Sermon Digests of Grace Covenant Church

Sermon Digests

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Christmas Sunday: Collateral Damage
Matthew 2:13-23 December 30, 2007 larry dipboye

      In an interview with biographers, Timothy McVeigh expressed regret for parking his truck bomb so near the daycare center in the 1995 destruction of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. His concern for the death of nineteen children focused on the public relations nightmare that distracted attention from his anti-government message. He was reported to have used the military euphemism, “collateral damage,” as an explanation of suffering of the innocents.
      In Matthew’s account of the birth of Jesus, King Herod is threatened by the report from the Eastern Magi of the birth of a new king of Israel. Rather than reporting back to Herod as requested, the Magi return home by another route leaving Herod in the dark concerning the identity and location of the newborn king. In one of his tantrums, according to Matthew, Herod ordered the execution of every child under age two in and around Bethlehem. I can imagine an adviser gently challenging the order because of the political fallout and possible riot that it might provoke. You can almost hear Herod’s two word response, “collateral damage.”
      Children are persons. The “thingification” of children offends our moral sensitivity. Matthew paints a grim picture of Herod the Great consistent with what we know from other historical records. Although there is no corroborating evidence of the slaughter of children in Bethlehem, the story blends well with other reports on Herod. Josephus detailed the final years of Herod’s reign with concentration on his brutality. Herod was a ruthless tyrant interested only in his own aggrandizement. Even the Romans were appalled at his lack of humanity. Caesar Augustus was said to have punned, “it is better to be Herod’s pig (hus) than his son (huios).” In a jealous rage he had three of his own children executed apparently out of fear that they might threaten his authority. When certain Pharisees prophesied that Herod would lose his throne to his brother Pheroras, Herod responded with orders of execution for the Pharisees and anyone who had publicly affirmed their prediction. To assure proper mourning of his death, Herod issued a standing order in his last days for the immediate execution of all notable political prisoners to coincide with the news of his death. Herod was certainly capable of the atrocity reported by Matthew and cold enough to have viewed the death of children as “collateral damage.”
      Matthew’s story is intended to connect baby Jesus with baby Moses and the central saving event of Hebrew history, the Exodus. Matthew wants you to connect the dots. Just as God miraculously spared Moses from the cruelty of Pharaoh, God directed Joseph through a dream to pack up and leave the jurisdiction of Herod. Joseph, the father, is named for Joseph son of Israel, who was also a dreamer, who also is connected to Egypt. Egypt is a place, but it is also a symbol of God’s saving work, and Matthew is more concerned with symbols that proclaim the message of salvation than with the facts of history that might pass our modern true-false test. Unfortunately, the absence of a factual basis in history for the suffering of innocents in Bethlehem does not relieve our anxiety about the justice of God. Although Matthew does not address the question, readers of his story have wondered why God did not rescue the other children of Bethlehem. Herod may have viewed them as collateral damage necessary to reach his target, but the word of God through the ages affirms the personhood, the identity with God’s image, of every child.
      In Hebrew history Rachel, the wife of Jacob/Israel, died giving birth to Benjamin (Genesis 35)and was buried near Bethlehem. Matthew cites the lamentation of Rachel from Jeremiah 31:15 as a fulfillment of prophecy in the slaughter of the innocents of Bethlehem. In Jeremiah, Rachel’s lamentation is neither for her own death nor for her newborn son. From the grave she cries for children in exile. Matthew finds a connection to Bethlehem’s grief over the death of the children.
      The suffering and death of children is unnatural. Tennyson observed that nature is “red in tooth and claw.” Some naturalists would insist that the balance of nature sustains the existence of predators that allows and supports the suffering of the young and the weak. The primary moral attack on Darwinian philosophy of life is the idea of the “survival of the fittest.” Although Darwin himself made no moral connections to the operations of nature and the justification of predatory behavior, “social Darwinism” has often been used to justify the dominance of the strongest and the disposal of the weakest.
      The historical facts in Matthew are not as important as the timeless repetition of the suffering of innocents. The untimely death of a child is always an unnatural, misplaced event. Matthew heard the echos of a community outcry not unlike the mourning of Oak Ridge over the death of twelve-year old Ashley Paine under the wheel of a school bus. We can find justification for the death of a soldier or policeman in the line of duty. We see fulfillment at the end of a long life well-lived, but the suffering and death of a child always evokes an outcry of righteous indignation. Yes, we grieve, but it is an angry grief that challenges the injustice of those who ought to protect and defend the children. We are appalled at parents or guardians who abuse children; at businesses that import, produce, and market unsafe toys or furniture; at political systems and leaders that ignore or dodge healthcare needs of children; or at the God of creation in a world where hunger, disease, abandonment, war are constant threats to the lives of the little ones.
      The practice of abandoning newborn babies to death by exposure in Roman society has often been cited as evidence of the inhumanity of that culture. The letter from a Roman soldier instructing his pregnant wife to expose her child if a girl or to keep a boy seems to be beneath the moral level of an animal. We could wish that the reality were a remnant from ancient history in primitive times that precede modern civil behavior, but not so. The Nazi attempt to exterminate the Jewish population from Europe was the classic modern example of the war on children. Estimates that a million children under sixteen died during Hitler’s program of extermination. Even death by hunger and disease was not of natural causes. They were deliberately, cruelly exterminated like vermin. The Jewish persecution led in 1948 to the adoption by the United Nations of the “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.” The war on children has continued for the past sixty years. Most recently the “convention” has addressed crimes in Bosnia, where the policy of extermination was called “ethnic cleansing,”in Rwanda, and in the Sudan over the slaughter in Dafur.
      Parents are protectors. After an extended preface to show that Jesus was born as an act of God and that Joseph, the unnatural father, was naturally confused and disturbed by the pregnancy of Mary, Joseph stands out in the story as a man of God and protector of his family. Joseph, who is essential in the genealogy of Jesus that connects him to David, is the defender and protector of his young family under the threat of Herod. With no attempt to explain or defend the virginal conception or to argue the miraculous birth of Jesus, Joseph’s role in the story is the same as every surrogate parent in this world of the weak and the helpless. We can no more turn our heads away and ignore the suffering of children in Iraq or Darfur than Joseph could awaken from his dream and roll over with a sigh that Jesus was not his problem.
      In a time of oppression Zechariah envisioned a new Jerusalem where senior adults could more freely about the town and the children would play in the streets, a world in which the young, the old, and the helpless would find protection and peace. The golden age of peace, the kingdom of God, would be God’s gift to the people, and in a time of constant oppression by overwhelming armies it seemed that only God could fulfill the hopes and dreams of all the years.
I recall a message from Carlyle Marney on world peace in which he asked the question, “Does peace wait on God?” If so, a God of love and justice would truly give this gift to the people. But what if peace waits, not on God, but on us? What if God is waiting for every adult in this world to act as Joseph to Jesus, to become the protectors of the world’s children? What if peace waits on me and on you?

