Preaching and Teaching

Western Presbyterian Church
Washington, DC
27 June 2010

Text: 2 Kings 2:1-2, 6-14

When I was in Cajun Louisiana, serving as a pastor, I learned about traiteurs. When people would get sick, they would go to the doctor and to the traiteur, just to make sure all of their bases were covered. Many of my neighbors, friends, and members of my congregation would say, “I was suffering from arthritis. I went to the doctor and I went to the traiteur, and now I’m healed. You can decide which one made me better.” And as they said it, I always got the feeling that I was voting for the doctor, and they were voting for the traiteur. The traiteurs were healers who lived in the swamps. I tried to research them, but there was very little written on them. They have a few pages in Cajun history books, and now there’s a wikipedia article on them. I never went to one, but I was pretty fascinated by them, so I was always asking people for stories.

They seemed to have combined some of the religious voodoo practices that are common in New Orleans with the liturgies of the Catholic Church. Some of the herbal treatments reminded me of the medicine men in Uganda. And then there were some interesting practices that seemed more magical. Like if you came to be healed from a wart, they would rub a dime over the wart, then they would tell you that when you spent the dime, then the wart would be transferred from your hand to the person you gave the dime to.

Their hands often radiated heat. When they were healing a dislocated shoulder, the patient could feel the burning coming from the palms of the traiteur’s hand. For the most part, traiteurs were men and women of prayer. They had a book of prayers that they would whisper, hardly audible for the person who came for healing. People didn’t pay them with money very often. They paid with food–chicken, shrimp, fish, or vegetables from the their gardens.

And one of the most interesting things that I learned about the traiteurs is they had an intricate system of passing down their magical knowledge. According to wikipedia, if the traiteur was a man, he would teach a woman. If the healer was a woman, she would pass down her knowledge to a man. One by one, the healer would teach the prayers to the apprentice, and when the apprentice would learn the prayer completely, then the teacher would lose power over that particular prayer. The prayer became the student’s, and no longer the teacher’s. Through many years, they would go through this ritual, until all of the prayers belonged to the apprentice. For almost 250 years, since the Acadians settled Louisiana, this ancient tradition has been kept alive through this process.

The magic tied to this process reminds me of the idea of legacies and inheritance in our Scriptures. There were two offices in the Old Testament, two kinds of religious jobs. One was that of a priest—and the priest would maintain the temple or the synagogue. He would keep the offerings burning on time and made sure that the rituals were followed correctly.

Then there was a prophet, a person who often caused chaos. When everyone was fat and happy, the prophets were there, reminding them that God’s punishment was just around the corner. When people were lamenting and in anguish, prophets were there, tearing their clothes, sitting in ashes, telling people about the mercy, grace and love of God.

In the Old Testament, there was a system of identifying and training prophets, usually within a family. They would look for the next generation of leadership, and they would anoint their predecessor. When a prophet found another prophet, he or she (there were women prophets. We know about Deborah, the judge and prophet, so there were probably more) would take a horn of oil, and pour it over the head of the predecessor to mark them. Often when a holy person died, he or she handed down their “mantle.” Or there was a blessing that was passed on. There was a sense that something miraculous was exchanged between the two people. And this is what we are reading about in our lesson this morning—the exchange of power between Elijah and Elisha.

Elijah and Elisha are incredibly fascinating characters. Elijah was a prophet, and Elisha was his apprentice. They’re kind of funny, kind of magical, and kind of scary.

In many ways I was lucky to start my ministry in South Louisiana, because this idea of apprenticeship was not only alive in the Cajun culture, but also in the African American culture. And so as I began my first years as a minister, several Methodist pastors took me under their wing. I was a 26-year-old feisty feminist, and these men who had been pastors for fifty years. And yet they took time with me, once a week, for an entire afternoon, to study Scriptures and give me advice. I was, at first, infuriated by what was happening. I thought it was pure patriarchy! I was always respectful to the men, but every week after we met, I told my husband that I wasn’t going back. I felt like just because I was a young woman, they were going to sit around and tell me what to do all day long. As if I had nothing to contribute to the conversation. But I kept going back.

Then I really started needing their help, and they were there, teaching me how to navigate the difficult terrain of a small church. Telling me when to take sides in a congregational conflict, and when to act as the mediator. Pretty soon, I became less angry about the injustices that I had to endure as a woman, and I began to empathize with my colleagues who served faithfully in communities where segregation and abuse was still very much alive. And, I’m not sure how to explain it, but they put recordings in my head that I’ve played back for a dozen years as I’ve served as a pastor. They established a foundation for me that I walk on every day. And I’m incredibly thankful that they took the time to drink thick black coffee, and teach me how to be a pastor.

I don’t know what I would have done if I started out here, in D.C. It is a sink or swim place, in our profession. There is rarely the expectation or vision among colleagues that we mentor each other. And, our schedules are so packed that it takes weeks to get a lunch appointment. It seems that it is not just in this particular religious community, but it can be all over.

We have lost the sense that something magical happens when we share our knowledge with someone who is starting out. We have lost this sense that we have a mantle, a legacy that we can pass on. Sometimes we do not know how to look at the next generation, not as a threat or competition, but as a hope that they will achieve greater things than we will. That they will make the world a better place. Sometimes I worry that we have lost the art of teaching the next generation in our country.

I am not sure why, but maybe it’s because we used to be an agrarian based culture, where the hard labor had to be shared—especially with those who were younger and stronger. Therefore, knowledge needed to be passed down as well, or we could not eat. There were family farms and family businesses, and so it was important for each generation to entrust their knowledge to their sons. Then, as the industrial revolution replaced the agrarian culture, and the tech and service industry replaced that, we entered into a time of competition. Instead of sharing the work so that all might be fed, we entered an economy that realized that keeping secrets was much more important than sharing them. Professions were not passed down from one generation to the next in the same way. People began to go to college to become trained. And sometimes, the academic pursuit of a profession was removed from the practical implementation. It seems that apprenticeships were replaced by internships.

This city is run with interns. We’ve had interns at our church. It seems that internship are highly competitive to get into. But they are too often about young, college graduates who have way too much student loan debt, are yet they expected to work for free without health insurance, paying rent in expensive cities, and going into more debt. Often it sets up a system of privilege so that people who have parents who can afford the internships, can do them. Many times internships are about doing the grunt work, and not learning the important skills and knowledge that the organization has to offer.

Don’t get me wrong. A good internship is a wonderful thing. Yet, for many college students in our country, they are expected to work for free for at least one year in order to get a decent job. Imagine if you had to live in DC, when you’re just starting out, without any income, for at least one year. (I’m sure many of you don’t have to tax your imagination too much, because you’ve already been through an internship, or you’re in one now.) This system is putting students into debt, and it’s eating away their parent’s retirement savings.

Now, I know that our city would probably shut down if there were no interns, but in this difficult economy, could it be time to start thinking about what we are doing to people in these situations? They’re in no place to complain, because they typically need to get a job out of it. But in this time when recent graduates face rising school debt, stagnant salaries, high rents, and lack of jobs, should we be expecting that they work without pay for so long? Often, it seems like an undue burden for those who desperately need a lighter load. We may need to ask some questions. If an intern is, in essence, contributing to the politician, office, church, or NGO a year’s salary, are we giving them more than just a foot in the door? Are we training them, mentoring them, and spending time with them? Are we setting up a system where people who do not have families with means are getting that much farther behind than those with means?

It’s not just in D.C. When I was teaching at a conference for campus ministers this week, we started talking about internships, many of the pastors agreed that this has become very damaging to young adults in our country. One campus minister even compared it to slavery.

Too often, we have lost the sense of building up new leaders, of leaving a legacy to the next generation. And I don’t just mean money, but I mean investing the time, the wisdom, and the secrets. I mean taking that metaphorical bull’s horn of oil, and seeking out that particular person. The one who will become greater than you are. And when you look back at your career, you can point to that person and know that a double portion of your blessing is still living in them.

The idea of anointing, of passing down our knowledge from one generation to the next, is very much alive in the church. As we baptized Max, we surround him with promises. He is part of a community where we will tell him the stories of our faith, encourage him to question, and teach him about the love and mercy of God be being loving and merciful to him.

And may that Spirit of blessing that runs from one generation to the next, pour out upon every area of our lives, to the glory of God our Creator, God our Liberator, and God our Sustainer. Amen.

Pastor, Western Presbyterian Church
Washington, D.C.
June 20, 2010

Text: Luke 8:26-31

Those of you familiar with this passage will realize that I cut it off a bit short before its usual conclusion. I absolutely hate reading aloud the part where Jesus allows the demons to enter a bunch of pigs who then rush into a lake and drown. Maybe it is residual guilt from my days when I was a meat packer at Oscar Mayer in Madison where I was part of a system that killed thousands of pigs a day.

Whatever, I now realize and treasure the reality that animals are as surely God’s creatures as you and I are. So why is it any better for them to be possessed by demons and die than a human?

It is an ongoing question that haunts the life of this nation. We massacred hundreds of thousands of buffalos that roamed the plains of the West, bringing them close to extinction. Now we are massacring the sea life and birds of the Gulf of Mexico with this oil slick. God put us on this planet to share with, not murder, our co-inhabitants. Humans need to change our ways—now.

However, while I don’t like the part about the pigs and the sea, I couldn’t avoid preaching on this Gospel lesson. It is too important. When I first started in ministry, I didn’t like the story because I didn’t believe in demons. I thought the idea of demons was a relic of a primitive, unscientific worldview.

People in ancient times didn’t know the truths uncovered by modern medicine, psychology and sociology. They didn’t realize that the behaviors they associated with demons might be caused by serious mental illness, Turret’s syndrome or post traumatic stress disorder. So let’s end all the talk about demons, I thought, and approach reality from a modern worldview. I especially scoffed at the part of the story where the demons spoke with Jesus. In the 21^st century, am I really supposed to believe that there are not only demons, but talking demons?

I thought all of this until I began to identify and acknowledge my own demons, those of my family system, those that have found a place to live in the church and our nation’s life. I began to realize these demons not only exist; they are talking to me all the time. Maybe it was the first time a voice within me told me, “No need to slow down on the drinking, John. You’re fine. You’re a man. You can handle it.” Going back four or five generations, my family system, like many others, has its fair share of alcoholics. So when this particular demon started to encourage self-destructive behavior, it got my attention. And it really didn’t feel like it was me talking to myself. It felt like I was talking to someone or something else.

I remember another demon. It told me, “John, don’t defeat your opponent in this debate. Destroy him. Pulverize him.” Yet another demon told me, “John, there is nothing wrong with telling an occasional sexist or racist joke. You’re just having some fun.”

Yup, there are demons, I learned. And they were talking to me. Even more bizarre, they were talking from within me. I’m willing to bet most of you have your own demons who are talking to you.

