Sermon: Unfair!

First Presbyterian Church

September 20, 2026, Pentecost 17A

Jonah 3:10-4:11; Matthew 20:1-16

 

Unfair!

 

 

On the surface, it might seem odd to put these two scriptural accounts together. Obviously, the makers of the Revised Common Lectionary felt otherwise, but you can be forgiven if you don't see what these two stories have in common. To see what makes these two stories complement one another, we might need to adjust our perspective; who are the important characters in each story, and why do they do the things they do?

We come to the book of Jonah after the famous part. The "great fish" has already done its work, gathering up Jonah after his attempt to run from God's call and depositing him in such a place that Nineveh, the city Jonah was trying to avoid, was about the only place he could go. Jonah gave up fleeing and made the pronouncement God had commanded. We are not told how much energy or effort he put into that announcement, but whatever he did it took effect in a way very few prophetic warnings ever have. The king himself took up the public role of chief mourner and commanded that all of Nineveh join in repenting. Our reading begins with God's response, in the last verse of chapter 3: "God changed his mind about the calamity that he had said he would bring upon them; and he did not do it."

At this Jonah "loses it." Jonah was upset precisely because his prophetic proclamation, so to speak, "worked." Nineveh and its king repented, and God relented. And this, it seems, made Jonah angry.

This is probably hard to stomach for most of us, wishing for that kind of destruction on anybody. I suspect, though, if you asked a citizen of Ukraine right now if they'd want to see Moscow destroyed, at least some would say "yes." We need to remember that this wasn't a random, unprovoked reaction; Nineveh and the kingdom of Assyria over which it ruled had wreaked havoc over Israel and Judah (and a lot of other nations) multiple times, with horrific levels of violence and destruction. Jonah's anger may have been over-the-top, but it wasn't without foundation.

Nonetheless Jonah has no answers for God, so he goes off and sulks like most people who know they've lost an argument, perhaps waiting to see if anyone in Nineveh might screw up and God might overthrow the city after all. God "appointed" a bush (what an interesting word choice, "appointed") that brought shade for Jonah, which gave him at least some pleasure. But then God "appointed" (that word again) a worm to kill the bush, and Jonah wilted as the hot, dry wind began to blow. For the umpteenth time he ordered God to let him die. That's when God settled the argument for good. Jonah could get all upset over a bush he had done nothing to grow or nourish, but God was not allowed to care about "Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also many animals?"

Again, it's hard to see what this story has to do with the parable from Matthew. A vineyard owner keeps going back to the marketplace and calling forth more day workers to go out into the field and work for him for the day. That's okay, as far as it goes, but when day's end came and the owner paid the latecomers the same wage as those who started at first light, things get testy.

The answers given by the vineyard owner don't necessarily look great on the surface, do they? "You got what you agreed to." Well, yes, but one of the workers might note that doesn't answer their complaint. "Take your wages and go; it's my choice how to pay." Also true, but it's not going to silence many cries of "unfair!" "You're telling me I can't do what I choose with what's mine?" And finally, the kicker: "Or are you envious because I am generous?"

We need to take note of that last answer. "Envious" is not an uncommon translation for the words used here, but it's not very literal. What is recorded here is an idiom. A literal translation of that question would be "Are your eyes evil because I am jealous?" That's a pretty evocative metaphor. If nothing else, that will hopefully give us pause before we dismiss envy as some kind of lesser transgression. It is one of the seven deadly sins, after all.

Back to the story: our tendency is to latch on to those first laborers as the "main characters" in the story, much as we tend to assume that, well, Jonah is the main character in the book of Jonah. Doing that, though, probably hinders us from seeing what God - the real "main character" in most anything from the Bible - is doing. God moves heaven and earth (and even the sea) to get a prophet to Nineveh to warn that city into repentance, and then hears their repentance and relents from destroying it. Clear enough, I suppose.

But to get a grip on the vineyard parable, let's try a different perspective. Instead of the first group sent into the field, take a look at those left waiting; some finally get sent out to work at about 9:00 a.m. (adapted for our daily patterns), another batch at noon, still more at about 3:00 p.m., and finally one more group, somehow overlooked all day, gets sent with maybe an hour of daylight left.

From not getting any work for the day, these laborers go to getting "the usual daily wage." Some translations might use the word denarius here, but perhaps it's useful to take that out of the equation and get to the core of the matter. While this is still a subject of some discussion in biblical scholarship, one of the more strongly held positions is that "the usual daily wage" would typically be enough to feed a family for three or four days. That doesn't necessarily sound like much to our ears, but it's not nothing, and being able to feed your family for a few days can be a major blessing if there's no work to be found the next day.

The point of the story is the generosity of the vineyard owner (and let's just acknowledge that this is probably the answer to the perennial parable question "where is God in this story?"). This is where God is revealed; this is what the kingdom of heaven is like; as God was unwilling to give up even the people of Nineveh to destruction in the Jonah story, so God (in the person of the vineyard owner) is unwilling to give up any of the laborers to go without.

God's economy is not our economy, nor will it ever be limited by our economy. Our standards are (whether we admit it or not) all about bringing in those who are deserving, or have some special merit, or something that (in our eyes) sets them above others. God, on the other hand, wants everybody, and God doesn't care how late they come to the work. God doesn't care how horrifying they have been, as long as repentance is real and put into action. God brings in all, no matter what we say.

This is an interesting thing to ponder in a time when churches of many different kinds are struggling to stay afloat, having declined precipitously from the pinnacles of size, wealth, and influence they knew many decades ago. At that point a church could get away with being quite selective about who they would welcome in - not that anyone would be turned away, mind you, but there's a difference between letting folks come to worship services and welcoming them into the church. Nowadays, you have to wonder if some of those churches can remember how to be welcoming to "all" of those whom God seeks, even when their institutional lives might well depend on it.

Maybe it's The Parable of the Generous Vineyard Owner? It is at the last a story of a God who seeks to draw in and save and redeem and justify all of us, even those who seemingly get passed over again and again. Really, the only thing for us to do is get on board with God.

For a generous God, Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal): #620, Praise, My Soul, the King of Heaven; #36, For the Fruit of All Creation; #725, O Jesus, I Have Promised

What am I listening to?

 The title question popped up on Facebook a couple of days ago (I think?), from a colleague/friend asking what music others were listening to right now. I did not answer at the moment, being a bit busy and distracted (my default state these days). When I had a moment to stop and check myself I didn't answer either. I still haven't, mostly because when I finally put my finger on the music that was most occupying my ears and my mind right now, neither of them seemed to be a "jam," and the question did ask what was one's "current jam." Making a currant jelly joke seemed a reach, so I left it.

In fact there are two things that have been lodging themselves on my sonic devices in particular - one which has been occupying my mind for quite a while, and the other coming to the fore more recently, apparently tied to the advent of the Advent/Christmas cycle now upon the church. 

When last I darkened the door of this blog I confessed to an ongoing obsession with the late piano sonatas of Franz Schubert. At that time his penultimate sonata, no. 20, was foremost in my ear and mind. Since then my listening has broadened...all the way to his last sonata, no. 21. In particular the second movement has taken hold. (Fair warning: this movement itself is about ten minutes long, although obviously I consider such minutes to be well spent.)

You will note that this movement ...  is ... slow. Now this is not itself so odd; your average Classic/Romantic era piano sonata has a slow movement. What's odd here is that in this particular case, the first movement of Schubert's sonata is also rather slow, and two slow movements back-to-back is less typical.

