Sermon: The Church Under Repair

First Presbyterian Church

October 29, 2023, Reformation Sunday

Psalm 46; Jeremiah 31:31-34; 

         Romans 3:19-28; John 8:31-36

 

The Church Under Repair

 

It was just six years ago that Protestant churches marked the five hundredth anniversary of the Reformation.

Of course this is wrong. It was actually the five hundredth anniversary of one particular branch of the Reformation, or more precisely yet, one key event in one particular branch of the Reformation – an event which, to be sure, may not have happened quite precisely in the way it is often depicted, and which (if it happened that way) happened five hundred years ago Tuesday, not today (this particular part was also true six years ago; Reformation Sunday fell on October 29, just like this year). Still, five hundred was a big round number, and quite possible to ignore.

But, to keep things accurate: it was on October 31, 1517, that Martin Luther, then a young-ish German monk assigned to teach classes on scripture at the University of Wittemburg, first promulgated his ninety-five theses, or arguments, on the corruptions of the church and the need for reform. The theses were definitely sent to his superiors at the Vatican; popular lore also says he nailed a copy of those ninety-five theses to the door of the church at Wittemburg, as depicted in a number of popular paintings, though more concrete documentation of that event is not so easy to come by.

The corruptions charged by Luther included such practices as the selling of indulgences (under the guise of raising funds for building projects), something that smelled way too much like buying forgiveness to Luther. His theses enumerated scriptural and moral arguments against that and other practices, and called for a sweeping reform of the church to eliminate such corruptions.

Luther was a pretty unlikely candidate to trigger such an upheaval; much of his adult life had been consumed with nearly crippling self-doubt, he being convinced that he could never be good enough for God. The supreme irony of Luther’s career is that the study of scripture his new teaching vocation demanded of him had the effect of convincing him, ultimately, that he was right; of his own efforts he never would be good enough; a passage like today’s reading from Romans (as well as several others from that book) showed him that he was saved not by any work or effort of his own, but only by the great gift of God’s grace. So liberated, Luther found the nerve to bear witness against the all-powerful church even at the cost of his own excommunication, and thousands of others found similar courage to follow into something new and unknown,

Luther does teach us a lesson, one applicable even to us modern Christians; things don’t change if we don’t speak up. Whether perpetrated by church, corporation, or government (or by the thoroughly unholy alliance of all three), injustice and corruption don't go away by themselves. Followers of Christ are obliged to bear witness – to speak out – against those injustices, no matter how pervasive or powerful, and no matter how much it costs us our standing in our community.

Let me repeat: followers of Christ are obliged to bear witness – to speak out – against injustices, no matter how pervasive or powerful, and no matter how much it costs us our standing in our community. Otherwise we’re fooling ourselves. After all, the word “protest” is embedded in the name “Protestant.” It’s in our spiritual D.N.A., so to speak. One of the inserts in your bulletin offers an example from just sixty years ago, in which a Presbyterian leader was called upon to do exactly that, no matter the penalty he would face. He spoke up, putting himself at some risk to do so (though not nearly so much risk as others had already faced). 

I'm lifting some words from Father Shannon T.L. Kearns, a frequent guest in this pulpit, to say that being Protestant should be defined as speaking up at what's wrong, and what's more, doing something about it. Kearns speaks of "active advocacy," work in which the church reaches out and speaks out and does not sit passively to the side hoping the marginalized and people of the world might stumble upon us. That's been the call all along, no matter how much the church gets it wrong.

Of course, Luther’s “reformation” was not the only one that took root in the church during this period. John Calvin was all of eight years old when Luther promulgated those theses, but by 1536 (at age 27) he produced his theological treatise Institutes of the Christian Religion, which became a bulwark of the branches of Protestantism known as “Reformed," as well as our own Presbyterian tradition via Calvin’s Scottish admirer John Knox. The work of Ulrich Zwingli and others also played a role in Reformed theology: the Second Helvetic Confession found in our own Book of Confessions is a Zwinglian document. The Anglican Reformation took root some decades later, and Methodism evolved from that about two centuries later under the leadership of John and Charles Wesley. The Protestant Reformation was no one-time thing. 

Sadly, no branch of the Reformation is innocent of its own corruption. For many centuries Lutheranism indulged too much Luther’s own anti-Semitism, which long outlived him and was useful to the Nazis in their consolidation of power in Germany in the twentieth century. The theological extremes of Calvin and Zwingli (like predestination) were twisted into destructive theologies that we are still coming to grips with.