Four decades ago or so, there was a comedian named Flip Wilson who made the nation laugh as he described some of his outrageous behavior. He would always end by pausing and then saying, “The devil made me do it.” We laughed because we know how often we do something bad and attempt to offload the responsibility for doing it. And who better to blame than a mythological devil?

But underneath our laughter I sensed a bit of nervousness. Because we also sense some truth in what Flip was saying. Sometimes when we do something crazy, it does feel as though someone other than ourselves has control of us. Not the devil, maybe, but something, for lack of a better word, that we might call a demon.

The more I have thought about demons, the more I keep coming back to this Gospel story. Because one of its truths is that demons have no life if they don’t inhabit something or someone. All right, I guess I have to read the concluding verses of the story after all. Some of you may not remember the end of the story. “Now there on the hillside a large herd of swine was feeding; and the demons begged Jesus to let them enter these. So he gave them permission. Then the demons came out of the man and entered the swine, and the herd rushed down the steep bank into the lake and was drowned.”

Once identified as present by Jesus, what was the concern of the demons? They worried that Jesus would cast them out of this poor man and they would have no home. They wanted to jump into the pigs because at least they would survive. The pigs, however, decided they would rather die than be inhabited by the demons. So they either committed group suicide or martyred themselves to eliminate the demons from the world. Whatever, the pigs died as a result of the demons making them their home

One of the story’s points is that demons can only live if they live in someone. Without someone or something to possess, they lose their power/control.

Another key point is that we don’t have to live with these demons dictating the quality and content of our lives. If we are hearing demons’ voices, we need not be possessed/controlled by them. We can get them out of our lives.

Just as this poor fellow was unnecessarily living with the demons destroying his life, many of us have grown comfortable with the controlling, influencing voices of demons in our lives. Here is where the 21^st century comes back into focus. We won’t get rid of demons with exorcisms. But we can get rid of them with spiritual counseling, psychotherapy, various kinds of medication, prayer, support groups, the list goes on. With God’s help, we can cast demons out of our lives and the lives of others. Maybe.

I say maybe because I have been able to get rid of some of my demons. But some of them are like the weeds in my yard. I think I have gotten rid of them and yet they keep reappearing.

I still hear that voice, “John, you can drink as much as you want, as often as you want. You’re not like the others.” I then have to get in a conversation with this voice who, by the way, is paying me no rent to live within me. This voice is a real freeloader. I have to say, “Yes, I can drink. But not as much as I might want and not as often as I might want.” I have reconciled myself to the fact that I will have this internal conversation as long as I am alive.

I still hear voices that push me in a sexist, racist or homophobic direction. I will take them to my grave as well. But I will not allow them to control me. When they talk, I talk back.

So yes, we can get rid of some of our demons. But some of them will be traveling companions for all our days on earth. Nonetheless, we don’t have to put them in the driver’s seat. It is one thing to have them along for the ride as passengers, irritating as they may be. It is a whole different ball game if we put them in the driver seat of our lives.

Demons don’t inhabit just individuals. As a nation, we have some profound demons. We aren’t all that unique. Most nations have them.

The demon called Violence has had disproportionate influence on our actions since the day we hit the shores of this Garden of Eden. It has convinced us to inflict violence of nature, animals, native Americans, and each other. It has convinced too many of us to put our trust in guns rather than God. Since the middle part of the 20^th century, it has convinced us that we can use violence to impose our will on nations and peoples around the world. It has persuaded us that we have the right to verbally and physically abuse family members.

The demon called Greed has transformed us into slick-talking salespeople. We sell ourselves and others on the idea that if we can make a buck at something, it is good. So what if it means drilling a mile deep into an ocean floor or laying off all our neighbors and shipping their jobs overseas or creating financial instruments that have no intrinsic value?

The demon called Careerism begs us to forsake our families, friends and everything else to pursue our careers. “Just work harder and everything will be fine,” the demon reassures us.

There is a tell tale sign that we are dealing with a demon. If we follow the demon’s advice and are totally unsatisfied, the demon’s response will be, “You’re not trying hard enough. Drink more, spend even more time at work, be more violent, or hoard even more money and you will be satisfied. You’re just a slacker. Double down on it.” That voice is a demon’s voice. Note it well.

The demon’s advice is in direct contrast to the counsel a very wise Rabbi gave me some thirty years ago. Rabbi Friedman said, “John, if something isn’t working for you, you have simply proven that it doesn’t work. Try something else or try doing it a different way. But stop doing what you know doesn’t work.” The rabbi’s advice has been a fundamental, guiding principle of my professional and personal life.

The church surely has its demons as well. The demons of the Roman Catholic Church have been all over the front page for several years now. The demons of the Presbyterian Church tell us to ignore that our membership is shrinking steadily as a denomination. “Not to worry,” says the demon. “Everything will work out.” “Not really,” Rabbi Friedman would counter. The demons of the conservative churches tell them to impose their beliefs on others.

My goal this morning is not to get us to believe in the kinds of demons we see in horror movies or the famous movie The Exorcist. I have two goals. First, I am trying to help us acknowledge the demons we know exist. We know they exist because they live within us. They speak to us as surely as I am speaking to you now. They attempt to influence our decision-making as surely as advertisers hope we will buy their products. The fact that we can’t touch or see them doesn’t mean they aren’t real. Lives destroyed by these demons are the very real evidence that they exist. I don’t care if we understand them as spiritual, psychological, biological or cultural phenomena. I just care that we understand they are real and powerful.

Second, I want us to understand Jesus’ message about these demons. We don’t have to live under their power. We don’t have to be possessed by them. They can be cast out. Maybe we can’t remove them from our lives totally. Maybe we can’t stop them from talking to us. But we can stop listening to them. We can eliminate their influence on our actions.

The alternative to acknowledging and taking control of demons is the Flip Wilson model. We can use the demon’s advice as our excuse for doing bad things.

On this Father’s Day, I remember the way my dad responded to excuses. When I told him I did something bad because my friends did it too, he stared at me in disbelief. “So if they told you to jump off a cliff, you would jump off a cliff?” he would ask me. I have a feeling we are going to get a similar response from our Divine Parent if we try imitating Flip Wilson on Judgement Day. “So because the demon said over-eat, over-drink and over-work, you did it?” God will ask us.

The Good News in this morning’s Gospel lesson is clear: God will help us deal with our demons—demons that come to us from our family systems, the culture in which we live, even the religion we practice. But God will not accept personal, family or societal demons as excuses for our destructive and self-destructive behavior. Because God has told us all demons, not some, all demons can be cast out and controlled. May each of us have the strength and patience to work with God to that end.

Let us pray: Gracious God, at times, there are some scary voices within and around us. Help us not to be afraid of them. Rather, help us to confront them. As we do so, may we feel ourselves taking control of our lives. For your healing, empowering presence as we deal with these very challenging voices and forces within us, we give you thanks. Amen.

Pastor, Western Presbyterian Church
Washington, D.C.
June 13, 2010

Text: Galatians 2:15-21

I don’t subscribe to the notion that there is no such thing as a new idea. But there are very few of them when it comes to philosophy and theology. What constitutes a new idea in these two fields is usually the rebirth or reframing of an old idea. Nowhere is this more obvious than with some of the key ideas of the Protestant Reformation.

Because the Reformation radically changed the direction of history, it is easy to overstate the novelty of its intellectual underpinnings. However, most scholars would agree that the most important element of the Reformation, the assertion that we are justified by our faith not our works, is a very old idea indeed. We find it numerous times in the Old Testament. Paul was its primary advocate in the New Testament. Augustine elevated the doctrine in his writings in the 5^th century. So when Luther and Calvin reclaimed justification by faith in the 16^th century, they were working fallow but familiar fields.

When I teach the intellectual history of Christian theology, after a brief review of the Old Testament, I start with Paul. He was not just a master evangelist. He was a master theologian. Four hundred years later, Augustine picked up and expressed Paul’s thinking in powerful writings.

One thousand years after Augustine, Luther, an Augustinian monk, resurrected Augustine’s thinking and with him, Paul. Luther did so after three centuries dominated by Thomistic thinking. For those unfamiliar with the term, Thomism refers to the theological teaching of Thomas Aquinas. It took me a couple of weeks in grad school to figure that one out!

Some scholars argue Luther and Calvin reasserted a platonic or neo-platonic worldview since Augustine had roots in that camp. Aquinas, on the other hand, was clearly beholden to Aristotle. Few remember it today but Aristotle’s writings were basically unknown in Europe prior to the 13^th century. Aquinas lived in the time when Aristotle’s works were brought back from the Middle East by returning Crusaders. As he read the ancient Greek philosopher, Aquinas was captivated and ultimately captured by Aristotle’s brilliance. He immediately applied Aristotle’s worldview to Christian theology.

I rehearse this brief history of theology to prove a point. The doctrine of justification by faith won’t go away. For all intents and purposes, it has disappeared from the church’s core teaching for centuries at a time. But it always comes back because it is at the heart of the Christian message.

The fact that we are justified by our faith and not our works is, in my opinion, the single most compelling revelation that Christianity brings to the world. It is the reason I am a Christian. It is the reason I am a Christian in the Reformed tradition.

Many are those who believe that we should do works of justice and peacemaking. Many are those who believe we should express gratitude to our Creator. Many are those who believe God is at work in history. But the idea that we need do nothing more than believe in God to be justified before God is a unique and totally astounding assertion. Astounding.

Paul, Augustine and Luther all came to their conclusions that they were justified by their faith through a combination of experience and revelation. Prior to becoming a Christian, Paul feverishly attempted to work his way into God’s good graces. Following the exhaustive and exhausting laws of first century Judaism, he tried to live faithfully. He failed, time after time after time after time. And the more he failed, the more he grew to despise himself. Comparing himself to the standard set by religious law, he came to see himself as weak and incompetent.

Augustine went in a very different direction. By his own account, he engaged, at times, in a narcissistic lifestyle, including having a son with his concubine. Despite his self-indulgence, by the age of 30, Augustine, an outstanding scholar, was appointed to the most visible academic position in the Latin world—professor of rhetoric for the imperial court in Milan. There, he left his first concubine and took up with another. That relationship ended shortly.

Totally frustrated with his corrupt lifestyle, knowing that he was hurting others and yet gaining no lasting satisfaction from his behavior, one day Augustine picked up Paul’s Letter to the Romans and read from the 13^th chapter, “Let us walk honestly, as in the day, not in rioting and drunkenness.” His life turned on a dime. From that day forward, Augustine devoted himself to God, under the tutelage of Bishop Ambrose.

Like Paul, Luther was also a highly disciplined person. Once he became a priest, he was known for his lengthy fasts, copious confessions and study of the Scriptures. Wrote Luther of himself, “”If anyone could have gained heaven as a monk, then I would indeed have been among them.” And yet, his spiritual discipline did not give him what he needed and sought. It was not until Luther began to lecture on the Psalms as well as the Letters to the Hebrews, Galatians and Romans that the monk found the peace he sought. He realized that he need not and could not prove his worth. He needed to accept it.

