. We’re uncomfortable sitting with them. We’re afraid we will say the wrong thing, or do the wrong thing, that we’ll cause more pain. Or else, we don’t like to be reminded of their mortality, because it makes us remember our own impending death. It makes us sad, so we shift our focus.

And on the other hand, for those of us who suffer, we don’t want to be pitied or feel dependent. We like to have ourselves put together, and if people see us in a devastated emotional state, we apologize to them, as if we’ve done something wrong by expressing our emotions.

I overheard two friends talking about Haiti recently. In the middle of the conversation, one friend interrupted and said, “I am so sick of hearing about Haiti. Can’t we talk about something else?” I was shocked when he said it. But I suppose that I shouldn’t be. We are a culture that has an incredibly short attention span when it comes to personal sorrow, or even national disasters. We can stick with the story as long as the headline is hot. As long as we’re still interested in rubbernecking at the disaster, we’ll listen, but our attention span ends with the commercial break. We don’t want to hear about the suffering when the bodies start smelling on the street.

We don’t really want to hear about New Orleans now. Katrina was a long time ago. We are not so interested in the painstaking actions that men and women must go through to rebuild Iraq or Afghanistan. We tire of it.

And yet, we gather here and read this story. It’s a happy one this morning, but we know what on the other side of that parade. We know that the crowds who are singing and waving branches will soon be replaced by those inciting anger and frustration. Other people will come on the scene, yelling “Crucify Him.” This week is full of anxiety, as Jesus sweats blood and prays for another way out.

And yet, we read this story. We enter into this time and we allow the heaviness of it to surround us and envelop us. As we enter Holy Week, what does that mean for Christians? In this particular time in history, our understanding of why Jesus died on the cross doesn’t always resonate with us. The cultural and biblical understanding is that Jesus dies on the cross to pay for our sins. But that makes many of us pause. Did Jesus suffer so that a sacrifice was paid for our sins? Ancient traditions are full of sacrificial systems. There is this notion that there is a cosmic reckoning that needs to occur. We sin and make mistakes, and so we need to pay a price for those wrongs. There is something within us that longs for the ability to pay for these mistakes, to wipe our record clean. So it is an ancient idea that the lifeblood of an animal needs to flow, or crops need to be burned in order to pay for our sins. And on Holy Week, we have said that Jesus Christ has paid the final payment for our sins.

But what does that say about God? Do we serve a divine being that needs blood to atone for sins? And, even more disturbing, would we worship a God who would require the sacrifice of God’s son to atone for sins? That sort of reckoning may have made sense in ancient times, but now it puts into question the nature and character of God. Is God vengeful? Does God need payment for wrongs that have been committed? Is God bloodthirsty? Is God some sort of divine child abuser, a divine being who would need to see God’s own son suffer so that our wrongs might be paid for? This idea of God is quite disturbing, this divine reckoning says something about the character of God, so many people have begun to question these notions.

I spoke to the neurologist Michael Newberg recently. He wrote the books Why God Isn’t Going Away and How God Changes Your Brain. He explained how religion has played an important part of our brain’s evolution. Thinking about, meditating on, and praying to a loving God can activate those things in our minds that give us internal peace and motivates us to compassion.

Yet, when we begin to imagine a vengeful God, that can lead to anger and frustration within ourselves. We can begin to ruminate and our minds begin to grasp hold to vengeance and hatred. So, it’s important to remember the very important truths of Scripture, that God is love. That God is full of mercy and truth.

So what is the importance of Holy Week in all of this? If we understand the idea that people needed this divine sacrifice at one time in our history, if we understand that this is a very important theme in Scripture and in our tradition, but we also know that it may not resonate with us. Then, what is the importance of Holy Week?

It is important because we set aside time to think about suffering. Jesus suffered, even though he did not have to. He could have taken the easy way out. He could have shut his mouth, he could have skipped the donkey ride, he could have left the temple instead of knocking tables over and making a whip with cords. But he didn’t, he rode through the city, spoke the truth courageously, and ultimately faced his death.

So what is the importance of this time for us? Holy Week is a time when we shift our focus as Christians. As we remember the suffering of Jesus, then we begin to think about the hardships of other humans. There are so many who agonize around us. We take the time to remember the suffering of those in Haiti who still do not have homes to live in, those who are living with that stench. We stop, and we think about those who have been bombed in their cities. We take time out to imagine what it is like to live with the threat of Malaria or with AIDS. We pause and think about the homeless that we would ordinarily ignore on our streets. We remember those who have been thrown out of their houses because they have lost their jobs, and they cannot make their mortgage payments, and they cannot sell their homes, because the value of their houses have dropped off. We stop to think about those who do not have health insurance.

In this culture where we spend so much time thinking about the sex lives of celebrities, our portfolios, and what sort of power and affluence we could have we worked longer and harder and smarter. In this culture where we think mere moments about the suffering of others, we stop. We reflect. We raise money for people who face disasters, and those who are hungry. We teach our children to remember those around the world who are without food.

