What Does It Mean to Be Presbyterian? 4. Sola Scriptura
Mark 10:1-12
October 3, 2010
He left that place and went to the region of Judea and beyond the Jordan. And crowds again gathered around him; and, as was his custom, he again taught them.
Some Pharisees came, and to test him they asked, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?” He answered them, “What did Moses command you?” They said, “Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of dismissal and to divorce her.” But Jesus said to them, “Because of your hardness of heart he wrote this commandment for you. But from the beginning of creation, ‘God made them male and female.’ ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.’ So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.”
Then in the house the disciples asked him again about this matter. He said to them, “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her; and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery.”
Do you know what one of the toughest things for me was about going to seminary? It was learning to read the Bible properly. I had read the Bible twice from cover to cover before going to seminary, so I was at least familiar with what was in it. Of course, I did that because I had only rejoined the church eight months earlier after being away from the church for nine years. I felt biblically ignorant, so I read the Bible twice to become more familiar. I didn’t understand most of what I read, but I read it. Still, I was unprepared for what I faced in seminary.
Most pastors experience the same kind of struggles I did when they first go to seminary. Most of us have had head-spinning first years. The reason is that there are ways to read Scripture that really open it up in amazing ways, but it takes a while to learn them.
This way of reading Scripture, called the historical-critical method, involves discovering in Scripture more than just what you see at first on the page. It means reading it in depth. But more on that later. To prepare us for this kind of reading, we seminary students had to take two full years of biblical languages, meaning that we had to take a year of learning to read Greek, and then another year of learning to read Hebrew, which are the original languages of the New and Old Testaments, respectively. Then we had to take courses on the different books of the Bible, to the point at which our heads felt like exploding because of too much information.
So here’s a question for you to ponder. Why do you think it’s so important for seminary students to learn so much Bible? Almost a third of our courses were biblical courses. Why not cut back on the Bible and learn more about things like religious ideas, church administration, leadership, and things like that? Sure, the Bible is important, but shouldn’t we pastors be reading the Bible on our own anyway? Why not use our valuable time learning other things, and then devote ourselves to biblical learning either on our own or later?
The answer lies at the core of Presbyterian beliefs. Why spend so much time on scripture? The answer is because of sola scriptura. Do you know what sola scriptura means? It was one of the prominent protest phrases of the Protestant movement on the 16th century. It means, “by scripture alone.”
The leaders of the Protestant Reformation were absolutely adamant that our faith should be grounded in Scriptural guidance and nothing else. They were protesting a problem that existed in the Roman Catholic Church at the tine, the church of which they had all been raised and become members of. The Catholic Church, for almost 1000 years, had developed beliefs and traditions rooted in thinking that sometimes ran counter to Scripture. The Catholic Church had made papal and church authority equal to Scripture, and it had led to abuses that the Reformers, such as John Calvin and Martin Luther, saw as self-serving and against God.
Let me give you an example. Do you know what the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception is? It’s a belief in the Roman Catholic Church that because Jesus was without sin, he could not have been conceived in a fallen and sinful womb. So the church came up with a doctrine that basically said that Mary was conceived without sin, so that she could bear Jesus without sin. This idea reflected the Catholic understanding of sex, which was that it was, by nature, sinful. So they had to come up with a way for Mary to have been conceived as humans normally are, without being subject to the sinfulness of sex. So they created the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, saying that Mary’s conception was free of flaws, mistakes, or sin. The problem is that at worst this is not a biblical idea, or at best it is an idea that stretches the Bible beyond what it actually says. This doctrine goes against Romans 3:23, which says that all people are sinful. Roman Catholics would say that it is biblical because when the angel appears to Mary and tells her that she is “full of grace,” that signifies that she was sinless. That’s a stretch. The Reformers looked at doctrines like this and said that they were human conventions, and that Christians needed to get back to a root in Scripture. Getting back to creating a church more like the original Church was a passion for the Reformers. The legacy for us is that we are called to base our beliefs on scripture alone—sola scriptura.
It’s not enough, though, just to put scripture at the center of our faith and life. There’s something else that the Reformers understood that was key. We not only have to read scripture, but we have to read it in a particular way, and if you don’t read scripture the right way, it can lead you down the wrong road. It can lead to the modern problems we have today when it comes to reading the Bible, which are the twin problems of biblical literalism and biblical anachronism.
Biblical literalism is a problem we all recognize today. It’s the tendency to read Scripture in a very literal way, in a way that treats it as though it was written 2000 years ago, placed in a time capsule, and opened today so that we can read what the ancient Christians wanted for us today. It treats the Bible as though there are no inconsistencies or difficulties in it. Biblical anachronism is the belief by some that nothing in the Bible is relevant to today. Biblical anachronists would simply say that it is an outdated, primitive book that has no bearing on today’s problems, so it should be ignored. Unfortunately, most biblical anachronists don’t know the Bible at all, so their belief is rooted in a basic ignorance of Scripture. The twin problems of literalism and anachronism comes from a deeper problem: the tendency of people to engage in eisogesis rather than exegesis.
I don’t’ mean to overload you with overly technical terms. These two terms are fairly easy to understand. Think “eisogesis” bad, “exegesis” good. What’s the difference. Eisogesis means reading into the Bible what you already believe or want to believe. You treat it as though it was written only to you, and to support what you already believe. Presbyterians stand against eisogesis, and this stand against it is the reason why Presbyterian pastors have to spend three years in seminary, with the equivalent of a full year devoted to studying the Bible, including reading it in its original Greek and Hebrew forms. We are taught to engage in exegesis.
What is exegesis? It is reading the Bible in context in order to understand what it is saying to us today. When you do exegesis, you read the Scripture in context, asking:
• Who’s the author?
• What’s the context?
• Why was it written?
• What was going on at the time?
• How does this relate to other parts of the Bible?
• How do we apply this to our situation today?
We ask deep questions of Scripture. We try to understand everything about why it was written, and what was going on at the time of its writing, so that we can understand its issues. Exegesis teaches us how to avoid misapplying and manipulating Scripture to fit our own preconceived notions. Learning to distinguish between eisogesis and exegesis is the purpose of sending all Presbyterian pastors to seminary.
This is a direct contrast to what you see among many in the nondenominational, evangelical movement. The fact is that many, many evangelical pastors (if not most) are ordained without going to seminary. They are not taught these deeper ways of reading Scripture. Since they are ordained by their own churches, rather than by a denomination with standards, many of these evangelical pastors lack biblical training, or at leat the kind we get. And of the ones who do go to seminary, many go to seminaries where they take one year of basic religious understanding, and another learning marketing, administration, and organizational skills. The result is that many of these church pastors abuse Scripture by reading into it their own agendas.
So far what I’ve talked to you about is fairly technical. Let me show you what I mean, starting with our passage today, which says, “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her; and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery.”
On the face of this passage it seems fairly clear what Jesus is saying: You can’t get divorced, and if you do so and get married you are committing the sin of adultery. And this would be a good interpretation,… if you are doing eisogesis. If you read it deeper, you’ll find that there’s more there that you need to know to understand the passage. And it all has to do with understanding who, what, where, when. First of all, to understand the passage you have to pay attention to why Jesus says what he does. It says in the beginning of the passage that “Some Pharisees came, and to test him… The key word in this is the word “test.” Jesus knows that he is being tested, and that the question is set up to get him in trouble. If he says it is permissible to divorce, then the orthodox Jews will make trouble against him. If he says it isn’t permissible, then King Herod’s people will hear about it and possibly arrest him. You see, Herod had been divorced several times. Either way, Jesus loses.
At the same time, Jesus’ answer is a rebuke of the Pharisees. He knows that among the Pharisees, divorce is easy for men, hard for women. What do I mean? A Pharisee man could divorce his wife for any reason, including adultery. He could divorce her because he no longer liked her cooking, or she got old, or she scolds him too much, or he doesn’t like her friends. To divorce her, all he had to do was to get a writ of divorce from a rabbi, which was very easy for the right price, and then face the east while reciting three times in her presence, “I divorce thee, I divorce thee, I divorce thee.” Meanwhile, a woman could only divorce a man if he had committed adultery, which she had to prove through witnesses, or because he was engaged in a corrupt vocation such as pig farming or tanning skins, which would render the husband sinful and untouchable. So, under these conditions what Jesus said might not have been so much a barring of divorce as it was protecting women. You see, a divorced woman, if she was not taken back by her original family, would be plunged into poverty. Often she had no choice but to become a prostitute, a slave, or a beggar. Jesus is both chastising the Pharisees and protecting women.
In addition, marriage had a different foundation then than today. Back then people didn’t marry out of love. They married because of a contractual arrangement. Women were considered property of men. Marriage was a contractual agreement between families as one family gave title of their daughter to another man. These marriages were often arranged years in advance when the man and the woman were both children. Marriage was as much an economic relationship as it was anything else. This is not the case today. We marry out of love. This brings us to a question about this passage. If marriage is based on something different today, and women and men have an equal ability to live dignified lives after a divorce, does the passage still apply in the same way? I don’t know if I know the answer, but what it says is that there is more complexity to Scripture than many people think. Add into this the fact that Jesus tells us to look at the plank in our own eyes, and not the speck in others, and to not judge. How does this impact what we make of this passage?
Let me give you another passage to look at, and see if you reading it more deeply helps gain a better understanding. Look at Deuteronomy 21:18-21, where it says, “If someone has a stubborn and rebellious son who will not obey his father and mother, who does not heed them when they discipline him, then his father and his mother shall take hold of him and bring him out to the elders of his town at the gate of that place. They shall say to the elders of his town, “This son of ours is stubborn and rebellious. He will not obey us. He is a glutton and a drunkard.” Then all the men of the town shall stone him to death. So you shall purge the evil from your midst; and all Israel will hear, and be afraid.” Would we apply this passage literally today? I’m sure some of you who are parents of teens would love to ☺. But what do we make of it today? We dismiss it because we compare it to Gospel messages of Jesus, which teach us to treat children with care and love, and we recognize that Gospel trumps Deuteronomy. So we ignore this passage today.
Let me show you one more passage, and see if reading it more deeply gives you a different understanding. Look at Genesis 2, where it says, “These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created. In the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens, when no plant of the field was yet in the earth and no herb of the field had yet sprung up—for the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was no one to till the ground; but a stream would rise from the earth, and water the whole face of the ground— then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being.”
Seems pretty much what we’ve learned all these years. Adam is created, and we know that later he will be put to sleep, his rib taken out, and Eve will be created. This understanding of the passage leads many Christians to say that women are inferior to men because they came out of men. The problem is that they lack a deeper understanding of the passage. Let me take you in deeper.
First of all, it should not be translated as “the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground…” That’s a poor translation based on hundreds of years of eisogesis. It really should read that Adam was formed from adamah. Adamah is the dirt, and Adam comes from adamah. It would be better translated that the human was formed from the humus, or earth. The name Adam is related to adamah in the same way that human is related to humus. It is Genesis’ way of telling us that human beings are made of the earth. The reason we translate Adam as “man” is that Hebrew, much like French, Spanish, Italian, and Latin, is a gender-specific language in which all nouns are assigned a gender, even if it makes no sense to do so. Adam is a masculine noun, adamah is feminine. If we are going to translate Adam as “man,” then perhaps we should translate adamah as “mother earth,” although that wouldn’t make sense, either. The point is this first creation of God is not a man, but a human being with no gender—or better yet, both genders.
Then God breathes into the human the “breath of life.” That is a mistranslation. It should say that God breathed into the human ruach. Ruach is the Hebrew word, and it means more than just breath. It means “Spirit,” too. The passage is saying that the first human being is created from humus, but then God’s Spirit is breathed into it. It tells us that humans, unlike all other created creatures, has God’s Spirit in them, not just life.
When the whole rib incident happens, it doesn’t say that Adam goes to sleep, has the rib removed, and then Eve is created. Actually, it is that the human being is put to sleep, and two new creations are formed. Once the rib is removed, the being that was Adam becomes Ish, and the woman is named Ishah. Ish is the man, Ishah is the woman. They are connected, but they are different creatures from the original human being, Adam. The reason we call them Adam and Eve is that later, in Chapter 3, the man changes from Ish to Adam, and the woman is given the name Eve. It’s confusing, but it has to do with the fact that the Bible often puts together stories from different traditions, and then never tries to clean it all up. We try to clean it all up, but when we do we can make mistakes. This new understanding of Genesis has a huge impact. For instance, it is part of the foundation that allowed the Prebyterian Church to begin ordaining women as deacons, elders, and pastors. This understanding tells us that women and men are equals because we both come from Adam and from Adamah, and are animated by God’s Spirit. There is no distinction in God’s eyes.
How we read Scripture makes a difference. Do we read it in a deep way, or in a shallow way? I realize that in talking about all this, you may not have the tools that we pastors have been given, but there are tools out there. For one, start by reading the Bible using a study Bible. There are a lot of great study Bibles out there, and they give you this kind of information to help you. Start by reading the gospels first, and then move onto other parts of the Bible. Another thing to do is to use our church library, in our prayer room. It has great resources for you to use.
Remember that we Presbyterians are people of the Bible because we believe in the idea of sola scriptura. If you ground your life and thinking in Scripture, you will find God speaking to your mind, heart, and soul. And it can have an amazingly transforming effect on your life.
Amen.
What Does It Mean to Be Presbyterian? 3. Ecclesia Reformata, Semper Reformanda
Romans 12:1-8
I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect. For by the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think of yourself more highly than you ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned. For as in one body we have many members, and not all the members have the same function, so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members one of another. We have gifts that differ according to the grace given to us: prophecy, in proportion to faith; ministry, in ministering; the teacher, in teaching; the exhorter, in exhortation; the giver, in generosity; the leader, in diligence; the compassionate, in cheerfulness.
I want to share with you a story I’ve told before, and I want to share it with you because it has a lot to do with what it means to be Presbyterian, although you may not see the connection right away.
Back in 1845, an expedition led by Sir John Franklin set sail from England with a crew of 138 men. The two ships of the expedition set sail amidst a great celebration because they believed this expedition would ultimately find the mythical Northwest Passage across northern Canada, a passage many believed would allow ships to avoid having to sail around the Cape of Magellan at the tip of South America, or the Cape of Good Hope at the southern tip of Africa, thus cutting thousands of miles off the trip to the Pacific. Whoever found this passage would become the greatest person on earth, and would assure that his country was the most powerful because they would control the lucrative trade with the Orient.
The expedition’s two ships were a marvel. Each ship was a three-masted barque carrying auxiliary steam engines. Each ship contained a 1200 volume library, a hand-organ playing 50 tunes, china place settings for the whole crew, cut glass wine goblets, and ornate silver settings for the officers bearing their initials and family crests. Along with this was a twelve-day coal supply. What the ships didn’t contain were winter clothing, coal reserves for more than twelve days, and other crucial provisions for a passage through the arctic. You see, they expected this to be an easy trip, and so they really didn’t prepare much at all.
The expedition soon passed out of sight. Over the following years, word of the expedition’s fate passed back to England through explorers who had heard from Inuit tribes near the arctic what had become of the expedition. For example, some crewmembers had been seen pushing a wooden boat across the ice. Similar boats were seen at Starvation Cove, along with the remains of 35 men. The remains of thirty bodies were found at Terro Bay. Apparently the Inuit had also seen one of the three-masted barques protruding from the ice at Simpson Strait.
Over the course of the next twenty years search parties recovered skeletons from all over the arctic. Slowly, the story was stitched together. With his ships frozen solid in the ice and unable to move, Franklin died aboard ship. Their supplies exhausted, the remaining officers and men outfitted themselves from the ships’ stores and set out to walk to safety. Eventually, their frozen bodies were found along with their supplies. Often what they took with them was bizarre. For instance, many were found with remains of chocolate, tea, guns, and oddly the place settings of the silver flatware with the officers initials and crests engraved on them. In the end, no members of the expedition survived.