Paul, a Type A workaholic, Augustine, a man searching for something just beyond his grasp, and Luther, a pious monk, all arrived at the same conclusion. They could not justify themselves through their work or piety. They couldn’t prove their worth to God, their neighbors and, perhaps most importantly, to themselves. They just couldn’t. They had to accept God’s declaration that they are worthy.

For two thousand years, the church has strayed from this core message more times than not. Creating religious rules for behavior, we have talked about the temptations of human sexuality, money, violence and many other things. But as humans, the primary temptation we face is not a moral temptation. It is the ontological temptation to prove our worth. We think we can prove how good we are by compiling good grades or ever-growing financial wealth, promotions and academic degrees, looking good or acting good. We can’t.

And in the greatest irony of human experience, we can’t prove our worth because we have already been deemed worthy by God. We are trying to do something that is already a done deal.

If we believed we were good, we wouldn’t try so desperately to prove we are good! Would we? Why is it so difficult to accept/believe that we are good?

Frankly, I don’t have a good answer to that question. Some people come into my office and say they can’t believe they are good because their parents were hyper-critical of them. But I know other people with hyper-critical parents who very much affirm their own worth. Some people say they developed low self-esteem have the were subjected to a lot of verbal abuse by classmates in school. Yet others who were dumped upon emerge with their self-esteem intact.

So I don’t know exactly why we find it so difficult to accept God’s declaration that we are good—a declaration God voices as early as Chapter One of the Bible. But I do know it is a crippling, debilitating problem.

We react to our lack of self-esteem in a variety of ways. Some of us get angry and inflict that anger on anyone, anywhere. Some of us become depressed. In an attempt to prove to ourselves that we are not worthy, some of us feed our low self-esteem with addictive behaviors.

Responding to our lack of self esteem, we get busy justifying ourselves. But self-justification doesn’t work. It didn’t work for Paul, Augustine or Luther. It doesn’t work for us. The harder we try, the harder we fail.

There is only one way to believe in ourselves. We have to believe in a loving God and God’s love for us. As we take this leap of faith, we realize we are good; we understand that we are created in God’s image in ways we dared not dream possible.

But we cannot believe in just any God. We must believe in a God whose goodness overflows into the creation, into you and me. If we believe God is a wrathful, threatening force, we are likely to be as hard on ourselves and others as we imagine God will be. If we believe a Creator God is totally detached from the creation, we are left to create our own worth.

Understanding ourselves as created in the image of our good God, we can start acting like it. This is why Calvin, in particular, devoted most of his work trying to focus us on the sanctified life. Luther lifted up the doctrine of justification by faith. Calvin thought out the implications of that doctrine when it comes to everyday living.

The Christian life is not about trying to prove we are good, said Calvin. It about acting out our gratitude for the revelation that God loves us. This is not a matter of semantics or some philosophical trick.

When we do good in order to prove we are good, we will fail. When we do good because we are grateful for and accept God’s declaration that we are good, we have a pretty good chance of succeeding. I say “pretty good chance of succeeding” because we live in a world that makes it very challenging to do good. Paul summed this up when he bemoaned that we don’t do the good we intend.

When liberals built housing projects in the 1960s, they were trying to do good. But a variety of external factors caused those new homes for poor people to become, over time, prisons for poor people. When conservatives decided to reduce the size and scope of the government’s regulatory structure in the 1980s, they were trying to do good. But a variety of factors have caused those efforts to corrupt things as seemingly disconnected as Wall Street, our food and oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico.

For our closing hymn, we are going to sing “Amazing Grace.” My mother never liked the hymn because she didn’t consider herself a “wretch”! She wasn’t. Neither are you or I. But think for a moment about the cause of the composer’s wretchedness. It was rooted in his feeling of being lost, unfulfilled, without purpose. He was drifting through life doing this, doing that, without any rhyme or reason why. The composer’s joy is in his feeling that he has been found. Crucially, he didn’t find something. He was found by a God who had loved him all along. Tired of justifying himself, he needed to accept that he was justified.

So many people in this and every generation are living wretched lives because they are lost, adrift in the chaos of their times and lives. In their confusion and lostness, they develop low self-esteem and fail to believe in their intrinsic value. To such people, Jesus’ followers must preach the Good News. When we believe in God, our eyes are opened, our ears unplugged, our hearts restored. No longer lost, we find ourselves in relationship with a God who sees a goodness in us we haven’t seen. Suddenly, we believe the unbelievable—God loves us because we are good, even when we don’t act good.

The Gospel lesson tells the sweet story of a sinful woman who lavishes a precious ointment on Jesus. The righteous men in the group, busy justifying themselves, objected to Jesus being handled by a woman with such a reputation. Jesus dismissed the objections of the men and focused on the woman. He saw a goodness within that made his heart sing.

God sees the same thing in you and me—a goodness that makes everything God does worth the effort; that keeps God coming back to us even when we fail. Can we accept this love? Can we allow it to wash away our self-doubts and occasional self-loathing? We can. Millions upon millions have.

Let us pray: Gracious God, you have found us, loved us, justified us in ways we cannot do for ourselves. Thank you. May we respond to your goodness and love with gratitude and thanksgiving, with acts of love and generosity that change the world. All this we pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.

Pastor, Western Presbyterian Church

Washington, DC

6 June 2010

Text: I Corinthians 10:12-33

Almost anytime in the news, we can unfold the paper or scroll down the screen and see that someone has been caught in some outrageous act of hypocrisy. Right now, the person in the news spotlight is on Ted Haggard, the antigay pastor, who was the head of the National Association of Evangelicals, and was caught hiring a male prostitute. He’s in the headlines, because after being removed from his church and spending a couple of years of public soul-searching, he is starting a new church, and he has toned down his rhetoric against same-gender couples. Of course, Haggard is just the flavor of this month. There are many others. The details are often different, but the stories stay the same. A man who gains notoriety for keeping American families on the straight and narrow, who spews hatred against gays and lesbians, gets caught with a sex worker in his car. Politicians who come into town, espousing family values for our country, destroy their own families by having an affair with their staffers. A preacher rails against sexual immorality, until we find out that he is having inappropriate relationships with women in his congregation.

We won’t go through the names. We don’t have to. You probably know who most of them are. We seem to love those scandalous details, as the media spotlights them for days. And then there is the ripple effect of social media, as the blogs become outraged, and the Facebook sites follow suit. I suppose there is a part of us that should respond with righteous indignation. And when a person perpetuates hatred against homosexuals, it makes me furious. But it was not long after becoming a pastor that the stories of blatant hypocrisy exhausted me. There are a lot of these indiscretions that happen quietly, without media attention, and when it’s found out, they just ruin people’s marriages, relationships with their kids, and often careers. The bigger the person is, the harder he or she falls, but in our profession, it is nothing short of heart-wrenching to watch the damage.

Recently, a high-profile hypocrisy occurred, as well as the deluge of angry newsletter articles and blogs. As I was sorting all of it out, I noticed that it was like this vicious cycle: The politician, in his righteous indignation rants against the eroding moral fabric of our society. He gets caught breaking his own rules, and then we spew righteous indignation about that other person’s righteous indignation.

People become infuriated by the hypocrisy, and I understand that. Often times they are working from their own personal hurts of being betrayed in a relationship or men and women who work for the rights for same-sex couple get fed-up when they see that the person on the other side of the issue has a closet the size of a five-car garage. Some people will see a famous preacher, and they reject Christianity altogether, because they say that it’s just full of hypocrites, and they want nothing to do with it. Other see lying politicians, and they lose complete faith in our political process. But I’m wondering if we can get beyond the cycle of heaping righteous indignation on top of righteous indignation. Is there a more constructive way that we can do with these situations? What fuels this hypocrisy in the first place?

The text that we read this morning from I Corinthians gives us a clue. “Let the one who thinks they stand take heed lest they fall.” There’s some wisdom in there: when we think we have it all together, when we think that we can do no wrong, when we put ourselves in a position where we are pointing fingers at someone else, that’s when we need to be careful. Most of us are hypocrites, in one way or another. I was at a gas station, cleaning out my car the other day. I mindlessly put recyclables in the trash. And as I was driving away, I thought about the bottles, then I remembered all of the articles, book chapters, and sermons I wrote on environmentalism in the last year. Not to mention all of the impromptu mini-sermons that I have forced my family of origin to endure for decades. And I took a deep breath, realizing that in my hurry to get something done, because it was convenient, I was a total hypocrite.

I wonder what fuels hypocrisy. There are three things that I often see.

First, it could be that the very thing we struggle with ourselves, we hate seeing in others. This happens with our character defects. We see it in families all the time, parents are often the most frustrated by their children when their children start to exhibit the character defects that they themselves have. I knew a father, who became infuriated that his son procrastinated on every homework assignment. The son never planned ahead, and always spent the last hour, stressed out and panicked over the deadlines. Of course, the son learned how to manage his assignments from his father. But it still made his father furious, precisely because it was something that he himself. The father wanted the son to learn from his mistakes, not repeat them. There are things within ourselves that we hate, and so we hate even more to see them in others.

Second, it seems to be a product of our human nature to crave that thing which is restricted. I remember when I was in college, I used to diet a lot. Too much, in fact. I would have intricate lists of foods that I could and could not eat. But, then I realized that I would actually gain weight when I dieted, because I became obsessed with food. While compiling the list of things in my head that I was not allowed to eat, I began to crave them.

I know a mom who restricted certain toys for her child. She didn’t allow her daughter to play with Barbie dolls because she thought that they were oversexualized and would lead her daughter into an unhealthy body image. But her daughter really, really wanted the doll. Then when a grandparent snuck Barbie dolls into a Christmas package, and the child had the toy within her grasp, she no longer craved them. In fact, she never played with them at all, and they sat ignored.

It’s the truth of our great myth of the Garden of Eden, playing over and over again. When the couple was told they could eat of any tree in the garden except for one, they craved the one fruit that they could not have. When a person spends his or her life, talking about the one fruit that is restricted, thinking about it on a constant basis, then perhaps it is human nature to start craving that thing.

The third thing that seems to be at play—and this is perhaps the most damaging one—is when a delusion exists. We often see this with addiction. Individuals and families can spend so much time hiding an addiction, convincing themselves that it does not exist, or lying about it, that it cam come to a point when it seems like the family truly believes that the addiction does not exist. Everyone in the whole town may know about the addiction, but the people who are living with it, or closest to it, have learned to excuse it so often, that they begin to live into an alternative reality.      