There is something very powerful about that focus. It moves us to compassion and stirs our imaginations, and compels us to act. For we cannot help until we have heard. We cannot respond to injustice, unless we have seen it. And traveling with Jesus, among the people singing hosanna, into the upper room where he washes the disciples feet. Moving through this powerful story where we remember the brutal assassination of our God has given Christians the ability to see suffering not as something that happens to the weak, but something that happens in unjust societies, something that happens to all of us. And the act of focusing our attention on it just might save our souls.

Through the glory of God our Creator,
      God our Liberator,
            and God our Sustainer. Amen.

Pastor, Western Presbyterian Church
Washington, D.C.
March 21, 2010

Text: John 12:1-8

Whenever I open the Gospels, I look for some things that are present but not often discussed: Jesus’ senses of humor, anger and irritation. Jesus’ humor seems to have been gaining visibility over the past thirty years or so. Those who preach in the African American church are especially adept at highlighting the funny things that happened in Jesus’ life and ministry.

However, with the exception of those moments when Jesus gets righteously angry with the principalities and powers of his day, Jesus’ anger and irritation remain buried in the collective unconscious of the church. I’m pretty sure it is because many people are uncomfortable with anger. And much of the church is most definitely uncomfortable with angry outbursts. Gratefully, Western seems to be an exception to that rule. While we aren’t always comfortable with internal congregational conflict, preferring a false peace, at times, to a healthy donnybrook, we do seem to handle individual anger fairly well.

One of my favorite members in this congregation was Leon Richeson who died a number of years ago. Richie, as he was known, had a volatile, volcanic temper. He blasted me more than once in congregational meetings for one thing or another. Gratefully, he also had one of those conditions where his face got red as he got angry. As his anger rose, he morphed from pale to pink to red. Since he was bald, by the time he would explode, his entire head was bright red. So watching for skin color changes, I could always see the angry blast coming and brace myself.

Early on, I realized Western was a special church because no one seemed to get all that upset about Richie’s anger (other than his wife). The congregation calmly absorbed his anger the way a parent absorbs the anger of a child. I learned so much from watching how the older members of this place dealt lovingly with Richie’s anger.

Given that anger is a very natural part of the human makeup, why are we so afraid to identify those moments when Jesus got angry or showed all-too-human signs of irritation with folks? Well, maybe I just explained it. Anger and irritation are all-too-human. And we don’t want to think of Jesus as all-too-human. We want to think of him as fully divine.

But all-too-human or fully human, as our theology puts it, Jesus was. It is part of Christian orthodoxy. To deny Jesus’ temper and ability to get irritated is to deny him his full humanity.

Reviewing the Gospels, we see that Jesus got irritated with his family, closest friends and colleagues, followers, and last but not least, Jesus got irritated with God (Father, would you please take this cup from me?!?) In this morning’s Gospel lesson, Jesus’ irritation with Judas is palpable. Mary put some expensive perfume on Jesus and Judas questioned, “Why are we wasting money putting perfume on you, Jesus?!? There are poor people out there starving, people without shelter. We could sell the perfume and use the money to help them.” Progressive people are quite irritating, aren’t we?

Actually, it isn’t really progressive people who are irritating. It is dogmatic people of all types who are irritating. Desperately afraid they will do something wrong, they define what is right in rigid terms. They then announce that anyone who deviates from their definition of what is right is damned. Dogmatic people of all stripes are very, very irritating as the entire nation is finding out on this health care issue.

The controversy over the perfume wasn’t the only time Jesus got irritated. When his family appeared outside a house, he expressed irritation with them. When a Syrophoenician woman came up and asked Jesus to help her daughter, he got very irritated with her and uttered what I consider to be an ethnic slur. When Peter didn’t understand something at one point, Jesus shouted, “Get behind me Satan.” If you don’t know about the Jesus who got irritated, you haven’t really read the Gospels carefully.

Of course, the fact that Jesus got irritated doesn’t mean irritation is holy. It means life can be irritating. People can be irritating. There is a long list of people and things that can be irritating: work, family members, neighbors, church meetings, people who talk too loud on cell phones, cable people who expect you to put your life on hold for half a day so they can repair their faulty equipment, the list goes on and on.

All right, people who drive like maniacs, airports, bureaucracies, phone answering systems that never let you speak with a person. I have to stop. I really do.

Given that life can be irritating, the question for a Christian becomes, how do I deal with my irritation at irritating things? Because if we don’t develop some intentional strategies to cope with irritating people and events, they are going to pull us off course. They will get under our skin to the point that we are no longer effective as Jesus’ disciples.

As I study Jesus, I find concrete help. This is one of many reasons why I call him Lord, an authority in and over my life. In Jesus, I see someone who really was very much in touch with what he was feeling and saying. As a result, when he got irritated, he didn’t deny it. But he also didn’t let it dominate him. On the contrary, he realized he was irritated yet kept control of himself.

