Sermon: A Psalm of Trust

Grace Presbyterian Church

February 21, 2016, Lent 2C

Psalm 27; Luke 13:31-35

A Psalm of Trust

So apparently two lymph nodes turned up positive (what an ironic use of that word), which means I'll be going into a four-month course of chemotherapy--the real stuff this time, not the oral business like before. Get a port in some time soon and start two weeks from today, that's the current schedule. I am angry as hell right now, and anybody who tries to judge me for that or preach at me over it will be off my friend list as fast as the Internet will allow without even a goodbye.

That was me, on Facebook, on February 18, 2013, three years ago this past Thursday. After allowing myself to get my hopes up after cancer surgery that previous December, that was the day I found out that no, I wasn’t quite through with cancer treatment and would be going through chemo as described. This was, of course, in the midst of my second year at Union Presbyterian Seminary, meaning that I really would not get through any part of that second year of seminary without cancer treatment getting in the way somehow. At times, in more weary moments, yes; I did wonder if that was a sign. A STOP sign, to be specific.

I certainly don’t hold that moment up as a sign that I am somehow a person of great faith. At that moment, even in the middle of seminary, I don’t know that I would vouch for much faith at all. I’d been through a fall’s worth of radiation treatment and oral chemotherapy, followed by the aforementioned surgery. Recovery from that had been difficult at times but largely seemed to be successful; I was back in classes without too much discomfort, and while certain activities were beyond me, I really wasn’t too limited in what I could or couldn’t do. I wasn’t necessarily at full strength, but I was not feeling sick or weak either. And then that word – no, no, you’re not well yet, how could you be so silly as to think that cancer was through with you? And yeah, I was angry. I wouldn’t dare pretend otherwise.

In time, I could look back at that moment and see a person desperately in need of lament, something along the lines of what the psalmist expresses in today’s reading. At its beginning this psalm sounds a bit like last week’s reading, full of confidence and reassurance in God’s goodness and providence. Phrases like “whom shall I fear?” or “of whom shall I be afraid?” sound almost cocky. You don’t scare me. You got nothing on me.

But then the tone shifts, just a little. Suddenly there’s an enemy camped against the psalmist! Evildoers assailing him! And yet the psalmist doesn’t quite slip over the edge to despair. Still proclaiming confidence, the psalmist turns to one of the more beautiful passages in the whole book. Frankly, it’s worth hearing again:

One thing I asked of the Lord, that will I seek after: to live in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the Lord, and to inquire in his temple. For he will hide me in his shelter in the day of trouble; he will conceal me under the cover of his tent; he will set me high on a rock. Now my head is lifted up above my enemies all around me, and I will offer in his tent sacrifices with shouts of joy; I will sing and make melody to the Lord.

Again, one could almost be persuaded that this is a psalm of confidence again, like last week’s Psalm 91. And them comes verse 7. Finally the psalmist can hold the lament back no longer, and the tinge of fear that has been lurking in the background so far comes lurching into the forefront: Hear me, Lord! Answer me! Don’t hide your face from me! Don’t turn away! Don’t forsake me! Don’t forsake me… .

There is no one, not one person on this planet, who is not at some point in her or his life in need of a lament, who is not somehow moved to cry out with the psalmist, not in confidence or cockiness, but in something just a bit different: trust.

Trust is what happens when our confidence is shaken, but we cry to the Lord anyway. No longer is this the psalmist from Psalm 91 instructing others in the reliability of God above. Now we have a figure who is shaken, who cries out in a moment of fear or even terror in this case, desperate to be reassured.

There is no one, not one person on this planet, who is not at some point in her or his life in need of a lament. As the gospel reading for today reminds us, that even includes Jesus.

At a moment when some apparently sympathetic Pharisees (that happened sometimes, in Luke’s gospel) sought to warn Jesus of Herod’s plan to kill him. Jesus expressed his opinion of Herod in no uncertain terms (to call someone a “fox” in this context is quite a statement about that person’s lack of moral character), and then perhaps by surprise Jesus turns his thoughts to Jerusalem, and laments their unwillingness to be gathered in to God’s care. The very protection that the psalmist sings about and cries out for, Jesus sees the people of Jerusalem rejecting.

It’s one of Luke’s more beautiful passages, one that music lovers might recognize as set by Felix Mendelssohn. It is unreservedly emotional. It speaks of great and tender care, wanting to gather in the children of Israel in the way a mother hen might gather in her brood. One might imagine these words being spoken with the beginnings of tears in Jesus’s eyes. And yet, Jesus was not at all deterred from moving forward to his Good Friday fate, in which all those children of God would be gathered in, anyway.

If Jesus was driven to sorrow in this way, you’ll never be exempt from lament. And yet, going back to the psalm, even in the psalmist’s heightened state of anxiety the poem returns to its original state – not unchanged, not necessarily confident, but trusting.

There are several psalms in the book that are given over solely to lament, and some of them get quite angry. One might compare this with Psalm 137. That psalm begins with one of the more beautiful songs of lament in all of scripture –

By the rivers of Babylon—

   there we sat down and there we wept when we remembered Zion.

On the willows there we hung up our harps.

For there our captors asked us for songs,

and our tormentors asked for mirth, saying, ‘Sing us one of the songs of Zion!’

Beautiful, and maybe a little bit familiar to a lot of people of faith. Less familiar, though, and a lot less beautiful, is the end of that particular psalm:

Remember, O Lord, against the Edomites

   the day of Jerusalem’s fall,

how they said, ‘Tear it down! Tear it down! Down to its foundations!’

O daughter Babylon, you devastator!