So how can we become more constructive in our conversations about hypocritical actions? I think a good place to start is where the author of this letter to the church in Corinth started. It seems like the congregation was dealing with a whole lot of unhealthy behavior in their gatherings. And the early church was having some strong debates over whether they should eat meat that had been sacrificed to idols. In the midst of all of this, the author sets up lists of things that the communities should and should not do. And he says, “So if you think you are standing, watch out that you do not fall.” I take that to mean, we should look within ourselves. We need to be careful about judging other people for the wrongs that they commit, because it could happen to us. We need to take heed in our righteous indignation, because we can get caught up in the same mire. The author still sets up lists of things that the community should and should not do. There is still a sense of right and wrong in their life together, but there is this also this reality that we should watch our own standing. We can take care of our own families, before condemning the families of others. We can look closely at our shadow side, the things in our lives that we would rather hide, and understand that it is a part of who we are, so that we can have a healthy realization of our own proclivities.

Many times that understanding will lead us into accepting behaviors that we have in the past seen as sinful—such as homosexuality. If a person is lesbian or gay, and she or he has understood that to be sinful, then the person may grow into a different understanding, one that realizes that God loves and accepts them. Or if a woman feels guilty about being career-minded and ambitious, and everything in society has informed her that she is sinful because of it, she may learn that it is not a sin.

Other times looking closely at our shadow side means getting the help and support that we need to overcome our character defects, so that we are not caught in those strange delusions about ourselves. As a community, that is why we come together and confess our sins together. It is a way of stopping, and turning ourselves over, realizing those things that we have hidden, confessing all of those things that fuel our hypocrisies, and embracing a God-given newness.  

May we go out, and learn to live examined lives, to the glory of God our Creator, God our Liberator, and God our Sustainer. Amen

Pastor, Western Presbyterian Church
Washington, D.C.
May 30, 2010

Text: Romans 5:1-5

When I first came to Western 27 years ago, there were a number of members who had fought in the front lines of World War II, not that they told me about it. Others told me. Our members who served in the war didn’t speak about their experiences.

Watching the HBO show Pacific the past ten weeks, I understand why. The trauma the troops experienced, the brutality and bloodshed they observed and in which some of them participated was devastating. It was challenging even to watch it in dramatic form some sixty years later. What people on both sides suffered is unfathomable.

A legacy of suffering is why Memorial Day has a very somber feel to it. There are no joyful celebrations. Rather, we remember the enormous sacrifices people make and made to protect freedom, to create justice, to establish peace. It is a melancholy, wistful holiday if ever there was one.

As I do every Memorial Day, I urge us to remember not only those in the military who died defending our liberties and rights but others defenders of freedom as well. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Dr. King, Bishop Oscar Romero, the young Neda Agha-Soltan in Iran, to name a few, willingly put their lives on the line to advance the cause of freedom, social justice and peace in the world. They sacrificed their lives so others might be free.

Given all of the sacrifices made by those who came before us, a disquieting question weighs heavily on us each Memorial Day: “For what will we be remembered—you and me? For what sacrifices will we be praised?” Certainly many parents will be remembered for enormous sacrifices they made on behalf of their kids. Members of this congregation have made sacrifices to keep our ministry alive through civil and world wars, economic depressions and recessions. Volunteers sacrifice free time to work at Miriam’s Kitchen, the Ethiopia Clinic project, the Race for the Cure and so many other worthy programs.

However, in the year 2010, the question that really haunts us as a people is whether or not we are willing to make the sacrifices necessary to keep this nation great, as did our ancestors. Because greatness is always built on sacrifice. Great relationships, careers, congregations, nations, it makes no difference. Greatness requires sacrifice. Sacrifice generates greatness.

Our foremothers and fathers made huge sacrifices when they ventured away from the known realities of their homelands—from Asia and Europe, Latin America and Africa—to create the nation we are. They fought a bloody civil war to end the brutal system of slavery. They traveled across two oceans to help defeat fascism in Europe and Asia. Brave souls walked through angry mobs in the struggle to create civil rights for women and people of color.

In our generation’s moment of crisis, actually, crises—fighting two wars, a stubborn economic recession, environmental disasters, the questioning of government itself—what sacrifices are we prepared to make? Because, frankly, we appear unwilling to make the type of sacrifices previous generations made. Indeed, at the moment, it is hard to be optimistic about how history will judge us.

A nation of debtors, we refuse to live within our means, personally or as a nation. We reject even the mention of paying higher taxes to cover our expenses as a people. We prefer to pollute the earth rather than reduce our dependence of oil, coal and nuclear energies. Baby boomers recoil at the mere suggestion of changes to our future social security benefits.

As a result of our sacrifice-phobic approach to reality, this Memorial Day is a bittersweet day for us in the United States. We remember and honor that which we are seemingly unwilling or unprepared to do ourselves: make sacrifices. We praise the ideal of sacrifice but adamantly refuse to practice it.

Into our sacrifice-starved milieu comes the Word of God as found in Romans 5 where Paul writes, “we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.”

Paul wasn’t describing suffering as a theoretical good. He was describing his life. By the time he wrote these words, Paul had been imprisoned numerous times. Forsaking a stable, settled family life, he spent his days on dangerous roads and perilous seas. Materially impoverished, the apostle was reviled and threatened by opponents who saw him as a challenge to everything they held dear.

Paul did not recoil from the suffering. He embraced it as his teacher. His suffering taught him the power of endurance, enabling him to think long-term when others thought short-term; to move forward when others retreated. Endurance showed him the value of character. He came to realize that his character was far stronger than he had imagined. He could endure things he didn’t know he could endure. With his character being forged in the white-hot furnace of suffering, Paul discovered and was directed by a hope that springs eternal. Indeed, he quickly identified this hope as flowing from none other than Almighty God.

Read the lives of the saints and they all describe a similar procession from suffering to character to hope. Read the biographies of individuals who embraced suffering for a greater good—explorers, social justice activists, humanitarians—and they too tell us about the way suffering shaped and steeled their character.

As a pastor, I have the challenge and privilege of watching people suffer. It is a challenge because no one likes to watch another person suffer. It is a privilege because of the inspiring way in which so many people become stronger, better women and men as they cope with and learn from their suffering, as Paul did.

Before I utter one more word, I need to say that I do not view suffering as some type of paradoxical gift from God designed for our spiritual growth. To me, such thinking is blasphemy. What parent would wish suffering upon their children to build character? We don’t. God doesn’t.

Suffering is inflicted on us by life, not by God. Dr. King suffered because he challenged an oppressive, racist system, not because God wanted him to grow spiritually. A woman battling breast cancer suffers because of cancer cells, not because of the will of God. The people of Palestine and Israel suffer because their leaders won’t create the peace vast majorities in both nations want. Suffering is not caused by God. It is caused by people and events.

That being said, suffering produces a lot of pain and agony which, in turn, has the potential to create character. I say potential because it also has the potential to destroy us, to melt us down into a puddle of uncontrolled, uncontrollable emotions. Whether our character is strengthened or destroyed by suffering depends on how we respond it.

In my first pastoral position, I got to know a church member whose adult son was an addict. My memory of Sarah is that of an older woman. But when you are 28, almost everyone seems old. She was probably in her mid-fifties. A widow with no other children, as a family unit, it was just Sarah and her addicted son.

The son would come home at all hours of the night and basically terrorize her with drug and alcohol-crazed rants. When I first met Sarah, she hadn’t gotten a good night’s sleep in months. Given her lack of sleep and inability to focus, Sarah feared she would lose her job. She also worried her son would fall asleep in a drunken stupor and burn down the house.

At an Al anon meeting, several parents told Sarah she needed to throw her son out of the house. “He needs some tough love,” they said. “Stop enabling his destructive lifestyle.” So she did.

For the first week, the son would come home in the middle of the night, sit in the front yard and scream at the house. Lights went on in the neighbors’ houses. A few times the police were called. Sarah would call me and say, “I don’t know if I can do this. It is the hardest thing I have ever done. I’m not sure I’m even doing the right thing.” Neither did I. I have never been an unconditional fan of the tough love strategy.

The son finally stopped coming home. Eventually he sobered up. However, their mother-child relationship hadn’t been repaired by the time I moved up here to the Washington area. There wasn’t a neat, tidy ending. In life, there rarely is.

Nonetheless, what I observed was a woman who grew more resolute as she endured her suffering. When I first met Sarah, she was a pretty wishy-washy type of person. But as she took this bull of suffering by the horns, a quiet strength began to appear within her. With the new strength came a new vision of a life for herself and, if he was willing and able, her son. Suffering led to endurance to stronger character to renewed hope, just as Paul predicted.

This is how memorials are built. They are rarely the product of our planning. They are produced by our response to life’s surprising twists and turns and the suffering which sometimes accompanies them.

Just as I cautioned against assigning the origin of suffering to God, I have another caution for us. As Calvinists who understand the potential value of suffering, we need to be careful that we don’t begin looking for opportunities to suffer! I see this happen from time to time.

While I was in college, the nation was going through a bad recession and none of us could find summer jobs. So a friend and I moved to a small rural town in Wisconsin to work in a pea-packing plant. Our co-workers were all migrant workers, country boys from Arkansas, who hated us college kids and made our lives miserable. We rented a room with one double bed from a retired woman who wouldn’t let us take a shower when we got home at night because it might wake her up. We worked 16 hour shifts at pathetic wages.

After a few weeks of this, my friend Carl Marquardt, said, “We are going to quit. This just isn’t worth it.” I responded angrily, “Carl, we can’t quit. If we do, we may develop a lifelong pattern of quitting. What will happen if we end up in Vietnam? We won’t be able to quit then, will we?” Looking at me incredulously, Carl said, “John, this isn’t Vietnam. This is a Columbus, Wisconsin pea-packing plant. We’ll deal with Vietnam if we get to Vietnam. This isn’t about being a quitter. This is about quitting a job that isn’t worth the hassle.” Carl was one of those preternaturally wise Scandinavian Lutherans from Wisconsin who regularly saved me from myself.

As a nation, as individuals, we are building our memorials right now. Some will stand for eternity. Some will disappear even before we die. In no small part, the difference between the two is rooted in the amount of sacrifice that goes into their construction.

Over the past few decades, we have learned a lot about investment bubbles—the tech bubble, the real estate bubble, the credit default swap bubble. In every case, the bubbles were successes built on very little, if any, sacrifice. As a result, they evaporated just as quickly as they appeared.

Contrast such temporary successes with what happened in Europe and Japan after World War II. We not only fought a war to stop fascism. We helped the people of those nations rebuild their lives. We and they made huge sacrifices. As a result, for the past fifty years, the United States, Europe and Japan have had unprecedented peace and prosperity.

People often ask me how the ministry of Western Church has been renewed over the past thirty years. I tell them, “First, it took thirty years, not five or ten. Second, our renewal is rooted in the sacrifices of the people who were here from 1950-1980 when there was no reasonable prospect for this ministry to succeed. They believed, suffered and endured when no one else believed a successful ministry here was possible.” The pastor of New York Avenue Presbyterian, at the time, tried to convince our members to sell the property and join their congregation. The IMF and Presbytery tired to convince our members to close the church and sell the land. They chose another option—they opted to endure by making sacrifices. It is why this congregation has such a strong and deeply ingrained character.