Because ultimately, the danger of irritation is that we can lose control of ourselves. Irritated with a bad driver, we start to drive badly. Irritated with an unpleasant work colleague, we become unpleasant ourselves. The source of our irritation begins to define and control our behavior.

When the Syrophoenician woman refused to back down in the face of Jesus’ irritation, he instantly realized he was wrong in dissing her. He thanked her for her persistence by healing her daughter. In like manner, he didn’t hang on to his irritation with Peter. Instead, he handed him the keys to the early church. He didn’t stay irritated with Judas, keeping him as an insider after the perfume controversy. Judas’ presence at the Last Supper indicates that he remained a valued disciple right up to the end.

Jesus’ ability to get irritated but not be controlled by irritation is so important because of where we are at right now as a people. There are individuals who are deliberately trying to irritate us because it helps them earn their living.

As some of you may know, professional provocateur Glenn Beck told his listeners to leave churches that “preach economic and social justice.” Jim Wallis, a respected evangelical pastor who is committed to preaching about economic and social justice, immediately responded to Beck. If Wallis hadn’t reacted, frankly, many of us never would have known about Beck’s comments. Speaking out his irritation with Beck, Wallis had the unintended but inevitable effect of elevating Beck’s nonsense to a level where serious people ended up having to debate the subject. To me, that is more irritating than what Beck originally said.

Some people say, “Well, we can’t ignore lies because that is how Hitler and every other bad person gained power—by good people doing nothing.” I’m not saying good people should do nothing in the face of injustice and outrageous comments. But sometimes nothing said is the most powerful way to oppose something said. Silence can be a powerful act. As my mother always used to tell me when I said something outrageously foolish, “I’m not going to dignify that with a response.”

We’ve all seen a driver pull some irritating stunt out on I-95. When the situation gets really dangerous is when another driver, irritated by what happens, decides to respond by also driving like an idiot. Getting irritated is Christ-like. Allowing irritation to dictate our behavior is the antithesis of what we learn from Jesus.

At a time when the job market is as bad as I have ever seen it, when some employers are pushing employees extra hard knowing the job market is bad, when economic pressures increase the pressure on us and we transfer the pressure to our relationships with people we love, in times like our times, we need to monitor closely our irritability quotient. When we see issues we care about, such as the environment, immigration, and gun control, being ignored, we need to watch carefully how that impacts our interactions with other people. When our health is deteriorating and we feel irritable, we need to find ways not to allow the irritation to overtake us.

In his walk through life, and especially the steps we focus on in Lent, Jesus teaches us so much about how to live a faithful, joyful life. So often, we tend to focus on the things Jesus did—challenging injustice, loving people deemed unlovable by his society, teaching us with parables that radiate wisdom, helping people to discover their God-given talents. However, nothing Jesus did was as important as who he was. He was a person who was very much in touch with those things within himself that could become barriers to fulfilling God’s mission. He developed ways to manage the most troubling parts of his humanity so his divinity could sparkle. As we walk with Jesus, may each of us do the same. Let us find ways to control those things within us that can undermine our goodness and effectiveness as Jesus’ disciples.

Let us pray: Gracious God, we all know the feeling. The irritation builds within us until we explode. Having exploded, we instantly realize we have made a bad situation worse. Help us to study Jesus’ life to the end of learning how to live in his image, in your image. All this we pray in your Holy Name. Amen.

Western Presbyterian Church

Washington, D.C.

14 March 2010

Text: Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32

Something inside of Becky went off. An internal alarm startled her from her deep sleep until she sat straight up in bed, and looked at the clock. It was 2 a.m. She peeled off the covers and checked her daughter’s room and found it empty again. Panicked, she began pacing the living room, waiting for LeAnn’s arrival. 

LeAnn was a beautiful person and a wonderful actress. All through high school, she had not only been the star of every school play but she was active in the community theater as well. She directed children’s plays. LeAnn was one of those people who excelled in school in that particular way that charming people do—always making A’s without ever seeming to try very hard. LeAnn had a dramatic flair to her, even off of the stage. She felt things deeply and she could convey her emotions with great force and conviction. When she was sad, she seemed to overturn the whole house with her sadness, and when she was happy, she made everything around her sparkle.

LeAnn had a horrible experience in college, a terrible, violent encounter with a man. From then on, that full and robust range of emotions became too much for the daughter to bear. She no longer wanted to feel in the same way, and so she began to look for ways to forget. She wanted to numb the ache, anger and grief. She drank too much. She went from alcohol, to abusing prescription drugs, to street drugs. Then, she started spending nights with her dealer.

All the while, Becky was frantic. Waiting every night, Becky was not sure if her daughter was going to make it home. Becky tried everything in her emotional arsenal to make LeAnn come home–tears, guilt, tough love, soft love. Nothing seemed to work. Becky could not make LeAnn come home. Becky looked over the years that she spent as a mother, and blamed herself for her daughter’s heartache.  Every day the situation looked more desperate. Everyday, we would all cry for her, and pray for her, and hope for her.