Calvin might look at passages such as those from Jeremiah and John as evidences for the sovereignty of God – the absolute freedom of God to do as God wills, unbound by any theological or other bind. It is ironic that his descendants have preached some of the most oppressive theologies against that sovereignty, claiming God to be “bound” to send person X to hell or give you great riches if you just say the magic scripture and pray the magic prayer. (I exaggerate, but not as much as you think.) Where such preachers seek to bind, the scripture found in John points to quite the opposite – “if the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed.” It resonates in such doctrinal ideas as the “priesthood of the believer”, the idea that every person is both free and responsible to minister to one another in the name of God and to, in the words of 2 Timothy, to present himself or herself to God as “a worker who has no need to be ashamed, rightly explaining the word of truth,” an idea that every Protestant tradition manages to claim as unique to itself. 

In fact, the history of pretty much every reformation is one of taking such words of scripture and, after a good start, failing to live up to them. Hence Calvin’s famous instruction that the church was to be “reformata et semper reformanda” – “reformed and always being reformed.” To be brief, we are – or always need to be – under repair. Being composed of fallible human beings, churches will fail, and must be constantly challenged to return to the scriptures and to be under the charge of the Holy Spirit to reclaim our calling, to live into whatever awaits God’s church over, say, the next five hundred years or so.

If we take today’s psalm seriously, we have in our God a strong fortress, a “bulwark never failing” in the words of the famous hymn we sang just before the message. We are never abandoned by God, no matter how much we abandon God. 

If we take today’s reading from Jeremiah seriously, we are under the watchful care of an all-sovereign God, a God who yet in the midst of such sovereignty and power knows us, and places in each of us nothing less than knowledge of him, writing on our very hearts.

If we take today’s reading from Romans seriously, we know that despite our deep sinfulness, we are preserved and redeemed by Christ, who is faithful to be the mediator of divine grace even unto death on a cross – a death that could not keep him in the end.

If we take today’s reading from John seriously, we are free. Free, that is, in Christ – we are freed from sin, freed to continue in the words of our Savior, and free to know the truth. 

None of these ideas were new at the time of all those reformations. All of them are as old as the scriptures those reformers fought to put in the hands of followers of Christ and to teach and preach; those ideas had faded a bit from the church’s collective memory, though, and needed to be refreshed. That might also be true in our own time. It’s on us – all of us – to reclaim all of those legacies, as well as the legacy that give us our name “Protestant.” It’s time to speak up. After all, a little reformation now and then is a healthy thing.

For a legacy, and for repair of that legacy, Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal): #610, O For a Thousand Tongues to Sing; #624, I Sing Thee, Who My Sure Redeemer Art; #329, God Is Our Refuge and Our Strength; #275, A Mighty Fortress Is Our God; #53, O God, Who Gives Us Life; #268, Crown Him with Many Crowns

Sermon: It's a Trap!

First Presbyterian Church

October 22, 2023, Pentecost 21A

Matthew 22:15-22

 

It's a Trap!

 

 

 

One of the most recognizable and most quoted bits of Star Wars film lore is a simple three-word exclamation, spoken by an admiral in the Rebel fleet upon learning that not only had they not caught Imperial forces unprepared, but that the Empire had a brand-new Death Star powering up and ready for them. Upon seeing this, Admiral Akbar (a distinctly non-humanoid character, exclaims "It's a trap!" And for that line, Admiral Akbar is one of the most-quoted characters in Star Wars lore. 

Were Admiral Akbar lifted out of Star Wars and plopped into today's reading, he would have multiple opportunities to let out his famous quote, some of which are obvious to pretty much all the readers of this passage, and some of which require a bit more work to detect.

The first clue that "it's a trap!" is the composition of the squad who approaches Jesus in the first place. Under normal circumstances, the Pharisees and the Herodians would have nothing to do with one another. The Herodians were not necessarily a religious group, and were open in their support for the Roman-installed puppet king Herold, and by implication the Roman Empire who propped him up. By contrast, the Pharisees were an extremely religious group (you probably know the type) and were practiced in the p.r. of opposing Rome, but not loudly enough to get Rome to pay attention. That these two groups were appearing together before Jesus at all was plenty enough reason for Admiral Akbar to exclaim "it's a trap!" (and we see in verse 18 that Jesus is well aware of this trap). 

Admiral Akbar would be yelling out again pretty quickly once he heard the opening statement of the Pharisee-Herodian cabal. Verse 16 is a classic bit of buttering up, some deeply insincere flattery spouted forth as if Jesus were susceptible to such a thing. If they truly believed what they were saying, they would know very well that it wasn't going to work on Jesus. Cue Admiral Akbar again: "it's a trap!"