Memorials are built on sacrifices, on the ability to endure suffering which produces incredibly strong and resilient character which fuels a hopeful vision for the future. If ever we need to engage in such a sacred process, it is today. If we will make the sacrifices, God will help us build the future of our dreams.

This is the Word of God for people looking for work right now, young people trying to figure out what is next, people in parts of our nation going through enormous economic transformation, our fellow citizens along the Gulf Coast, for you and me. If we will work our way through suffering, allowing it to be our instructor, we will not only endure, we shall overcome. Millions upon millions of lives bear witness to this eternal truth.

Let us pray: God of our lives, these are trying times. Most of our problems we can trace right back to our own actions—individually or collectively as a people. Help us not to lose hope. Rather, help us to stand together in this time of suffering so we can build a better future for our children and grandchildren. All this we pray in the name of One who suffered on our behalf, Jesus the Christ. Amen.

Pastor, Western Presbyterian Church
Washington, D.C.
May 23, 2010 Pentecost Sunday

Text: John 14:25-27

One of the fascinating things about the Bible is the way translations change over the years. Since many words have multiple meanings, translation is an art form, involving the interpretation of a word and the grammatical setting in which it is found. In reputable translations such as the New Revised Standard Version we use here at Western, textual changes oftentimes come from new understandings of very old words. Usually such new insights are the result of archaeological discoveries.

Whenever archaeologists dig up a bunch of manuscripts or find words inscribed on the walls of crypts or a piece of pottery, we gain new knowledge about how a particular word was used in a given period of history. Using an example from our era, until the mid-1950s, the word “cool” had to do with temperature. Since the mid-1950s, it may still relate to temperature but it also may indicate how appealing or trendy something is. Future translators will have to determine which meaning to use when they are translating documents from our time period.

All of this is introduction to the fact that some scholar found something somewhere that has led to a significant change in the translation of verse 26 of John’s 14^th chapter. As read this morning, the Holy Spirit is described as an “Advocate.” In previous Revised Standard translations, the word was translated “Counselor.” It is a major change—at least, to a preacher in search of a sermon. To preachers, such distinctions are like setting a box of Godiva chocolates in front a chocoholic.

The Oxford English Dictionary is one of the great reference books of the world, even if you do have to use a magnifying glass to read it. It reveals that the word counselor is rooted in the Latin conseillere, meaning “to advise.” Advocate comes from two Latin words “ad” and “vocare” meaning “called or summoned to another.” More specifically, the OED continues, “advocate” means “called or summoned to plead another’s cause in court.”

So with our new translation of John 14:26, we no longer look at the Holy Spirit as a divine advisor. Instead, Jesus said God was sending us as an Advocate, One who is called or summoned to plead another’s cause in court. The Spirit is about advocacy, not advice.

The Advocate’s client is God, which begs the question, “Why does the Creator of the Universe need a barrister?” Because humanity is a tough jury! We are just as inclined to disbelieve as believe what God reveals as the Truth. Give us any reasonable doubt and we just may walk away from God.

In front of the court of human experience, God needs an Advocate arguing that God loves us, contending that God is engaged, not disengaged, pleading that God is caring, not indifferent to the human condition. More specifically, when our health is bad and doesn’t seem to be improving, God needs an advocate to convince us that God wants us healthy. Because it feels as though God has cursed us. When a long term love relationship is falling apart, God needs an advocate to convince us we are capable of loving and being loved. Because we feel like a failure at love. When a family member is dying a painfully slow death, God needs an advocate to argue that God is paying attention. When a devastated country like Haiti is ravaged even further by a natural disaster, God needs an advocate to convince the world that God is not capricious.

The beliefs of most atheists and agnostics are the result of observation and interpretation. They watch negative, destructive things going on around them, and maybe within themselves, and reach the conclusion that no loving God would ever accept or allow such things to happen. A loving God would not tolerate the intolerable, they claim.

Theirs is not an unreasonable conclusion. An empirical case can be made for their position. However, as God’s Advocate argues, it is a false conclusion, a classic case of looks deceiving us.

God’s Advocate contends that cancer is not the result of divine indifference to our health. It is caused by carcinogens, most of which are created by human environmental devastation. A relationship breaks up not because we are unlovable but because we weren’t good stewards of love. Haiti’s devastation isn’t the result of a detached, disinterested God. It is the result of Haiti being located almost on top of a fault line (Earthquakes of similar violent force hit Haiti nineteen years apart in 1751 and 1770).

Luke, the author of both the Gospel of Luke and Acts of the Apostles, saw the Holy Spirit at the center of what God did both in Jesus’ ministry and that of the early church. Indeed, scholars I respect describe Luke’s writings as two volumes of a single work that could be entitled The Work of the Holy Spirit in the World. To make his point about the ongoing work of the Holy Spirit in Jesus’ life and the life of the church, Luke draws multiple parallels between the two. For example, in the first volume, Jesus is baptized into the work of the Holy Spirit. In the second volume, the church is baptized into the work of the Holy Spirit. Jesus suffered because he acted as God’s Advocate. So did the early church. The parallels go on.

I like using this paradigm because it can serve as a frame for our work here at Western. Just as the Holy Spirit was at work in the life of Jesus and the early church, it continues to be at work in our ministry. Working through our ministry, the Holy Spirit, competes for the hearts and minds of human beings—college students, the homeless, newcomers to Washington, you and me. Because the advocates who argue against the existence of a loving God are skilled and articulate compelling arguments, we need ministries such as our own to advocate a God who is just, loving and graceful.

However, if we aren’t careful, this paradigm can be bit presumptuous and parochial. It can begin to assume as though the Holy Spirit wasn’t at work in the world prior to Jesus or outside the work of the church. But who was more effective as advocates for God than Moses and Esther, Micah and Amos, Ruth and Isaiah? Surely the Spirit was at work through them.

And how can people argue that the Spirit is only at work in the Church? Is not God’s Spirit working through the efforts of a Hindu such as Gandhi, a committed Muslim such as Muhammad Yunus or a devout Jew such as Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel? Indeed, I would argue that the Holy Spirit oftentimes works through people who have no relation to religious faith whatsoever.

Christianity is all about incarnation—the indwelling of the divine in the human; the Word become flesh. So the Holy Spirit does not function in a disembodied manner. To speak words humanity can hear, God must speak and work through us.

If this newest translation of John 14:26 is correct, when you and I open ourselves to the Holy Spirit, we become God’s advocates, arguing God’s case to our families and friends, and colleagues at work; to the political and economic principalities and powers of the world. To despondent, despairing friends, we argue that God got the Hebrew people to the Promised Land and will get us there as well. To people who can’t find a job, we argue that God has a purpose for them. To a fearful, anxious nation, we argue that we should put our trust in God, not guns and foreign military interventions.

When thinking about advocacy, it is important to remember that not everyone communicates verbally. Many people are strong, effective non-verbal communicators. Nelson Mandela is obviously a very gifted verbal communicator. He is equally gifted as a non-verbal communicator.

For example, when he became President of South Africa, Mandela invited Percy Yutar to lunch at the presidential residence. Yutar was the notorious prosecutor who sent Mandela and many other innocent people to prison during the apartheid era. Several of Mandela’s closest aides, including Walter Susulu, refused to join them for lunch. They didn’t want to break bread with their prosecutor. Mandela did. It was an act of reconciliation that spoke louder than any words. In a non-verbal manner, he advocated that his nation put behind itself a divisive past.

Rosa Parks said nothing the day she sat down in a portion of a bus reserved for white people. Her non-verbal statement is now enshrined in our nation’s history. Without speaking a word, Rosa Parks became one of the Holy Spirit’s most powerful advocates for racial integration.

Whether our advocacy is verbal, non-verbal or both, as Christians, it is important to pay attention to what is happening within us. For as we advocate for God, if we are attentive, we will feel a Spirit at work within us; a spirit greater than our own; a power that transcends our power. Anybody who was involved in the civil rights movement can tell us about it. I could feel it when I testified to the City Council in favor of same-sex marriage legislation. People will feel it as they participate in the three-day walk for a cure to breast cancer. For those who are attentive to it, the sense of the Spirit’s presence is palpable in moments of advocacy.

In Acts 17, some of Paul’s opponents go to the local authorities to complain about the growing Christian movement. I absolutely adore their description of the early Christians. The locals call them, “These people who have been turning the world upside down.” People who turn the world upside down. What a glorious slander!

Wherever people are turning the world upside down to create justice and peace, to break down walls that divide, to reconcile ancient enemies, to heal broken hearts, to console the grieving, there we find God’s Spirit at work—advocating for the world God created, not the world we have created. As we baptize little Logan Michael today, it is our prayer that he will turn the world upside down. Actually, he has already turned Lisa, Geoff and Andrew’s world upside down. But we pray that he will continue to do so outside the confines of their family.

And may each of us turn our worlds upside down as we become God’s advocates in our homes, neighborhoods, workplaces, politics and the church, giving expression to that which God wants said, doing that which God wants done. Life in the Spirit is a life of advocacy.

Let us pray: Gracious God, you call us to speak the truth. Help us to do so. May we, like those in the early church, live not in fear of our society’s condemnation. Rather, as your advocates in the world, may we worry only about being less than faithful to our calling. All this we pray in the name of our Triune God—Creator, Christ and Holy Spirit. Amen.

Western Presbyterian Church

Washington, D.C.

16 May 2010

Text: Acts 16:16-34

There are some prisons in the United States that do not allow hard soap. They stopped permitting it because the prisoners would take the hard white blocks, and they would carve it. Or they would mold it into sculptures, soaking the pieces in a bit of water, they would make the soap just soft and pliable enough that it would conform to the fingers like clay does. In this case, they might take several bars of soap, so that they can adhere together. Or they might take coffee and use it to stain the soap into different shades of brown.

It is not so much the molding, but the carving that is the problem, because often the prisoners would need to steal some sort of contraband for a carving tool. Sometimes they would take paperclips and hide them in their ballpoint pins, or they would carefully remove the staple from a National Geographic magazine, and make carving tools from the small pieces of metal. Some prisons ignore it, while others try to stop it.

Through the miracles of Internet, you can find men who made intricate dioramas by carving soap.  What may look like a simple white square to some have been sculpted into Our Lady of Guadalupe. Often the soap is molded into a prison, and when we look closely we can see different things behind the bars. One sculpture had a man praying in his cell, and there was a poster that said, “Do not pray that your life will be easy, but that you might have the courage to face the life that you have.”