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Advent IV: God with Us
Isaiah 7:10-14; Matthew 1:18-23 December 23, 2007 carolyn dipboye

     Are you familiar with the Great O’s? Traditionally known as the O Antiphons, they are seven verses recited or sung, two verses at a time, at Vespers in the Catholic church in the week leading up to Christmas Eve. Their exact origin is not known, but they appear to be ancient. One of the church fathers made reference to them in the late 5^th or early 6^th century: “O Wisdom, from highest heaven . . . come.” “O Emmanuel . . . come.” They were recited in a 7^th century Benedictine abbey; and by the 8^th century, they were in use in Rome and the monasteries. The haunting tune by which we sing them today goes back at least to the 15^th century and perhaps even the 8^th. The hope-filled refrain: “Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel shall come” was added in the Protestant era.
     The most solemn of Advent hymns, each of its traditional seven verses begins with a title for Messiah taken from the book of Isaiah: O Wisdom, O Lord, O Root of Jesse, O Key of David, O Rising Sun, O King of the Nations, and O Emmanuel. Each expresses the struggle of human history and the longing for salvation, light, healing, deliverance and freedom. The seven titles are so arranged that if we begin with the last and take the first letter of each, we have the Latin words ero cras and the joyful promise, “Tomorrow, I will come.”
     There are those who rebel against the heaviness of the hymn. They argue we need to get on with the joy of Christmas rather than becoming bogged down in the doleful waiting of Advent. Human history, however, like our personal histories, is not always joyful; and perhaps the very duration of the Great Antiphons reflects the tenacity with which faith must hold onto hope. In an intriguing article in an Advent issue of The Living Pulpit, Mary Gray traces the soulful message of “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” through the turmoil of the ages. She envisions 6^th century Christians uttering its cry as they were brutalized by Vandals and Huns. She imagines a handful of 6^th century monks chanting it into the cold, dark night on the lonely island of Iona, off the coast of Scotland and a young 8^th century monk, laboring by dim candlelight to pin the words “O come, thou Dayspring from on high. . .disperse the gloomy clouds of night, and death’s dark shadows put to flight.” “Suddenly,” she observes, “an axe plunges out of the darkness,” and the Viking attacks begin taking their deadly toll. On and on she imagines the words of the antiphons taking on new form and meaning as one war-torn era merged into another, eventually coming to the age of Christian taking up sword against Christian. In the throes of the Reformation, she wonders, “did Catholics and Protestants both sing, ‘bid our sad quarrels cease,’ in their secret hideaways?” [Living Pulpit, O-D, 1997, pp. 18-19].
     Imagine the words being sung today among newly targeted Christians in Iraq and India. Hear their strains from the hutments of African communities devastated by HIV-AIDS. Hear them drifting across the refugee camps of Darfur. They sound on the oncology floors of hospitals, down the hallways of the nursing home and in the loneliness of a living room recently bereft of a loved one. “Captive Israel” mourning “in lonely exile” speaks not just of the distant past, but of the tragic reality of the human struggle. The bright light of God’s coming matters and matters greatly because it is set over against the deep darkness of human evil, human want and the fundamental conviction that life is always unfinished and we do, indeed, need a God of mercy and deliverance.
     God comes to save. Matthew, probably writing within a decade of the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple, knows the trauma of living among a people experiencing the devastating loss of every semblance of security and self-determination. In keeping with his heritage, his story of the annunciation of Jesus’ birth assigns the baby two significant names. Naming, of course, was a highly significant act in the ancient tradition. It was not just about assigning a child a convenient label to distinguish him or her from other children; it spoke of character and purpose and mission. We are aware of instances in the Bible’s story where, after a life-altering event or upon receipt of a significant mission, a person’s name is changed to meet the new situation. Abram becomes Abraham; Jacob becomes Israel; Simon becomes Cephas, Rock or Peter; and although its significance is disputed by some, Saul becomes Paul. The naming of the child belonged to the father, and the very act indicated the father’s affirmation that he accepted the child as his own–an act particularly significant in the birth of Jesus.
     “You are to name him Jesus,” the heavenly messenger says to Joseph, “for he will save his people from their sins” (1:21). “You are to name him Yeshua (God saves), for he will save.” Jesus’ identity or mission, like that of the ancient Moses and his successor, Joshua (Yeshua), will be the salvation of his people. “His people,” whom he will save, however, will become a matter of dispute. As Matthew will go on to indicate in the following chapter when men from distant lands seek the baby out, “his people” will include other nations.
     God is with us. Again reaching back into Jewish history, Matthew makes note of a second name for the baby: Emmanuel, God with us. First given through the prophet Isaiah to King Ahaz as Judah trembled before the onslaught of neighboring nations, it had no messianic overtones. It spoke of the immediate future. Pointing perhaps to a young woman standing within their range of view, Isaiah tells the king, “The young woman is with child and shall bear a son, and shall name him Immanuel” (7:14). Before the child would be old enough to know the difference between right and wrong, the threatening nations would themselves be destroyed.
     Isaiah and Matthew draw upon the one source of security that Israel and God’s people of all time have ever known. Again and again the prophets of Israel warned against any other security. The security of good times, of wealth, political clout, horses and chariots, and powerful allies all pale before the fundamental awareness that we live in the presence of God. Warned against presuming upon all the accouterments of wealth and power in times of peace and prosperity, we are called to the source of real strength and endurance in times of want and tragedy. Sounding within our personal crises and over the ghettoes of our cities and the war zones of our world, the hope of Emmanuel strengthens us and enables us to endure. God is with us.
     The sign of Emmanuel forms a curtain around Matthew’s story. Spoken at the point of his birth, it is also placed on the lips of Jesus at the conclusion of his ministry. “Remember,” he urges his fearful disciples as he is about to leave them, “I am with you always.” Emmanuel, God with us, is the source of hope, the source of strength that enables us not just to endure the darkness but to focus our lives on working for its elimination. Hunger, poverty, hatred, violence, and warfare are all forms of darkness that come up against a light that they cannot overcome.
     Still the message holds. In the midst of difficulty and loss: “I am with you.” And, “Tomorrow I will come.” Thanks be to God!