Also, this movement is not only slow, it is quite spare, for lack of a better word. Aside from the slightly faster and somewhat fuller middle section, this movement is joltingly spacious in its texture. Rather than being spun out in a line (a not-atypical way to talk about musical melodies or motives), these notes and figures seem almost suspended in empty space. Laden with the burden of pandemic time, it almost sounds as if the notes are socially distanced.

Even when things seem to get busier, the musical activity often consists of repeated notes or figures, which manages to sound busy without necessarily sounding full, at least as Schubert deploys them. And even then, after what passes for great agitation in this movement, the music ultimately returns to the arrestingly spare sonic space of the first section, with slight tweaks of harmony and rhythm,  the emptiness of notes and motifs hanging from gently swaying mobiles in a darkened room. It is not the sound of silence - that is Simon & Garfunkel's territory - but perhaps it is the sound of quiet - quiet in the way Frederick Buechner describes a room where people are not speaking; the room is darkened, perhaps, but not empty. 

I hesitate to guess why this movement has latched on to me of late. Maybe in the deafening emptiness of pandemic-tide the genuine quiet of the movement provides sanctuary. Maybe I'm just really geeked by Mitsuko Uchida's interpretation of the sonata. Maybe it's just the pleasure of ten minutes that invite me not to be overwhelmed or ragged or confronted with the endless rounds of I don't know how to do this that constitute so many of my days in this time. Or maybe it simply invites me in the direction of mystery, and some part of me that is normally shouted down and drowned out sneaks into my consciousness through it.

The second, more recent, more seasonal, and shorter fascination of late is a more modern composition, by an American named Daniel Pinkham. It is the second movement of his Christmas Cantata, a setting of the ancient text "O magnum mysterium." You might notice some similarities to the sonata movement among the obvious differences. 

I have had the intense pleasure of singing this work a couple of times. "Spare" and "spacious" are fitting adjectives here also, and the hints of medievalism add to the effect. This is a movement to tax the breath control of the finest choral singers and brass players, and the sheer length of notes makes more space rather than filling it. 

The effect is, to be sure, deepened by those initial words of the text - O magnum mysterium, "o great mystery." The hearer is led directly into that contemplation, in this case the mystery of the Nativity and Incarnation. The mystery does not avoid the seemingly ludicrous; barn animals the first witnesses of the infant Messiah. There is a thickening of the music as the Blessed Virgin gets her shout-out, a build to a volume climax spiced with discordant intervals and the long sustained notes underneath it all interrupted for a fraction of a moment, and yet at the last it all collapses in slow motion back into the space, the quiet, repeated motifs from the brass and organ strung together and fading away, to one last unresolving chord. 

It is a text for the Nativity, but musically it is all Advent - waiting, quiet, unbearable anticipation. It is much shorter than the Schubert sonata movement, but it is still music that demands time. Somehow, I guess this is something I need in some way or other. 

Anyway, that's what I'm listening to.

Dear Pastor: Musical borrowing, cultural appropriation, and "borrowed" song

Earlier this year in one of the "wedding day" series of posts on what the church should sing, I put forth this post on singing "something borrowed." You may recall that post advocating for singing at least some of the song of the global church, broadening the repertoire of our congregations beyond the comfortable "western" stuff we know and taking in music from the continents of South America, Africa, and Asia in particular. (I am far from a significant voice advocating for this: far more notable figures in the church such as C. Michael Hawn, Nathan Corbitt, and even John L. Bell can be counted among those who in one way or another speak to the power and importance of global song in the Western church.)

Such "borrowing," it should be noted, is not without its potential pitfalls. If your principal church musician has a fairly significant academic background (and likes to scare you), or if you have a few professors among your congregation, you might get introduced to the phrase "cultural appropriation," if you didn't run across it yourself during your own education. It's not nothing, and a church can be as guilty as any other institution or group of it, but the simple congregational singing of songs from non-US cultures should not fall into the category of cultural appropriation. Let's talk about why, dear pastor.

A full treatment of cultural appropriation would overwhelm this blog, so we shall try to be brief about it. In short, cultural appropriation involves the lifting of images, creative or artistic works or forms in which such works are produced, religious imagery, folklore, or other creations of a culture without permission or at least acknowledgment. The appropriation factor also often involves a situation in which the culture being appropriated is a minority culture and quite likely one which has experienced dominaiton, exploitation, or abuse in history at the hands of the culture doing the appropriating. (This article offers a fuller exploration of the topic.)

One thing that has to be acknowledged is the degree to which such appropriation does happen in the realm of music. In the United States, such appropriation has long histories in popular music, particularly as early rock'n'roll artists and/or their producers engaged in wholesale grabbing of blues and R&B songs already recorded by black artists, repackaged them with white artists singing, and reaped the profits with no acknowledgment or recompense to the original artists. When Elvis Presley scored a hit with "Hound Dog," there probably weren't a whole lot of listeners who were aware of Big Mama Thornton's earlier, earthier version of the song, and Presley's people didn't much concern themselves with that. 

Not all popular music encounters quite fell into such appropriation. Eric Clapton's wanderings into the blues were generally careful (after a time) to acknowledge masters such as Robert Johnson, the Rolling Stones did generally seek to deflect some attention onto Muddy Waters, and Paul Simon did a reasonable job of putting his South African collaborators in the spotlight to some degree on the Graceland album (not necessarily in the video to the biggest hit from that album, unless Chevy Chase has some South African background I don't know about). In other cases (some recent Miley Cyrus videos come to mind, as well as a recent Coldplay/Beyoncé video heavily borrowing dance and imagery of India), the spectre of appropriation is less successfully dispelled.

The more slang term "cultural tourism" might be useful here. If the music "dabbles" in the culture without any particular involvement or deeper acknowledgment, without the voice of that culture being heard and recognized, there's a decent chance appropriation is happening. In that last video, India (and a fairly stereotyped India at that) is basically little more than a backdrop for a fairly generic (albeit catchy) Coldplay song and a costume department for Beyoncé; the music itself offers no acknowledgment whatsoever.

In the case of the church and its song, if we do it right, these issues don't quite come into play the same way. This does, however, require the church to be diligent about the how and why of singing the song of the whole church. 

Maybe the most significant part is acknowledging these Christians as exactly that: Christians. Not merely objects of mission or "exotic" elements for our fascination, but Christians no less (or no more, although sometimes it's hard not to wonder) than us. It involves regarding Tokuo Yamaguchi, the author of the always-intriguing hymn "Here, O Lord, your servants gather" (Glory to God #311), as a contributor to the church's song in the same way as, say, John Wesley (whose journals Yamaguchi translated into Japanese), if not necessarily as prolific a contributor as John's brother Charles. It means submitting Yamaguchi's hymns to the same theological scrutiny as any other hymn (stands up fine in my opinion, your mileage may vary), and taking the accompanying tune (an appealing use of Japanese gagaku mode by Isao Koizumi made for this text) as seriously and as joyfully as any other we sing. (I do recommend it, for what that's worth.) (Of course, gagaku mode actually originated in China, so there's that.)