All of these pieces of work testify to the fact that even when we are confined or imprisoned, humans have an impulse for freedom. Even when every moment of our day is scheduled and every surface that surrounds us is concrete, gray, hard, and unpliable, we have the longing and urge to make something. There is something within us that longs to exert our own will, to work, and to form something that is uniquely ours, even if that means creating with a bar of soap.

The theologian Paul Tillich connects our very “being” with creativity. He explains that no matter what our jobs might be, when we do our jobs, and do them a bit differently, we are being creative and as we do, we are acting in the image of God, as a reflection of our Creator, we have this freedom.

Of course, most of us are not in prison. In our jobs, innovation can be easily squelched by an over-active boss, someone who micromanages his or her employees. When there is a culture of criticism and people feel like they do not have the ability to do something different without hearing complaints, that chokes the creativity out of us.

Even though we can make spaces and environments in our work and in our lives that nurture our creative impulses, and there are some places where these when are strangled, at the end of the day, no matter how hard we squelch the creativity, the soul keeps calling out in its innermost yearnings. Tillich connects creativity to our being, and I wonder if creativity is also an expression of freedom. Even in times of confinement, people learn to express their freedom. They learn to create. Poems have been written on scraps of paper and stuffed between the bricks in prison walls. When Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was imprisoned for being critical of Stalin in a letter, he wrote extensively. Within forced labor camps, he created. There are some stories that say he would write down the pages of his book, on small strips of paper, and then he memorized the words as he ate the scraps. Then when Solzhenitsyn would pray the rosary, he would actually be reciting pages of his book to himself so that he would not forget. He wrote the narrative poem, The Trail, without the benefit of paper or pen, but he painstakingly conveyed his intellectual and spiritual journey nonetheless.

Maya Angelou knows why the caged bird sings. And our hymnal is heavy from the melodies of enslaved men and women who met in prayer houses and learned to repeat complicated choruses in a minor key. In some plantations in Louisiana, you can see where slaves scratched pictures of Br’er Rabbit and the Briar Patch on the walls. Telling the stories of Africa to their children, and embellishing them with new details of courage and cunning.

During World War II, our country interned American citizens who were from Japan into camps. Many families were torn apart by these camps. Sometimes a son would be fighting in the war while his parents and sisters were imprisoned by the U.S. government. Right now, there is an exhibit at the Renwick depicting the art of Gaman. Gaman is a Japanese word for bearing the unbearable with dignity and patience. And so they did. They used the common, found objects all around them to make beautiful pieces of art. Oftentimes they were not artists by trade, but they were shop owners or workers. And after their imprisonment, they went back to owning their shops, or working their trades.

Within our Christian tradition, we have that impulse, to tell the stories of freedom even in times of deep physical, emotional, psychological imprisonment. The liberation comes in different ways, but it has been happening since the formation of the church. We hear the narratives echoing from Acts. We have been hearing the stories, detailing how our church began. Not only has John preached on it, but we’re also digging deeply into Acts on Wednesday night. It’s such a fascinating book. We read about these men and women, and these stories form us individually, as a church, and as people of faith. We read about these men and women who courageously spoke out about Jesus, even when their lives were often in danger. They were smart, going to the port cities, the ancient hubs of information, to spread their message, so that the stories could travel all over the world. They were opinionated and passionate, and they struggled with one another, fighting over things like whether new Gentiles believers needed to be circumcised or if they could eat meat that had been sacrificed to idols.

This morning, we read a story of liberty that seems to touch upon to mind, body, and soul. It is the story from Acts that Reuben read, a story of freedom in that miraculous sense: the prison doors are opened. But in these short verses, there are numerous narratives of liberation.

We can begin by focusing on the girl who is enslaved. She is a fortuneteller, and her owners are making a great deal of money from her. And she is following Paul and Silas, completely annoying them. It is interesting that she is calling them slaves, slaves of the Most High. Finally, it gets so irritating that Paul casts the spirit out of her. And she is no longer able to tell fortunes any longer.

Has her life has gotten worse now? She was a slave girl with a special talent, and now she is simply a slave. But surely whatever condition was torturing her, she was now healed and whole. She moved from a muddled mental illness, to having clarity. When she could not control her outbursts, and she would yell at complete strangers on the top of her lungs, now she was able to constrain herself. I imagine that her thought became organized and she found peace. And though there is no indication that she was set free from slavery, perhaps she was able to find a bit of liberation–freedom and wholeness for her mind.

I would like to say that Paul and Silas risked their lives to free this little girl, but I’m not sure that’s what happened. It looks more like they were annoyed by her, than concerned with her freedom, but nevertheless, this story of liberation remains. She walked away with a clear mind, without the torments which previously haunted her.

Her owners, enraged by this, because she could no longer tell fortunes had Paul and Silas tortured, beaten, and thrown into prison. And the story of imprisonment moves and focuses on Paul and Silas. After the brutal beatings, when the men had a few moments in prison, they started singing. Paul and Silas, in their confinement, with open wounds and welts covering their bodies, began singing hymns. It’s an act of defiance, clearly stating that no matter what they have to go through, they will not stop proclaiming their message. I’m pretty sure there was no law against casting out a spirit, there was no law against restoring a child to sound mind, and yet they were in prison. But even in their innocence, no matter how many beatings they had to bear, no matter how much confinement they had to endure, they would not keep silent, they would find freedom, their voices would rise up amongst the shackles. Though an earthquake shook the prison doors open, it seems that they found their liberty before the quake, and so when the gates were opened wide, they did not move.

Then our attention shifts to our third story: the jailer. Did he participated in the abuse of Paul and Silas? Did he often flog his prisoners? He had a family. What did it feel like for him to go from watching these brutal beatings to holding his children? When he was angry at home, was he tempted to use those brutal techniques? Was he an abuser? Was he imprisoned? The first time that he thinks his job is in jeopardy, the jailer decides to kill himself. Though he has so many options before him, it’s as if he could only see one. He could only see violence as a way out.

Until his freedom came, and he led Paul and Silas out of their confinement. He brought them to a source of water. He took their welts and torn skin, and he gently washed the dirt out of them. What remorse he must have felt, as he cleansed the wounds that his hands must have inflicted. It seems as if this unjust jailer, was living in his own prison–until that moment. Because he not only cleansed that skin, but he allowed the water to be poured over his own head. Paul and Silas baptized him and his family, letting us all know that God gives even the captors liberty. God’s eternal love would surround him, cleansing him, making him new.

These stories of enslavement are often difficult to hear. Many of us live in lovely homes, and the thought of imprisonment, or concentration camps, or slavery seem so far away from us. And yet, it is not too far away. Most of us know someone who has been confined, in one way or another. We have known someone close who has been enslaved in their addiction or abuse. And we read the news. We know what is happening globally, how women in Haiti are being raped and violated. We know how history repeats itself, and we cannot move away from these dark places in our histories, until we can begin to tell the stories of liberation and work for freedom.

And so we tell one another. Through our art, poetry, writing, and through our faith, we remind ourselves where we have been, and that justice will not prevail until all are free.

To the glory of God our Creator,

            God our Liberator,

                        and God our Sustainer. Amen.

Pastor, Western Presbyterian Church
Washington, D.C.
May 9, 2010

Text: Acts 16:9-15

One of our members thought I was being a bit unfair when I characterized Paul as a fanatic. I described Paul as a fanatical Jew who became a fanatical Christian, the common theme being fanatic. While I think Paul was a fanatic, I certainly wasn’t intending that to be the singular definition of his life.

Paul was a master at multi-cultural communication, able to work effectively in cultures as different as those found in the Palestinian Jewish community in and around Jerusalem, the diaspora Jewish community in places such as Antioch and Galatia and predominately non-Jewish populations in places such as Athens. Paul demonstrated great skill at mediating differences within the Christian community on divisive issues ranging from speaking in tongues to slavery to attitudes toward government.

In addition, Paul was a visionary leader. Without his vision of taking the Gospel into the Gentile world, the church would have remained and perhaps died as a small sect within Judaism. By following his vision of the Gospel being universal rather than particularistic to any single group of people, Paul set in motion a sequence of events through which Christianity lost many of its Jewish trademarks.

First, the church lost its negative attitude toward Gentiles. Second, in order to mix it up successfully with Gentiles, the church gave up Jewish dietary restrictions. Third, as the early Christians in the Greek speaking world discussed Jesus’ nature and that of the Holy Spirit, they readjusted their thoughts about God, moving slowly but surely toward a Triune formation of God’s nature. So, following Paul’s lead, the church clearly distinguished and differentiated itself from Judaism.

Throughout this metamorphosis, Paul’s vision for the church was under attack. It was under attack from within by some of the leaders of the Jerusalem Church who thought Gentiles were not worthy of the Gospel. It was attacked from without by secular government officials from Jerusalem to Rome.

As a result of these threats, Paul simultaneously had to cling firmly to his vision to keep it from being diluted and polluted and, at the same time, fine-tune his vision on-the-run, making adjustments as his ministry moved further from the realities of Jerusalem and ever closer to those of Rome. It was a dicey job. He managed it with amazing leadership dexterity.

What I label his “fanaticism” helped Paul to hang onto his vision for the church. If he had not believed so firmly in his message, he would have been tempted to compromise on key issues. What others call his adaptability helped him revise his message on less crucial issues, tailoring the Gospel to the wildly different audiences to whom he preached. As a result of his fascinating combination of tenacity and adaptability, I believe we are as much the church of Paul as we are the church of Jesus.

In this morning’s lesson from Acts, we see Paul the Visionary Leader at his best. His original ministry was aimed at the Jewish communities that dotted modern day Turkey in places such as Tarsus, Iconium and Antioch. One night, standing in Turkey on the shores of the Aegean Sea, near the town of Troas, Paul had a vision of a man on the shore of the European continent beckoning him to come over. Convinced the vision was from God, Paul and his colleagues immediately set sail across the Aegean Sea for Europe.

It was a world history-changing decision from which there has been no turning back. In the decades and centuries that followed, the church more and more reflected the beliefs and realities of Europe, less and less the beliefs and realities of the Middle East. For better and worse, the church that developed in Europe is the church of which you and I are members.

Visionary leadership always changes the world. Christopher Columbus, the authors of the U.S. Constitution, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Dr. Martin Luther King were all visionary leaders. Today, we are desperately in need of visionary leadership when it comes to the environment.

Some are saying the environmental crisis along the Gulf Coast created by this huge oil slick is a wake up call. I don’t agree. We have had wake up calls for a long time—a lot of them. The Exxon Valdez oil spill, air in China so polluted the Chinese cabinet met last week and issued harsh new regulations to business owners, the Love Canal near Niagra Falls—no, we have had more than enough wake up calls.

This latest disaster isn’t a wake up call. It may be a last call. It is also a call for visionary leadership to step up and lead us to a better place.

On this Mother’s Day, it is good to remember that Mother Nature is a fabulous mother—nurturing and supplying us with everything we need to enjoy life. However, like other good mothers, her patience is not inexhaustible. At some point, she is going to say, “Enough is enough.”