Why do you think Franklin set out for such a cold, cold environment with so many silly things? The answer is simple: he had prepared the way you normally prepare for typical journeys, and he hadn’t realized that this was an atypical journey. The members of the Franklin Expedition died because they set out on a new voyage prepared for the past and not the future. Captain Franklin had a lot of experience sailing normal seas, but had thought very little of the challenges of sailing through a frozen sea. They didn’t bring along enough food, coal, or even winter clothes. He was satisfied that his experiences in the past would be enough for what he faced in the future, and the result of his miscalculation was that he and his crew all died terrible deaths.
You know, one of the main challenges in life is always being prepared for what’s coming rather than for what’s past. You can see this idea reflected in how we live our lives. We spend a tremendous amount of time going to school and college to prepare for the future. In sports we practice and practice to prepare for future games. Unfortunately, as we get older we often become less prepared for what is coming, especially in a religious, spiritual way. For example, how prepared are we ever for dying? How prepared are we for crises where we need God? The church is no different from us as individuals. The church lives in a culture undergoing constant change, but are we prepared for the changes around us, and for meeting them? Are we prepared for the future?
The modern Church is often prepared more for the past than for the future. The answers given by Christianity to the questions of faith so many people have today are often ones that worked in the past, but aren’t adequate for the future. We also struggle with our theologies and ways of worship, because often they reflect a culture that’s past, not one that’s coming.
Why do we have such a hard time adapting to the future. A basic reason is that people often want the Church and their faith to be an anchor for their lives. I’ve heard this often. People say, “I want the Church to be my anchor as I go through difficult times.” Do you know what the problem with being an anchor is? It keeps the ship from sailing. Think about what the purpose of a ship is? It is supposed to sail to new lands. It is supposed to be prepared for that trip. It is supposed to get people from one state of being to another. If a ship is at anchor, it is not really doing what it was created to do. There may be times to be at rest when loading or unloading, but a ship is for sailing. If the church is our anchor, it is leaving us unprepared for the winds of life. Here’s a way of thinking about it. If a hurricane comes, are you safer in your ship at anchor in a harbor, or out at sea? The answer is that you are safer out at sea where you can bob up and down on the waves. If you are at anchor in the harbor, you are in danger of being smashed against rocks, being thrown inland, or, if of being capsized.
John Calvin and the other reformers of the 16th century were very familiar with the problems of wanting church to be an anchor. They surveyed the times and recognized that the Roman Catholic Church was becoming irrelevant for people’s lives. The people of their times were asking new questions of faith, and they were facing new situations with the rise of new forms of government, new technologies, and new ways of living. The Reformers knew that to be a church meant to be a place that struggles to change to adapt to new challenges and situations. That’s why they came up with our phrase for today:
Ecclesia Reformata, Semper Reformanda.
Have you ever heard that phrase? It was a popular one in Calvin’s day. It means, “The church reformed, always being reformed.” They used this phrase to remind the church that it had undergone changes in the past, and that it needed to be prepared for changes coming in the future. The idea was that we are a church that has been transformed, and that we always need to be open to being transformed by God. We never stay fixed. We are never an anchor. We are a ship. This does not mean that we make changes for change’s sake. We always hold onto our traditions, but we are willing to upgrade them when times change. Our challenge is always figuring out how to adapt to the future while maintaining ties to the past. This “reformed, always being reformed” was a reponse to the Catholic tradition that had stayed mostly fixed for a thousand years.
You can see how reformata semper reformanda has impacted the Presbyterian Church in its history. For example, back in 1860 the church split over an issue of being reformed. One part of the church wanted to prepare itself for the future, the other part wanted to cling to the past. Do you know what the issue was? Slavery. The northern Presbyterian Church declared it was against God, the southern Presbyterian Church declared it was an institution instituted by God. That split wasn’t healed until reunification in 1983. Back in the 1960s and 70s another split occurred as the church began ordaining women. Again, part of the Church was meeting the challenges of the future, as women in the culture were being more fully included in all areas. That split still hasn’t been healed. Both the Presbyterian Church of America and the Evangelical Presbyterian Church split from us because they were not ready to adapt to a fuller inclusion of women.
This idea of reformata semper reformanda isn’t just for churches. It’s for us as individuals, too. The truth is that the moment our faith becomes fixed is the moment our faith moves off of God. Learning, stretching, and growing is always meant to be part of our faith lives because we are always called to be reformed. Paul teaches us this in our passage for today: “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect.”
Paul is telling us that if we are content to anchor our lives in the world, to stop growing spiritually, religiously, and theologically, we miss God. God moves on without us. The challenge is to keep moving with God. It’s as though God is constantly beckoning us to grow and move with God, but we have to choose to follow. We have to be prepared to sail to the new ways God is leading us to be, both as individuals and as a church.
A great way of understanding this comes when you watch the short film, “Day and Night,” a Pixar film shown before Toy Story 3. I showed it when I originally preached this sermon, and I would suggest you find a way to watch it. But let me try to describe it (almost impossible).
It starts with a figure sleeping who wakes up. The surrounding landscape is all black, but within him you can see a bright morning landscape. And as he walks, the landscape changes. He breathes in the air, and as he does you see trees within him blowing in the wind. He takes a morning stroll, and walkers walk through a field appearing within him. He is Day. Suddenly, he comes across a dark figure sleeping on the ground, and within him you see a nighttime field with sheep jumping over a fence, signifying that he is asleep, counting sheep. This is Night. Day pokes Night, and the sheep scatter. He wakes up Night, and the two struggle to understand each other. Soon they are in conflict, fighting with each other. Their rigidity about their each being the only valid person has gotten in their way. As they fight, the scenes within them change, demonstrating their moods. Night is filled with cawing crows, Day is filled with angry bees. You can see the two of them above in the picture:
Then something changes. Day steps away from Night, and within his body you see a woman sunbathing. Night, interested in the woman, pushes Day out of the way and steps into the same area, but you only see the same beach at night, with no one there except an empty cup. Day then steps away and shows him a bunch of women sitting, sunbathing around a pool. Night again pushes him out of the way and sees the same pool at night, crickets chirping in the background. Day realizes that there is something of value in himself to Night, so he shows Night all that he can reveal, showing him jets flying in formation, among other things. Night then shows him all he can do, showing Day nighttime fireworks. The two of them begin to develop an appreciation for each other.
As they grow in appreciation, they dance, they celebrate, and then both begin to change. Day starts to turn into Night, and Night turns into Day. They hug as the rising and setting suns within each on of them synchronizes. And they have joy.
This is what it means to be ecclesia reformata, semper reformanda. It means to be people who grapple with changes that we don’t understand, and learn to embrace them as we change for God’s sake.
Amen.
What Does it Mean to Be Presbyterian? 2. Democratic Wisdom
Ephesians 4:1-16
September 19, 2010
I therefore, the prisoner in the Lord, beg you to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope of your calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all. But each of us was given grace according to the measure of Christ’s gift. Therefore it is said, “When he ascended on high he made captivity itself a captive; he gave gifts to his people.” (When it says, “He ascended,” what does it mean but that he had also descended into the lower parts of the earth? He who descended is the same one who ascended far above all the heavens, so that he might fill all things.) The gifts he gave were that some would be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until all of us come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ. We must no longer be children, tossed to and fro and blown about by every wind of doctrine, by people’s trickery, by their craftiness in deceitful scheming. But speaking the truth in love, we must grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by every ligament with which it is equipped, as each part is working properly, promotes the body’s growth in building itself up in love.
When you think about the great presidents of the United States, who usually comes to mind? Washington? Lincoln? Jefferson? The Roosevelts? Reagan? It’s always a good debate with no clear answer. Now, if you were to debate whom the greatest person to become president was, I think the answer would come down to a choice between two men, one of whom would be George Washington. Besides Washington, it would hard to find a greater person, to find a person who had more impact on history and development on the United States, than James Madison.
He certainly wasn’t one of our greatest presidents. His miscalculations about the British led to the War of 1812, and his miscalculation about Britain’s wartime intentions allowed the British to capture and burn, with no American resistance, much of Washington, D.C. Madison was not one of our greatest presidents, but he was clearly our greatest resident. He accomplished something that was far more powerful than anything achieved by any of our presidents other than Washington. What did he do? He wrote most of the Constitution of the United States of America.
Our constitution is seen worldwide as perhaps the greatest political document ever written, and most of it was conceived and written by James Madison. It’s too bad people don’t know more about him.
What’s ironic is that despite his greatness in his day, he most likely could never win the presidency if he were to run today. Why not? It has to do with his physical stature. If you look back at all the presidents elected since the beginning of the television era, starting with John F. Kennedy’s win over Richard Nixon, the taller of the two candidates has always won. In addition, since that time, no one has won the presidency without being at least six feet tall. James Madison was a pip-squeak in comparison, topping about between 5’4” and 5’6”. But his physical smallness didn’t hide his mental brilliance. Without him who knows if our democracy would be even half as great.
So where did Madison come up with all these ideas, ideas that he eventually applied into the U.S. Constitution? The easy place to look is to Roma and Greece. Certainly democracy was born in Greece, and championed in the early Roman Empire. Still, there were many ideas brought in by Madison that didn’t have roots in Greece or Rome. For instance, democracy in the ancient world was only for the rich and powerful. In ancient Athens you had to be wealthy to vote. In Sparta, you had to be a warrior of distinction to vote and participate in government. In Rome, the senate was filled with wealthy landowners. These were democracies for the wealthy. If you were poor, you had few rights and little participation.
Madison was influenced by something else, something that might surprise you. His life had twist that changed the way he thought, and it all came about because Madison had been so sickly as a child. He had been born and raised in Virginia as the son of a relatively wealthy landowner. For young men of his status, it was expected that he would go to the College of William and Mary. But the land and climate there—a boggy, muggy mess in the summer—would damage his already fragile health. So he decided to go to the College of New Jersey, which later became Princeton University. It was there he learned under the tutelage of John Witherspoon, and Witherspoon’s teachings made their way, through Madison, into the U. S. Constitution.
Witherspoon was a Scottish Presbyterian pastor who had been brought over from Scotland to resurrect the troubled university. With him he brought ideas that had been forged in the Presbyterian Church of Scotland. The Presbyterian Church of Scotland was a skeptical church that was, and always has been, very aware of the presence of sin. Having been dominated by the English for centuries before forging a peace with them, the Scottish always were skeptical about the willingness of anyone in power to be truly gracious in governing. The Scottish people had seen empty promises from the English. They also had witnessed the corruption of bishops and others in both the Catholic and Anglican churches. So, in creating a church government for their church, they created a system full of checks and balances. The point was to keep any one person or group from wielding too much power.
Thus, in the Scottish Presbyterian system, clergy had no more ruling power than elders. In fact, on church boards (or sessions, as they are called), the pastor only had one vote equal to each other member. In higher governing bodies, there would always be an equal number of laity and clergy. The point was to keep the clergy from having too much power, as was the case in the Catholic Church, but to also keep the laity from having too much power. It was a balance between hierarchical and mass rule. The elders would also be elected, and they would be part of a representative system. The point of this was to have people of wisdom lead so that the power of populism would be checked.
Witherspoon taught the importance of these kinds of checks and balances in his courses at Princeton, and the ideals of checks and balances heavily influenced Madison. Thus, the United States governing system is based upon the Presbyterian system. It is a system that is highly aware of the likelihood of people in power to sin and to be self-centered in their governing system. Based on the Presbyterian approach, Madison created a system in which each branch—the executive, legislative, and judicial—acted as a check and balance on the others. Thus, just as clergy were not given unlimited power, neither were presidents. The legislative and judicial branches would check and balance presidential power. In the legislative branch there would be two bodies that checked and balanced each other. There would be the House of Representatives, which would be more immediately representative of people. Serving only two-year terms, and representing a relatively small number of people, they would be very dependent on the voters, so they would more clearly represent the interests of smaller groups within their states. The Senate, comprised of two senators from each state serving six-year terms (and originally voted on by the state governments, not by the people), would be the wisdom body of government. They would be less reactive to interest groups, and their long terms would free them up to act with a slow-paced, measured wisdom. All of these checks and balances come courtesy of us Presbyterians.
This emphasis on checks and balances, recognizing the reality of human sin, is at the core of what it means to be Presbyterian. Our name, “Presbyterian,” reflects that sense of checks and balances. Do you know what the name means? Let me give you a hint. If you go to the eye doctor, and you are told you have to start using reading glasses, do you know what that condition is called? It is called “presbyopia.” It literally means “old eyes.” Presbyterian comes from the Greek word “presbyteros,” or “elder.” The idea is that elders, who hopefully have great wisdom, represent the church members. They aren’t necessarily political representatives, like your congressmen or congresswomen. They are spiritual representatives, chosen by the people, who hopefully have the wisdom to discern God’s will.
If you look at almost any denomination, their names tell you something crucial about them, often about their government. For example, Episcopalians are called that after the Greek word “episkopos,” which means “bishop.” It tells you that bishops run them. Congregationalists are run by the congregation, with monthly meetings voted on by the members. Methodists are called that because of their “methods,” or ways of practicing their faith, instituted by their founder, John Wesley. Quakers are called Quakers because it used to be said that they prayed with such passion that they shook or “quaked” when praying. Lutherans follow the teachings and example of Martin Luther.
The creation of the Presbyterianism system wasn’t only an attempt to create a religious democracy. It was an attempt to get back to the original intent and practices of Christianity found in scripture. The original reformers such as John Calvin, Martin Bucer, Philip Melancthon all had studied scripture, and tried their best to recreate the form of government in a church found in scripture. What they found in scripture was an emphasis on elders, who were gifted with leading the congregation, and pastors, who were gifted with teaching a congregation. In fact, in our tradition we have what we call “ruling” elders, or laity who are to lead the church, and “teaching” elders, or pastors, who are to teach the people how to grow spiritually. These ideas are reflected in our scripture for this morning, where it says, “The gifts he gave were that some would be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ.”
Paul is giving us a template for the church, which is that everyone has a role. Our role is unique to each of us, yet whatever our role we are to work together for the good of the body of Christ. Churches aren’t to be run by any of us for our own sakes, but by all of us together for Christ’s sake.
What really separates us Presbyterians from other Christians is not so much our beliefs, which are very similar to other Protestants, but our approach. We believe in the importance of following God together, seeking to follow it in the way Paul teaches, which is that we are called to: “lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.”
Amen.
September 19, 2010
I therefore, the prisoner in the Lord, beg you to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope of your calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all. But each of us was given grace according to the measure of Christ’s gift. Therefore it is said, “When he ascended on high he made captivity itself a captive; he gave gifts to his people.” (When it says, “He ascended,” what does it mean but that he had also descended into the lower parts of the earth? He who descended is the same one who ascended far above all the heavens, so that he might fill all things.) The gifts he gave were that some would be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until all of us come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ. We must no longer be children, tossed to and fro and blown about by every wind of doctrine, by people’s trickery, by their craftiness in deceitful scheming. But speaking the truth in love, we must grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by every ligament with which it is equipped, as each part is working properly, promotes the body’s growth in building itself up in love.
When you think about the great presidents of the United States, who usually comes to mind? Washington? Lincoln? Jefferson? The Roosevelts? Reagan? It’s always a good debate with no clear answer. Now, if you were to debate whom the greatest person to become president was, I think the answer would come down to a choice between two men, one of whom would be George Washington. Besides Washington, it would hard to find a greater person, to find a person who had more impact on history and development on the United States, than James Madison.
He certainly wasn’t one of our greatest presidents. His miscalculations about the British led to the War of 1812, and his miscalculation about Britain’s wartime intentions allowed the British to capture and burn, with no American resistance, much of Washington, D.C. Madison was not one of our greatest presidents, but he was clearly our greatest resident. He accomplished something that was far more powerful than anything achieved by any of our presidents other than Washington. What did he do? He wrote most of the Constitution of the United States of America.