That hymn and its tune also lead to another point about global song: very little of it has not already been affected by interaction with the West. While that tune does seem to be reasonably close to gagaku mode (as far as I can tell, and I'm far from any kind of expert), its accompaniment is quite Westernized. Most tunes that come from these traditions are going to have even more Westernish tint to them. This should be no shock in light of history; the West (and the church) was involved in South America for centuries, and parts of Asia and Africa as well. Whether through benign carelessness or more insidious intent, as noted in the earlier blog entry, the "primitive" musics of those peoples weren't going to be heard by those missionaries as anything other than something needing to be suppressed. Western hymns were imported wholesale (translated, possibly, if the missionaries were feeling generous) and given privileged status. The development of a somewhat more indigenous music for singing in church was too often a late twentieth-century phenomenon, by which time much of the musical life (not just missionary music) of those peoples had been highly altered by contact with Western music and musical styles. We're very seldom, if ever, getting any "pure" Japanese or Brazilian or Congolese tunes in our hymnals. So, in a sense, our fingerprints are already all over the music as it arrives into our hymnals and collections.

Furthermore, if you're working with a hymnal of some sort, copyright law provides at least some protection for those creating the songs that come to those hymnals. You will see somewhere on the page an acknowledgment of the source of the tune and text when those are known. Hymnal compilers have had to work out some form of compensation and permission for the use of these texts and tunes (if they're under copyright, of course). This isn't like Elvis lifting "Hound Dog" from Big Mama. (I assume the same is true for non-hymnal sources that might import music, but don't quote me on that.)

Finally, the very point of singing global song in the church is to hear the voices of those peoples, often with histories of oppression, who are our sisters and brothers in Christ; to hear - and more, to experience as much as possible - how images that might seem odd or different (or "foreign") to us nonetheless point us to the one true God, the one Savior, the one Spirit. If that's not part of your reasoning you're doing it wrong. 

Probably more to come on this subject, since it doesn't submit to easy explanation. 

John Bell does do a bit of borrowing in his work...

Dear Pastor: When congregational singing gets tribal

Note: post partly inspired by a chapter from Don Saliers & Emily Saliers, A Song to Sing, A Life to Live: Reflections on Music as Spiritual Practice.

The number of potential pitfalls lurking in the practice of congregational singing, dear pastor, would boggle your mind.

Maybe you've run into some of them. Ever worked out the idea to accompany a particular hymn differently than usual and felt yourself on the precipice of death from the icy stares of the congregation? Or a particular song chosen for a particular service draws ire from the congregation for being "different" or "complicated" (often a synonym for "different").

Though not necessarily a widespread thing, it is possible for churches, even in the mainline, to get caught up in their music as a marker of their identity. It doesn't have to be about the congregational singing, and frequently is not; a church can be identifiable as, say, "the one with the really good organ," or "the one with the opera singers as soloists," or "the one that does Messiah every December (possibly in sing-along form)," or so on and so on.

In fact, for much of the history of the mainline, the church's musical life did define many congregations, but the musical life that formed that identity had very little to do with the congregation lifting up its voice in song. Whether it was the organist, a soloist, or other vocal forces providing the special music (likely a vocal quartet or octet of paid singers), the musical identity of the church might even vie with the pastor's reputation as a most well-known marker of that church in its city.

That is less common today (although a few vocal-octet churches like this one), but there are still ways in which a church's music can become a focal* point of that church's identity.

*I initially typed "vocal point" by mistake, and it was almost better and I nearly left it in.

Nowadays there's a somewhat better chance that such a musical identity might well be centered on what the congregation sings (or supposedly sings in some cases). The interesting challenge is that such identities, perhaps because the people of the congregation are more directly involved, can become pretty fiercely identified and defined, maybe even to the point of becoming a means of defining the borders of the church; i.e. we sing this, not like that other church that sings that. The song of the people in the congregation becomes virtually a tribal marker of identity.

Sometimes that identity may be little more than an advertising schtick. "Our music is alive!/fresh!/exciting!/new!/powerful!/" etc., with the heavily implied corollary that the music of other churches is not. Churches of the "contemporary" variety can often be quite caught up in such markers of identity.

On the other hand, perhaps the other variety of church that is most susceptible to the tribalism of congregational song is the variety at more or less the opposite end of the spectrum. You might see the church speaking of the "Great Songs of the Faith" or "Timeless Classics," invoking the kind of breathless pseudo-religious rhetoric that would normally be associated with the hopelessly outdated promotional office of your symphony orchestra or concert hall. The implication that such a church would never demean itself with something "new" (whether "contemporary" or not) is of course unspoken but no less explicit.

These are extremes, and particularly obnoxious ones. Still, there is some risk when a congregation gets hung up on congregational sing of one particular type or another. And on the whole that risk is not necessarily about the music itself; it may well be that the fierce identification with that music is a mask for other issues within the church or its leadership. Such things are beyond the scope of this blog, but it's still an outside possibility.

Having gone on record with basic ideas about what the church might sing, I will acknowledge that such a program of congregational song as described in those entries will have the effect of introducing variety into the church's hymnic repertoire. If nothing else the intentional singing of old and new songs will work against that.

And a final thought; what some churches might forward as their identity, a marker of their tribe, might for some others seem more like being in a rut. Just a thought.

When memory attacks

So I suppose this post is a companion piece to this one from almost five years ago.

I'm not sure why -- whether it be the usual stresses of the season, amplified by many pastoral care needs; being rather sick, such that tending those needs becomes unwise or even dangerous; feeling the strain of relationships fading or failing across time and distance; the daily soul-crushing quality of life in 2017; strangely fluctuating weather; or who knows what -- I suddenly started talking about my mother yesterday in a mini-sermon.

We had a "jazz evensong" at the church yesterday afternoon (not really an evensong in the formal sense, but let it go) and, in the spirit of jazz, I concluded my brief reflection should be improvised. I had some basic ideas going in, but I wanted to try to respond to the seasonal tunes played by the quartet in "real time," so to speak.

I'm not fond of unscripted sermons (and I am wildly hacked off by the smug condescension of those preacher-types who insist that memorized sermons are the only way to go; if I'd been able to memorize that much I'd be a singer or actor, or both, and neither musicology nor preaching would ever have crossed my path). The one time I tried to do so, the sermon went twice as long as it should have. And don't even start with that Holy Spirit crap; if the Holy Spirit only "comes upon you" once a week, for an hour on Sunday morning, you seriously need to re-examine your faith.

But, for this occasion, a meditation that was necessarily going to be brief, it seemed worth a shot.

The basics were easy enough to start with -- a lot of popular Xmas tunes (not Christmas carols, but the more secular stuff) have a fairly deep streak of melancholy in them. That led to an o.k. reflection about how this particular season can be deeply painful for some, but in some ways we only harm ourselves if we can't at least acknowledge the grief or sorrow even as we celebrate the joy of the Nativity. Not going to enter it into any preaching contests (especially since it wasn't written down or recorded), but it was, I think, working for the occasion.

Then, suddenly, I was talking about my mother.

You see, she died suddenly twenty-eight years ago today.

I told that story about as much as possible eight years ago, in one of those Facebook notes that I would occasionally write before I discovered blog sites and headed off into the fool's errand of seminary and this regularly-remade blog. I can't say much has changed. As much as I blanch to admit it, there are some years where the anniversary slips by almost unnoticed. Then there are years, like this one, where it smacks me in the face out of nowhere, in the middle of ruminating about melancholy Christmas songs.

I guess I'm caught this time by our relentless drive and unflagging energy to suppress memory that we don't want to recall. We can bury it and push it away and consign it to its place in the murky and unwanted past...until we can't.