In every church, sitting here in these pews, there is a full range of emotions, the people next to you are almost all going through some transition. But there are few things that match the intense love and yearning of a mother or a father who is hoping that her child will come home, safe and sound. It’s not just the physical home, but very often, they are hoping and praying that they will make it through without psychological damage, or a lifetime addiction, or jail time.

In those times of turmoil, the guilt, worry, concern, anger, frustration, feelings of betrayal and ultimately love intensifies, because often there’s nothing that a parent can do. All she could do is wait and pray.

Becky and LeAnn’s story is one that we all know well. Either we know it as parents, as siblings, or as the person who wanders. We most of us relate to this narrative in one form or another. Sometimes it seems like the story is more prevalent now. It seems like the drugs have gotten harsher. They are more widely available. Our culture seems to invite the waywardness more. But, it probably isn’t a story that happens more often. After all, there is a reason why Jesus’ parable is so famous. There’s a reason why we tell it to one another so often. It has given people of faith such comfort. It is a story of intense longing to which so many parents can relate. It is the overwhelming forgiveness that rejoices that the son has returned. There’s the sibling rivalry. It feels so new to Becky and LeAnn, but then we realize that this has been a common story for two thousand years. We have been echoing and replaying this story, in different heartbreaking ways, since Jesus first told the parable of the prodigal son.

There are many ways of studying parables. I’ll tell you three of them. Adolf Harnack, a Germon theologian from about a hundred years ago, says that we should look for the “kernel” of truth in each parable. So how do we do that? What is the one take-away from the story? Instead of trying to figure out the one-to-one correlation of each character and item in the story, we need to ask, in general, what is Jesus saying? There are three ways that you can engage the text in prayer and meditation.

The first one is called Lectio Divina. We talked about this last Sunday night at the Lenten service. We read a parable. Then we sit in silence, opening ourselves up to God, asking what God might be trying to tell us. In the quiet, our minds usually hold fast to one word or one phrase. When we have that one word or phrase, we can begin to imagine how that word weaves within the story and our context. How does it come up in our histories? How does it come up in our present situations? Hold it in silence. What are the voices in the text trying to tell you?

The fascinating thing is that whenever I participate in Lectio Divina in a group, different people come up with a different word or phrase. What seems to be the central word to me is not the most important one for the others. I did this with a group of fourteen youth a couple of weeks ago, and it was not with a parable, but only one small verse, and even then, there were several things that people focused on.

The second way of studying parables is to ask questions of the story. This method has become important in children’s curriculum.  There is a very popular curriculum that asks wondering questions after the story is told. For instance, we would look at a text like this and ask ourselves,

            “I wonder how the man felt when he had all of that money.”

“I wonder how it felt for the man to be eating with pigs.”

“I wonder what the father was thinking as he looked over the horizon.”

“I wonder what the mother was thinking.”

“I wonder if the brothers ever got along again.”

“I wonder what the son felt like, when his father hugged him.”

Children who have grown up looking at the text and asking these questions keep asking them when they are older.

And, indeed, one of the main steps in preparing sermons is to ask questions of the text. This is often my favorite part. It makes these stories strange to us. Especially if we have grown up in the church, and we think that we know the stories like the back of our hand. It makes them much more peculiar. It makes us think of them differently.

Another way to meditate on parable is to take them and ask yourself, “What character do I identify with in this story?” It’s interesting, because in different times in my life, I have identified with different people in the Prodigal son story. When I was younger, I looked at the story of the prodigal and thought of myself as the older son, who stayed faithful and resented my siblings who weren’t as “good” as me (I just made some air quote there, around “good,” because I wasn’t that great. But I thought I was).

Then, when my husband and I moved away from his family in Nebraska, I felt like the younger son. The Prodigal. Especially when my father-in-law started having some health problems. I felt like we had abandoned them. We weren’t taking care of things at home like she should have been.

Now, strangely, I relate to the father.

I can imagine him, pacing the road, looking into the horizon, getting his hopes up every time he sees the figure rising up in the horizon. Imagining his son’s return. Fearing that it will never happen. It’s probably because I love Becky and LeAnn so much. I’ve spent so many nights praying for them both, that this story moved into me in a different way.   

The Father in the parable is God. Jesus is explaining to the religious leaders why he’s hanging out with the sinners and outcasts. He’s telling them that it’s their welcome back party. God is often referred to as father in Jesus’ teaching. And one of the interesting things about women going into academic theology is that they have begun to question this metaphor.

One ground-breaking theologian, Mary Daly, who just died a couple of months ago, was constantly pushing on the patriarchy of society and of the church, and she made the stunning proclamation:

“If God is Man, then Man is God.”

If when we worship, we imagine God as a big white guy with a flowing beard, sitting on a throne, then when we see a big white guy, we will automatically give that man greater honor and respect than other people. “If God is Man, then Man is God. ”

And all of a sudden, people understood this title of “Father” as a pretty complicated idol.