   Happy shall they be who pay you back what you have done to us!

Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rock!

Rather less lovely, that.

The psalmist of Psalm 27 doesn’t go there, thankfully, no matter how much his fears and anxieties might urge her or him to do so. Rather, what follows is supplication to God – asking God for protection, for shelter, for comfort. Confident? Not necessarily. Trusting? Yes, oh yes.

We all have our confidence shaken at some point. It’s what happens in a fallen world. The psalmists teach us to cry out. The psalmists show us how to lament, to cry out even in our fear or anxiety or even anger. Jesus also shows us lament. But both the psalmist and Jesus also show us how to go forward even in a time of lament, to press ahead despite the fear or anxiety.

They show us how to trust.

For trust, in times of sorrow or fear, Thanks be to God. Amen.

Hymns (PH ’90): “The God of Abraham Praise” (488); “God Is My Strong Salvation” (179); “The Glory of These Forty Days” (87); “Lord, Make Us More Holy” (536)

Detail from Edward Burke-Jones, "The Lament"

Sermon: A Psalm of Confidence

Grace Presbyterian Church

February 14, 2016, Lent 1C

Psalm 91:1-2, 9-16; Luke 4:1-13

A Psalm of Confidence

The Psalms are a fairly constant presence in the life of the church. Certain individual psalms are irreversibly locked into the memory banks of the body of Christ – Psalm 23 most notably, but there are others. Musicians come to know Psalm 150 very well, as well as Psalm 100. Individual verses from particular psalms also stand out as well.

Presbyterians, taking a cue from their heritage in the Reformation as inspired by John Calvin, have given particular emphasis to the inclusion of psalms as a regular part of worship. It wasn’t always a good thing, mind you; the song of the church would be infinitely poorer if, as under Calvin’s control, psalms were the only songs that could be sung in the church’s worship. But consciously including psalms in worship is a good thing. It was a relief to me to see, upon arriving at Grace a little over a year ago, that psalms were regularly included in worship in the form of the responsive reading. Mind you, the musician in me can’t help but feel that’s not quite as good as singing them, but it’s still good.

I’d be remiss, though, if I didn’t also acknowledge that there is risk in such regular hearing of the psalms in such a fashion, as there is with anything that is repeated on a regular basis in worship or any other part of our life together. We can become so accustomed to hearing the psalm in worship that we forget to listen to it. The risk is present that it becomes merely background noise. Again, that can be true of many parts of worship – the choir anthem, the prayers, any of the scripture readings, even (shudder) the sermon.

This would be a shame, because Psalms is unique in the Bible as the one book in which we are given models for a human response to the revelation of God.

Now before anybody gets in a theological panic, let’s be clear here: Psalms is just as much a book of divine inspiration as any other in the Bible. But note how many of the psalm texts are composed from a decidedly human point of view: “The Lord is my shepherd…” or “Create in me a clean heart, O God” from Psalm 51, “O come, let us sing unto the Lord” from Psalm 95, just for a few examples.

Another way in which individual psalms model a human response to God is found in today’s reading from Psalm 91. Here the psalmist offers testimony to the faithfulness of God directed to his (or her) fellow worshipers. It’s a pretty simple effect: the psalmist has known and experienced the goodness of God, and testifies to that goodness to others, expressing confidence in the God who has shown goodness and graciousness to all of the children of God.

The psalmist proclaims God’s protection, speaking of God as a “refuge” and “fortress.” Perhaps the psalmist has known God’s deliverance from great trouble or distress. Or possibly the psalmist is creating this expression of confidence as an act of devotion, given for the corporate worship of the people of Israel.

In either case, we are witnessing the psalmist wrestling with the perennial challenge of God’s people: how do we express our devotion to a God who is beyond expression? What words do we, word-bound creatures as we are, use for a God who is beyond words?

It would be a mistake to assume that a passage like this one has to become a fixed text. We are not going to find our way to a most effective expression of worship or prayer or anything by taking verses like these first two and turning them into inflexible and rote mantras we repeat mindlessly. That’s not what these psalms are meant to be. Rather, we take these psalms and let their language shape and inform and inspire our own hearts in our own language. We learn to speak confidence not by turning the verses into a repeated formula but by taking them into our hearts, learning confidence as we live with the guidance of the Spirit in the body of Christ. Let the psalm teach you how to praise.

There is, of course, a risk to all this confidence. We humans are pretty good at taking such confidence and becoming jerks with it. We take such words as this psalm offers and, instead of learning how to live and give praise and be in the body, turn them into weapons. Confidence in God too easily becomes pride in our own righteousness. We get tempted to flaunt that confidence, to act as if we have somehow earned that refuge or that shelter or that fortress by our superior faith. Or we are tempted to use that confidence as a means to wield power.

This is the crux of the temptation Jesus faces in our gospel reading. The outlines of the story are familiar. Jesus, after being baptized, is led by the Spirit out into the wilderness. He eats nothing for those forty days, and faces temptation from the devil. First, appropriately enough for someone who hasn’t eaten for forty days, Jesus is tempted to use his power to turn stones into bread. Jesus refuses, using the words of Deuteronomy 8:3. The second temptation, a temptation to claim ultimate power in turn for allegiance to the devil, Jesus turns away with words from Deuteronomy 6:3.

Then comes the kicker: it turns out, as Shakespeare would say many centuries later, that the devil can cite scripture for his purpose. If Jesus is going to keep quoting scripture at the devil, well, two can play at that game, and the devil does exactly that, pulling out a couple of verses from today’s psalm.