Churches do that too, on a much larger scale. We studiously avoid reflecting on the blood on our hands over decades or even centuries, until #metoo or #blacklivesmatter or Roy Moore inevitably shines that infrared or whatever on us that shows the blood we thought we had wiped away ages ago. And it's not just any one branch; mainline church folk owned slaves and oppressed and abused women and settled themselves on land stolen from the native peoples who had lived there for centuries every bit as much as more "evangelical" types did.

Memory is unpredictable. Maybe it's just the not-quite-flu-but-bad-enough bug talking, or other general sources of melancholy, or just the unquenchable need for memory -- even the nasty ones -- to assert itself and force me to look it in the eye and acknowledge its existence, its part-of-me-ness, when I just want to get well and get ready for Sunday. But even if twenty-eight is not a round number, that memory of loss and ongoing absence is claiming my attention this year. I don't quite understand what its plans are for me, as the day winds to its close. But it his here, and it is there, and there is nothing to do but ride through it.

The Year of Matthew 10:34

Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace to the earth, but a sword.
For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daugher-in-law against her mother-in-law; and one's foes will be members of one's own household. 
Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever does not take up the cross and follow me is not worthy of me. 
Those who find their life will lose it; and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.

Matthew 10:34-39


(Reminder: evangelicals, you were told way back at the beginning of this blog re-reboot that this blog was not for you.)

I'm not sure how much this kind of thing gets beyond what might be called "church Twitter," but if you note much of that you are probably aware of the release of the "Nashville Statement" earlier this week. (Google it; I have no intention of propagating it further than it has already spread.)

The statement has already been torn apart in multiple fashions. Its attempt to situate an anti-LGBTQ+ screed in the church's historical belief is punctured here by some historians; other groups have offered point-by-point rebuttals like the Denver Statement (spearheaded by mainline-ish quasi-celebrity pastor Nadia Bolz Weber); pastors have noted its odd lack of scriptural foundation (no reference to the "six verses" or "seven verses" in particular); petitions have been signed and so forth and so on. It made for an active week on "church Twitter."

In short, many far more skilled and informed pastors and scholars and writers and other folk have debunked the content of the statement to a degree I cannot hope to match much less exceed. Go read. Inform yourself.

My intent here, on the other hand, is to argue that at least one part of the "Nashville Statement" should absolutely be taken seriously.

Article 10 of said statement is for some the most brash part of the statement, claiming as it does that "it is sinful to approve of homosexual immorality or transgenderism and that such approval constitutes an essential departure from Christian faith and witness," and that the issuing speakers "deny that the approval of homosexual immorality or transgenderism is a matter of moral indifference about which otherwise faithful Christian [sic] should agree to disagree." In short, you cannot disagree with the Council for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (the issuing group behind the manifesto) and be a Christian, according to the CBMW. Its president, Denny Burk (who seems awfully famous for reasons I cannot fathom), flat-out calls Article 10 a "line in the sand." It is meant to exclude.

OK, fine, I'm not part of your group.

As I have noted, this blog is addressed to my fellow dying mainliners, that twig of the church that others like either to belitte or ignore. The likes of the CBMW are certainly not under my authority to any degree. I, however, am not under their authority either, and frankly their orders do not apply to me. Trying to do my job and fulfill my call in the corner of the church I now occupy is enough challenge for me. I care about those persons, particularly those LGBTQ+ persons who are yet again being dragged through the slime by some particularly hateful pastors, who are directly harmed by the statement. The persons who issue such statements are irrelevant to me and have no place in my thought or theology, outside of the occasional sermon about those who get hung up on "statutes and ordinances."

Other mainliners do not share my indifference. The whole reason "church Twitter" gets all riled up is precisely because such hardcore evangelicals cannot resist rising to the bait when groups like this bleat out statements like this. Personally, my blood pressure couldn't take such regular "engagement" in such disputes, but it's not my place to judge them either.

What I do have to go on about, and be a little bit of a jerk about, is the degree to which mainliners tend to get fluttery about this to the detriment of being about our business of serving and following.

We have a lot to do: welcome to the unwelcome; care for those for whom nobody cares; proclamation of the gospel without bullying; non-stupid worship; presenting our bodies as living offerings and being transformed by the renewing of our minds and such work as that. We'd also be well-advised to get on with welcoming and loving those who are targeted by these occasional blasts from the would-be popes of evangelicaldom. Instead, we have this bad habit of getting obsessed with the ones doing the blasting.

I so wish we would grasp the truth of Matthew 10:34.

At the risk of trumpeting my own sermon, it's not about seeking to cause division. It is, however, also not about avoiding division, about being so cowed by those who come bringing the sword that we forsake our call to follow and serve. It emphatically is not about engaging in some kind of "let's not offend anybody" straddling that does nothing but shield the bullies.

It is about living in the light, living in Christ, living as if Jesus were going to show up tomorrow (after all, He just might), which only happens by living in love. If that means the sword comes, then the sword comes.

Cutting to the chase for us mainline types: our call as a people of God, as followers of Christ, is not enhanced by getting into these pitched battles with these militant forces of fundamentalism. It's not our call to fight that war.

Maybe our call is to be the medics, the ones who are called to extend ourselves out into the battlefield to gather up the wounded, to bring them in to safety and welcome them and care for them and even join with them in doing Christ's work in God's world.

Can we please get on with it?

Maybe we're called to be stretcher bearers in the church wars?

Preaching the sermons we hate

So I hated my sermon this morning.

Not because it was bad sermon, I don't think. Not saying it was Best Sermon Ever, but my guess is it "worked," whatever that means for a sermon. It's even possible it worked too well.

I'm semi-using the lectionary at the moment, so this week I was a week ahead in an ongoing march through Paul's epistle to the Romans. As a result, today's sermon came out of Romans 12:9-21. (For what it's worth, I've been a week ahead for a couple of weeks, and will be for one more, in order to avoid missing Romans 13 when I'm on vacation in a couple of weeks.)

So Romans 12, the first portion of which supplied last week's sermon, is a profoundly rich chapter by any accounting. The first two verses in particular are among the best ever, and what follows from them does so in striking and powerful form. (If you ask me my favorite verse of scripture it could vary from day to day, but Romans 12:2 is always a good candidate.)

The second lectionary chunk of Romans 12 presents one immediate difficulty for preaching; you really could extract about twenty different sermon topics from it without trying too hard. Nonetheless, I did my prep work, muddled through Greek and hit the commentaries and read again and again and finally came to the conclusion that I had, more or less, a sermon. (Make of it what you will.)

By the time I preached it I hated it. Profoundly so.

Some of this scripture is quite beautiful, but some of it is awfully difficult to deal with. Paul wants to talk about how the Christ-follower, living as a living offering to God and transformed by the renewing of the mind, both lives in the body of Christ and in turn responds (as part of the body of Christ) to the larger world outside. Sometimes that means running up against evil, and Paul comes back to that idea in different ways throughout the chapter.

Some of them are easy to get behind or even to cheer. "Hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good." Yeah! We can get behind that! (Never mind that we might not always be completely clear on what is evil sometimes, but there are some obvious things out there in the headlines and we can get behind hating that evil!) Woohoo!!

But "bless those who curse you; bless and do not curse them"... whaaa? 

"Do not repay anyone evil for evil"... oh, come on... .

"Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave room for the wrath of God"... but I want revenge now!!!