Our constitution is seen worldwide as perhaps the greatest political document ever written, and most of it was conceived and written by James Madison. It’s too bad people don’t know more about him.
What’s ironic is that despite his greatness in his day, he most likely could never win the presidency if he were to run today. Why not? It has to do with his physical stature. If you look back at all the presidents elected since the beginning of the television era, starting with John F. Kennedy’s win over Richard Nixon, the taller of the two candidates has always won. In addition, since that time, no one has won the presidency without being at least six feet tall. James Madison was a pip-squeak in comparison, topping about between 5’4” and 5’6”. But his physical smallness didn’t hide his mental brilliance. Without him who knows if our democracy would be even half as great.
So where did Madison come up with all these ideas, ideas that he eventually applied into the U.S. Constitution? The easy place to look is to Roma and Greece. Certainly democracy was born in Greece, and championed in the early Roman Empire. Still, there were many ideas brought in by Madison that didn’t have roots in Greece or Rome. For instance, democracy in the ancient world was only for the rich and powerful. In ancient Athens you had to be wealthy to vote. In Sparta, you had to be a warrior of distinction to vote and participate in government. In Rome, the senate was filled with wealthy landowners. These were democracies for the wealthy. If you were poor, you had few rights and little participation.
Madison was influenced by something else, something that might surprise you. His life had twist that changed the way he thought, and it all came about because Madison had been so sickly as a child. He had been born and raised in Virginia as the son of a relatively wealthy landowner. For young men of his status, it was expected that he would go to the College of William and Mary. But the land and climate there—a boggy, muggy mess in the summer—would damage his already fragile health. So he decided to go to the College of New Jersey, which later became Princeton University. It was there he learned under the tutelage of John Witherspoon, and Witherspoon’s teachings made their way, through Madison, into the U. S. Constitution.
Witherspoon was a Scottish Presbyterian pastor who had been brought over from Scotland to resurrect the troubled university. With him he brought ideas that had been forged in the Presbyterian Church of Scotland. The Presbyterian Church of Scotland was a skeptical church that was, and always has been, very aware of the presence of sin. Having been dominated by the English for centuries before forging a peace with them, the Scottish always were skeptical about the willingness of anyone in power to be truly gracious in governing. The Scottish people had seen empty promises from the English. They also had witnessed the corruption of bishops and others in both the Catholic and Anglican churches. So, in creating a church government for their church, they created a system full of checks and balances. The point was to keep any one person or group from wielding too much power.
Thus, in the Scottish Presbyterian system, clergy had no more ruling power than elders. In fact, on church boards (or sessions, as they are called), the pastor only had one vote equal to each other member. In higher governing bodies, there would always be an equal number of laity and clergy. The point was to keep the clergy from having too much power, as was the case in the Catholic Church, but to also keep the laity from having too much power. It was a balance between hierarchical and mass rule. The elders would also be elected, and they would be part of a representative system. The point of this was to have people of wisdom lead so that the power of populism would be checked.
Witherspoon taught the importance of these kinds of checks and balances in his courses at Princeton, and the ideals of checks and balances heavily influenced Madison. Thus, the United States governing system is based upon the Presbyterian system. It is a system that is highly aware of the likelihood of people in power to sin and to be self-centered in their governing system. Based on the Presbyterian approach, Madison created a system in which each branch—the executive, legislative, and judicial—acted as a check and balance on the others. Thus, just as clergy were not given unlimited power, neither were presidents. The legislative and judicial branches would check and balance presidential power. In the legislative branch there would be two bodies that checked and balanced each other. There would be the House of Representatives, which would be more immediately representative of people. Serving only two-year terms, and representing a relatively small number of people, they would be very dependent on the voters, so they would more clearly represent the interests of smaller groups within their states. The Senate, comprised of two senators from each state serving six-year terms (and originally voted on by the state governments, not by the people), would be the wisdom body of government. They would be less reactive to interest groups, and their long terms would free them up to act with a slow-paced, measured wisdom. All of these checks and balances come courtesy of us Presbyterians.
This emphasis on checks and balances, recognizing the reality of human sin, is at the core of what it means to be Presbyterian. Our name, “Presbyterian,” reflects that sense of checks and balances. Do you know what the name means? Let me give you a hint. If you go to the eye doctor, and you are told you have to start using reading glasses, do you know what that condition is called? It is called “presbyopia.” It literally means “old eyes.” Presbyterian comes from the Greek word “presbyteros,” or “elder.” The idea is that elders, who hopefully have great wisdom, represent the church members. They aren’t necessarily political representatives, like your congressmen or congresswomen. They are spiritual representatives, chosen by the people, who hopefully have the wisdom to discern God’s will.
If you look at almost any denomination, their names tell you something crucial about them, often about their government. For example, Episcopalians are called that after the Greek word “episkopos,” which means “bishop.” It tells you that bishops run them. Congregationalists are run by the congregation, with monthly meetings voted on by the members. Methodists are called that because of their “methods,” or ways of practicing their faith, instituted by their founder, John Wesley. Quakers are called Quakers because it used to be said that they prayed with such passion that they shook or “quaked” when praying. Lutherans follow the teachings and example of Martin Luther.
The creation of the Presbyterianism system wasn’t only an attempt to create a religious democracy. It was an attempt to get back to the original intent and practices of Christianity found in scripture. The original reformers such as John Calvin, Martin Bucer, Philip Melancthon all had studied scripture, and tried their best to recreate the form of government in a church found in scripture. What they found in scripture was an emphasis on elders, who were gifted with leading the congregation, and pastors, who were gifted with teaching a congregation. In fact, in our tradition we have what we call “ruling” elders, or laity who are to lead the church, and “teaching” elders, or pastors, who are to teach the people how to grow spiritually. These ideas are reflected in our scripture for this morning, where it says, “The gifts he gave were that some would be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ.”
Paul is giving us a template for the church, which is that everyone has a role. Our role is unique to each of us, yet whatever our role we are to work together for the good of the body of Christ. Churches aren’t to be run by any of us for our own sakes, but by all of us together for Christ’s sake.
What really separates us Presbyterians from other Christians is not so much our beliefs, which are very similar to other Protestants, but our approach. We believe in the importance of following God together, seeking to follow it in the way Paul teaches, which is that we are called to: “lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.”
Amen.
What Does It Mean to Be Presbyterian? 1. Grace Is All that Matters.
Romans 3:19-26
September 12, 2007
Now we know that whatever the law says, it speaks to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be silenced, and the whole world may be held accountable to God. For “no human being will be justified in his sight” by deeds prescribed by the law, for through the law comes the knowledge of sin. But now, apart from law, the righteousness of God has been disclosed, and is attested by the law and the prophets, the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe.
For there is no distinction, since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; they are now justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a sacrifice of atonement by his blood, effective through faith. He did this to show his righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over the sins previously committed; it was to prove at the present time that he himself is righteous and that he justifies the one who has faith in Jesus.
You know, generations ago Presbyterians knew what it meant to be Presbyterian. Today I’m not so sure how many of us really know what it actually means to be Presbyterian. I say that because looking at our congregation, it’s pretty apparent that the majority of us grew up something other than Presbyterian. In the polling I’ve done of the members, I’ve found that at least 65% of our members grew up in a denomination other than Presbyterian, or grew up as nothing at all. They grew up Roman Catholic, Lutheran, Episcopalian, United Church of Christ, Disciples of Christ, Methodist, Christian Scientist, Pentecostal, or some other denomination.
A generation or two ago, growing up in one denomination, and then joining another would never have been the case. People who grew up Presbyterian stayed Presbyterian. We didn’t bring in many outsiders, and people just knew what it meant to be Presbyterian. Now, I’m not so sure people do. Do you know what lies at the foundations of our beliefs?
For the next four weeks, I want to do a series on what it means to be Presbyterian. I want to focus on what the basics of being Presbyterian are so that those of you who didn’t grow up Presbyterian, and those of you who did, can become a bit clearer on what it is that makes Presbyterian distinctive. In truth, four weeks really isn’t adequate. I could spend all fall preaching on this topic, but that would be kind of boring. So, I’m going to limit it to four weeks.
What is at the foundation of being a Presbyterian? If we are going to understand what it means fundamentally to be Presbyterian, we have to travel back to Germany on October 13, 1517, where a young monk did something that changed the world.
Before that hallowed date, this young monk had been an unknown Augustinian friar who toiled in obscurity in the town of Wittenberg. Having been raised and trained in the Augustinian Christian tradition (a tradition based on Augustine, who in the 5th century wrote a treatise on his own sinfulness and the fall of humanity), he was very much obsessed with his own sinfulness. He was also ordained as a priest, and he was so consumed with his own unworthiness that whenever he celebrated mass by holding the chalice, his hands shook so much that he often spilled the wine. This young monk kept wondering what he could do to overcome his own sinfulness.
Part of his problem was the theology of the Catholic Church at the time. There was a belief in the church, which still persists in a lesser form among Catholics, that a person had to merit getting into heaven. The Catholic Church had a central doctrine that entry into heaven was not free. Instead, people had to earn getting into heaven by doing good deeds. And giving money to the Church to do big projects was considered by God to be great enough to earn either entry into heaven, or at least less time in purgatory. In the early 1500s contributing to a big project, and thus doing a great deed, meant giving money to the Catholic Church to help build St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. The Catholic Church used this doctrine as a fundraiser for building the basilica. They did this by sending a bishop traveling throughout Europe in a cart carrying thousands of small scrolls, bearing the papal seal and bound with a red ribbon. These scrolls were called “indulgences.” By purchasing an indulgence, the proceeds of which would go to building the basilica, a person would be told that she or he, or a relative, had purchased the ability to get out of purgatory early, and to merit getting into heaven.
This whole theology of meriting entry into heaven through the purchase of indulgences bothered the young monk. He wondered how the Church or we could tell if a deed was good enough, or if we had done enough of them. This matter pressed upon his mind and soul, and he obsessed about it. As a New Testament scholar and reader of Greek, the monk was reading the Letters of Paul one day, and came across our passage for this morning. He had read it many, many times before, but this time he read it with fresh eyes. In reading it, he had a hard time moving beyond one particular sentence: “For there is no distinction, since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; they are now justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a sacrifice of atonement by his blood, effective through faith.” He wondered, “Is this true? Is what Paul says the real path to God? Are we really saved by grace as a free gift? If this is true, then the church has been astray from the Gospel for over 1000 years.”
What did the young monk do? He did what any religious scholar at the time did to make people aware of a theological idea. He invited people to debate it. The monk, Martin Luther, went to All Saints Church, in Wittenberg, and nailed his proposal, titled "Disputation of Martin Luther on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences," onto the church door. Why nail it to the door? That was the practice of the time for making people aware of events, announcing proclamations, and inviting discussion and debate on theological topics. The printing press had been around for only a short time, and publishing was expensive, so this was a cheap and time-honored way of posting his ideas. He did not anticipate the Church’s response.
His proposal basically entailed 95 “theses” that stated, in essence, indulgences were wrong because they had no power. Since grace, and therefore salvation, were free gifts given by God unearned, and accessed only through our faith in God, money spent on indulgences were merely good acts with no power to save us. He was telling the church and the faithful that the practice of selling indulgences did nothing to get us into heave or keep us out of hell. This idea rocked the church. It not only challenged almost 1000 years of church doctrine, but it seriously threatened the fundraising efforts for building a holy building in Rome—one that was to become treasured throughout the world.
The Church was so angry with Luther that it not only excommunicated him, but officially tried to have him killed. Luther had to go into hiding, yet his “95 Theses” were printed, published, and distributed widely throughout Europe. The Church now not only had its fundraising efforts interfered with, but people were leaving the church and joining new movements based on Luther’s insight that we are saved by grace, not works.
Why is this idea, that we “are now justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus,” so important to Presbyterians? Because this idea of salvation by grace is the foundation of being a Presbyterian. We are a people who believe that everything in life comes from God through grace, and that all our actions should be motivated by faith in this grace. Despite our believing this, this is also one of the hardest ideas to get across to people because most people want to be saved by something other than grace
What do I mean? What are some of the things you’ve heard people say we need to do in order to be saved? You’ve heard that we have to be “born-again,” although that passage from John 3:3 only tells us that we need to be born-again to “see” the kingdom of God, not to be saved. You’ve heard that we need to do the right good deeds to be saved. You’ve heard that you need to belong to the right denomination, movement, or church to be saved. Despite what Paul says in Romans, we are always looking for ways to get this salvation thing under our own control. We don’t want salvation to be a gift. We want to be able to earn it through our beliefs, behaviors, or belonging to the right church. We don’t want it to be all up to God. What if God decides not to give us grace or salvation? Much better to have it under our own control.
I was asked an interesting question a few weeks ago by one of our folks. Years ago I had asked the same question and it took me a while to get a good answer. The question? What is grace? I love the fact that she asked me this question. Sometimes we are so reluctant to ask basic questions because we worry that people will think we’re stupid. But the truth is that those of us who have studied deep Christian concepts forget what it was like to not know them. How did I answer? I answered by giving her a hug and telling her that’s what grace is. I’m not sure it was the best answer, but what I was trying to say was that grace is all of God’s love, all of God’s blessings, all of God’s power all wrapped up and given to us as a free gift. Like a hug, it’s an expression of God’s love for us that goes beyond what we understand. We feel and experience it more than we understand it.
David Steindl-Rast, who is a Dominican priest, says that grace can be understood this way. It is as if God was standing around every corner, doorway, and hallway, waiting to give us gift-wrapped gifts of grace. The problem is that we are so busy with our tasks and interests that we brush right by them. But God keeps running in front of us, holding out gifts. We accept them when we simply have faith—when we trust in God’s goodness and receive the gifts thankfully. The irony of the approach of trying to earn the gifts is that we become like people receiving gifts at our birthday party, asking the givers how much we owe them for the gifts. We would never do that, but we do try to earn God’s gifts, gifts that have already been given for free.
It’s because of the connection between grace and faith that the forming a relationship with God is so important. God doesn’t force grace on us. We accept these gifts of grace by having faith, by trusting in God and loving God. That is a problem for some people because they want grace, but they don’t necessarily want the relationship with God that comes with grace. They want God to give them grace when they need it, but they also want God to leave them alone when they don’t. Yet when we have a deep relationship with God, based on faith, grace flows through everything we do.
To be Presbyterian means to be aware of God’s grace everywhere, and being constantly open to it. This idea of being available to grace creates some interesting and quite profound ways of thinking about our faith. For instance, why as Presbyterians, should we worship, do good deeds, and serve God in everything? Do we worship in order to please God so we can get into heaven? Do we give money to the church to get into heaven? Do we do good deeds to get into heaven? We already know the answer to those questions, but the question remains, if everything is free, then why worship, give, and serve?
The answer is that for us Presbyterians, we worship, give, and serve in response to grace. We recognize that grace is all around us, and we become so grateful (literally meaning “grace-filled”) that we respond to grace. We worship in order to enhance the connection between God and us so that grace can flow more freely in and through our lives. One of the problems of today is that we are so “me-focused” that we are always asking, “what’s in it for me to worship?” The answer is “nothing,” unless you count spending an hour with God, praising God, praying to God, listening to God, and preparing the way for God to grow in your soul as “something.” Presbyterians worship because we are called to worship, and because worship deepens our relationship with God. We give to the church and charity as a way of saying thank you to God, and as a way of giving back to God some of the grace God has given us. We serve because God’s grace has entered our lives so fully that we want to share grace with others.
It is this belief in grace, and our response to grace, that distinguishes us from Roman Catholics, Pentecostals, and many Evangelicals. In the Roman Catholic tradition, there is still a belief that we must do good deeds to merit salvation. That’s why worship in the Roman Catholic tradition is considered an obligation. We have to worship, and take part in the mass, to merit salvation. In the Pentecostal and Evangelical traditions, the emphasis is much more on certain ways of acting in faith that procures grace. You must believe the right things, or have the right gifts of the Spirit, or have given the right confession to merit grace and salvation. We Presbyterians don’t worry about salvation. When someone asks us when we were saved, we say that we were saved 2000 years ago when Jesus died on the cross, and we spend our times opening up to and responding to grace rather than trying to figure out how to get it.