Sounds like checkmate, huh? I can quote scripture just as much as you. So there. But there’s a big difference between being able to quote scripture and knowing it. At minimum, this should be a reminder that the person quoting scripture at us isn’t always the nice guy.

Our call isn’t to become a quote machine. We can memorize all the Bible verses we want, but if the message of that scripture doesn’t sink into our minds and hearts and inform the very way we think and act and speak, it’s not all that useful. Certainly Jesus knew the psalm the devil quoted, but Jesus also knew that the devil’s use of that scripture was a twisting and distorting of its message. The psalmist didn’t talk about angels guarding you from dashing your foot against a stone in order to encourage you to jump off tall buildings to prove your faith or to prove that God likes you best. The psalm teaches confidence in God’s refuge, not putting God to the test – which of course Jesus answers to the devil, using one more passage from Deuteronomy, 6:16.

Let the Psalms be a teacher for these next few weeks, particularly in this season of Lent. If the great challenge of Lent is to examine ourselves and know our need for repentance, these psalms help us to find that language of confidence in God, as well as such things as trust, dependence, wisdom, repentance, and many more responses to God with which we modern followers of Christ so often struggle. Let the words of these psalms be more than just words; let them be wisdom, “wisdom in my secret heart” as Psalm 51:6 describes. Take in these verses and let them help you form a language for self-examination, for looking into those darkest corners of the soul and seeing what God sees in you, both the good and the bad.

For scriptures that help us pray and reflect, Thanks be to God. Amen.

Hymns (PH 90): “O God, Our Help In Ages Past” (210); “Within Your Shelter, Loving God” (212); “Lord, Who Throughout These Forty Days” (81); “God Be With You Till We Meet Again” (540).

Ash Wednesday meditation: Truth In the Inward Being

Grace Presbyterian Church

February 10, 2016, Ash Wednesday C

Psalm 51:1-17

Truth In the Inward Being

We don’t like to look at ourselves too closely.

It’s uncomfortable to look inside of our own minds, or especially our own souls. It’s dark in there.

Far easier, in the modern world, to distract attention from the darkness and fallenness of our own person. Easier to point and blame. Look at that person. Look how awful they are. Even better if that other person is famous somehow – a celebrity of some sort; singer, actor, athlete, politician. That way we can all gang up on them safely, without fear of being called, and especially without fear of having to look inside ourselves, examine our motives, see our own darkness.

The author of this psalm must have been in agony.

In most Bibles Psalm 51 carries a heading suggesting it was “A Psalm of David, when the prophet Nathan had come to him, after he had gone in to Bathsheba.” While the heading is certainly evocative, and the situation it mentions certainly is in keeping with the content of the psalm, there are two main problems with it. Historically, the heading doesn’t seem to have come with the psalm, originally; it seems instead to have been added at least four hundred years later, well after David was dead. That doesn’t necessarily mean the psalm wasn’t associated with David, but it’s a little troubling.

The bigger, more theological problem with the heading is that it surreptitiously encourages us to think that we don’t need to engage in the self-examination and repentance portrayed in the psalm unless we’ve just committed one big whopper of a misdeed.

And that’s a tremendous problem. We all have “fallenness” in common. Our need to cry out with the psalmist, as in verse 5, that we have been sinners since before we can remember is not dependent on having just been caught in a major infraction. We can and should always be able to acknowledge that, as verse 3 says, “my sin is ever before me.”

God sees this in us. As much as God loves us and longs to draw us ever closer, God never see us without that sinfulness in us, no matter how the psalmist might beg in verse 8. Because God loves us so, God wants us to see in ourselves what separates us from all that God is and wants us to have and to be. Thus, the psalmist cries out to God to be cleansed – no, more than cleansed; to be purged, to be purified, to be “de-sinned” – to have all that horror show of fallenness and separation extracted from us once and for all. But that can never happen until we see it; thus in verse 6 – a wholly remarkable verse – the psalmist hits upon this: “You desire truth in the inward being; therefore teach me wisdom in my secret heart.” That’s a curious phrase – “secret heart” – and the word actually used here warrants an explanation. We Americans are likely to see “heart” as a metaphor for the source of love, particularly aided by that other holiday coming up on Sunday. Hebrew thinking, though, understood the heart as the center of will, or of decision-making. The psalmist is asking to be made wise in the inmost and deepest part of himself or herself in order to live rightly, wisely, and truthfully – as in that earlier phrase “truth in the inward being.”

“Truth in the inward being.” God desires us to be truthful – not merely in the sense of distinguishing facts from falsehoods, although that’s always a good thing, but in being true. Living true. The word goes much deeper than even such words as “faithfulness”; living in complete coherence and inseparability with the Source of all our living.

And then, when we have learned truth in the inward being, when we have been purged and “de-sinned” and made clean and had a “new and right spirit” put within us, then we will live in the joy of salvation, we will be the ones who show others how to live – not merely with words but with our lives – and we will sing our praise to God in a way that transcends even the most noble of sacrifices. The “broken” spirit – the one no longer hinged on our pride but on that truth in the inward being – is the sacrifice God loves.

But it starts with that “truth in the inward being.” It starts with self-examination and repentance of our fallenness, and of the way we cling to that fallenness. And sometimes that means we have to stop with the pointing fingers at others without looking into the darker corners of our own souls.

I’m not much for telling people they have to “give up something” for Lent. If we’re not careful it doesn’t necessarily help, and can even become a source of self-righteousness that accomplishes exactly the opposite of what we need in a season of self-examination and repentance. But here’s something I plan to do this year, and maybe some of you might find it helpful too. I’ve got verse 6 written down on a post-it note. It’s going to be on or beside my laptop at all times. I might also post it in my car somewhere (when I have one again), or any other places where I might be tempted to lash out at some other figure caught in public approbation. With any luck I’ll be challenged to engage in the self-examination and repentance I know I need in this season first.