"No; 'if your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink; for by doing this you will heap burning coals on their heads'." ...you have got to be kidding me...and what does that "burning coals" business even mean???

Finally, "do not be overcome with evil, but overcome evil with good." Again, what does that even mean?

Seriously, what does that even mean to "overcome evil with good"? What evidence exactly do we have that this kind of thinking won't get us killed (in a very literal physical sense these days)?

It's possible that the destructive effect of Hurricane Harvey is illustrating some of these verses for us. It's entirely possible that there are black or Hispanic or LGBTQ+ rescue workers pulling KKKers or neo-Nazis out of the floodwaters in Houston even as I type. They're preaching this scripture far better than I can do.

I don't want to do these things. I should be ashamed to admit it, but that doesn't make it any less true.

There's a lesson, of course. Even as the mainline tries to be faithful and admittedly not die in the process, we don't get to ignore the stuff we'd rather ignore. We're still obligated to preach the tough scriptures and feed those who would just as soon see us go down the drain (and they are out there). If anything, we're probably more obligated to do so, seeing as we know what it is to be endangered by our own hubris and blindness, lest others fall.

Our churches may not worship scripture the way some (*ahem*) Christian traditions do, but we don't get to dismiss it when it becomes difficult. I still need to confront all those unpleasant instructions in Romans 12, not to mention the much-abused first seven verses of Romans 13, famously used to justify a nuclear strike on North Korea just a few weeks ago (remember that?). Far from being a "political" move such is mandatory as precisely a theological imperative in the wake of Robert Jeffress's claims. I can't avoid confronting that (even though the lectionary tries to let me off the hook by leaving those seven verses out of the prescribed reading). It would be no less than dereliction of duty.

Sometimes we are charged to confront other corners of the church, and sometimes we have to proclaim the stuff that we don't even like. Just because I might hate the sermons that result doen't let me avoid preaching them.

Who's rescuing who in the wake of this?

Face the past

One of the challenges the mainline faces in finding a way forward (whatever "forward" may turn out to be) is that we oftentimes haven't quite finished reckoning with the past. And as everybody knows, those who do not remember the past are doomed to repeat it.

To be more specific here, mainliners have no memory, or maybe in some cases a selective memory, about the degree to which the mainline was once a frequent, some times even a primary perpetrator of many of the same things for which mainliners now get peeved at evangelicals for doing.

For example: do you think that the only pastors to whom Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was writing from the Birmingham jail were evangelicals? Uh, no. While a few mainliners managed to stand with the civil rights movement, many, many more were either keeping silent or chiding King for making trouble or wanting to move too quickly. 

I am reminded of the kerfuffle over the "new" book by Harper Lee that somehow appeared late in Lee's life, Go Set a Watchman, in which Atticus Finch (the hero of To Kill a Mockingbird) was a rather less than heroic figure. I'm not sure which was more upsetting to many folks: the original perception that Go Set a Watchman was a sequel, suggesting that we were finding out that a beloved literary character was less wonderful than previously thought, or the later realization that GSAW was in fact an early version (a first draft, if you will) of TKAM. 

For me, I think, the later version is ultimately a more depressing version of events. One could easily get the idea that Lee more or less wrote what she saw and experienced, raw as it was, and sent GSAW for potential publication with Atticus as the more flawed character she had probably known in many of the men she had known and seen as a youth, only to discover that readers of the late 1950s/early 1960s needed to have the story "sweetened" to make it palatable; they required a good guy, and specifically a white good guy. (This is of course leaving aside more mundane editorial issues that needed to be addressed in GSAW.)

Modern mainliners may be guilty of this to some degree. 

It's not hard, for example, to be in Presbyland and hear of Eugene Carson Blake. A Presbyterian minister and educator, later denominational and ecumenical leader, Blake holds a place of high regard in mainline Presbydom for having stood with and even marched with King and other civil righs leaders in the March on Washington, and speaking at the Lincoln Memorial. I don't know how many other folks outside Presbyland would know of him, but he is highly regarded within this particular domain.

As far as I can learn and discern, Blake was legit, a throughgoing progressive on race and many other matters. But we moderns shouldn't necessarily assume that Blake was necessarily representative of all of the then-PCUSA or UPCUSA denominations in which he served. 

So yes, Presbydom and the mainline in general can take some measure of solace in Blake's work. But the mainline also has some real pieces of work in its various family trees, like one James Fifield. A Congregational minister who fought like, well, hell to prevent the merger that created the United Church of Christ, Fifield is particularly noteworthy as the "Apostle to Millionaires," embracing without apology and with horrible exegesis what would seem like a proto-prosperity gospel, except that its aim was far more sinister, and far more directly corporate. It wasn't just prosperity for which Fifield shilled, but specifically the prosperity and profitability of American tycoons. The "Christian America" rhetoric of today (like this) has its roots not in anything of the colonial era, but in Fifield's work. 

Note: I have already recommended Kevin M. Kruse's One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Created Christian America, in which Fifield figures prominently. This NYTimes article from a couple of years ago summarizes some (but not all, not nearly) of the salient points of that book.

In short, if we're gonna claim our Blakes, we gotta own our Fifields. We gotta be forthright about the role we played in how supposed Christianity in this country got to the point where it is today. A lot of the stain might be on evangelicals now, but they didn't do all the work. 

There won't be any successful going forward (whatever "forward" turns out to be) until we do that reckoning.

Rev. James W. Fifield, Jr., the "Apostle to Millionaires," or "St. Paul of the Prosperous"

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Ridiculous Comparison: The mainline and Broadway

So if the mainline church is lacking in celebrity (whatever that means in churchworld), what of it? Where's the fit? Despite the most virulent naysaying of the vultures, the mainline is not dead yet, and as long as that's the case it maintains some toehold in American religious culture (whether that's a good thing to be part of is a question for another time). So, what is that toehold?

I'm going to put forth a Ridiculous Comparison. I'm liking this so much I'm putting that in caps, as a potential recurring feature of this blog. Or a threat to do so. Who knows? But here goes:

The role of the mainline in American religious culture is somewhat, a little bit, kinda sorta like the role of Broadway in American entertainment. (Yes, I'm currently watching the Tony Awards. Why do you ask?)

No, I'm not trying to make a full-fledged equation betwen the two, although somebody will probably try to claim I'm doing so. But there are similiarities, I think, at least enough to justify a Ridiculous Comparison.

So, for your consideration, a few rough comparisons of Broadway and the mainline:

1. They're both quite overshadowed by far more pervasive and flashier options in their respective fields of endeavor. Speaking of the Tony Awards, the occasion of that broadcast is for an awful lot of people the only awareness of Broadway they ever get. In many ways I do count myself among such people. I don't get to New York very often at all, and while I'll try to get to a show if one comes near me, I'm not living in a place where that's the easiest thing to do.

On the other hand, Hollywood churns along with ridiculous sums of money going into movies that can potentially tank incredibly badly, and yet the cycle happens again and again. If that happened to a producer one time on Broadway you'd probably never hear from that producer for quite a while; Hollywood somehow doesn't work that way.

Throw in television in its various permutations, streaming services, and other entertainment options that frankly encourage people never to leave their homes (or to not look up even if they do), and Broadway becomes a lot of work and a good deal of expense by comparison, at least in the perception of a lot of potential audience members.