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Advent III: Visions of Sugar-Plums
Isaiah 35; Matthew 11:2-6 December 16, 2007 larry dipboye

       “The children were nestled all snug in their beds, while visions of sugar-plums danced in their heads.” The line is from Clement Clarke Moore’s famous Christmas poem, “A Visit from St. Nicholas.” As the story goes, Moore wrote the poem in 1822 for his children and laid it aside. A friend read it, recognized its appeal, and submitted it to the New York Sentinel where it was published anonymously on December 23, 1823. Moore claimed the poem in a book of poetry in 1844, and the rest is history. The son of the Episcopal bishop who participated in the presidential inauguration of George Washington, Clement Clarke Moore wanted to be remembered for his life work on a Hebrew dictionary, but his one claim to fame is the poem that shaped the magic and mysticism of the American Christmas and his legendary elaboration on the character of St. Nick.
      Who among us does not recognize the childish vision? Perhaps consumable sugar-plums do not adequately represent modern materialistic dreams that the culture fosters for the shopping season. I understand the video game Wii has become so popular and in short supply that people have been buying retail and reselling them for a profit on Ebay. But, alas, they will soon be overshadowed by next year’s toy and forgotten like last year’s sugar-plums. Adult toys may be slightly more expensive but no less temporary. I remember the Christmas of 1967. We had traveled from Kentucky to Texas with our small children to celebrate the holiday with our parents. Early on Christmas morning we were driving through East Texas. We passed a nice home outside a small Texas town. I secretly coveted the brand new 1968 Oldsmobile Cutlass in the driveway with a big red bow on the roof. We drove that route every year, and I watched the paint fade and the rust grow on that Christmas sugar-plum, and the wear of time tempered my covetous spirit.
      The prophetic vision is for the total salvation of the earth and all of its people. Isaiah’s vision of an age of peace and justice was not exactly a sugar-plum, but it was no less magical and mystical. The Prophet encouraged the despairing exiles with a word of hope, “Be strong, do not fear! Here is your God. . . .He will come and save you.” Isaiah envisioned the salvation of planet earth. The wilderness will rejoice and blossom. The blind will see, the deaf hear, the lame leap like a deer, and the speechless will sing for joy.
      Turn the page some 600 years. John the Baptist, identified in the Gospels as the herald of Messiah, is in prison. It appears that the hope resting on the coming of Messiah was shutting down. According to Mark, John had offended Herod Antipas, son of Herod the Great identified with the birth of Jesus. John exposed the public scandal of Herod’s taking his brother’s wife. John had never specifically called Jesus “Messiah,” but he had proclaimed “the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.” He had baptized one whose sandal he was not worthy to loose. Cut off from his preaching mission and with nothing to do but sit and wait for a death sentence, John had time to think. Perhaps he had made a mistake. Of all people, he had a right to know. So he sent a messenger to Jesus with the question: “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?” John wanted to know, where is the crocus blossoming in the dessert? Where is the perfect world which is supposed to emerge with the Christ? Jesus responds with a lesson from Isaiah 35: “the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them.” And, God is not finished. John did not get it, and I am not sure that any of us ever really get the message. The messianic age in the vision of Isaiah is not about this year’s sugar-plums. We wait for God to finish the new creation, to wipe away every tear, and to vindicate the lives of saints like John.
      Depression, anger, and nostalgia are poor substitutes for grace. Isaiah 34-35 is generally associated with the Exile, 600 years before Christ. Land for the Jews was always more than dirt or just another address in the path of upward mobility. The Land was a gift from God, a physical symbol of purpose and hope. It was never just a place on the way to something better. The Land was the ultimate point of arrival. There was no life after Zion--or before, for that matter. The realities of Canaan had become a place of dreams. The land never quite measured up to memory, but no matter. The Exile was loaded with emotion. The deep pain of separation produced violent anger and visions of divine punishment on the enemies of Judah (Isaiah 34), and separation led to idealized visions of home (Isaiah 35) where the dessert shall blossom, all physical disabilities shall end, and the wilderness shall become an oasis. I can almost hear Isaiah pick up his guitar to sing, “Where seldom is heard a discouraging word, and the skies are not cloudy all day.”