Hannah Whitall Smith, the great Quaker writer of the 19th century, gives a great metaphor for the Presbyterian, and Protestant, attitude towards grace. She says that the problem is that we are like flowers planted outside the garden of grace, always straining over the fence to get some of that grace. We strain to get grace, but can’t get it because we are planted in something other than grace. What we need to do is to simply plant ourselves in grace, and when we do that the grace just flows through everything we do.
I actually believe that it is this belief in grace, and response to grace, that keeps the Presbyterian Church relatively small. I think that people respond much more to fear, and worries about their salvation, and doing good things to save themselves, than to the free gift of grace. Many churches preach messages that say that if you don’t become one of them, or believe like them, or act like them, or belong to them, you aren’t saved. Presbyterians never preach that, and we also never make people afraid. What we do is to help people to grow and mature in grace, but that’s not necessarily what people want, or at least it’s not what people think they want. We offer grace as a free gift, and we offer a path to grow in that grace. That’s what makes us Presbyterian at our foundations.
So, here are some questions that I want you to reflect on, as Presbyterians
• To what extent do you worship in response to grace?
• To what extent do you serve God in response to grace?
• To what extent do you let grace fill and flow through your life?
Amen.
September 12, 2007
Now we know that whatever the law says, it speaks to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be silenced, and the whole world may be held accountable to God. For “no human being will be justified in his sight” by deeds prescribed by the law, for through the law comes the knowledge of sin. But now, apart from law, the righteousness of God has been disclosed, and is attested by the law and the prophets, the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe.
For there is no distinction, since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; they are now justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a sacrifice of atonement by his blood, effective through faith. He did this to show his righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over the sins previously committed; it was to prove at the present time that he himself is righteous and that he justifies the one who has faith in Jesus.
You know, generations ago Presbyterians knew what it meant to be Presbyterian. Today I’m not so sure how many of us really know what it actually means to be Presbyterian. I say that because looking at our congregation, it’s pretty apparent that the majority of us grew up something other than Presbyterian. In the polling I’ve done of the members, I’ve found that at least 65% of our members grew up in a denomination other than Presbyterian, or grew up as nothing at all. They grew up Roman Catholic, Lutheran, Episcopalian, United Church of Christ, Disciples of Christ, Methodist, Christian Scientist, Pentecostal, or some other denomination.
A generation or two ago, growing up in one denomination, and then joining another would never have been the case. People who grew up Presbyterian stayed Presbyterian. We didn’t bring in many outsiders, and people just knew what it meant to be Presbyterian. Now, I’m not so sure people do. Do you know what lies at the foundations of our beliefs?
For the next four weeks, I want to do a series on what it means to be Presbyterian. I want to focus on what the basics of being Presbyterian are so that those of you who didn’t grow up Presbyterian, and those of you who did, can become a bit clearer on what it is that makes Presbyterian distinctive. In truth, four weeks really isn’t adequate. I could spend all fall preaching on this topic, but that would be kind of boring. So, I’m going to limit it to four weeks.
What is at the foundation of being a Presbyterian? If we are going to understand what it means fundamentally to be Presbyterian, we have to travel back to Germany on October 13, 1517, where a young monk did something that changed the world.
Before that hallowed date, this young monk had been an unknown Augustinian friar who toiled in obscurity in the town of Wittenberg. Having been raised and trained in the Augustinian Christian tradition (a tradition based on Augustine, who in the 5th century wrote a treatise on his own sinfulness and the fall of humanity), he was very much obsessed with his own sinfulness. He was also ordained as a priest, and he was so consumed with his own unworthiness that whenever he celebrated mass by holding the chalice, his hands shook so much that he often spilled the wine. This young monk kept wondering what he could do to overcome his own sinfulness.
Part of his problem was the theology of the Catholic Church at the time. There was a belief in the church, which still persists in a lesser form among Catholics, that a person had to merit getting into heaven. The Catholic Church had a central doctrine that entry into heaven was not free. Instead, people had to earn getting into heaven by doing good deeds. And giving money to the Church to do big projects was considered by God to be great enough to earn either entry into heaven, or at least less time in purgatory. In the early 1500s contributing to a big project, and thus doing a great deed, meant giving money to the Catholic Church to help build St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. The Catholic Church used this doctrine as a fundraiser for building the basilica. They did this by sending a bishop traveling throughout Europe in a cart carrying thousands of small scrolls, bearing the papal seal and bound with a red ribbon. These scrolls were called “indulgences.” By purchasing an indulgence, the proceeds of which would go to building the basilica, a person would be told that she or he, or a relative, had purchased the ability to get out of purgatory early, and to merit getting into heaven.
This whole theology of meriting entry into heaven through the purchase of indulgences bothered the young monk. He wondered how the Church or we could tell if a deed was good enough, or if we had done enough of them. This matter pressed upon his mind and soul, and he obsessed about it. As a New Testament scholar and reader of Greek, the monk was reading the Letters of Paul one day, and came across our passage for this morning. He had read it many, many times before, but this time he read it with fresh eyes. In reading it, he had a hard time moving beyond one particular sentence: “For there is no distinction, since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; they are now justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a sacrifice of atonement by his blood, effective through faith.” He wondered, “Is this true? Is what Paul says the real path to God? Are we really saved by grace as a free gift? If this is true, then the church has been astray from the Gospel for over 1000 years.”
What did the young monk do? He did what any religious scholar at the time did to make people aware of a theological idea. He invited people to debate it. The monk, Martin Luther, went to All Saints Church, in Wittenberg, and nailed his proposal, titled "Disputation of Martin Luther on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences," onto the church door. Why nail it to the door? That was the practice of the time for making people aware of events, announcing proclamations, and inviting discussion and debate on theological topics. The printing press had been around for only a short time, and publishing was expensive, so this was a cheap and time-honored way of posting his ideas. He did not anticipate the Church’s response.
His proposal basically entailed 95 “theses” that stated, in essence, indulgences were wrong because they had no power. Since grace, and therefore salvation, were free gifts given by God unearned, and accessed only through our faith in God, money spent on indulgences were merely good acts with no power to save us. He was telling the church and the faithful that the practice of selling indulgences did nothing to get us into heave or keep us out of hell. This idea rocked the church. It not only challenged almost 1000 years of church doctrine, but it seriously threatened the fundraising efforts for building a holy building in Rome—one that was to become treasured throughout the world.
The Church was so angry with Luther that it not only excommunicated him, but officially tried to have him killed. Luther had to go into hiding, yet his “95 Theses” were printed, published, and distributed widely throughout Europe. The Church now not only had its fundraising efforts interfered with, but people were leaving the church and joining new movements based on Luther’s insight that we are saved by grace, not works.
Why is this idea, that we “are now justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus,” so important to Presbyterians? Because this idea of salvation by grace is the foundation of being a Presbyterian. We are a people who believe that everything in life comes from God through grace, and that all our actions should be motivated by faith in this grace. Despite our believing this, this is also one of the hardest ideas to get across to people because most people want to be saved by something other than grace
What do I mean? What are some of the things you’ve heard people say we need to do in order to be saved? You’ve heard that we have to be “born-again,” although that passage from John 3:3 only tells us that we need to be born-again to “see” the kingdom of God, not to be saved. You’ve heard that we need to do the right good deeds to be saved. You’ve heard that you need to belong to the right denomination, movement, or church to be saved. Despite what Paul says in Romans, we are always looking for ways to get this salvation thing under our own control. We don’t want salvation to be a gift. We want to be able to earn it through our beliefs, behaviors, or belonging to the right church. We don’t want it to be all up to God. What if God decides not to give us grace or salvation? Much better to have it under our own control.
I was asked an interesting question a few weeks ago by one of our folks. Years ago I had asked the same question and it took me a while to get a good answer. The question? What is grace? I love the fact that she asked me this question. Sometimes we are so reluctant to ask basic questions because we worry that people will think we’re stupid. But the truth is that those of us who have studied deep Christian concepts forget what it was like to not know them. How did I answer? I answered by giving her a hug and telling her that’s what grace is. I’m not sure it was the best answer, but what I was trying to say was that grace is all of God’s love, all of God’s blessings, all of God’s power all wrapped up and given to us as a free gift. Like a hug, it’s an expression of God’s love for us that goes beyond what we understand. We feel and experience it more than we understand it.
David Steindl-Rast, who is a Dominican priest, says that grace can be understood this way. It is as if God was standing around every corner, doorway, and hallway, waiting to give us gift-wrapped gifts of grace. The problem is that we are so busy with our tasks and interests that we brush right by them. But God keeps running in front of us, holding out gifts. We accept them when we simply have faith—when we trust in God’s goodness and receive the gifts thankfully. The irony of the approach of trying to earn the gifts is that we become like people receiving gifts at our birthday party, asking the givers how much we owe them for the gifts. We would never do that, but we do try to earn God’s gifts, gifts that have already been given for free.
It’s because of the connection between grace and faith that the forming a relationship with God is so important. God doesn’t force grace on us. We accept these gifts of grace by having faith, by trusting in God and loving God. That is a problem for some people because they want grace, but they don’t necessarily want the relationship with God that comes with grace. They want God to give them grace when they need it, but they also want God to leave them alone when they don’t. Yet when we have a deep relationship with God, based on faith, grace flows through everything we do.
To be Presbyterian means to be aware of God’s grace everywhere, and being constantly open to it. This idea of being available to grace creates some interesting and quite profound ways of thinking about our faith. For instance, why as Presbyterians, should we worship, do good deeds, and serve God in everything? Do we worship in order to please God so we can get into heaven? Do we give money to the church to get into heaven? Do we do good deeds to get into heaven? We already know the answer to those questions, but the question remains, if everything is free, then why worship, give, and serve?
The answer is that for us Presbyterians, we worship, give, and serve in response to grace. We recognize that grace is all around us, and we become so grateful (literally meaning “grace-filled”) that we respond to grace. We worship in order to enhance the connection between God and us so that grace can flow more freely in and through our lives. One of the problems of today is that we are so “me-focused” that we are always asking, “what’s in it for me to worship?” The answer is “nothing,” unless you count spending an hour with God, praising God, praying to God, listening to God, and preparing the way for God to grow in your soul as “something.” Presbyterians worship because we are called to worship, and because worship deepens our relationship with God. We give to the church and charity as a way of saying thank you to God, and as a way of giving back to God some of the grace God has given us. We serve because God’s grace has entered our lives so fully that we want to share grace with others.
It is this belief in grace, and our response to grace, that distinguishes us from Roman Catholics, Pentecostals, and many Evangelicals. In the Roman Catholic tradition, there is still a belief that we must do good deeds to merit salvation. That’s why worship in the Roman Catholic tradition is considered an obligation. We have to worship, and take part in the mass, to merit salvation. In the Pentecostal and Evangelical traditions, the emphasis is much more on certain ways of acting in faith that procures grace. You must believe the right things, or have the right gifts of the Spirit, or have given the right confession to merit grace and salvation. We Presbyterians don’t worry about salvation. When someone asks us when we were saved, we say that we were saved 2000 years ago when Jesus died on the cross, and we spend our times opening up to and responding to grace rather than trying to figure out how to get it.
Hannah Whitall Smith, the great Quaker writer of the 19th century, gives a great metaphor for the Presbyterian, and Protestant, attitude towards grace. She says that the problem is that we are like flowers planted outside the garden of grace, always straining over the fence to get some of that grace. We strain to get grace, but can’t get it because we are planted in something other than grace. What we need to do is to simply plant ourselves in grace, and when we do that the grace just flows through everything we do.
I actually believe that it is this belief in grace, and response to grace, that keeps the Presbyterian Church relatively small. I think that people respond much more to fear, and worries about their salvation, and doing good things to save themselves, than to the free gift of grace. Many churches preach messages that say that if you don’t become one of them, or believe like them, or act like them, or belong to them, you aren’t saved. Presbyterians never preach that, and we also never make people afraid. What we do is to help people to grow and mature in grace, but that’s not necessarily what people want, or at least it’s not what people think they want. We offer grace as a free gift, and we offer a path to grow in that grace. That’s what makes us Presbyterian at our foundations.
So, here are some questions that I want you to reflect on, as Presbyterians
• To what extent do you worship in response to grace?
• To what extent do you serve God in response to grace?
• To what extent do you let grace fill and flow through your life?
Amen.
Forming a Passionate Faith: 3. Going
Luke 13:22-30
August 22, 2010
Jesus went through one town and village after another, teaching as he made his way to Jerusalem.
Someone asked him, “Lord, will only a few be saved?” He said to them, “Strive to enter through the narrow door; for many, I tell you, will try to enter and will not be able. When once the owner of the house has got up and shut the door, and you begin to stand outside and to knock at the door, saying, ‘Lord, open to us,’ then in reply he will say to you, ‘I do not know where you come from.’ Then you will begin to say, ‘We ate and drank with you, and you taught in our streets.’ But he will say, ‘I do not know where you come from; go away from me, all you evildoers!’ There will be weeping and gnashing of teeth when you see Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and all the prophets in the kingdom of God, and you yourselves thrown out. Then people will come from east and west, from north and south, and will eat in the kingdom of God. Indeed, some are last who will be first, and some are first who will be last.”
I’m about to say something that a lot of us think, but rarely say out loud. We keep it to ourselves because we worry that saying it out loud will somehow offend God. But here it is: You know, sometime Jesus can be really frustrating and irritating. I know we’re not supposed to think of Jesus in that way, but the truth is that he can be really, really frustrating in his teachings. As easy as many of his teachings are to understand, some are really, really tough to understand, and when they are, it’s aggravating.
For example he says elsewhere in Luke, “I did not come to bring peace but a sword. I came divide father against son, mother against daughter,” and so on. Wait, didn’t he come to bring peace? If this is true, why do we call him the Prince of Peace? Why does he tell us that “blessed are the peacemakers.” Very confusing. There are a number of Jesus’ teachings like this one that baffle pastors and laity alike.
Then there’s our passage for today. It is quite confusing and frustrating. What does he mean when he says, “Strive to enter through the narrow door; for many, I tell you, will try to enter and will not be able”? What’s frustrating is that he doesn’t actually tell us in the passage what it is that we need to do to be able to enter through the narrow door. He just tells us that we have to strive to enter through it. But where is it. What’s the password to get through it? The whole narrow door metaphor kind of reminds me of an after hours nightclub where you knock on a door, and a bouncer opens a small, sliding panel on the door and says in a rough voice, “Yeah? What’s the password.” And we say, “Uhh,… Jesus?” And he goes, “Nope! Go away.” It’s like Jesus tells us we have to get through that door, but then says nothing about how. Very frustrating. Very irritating.
Over the years I’ve come across a lot of Christians who have been convinced that they know what the narrow door is. And they’re never shy about telling you what the secret is, and why they have entered through it and you haven’t. Basically you can put them in one of three groups. They are either right believers, right behavers, or right belongers. The worst of all are the ones who are all three because they are the most sure that they’ve not only entered through the narrow door, but that they are now the bouncers behind the door, deciding who passes and who doesn’t. Let’s look at each group in a bit more detail.
Who are the right believers? They are the people you come across who are sure they know everything. They think that if they can just know Christian theology well enough, know the Bible well enough, be orthodox enough (which means “right teachings or beliefs”) they can get through the narrow door. They are quick to tell you why your beliefs are inadequate. They quote scripture loud and often to back up their points, even though what they quote doesn’t always support what they say. They are so certain about their own rightness that to them everyone who disagrees is steeped in wrongness. They also drive you crazy because you can never get a word in edgewise, and if you can, you feel like you are in a court of law, with them as the prosecuting attorney, judge, and jury.