Mary Daly pushed us to go beyond “God the Father” so that we might begin to imagine God as a more dynamic and creative force. It is partly due to Mary Daly’s fearless work that we began to question the use of male imagery in our prayers and liturgy. Was our tradition trying to put God—the Great I Am into anthropocentric box? And was that box contributing to sexism in the church and even in the larger culture?

And, she began to follow in the thought of Paul Tillich, and she taught us how to imagine God, not as a person, or a noun, but as a verb. God is the ground of all being.

I must admit, I’m compelled by Daly’s critiques, but I also, most of the time think of God in a personal sense.

But I do remember the first time when I came across the idea of God being a verb. It was with a friend who had suffered from sexual and physical abuse that had occurred in his religious tradition. When he started going to a twelve-step program, he had to figure out what this “Higher Power” meant to him. He could not bear to go to church, and he could not imagine God as a father. But he said that he could start with the words, “God is love.”

I thought about that. God is love. Not the noun love, but the verb love. God is that active force that is pacing, and praying, and hoping that we come home. God is that concern and worry that keeps us looking out on the horizon, yearning to see the loved one in the distance. God is the love that embraces that ashamed son or daughter. God is the love that laughs with us. God is the love that lavishes gifts upon us when we do not deserve them. God is the love that dances with us—even in the midst of betrayal.

And maybe that’s why this story has stood the test of time. Perhaps that’s why we preach about it. Perhaps that’s why we remind each other of this beautiful story in our darkest times. Because it reminds us that God is that dynamic force, whose arms yearn to embrace us.

May we go out, with the knowledge of this great love.

To the glory of God, our Creator,

            God, our Liberator,

                        and God, our Sustainer. Amen.

Pastor, Western Presbyterian Church
Washington, D.C.
March 7, 2010

Text: Luke 13:1-9

About a month ago, I delivered a sermon in which I described and critiqued the church’s traditional teaching about salvation. These doctrines have what is called an objective view of salvation. We are the objects of God’s redemptive work, basically bystanders while God accomplishes our redemption in the death and resurrection of Jesus. God takes away our sins; sins we are incapable of removing ourselves.

While such a theology has a certain allure (it is always great to have someone else do odious tasks for us) and a certain amount of truth (our sins are greater than our ability to atone for them), this approach to salvation leaves many of us cold. It is rooted in a worldview we no longer embrace. It envisions a judge-like God angrily demanding satisfaction for the sins of humanity, a satisfaction humanity cannot provide. Switching from anger to grace, God is forced to become human to make the sacrifice on our behalf.

An omnipotent, omniscient God can only come up with a plan that entails sending Jesus into the world to die a brutal death on a cross for us? This is simply too weird by half for many of us in the 21^st century. Indeed, it was too weird for many of us in the 20^th century.

While our tradition’s explanation as to how salvation is accomplished may leave us cold, the desire to believe that one is redeemed, saved, made whole, call it what you want, remains at the heart of our spiritual quest. One of my favorite contemporary Gospel songs, a tune by Jessy Dixon, has as its chorus, “If anybody asks you, just who I am, tell them I am redeemed.” A huge part of my self-understanding/identity is that of a person redeemed by God. I am not just John. I am also Redeemed.

So dissatisfied with traditional teachings on redemption but very much wanting an explanation for my profound sense of being redeemed, I have always kept an eye out for explanations of how God redeems us. While I was doing my PhD work in systematic theology years ago, I was pleased to learn that many, many of the church’s greatest theologians had the same dissatisfaction with orthodox teaching. They came up with explanations of how God redeems us that are more consistent with Jesus’ ministry than the traditional teaching on atonement.

During my doctoral program, I was blessed with some amazing professors—women and men who had astounding intellects and hearts filled with faith, hope and love. I have never worked so hard academically. For each of my five comprehensive exams I read more books than I read for all my courses combined in seminary. However, it was easy to work hard when the results were so important.

Among my professors was Elizabeth Johnson, a Sisters of St. Joseph nun who remains a major feminist theologian at Fordham University. Dr. Johnson contends that in today’s world, the questions about God’s redemptive work are no longer oriented toward what God has saved us from. We aren’t as concerned as our ancestors with righting a wrong committed by Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Instead we want to know what God has saved us for. Put in other words, we are not so concerned with undoing past sins as we are with living faithful lives in the present and future.

Why has God put us here on earth? To what end does God forgive us our sins? These are the questions that motivate our spiritual journeys.

From such questions flow the conundrum of human freedom. Are we truly free to live the life to which we feel God is calling us or are we constrained by sin and other realities that limit our ability to act freely? There are many today who believe that, at best, we are perhaps free and, at worst, not free at all. They contend that our freedom, if it even exists, is extremely limited by forces, internal and external, that are greater than us.

For example, some scholars suggest genetics determine human behavior. Following this theory, if we come from a family system inundated with depression, our days on earth are doomed to be covered by the dark cloud of depression. If we come from a long line of alcoholics, particularly males in that family have a high likelihood that they too will become alcoholics. Such theories are sophisticated forms of the biology is destiny argument that has been used to limit and box in women, people of color and others since the beginning of time.