If it works out, I may not have much time or energy to lash out at others. And maybe there will be something more like “truth in the inward being” and “wisdom in my secret heart.”

For the pain and cleansing of repentance, Thanks be to God. Amen.

Hymns "O For a Closer Walk With God" (PH 396); Psalm 51 (PH 196); "Jesus Knows the Inmost Heart" (GtG 427)

Sermon: Three Journeys to a Holy Mountain

Grace Presbyterian Church

February 7, 2016, Transfiguration C

Exodus 34:29-45; Luke 9:28-43a;

2 Corinthians 3:12-4:2

Three Journeys to a Holy Mountain

Mountains often figure into the stories of religious traditions – not just the Judeo-Christian tradition, but others as well. Not surprisingly, mountains often figure as the location for an encounter between the human and the divine, or possibly as a retreat for a person seeking contact with the divine. Such is the commonality of this connection that it shows up fairly often in popular culture – say, any number of comic strips in which people are climbing a high mountain to seek the council of the guru perched atop it. Even in the current blockbuster movie rampaging though theater box offices, Star Wars VII: The Force Awakens, the final scene of the movie takes place on a mountaintop, as a young woman seeks the long-absent last of the Jedi Knights. To bring the mountain references full circle, that scene itself was filmed on a mountaintop on an island off the coast of Ireland that had, until the 12^th century or so, been home to a Christian monastery, a place where monks had sought to live closer to God, and more closely with God.

Moses went up a mountain.

The Hebrew people came to a mountain, Sinai, out in a wilderness. Moses went up that mountain to receive law from God. Receiving the law, first from the finger of God; then the awful rebellion of the Hebrew people; Moses pleading to God not to destroy the people God had just delivered from Egypt. Moses up the mountain again, this time to carve God’s commandments onto new stone tablets.

Exodus tells a strange story at this point. Moses comes down from the mountain, back to the people, after having been forty days with God receiving the commandments. Evidently Moses didn’t notice (though the people did) that after so much time in the presence of God, his face was glowing. Not in the way we speak of a pregnant woman or a new mother “glowing”; Moses’s face was literally shining.

Maybe surprisingly, or maybe not, the people were afraid of Moses. It’s not as if the Hebrew people hadn’t already seen plenty of strange things – the plagues on Egypt, the parting of the sea, the fire and pillar going before them – but this one was too much; too strange, or too close to home, somehow too much for the Hebrew people to bear, and they were afraid of Moses. Eventually Moses had to put on a veil, to keep the people from being fearful or freaked out by his shining face – though he would remove the veil when he went back up the mountain, to the presence of the Lord.

Elijah went up a mountain, too.

Even though the story isn’t included in today’s lectionary reading, Elijah had his own mountain encounter with God. 1 Kings 19 tells the story of Elijah’s flight from Queen Jezebel, who had threatened his life after his victory over the prophets of Baal. Despite seeing four hundred and fifty prophets of a false idol destroyed, and God miraculously devouring with fire an utterly drenched altar, Elijah reacted out of fear of the human monarch rather than trust in the God of power he served. And he ran.

He ran all the way to Horeb, the mount of God, which in Moses’s time had been called Sinai.  There God hid Elijah in the cleft of the rock, where Elijah witnessed God not in the wind, earthquake, or fire, but in the “sound of sheer silence.”

But even in the very presence of God, Elijah reacted with resignation, with fear, and with hopelessness, repeating the same mantra he had repeated all through this journey: “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.“ As a result God sent him down from the mountain with a commission to set apart a new king for Aram, a new king for Israel, and a new prophet … to replace himself. Not every mountaintop turns into triumph.

Now Jesus goes up a mountain.

This wasn’t uncommon. More than a few times Jesus would, throughout the four gospels, go off to a mountain to pray. The passage actually says “the mountain,” a definite article as grammarians would say, though it clearly wasn’t Sinai or Horeb. But it was the mountain, one they knew.

This was a little different, though, because Jesus took a few of his disciples with him. And it got even more different when a couple more people showed up, and something started happening to Jesus. His face changed. His appearance became dazzling bright. Shades of Moses’s shining face.

To their credit, the disciples didn’t react in fear, at least not immediately. Peter started babbling nonsense, about building three booths, but Peter babbling nonsense is just Peter being Peter, really. But then a cloud started descending on all of them, the three disciples as well as the three transfigured figures, and then some fear begins to set in. And frankly, for a good Hebrew, that kind of theophany (a fancy seminary word for “manifestation of God”) should be met with a little fear. The real trouble didn’t start in this case until Jesus and the disciples came down the mountain, when the rest of the disciples had been unable to heal a sick child. Coming down from the mountaintop isn’t easy, and things don’t always work the way you think they should after you’ve been on the mountaintop.

Three journeys to holy mountains – always they were as holy as any place God created, but here made holy by the manifestation of God, to Moses, to Elijah, to the disciples in Jesus. Here the Transfiguration becomes a bookend to Epiphany, when God was made manifest in the child Jesus to those magi who came from far away. God is made manifest in Jesus, God is made manifest in the body of Christ as Paul has been teaching us these last few weeks.

But there’s one more mountain left, actually.

Besides looking back, the mount of transfiguration also looks forward. Luke refers to this in verses 31-32, when Moses and Elijah were speaking to Jesus about his departure, “which he was soon to accomplish in Jerusalem.” There Jesus would be led up one more mountain, upon which would be performed perhaps the most unholy act in human history.