A clearly sprung trap is what we see in verse 17. "Tell us, then, what you think. Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor, or not?" Admiral Akbar would be spewing out "it's a trap it's a trap it's a trap" on a seemingly endless loop by this time. Sure enough, in verse 18 Jesus calls out the cabal for their "malice" - no pulling punches here! - and then springs his own trap on them by asking them to produce "the coin used for the tax."

This is a part of the trap that Admiral Akbar might not catch. Jesus's phrasing here sets this particular tax apart from all the other random taxes the people might have imposed upon them from Rome or from the Temple or from anywhere else. The particular "tax" referenced here is one that Rome reserved especially for those lands it had taken by conquest. It was, in effect, an "occupation tax," one that Rome levied on its conquests to pay the salaries and expenses of those soldiers and other officials doing the local physical work of occupying a territory. 

In other words, Judea (and many other regions taken by the Roman Empire) were paying a tax to fund their own occupation by Rome. And to further the aggravation, such tax (roughly equivalent to a normal day's wages) could only be paid this particular coin. No other currency would be accepted. So you had to go through the hassle of getting one of these coins before you could pay the "occupation tax." No wonder many in such occupied territories never paid it and hoped the Romans wouldn't notice. 

So, by inducing his questioners to produce this particular coin, Jesus had trapped them into revealing that they were apparently OK with paying this tax, since there was literally no other use for this coin. Admiral Akbar might respond with a variant of his usual phrase, but in a much more admiring tone - <slowly> "now THAT'S a TRAP!!!"

There's one more potential trap in this passage, but it's a lot more subtle, and might be the one that modern readers and scholars of this scripture are more likely to get caught in. Jesus finishes the conversation by asking them whose image was on the coin, and when they correctly answered "the emperor's" in verse 21 Jesus springs his get-out-of-the-trap card: "Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor's, and to God the things that are God's." It's enough to get the Pharisee/Herodian cabal to beat a hasty retreat, to be sure. Still, though, we moderns (as well as many generations of the church before us) might well be trapped by the particular interpretation of the scripture we want to see.

It's not hard to come up with a scripture like Psalm 24:1 - "The earth is the Lord's and all that is in it" - and jump quickly to the conclusion that "hey, we Christians don't have to pay any taxes!" The trouble is that even before we get to Matthew 22, we've been through a passage in Matthew 17:24-27 that doesn't let us off the hook so easily. In that passage the collectors of the temple tax show up wondering if Jesus was one of those tax-skipping types (leaving aside the fact that Jesus literally had no income). Peter answers straight out of fear "yes, he does" and then goes running to Jesus, who oddly enough seems to know exactly what's on Peter's mind. He uses an illustration about whom kings assess taxes on (hint: not their own children) to acknowledge, in a way, that the claim is correct; the children of God really don't "owe" the empire. And yet, in the next breath, Jesus suggests that "so that we do not give offense to them," Peter should go and literally fish an "occupation tax" coin out of the lake via a fish's mouth and pay the tax with it. 

Jesus doesn't see any good in a agitating, performative, but not very effective way of sticking it to the Empire. Left unspoken but implied is that if you are truly following Jesus, you're going to offend the empires you live among soon enough. If you're going to offend the empire, do it in a way that means something and does people some good in the process. Admiral Akbar might be wondering at this one: "it's a trap?"

One could argue that there's one more trap inherent in Jesus's final answer. Remember that the coin used to pay the "occupation tax" literally had no other use anywhere in the Roman Empire; all it could do was pay that tax. Why would God want such a thing? It truly was the emperor's in that sense, and frankly, it's best to let him have it. Give God the actually useful stuff; your time, your abilities and efforts, and yes, your financial resources as you can. 

This might be a place where we get tripped up today. We may occasionally get tripped up (or trapped up?) by our sentimental attachments to certain things, even certain things about the church, and confuse our attachments to those things with things that the church can actually use. Or perhaps society has conned us into thinking some of its own obsessions and infatuations are something we need to offer to God. Even Admiral Akbar might have to concede, "yeah, it's a trap." 

Let's put this bluntly in stewardship part two: aside from our own time, energy, presence, and work for the church, the most useful thing we are going to be able to give to the church is money, or something that can be redeemed for money, the stuff that enables the church to do things like keep the lights on and the air conditioning or heat running, to fix things that need to be fixed or remove things that need to be removed, and yeah, to pay folks who work for the church in some capacities. 

Don't give God the useless things of the world; give to God what is God's, starting with ourselves. 