The basic problem with the whole “right belief” approach is that we can never know enough to be right. Our years are too short and our brains are too small to ever know all the theology and the Bible that completely. Also, they run into a little, itty-bitty problem highlighted in Paul’s letter to the Romans. Fill in the blanks of this sentence: “We are saved by _____ through ____.” Did you say “by grace through faith”? That’s the problem. Neither Jesus nor Paul ever say that believing the right things, having the right theology, or knowing the Bible well enough gets us through that narrow door. They tell us that the narrow door is a gift of God’s grace, freely given, that we accept through faith. Not right belief, but faith. Not right knowledge, but grace.
Then there are the right behavers. These people also bother you. They are moralists who always see their behavior as perfect, and everyone else’s as sinful. To them, they are without sin, or, if they do admit to some sin, they push it off as a minor sin in comparison with everyone else’s. What they don’t see is how strong the sin of pride and judgment is within them. They are so certain of their own rightness in the way they see the world morally that they become judgmental. They take the place of Christ in judging us, and in the process never see the plank in their own eyes. You know these people because you avoid these people. They are sure their behavior gets them through the narrow door, and ours doesn’t.
Finally, we have the right belongers. These are the people who are certain of their own salvation because they belong to the “right” church or the “right” group. When they talk with you, you are always wrong, not because of your beliefs or behaviors, but simply because you aren’t part of their church, denomination, or Christian movement. You could pray all day, be faithful in so many ways, go on mission trips through your church, but it’s all for naught because you simply belong to the wrong church.
I’ve come across Roman Catholics who are like this, non-denominational evangelicals like this, Orthodox who are like this, and so many more. You don’t find these types much in the Presbyterian Church nowadays, but go back fifty years and earlier, and you would have found these types all throughout our own churches. Generations ago, many thought that the only true church was the Presbyterian Church. Episcopalians saw themselves as the only true Church. Lutherans saw themselves as the only true Church. In our denominations today, we aren’t like this much anymore, and many Roman Catholics and Orthodox have let go of this kind of belief, but in any religious denomination or group you will still find some who are certain that they can get through the narrow door simply because they are part of the right group.
There’s a problem with each of these approaches, which I pointed out above. The basic problem is that Scripture points to salvation by grace through faith, not through right belief, behavior, or belonging. The process that gets us through that narrow door is a process by which we simply accept the gift of love that God offers us all the time.
So, what is the key that unlocks the narrow door? It may seem like a mystery, but you can find the answer. You find it by doing a little trick that we pastors sometimes use. It’s called “reading the rest of the Bible.” ☺ If you read our “narrow door” passage in context by reading what precedes it in chapters 12 and 13, you will find what Jesus says gets us through the door.
Our passage for this morning is part of a very large group of teachings Jesus gives in which he lays out what the narrow door is. First, in chapter 12, Jesus contrasts his approach with the Pharisees who are obsessed with the law. Luke tells us about a woman Jesus healed. She had been bent over for 18 years, and he healed her. Afterwards the Pharisees are furious and critical of Jesus. Why? Because he healed on the Sabbath. It doesn’t matter that God did something amazing through Jesus and healed a woman from her suffering. All that mattered was that Jesus healed on the Sabbath, thus breaking God’s law. Jesus does God’s will by breaking God’s law. Jesus basically is saying that when we do God’s will no matter what, even if it means breaking religious convention, we become ready to enter through the narrow door.
Then Jesus talks about the heart and treasure, using the passage that I preached on several weeks ago, saying that where our treasure is, there our heart is, too. When our treasure is in possessions, money, and security, then the door is closed to us. But when we place our treasure in heaven, in God, and in sharing God’s love, the door becomes opened to us. He goes on to say that we need to let go of our worries and trust God. He points out that God takes care of sparrows and lilies, and God will take care of us, too, if we let go of our anxieties and worries.
Jesus then tells us a parable about a master who returns home and sees what his slave has been doing. Now, typically, when a master goes away, what would you expect the slaves to do? Hang out and do nothing, right? But this master finds that his slave has been working hard to do the master’s will. This is a way of living that Jesus says we need to have if we are to enter through the narrow door, which is to have a passion for doing God’s will, even when we don’t sense God anywhere near.
Finally, he uses the example of a fig tree to show that to be truly in sync with God. He says that our lives must produce good fruit. He basically is saying that when we are doing God’s will, when we are overcoming all obstacles to doing it, and when we do it whether or not we sense God, we produce good fruit. The fruit is the proof of our openness to God. When our hearts are with God, goodness flows out of our actions.
The whole point is that we make the narrow door complicated, which is why it seems so confusing to figure out how to enter. Entering by the narrow door can be simple, although being simple doesn’t necessarily mean easy. Entering is a matter of simply being open to God in all things, and letting God’s grace flow through our lives in everything. But that doesn’t mean it’s not hard. Opening to God’s will is always hard, but when we do it, our lives can become very fruitful in amazing ways. Let me share with you an example.
Back in 1992, Susan was sitting at home when the telephone rang. Her son answered it. He called out to her, “Bob Thompson is on the telephone.” “Bob Thompson? Bob Thompson?” she thought. “That name sounds familiar. Who’s Bob Thompson?” Suddenly she realized who he was. He must be related to Beverly Thompson. As she thought this, she reflected on her experiences during the past year.
It was almost a year ago that she prayed to God to help her find a way to serve God. She felt disconnected from God, and overwhelmed by being a single mom for three children. Every morning and evening she was making a 45-minute trip from her home in New Hampshire to her job in Vermont. She worked in the accounts receivable department of a toy company. It was difficult, and she was becoming overwhelmed. So one morning she prayed as she drove. She prayed to God about her three children and about her situation as a single mother raising them. She thought about how much her church had supported her, and how attending worship and the weekly women’s Bible study were important parts of her week. Still, she wished she could find a way to serve God more and better. So she prayed. She said to God, “I want to serve you so much, but I don’t know how. How do you want me to serve?” She expected an answer that would call her to do something active and unique, but bubbling up from her heart she heard the answer: “Pray.” God wanted her to simply pray. This is not the answer Susan expected, but she responded to God by saying, “Okay, I’ll pray, but you have to give me people to pray for. I’ll devote my trips to and from work to prayer.”
A few months later she came across Beverly Thompson’s name. Beverly owned a toy store. She had sent a check for a shipment of teddy bears, and with it a note apologizing for being so slow with the check. She said that she had been ill and to please forgive her tardiness. Susan knew then and there that she was called to pray for Beverly, and so she did. Every day, to and from work, Susan prayed for Beverly even though she didn’t know anything about her.
After several months, Susan decided to send a letter to Beverly saying that she was praying for her. There was no response. Several months later she sent another letter telling Beverly that she was praying for her and also a little bit about herself. Again, there was no response. Every few weeks she would send a short note, but there never was a response. Still, she continued to pray.
When Susan answered the phone, Bob Thompson introduced himself as Beverly’s husband and told Susan that Beverly had died recently. Then he said, “While we were going through her things, we found your cards and notes tied up with a red ribbon. I know she must have read them over and over because they looked worn. My wife had been diagnosed with lung cancer at the age of forty-eight. She never suffered any pain at all. I know that this was a result of your prayers. The reason you never heard back from her was that she also developed brain cancer. Our relationship with God amounted to going to church once in a while, but it was nothing that had much effect on our lives. I wanted you to know that my wife asked to be baptized two weeks before she passed away. The night before she died, she told me it was okay for her to die because she was going home to be with her Lord.” (adapted from Chicken Soup for the Christian Family Soul, 2000).
Entering through the narrow door is simple, although it’s not always easy. It requires us to be open to God in everything, everyday. The question for you to ponder is this: Are you prepared to enter through the narrow door?
Amen.
August 22, 2010
Jesus went through one town and village after another, teaching as he made his way to Jerusalem.
Someone asked him, “Lord, will only a few be saved?” He said to them, “Strive to enter through the narrow door; for many, I tell you, will try to enter and will not be able. When once the owner of the house has got up and shut the door, and you begin to stand outside and to knock at the door, saying, ‘Lord, open to us,’ then in reply he will say to you, ‘I do not know where you come from.’ Then you will begin to say, ‘We ate and drank with you, and you taught in our streets.’ But he will say, ‘I do not know where you come from; go away from me, all you evildoers!’ There will be weeping and gnashing of teeth when you see Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and all the prophets in the kingdom of God, and you yourselves thrown out. Then people will come from east and west, from north and south, and will eat in the kingdom of God. Indeed, some are last who will be first, and some are first who will be last.”
I’m about to say something that a lot of us think, but rarely say out loud. We keep it to ourselves because we worry that saying it out loud will somehow offend God. But here it is: You know, sometime Jesus can be really frustrating and irritating. I know we’re not supposed to think of Jesus in that way, but the truth is that he can be really, really frustrating in his teachings. As easy as many of his teachings are to understand, some are really, really tough to understand, and when they are, it’s aggravating.
For example he says elsewhere in Luke, “I did not come to bring peace but a sword. I came divide father against son, mother against daughter,” and so on. Wait, didn’t he come to bring peace? If this is true, why do we call him the Prince of Peace? Why does he tell us that “blessed are the peacemakers.” Very confusing. There are a number of Jesus’ teachings like this one that baffle pastors and laity alike.
Then there’s our passage for today. It is quite confusing and frustrating. What does he mean when he says, “Strive to enter through the narrow door; for many, I tell you, will try to enter and will not be able”? What’s frustrating is that he doesn’t actually tell us in the passage what it is that we need to do to be able to enter through the narrow door. He just tells us that we have to strive to enter through it. But where is it. What’s the password to get through it? The whole narrow door metaphor kind of reminds me of an after hours nightclub where you knock on a door, and a bouncer opens a small, sliding panel on the door and says in a rough voice, “Yeah? What’s the password.” And we say, “Uhh,… Jesus?” And he goes, “Nope! Go away.” It’s like Jesus tells us we have to get through that door, but then says nothing about how. Very frustrating. Very irritating.
Over the years I’ve come across a lot of Christians who have been convinced that they know what the narrow door is. And they’re never shy about telling you what the secret is, and why they have entered through it and you haven’t. Basically you can put them in one of three groups. They are either right believers, right behavers, or right belongers. The worst of all are the ones who are all three because they are the most sure that they’ve not only entered through the narrow door, but that they are now the bouncers behind the door, deciding who passes and who doesn’t. Let’s look at each group in a bit more detail.
Who are the right believers? They are the people you come across who are sure they know everything. They think that if they can just know Christian theology well enough, know the Bible well enough, be orthodox enough (which means “right teachings or beliefs”) they can get through the narrow door. They are quick to tell you why your beliefs are inadequate. They quote scripture loud and often to back up their points, even though what they quote doesn’t always support what they say. They are so certain about their own rightness that to them everyone who disagrees is steeped in wrongness. They also drive you crazy because you can never get a word in edgewise, and if you can, you feel like you are in a court of law, with them as the prosecuting attorney, judge, and jury.
The basic problem with the whole “right belief” approach is that we can never know enough to be right. Our years are too short and our brains are too small to ever know all the theology and the Bible that completely. Also, they run into a little, itty-bitty problem highlighted in Paul’s letter to the Romans. Fill in the blanks of this sentence: “We are saved by _____ through ____.” Did you say “by grace through faith”? That’s the problem. Neither Jesus nor Paul ever say that believing the right things, having the right theology, or knowing the Bible well enough gets us through that narrow door. They tell us that the narrow door is a gift of God’s grace, freely given, that we accept through faith. Not right belief, but faith. Not right knowledge, but grace.
Then there are the right behavers. These people also bother you. They are moralists who always see their behavior as perfect, and everyone else’s as sinful. To them, they are without sin, or, if they do admit to some sin, they push it off as a minor sin in comparison with everyone else’s. What they don’t see is how strong the sin of pride and judgment is within them. They are so certain of their own rightness in the way they see the world morally that they become judgmental. They take the place of Christ in judging us, and in the process never see the plank in their own eyes. You know these people because you avoid these people. They are sure their behavior gets them through the narrow door, and ours doesn’t.
Finally, we have the right belongers. These are the people who are certain of their own salvation because they belong to the “right” church or the “right” group. When they talk with you, you are always wrong, not because of your beliefs or behaviors, but simply because you aren’t part of their church, denomination, or Christian movement. You could pray all day, be faithful in so many ways, go on mission trips through your church, but it’s all for naught because you simply belong to the wrong church.
I’ve come across Roman Catholics who are like this, non-denominational evangelicals like this, Orthodox who are like this, and so many more. You don’t find these types much in the Presbyterian Church nowadays, but go back fifty years and earlier, and you would have found these types all throughout our own churches. Generations ago, many thought that the only true church was the Presbyterian Church. Episcopalians saw themselves as the only true Church. Lutherans saw themselves as the only true Church. In our denominations today, we aren’t like this much anymore, and many Roman Catholics and Orthodox have let go of this kind of belief, but in any religious denomination or group you will still find some who are certain that they can get through the narrow door simply because they are part of the right group.
There’s a problem with each of these approaches, which I pointed out above. The basic problem is that Scripture points to salvation by grace through faith, not through right belief, behavior, or belonging. The process that gets us through that narrow door is a process by which we simply accept the gift of love that God offers us all the time.
So, what is the key that unlocks the narrow door? It may seem like a mystery, but you can find the answer. You find it by doing a little trick that we pastors sometimes use. It’s called “reading the rest of the Bible.” ☺ If you read our “narrow door” passage in context by reading what precedes it in chapters 12 and 13, you will find what Jesus says gets us through the door.
Our passage for this morning is part of a very large group of teachings Jesus gives in which he lays out what the narrow door is. First, in chapter 12, Jesus contrasts his approach with the Pharisees who are obsessed with the law. Luke tells us about a woman Jesus healed. She had been bent over for 18 years, and he healed her. Afterwards the Pharisees are furious and critical of Jesus. Why? Because he healed on the Sabbath. It doesn’t matter that God did something amazing through Jesus and healed a woman from her suffering. All that mattered was that Jesus healed on the Sabbath, thus breaking God’s law. Jesus does God’s will by breaking God’s law. Jesus basically is saying that when we do God’s will no matter what, even if it means breaking religious convention, we become ready to enter through the narrow door.
Then Jesus talks about the heart and treasure, using the passage that I preached on several weeks ago, saying that where our treasure is, there our heart is, too. When our treasure is in possessions, money, and security, then the door is closed to us. But when we place our treasure in heaven, in God, and in sharing God’s love, the door becomes opened to us. He goes on to say that we need to let go of our worries and trust God. He points out that God takes care of sparrows and lilies, and God will take care of us, too, if we let go of our anxieties and worries.
Jesus then tells us a parable about a master who returns home and sees what his slave has been doing. Now, typically, when a master goes away, what would you expect the slaves to do? Hang out and do nothing, right? But this master finds that his slave has been working hard to do the master’s will. This is a way of living that Jesus says we need to have if we are to enter through the narrow door, which is to have a passion for doing God’s will, even when we don’t sense God anywhere near.
Finally, he uses the example of a fig tree to show that to be truly in sync with God. He says that our lives must produce good fruit. He basically is saying that when we are doing God’s will, when we are overcoming all obstacles to doing it, and when we do it whether or not we sense God, we produce good fruit. The fruit is the proof of our openness to God. When our hearts are with God, goodness flows out of our actions.
The whole point is that we make the narrow door complicated, which is why it seems so confusing to figure out how to enter. Entering by the narrow door can be simple, although being simple doesn’t necessarily mean easy. Entering is a matter of simply being open to God in all things, and letting God’s grace flow through our lives in everything. But that doesn’t mean it’s not hard. Opening to God’s will is always hard, but when we do it, our lives can become very fruitful in amazing ways. Let me share with you an example.
Back in 1992, Susan was sitting at home when the telephone rang. Her son answered it. He called out to her, “Bob Thompson is on the telephone.” “Bob Thompson? Bob Thompson?” she thought. “That name sounds familiar. Who’s Bob Thompson?” Suddenly she realized who he was. He must be related to Beverly Thompson. As she thought this, she reflected on her experiences during the past year.