And yet Golgotha, too, is a mount of transfiguration. Only there, on that mountain,, we are the ones being transfigured.

Paul helps us here, in 2 Corinthians. Look at 3:18: “And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit.”

At Epiphany, the magi see God in the child Jesus. At Transfiguration, the disciples see God in their teacher. But on Golgotha, at the other end of this approaching season of Lent, Jesus ascends a mountain so that we might be transformed, we might be changed “from glory to glory,” so that we might be transfigured into the Body of Christ, showing God’s love and justice to a skeptical and suspicious world.

One journey completed, we now take up another. A cross awaits at the end of that journey. Don’t let the old gospel songs fool you: it is a hideous, cruel, demonic cross. What happens there is the brutality of fallen and depraved humanity at its basest and lowest.

And yet…

Because of that one more mountain we are transfigured, are transformed. We are drawn in to God. Because God would not settle for our lostness, our separation, our fallenness, Golgotha, Good Friday, becomes a place of transformation for us.

Today we see Jesus transfigured, but then it’s our turn.

For transformation, Thanks be to God. Amen.

Hymns (PH ’90): “O Splendor of God’s Glory Bright” (474); “Jesus On the Mountain Peak” (74); “O Wondrous Sight, O Vision Fair” (75); “Love Divine, All Loves Excelling” (with tune BEECHER)

Ahem. (agnusday.org, again)

Sermon: What It Looks Like: We Love

Grace Presbyterian Church

January 31, 2016, Epiphany 4C

1 Corinthians 13:1-14:1a

What It Looks Like: We Love

I feel compelled to make one thing clear: despite the scripture passage you’ve just heard, nobody is getting married today. At least not here in this service.

This chapter, probably the most famous thing the Apostle Paul ever wrote by a long shot, is a prime example of a verse that has become so associated with or attached to a particular occasion or usage, in the minds of so many church folk, that we get blinded to the fact that it wasn’t written for that particular purpose, and by so confining it in our minds or in our church life we are in fact starving ourselves of the very spiritual nutrients the passage was meant to provide for us, the “more excellent way” Paul urges upon us.

Before going further, let me make this clear: just because this passage wasn’t written as an ode to romantic love doesn’t mean it isn’t appropriate for a service of marriage. There’s nothing starry-eyed or swoony about the love Paul describes here. This love is tough, determined, and persistent, enduring even in the harshest of times. Yes, that is exactly the kind of love of which a couple needs to be reminded on the occasion of their marriage. We simply need to hear it at other times as well, and not connected to a wedding.

Though it may seem a bit of a diversion or tangent when situated in the contest of what Paul has just said before and is about to say after, in fact it is quite the opposite. Paul’s discourse on love is central to this part of his letter, and one might even argue to the whole letter as well. Indeed, the litany of love’s characteristics is more than just beautiful and poetic; it is a pointed response to those difficult Corinthians to whom Paul was writing, who had created the divisions Paul addresses in this letter.

First of all, the very gifts Paul has been discussing in chapter 12 are put in their place, in verses 1-3. Without love, none of them – none of these gifts over which the Corinthians had been in dispute, trying to one-up each other – are anything. Not the most eloquent or powerful speech, not prophecy, not even faith, not even the most extravagant generosity. Without love, these simply don’t add up to anything. If anything, as the Corinthians are experiencing, even those great gifts can become destructive.

If Paul is perhaps deflating the egos of the Corinthians in verses 1-3, he gets quite pointed in verses 4-7. For example, Paul isn’t just being lofty and poetic when he says “love is not envious” in verse 4; Paul is very specifically responding to the behavior of the Corinthians he has already chastised back in chapter 3, verse 3. Saying that love is not boastful follows very clearly after Paul’s admonition in 5:6 that “your boasting is not a good thing.” He flat-out calls them “arrogant” in 5:2, which love is not here. In short, the Corinthians are profoundly lacking in love for one another, and thus their church is fractured and difficult.

No two churches are alike. There are, though, ways that any church might want to examine itself to see just how its actions and missions and enacting of its spiritual gifts actually reflects the love of Christ for the church and the love Christ charges the church to show to the world. It’s far too easy for any given church to slip into a pattern of “going through the motions” in its missions and ministries. Conversely, such missions or ministries can fall into the trap of being ways the church flaunts itself, getting “puffed up” as the King James Version translates Paul’s description of the Corinthians, and pointing to its good works as a means of exalting itself against “those people” in other churches or denominations or religions. And that, whatever it is, isn’t love.

At this point Paul turns again to those spiritual gifts from chapter 12, and how love is “more excellent” because, as verse 8 puts it, “love never ends.” It would be easy to mis-interpret this passage as a particular kind of criticism of those gifts, but that would be to miss Paul’s point. Gifts such as prophecy, knowledge, or tongues are finite. More precisely, they are end-directed. These are gifts given by the Spirit, at the Spirit’s own initiative and the Spirit’s own choice, for this in-between time when we are in relationship with God, when we are the body of Christ but not yet in union with Christ. When we are come at last to that place where we are eternally in the company and presence of God the Father and God the Son and God the Holy Spirit, there will be no need for prophecy. There will be no point to tongues. Knowledge will be fulfilled. Teaching, preaching, help, all those other gifts will be done.

But love never ends. Love is as eternal as God is eternal. That eternal union with God will be all love.