The idea that humanity is somehow invincible, bulletproof, forever capable of surviving our own excesses is inconsistent with what science teaches us about evolution. Science teaches us that species are regularly flushed out of the evolutionary chain. Humanity’s actions vis-à-vis the environment are ultimately going to produce that kind of reaction. The planet will become inhospitable to human life.

The idea that humanity is untouchable also doesn’t match what the Bible teaches us about God. God has not given us unconditional use of this good earth. Our presence here is conditioned on our respectful use and care of the creation.

The crisis in the Gulf is not just about oil companies. It is first and foremost about you and me—the customers of the oil companies. George Bush said we, as a nation, are “addicted to oil.” He was right.

However, the issue is broader than oil. We have an insatiable appetite for energy. We want everything and anything powered. And yet, our energy sources range from highly problematic to downright disastrous for the environment.

The problems with oil don’t need explanation on this particular Sunday. The problems with coal relate both to the devastation of the environment and the death and disease coal miners suffer to get us the coal. The problems with nuclear power are rooted in our inability to solve the nuclear waste problem. Every day we use nuclear power, we create a massive, toxic problem for our grandchildren and their grandchildren. Even solar, the supposed silver bullet that will slay our energy problems, has a huge downside. Solar energy is stored in batteries but no one knows what to do with the highly toxic batteries once they die. By the way, the same is true of the batteries that power everything from our cell phones to our ipads. So our problem is energy, not oil.

We have an energy problem because energy fuels our lifestyles and our lifestyles reflect an insatiable desire for more. We want to live in houses that are bigger than those in any country in the world. We don’t want to travel on mass transit in groups. No, we want to drive just about anywhere, anytime, happily cruising down the road in our own little cocoon. We don’t want to rake our leaves. We want to blow them with powered blowers. We don’t want to mow our lawns unless we are using a powered mower. We don’t want a light on in the room where we are reading. We want lights on throughout the house.

I got into a little management spat here a number of years ago when I told staff members at Western and Miriam’s Kitchen that people need to turn off their computers when they leave for the day. Since both organizations are committed to living a greener lifestyle, I was surprised to get some push back. But a number of folks said, “In the bigger scheme of things, what difference does my computer make?”

Well, even Microsoft, EVEN MICROSOFT, tells us to turn off our computers. They say that even if we just set it to hibernate at night, we will save $90 per year. In this building, since Miriam’s has a lot of computers, that would save about $2700 annually.

But this sermon isn’t about saving money. It is about saving energy. The amount of energy we could save if everyone in the U.S. turned off our computers is mind-boggling. And that is just one tiny change.

However, again, we don’t want to be bothered. We don’t want to change our lifestyles. Because lifestyle changes demand constant attention to that which is being changed. We have to think every minute of every day about how we can save some energy.

A recovering addict has made a huge lifestyle change. However, stopping the addictive behavior initially is, in many ways, the easiest of the recovery steps. It is sustaining the change that is the real challenge. Addicts can’t afford to stop thinking about their addictive triggers. One misstep and a person is back in the bottom of that dark pit again. So addicts have to think about their addiction every hour of the day.

If we are going to change our lifestyles in relation to energy usage, we are going to have to think about the choices we are making every minute of every day. How many times in any given hour do we turn on something or start something up that uses energy? We flip a light switch, make a phone call, start our car, turn on the air conditioning, boot up a computer, the list goes on.

Of course, some people inevitably ask, “What difference will it make if I change my behavior when big industrial polluters don’t change their behavior?” Such comments are the reason nothing changes. Social change is always incremental and based on personal decisions by individuals.

Segregation didn’t collapse because of sudden changes by big institutions. It changed as individual Americans changed their behavior and attitudes—one person at a time. The decline of smoking didn’t occur because we outlawed tobacco. It stopped because of the rising price of tobacco plus a massive public education program to which people, one person at a time, responded positively.

When I pushed my mother, she would take it for a while but eventually she pushed back—hard. She knew she would be doing me no favors to accept my unacceptable behavior. I am convinced that we have pushed Mother Nature just about as far as she is going to be pushed. Indeed, the push back has begun. Abuse nature enough and nature will abuse us.

On some counts, the rants against the oil and other energy companies are well deserved. The failures of this oil rig were predictable and probably preventable. However, the rants are a bit like a cigarette smoker railing against a tobacco company. Don’t blame the seller. Stop buying.

As a nation, I wish we would follow the example of how we changed smoking in this country and raise taxes on consumption. Slap a $1 per gallon tax on gasoline tomorrow. As prices rise, human behavior changes. As a bonus, the tax revenue could be used to reduce the gap in our deficit federal budgets.

However, for change to take place, whether it be individual, corporate or government change, we need visionary leaders to stand up and speak up/to lead—women and men who can envision a renewed environment and show us how to create it. We need visionary leaders to encourage us, scold us, motivate us. In short, we need them to push us to do whatever it takes to make the vision a reality. That is what is missing today—in our politics, in the church, in the business community. We need leaders to stand up and lead—leaders with the zealous, relentless drive of a Paul, a Benazir Bhutto, or an Oscar Romero.

If these leaders get defeated in elections or lose their pulpits, so be it. Paul ended up in prison. King, Bhutto, Romero and many others made the ultimate sacrifice to see their vision become reality. A visionary leader isn’t afraid of losing an election or anything else. She is only afraid of losing the vision.

And you and I? We need to follow. We can question and complain. But when all is said, we need to follow visionary leaders, especially when they call upon us to make sacrifices for the greater good.

When we baptize a child as we did today, we make promises to the child and his or her parents. If we are unwilling to change our energy guzzling lifestyles, perhaps we need to be more honest with ourselves, our babies and their parents. Perhaps we need to tell them that we will make some small changes to our lifestyles but we’re not going to do everything in our power to insure the baby a healthy environment in the future.

The time for self-deception and denial is over. The time for visionary leadership and visionary followership is here. May we seize the moment and pray that we aren’t too late in so doing.

Let us pray: Mother God, you give us everything we need and then some. Help us not to abuse your trust. Indeed, guide us to be wise and faithful stewards of this good earth. All this we pray in your Holy Name. Amen.

Pastor, Western Presbyterian Church
Washington, D.C.
May 2, 2010

Text: John 13:31-35

Because different audiences have varying attention spans, every effective leader or organization has a long, medium, short and shortest version of their core message. We fit the size of the message to the listening span of those who will hear it.

According to a recent National Endowment for the Humanities study, approximately one-half of our citizens read a piece of literature in the course of a year. For this audience, a long or medium message might be most effective. However, for the other one half of the population who do not read literature, the short or shortest message might be in order.

A case in point is found in our work providing healthcare in Ethiopia. Our shortest message is our new logo, created for us pro bono by some folks who are skilled in marketing. It says simply: Network Ethiopia: Partners in Healthcare for Women and Children. With those nine words, a person gains a general but clear understanding of what we are trying to do. The logo will go on all of our future communications.

For people who want more information, in the opening descriptive text of our web page, we will expand our shortest message to something a bit longer such as: “Network Ethiopia is working to create a group of clinics throughout Ethiopia that will provide basic healthcare to very low income women and children. With no overhead expenses in the United States, we are able to transform almost 100% of our donations into healthcare for the people we serve. Within Washington, D.C. we are also creating a network of people and organizations to mobilize their experience, skills and personnel for the benefit of our clients in Ethiopia.” A page deeper into the website, there will be much longer descriptions of our work for those who seek in-depth information.

While some people think this nuanced, multi-layered approach to messaging is new, it isn’t. Jesus did it and Moses did it before him. If we read all four Gospels, we have the longest and most comprehensive version of Jesus’ message. This version of his message covers a broad range of subjects ranging from the nature of God to personal ethics to social justice issues.

Cut the message down to a collection of Jesus’ parables and the Sermon on the Mount and we have a medium size version of Jesus’ message. The Golden Rule is a very short version of his core teaching. The shortest version of all, Jesus’ executive summary, is found in this morning’s Gospel lesson: “love one another.” Three words. Nothing in the three words contradicts the longest, medium or short versions of his message. The three simply crystalize Jesus’ message.

Of course, there is a problem with short messages. Once we start discussing and unpacking them, they start expanding. The shortest version of the Jewish law is the Ten Commandments. It grew into a larger collection of teachings called the Torah. As Jews reflected on the meaning of the Torah from 70-200 CE, they generated an even longer document known as the Mishnah. Debates about the meaning of the Torah and Mishnah ultimately produced the largest commentary on the law: the Talmud.

A comparable movement from simple to more complicated, from small to large is found in the area of U.S. constitutional law. Our Constitution is a relatively brief and to the point document. However, once the courts started making decisions about its meaning, they produced, literally, libraries full of opinions about the meaning of the Constitution.

So the movement from small to large is inevitable. However, it always causes people to lament why we can’t simply implement the more concise core messages. For example, people regularly ask in frustration, “Why don’t we just love one another?”

Why don’t we? Why don’t we simply live out Jesus’ executive summary of his teachings, of God’s law? Because loving one another isn’t simple. What constitutes love and how best to love one another are up for debate. And once that debate starts, the simple becomes complex, the short grows lengthy.

In some cultures, a loving marriage consists of the male assuming a position of authority and dominance over his wife and children. In other cultures, such a relationship is seen as the exact opposite of loving. Some people think spanking their children is the loving thing to do. Others don’t.

This week we had a meeting here at Western with many of the Washington region’s most influential rabbis and an equal number of prominent Presbyterian pastors. The reason for the meeting is a report our General Assembly will be considering this summer that is harshly critical of Israel. It proposes a simple solution to the conflict, claiming that if the occupation of the West Bank were to end, the conflict would end and peace would break out in the region. As you might suspect, while the rabbis agree the occupation is hugely problematic and making life miserable for people, they don’t see a single solution resolving the multifaceted problems in that situation.

As I listened to people speaking, respectfully but forcefully, I kept thinking about the passage on which I would be preaching today: “love one another.” How are those words helpful in the Middle East where there are two strikingly different narratives as to who is the victim? And yet those words, “love one another,” were spoken in the Middle East, by a person born in the Middle East, in a region filled with as much oppression and conflict then as there is now. Surely, Jesus knew his words were not only simple but open to the charge of being simplistic.

It seems to me that the shortest and longest versions of a message are both necessary and necessarily in tension with one another. The shortest message is the core message. The longer versions of the core message go to the heart of how one implements the core, makes it real in specific situations.

Thursday night, I was involved in a fabulous ACLU debate on the first amendment implications of campaign finance laws. All three hundred individuals in the room agreed on the core principle that speech should be protected. However, as we unpacked what that means regarding laws about campaign finance, the consensus broke down. What was clear became opaque.