For staying out of the traps of stewardship, Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal): #450, Be Thou My Vision; #693, Though I May Speak; #711, Lord of All Good

 

This guy. Remember?

Sermon: Extreme Stewardship?

First Presbyterian Church

October 15, 2023 (Stewardship)

Proverbs 11:23-28; Matthew 19:16-26

 

Extreme Stewardship?

 

 

This handful of verses from the book of Proverbs, clustered together as it is, provides an interesting look into how so many people assume "morality" or "goodness" or "blessing" works; good people get good things, and bad people...don't. 

Honestly, it must feel nice to be able to believe such things. 

We live in a world that proves, over and over again, that such things simply aren't true. Some of the richest people in the world are also some of the worst people in the world. Meanwhile, too many hard-working and gentle people end up in homeless shelters. (I've never served a meal at a homeless shelter that didn't ask us to set aside at least one, usually two or three, meals for folks who hadn't yet gotten off from their job, or one of their two jobs.)

To be honest, though, the issue isn't to say that "all rich people are evil" or something like that, but it becomes necessary to point out that greater concentrations of wealth do damage, not only to those who end up poor because of it, but also to those with whom that wealth is concentrated. 

In his collection Whistling in the Dark: A Doubter's Dictionary, the novelist and Presbyterian minister Frederick Buechner says of today's reading from Matthew's gospel that "Jesus says that it's easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God. Maybe the reason is not that the rich are so wicked they're kept out of the place, but that they're so out of touch with reality they can't see it's a place worth getting into." It is perhaps for a similar reason that the oft-quoted and oft-misquoted 1 Timothy 6:10 says not that "money is the root of all evil," but that "the love of moneyis a root of all kinds of evil."

Perhaps most telling is a statement from Jesus in Matthew 6:21; "For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also." Or, to put it in a modern vernacular rendering, "What we own, owns us." This seems to be the best way to understand Jesus's questioner in this reading; we are told that after Jesus's final answer to his persistent questions, "he went away sad, because he had great wealth." 

Here's the thing: most of us do not have "great wealth," by the standards of the Jeff Bezoses and Elon Musks and Warren Buffetts of the world. This does not, however, mean we are free from the potential peril that "what we own, owns us." Sometimes that peril becomes greatest for poorer people, even if they are able to come out of poverty. It is a potential hazard for anyone with possessions of any sort. It's the kind of trap that requires us, in dealing with wealth or possessions, to observe an instruction that Jesus gave the disciples earlier in this gospel (10:16): we have to be "wise as serpents" even while we are called to be "innocent as doves."

Now it's worth noticing of today's reading that this is not a commonplace event in the life of Jesus. This same story, with slight variations, is also told in Mark 10:17-31 and Luke 18:18-30. The instruction that Jesus gives here is not repeated again. It's not a commonplace event that Jesus tells someone to give everything away; it's a one-off, only issued in the face of this one rich man who, even as he says he has kept all the commandments, sees and knows himself to be lacking something, despite his great wealth. 

For us, this instruction doesn't necessarily compel us to give it all away; if anything, the stories of too many unscrupulous televangelists wheedling widows out of their last dime is not an example this church or this pastor wants to follow. Nonetheless, we are challenged here. What are we holding on to that we don't need to hold on to? What of our finances or possessions are we at risk of being owned by? Or what really does own us? This may even be a question that the church, as a whole, needs to ask itself as well, but that starts with members asking the question of themselves.

Here's what it comes down to: if we really believe we are God's own, if we truly even want to be one of God's people, what we do with our possessions, perhaps especially how we provide for and support the church - the "body of Christ" in the world, after all - is going to reflect that. Providing for the work of the church is a necessary part of any member's own stewardship. 

Not that this is the only worthy church, or that there aren't other church-based or charitable organizations worthy of support, but the church - again, this particular unit of the body of Christ - is a needful starting place, one that is particularly needed as a voice and witness in this community. Even if we haven't figured out what it is yet, we have something to offer this community that no other church does. But we can't do that without the support of the people who make up this church. 

It's as simple as that. And if we allow ourselves to be owned by our possessions, we won't be able to live up to that.

Tune in for part two next week.

For the call to be good stewards of our possessions and the church, Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal): #708, We Give Thee but Thine Own; #712, As Those Of Old Their Firstfruits Brought; #697, Take My Life

How some modern folk might respond to that one line...