Even faith and hope, as Paul describes in the chapter’s final and most famous verse, are secondary to love in this way. Faith and hope are beautiful. They are amazing gifts of the Spirit. But like the others Paul describes, they are finite gifts to help sustain us through this in-between time. If faith is, as the author of Hebrews describes, “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen,” then what is the point of faith when we are in the very presence of God, seeing God face to face? What is the point of hope when God is unmistakably and unshakably in the midst of us, for all to see? The partial things, as Paul says in verse 10, come to an end.

But love never ends. Love is as eternal as God is eternal.

Love. Never. Ends.

Though it is not part of today’s lectionary reading, the first verse of chapter 14 is useful, or even needful, to place chapter 13 into proper relationship with chapter 12.

“Pursue love, and strive for the spiritual gifts.”

Not either/or, both/and.

Paul’s instruction does not mean that the Corinthians, or we, should somehow deny the gifts we have been given by the Spirit – and remember from back in 12:3 that anyone who truly confesses that “Jesus is Lord” is gifted by the Holy Spirit. Rather, Paul needs the Corinthians, and us, to understand that the care and feeding and usage of our spiritual gifts within the body of Christ and out in the larger world only works in the context of love – the love that God has shown us so that we might show love for one another and for all of God’s creation.

Sometimes that love takes on dramatic forms. Social media offered up this week a story (drawn from the Today show) of a woman in Wisconsin, Cori Salchert, who after a career as a nurse has come into a unique and sometimes heartbreaking calling. Cori and her family take in infants with terminal or extremely life-limiting diagnoses. She calls them “hospice babies.”

The first such infant the family took in lived fifty days, which might have been forty-five days longer than might have been expected. Cori Salcher is a trained nurse; she has no illusions that any child they take in will be “saved” in their care. She knows they will die.

But for those fifty days, or three months or two years or however long each child may live, that child will be loved. Not for hope of any return or expectation of any miracle, and not because it will somehow make her family any “holier” than any other family. That child will be loved because God loves, eternally, and her family will be a vessel of that love.

Our stories will not be that dramatic. They will be heartbreaking at times. They will try our patience or our virtue. We may stumble in grief and leap for joy at the same time because of that love. But if we dare to call ourselves followers of Christ, we will love, without reservation and without qualification.

We will love because God is love, eternal and unending. We will love because God loves. We will love because Christ loves. And we will love because that’s what the body of Christ does.

For love, eternal and unending, Thanks be to God. Amen.

Hymns (PH ’90): “Lord, Speak to Me That I May Speak (426); “Not For Tongues of Heaven’s Angels” (531); “Though I May Speak” (335); “O Love That Wilt Not Let Me Go” (384).

agnusday.org

Sermon: What It Looks Like: We Need Each Other

Grace Presbyterian Church

January 24, 2016, Epiphany 3C

1 Corinthians 12:12-31

What It Looks Like: We Need Each Other

Bodies are amazing things. The sheer complexity of the human organism, the dynamics of coordination that make us able to function physically and mentally are staggering.

The trouble is, though, that bodies being so interdependent can result in one small problem in one part of the body can cause trouble for the whole body. I received a personal object lesson in this fact earlier this week. My body temperature was off, just barely. Not even a degree high, but just a little bit high. Yet that very small difference in temperature was enough to leave me alternately chilly and hot, a bit woozy, and generally not very functional for a couple of days.

Athletes are particularly prone to this kind of difficulty. In the 1937 All-Star Game in Major League Baseball, the pitcher Dizzy Dean of the St. Louis Cardinals was struck on the foot by a line drive, and ended up with a broken toe. Dean was out for a significant part of that season, but with his St. Louis Cardinals striving for a pennant Dean tried to get back into action before his toe was fully healed. In trying to prevent more damage or pain in that broken toe, Dean altered his delivery – the mechanics of his pitching motion. Unable to adjust to a new pitching motion, Dean injured his arm. His pitching career never fully recovered, and Dean was forced to retire from baseball four years later, only able to win a few more games in that career. A toe seems an awfully small thing, but in Dizzy Dean’s case, it was enough to bring his whole body down. Bodies are amazing things, indeed – sometimes in a good way, sometimes less so.

That Paul chooses the body as a metaphor for the interworkings of the people of God is striking and informative in ways that the apostle himself might not even have imagined.

While Paul is the only contributor to the New Testament to use this particular metaphor, it wasn’t uncommon for teachers and writers in the Greco-Roman world to use such a metaphor to describe communal life. Philosophers and political figures were particularly fond of the body metaphor in that culture. For a politician, for example, the metaphor of the body might well be used to suggest that every member of a society had his or place to fill. A body needs a head; that place was to be filled by the “elites” of society – the wealthy, the military elite, those in power. A body also needs hands and feet; here pretty much everybody else in society, those charged with the hard or dirty or dangerous work of society was to fulfill his or her role.

Paul, though, takes a different angle on this metaphor. For Paul, what matters is the utter interdependence of the body – the degree to which the body needs everything in good working order. Parts of the body that might be regarded as weaker, or less “respectable,” are treated with greater care and covered or protected more carefully. In Paul’s scheme of the body, no part can claim to be independent of all the other parts. The eye can see all it wants to see, but without feet and legs to move, or hands to do the work that needs to be done, the eye is powerless. The head is useless without the rest of the body.

Many of us know what it is for our physical bodes to fail us or betray us. We see what needs to be done but we just aren’t capable of doing it physically. If one part of the body suffers, the whole body suffers with it. And so it is with the body of Christ, the church; when one member of this body suffers, we all suffer with that member.