It was almost a year ago that she prayed to God to help her find a way to serve God. She felt disconnected from God, and overwhelmed by being a single mom for three children. Every morning and evening she was making a 45-minute trip from her home in New Hampshire to her job in Vermont. She worked in the accounts receivable department of a toy company. It was difficult, and she was becoming overwhelmed. So one morning she prayed as she drove. She prayed to God about her three children and about her situation as a single mother raising them. She thought about how much her church had supported her, and how attending worship and the weekly women’s Bible study were important parts of her week. Still, she wished she could find a way to serve God more and better. So she prayed. She said to God, “I want to serve you so much, but I don’t know how. How do you want me to serve?” She expected an answer that would call her to do something active and unique, but bubbling up from her heart she heard the answer: “Pray.” God wanted her to simply pray. This is not the answer Susan expected, but she responded to God by saying, “Okay, I’ll pray, but you have to give me people to pray for. I’ll devote my trips to and from work to prayer.”
A few months later she came across Beverly Thompson’s name. Beverly owned a toy store. She had sent a check for a shipment of teddy bears, and with it a note apologizing for being so slow with the check. She said that she had been ill and to please forgive her tardiness. Susan knew then and there that she was called to pray for Beverly, and so she did. Every day, to and from work, Susan prayed for Beverly even though she didn’t know anything about her.
After several months, Susan decided to send a letter to Beverly saying that she was praying for her. There was no response. Several months later she sent another letter telling Beverly that she was praying for her and also a little bit about herself. Again, there was no response. Every few weeks she would send a short note, but there never was a response. Still, she continued to pray.
When Susan answered the phone, Bob Thompson introduced himself as Beverly’s husband and told Susan that Beverly had died recently. Then he said, “While we were going through her things, we found your cards and notes tied up with a red ribbon. I know she must have read them over and over because they looked worn. My wife had been diagnosed with lung cancer at the age of forty-eight. She never suffered any pain at all. I know that this was a result of your prayers. The reason you never heard back from her was that she also developed brain cancer. Our relationship with God amounted to going to church once in a while, but it was nothing that had much effect on our lives. I wanted you to know that my wife asked to be baptized two weeks before she passed away. The night before she died, she told me it was okay for her to die because she was going home to be with her Lord.” (adapted from Chicken Soup for the Christian Family Soul, 2000).
Entering through the narrow door is simple, although it’s not always easy. It requires us to be open to God in everything, everyday. The question for you to ponder is this: Are you prepared to enter through the narrow door?
Amen.
Forming a Passionate Faith: 2. Getting Set
Luke 12:32-40
August 15, 2010
Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom. Sell your possessions, and give alms. Make purses for yourselves that do not wear out, an unfailing treasure in heaven, where no thief comes near and no moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
Be dressed for action and have your lamps lit; be like those who are waiting for their master to return from the wedding banquet, so that they may open the door for him as soon as he comes and knocks. Blessed are those slaves whom the master finds alert when he comes; truly I tell you, he will fasten his belt and have them sit down to eat, and he will come and serve them. If he comes during the middle of the night, or near dawn, and finds them so, blessed are those slaves.
But know this: if the owner of the house had known at what hour the thief was coming, he would not have let his house be broken into. You also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.
Do you know who Millard Fuller was? He died last year, but before he died he made a tremendous impact on the world. He spent his life giving, which was a direct contrast to his early life, which he spent obtaining. As a child he grew up as a kid who loved money. From the earliest ages he had a gift for making money. His gift surfaced when he was six years old. Fuller wanted a pig, so his father bought him one. He built a little pen in the back yard and taught Millard how to set up a bookkeeping system to understand cost and profits. Millard scrupulously kept a record of everything it cost to feed and keep the pig, and after he had fattened the pig up a bit, he sold the pig for a profit. Millard was hooked. He loved making that profit. He moved on to raising and selling chickens, and he made a profit from them, too. As his profits increased, so did his appetite for larger projects. He bought and sold rabbits, and made a profit there. He and his father bought and sold cattle, and they made a profit in that business, too.
By high school, Millard was an entrepreneur. He was a member of Junior Achievement and had his own little company that manufactured mops and house number signs. By college, Millard was beginning to bring in larger and larger profits. His college roommate, Morris Dees (whose story is equally inspiring – he is the head of the Southern Poverty Law Center, an organization that fights racism), and he sold birthday cakes that parents could have delivered to their college children. They also sold advertising on desk blotters, holly wreaths through the mail, doormats, trash-can holders, and lamps made out of cypress. They invested their profits in real estate and owned half a city block and a small trailer park. As law students at the University of Alabama in the early 1960s, they were making $50,000 a year. By age 28, Fuller was a millionaire. Who wouldn’t be happy to be in his shoes? He was living the American dream. He had everything we say should make us happy: money, homes, cars, a wife and kids. So, why did he feel like his life was falling apart?
The problem is that Millard Fuller had become so focused on achieving and acquiring that his life had become horribly unbalanced. At a time when he should have been reveling in how great his life was, he turned around to find that his wife had left him. He was alone. She left because she had everything she could possibly want, except a husband, and that was all she really wanted in the first place. Facing the possibility that he would lose his family, Fuller realized he had to do something to get his life back in balance. After talking to a pastor in New York, and engaging in deep discussions with his life with his wife, they decided they should follow Jesus’ advice to the rich young man – to sell everything and give it to the poor so that they could follow God (Matthew 19: 16-30). They began to give their money away and got involved in a Christian ministry called Koinonia Partners.
From that point onward, his marriage and his life began to improve as they centered their lives more in God and God’s work. In 1973, they and their four children moved to Zaire, Africa to help build modest housing for low-income families. Their project became so successful that they decided they were being called by God to apply this idea worldwide. They moved back to Georgia in 1976 and created the housing ministry, Habitat for Humanity. This is an organization that builds affordable, safe, and reliable housing for low-income families. Since its inception, Habitat for Humanity has built homes for over 60,000 families in more than 1400 American cities and in 57 countries around the world. This is an organization that cuts across denominational, religious, and national boundaries. Among the volunteers are former presidents, senators, congressmen and congresswomen, executives, and people from every walk of life.
Today, Millard Fuller receives a salary of only $52,000. The focus of his life is on serving God by serving the poor. As he says, “I feel that I am close to God, and I think I am pleasing God. I know that my heart’s desire is to express love in a way that touches people. Providing a home for people who need a place to live is an incredible way to touch people” (adapted from Biography Magazine, July 1998).
The inspiring lesson of Fuller’s life isn’t necessarily that we should sell everything and start an organization that builds homes for poorer people. The lesson is that a life lived focused on getting and acquisition is a life wasted. But a life lived focused on giving and generosity is a life blessed.
I'm not sure why, but I think that when it comes to trying to live out our faith, many Christians don't necessarily make the connection between generosity and being ready for God. We think about qualities such as love, believing in Christ, and having faith, but not necessarily about the ongoing call to being generous. And we certainly don’t connect generosity as preparation for death, but our passage makes that connection. In our passage Jesus begins with a call to give, and then follows it up by teaching us that we have to be ready because our lives can end at any moment: “Be dressed for action and have your lamps lit; be like those who are waiting for their master to return from the wedding banquet, so that they may open the door for him as soon as he comes and knocks.”
If today was your last day, would you be set? Would you be ready? How would God judge you? Would God say to you that you did a great job of being generous in your life, giving of your time, money, and of compassion?
We get opportunities to give all the time, not only opportunities to give money, but also to give time, because both embody love and compassion. In fact, that’s what giving is all about. Many people believe that they love, but for love to be real it has to be evidenced in our actions, and being generous is the height of loving behavior. It’s this call to generosity that makes giving so central to the church. You know, one of the complaints I’ve heard from people in our culture over the years is that “all the church wants is our money. Every time you are turn around there’s a collection.” It’s not just other people complain about the church’s focus on giving. I used to say the same thing all the time when I was younger. I used to complain that the church was all about money and not about God. But that was when I was young and before I returned to the church in my twenties. I’ve learned a bit since then about the nature of churches. What I’ve discovered is that, yes, we are guilty of wanting people’s money. But there’s a reason. The reason is that our church and any church is a weigh station for giving. The whole nature of the church is to give. We receive as a way of channeling people’s generosity.
Think about every part of the Calvin Presbyterian Church. Everything we do is related to giving. Start with the staff. Take me out of the equation for a moment. Every staff member in this church is committed to giving. Bruce Smith, our music and youth director, doesn’t take his pay, sit home, and say, “Wow! This is great. I get to get paid for hanging out at home listening to cds.” He lives his life giving. If you come to the church or track him down almost any hour of the afternoon or evening, you’ll find him talking with youth, working with musicians and singers, or doing something to make others’ lives better. Look at Toni Schlemmer, our associate music director and drama director. She spends so much of her off time giving voice lessons, or directing plays both here and outside of Calvin Church. And she rarely gets paid to direct the plays outside of Calvin Church. Steve Polley, our pastor of pastoral care, spends his week giving his time to visit people. Connie Frierson, our program director is tired this morning because she’s just partied out. She had a party at her house on Thursday evening for fifty women of the church, just so they could have an opportunity to come together and get to know each other. Then, on Friday evening, she had sixty singles over to her house for a get-to-know-you as part of our singles ministry. I could go on because everyone on our staff lives a life of giving.
We collect money from members and others to give even more. We offer worship services every Sunday to help improve people’s lives and help them grow closer to God. We give a tremendous amount of money to giving organizations beyond our walls, such as the Pittsburgh Project, VOICe, the Samaritan Counseling Center, Habitat for Humanity, the mission projects of the Presbyterian Church (USA), supporting Janet Guyer—our missionary in Southern Africa—Carrie Baker’s trip to South Africa this summer, Project Hope, SERRV, the Ladle and the Hearth soup kitchen in Ambridge, and so much more. Our building is a place of giving, and our upkeep of it helps with that giving. We do Christian education on Sunday morning for so many children and adults, and we have over 45 adults volunteering their time and efforts for no pay in order to teach these children. We have committees set up to reach out and help, all staffed by volunteers. Being generous to Calvin Church means giving to a giving place. Despite what cynics think, churches don’t want money because they are moneygrubbers. They want money to give away and make a bigger and bigger difference in the world.
It’s not just in and to church that we’re called to give. We’re called to be giving in all of life, even when it’s a pain and it’s not planned. Sometimes we’re at our most generous when we want to do anything but give. Let me give you an example of a giving time when it made sense to do something else.
Six years ago, while on vacation in the Boston area with Diane and the kids, I had to make a choice to either give or to do what I wanted to do—and I wasn’t gravitating towards giving. It was a late Sunday afternoon, and Diane was taking our kids and my cousin’s kids swimming in our hotel’s swimming pool. I decided that it was a fine time for me to take my walk, but I was told to not be gone too long because we had dinner plans. So I mapped out my four-mile route, put on my hat and t-shirt, clipped headphones onto my ears, drove to the starting areas, parked my car in the local Starbuck’s, and set out on my walk.
I had only walked about three blocks when I saw a young, African-American woman walking toward me. It was obvious she wanted to talk with me. I kind of avoided her gaze because I was worried that she wanted to sell me something. She was persistent, though. Despite my downcast eyes, she walked up to me and asked, “Excuse me, can you tell me where Powell Street is?” I told her that I really didn’t know the area all that well and that she needed to give me some landmarks. “It’s near Shaw’s Supermarket on Nahatan Street.” I told her that I knew where that was, but that it was over two-and-a-half miles away. “Oh my,” she replied. “I’m supposed to be at work there at three o’clock, and it’s almost three now. When I got off the bus, the driver told me to just walk down Nahatan Street, and I kept walking but couldn’t find it.”
Now, you need to understand that giving this woman a ride to her job was not part of my plan, so I had to make a decision. Do I tell her that I’m sorry she won’t make it, or do I give her a ride? I really wanted to walk. I really wanted to do my own thing. I really wanted to stick with my plans. Finally, I broke down and said, “You know, you’ll never make it. Let me give you a ride.”
As we walked, both of us were nervous. She didn’t know me. For all she knew I could be dangerous, and I didn’t know if her request for me to help was only a con. As we walked I talked with her. “What’s your new job?” I asked. She said, “I’m a children’s caseworker at a home for troubled youth. I just started the job two days ago.” I asked her if child-care was her background. “Oh no. Actually, I’ve been trained to be a political and a community activist, but I really like to work with kids and thought this would be a good job. I work with kids in my church and really love it.”
“You go to church?” I asked. “Yes, I go to the Holiness Temple in Roxborough.” I said, “That’s interesting. You don’t know this, but I’m a pastor.” She looked at me in my hat and t-shirt and said, “Are you really?” “Yeah, believe it or not. I normally dress differently, but I’m on vacation.” She said, “This is amazing. When I saw you, I had just been praying to God to bring me someone to help me, and look what God did. God brought me a pastor.” I laughed. We continued to talk all the way to her job. As she got out I said, “Remember this the next time you have doubts about whether God answers your prayers.” She said, “I already know that God answers my prayers! Let’s both remember it.”
I didn't really want to give my time, but in the end giving her my time got me more prepared for God. What gets us ready for God's kingdom is generosity because generosity is an act of sacrificial love, and it connects us with God's way of life. The Bible emphasizes the idea of tithing for this very reason. The whole idea of tithing is that we become aware of how much God has given us, of how everything is a gift from God, so we give back 10% of all that God gives us back to God for God to give to others. Giving is the nature of God, and God wants it to become our nature. God gives everything to us for free, and the whole idea of Christ coming into the world was the idea that God came in Christ to teach us. And we didn’t have to do anything to deserve it. The idea of Christ dying on the cross is that he gave up his own life willingly so that in the end we could be given even more—the gift of the Holy Spirit.
Ultimately, Christianity teaches that the more we give, the more we are given. The more we share, the more we become prepared. Giving transforms our souls because the nature of God is generosity
Do you want to really experience God in your life? Do you want to really know God in your life? Begin with becoming as generous as you can, and you'll discover something wonderful.
Amen.
August 15, 2010
Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom. Sell your possessions, and give alms. Make purses for yourselves that do not wear out, an unfailing treasure in heaven, where no thief comes near and no moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
Be dressed for action and have your lamps lit; be like those who are waiting for their master to return from the wedding banquet, so that they may open the door for him as soon as he comes and knocks. Blessed are those slaves whom the master finds alert when he comes; truly I tell you, he will fasten his belt and have them sit down to eat, and he will come and serve them. If he comes during the middle of the night, or near dawn, and finds them so, blessed are those slaves.
But know this: if the owner of the house had known at what hour the thief was coming, he would not have let his house be broken into. You also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.
Do you know who Millard Fuller was? He died last year, but before he died he made a tremendous impact on the world. He spent his life giving, which was a direct contrast to his early life, which he spent obtaining. As a child he grew up as a kid who loved money. From the earliest ages he had a gift for making money. His gift surfaced when he was six years old. Fuller wanted a pig, so his father bought him one. He built a little pen in the back yard and taught Millard how to set up a bookkeeping system to understand cost and profits. Millard scrupulously kept a record of everything it cost to feed and keep the pig, and after he had fattened the pig up a bit, he sold the pig for a profit. Millard was hooked. He loved making that profit. He moved on to raising and selling chickens, and he made a profit from them, too. As his profits increased, so did his appetite for larger projects. He bought and sold rabbits, and made a profit there. He and his father bought and sold cattle, and they made a profit in that business, too.