Others say our economic and sociological surroundings, not human freedom, determine our choices and decisions. So they argue: because poor people live in bad housing conditions or their kids attend deteriorating schools, they won’t be able to be able to accomplish much. People who grow up in an abusive family are told they will likely be abusers themselves. According to these theorists, our environment is more determinative of the outcomes of our lives than any other factor. The primary difference between the outcome of a child in a bad neighborhood in Calcutta and a child in Montgomery County is the happenstance of them being born where they were born.

Conspiracy theories are another attack on human freedom. Conspiracy advocates suggest that everything is controlled by dark, insidious forces working behind the scenes. Listening to such disempowering nonsense, we begin to question whether our actions can make any difference in the world.

Modern theories suggesting that we are not masters of our own destiny are the latest form of predestination. Rather than being theologically rooted as has happened in the past, they are rooted in pseudo-science. Their attack on human freedom is a powerful subtext in our culture today.

A gang recruits a kid saying, “Who do you think you can be on your own? You’re a Salvadoran living in the U.S. What chance do you have to succeed in life? If you don’t become one of us, you will be nothing. We can shape your life. You cannot.” The gang claims for itself redemptive power to infuse the young person’s life with direction, purpose and meaning. A company says to an employee, “If you don’t like what we are doing, go and try to find another job. Good luck.” It is a modern version of threatening to cast people into the darkness where they will weep and gnash their teeth. The company suggests that the employee is powerless apart from it.

Every individual in each generation faces the question: “Am I my own person, in control of my own destiny or am I ruled by forces beyond my control?” No one stated the question more succinctly than Shakespeare when young Hamlet wonders, “To be or not to be.” To Hamlet, the choice is ours. Jesus told us precisely the same thing.

In our Gospel lesson, Jesus tells his listeners that the first step to redemption is repentance. Acknowledging our failures is how we start taking control of our lives. Freeing ourselves of the past, we open ourselves to a future in which we have new choices and options.

Jesus then went on to tell a parable about a fig tree that wasn’t fruitful. A landowner told his gardener to cut the fig tree down. The gardener became the tree’s advocate, asking for time to fertilize the tree and give it another chance to grow. Parenthetically, it is a wonderful illustration of how humans can be advocates for the trees, animals, waters and other parts of the creation.

The gardener knew what the landowner ignored. Life is not a simple matter of being or not being productive. Productivity can be increased with application of human will power to a project. As we assert our free will, as did the gardener, things change. The fruitless becomes fruitful.

Redemption is not about some cosmic re-balancing of the scales of justice as traditional theological doctrine suggests. It is not about being washed by the blood of Jesus. It is about God restoring, every day, our ability to make free choices in faithful, hopeful and loving ways. God’s redemptive act is the ongoing re-creation of free will in the midst of a family system plagued with addiction, in the heart of a devastated neighborhood in Haiti, in the center of an organization filled with corruption, in the soul of a person who has just been told that she is terminally ill.

We are free to abuse or be abused. We are free to reject being abusers or victims of abuse. We are free not to care for our bodies, destroying them with an unhealthy diet and lack of exercise. We are free to care for our bodies by treating them as the holy temples they are.

We see this redemptive process at work every day in the choices people freely make here at Western. Volunteers freely and joyfully come to feed the homeless; enable 200 of some of the world’s poorest people in Addis Ababa to receive monthly medical care; create a loving, affirming church environment for our kids here. We see it as people search through the rubble in Haiti and Chile looking for life; as LGBT folks say “I do” in a marriage ceremony; as many members of Congress refuse to accept our overpriced, non-universal health care system as fated to continue as is.

In one of the most beautiful passages in Scripture, the prophet Isaiah records God asking us, “Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy? Listen carefully to me, and eat what is good, and delight yourselves in rich food. Incline your ear, and come to me; listen, so that you may live. I will make with you an everlasting covenant….” Why do we spend our money on foolish things and work so many hours on matters that ultimately leave us unsatisfied? Why do we eat and drink that which leaves us simply wanting more to eat and drink? The choices are ours.

As we come to the Lord’s Table this morning, let us incline our ear to God and listen so that we may choose life, a redeemed life built on choices freely made and freely lived. Salvation is about God’s offer of freedom. Freedom to live faithfully not sinfully. Freedom to overcome the circumstances into which we are born or live. Freedom to manage rather than be managed by our own genes or health. Let us embrace the freedom with which God blesses us.

Let us pray: Gracious God, you save us by giving us the opportunity to save ourselves. Help us to embrace our freedom and make the choices we see Jesus making, the choices we see his faithful disciples making throughout history. As we do so, may the sense of our own limitless possibilities grow and produce the fruits of faithfulness. Amen.

Pastor, Western Presbyterian Church
Washington, D.C.
Text: Luke 13:31-35, Philippians 3:17-4:1
February 28, 2010

In the season of Lent, we focus on what is known as “Jesus’ journey to the Cross.” During this crucial phase of Jesus’ life, the somewhat laissez faire days of his early ministry in Galilee were replaced by equally intense support and opposition to his ministry. Adoring crowds grew ever larger as masses of Galileans sought to be inspired Jesus’ preaching, touched by his healing power and enlightened by his broad understanding of God’s grace. During this period, the disciples intensified their work to spread Jesus’ Word.