Paul wants us to understand, in verse 13, that in being baptized in Christ we are baptized into this one body, no matter the differences between us. Indeed, following on the first part of this chapter we heard last week, the differences we bring to the body are not accidental; they are necessary, both in a given local congregation and in the church universal – we need all those different experiences, all those different backgrounds, for the body of Christ to function rightly and bear witness to the good news.

This is where it gets tricky, though. We are not always good at dealing with difference. We don’t always care for diversity, even as we need it. New Testament scholar Brian Peterson puts it bluntly in noting that “We often confuse unity with uniformity, because it is much easer to gather with people who are like ourselves than it is to reach across the divisions which mark our culture.”[i] We are more comfortable with a church where everybody looks like us, talks like us, is about the same age as us, reads the Bible in the same way as we do – or for that matter, votes like us, goes to Gator games like us, and all sorts of other things that may have very little to do with the life of the church. It’s a natural inclination, but it isn’t really all that Christlike.

In verse 13 Paul refers to two of the great divisions he knew to be at work in the church – “Jews or Greeks, slaves or free.” Admittedly, “Jew or Greek” is not a huge dividing line in the modern church, and while slavery certainly does exist in the modern world still, such a dividing line doesn’t run through the modern church in quite the same way it did for Paul’s Corinthian readers. We do, though, have lots of dividing lines among us in the church today:

Black or white, or Asian, or Hispanic, or Native American…

Or how about Democrat or Republican?

Maybe rich or poor?

Native-born, naturalized citizen, immigrant waiting to be citizen?

Straight or gay?

How about married or single?

Progressive or mainline or evangelical or fundamentalist?

How are we, as the church, the body of Christ, at truly living in the diversity that makes us work? Or are we still inclined to hole up in like-minded enclaves of homogeneity?

Whether we acknowledge it or not, when any part of the body of Christ suffers, whether they look like us or think like us or sound like us or have anything in common with us other than Christ, we all suffer, and we don’t bear witness to the gospel the way the body of Chris is meant to do. And to the degree that we stand by and let that suffering continue, we are complicit in damaging the body and its witness.

Having worked through this body metaphor, Paul now returns to the diversity of spiritual gifts, or manifestations of the presence of the Spirit, that he had discussed earlier in this chapter. Again the list is incomplete, but Paul now places those gifts in the context of the church as God appoints people to contribute: apostles, prophets, teachers, doers of powerful deeds, healers, helpers, leaders, speakers of various tongues. And just as the body would look rather ridiculous if it were nothing but an eye or a foot, so the church becomes rather ridiculous if it consists of nothing but apostles or preachers or teachers.

But as Paul closes this thought, he actually “teases” us with something even better, a better, “more excellent” way for the church to live or for the body of Christ to function. The diverse and distinctive appropriation of gifts is characteristic and even needful in the church, and the diversity of members matters profoundly as well.

And yet, there is something else that matters more than all of these, or more precisely is the very thing that makes this distinctiveness and diversity work. What is it that makes the body of Christ what it is meant to be? What is it that brings all those diverse gifts and abilities and manifestations of the Spirit together in a way that enables us truly to bear witness to the Christ we say we follow?

Thanks be to God. Amen.

Hymns: “Blessed Jesus, At Your Word” (PH 454); “O Word of God Incarnate” (PH 327); “Blest Be the Tie That Binds” (PH 438); “We Are One In the Spirit” (GtG 300)

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[i] Brian Peterson, “Commentary on 1 Corinthians 12:12-31a,” Working Preacher (workingpreacher.org, 24 January 2016 2^nd reading), accessed 21 January 2016.

agnusday.org. Wish they'd do more epistle readings.

Sermon: What It Looks Like: We Use Our Gifts Together

Grace Presbyterian Church

January 17, 2016, Epiphany 2C

1 Corinthians 12:1-11

What It Looks Like: We Use Our Gifts Together

Baseball fans and lovers of the game’s history were saddened this week by the news of the death of Monte Irvin. Irvin starred with the New York Giants from 1949, when he was thirty year old, to 1955, leading the majors in runs batted in with 121 in 1951 and finishing his career with a batting average of .293. He played one season with the Chicago Cubs before retiring in the spring of 1957.

Despite what would seem a short career by Hall of Fame standards, he was elected to the Hall in the 1970s. Of course, to understand why Irvin’s career seems so slight and yet he’s a Hall of Famer, you need to remember the state of baseball at the time, and that Irvin was black.

Even a casual baseball fan most likely remembers that until Jackie Robinson joined the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947, Major League Baseball had barred African-Americans from the game throughout the twentieth century. Irvin had spent the first part of his career in the Negro Leagues, the shadow league that hosted numerous talented players, such as Josh Gibson, “Cool Papa” Bell, Buck O’Neill (the native of Carrabelle, over in the Panhandle, who became the “star” of Ken Burns’s series Baseball), and other future major leaguers such as Satchel Paige, Willie Mays, and even Hank Aaron for a year.

While the Negro Leagues provided great entertainment and a place for black players to put their talents to use, and Major League Baseball did include pretty fair talent in its pre-integration days (Babe Ruth, Joe DiMaggio, and Ty Cobb come to mind, among others), it doesn’t take a brilliant mind to understand that baseball wasn’t at its best.

The best players didn’t play against each other. Babe Ruth in his prime didn’t get to take his hacks against Satchel Paige in his prime. A pitcher like Dizzy Dean never had to try to keep Cool Papa Bell from stealing a base. Both leagues had talent and entertainment, but baseball simply wasn’t the best it could be as long as players like Gibson, Bell, or O’Neill weren’t part of the game.

The Apostle Paul would get that.