      We tend to be possessed of the same nostalgic tendencies. Depression and anger erupt from a common source. We tend toward selective memory of the past. Many of our dreams of Christmas are only dreams. We exclude unpleasant facts from our mental image of home until we have the perfect picture. We nourish anger at the circumstances and persons who have separated us from home or from childish wishes. The Jewish version of “Home on the Range” is Psalm 137: “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. . . . How could we sing the LORD’s song in a foreign land?” Anger at the people and circumstances which have taken us away from home and childhood builds walls of isolation and loneliness. The truth is, no one ever goes home again, and certainly no one gets home by paths of hatred and violence. Visions of Babylonian babies dashed against the rocks (Psalm 137) or land soaked with blood (34:7) is poor consolation for people lost and alone.
      We need to observe around us that not everyone harbors an ideal memory of home. Some folks actually don’t want to go home again. There are thousands kids growing up in today’s world whose memories of childhood will be less than warm and tender next decade. Military kids and missionary kids remember more moves than homes. For folks on the move, home becomes less a place than a relationship. Grady Nutt told of the pastor who moved so often that every time a truck pulled into the drive the chickens would lie down and cross their legs. Nostalgia is not what it used to be, and perhaps it never was.
      We need a larger vision. We were attending an adult Sunday school Christmas party. The people were sixty years old, give or take a decade. The food was sinfully delicious and plentiful enough to recall the feeding of the 5,000. A family bond was evident. Table talk which had once revolved around the behavior and accomplishments of the children, now was about the grandchildren. We exchanged gag gifts and laughed again at the ones which had reappeared. Someone called for the games to begin. I looked for an escape route. (Shouldn’t I rush to the hospital to see about someone? Perhaps Carolyn had left the oven on at home? Maybe we should check on our teenager children.) After a few carols and a Christmas word game, I relaxed. Toward the end of the evening we were asked to recall an event from childhood Christmas memories. We remembered together trimming trees, church and school pageants, and antiques no longer visible in the modern age. John chuckled as he began his story. He remembered the simplicity of farm life, the austerity of the Depression era, and a fiasco created by his father’s attempt to dress up as Santa, but he lost his train of thought as his laughter suddenly turned to tears. Long suppressed memories about home triggered deep emotion, and for a few minutes this grown man became the child he had allowed himself to remember.
      Nostalgia will do that to you. Memory exposes grief for people and places left behind with the dreams of yesteryear.
      That other John, the Baptist, had a problem of limited vision that tends to afflict every age. The God of creation, the Father of our Lord, the God of eternal salvation has never promised to satisfy all of our wishes.
      Grant and Lil Stradley have a painting by Helen Guymon. I learned the story from Lil’s first husband when he was coming to terms with a terminal illness. He told me of Helen’s fight with cancer and trip to Houston for surgery and her struggle to get her life back. He decided that the recovery of her artistic gift would be therapeutic. He asked her to paint him a picture, “I never promised you a rose garden.” The colors are glorious, and the rose garden is almost ethereal as the children play among the roses.
      God has not promised any of us a rose garden. God has promised much more. Frankly our wants and wishes are too small. Visions of sugar-plums do not begin to capture the vision of hope. Sursum corda, lift up your hearts. The work of God is bigger than all of us put together, bigger than one lifetime, either John’s or mine. God is not finished. We continue to wait as the vision unfolds.