By high school, Millard was an entrepreneur. He was a member of Junior Achievement and had his own little company that manufactured mops and house number signs. By college, Millard was beginning to bring in larger and larger profits. His college roommate, Morris Dees (whose story is equally inspiring – he is the head of the Southern Poverty Law Center, an organization that fights racism), and he sold birthday cakes that parents could have delivered to their college children. They also sold advertising on desk blotters, holly wreaths through the mail, doormats, trash-can holders, and lamps made out of cypress. They invested their profits in real estate and owned half a city block and a small trailer park. As law students at the University of Alabama in the early 1960s, they were making $50,000 a year. By age 28, Fuller was a millionaire. Who wouldn’t be happy to be in his shoes? He was living the American dream. He had everything we say should make us happy: money, homes, cars, a wife and kids. So, why did he feel like his life was falling apart?
The problem is that Millard Fuller had become so focused on achieving and acquiring that his life had become horribly unbalanced. At a time when he should have been reveling in how great his life was, he turned around to find that his wife had left him. He was alone. She left because she had everything she could possibly want, except a husband, and that was all she really wanted in the first place. Facing the possibility that he would lose his family, Fuller realized he had to do something to get his life back in balance. After talking to a pastor in New York, and engaging in deep discussions with his life with his wife, they decided they should follow Jesus’ advice to the rich young man – to sell everything and give it to the poor so that they could follow God (Matthew 19: 16-30). They began to give their money away and got involved in a Christian ministry called Koinonia Partners.
From that point onward, his marriage and his life began to improve as they centered their lives more in God and God’s work. In 1973, they and their four children moved to Zaire, Africa to help build modest housing for low-income families. Their project became so successful that they decided they were being called by God to apply this idea worldwide. They moved back to Georgia in 1976 and created the housing ministry, Habitat for Humanity. This is an organization that builds affordable, safe, and reliable housing for low-income families. Since its inception, Habitat for Humanity has built homes for over 60,000 families in more than 1400 American cities and in 57 countries around the world. This is an organization that cuts across denominational, religious, and national boundaries. Among the volunteers are former presidents, senators, congressmen and congresswomen, executives, and people from every walk of life.
Today, Millard Fuller receives a salary of only $52,000. The focus of his life is on serving God by serving the poor. As he says, “I feel that I am close to God, and I think I am pleasing God. I know that my heart’s desire is to express love in a way that touches people. Providing a home for people who need a place to live is an incredible way to touch people” (adapted from Biography Magazine, July 1998).
The inspiring lesson of Fuller’s life isn’t necessarily that we should sell everything and start an organization that builds homes for poorer people. The lesson is that a life lived focused on getting and acquisition is a life wasted. But a life lived focused on giving and generosity is a life blessed.
I'm not sure why, but I think that when it comes to trying to live out our faith, many Christians don't necessarily make the connection between generosity and being ready for God. We think about qualities such as love, believing in Christ, and having faith, but not necessarily about the ongoing call to being generous. And we certainly don’t connect generosity as preparation for death, but our passage makes that connection. In our passage Jesus begins with a call to give, and then follows it up by teaching us that we have to be ready because our lives can end at any moment: “Be dressed for action and have your lamps lit; be like those who are waiting for their master to return from the wedding banquet, so that they may open the door for him as soon as he comes and knocks.”
If today was your last day, would you be set? Would you be ready? How would God judge you? Would God say to you that you did a great job of being generous in your life, giving of your time, money, and of compassion?
We get opportunities to give all the time, not only opportunities to give money, but also to give time, because both embody love and compassion. In fact, that’s what giving is all about. Many people believe that they love, but for love to be real it has to be evidenced in our actions, and being generous is the height of loving behavior. It’s this call to generosity that makes giving so central to the church. You know, one of the complaints I’ve heard from people in our culture over the years is that “all the church wants is our money. Every time you are turn around there’s a collection.” It’s not just other people complain about the church’s focus on giving. I used to say the same thing all the time when I was younger. I used to complain that the church was all about money and not about God. But that was when I was young and before I returned to the church in my twenties. I’ve learned a bit since then about the nature of churches. What I’ve discovered is that, yes, we are guilty of wanting people’s money. But there’s a reason. The reason is that our church and any church is a weigh station for giving. The whole nature of the church is to give. We receive as a way of channeling people’s generosity.
Think about every part of the Calvin Presbyterian Church. Everything we do is related to giving. Start with the staff. Take me out of the equation for a moment. Every staff member in this church is committed to giving. Bruce Smith, our music and youth director, doesn’t take his pay, sit home, and say, “Wow! This is great. I get to get paid for hanging out at home listening to cds.” He lives his life giving. If you come to the church or track him down almost any hour of the afternoon or evening, you’ll find him talking with youth, working with musicians and singers, or doing something to make others’ lives better. Look at Toni Schlemmer, our associate music director and drama director. She spends so much of her off time giving voice lessons, or directing plays both here and outside of Calvin Church. And she rarely gets paid to direct the plays outside of Calvin Church. Steve Polley, our pastor of pastoral care, spends his week giving his time to visit people. Connie Frierson, our program director is tired this morning because she’s just partied out. She had a party at her house on Thursday evening for fifty women of the church, just so they could have an opportunity to come together and get to know each other. Then, on Friday evening, she had sixty singles over to her house for a get-to-know-you as part of our singles ministry. I could go on because everyone on our staff lives a life of giving.
We collect money from members and others to give even more. We offer worship services every Sunday to help improve people’s lives and help them grow closer to God. We give a tremendous amount of money to giving organizations beyond our walls, such as the Pittsburgh Project, VOICe, the Samaritan Counseling Center, Habitat for Humanity, the mission projects of the Presbyterian Church (USA), supporting Janet Guyer—our missionary in Southern Africa—Carrie Baker’s trip to South Africa this summer, Project Hope, SERRV, the Ladle and the Hearth soup kitchen in Ambridge, and so much more. Our building is a place of giving, and our upkeep of it helps with that giving. We do Christian education on Sunday morning for so many children and adults, and we have over 45 adults volunteering their time and efforts for no pay in order to teach these children. We have committees set up to reach out and help, all staffed by volunteers. Being generous to Calvin Church means giving to a giving place. Despite what cynics think, churches don’t want money because they are moneygrubbers. They want money to give away and make a bigger and bigger difference in the world.
It’s not just in and to church that we’re called to give. We’re called to be giving in all of life, even when it’s a pain and it’s not planned. Sometimes we’re at our most generous when we want to do anything but give. Let me give you an example of a giving time when it made sense to do something else.
Six years ago, while on vacation in the Boston area with Diane and the kids, I had to make a choice to either give or to do what I wanted to do—and I wasn’t gravitating towards giving. It was a late Sunday afternoon, and Diane was taking our kids and my cousin’s kids swimming in our hotel’s swimming pool. I decided that it was a fine time for me to take my walk, but I was told to not be gone too long because we had dinner plans. So I mapped out my four-mile route, put on my hat and t-shirt, clipped headphones onto my ears, drove to the starting areas, parked my car in the local Starbuck’s, and set out on my walk.
I had only walked about three blocks when I saw a young, African-American woman walking toward me. It was obvious she wanted to talk with me. I kind of avoided her gaze because I was worried that she wanted to sell me something. She was persistent, though. Despite my downcast eyes, she walked up to me and asked, “Excuse me, can you tell me where Powell Street is?” I told her that I really didn’t know the area all that well and that she needed to give me some landmarks. “It’s near Shaw’s Supermarket on Nahatan Street.” I told her that I knew where that was, but that it was over two-and-a-half miles away. “Oh my,” she replied. “I’m supposed to be at work there at three o’clock, and it’s almost three now. When I got off the bus, the driver told me to just walk down Nahatan Street, and I kept walking but couldn’t find it.”
Now, you need to understand that giving this woman a ride to her job was not part of my plan, so I had to make a decision. Do I tell her that I’m sorry she won’t make it, or do I give her a ride? I really wanted to walk. I really wanted to do my own thing. I really wanted to stick with my plans. Finally, I broke down and said, “You know, you’ll never make it. Let me give you a ride.”
As we walked, both of us were nervous. She didn’t know me. For all she knew I could be dangerous, and I didn’t know if her request for me to help was only a con. As we walked I talked with her. “What’s your new job?” I asked. She said, “I’m a children’s caseworker at a home for troubled youth. I just started the job two days ago.” I asked her if child-care was her background. “Oh no. Actually, I’ve been trained to be a political and a community activist, but I really like to work with kids and thought this would be a good job. I work with kids in my church and really love it.”
“You go to church?” I asked. “Yes, I go to the Holiness Temple in Roxborough.” I said, “That’s interesting. You don’t know this, but I’m a pastor.” She looked at me in my hat and t-shirt and said, “Are you really?” “Yeah, believe it or not. I normally dress differently, but I’m on vacation.” She said, “This is amazing. When I saw you, I had just been praying to God to bring me someone to help me, and look what God did. God brought me a pastor.” I laughed. We continued to talk all the way to her job. As she got out I said, “Remember this the next time you have doubts about whether God answers your prayers.” She said, “I already know that God answers my prayers! Let’s both remember it.”
I didn't really want to give my time, but in the end giving her my time got me more prepared for God. What gets us ready for God's kingdom is generosity because generosity is an act of sacrificial love, and it connects us with God's way of life. The Bible emphasizes the idea of tithing for this very reason. The whole idea of tithing is that we become aware of how much God has given us, of how everything is a gift from God, so we give back 10% of all that God gives us back to God for God to give to others. Giving is the nature of God, and God wants it to become our nature. God gives everything to us for free, and the whole idea of Christ coming into the world was the idea that God came in Christ to teach us. And we didn’t have to do anything to deserve it. The idea of Christ dying on the cross is that he gave up his own life willingly so that in the end we could be given even more—the gift of the Holy Spirit.
Ultimately, Christianity teaches that the more we give, the more we are given. The more we share, the more we become prepared. Giving transforms our souls because the nature of God is generosity
Do you want to really experience God in your life? Do you want to really know God in your life? Begin with becoming as generous as you can, and you'll discover something wonderful.
Amen.
Forming a Passionate Faith: 1. Getting Ready
Luke 12:22-31
August 8, 2010
He said to his disciples, ‘Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat, or about your body, what you will wear. For life is more than food, and the body more than clothing. Consider the ravens: they neither sow nor reap, they have neither storehouse nor barn, and yet God feeds them. Of how much more value are you than the birds! And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life? If then you are not able to do so small a thing as that, why do you worry about the rest? Consider the lilies, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin; yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, how much more will he clothe you—you of little faith! And do not keep striving for what you are to eat and what you are to drink, and do not keep worrying. For it is the nations of the world that strive after all these things, and your Father knows that you need them. Instead, strive for his kingdom, and these things will be given to you as well.
Our passage reminds me so clearly of something that happened back in 1993. It was a time when I, and a bunch of other people, had to decide whether to let go of our worries and trust God, or hold onto our worries and let go of God.
At the time I had been ordained already for four years, and about three months earlier I had made the decision to quit working as a pastor so that I could devote myself full-time to finishing my Ph.D. at Duquesne University. The program I was studying in was really the one program, the Institute of Formative Spirituality, that Duquesne University was known for all over the world. It brought a lot of prestige to the university, and we were all very proud to study there. The students came from all over the U.S., Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australia, representing many different denominations and traditions. All had come to Pittsburgh to study in the area of spirituality.
There was one major problem with the institute. If you look at the other graduate programs at Duquesne University, especially the MBA program and the law school, they generated money. Typically the alumni of those programs gave back a lot of money to the school after graduation, especially those that ended up in high-income careers. And Duquesne was interested in programs that generated revenues. Unfortunately, the Institute of Formative Spirituality, since it was educating mostly priests, pastors, and religious sisters and brothers, didn’t produce high-income graduates. Graduates of the MBA and law school contributed thousands and millions to Duquesne. Graduates of the Institute of Formative Spirituality contributed hundreds. From the school’s perspective, the decision was easy no matter how much prestige the institute gave them. They decided to discontinue the program in order to expand the pharmacy program.
We had heard rumors that the program was in peril, and then one week we were all invited to a meeting with a dean. Most of the students were there, and the meeting began awkwardly as the dean was introduced. Standing slowly, and beginning with words of thanks and appreciation for all we had done, and the value the program had had for Duquesne for many years, he then told us that the program was in peril and that the program was going to close down in the next few years. Basically, classes would end by 1995, and the Ph.D. students would be given till 1997 to finish their dissertations.
The students, whose anxieties were now leading to anger, peppered him with questions: “How can you do this to us? We’ve all made so many sacrifices. What are we supposed to do? How do we make plans for ourselves? What good is a master or doctoral degree from a program that doesn’t exist? Why didn’t you tell us this could happen when we applied.” The dean tried his best to answer everyone, but it was obvious that this was a hostile crowd.
The reaction we all had was a natural one. We had made all sorts of plans for our future. We had spent thousands of dollars on tuition, books, and the rest. And we had committed countless hours to study and prayer. What was it all for? How dare they ruin all our carefully laid plans?
Then God broke into the meeting. Keith Barron, one of our professors, stood up and said something that has stuck in my mind ever since. He stood before us and said, “You know, this is where your faith gets tested. You’re all worried, but I want you to listen to this passage of scripture.” He then read our passage for today: “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life…” Afterwards, he said, “God is going to take care of everything. God didn’t lead you here to then let you down. God had a purpose for you in bringing you here, and God still does. So don’t get consumed by worries. Just trust that God will take care of you.”
Keith was 100% right. In the end, God did take care of us. Eventually, they did close the program, but everyone in the program received their degrees and are now making a difference in the world. Keith had been right. In the end everything worked out for everyone. We worried so much, though, because all our plans looked like they were about to crumble.
I learned a big lesson that day. I learned that if you really want God in your life, you have to lay a foundation for God, and calm surrender is the key. The degree to which we surrender our worry and let God in is the extent to which God can work in our lives to do wonderful things.
Let me shift gears for a moment because I want to talk about letting go of worry in a different way. You wouldn’t know this about me, but I’m an expert fire-maker, and I’ve learned that building a fire is much like building a passion for God. I am an excellent fire-maker. Building proper fires is so important to me that I’ve told my wife, Diane, that I have only one demand when it comes to buying a home. It must have a natural fireplace. No gas jets or artificial logs for me. I want a fireplace where I can build it, stoke it, and grow it. In fact, one reason we moved to where we live now is that it is a place surrounded by woods. I love to cut down dead wood and trees, chop them up, and burn them in our outdoor fire pit.
I learned how to build fires as a teen in summer camp. I was sent every year for eight weeks to a camp in New Hampshire, and one of the tasks we had to learn was how to build a fire. We were taught how to build one using only one match, and after we succeeded, we then had to learn how to build it in the rain, which mean huddling under a poncho while a counselor sprayed a hose over us. What I learned is that to build a good fire, you have to start with very small kindling and build up from there.
Many people can’t build adequate fires because they start out too big. They put large logs over newspaper, and then wonder why the fire fizzles. To build a good fire you have to patiently start small. If you use crumpled newspaper as a base (at camp I had to use pine needles), you start by putting a layer of really small twigs—the smaller the better—atop the paper. Once the fire gets going, you place finger sized twigs on top. Once that starts to burn, you build around it log cabin structure (some like to build teepee styled structures, but I like to build it cabin-style) using twigs the width of our wrist. Then, as that begins to burn, you place normal sized logs atop the cabin structure, topping it all off with a roof of larger logs. There are small variations on this, but basically if you do it this way, you eventually get a roaring fire. To keep it going, you have to stoke it and put new logs on, while maintaining that cabin structure, to some extent.
Becoming available to God, and building a passion for God, is very similar to building a fire. If we are going to really build a passion for God, a passion that really allows God deeply into our lives, we have to start small by giving God our small worries. I think that most people try to start too big, and that’s why their faith struggles. They wait until they are facing a major crisis, and then try to give it to God, but they can’t. The faith needed for that is too big. When issues are that big, our worry and anxiety become so big that we have a hard time letting go and letting God. The key is building our faith like a fire, which means learning to let go of our worries and turning them over to God by starting with the small worries of life. Nothing’s too small. Learn to give over the little things. Then build up. Start giving God the bigger things. Pretty soon, you can learn to give over to God the big things in life, and they don’t come back.