At the same time, Jesus’ opponents grew ever more restless as they watched the young preacher’s popularity grow. Roman provincial governments were ordered to be on the lookout for alternate sources of power and authority surfacing in the grassroots. When spotted, Rome squashed any perceived threat quickly and ruthlessly. Jesus quickly showed up on Rome’s radar.

For reasons other than Rome’s, some among the established religious leadership of Israel were troubled by what they heard and saw of Jesus. From where they sat, the peasant preacher seemed to be moving away from the well-defined traditions of their ancestors. He had odd, even dangerous, ideas about what believers could do on the Sabbath, who was included in God’s family, and to whom forgiveness could be extended. During breaks in meetings of the Sanhedrin, a small but influential group of leaders lobbied their peers arguing that Jesus needed to be dealt with as a heretic, reminding the more tolerant in their midst that they were charged with protecting the faith. So there were two forces spinning around Jesus—his personal popularity and opposition to his ministry.

To keep his popularity intact, Jesus faced the temptation to tell the crowds whatever they wanted to hear. Fame has a way of compromising those who are blessed with it. There is a tendency to feed the beast that creates a high approval rating, to give the people more of what they seem to crave.

On the other hand, Jesus faced a temptation regarding his opponents. He could either 1) dismiss his critics as an older generation unable or unwilling to change with the times or 2) battle them tooth and nail. If he did the former, he would have been dismissive rather than inclusive. If he did the latter, his ministry would have been reactive rather than proactive.

I would suggest that many of us face the same type of struggles. Perhaps we are blessed with a certain amount of success at work, in our neighborhood, at church or wherever and we feel challenged as to how to cope with our acclaim. Or we come under criticism for our beliefs or lifestyle and get sucked into an unending, unwinnable debate with our critics. As we do so, these criticisms and our responses to them increasingly define who we are.

I have seen a number of pastors lose their personal integrity when their ministry became highly successful. Falling in love with success, all of their decisions flow through the matrix of whether or not a particular action will increase or decrease their popularity. Paul warned against this in a passage we read this morning where he writes, “their minds are set on earthly things.”

I have also seen clergy colleagues fall into the trap of obsessing over criticism. These pastors become unhinged as they attempt to counter every false statement made about them, rebut every criticism no matter how trivial it may be. It is a deadly trap.

When we fall into these classic quagmires, we lose our focus. Instead of making decisions based on where we want to go and how we are going to get there, we focus on whether or not we are popular or our critics are wrong. In so doing, we allow others to set our agenda. We are always responding to external realities rather than the internal call from God that should direct our actions.

Part of Jesus’ genius that is so abundantly on display during the season of Lent was his ability to stay focused. He didn’t ignore his critics or his fans. But neither would he would allow them to dictate what he did.

In this morning’s Gospel lesson, some Pharisees come to Jesus and warn him about Herod’s intent to kill Jesus. First, it is important to note that it was Pharisees who warned Jesus. Too often, the Pharisees are portrayed as a solid phalanx of opposition to Jesus. The Gospels don’t support such a caricature. The entire Jewish leadership was not set against Jesus.

How did Jesus respond to the threat from Herod? He told the Pharisees to tell the King, “‘Listen, I am casting out demons and performing cures today and tomorrow, and on the third day I finish my work. Yet today, tomorrow, and the next day I must be on my way….’” In other words, “I have work to do.” Jesus refused to allow Herod or any other critic push his ministry off target. He knew where he was going and it didn’t make much difference to him whether or not a huge crowd walked with him or critics tried to stop him.

The disciplined focus so evident in Jesus should be a goal for each of us in our spiritual journey through life. When we stay focused, we, like him, can do amazing things. When we lose our focus, we lose our effectiveness as his disciples.

In the context of Washington, D.C., it seems to me that the Republican Party is currently struggling with the temptation of success while the Democrats are dealing with the temptation of battling one’s critics. To rebuild their popularity, the Republicans are jumping on the runaway freight train of anti-government feelings. Without question, there are strong feelings among the American people that our government isn’t working. When we should have been raising taxes to fight two wars, our government spent money lavishly on bridges to nowhere. When we should have been paying attention to various market bubbles, we reduced regulatory scrutiny of those who make financial decisions. When we were facing an obvious job crisis, there seemed to be little concerted response to generate new jobs. People are rightly angry that our government isn’t governing effectively.

However, having seized upon an issue they helped create with their own inept governing during the Bush era, the Republicans now face the temptation of following this volatile message to the darkest side of the body politic. Anti-government crackpots are being given podiums in responsible Republican circles as though they are mainstream. It is a dangerous time for the Republicans.