Sermon: The World at God's Table

First Presbyterian Church

October 1, 2023, World Communion

Isaiah 25:6-9; Revelation 7:9-17

 

The World at God's Table

 

 

It doesn't take much to remind ourselves that, whatever of God's promises we might seek out or read about or remember, or whatever vision of future glory we subscribe to, we don't live in that world yet. Clearly this is not a world that is unified in its devotion to God. Your average front page of a newspaper (whether in print or online) can usually make that clear pretty quickly.

What we might do well to remember sometimes is that the same is true of the world in which these scriptures were first written and disseminated. The Israel in which Isaiah wrote was a land at various times under siege or carried off into exile by one empire or another, and frankly beset by the inept or crooked leadership of one king after another. As to the time of the writing of the book of Revelation, most likely some time near the end of the first century, the Roman Empire held sway. As if that wasn't enough, the far-flung but still emerging body of followers of Christ was having to face the reality that there would be no home in the Judaism in which many had been born or raised before coming to follow the way of Christ. Even those who had held out the longest could no longer deny that the two, no matter what common roots they may have had, were simply separate faiths at this point. 

That point is simply that texts like those we have heard today sounded as farfetched and fantastical to their first readers and hearers as they do to us today, perhaps even more so. Remember from last week's reading from the book of Jonah, how ragingly angry Jonah was at the repentence of Nineveh, the capital of Assyria? If you take Isaiah's prophetic writing at its word, that this "feast of rich food" that the Lord prepares is to be "for all peoples," then you have to assume that the people of Assyria (and Nineveh) are included among "all peoples." And to put it bluntly, there were plenty of other menacing empires that had harmed Israel, either through attack or exile, or who threatened to harm Israel, that the idea of a feast "for all peoples" might well have sounded more like threat than promise to Isaiah's hearers and readers. 

It's also worth noting the nature of this feast. The wines are not only well-aged but "strained clear" - wine-making in this period often produced wines, particularly of the less-expensive variety, that were cloudy or needed to have some excess matter strained away to be palatable. And while describing food as "rich" nowadays might suggest health risk more than anything, the opposite was closer to the truth in this time, with a "rich" meat not lacking in texture and quality and frankly edibility, which was too often the case with the meats that most could obtain. 

The remainder of this brief passage describes how the Lord takes away those barriers that have kept the peoples of the earth at one another's throats. The "shroud that is cast over all peoples," the shroud of violence and death, is lifted away; the tears of the peoples are dried; the disgraces that weigh down all peoples (for indeed all people are "his people") are wiped away. None of these can stand in the presence of the Lord presiding over the feast.

Our second reading also takes us away to a time yet to be, in the seemingly fantastical writings of the writer who goes by the name of John, recording a series of visions each seemingly more "out there" than the previous one. In this case, though, this particular vision is an interruption; in chapter 6 six "seals" have been broken and great terrors set loose in the land, but before the seventh seal is broken we get a glimpse of large numbers of those who have in some way remained faithful despite the tribulations visited upon them. First to be presented is a vision of thousands out of the twelve tribes of Israel. Then, however, a much greater multitude appears, "a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people, and language," standing before God. They are described in verses 14-16 as "those who have come out of the great tribulation"; they serve before the Lord's throne day and night, and "never again will they hunger; never again will they thirst," and the Lord will "lead them to springs of living water."

In short, no matter which testament you prefer, you get a vision of a great gathered multitude, one in which all of the peoples of the earth are represented. Whether they are put before a "feast of rich food" or being led to "springs of living water," this great multitude is being provided nourishment and even more, well beyond sustenance, by the one Lord.

This is the ultimate vision of the people of God, one way or another. When one compares that vision to the current state of the church, it's not hard to see that we have some ways to go to live into that vision of multitudes from all the peoples of the earth.

Except, not really, but yes, sort of. The church is truly spread across the nations, with all peoples or really darn close to it found in its number among the countries and tribes and languages of the earth. It can be difficult to tell that in visiting any one particular congregation of the church at worship time, when the old saw about the church at worship being one of the most segregated entities around still holds too close to true. 

In some ways the whole point of a World Communion Sunday such as we celebrate today is to remind ourselves that God's table is not only found in the United States nor alone in any other nation. That Sunday morning separation, willful or otherwise, cannot obscure the truth that God truly gathers followers and disciples from all the peoples of the earth. Some of the practices of those peoples might look wildly different from even the church next door, but God is gathering. What remains for us, really, is in some ways to get out of God's way and see all nations as part of the people of God. Even more, though, we are called to join, to serve together, to make welcome and hospitality for all those peoples God gathers in.

For the great multitude, from all the peoples of the earth, Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal): #311, Here, O Lord, Your Servants Gather; #695, Change My Heart, O God; #292, As the Wind Song