The secret of our passage is that when we learn to live life by doing our part, but then giving God our worries and the responsibility for the results, life gets better. We discover how to live anxiety-free lives that build God-full lives.
When I think of people who started small in giving their anxieties to God, which resulted in being able to give God worries in the big things of life, I think of one of my faith heroes: the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. One of the sad things about remembering him and his work is that many people today forget that he was a pastor. They see him as a Civil Rights leader, but they fail to recognize how much his faith and Christianity shaped him to do what he did. He was shaped by his Christian upbringing. He was shaped by Scripture. He was shaped by great Christian writers such as Reinhold Niebuhr and Tolstoy. He was shaped by Gandhi and Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. Without these influences, he never would have led such a great movement that changed this country in radical ways.
What most people don’t know is that King’s part in this movement almost ended as it was beginning because of his anxieties. He didn’t want to lead this movement. In fact, he was reluctant to even go to Montgomery, Alabama. He first became pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church to get out from under the shadow of his father, Martin Luther King, Sr. Martin Luther King, Sr. was a powerful and popular preacher in Atlanta, and Martin Luther King, Jr. needed to go somewhere else to find his own voice and his own ministry. Montgomery was far enough away culturally and geographically for him to do that.
He became the leader of the Civil Rights Movement slowly by getting involved in the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955. Rosa Parks, a black seamstress in Montgomery, boarded a bus and refused to walk to the back of the bus after being ordered to do so by the white driver. In those days, blacks were forced to sit at the back of the bus. The response of the driver and others led the black community to initiate a bus boycott. In looking for a leader, the other pastors and civic leaders chose King. Still, he was reluctant. The main reason he ascended to the leadership was that he was young, just in his late twenties, and he was willing to say yes to organizing things. An older, wiser pastor would have said “no.” King really didn’t know what he was in for. Over time, the death threats against his life grew, and they made him nervous. He realized that at any moment, he could be taken from his wife and toddler daughter, or they could be taken from him, through violence. He became fearful and doubtful. Should he continue? Was it fair to his wife and family?
It was as he struggled with his anxieties that he sought God’s voice and call in prayer. Let me share with you what he says in his book, Stride toward Freedom, about how he heard God in prayer. On one particular night, he received a death threat on the phone from a stranger saying, “Listen, nigger, we’ve taken all we want from you; before next week you’ll be sorry you ever came to Montgomery.” This threat was different from all the others. It somehow seemed more like a promise than a threat. King struggled to sleep that night. He says, “I got out of bed and began to walk the floor. Finally I went to the kitchen and heated a pot of coffee. I was ready to give up. With my cup of coffee sitting untouched before me I tried to think of a way to move out of the picture without appearing a coward. In this state of exhaustion, when my courage had all but gone, I decided to take my problem to God. With my head in my hands, I bowed over the kitchen table and prayed aloud. The words I spoke to God that midnight are still vivid in my memory. ‘I am here taking a stand for what I believe is right. But now I am afraid. The people are looking to me for leadership, and if I stand before them without strength and courage, they too will falter. I am at the end of my powers. I have nothing left. I’ve come to the point where I can’t face it alone.’
“At that moment I experienced the presence of the Divine as I had never experienced Him before. It seemed as though I could hear the quiet assurance of an inner voice saying: ‘Stand up for righteousness, stand up for truth; and God will be at your side forever.’ Almost at once my fears began to go. My uncertainty disappeared. I was ready to face anything.” He had found his call through prayer.
What made this prayer and his experience so profound was that a week later a bomb was thrown onto the porch of his home, almost killing his wife and child. Instead of being gripped by fear, King became more resolute. He felt God’s presence in his life, telling him that God would be with him no matter what. He heard God’s call, and this call made it possible for him to follow God not matter how difficult and dangerous the task ahead was. King had been struggling to give his worries to God in much smaller things all along. In just following a call to be a pastor, he was giving anxieties over to God. So when it was time to give something big, like whether to stay in the movement or not, he had built up the ability to give over those worries. And in experiencing God as he gave over his worries, he was able to let go and let God throughout the rest of the movement. Many people have reported that in the last six months of his life, before being shot in Memphis, he spoke openly about his acceptance that he would probably be assassinated soon. And they remarked that he never seemed to be afraid. He had learned the secret of our passage. King had a passion for God, and the true kindling for it was his surrender to God of all his worries.
If you want to really form a passion for God in your life—if you really want to experience God in your life—it begins with surrendering you worries. It’s never easy to do this, and the moment we give God our worries, we generally get them right back. It’s what I call worry echoes. We give our worries to God, and then they come right back to us. But if we keep giving them over, like an echo, they will diminish. Also, when I say we surrender our worries I don’t say that we sit back and do nothing. We do. We do our part, but surrendering our worries lets God do God’s part.
For today, learning to let go of your worries is enough. Come back next week and we’ll learn more about how to build a passion for God that makes a real difference in life.
Amen.
August 8, 2010
He said to his disciples, ‘Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat, or about your body, what you will wear. For life is more than food, and the body more than clothing. Consider the ravens: they neither sow nor reap, they have neither storehouse nor barn, and yet God feeds them. Of how much more value are you than the birds! And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life? If then you are not able to do so small a thing as that, why do you worry about the rest? Consider the lilies, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin; yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, how much more will he clothe you—you of little faith! And do not keep striving for what you are to eat and what you are to drink, and do not keep worrying. For it is the nations of the world that strive after all these things, and your Father knows that you need them. Instead, strive for his kingdom, and these things will be given to you as well.
Our passage reminds me so clearly of something that happened back in 1993. It was a time when I, and a bunch of other people, had to decide whether to let go of our worries and trust God, or hold onto our worries and let go of God.
At the time I had been ordained already for four years, and about three months earlier I had made the decision to quit working as a pastor so that I could devote myself full-time to finishing my Ph.D. at Duquesne University. The program I was studying in was really the one program, the Institute of Formative Spirituality, that Duquesne University was known for all over the world. It brought a lot of prestige to the university, and we were all very proud to study there. The students came from all over the U.S., Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australia, representing many different denominations and traditions. All had come to Pittsburgh to study in the area of spirituality.
There was one major problem with the institute. If you look at the other graduate programs at Duquesne University, especially the MBA program and the law school, they generated money. Typically the alumni of those programs gave back a lot of money to the school after graduation, especially those that ended up in high-income careers. And Duquesne was interested in programs that generated revenues. Unfortunately, the Institute of Formative Spirituality, since it was educating mostly priests, pastors, and religious sisters and brothers, didn’t produce high-income graduates. Graduates of the MBA and law school contributed thousands and millions to Duquesne. Graduates of the Institute of Formative Spirituality contributed hundreds. From the school’s perspective, the decision was easy no matter how much prestige the institute gave them. They decided to discontinue the program in order to expand the pharmacy program.
We had heard rumors that the program was in peril, and then one week we were all invited to a meeting with a dean. Most of the students were there, and the meeting began awkwardly as the dean was introduced. Standing slowly, and beginning with words of thanks and appreciation for all we had done, and the value the program had had for Duquesne for many years, he then told us that the program was in peril and that the program was going to close down in the next few years. Basically, classes would end by 1995, and the Ph.D. students would be given till 1997 to finish their dissertations.
The students, whose anxieties were now leading to anger, peppered him with questions: “How can you do this to us? We’ve all made so many sacrifices. What are we supposed to do? How do we make plans for ourselves? What good is a master or doctoral degree from a program that doesn’t exist? Why didn’t you tell us this could happen when we applied.” The dean tried his best to answer everyone, but it was obvious that this was a hostile crowd.
The reaction we all had was a natural one. We had made all sorts of plans for our future. We had spent thousands of dollars on tuition, books, and the rest. And we had committed countless hours to study and prayer. What was it all for? How dare they ruin all our carefully laid plans?
Then God broke into the meeting. Keith Barron, one of our professors, stood up and said something that has stuck in my mind ever since. He stood before us and said, “You know, this is where your faith gets tested. You’re all worried, but I want you to listen to this passage of scripture.” He then read our passage for today: “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life…” Afterwards, he said, “God is going to take care of everything. God didn’t lead you here to then let you down. God had a purpose for you in bringing you here, and God still does. So don’t get consumed by worries. Just trust that God will take care of you.”
Keith was 100% right. In the end, God did take care of us. Eventually, they did close the program, but everyone in the program received their degrees and are now making a difference in the world. Keith had been right. In the end everything worked out for everyone. We worried so much, though, because all our plans looked like they were about to crumble.
I learned a big lesson that day. I learned that if you really want God in your life, you have to lay a foundation for God, and calm surrender is the key. The degree to which we surrender our worry and let God in is the extent to which God can work in our lives to do wonderful things.
Let me shift gears for a moment because I want to talk about letting go of worry in a different way. You wouldn’t know this about me, but I’m an expert fire-maker, and I’ve learned that building a fire is much like building a passion for God. I am an excellent fire-maker. Building proper fires is so important to me that I’ve told my wife, Diane, that I have only one demand when it comes to buying a home. It must have a natural fireplace. No gas jets or artificial logs for me. I want a fireplace where I can build it, stoke it, and grow it. In fact, one reason we moved to where we live now is that it is a place surrounded by woods. I love to cut down dead wood and trees, chop them up, and burn them in our outdoor fire pit.
I learned how to build fires as a teen in summer camp. I was sent every year for eight weeks to a camp in New Hampshire, and one of the tasks we had to learn was how to build a fire. We were taught how to build one using only one match, and after we succeeded, we then had to learn how to build it in the rain, which mean huddling under a poncho while a counselor sprayed a hose over us. What I learned is that to build a good fire, you have to start with very small kindling and build up from there.
Many people can’t build adequate fires because they start out too big. They put large logs over newspaper, and then wonder why the fire fizzles. To build a good fire you have to patiently start small. If you use crumpled newspaper as a base (at camp I had to use pine needles), you start by putting a layer of really small twigs—the smaller the better—atop the paper. Once the fire gets going, you place finger sized twigs on top. Once that starts to burn, you build around it log cabin structure (some like to build teepee styled structures, but I like to build it cabin-style) using twigs the width of our wrist. Then, as that begins to burn, you place normal sized logs atop the cabin structure, topping it all off with a roof of larger logs. There are small variations on this, but basically if you do it this way, you eventually get a roaring fire. To keep it going, you have to stoke it and put new logs on, while maintaining that cabin structure, to some extent.
Becoming available to God, and building a passion for God, is very similar to building a fire. If we are going to really build a passion for God, a passion that really allows God deeply into our lives, we have to start small by giving God our small worries. I think that most people try to start too big, and that’s why their faith struggles. They wait until they are facing a major crisis, and then try to give it to God, but they can’t. The faith needed for that is too big. When issues are that big, our worry and anxiety become so big that we have a hard time letting go and letting God. The key is building our faith like a fire, which means learning to let go of our worries and turning them over to God by starting with the small worries of life. Nothing’s too small. Learn to give over the little things. Then build up. Start giving God the bigger things. Pretty soon, you can learn to give over to God the big things in life, and they don’t come back.
The secret of our passage is that when we learn to live life by doing our part, but then giving God our worries and the responsibility for the results, life gets better. We discover how to live anxiety-free lives that build God-full lives.
When I think of people who started small in giving their anxieties to God, which resulted in being able to give God worries in the big things of life, I think of one of my faith heroes: the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. One of the sad things about remembering him and his work is that many people today forget that he was a pastor. They see him as a Civil Rights leader, but they fail to recognize how much his faith and Christianity shaped him to do what he did. He was shaped by his Christian upbringing. He was shaped by Scripture. He was shaped by great Christian writers such as Reinhold Niebuhr and Tolstoy. He was shaped by Gandhi and Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. Without these influences, he never would have led such a great movement that changed this country in radical ways.
What most people don’t know is that King’s part in this movement almost ended as it was beginning because of his anxieties. He didn’t want to lead this movement. In fact, he was reluctant to even go to Montgomery, Alabama. He first became pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church to get out from under the shadow of his father, Martin Luther King, Sr. Martin Luther King, Sr. was a powerful and popular preacher in Atlanta, and Martin Luther King, Jr. needed to go somewhere else to find his own voice and his own ministry. Montgomery was far enough away culturally and geographically for him to do that.
He became the leader of the Civil Rights Movement slowly by getting involved in the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955. Rosa Parks, a black seamstress in Montgomery, boarded a bus and refused to walk to the back of the bus after being ordered to do so by the white driver. In those days, blacks were forced to sit at the back of the bus. The response of the driver and others led the black community to initiate a bus boycott. In looking for a leader, the other pastors and civic leaders chose King. Still, he was reluctant. The main reason he ascended to the leadership was that he was young, just in his late twenties, and he was willing to say yes to organizing things. An older, wiser pastor would have said “no.” King really didn’t know what he was in for. Over time, the death threats against his life grew, and they made him nervous. He realized that at any moment, he could be taken from his wife and toddler daughter, or they could be taken from him, through violence. He became fearful and doubtful. Should he continue? Was it fair to his wife and family?
It was as he struggled with his anxieties that he sought God’s voice and call in prayer. Let me share with you what he says in his book, Stride toward Freedom, about how he heard God in prayer. On one particular night, he received a death threat on the phone from a stranger saying, “Listen, nigger, we’ve taken all we want from you; before next week you’ll be sorry you ever came to Montgomery.” This threat was different from all the others. It somehow seemed more like a promise than a threat. King struggled to sleep that night. He says, “I got out of bed and began to walk the floor. Finally I went to the kitchen and heated a pot of coffee. I was ready to give up. With my cup of coffee sitting untouched before me I tried to think of a way to move out of the picture without appearing a coward. In this state of exhaustion, when my courage had all but gone, I decided to take my problem to God. With my head in my hands, I bowed over the kitchen table and prayed aloud. The words I spoke to God that midnight are still vivid in my memory. ‘I am here taking a stand for what I believe is right. But now I am afraid. The people are looking to me for leadership, and if I stand before them without strength and courage, they too will falter. I am at the end of my powers. I have nothing left. I’ve come to the point where I can’t face it alone.’
“At that moment I experienced the presence of the Divine as I had never experienced Him before. It seemed as though I could hear the quiet assurance of an inner voice saying: ‘Stand up for righteousness, stand up for truth; and God will be at your side forever.’ Almost at once my fears began to go. My uncertainty disappeared. I was ready to face anything.” He had found his call through prayer.
What made this prayer and his experience so profound was that a week later a bomb was thrown onto the porch of his home, almost killing his wife and child. Instead of being gripped by fear, King became more resolute. He felt God’s presence in his life, telling him that God would be with him no matter what. He heard God’s call, and this call made it possible for him to follow God not matter how difficult and dangerous the task ahead was. King had been struggling to give his worries to God in much smaller things all along. In just following a call to be a pastor, he was giving anxieties over to God. So when it was time to give something big, like whether to stay in the movement or not, he had built up the ability to give over those worries. And in experiencing God as he gave over his worries, he was able to let go and let God throughout the rest of the movement. Many people have reported that in the last six months of his life, before being shot in Memphis, he spoke openly about his acceptance that he would probably be assassinated soon. And they remarked that he never seemed to be afraid. He had learned the secret of our passage. King had a passion for God, and the true kindling for it was his surrender to God of all his worries.
If you want to really form a passion for God in your life—if you really want to experience God in your life—it begins with surrendering you worries. It’s never easy to do this, and the moment we give God our worries, we generally get them right back. It’s what I call worry echoes. We give our worries to God, and then they come right back to us. But if we keep giving them over, like an echo, they will diminish. Also, when I say we surrender our worries I don’t say that we sit back and do nothing. We do. We do our part, but surrendering our worries lets God do God’s part.
For today, learning to let go of your worries is enough. Come back next week and we’ll learn more about how to build a passion for God that makes a real difference in life.
Amen.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)