You see, Paul’s work as he traveled around the Mediterranean was frequently made more challenging by the difficulties of churches made up of diverse groups of people and the disputes, disagreements, or contests that too often arose between those groups. For example, by the time Paul is making his travels the congregations to whom he preaches and writes are usually composed of both Jewish and Gentile converts to Christianity. At times the Jewish party would contend that the Gentiles needed to take up practices associated with Judaism (most notably the act of circumcision for males) before they could be fully accepted into the fledgling group of Christ’s followers. To put it more briefly, they felt that Gentiles should become Jews in order to become Christians. Paul, despite his own thoroughly Jewish heritage, argued against that claim, agreeing with those who called that an unnecessary burden.

The conflict Paul addresses here in 1 Corinthians is a different one, and not necessarily based on Jewish-Gentile dividing lines, but causing tremendous strain in the church at Corinth no less. Rather, in this case, this local church was struggling with the effects of spiritual pride and even a kind of competitiveness, in which some claimed that their particular spiritual gifts made them spiritually superior to others. This kind of spiritual elitism never ends well, and Corinth was no exception.

After much chiding and critique earlier in the book on this and other matters, Paul now turns with chapter 12 to address “matters pertaining to the Spirit.” “Spiritual gifts,” the term you see in verse 1, is certainly part of the matter, but not the full extent of what Paul wants to address.

First Paul is compelled to remind his readers, many of whom in Corinth were Gentile converts to The Way, that all of them had been equal in ignorance before following Christ. The lot of them had been duped worshipers of powerless, speechless idols. Even as followers of Christ now, Paul challenges them to understand that they have much to learn, particularly about the Holy Spirit.

For example: no one who is speaking under the influence of the Holy Spirit could ever utter the phrase “Let Jesus be cursed!” You can’t do it. Similarly, but not quite the same way, one cannot make the claim that “Jesus is Lord” except by the power of the Holy Spirit. Even being able to make the confession “Jesus is Lord” is evidence of the work of the Spirit.

Understand what it means: anyone who confesses “Jesus is Lord” is doing so by a gift of the Spirit. There is no one who confesses Christ is Lord that is not gifted by the Spirit. If that’s the case, no one has any business claiming that any other believer has no spiritual gift. We all do. That’s how we can even be followers of Christ at all, by the gift of the Spirit. You didn’t think you earned your salvation, did you?

With that understanding, Paul turns to the issue of differences in spiritual gifts and other workings of the Spirit. One of the common threads of what Paul has to say is that difference, or variety, or diversity is inevitable, and indeed is “baked into” the way that the Spirit “gifts” the followers of Christ. Each of us receives different abilities or talents or gifts.

Paul sketches out a few of these possible gifts or abilities in verses 7-10. By no means is this a complete list, but Paul mentions the speaking both of wisdom and of knowledge; faith; healing; miracles; prophecy; discernment; and the speaking and interpreting of tongues. And as Paul notes, the Spirit allots these gifts to the children of God quite according to the Spirit’s own choosing, and nothing other.

The challenge for the Corinthians was to understand that this dispersal of the gifts of the Spirit was absolutely no cause for pride. There is no grounds for any claim that having any one spiritual gift made you in any way superior to or more important than any of your sisters or brothers in Christ.

I have been called as the pastor of this church and have been here almost exactly a year now. I believe I do have some gift for the speaking of wisdom or knowledge, perhaps a way of describing preaching. Hopefully those three years I spent in seminary helped develop that gift to some degree. But if I were ever tempted to think that this particular gift were somehow “more special” or more important than other gifts, … well, let’s just say that many weeks, including this week, have really caused me to wish I had a gift for healing or miracles instead.

What Paul needs the Corinthians (and us) to understand is that we need all the gifts. This church can’t survive on preaching alone. Nor can it survive on any one of the gifts the Spirit might bestow. We need them all, both our own church here and the greater church around the world. And when we turn inward, when we start failing to welcome others into our church, or when we start drawing lines to keep some out and include only certain people, “folks like us,” then we are cutting ourselves off from some of the very gifts or manifestations of the Spirit that we absolutely need to survive, for the common good.

And it’s not even about our surviving, in the end. Our church, local or universal, is not put here on earth to serve ourselves. These flourishings of the Spirit that are made manifest in us are here to show God’s glory to those all around us. We are here to bear witness to the gospel, to be the vessel by which that good news is given to all the world around us. And those gifts of the Spirit are scattered out among us for that very end; giving glory to God that the world might see.

This is part of the church “being an epiphany.” When we all pull together using each of our distinctive gifts for the work of the kingdom of God, we become a revelation of God to the world, through the working of the Spirit. We show God to the world. We show the world what it looks like when the Spirit is working among us. Or, when we start elevating some gifts and demeaning others, when we start indulging in pride about our own spiritual abilities, or when we cut ourselves off from the gifts we need in the church because we don’t like the people who have them? Or when we hold back the gifts God has given us for whatever reason? We fail to bear witness to God’s Spirit.

The abilities we bring to the body of Christ are not an accident. The Holy Spirit is working in us, each of us, all of us, so that we might bear witness to God and to the gospel of Christ to a world that really needs to be reminded of that story and to hear that witness. And we have no margin for error; we need all of those manifestations of the Spirit to do our job in the world.

For gifts of the Spirit, and the opportunity to use them together, Thanks be to God. Amen.

Hymns: “Praise, My Soul, the King of Heaven” (PH 478), “Great Is Thy Faithfulness” (PH 276), “When Hands Reach Out and Fingers Trace” (GtG 302), “We All Are One in Mission” (PH 435)