A mainline church can seem like a lot of work. If they're doing worship right you can't just show up; you actually are asked to participate. You might even end up speaking as much as the preacher (or is that just my church?). They can be rather hard to find depending on where you live -- the mainline is getting a bit more scarce in some rural areas, for example. Mainline churches don't tend to carry quite the prestige that they once did, and certainly not the sense of social compulsion that once filled pews if nothing else would. Megachurches tend to consume a lot of oxygen in the communities they inhabit, and mainline churches can struggle to breathe. The mainline and its churches don't get to fail; when you go down, you're gone for good. Church celebrity, as noted elsewhere, tends to be an evangelical thing. In multiple ways, the mainline just gets overshadowed.

2. For both, the most vital signs of life are found when those long excluded, and their stories, are , included. Suffice to say Broadway benefits tremendously from the presence of artists male and female (and even in-between), artists of color, LGBTQ+ people, and more that I'm sure I'm not thinking of in every role possible -- on the stage, directing, providing technical prowess, composing, and all the other jobs that make a show happen. Further, an awful lot of the best of Broadway happens not just when the excluded are in the cast or behind the scenes, but also when their stories are the ones being told.

This last point might be more aspirational than current in the mainline, but as far as the life of the church, the places where church is actually showing life tend to be the places where the once-excluded are included. You want examples of the moribund and fading mainline to justify your vulturing? Find the churches where the old white guys still hold sway. When the folks who have spent generations being shoved aside or thrown out or worse are now part of the church, not just on the margins but being heard and welcomed and having more than a token voice, the church is living and even feisty.

3. They are both at their best when they tell the story differently, finding an unconventional perspective to illuminate what we (think we) know. Hollywood can give you movies, for example, based on the events of September 11, 2001. They can give you a movie about what happened on that plane that crashed in Pennsylvania, one about the emergency personnel responding to the attack, a forthcoming movie (originally a play, admittedly) about people trapped in one of the towers that day, and so forth. Broadway can do those, but it's at its best when it tells the story of Gander, Newfoundland, the place where all those transatlantic flights on 9/11 landed when they could no longer get into the US. (I really, really want to see that show now.)

Similarly, this may be more aspirational than real, but the mainline church is at its best when it "tells the story slant" (to crib from Emily Dickinson). The more the church opens up the whole of scripture, finding the stories the rest of the church doen't hear or doesn't want to hear or wants to stop anybody else from hearing, the more the mainline is telling the whole story of faith, of salvation, of the relentless God who would never accept human lostness. Are you willing to learn from the midwives Shiprah and Puah, or the slave Onesimus, or the Syrophoenician woman who, when first rebuffed by Jesus, nevertheless persisted? They're not tidy stories, but they still tell us of God's moving among God's people. And those stories certainly haven't been told enough.

Maybe this is silly, but it's not as if we don't have some things to learn as a community of churches trying to be faithful, even if a faithful remnant. If we can learn something from Broadway, let's learn.

A number from Come From Away at the Tony Awards. 

Yeah, I want to see that show.

When (or to whom) not to listen

So the previous entry on this fool's errand suggested that the staggering but "not dead yet" mainline needs to do a heap of listening as it seeks to find the way forward in the Spirit to be (finally, at last?) what God has ever been wanting the church to be. There are limits to that, however.

Folks involved with computer science and programming (and probably lots of other folks) will be familiar with the phrase "garbage in, garbage out" (sometimes shortened to "GIGO"?), an expression that reflects a computer's inability to do anything about the quality of the data entered into it; given flawed data, the computer will duly process that data according to its programming, producing output that is as flawed as the input from which it is generated.

(A further extension of that acronym points to human gullibility about anything that comes out of a computer: "garbage in, gospel out." Now this really begs to be considered in the life of the church, but in its own blog entry, or maybe several.)

So in short, bad input generates bad output. And that certainly has application to the mainline. Given this maxim, we'd better be very cautious about who or what is allowed into the church's head space. Whether it is those who are up to no good, those who are sincerly but desperately misguided, or those who can only envision a rival to be conquered, there are plenty out there who should not be allowed to deposit garbage into the soul of the mainline.

Such as...?

Don't listen to the vultures. You know, those people. Just don't. It's bad for your soul.

Don't listen to the fixers. They often overlap with the above, as in "you're dying but I can bring you back to life." Unless Jesus Christ in the flesh (or in the Spirit) is the one standing in front of you saying this, run. Run very hard in the opposite direction. One thing the mainline absolutely, positively cannot get caught up in is "personality churches." To the degree that any human figure usurps the role of Christ as head of the church, the church is no church and should be euthanized immediately. The mainline has usually managed to avoid such a thing, thankfully, but now is not the time to be anything other than extra-vigilant.

Don't listen to the clone-makers. That would, not surprisingly, be a related category to the fixers, though it might not involve a lone hero figure. Instead it might sound like "if your church would do (x) and (y) etc. like our church does it would be great." No, it wouldn't be great. It would be a pale imitation of something else transplanted into a situation where it (very likely) makes no sense.

Don't listen to the nostalgia-mongers. Now this is the hard one, but every church has them. You know them, the ones who remember when the church was full every Sunday (though what defines "full" can be hard to nail down...), when the choir was the best in town, when all the right people were there...you know the drill. And you also know, dear mainline church leader, that the road that follows Christ never goes backward.

(Somewhat on this subject, I cannot recommend highly enough Kevin M. Kruse's One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America. The title says it all. Even that spasm of everybody going to church and all that was part attack on FDR's New Deal, part "parasitic greedhead scam" in the ever-poetic words of singer-songwriter Bruce Cockburn. Just read it.)

Do you notice how these seem to have a lot in common? How to fix. "I alone can fix it." (Really, shouldn't we know better by now?) These are all things that distract one from the hard work of knowing where you are and how you and your church got there, and how you and your church might respond to that particular, distinctive context. (They also tend to involve human heroes, but I harped on that already.) In other words, they lead you away from the hard work of listening. And they certainly don't lead you to the leading of the Spirit.

There are more red flags to discuss and I have a feeling we'll get to them. But in the meantime, a kind of "shaking the dust off your feet" (Luke 9:5) is not out of line here. They don't listen to your testimony, because all they can do is tell you what to do? Shake that dust, baby, and walk away.

One thing that might make all this easier to remember is the hard but needful saying that it is not your  (pastor, educator, member) job to save the church. It is your job to be the church.

Confusing the two only leads to misery. So don't.

Sermon: Lifestyles of the Rich and Faithless?

Grace Presbyterian Church

July 31, 2016, Pentecost 11C

Luke 12:13-21

Lifestyles of the Rich and Faithless?

I am curious to know: how many of you remember Robin Leach?

If you don’t remember his name, maybe you remember the name of the show he hosted for many years on television:

(with accent) THIS is…Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous!

It was a show back in the 80s and 90s devoted to … well, it’s hard to make it any clearer than the title itself. Insanely opulent mansions, ridiculous limousines and luxury cars, and yachts the size of Navy ships – but far more luxurious than any military vessel ever, populated by Hollywood stars, Saudi Arabian princes, minor European royalty, the occasional athlete, and even a casino and hotel developer who, coincidentally, is seeking a new job this year. You may have heard of him.

Anyway, the show itself (to its credit, I suppose) didn’t really pretend to be about anything other than ogling all the stuff. I never could decide if the makers of the show really wanted their audiences to feel sick and depressed about their own mundane lives, or if social consequences of any sort were even contemplated in any way. It was just out there, relentlessly displaying luxury after luxury for the … entertainment (I guess?) of its viewing audience. If your brain didn’t shut down due to the sheer sensory overload, you might have found yourself wondering … why do these people have this stuff? What’s the point? Outside of the occasional “I saw it and I just had to have it” (which of course is not really an answer), that question seems never to have been asked or answered, at least not on the occasions I saw the show (which were admittedly blessedly few).