If we hadn’t possessed the shortest, most concise framing of our values “The Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech . . . ,” we would have become hopelessly lost in the complications of real-life issues. It was an invaluable touchstone to which we could repeatedly return as we grew confused by the campaign finance issues.

Jesus’ core message of “love one another” does not allow us to get lost in the complications of life. To the Israelis and Palestinians, Jesus’ core message says, “We understand your history of conflict. We understand the political dynamics within each of your societies that work against peace. We understand the challenges of trying to work out the practical stuff like borders. But you have to find a way to love one another. You just must.”

In like manner, when talking to couples with a struggling relationship, I ask them, “Do you still love each other?” If the answer is “yes,” my next words are, “Then we have to find a way for you to love one another. We have to sort through all the things that are pulling you apart, all the angry words that have been spoken or gone unspoken, so you can move toward one another once again, so you can love one another.”

“Love one another” is not a simplistic message. It is a core message. Like a mantra, it can focus and refocus us as we drift from its intention.

When we say, “Love one another,” some people will tell us we are naive. Our response to such putdowns? “Well, where has your sophistication, your real world politics gotten us? Into wars, broken relationships, and divided denominations, that is where.”

When we were contemplating invading Iraq, someone in the corridors of power needed to be naive enough to ask over and over again, “How does this help us love one another?” When we were considering the benefits of universal healthcare, someone needed to be naive enough to ask, “Isn’t this loving one another in a very real manner?” As we run up massive national, corporate and personal debt, someone needs to be asking, “How are we loving the next generation by piling up such debt?”

Jesus knew there was nothing simple about loving one another. After all, he got killed for doing it. But he also knew that bringing the conversation back to three words (love one another) was necessary, indeed, mandatory. Because too often the words we add to those three tend to be “except,” “unless,” “however,” and “but.” “We need to love one another but not until they put down their weapons.” “We need to love one another but not until you apologize to me.” What we add conditions and draws us away from the responsibility of loving one another. As followers of Jesus, we need to add to the words “love one another” something like this: “Therefore, we need to . . . ”

The fact that Jesus’ message was simple doesn’t mean it was simplistic. Far from it. He knew that a Samaritan stopping to help an injured Jew, a healthy person putting an arm around a leper, men and women sharing power, enemies reconciling, forgiving someone who has profoundly hurt us, these are very, very complicated things. All the more reason to have burned into our hearts a mantra that brings us back to our core responsibility: to love one another.

Let us pray: Gracious God, it is so easy to love some people, seemingly impossible to love others. Help us not to despair when love seems beyond our reach. Instead, let us repeat to ourselves and one another Jesus’ most basic commandment. And then let us repeat the names of all the enemies, throughout history, who have reconciled, all the bitter foes who have made peace with one another, all the broken relationships that have become whole again. For your will shall be done on earth as it is in heaven. Amen.

Western Presbyterian Church

Washington, DC

April 25, 2010

Text: John 10:22-30

Five years ago, when I was interviewing at this church, I met the committee who was making the decision. I heard about the history here, and took a tour of the building. And, I had a lot of decisions to make, especially since the cost of living was way out of my range. And, I really appreciated that the committee both loved and knew the church well, and while they did a beautiful job of representing the best aspects of it, they didn’t try to sugarcoat the flaws here either. They were honest about the struggles I would have here, and about what kind of pastor that they needed. They were clear about the challenges of working with John. (And John asked me to add that there are great joys as well.) One of the main things I was told was, “This is a wonderful congregation. But, there are lot of leaders here, and not a lot of followers.”

In that statement, they were telling me many important things about what kind of person worships here and what kind of pastor they needed. They needed someone who would not be easily intimidated and they needed someone who would not be autocratic. They were letting me know that they wanted a pastor would not bend to every opinion around the table, but would try to discern with the church what was important. This is a congregation that needed someone who was resilient. Someone who would not give up when an idea was challenged, but would help the church sort through the options and opinions, before helping them move forward.  They were telling me that this is a place that appreciates discussion and a challenge, so they needed someone who was not threatened by a good debate, but excited by it.

They wanted me know that you would not respond well to someone who said, “This is the way that it is going to be” and expected everyone to step in line. There are many pastors like that. I have a friend who is a priest from another religious tradition. One afternoon after he listened to me sort out an important decision in the church, shook his head, and said, “The problem with you Presbyterians, is you actually care what the people in the pews think.” He thought that it was ridiculous to get the input and opinions of the congregation when making an important decision. In our leadership, he thought that we wasted far too much time negotiating with the congregation.

Another friend, a Presbyterian minister who pastors a church of thousands, also thinks it’s strange how we lead. He said, “Imagine if a pilot flew a plane the way that we run our churches. If there was a warning light going off on the control panel, the pilot would stand up and ask the physician in First Class what do, and since he was a respected member of society, we would expect him to know the answer. Then we would ask the woman seated in 15A, and she would have an opinion, because her cousin was a pilot, and so she had a vague idea what would be necessary. And we would take extra care to hear from the passenger in 22B, because she had never even been in a plane before, and so she would have outside eyes. And before you know it, the plane would crash, because everybody’s opinion was more important than the person flying the plane!”

I think that it is clear that neither of these men would have done well at Western Presbyterian Church. But, I was thrilled about the church. And, something that attracted me the most, they were letting me know that you like to be challenged, so you did not expect someone to stand in the pulpit and hold up a mirror that reflected the general mood, opinions, and attitudes of the congregation. You expected that the pastor would say things that you did not agree with; in fact, you enjoyed it when you did not agree with everything. In the end, the committee decided that I was the right person for the position, and I felt like it would be a good place for me.

I suppose, now that I have been here for a while, I would not say that the church doesn’t have a lot of followers, but I would say that you are skilled in the art of following. And in this time and place in history, that is an extremely important gift.

The word “pastor” means “shepherd” in Latin. And many of the metaphors of the Christian life in our Scriptures are ones of sheep and shepherds. Often they are extremely comforting. When a person is going through a life-threatening illness, there can be nothing more soothing than knowing that we are being led through dark valleys, that God knows our name, and God is calling us home, where we ought to be.

I am someone who has never had any exposure to sheep, except at the petting zoo. I have this general idea that they are stupid animals, without minds of their own. And so I don’t like this metaphor when it is used to describe the relationship between clergy and the church. But, then when I would talk to ranchers in my first congregation, they would let me know that herding was not such an easy task, and animals have a mind of their own.

Whether we like the metaphor or not, it gets to the relationship between leading and following. I am always reminded of this when I talk to men and women who are from different generations. I travel across the United States and ask groups of people, “What sort of events formed your generation?” Older men and women tell us about the Great Depression and how frugality shaped everything they did. People learned to open up their homes for family members and tenants. Even though many years have passed, even though they are far away from the trauma, those who lived through the Great Depression distinctly recall the scarcity, and therefore continue to rinse out plastic bags, reuse coffee grounds, and stretch one meal for a week of leftovers.

I often hear the stories of World War II, as men and women remember what it was like to live on rationed food, milk, and gas. The feminist movement bloomed as white women rolled up their sleeves during the war effort and went to work in factories. They joined many African-American women who were already working. After the war was over, the spirit of sacrifice and hard work did not end, but men and women redirected that energy and the nation’s resources to build many of the institutions of this country. Older generations are known as “Builders” for good reason. They constructed the infrastructure of our country and provided the bricks and mortar of many of our institutions.

At the same time, a sense of entitlement characterized the wealthiest families in our country. Educational institutions made admission decisions based on legacy. So if your father went to an Ivy League school, then you could probably make it into the same school. Success in one’s professional life often had to do with whether one belonged to certain social clubs, and many of those clubs did not allow for ethnic minorities. All of this ensured the dominance of particular families and buttressed a White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant culture. Our mainline churches were often made up of the educated elite, the ones who ran the banks, the businesses, and the law offices. People respected parents, teachers, and pastors; men and women trusted the government. One time a man in his seventies told me that he almost got kicked out of college because he needed a note from his mother to miss a class, and he had his girlfriend write it. When the school discovered the forgery, he was very close to being expelled.

Then, people relate stories of huddling terrified under school desks as small children. The boys and girls were enacting mandatory bomb drills, using the tiny tables in a meager attempt to shield themselves from an imagined nuclear attack. If they were in hallways, the children learned to back up to the concrete walls for safety. In other exercises, boys and girls ran home as rapidly as they could so that their mothers could time their arrival. It is no wonder that these same children began to question what was happening around them as they grew up. A culture of distrust was piqued during the Vietnam War, the Watergate scandal, and Richard Nixon’s resignation, and they began to promise themselves that they would “never trust anyone over thirty.”

At the same time, the Civil Rights movement called into question many long-standing assumptions of the White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant culture, and new voices arose, giving us great possibilities and new visions for our country. Even when fire hoses and angry dogs threatened, men and women continued in the blazing sun of the South to march for dignity and respectful treatment of African Americans. Women began to demand equal money for equal work. It seemed like a new progressive era would be ushered in, and yet our country made a tragic turn.

The assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr. dashed our dreams and shook our nation’s confidence. One of the many casualties in this time seemed to be our trust in institutions. With this sense that institutions and governments could no longer be depended upon, the foundations of all we had built began to crack.

Many things were negative, but there were positive things as well. The Immigration Act of 1965 abolished the national-origin quotas and opened our borders to a rich variety of people from non-European countries. In our academies, a subtle shift occurred, with entry into colleges becoming based on special exams as opposed to legacies. Suddenly, something wonderful occurred as men and women of all ethnicities began to make up the elite in our country. Although we know certain families still had definite advantages in our country, we moved away from having an established ruling class in the way that we once had.

Students began to learn differently. They formed teams and worked on group projects. They began to rely more and more on the scientific method, questioning assumptions and testing them. Even in third grade, my daughter’s class is learning to evaluate their curriculum and their teachers. In the business world, we can see the shift, as businesses are trying to figure out how to manage in teams, and be more collaborative. In technology, we see how much social media flourishes, because it allows for discussion, conversation, and network building. Right now, we are questioning many of the assumptions that we have made in the financial sector. After the impact of the last economic crisis, we are beginning to look closely at the way that our mortgages are put together. We are beginning to look at our business in a different light. In almost every area of our lives, we are having conversations and discussions and evaluating things from different perspectives.

And, the church is not immune from these changes. We are not in the center of church and society. Frustration with religion rises in our society, as people proclaim that “religion poisons everything.” We’ve watched with concern as new issues arise over pedophilia in the Roman Catholic Church. It has been heartbreaking to read about the cover-ups.

All of these shifts remind us that there is an art to following. It is important to question what we believe. It is important to doubt. It is vital for us question those who have gone before us. And so we are learning the art of following, being sure that we listen for God’s voice, as we move ahead in God’s work.

            To the Glory of God our Creator,

                        God our Liberator,

                                    and God our Sustainer. Amen.