The Democrats, on the other hand, face the danger of handing over their agenda to their critics. In life, we have to listen to, respect and attempt to work with our critics. People who ignore criticism do so at their own peril and usually suffer severe consequences. However, while we need to listen to our critics, we have to act on our convictions. In an effort to reach reasonable compromises, we can’t compromise our beliefs until they are unrecognizable or dig in for an extended battle just for the sake of the battle.

At some point, leaders have to lead. They have to act on what they believe to be the best course of action. If they are criticized for their actions, so be it. Maybe their critics are correct. Maybe they aren’t. But leaders need to do what they think is the right thing to do and live with the consequences.

For progressives in the Presbyterian Church, our temptation isn’t being too popular. Those of us who favor the full inclusion of LGBT folks in the life of the church will never please our critics. We just won’t. Indeed, to date, we haven’t been able to get a majority of our brothers and sisters to vote with us on this issue over any lasting period of time. So popularity isn’t our problem. But we do face the temptation of getting bogged down in a battle with those who oppose the inclusion of LGBT folks and losing the ability to work on a host of other equally important issues.

We can and should meet with those who oppose the full inclusion of LGBT women and men in the church, talk and break bread with them. In essence, this is exactly what has been happening throughout my 36 years in ministry. Gratefully, the progressive argument has been gaining votes every single year.

Is this a long time to ask LGBT folks to wait for inclusion? Of course. But considering that we are attempting to undo 2000 years of Christian bias and tens of thousands of years of human bias on this issue, we are actually moving quite fast.

However, we can’t allow this debate to consume us or divert us from the broad agenda of other justice, environmental and peace issues that face the world. So let us continue to press our position and vote our consciences. Let those who oppose us do the same. In the end, right will prevail.

So often we turn Jesus into an idealized, romanticized figure. We portray him as being so perfect that it is hard to relate to him. In fact, he was flesh and blood, real as real can be. When we are dealing with the challenges of popularity and criticism, we can learn so much from his pragmatic, realistic approach.

For example, let’s look at how he dealt with his popularity which seems to have peaked on the day we call Palm Sunday. As evidenced by the way the crowds eventually abandoned him, some of Jesus’ popularity was rooted in small and large misunderstandings of who he was. Indeed, most people were drawn to him because they thought he was somebody other than who he was. He was a wall onto which they projected their hopes. They saw him as the instant solution to their problems—personal, political or other problems. In some ways, this fantasy continues today with the many Christians who think Jesus will solve all their problems. When Jesus doesn’t, they turn on him.

But Jesus refused to portray himself as the solution to humanity’s many problems. “Only you can solve your problems,” he said in many different ways. To an adulteress he said, “Go and sin no more.” To a person overly attached to his material possessions, he said, “Sell what you have and give it to the poor.” To people filled with anxiety he said, “Look at the lilies of the field and birds of the air. If God cares for them, will not God care for you as well?”

These answers may or may not have been well received. But they were the only things Jesus could say with integrity. He wasn’t going to sell out his message just to gain a few more followers. So it must be for you and me individually and as a congregation.

Our success at Western hasn’t flowed from a strategy designed to make us popular. It flows from focus. We have done a pretty good job of understanding what we can and cannot do. There are always causes beckoning us to move off in different directions. Often, they are the popular causes of the day. However important they may be, none of them are as important as maintaining our focus.

Rick Warren has made a lot of money with his book The Purpose Driven Life. On one level, I think he misses the point. I have known a lot of people who were very clear about their purpose. But in pursuing that purpose, they lose their focus.

Maybe it is a pastor who tries to grow her or his church by being all things to all people or a teacher who is more concerned about being popular with the students than the students learning all the material or parents whose obsession with their child’s grades causes them not to pay enough attention to the child’s shaky self-esteem. The examples are as numerous as the human race. So many of our problems flow not from a lack of purpose but from a lack of disciplined focus on how we are going to accomplish the purpose.

On the plane down to Mexico earlier this month, a US citizen was sitting near me filling out his immigration form. The form asks for a destination in Mexico. The guy called over the flight attendant and said, “I don’t know what to put here. I don’t know where I am going.” She responded, “Well, put the city where you are going.” He said, “I don’t know that.” She replied, “Well where are you staying tonight?” “At a hotel near the airport.” “Put that down,” she concluded and walked away shaking her head. I just started to laugh. Talk about a lack of focus. For decades, Mexico has attracted Americans who have no idea where they are going.

Knowing where we are going and then staying focused on that destination is at the heart of a happy, health life. It is at the heart of effective, faithful Christian discipleship. In this season of Lent, we see Jesus focused in a way that is truly divine. May each of us learn from him how we can stay focused on who we are, where we are going and how we are going to get there.

Let us pray: Gracious God, it is easy to get diverted in life. There are so many important things begging for our attention, time and energy. Help us to figure out what you are calling us to do. May we then have the discipline to dedicate ourselves to accomplishing our calling. Having said “Yes” to your call, may we have the strength to say “no” to those things that will divert us from that end. All this we pray in the name of our Teacher, Jesus of Nazareth. Amen.