Maybe the lead character of the parable Jesus tells in today’s reading from Luke isn’t quite on the level of a featured rich person on that show, but he is rich, and we are told this by Jesus before we even know that he got such a super-abundant harvest. And in Luke, to be honest, “rich” isn’t always a good thing.

For example: even at the very beginning of this gospel, in the Song of Mary upon her meeting with Elizabeth, we hear that God “has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty” (1:53). In chapter 6, Jesus proclaims a “woe” on the rich, “for they have received their consolation” (6:24).

The hits don’t stop coming with this reference in chapter 12. The parable of the rich man and Lazarus, in chapter 16, is particularly harsh. In that story, the rich man ends up in the torments of Hades, while Lazarus, the poor beggar who lay at his gate daily, was in eternal rest in Abraham’s bosom. It doesn’t go well for the rich man when he (still not getting his situation) asks Abraham to send Lazarus to dab some cold water on his tongue, because hey, it’s really hot down here. The denouement of that parable is perhaps the coldest cut of all, when Abraham declares that such persons would not be convinced of the errors of their ways “even if someone rises from the dead” (16:31).

And then there’s the rich young ruler of chapter 18 who, when challenged by Jesus to give it all away and follow, “became sad, for he was very rich” (18:23), an event that prompts Jesus to exclaim “How hard it is for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God!” (18:24), comparing the feat to getting a camel through the eye of a needle, but finally offering the hope that “what is impossible for mortals is possible for God” (18:27). Frankly the only rich person that really comes off well in this gospel is Zacchaeus, the tax collector, who pledges to give away for the poor and pay back any who have been defrauded.

So it’s not a surprise that this rich man here in Luke 12 is not going to turn out to be a good guy, but he does seem particularly tone-deaf, with his resolve to tear down perfectly good barns and build bigger and better, showier barns. Seriously, simply adding another barn would be a lot easier and quicker, and that’s before the moral calculus about a person’s responsibility with wealth.

Note that Jesus tells this parable in response to a man from the crowd calling out to Jesus to settle a dispute with his brother over the family inheritance. After an initial “who do you think I am?” rebuff, Jesus turns quickly to warning the crowd against greed, saying “life does not consist in the abundance of possessions” (12:15). Immediately after the parable Jesus launches into teaching that is very specific in its extension of this warning, inviting his hearers and us to look at the ravens who don’t plant or harvest, the lilies that “neither toil nor spin” (12:27) and yet are more glorious than Solomon at his most glorious. Finally Jesus gets to the point: “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (12:34).

Now by this point, you may have already begun to draw a conclusion about where this sermon is going to end up. Ugh, another sermon bashing rich people. And there is definitely a moral peril expressed in this parable. The more wealth and possessions one has, it seems, the greater the danger of becoming attached to that wealth and those possessions in a way that clouds one’s spiritual judgment. It may be a cliché to say that “money can’t buy happiness,” but clichés often become clichés because they are true enough to get repeated over and over again, which seems the case here.

Perhaps more significant than simply the insufficiency of money to procure happiness is the utter inadequacy of money as a substitute for a relationship with God, which seems to be where the man who decides to build bigger barns goes off the rails. As Presbyterian minister Meda Stamper puts it, “The parable of the rich fool … illustrates simply and memorably the futility of choices made in isolation from the love of God and neighbor.” Stamper continues to describe what is a central theme, not just in this parable but in the whole gospel of Luke: “the problem of wealth in the context of the holy kingdom where closeness to God is life and attachment to things reflects soul-stifling anxiety and fear.”*

The particularly damning part of the choice the “barn man” makes in this parable is that only one person seems to factor into it: himself. There’s no notion that he even has a clue there might be others in his town in need. There isn’t even the notion that his workers (which he would have had to have if the harvest was that plentiful) might benefit from some portion of that harvest. He sure looks like a man who never learned the basic lesson we tend to expect our kids to learn by kindergarten: the lesson of how to share. To modify a quote that has become a popular social media meme recently, it never occurs to this man that, having more than he needs, he might choose to build a longer table instead of bigger barns.

But of course, this being a parable of Jesus, the simple answer is not quite the whole answer. The dirty little secret about us modern folk, even us modern Christians, is that we don’t have to be “rich” by the standards of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous or other such popular measures to become attached to our stuff in a way that hinders closeness to God. Heck, you can even be homeless and be powerfully attached to your stuff. If we look deeply enough, we can all find some element of that unhealthy attachment in ourselves.

For myself, it would probably be books or music. For you it might be some other possession – not necessarily a pricey thing, but some thing or things to which the attachment might be so strong that it has the power to cloud one’s spiritual discernment. Whatever might be the case, attachment to the things of the earth is a moral peril to the degree that it precludes or hinders attachment to the things of God, to the “treasures in heaven” we are encouraged to store up, to the neighbors around us whom God calls us to serve.

You see in your bulletins today a survey from the Finance and Stewardship Committee, one that begins the process of discerning how we will steward our resources for the forthcoming year. The word “stewardship” tends to feel loaded and burdensome to us in such a context, but at its most basic it speaks to this question of how we participate in the kingdom of God, as a church and as individuals, and how we make use of the resources we have been given – the harvest we have gathered, so to speak – to participate in that kingdom and its work. In that process the challenge before us, this year and every year, is to do so without becoming attached to those possessions or resources themselves, but to see them as gifts from God to be given in service to God and neighbor, something that “barn man” never seems to have grasped.

We don’t need to have crazy luxury around us, or Robin Leach ogling our stuff on behalf of millions of TV viewers, to fall into the trap of attachment to things that cannot give life. None of us are beyond that trap. Only when we see what we have through the eyes of the kingdom, fully recognizing God and neighbor in our decision-making, do we begin to get free of that trap. Only then do we see that building bigger barns is not the answer.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

*http://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?commentary_id=2923

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal):

#307            God of Grace and God of Glory

#417            Lord Jesus, Think on Me

#822            When We Are Living

#716            God, Whose Giving Knows No Ending

Credit: agnusday.org. Enough is never enough...

Sermon: Not the Lone Ranger

Grace Presbyterian Church

June 19, 2016, Pentecost 5C

Psalm 77:1-2, 11-18; 1 Kings 19:1-16;

      Galatians 3:23-29

Not the Lone Ranger

I’m a little young to remember the TV show – not as young as some here, but a little young for that. And because of my history of studying and teaching music history, if you played me the musical theme to that show I’d be much more likely to identify it as the final theme from Gioacchino Rossini’s overture to his opera Guillaume Tell, or the “William Tell Overture.”

But, yeah, we know about the Lone Ranger.

Some of you might be mentally rehearsing the opening to that show right now: “Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear … From out of the west with the speed of light and a hearty ‘hi-yo Silver!’” … Yes, I can see you, it’s showing on your faces… .

I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that the Lone Ranger, because of those old radio serials and the later television series, has been established for many decades as one of the iconic fictional characters in American popular culture.

Funny thing about the Lone Ranger, though; he was almost never really “lone.” The name, it turns out, is traceable to the character’s “origin story,” in which he was the lone survivor of a unit of Texas Rangers that was ambushed on a patrol. The five other members of the patrol, including its captain – the older brother of the eventual “Lone Ranger” – were killed. Rather than being truly “lone,” The Lone Ranger was instead virtually always accompanied by Tonto, a Native American who found the man barely alive after the ambush and nurtured him back to health. Again, I didn’t hear or watch the show, but it seems that most of what he accomplished required Tonto’s help.

Nonetheless, the image, or maybe the myth of the “Lone Ranger” as a singular individual who pursued justice on his own has persisted in the American mindset in particular, and has sometimes curdled into a image of a loner seeking revenge or retribution instead of justice (an appropriation that does no justice to the original character).

Though he lived innumerable centuries before the Lone Ranger mythology, the prophet Elijah seems sometimes to fall prey to the mindset of “going it alone.” You might remember from a few weeks ago, how Elijah took a simple command from God to announce the end of a drought and drew it out into an elaborate contest with the Baal prophets, culminating in the spectacular display of fire from heaven coming down and consuming all the waterlogged altars and soaked sacrifices. Afterwards, as the rain approached, Elijah (apparently now possessed by the super-speed of another modern hero, The Flash) ran ahead of King Ahab’s fully equipped chariot to the town of Jezreel, serving then as the seat of power in Israel.

And that’s where today’s reading kicks off, with Ahab whining to his wife Jezebel about what Elijah had done, and Jezebel issuing (via messenger) a not too veiled threat to Elijah: what you did to my Baal prophets, I’m gonna do to you.

And Elijah, the man who had been sustained in the wilderness by ravens, who had seen God miraculously extend meal and oil for weeks for the widow and her son, who had challenged the Baal prophets and won, who had slaughtered all those Baal prophets in triumph and humiliated the king … now, Elijah was scared. And Elijah ran. To be blunt, he ran like a scared chicken.

You can see the account of Elijah’s flight, falling asleep in despair only to be awakened, fed, and sent on his way (not once, but twice); arriving at Horeb the mount of God (in Exodus, that mountain was called Sinai), and repeating what almost sounds like a rehearsed, pre-packaged answer to God:

I have been very zealous for the Lord, the God of hosts; for the Israelites have forsaken your covenant, thrown down your altars, and killed your prophets with the sword. I alone am left, and they are seeking my life, to take it away.

Elijah says this two times: first, when he comes to the cave on Horeb the mount of God, and then after the progression described in verses 11-12; a great wind, a strong earthquake, and a mighty fire, a scene not unlike that at the end of the psalm we read earlier. But God was in none of those; only in the “sound of sheer silence” did Elijah discern the presence of the Lord.

So somehow, the bombast and tumult of the mountaintop display, not completely unlike the bombast and tumult Elijah himself had initiated back at Mount Carmel, somehow doesn’t seem to get through to Elijah, for afterwards when he is asked a second time “what are you doing here, Elijah?” he responds the exact same way as before:

I have been very zealous for the Lord, the God of hosts; for the Israelites have forsaken your covenant, thrown down your altars, and killed your prophets with the sword. I alone am left, and they are seeking my life, to take it away.

He doesn’t get it. Maybe if Felix Mendelssohn’s oratorio with its vivid and exhilarating depiction of that scene had been available, Elijah might have had a better time understanding it. (Insert misguided attempt to sing here.) But Elijah doesn’t get it, so God has to hit him over the head with it, if Elijah is ever going to get over his severe case of Lone Ranger Syndrome.

First of all, we the reader know that Elijah has been fundamentally incorrect all along. Back in the first verses of chapter 18 we read of Obadiah, a servant in Ahab’s court who despite the threats of the royal family had secreted away a hundred prophets loyal to the Lord, hiding them in caves to thwart Jezebel’s plans to kill them. That’s at least a hundred and one examples of how Elijah was wrong when he claimed that “he alone was left,” and Elijah knows this because Obadiah told him to his face in 18:13. God then, in 19:18 just outside our reading, points to seven thousand loyal Israelites who have not bowed the knee to Baal, seven thousand faithful that God would preserve.

But maybe the unkindest cut of all comes in verse 16. Not only was Elijah not the Lone Ranger, he wasn’t even irreplaceable. Another prophet would take his place, and it was Elijah’s job to go anoint him. If that’s not a direct slap in the face against Elijah’s pity party I don’t know what else it could be.

Now God still had work for Elijah to do, but God needed Elijah focused on God’s call to him, and not hung up on his self-obsessed and self-possessed despair. It’s not hard to extrapolate the lesson for us from such a story: the same thing applies to us.

It’s not uncommon for us to fall into that pit. Australian biblical scholar and pastor Howard Wallace points out that Elijah needs to be released from the zealousness and self-control that had ruled his previous service and learn that it was the word of the Lord, which sometimes did not speak in the wind or earthquake or fire, to which he needed to submit his prophetic witness.[i] We’re convinced it’s all up to us. No one else is going to step up, it’s all on our shoulders. Yes, it’s easy to slip into that particular quality of despair, but it can be possibly the worst place for a follower of Christ to end up, It can go either of two different ways, both disastrous and potentially destructive.

This has been a week where perhaps we’ve felt that despair and sense of aloneness, in the wake of the horrific murders of forty-nine patrons in a nightclub in Orlando patronized primarily by gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans, or queer persons (and primary a Latino/Latina audience on that particular night). That event happened only a few days before the first anniversary of another infamous shooting, of nine members of an African-American congregation in Charleston. In the face of such horrific evil, it’s not hard to slip into that despair that no one is faithful anymore, no one will stand up and do what needs to be done.

Of course, on the flip side of that “I alone am left” mentality is the misguided, vengeful would-be Lone Ranger who takes up weapons to commit the murders, because he believes blacks are inferior or gets offended by the sight of two men kissing. “I alone am left” is not just a despairing place; it can be a pathway to acts of unspeakable evil. Even Elijah has already shown himself capable of grotesque violence in the throes of this mindset, commanding the slaughter of all those Baal prophets back in verse 18.

We can’t go there. We must not fall into that mindset (which has nothing of God in it) that the problems of the world are ours to solve by any means necessary. We also can’t be the one who is paralyzed by grief and despair, unable to take up the work of God’s kingdom. We need God, we need Christ, and we need each other too much.

The passage from Paul’s epistle to the Galatians reminds us that for all the ways we differ, God insists on making us one. Not making us “the same,” but one. We are one in Christ. We can’t go thinking we’re the Lone Ranger, folks; if we are truly following Christ, we literally can’t be alone – it is not possible. We are never abandoned, no matter how much we may feel like it.

Speaking of that masked man, besides Tonto, the Lone Ranger as originally written was bound to a strict moral code, one which governed all his actions and prevented him from veering off into revenge or other departures from his mission. For us, our ground is simpler, and yet amazingly complex; our “moral code,” our ground is Christ. It is in Christ, after all, that we are never alone; it is in Christ that we are one.

Even in dark and despairing days, we’re not alone in this, friends. Let’s not act like it.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

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[i] http://hwallace.unitingchurch.org.au/WebOTcomments/OrdinaryC/Pent41Kgs19.html, accessed 17 June 2016.

Hymns (From Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal):

#4                Holy God, We Praise Your Name

#317            In Christ There Is No East or West

#322            We Are One In Christ Jesus

#824            There Is a Place of Quiet Rest

Yep, there's Tonto. See, he's really not "lone."