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Advent II: Preparing the Way
Luke 3:1-14 December 9, 2007 carolyn dipboye

I suspect you haven’t noticed. As a matter of fact, I usually skim over it, too. I treat it on the order of those detailed genealogies that precede Matthew’s and Luke’s stories of the birth of Jesus. I go right past it to “the good stuff.” But there it is at the head of Luke’s story of John the Baptist’s wilderness preaching. Two long verses with more detail than we want: “In the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was ruler of Galilee, and his brother Philip ruler of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias ruler of Abilene, during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the wilderness.” Not exactly gripping, is it? Why this long, involved route of getting into John’s story? Perhaps Luke is merely following the example of the books of the prophets in his Bible. Perhaps he is casting John as another prophet in the long, impressive line of Israel’s prophets. Perhaps he is painting here a bridge–one who, like that esteemed body of witnesses, will speak truth to power; and this is a list of the names of those whose power will be rocked by the truth-telling, not just of John, but even more, of Jesus. Or perhaps Luke is just putting the entire gospel story into context. Here is where it begins. Here in the midst of the hard rock realities of the day.

What if we, like Luke, were setting out to write an account of God’s truth-telling prophets in our own day? What hard rock realities would we detail? Who are the political and religious authorities we would name? What evidence of corruption would the faithful prophet unmask? What human misery and suffering would be exposed to the light of day?

Would we situate the prophet’s message in terms of human freedom and political showdown in Myanmar, Pakistan, Venezuela and Russia? Would we speak of the AIDS crisis in Africa? Genocide in Darfur? The struggle over Guantanamo, torture and immigration in our own country? Would we, no matter what our political party, raise serious questions about a derisive level of political discourse that spews hatred of a candidate whether that candidate is a man or a woman? Would we raise concern over efforts to determine the theological orthodoxy of a presidential candidate in the place of raising fundamental questions about how he or she would govern once in office?

Yes. Prophets, you see, deal in realities. That’s the reason they tend to get into so much trouble. They deal with the contentious, unsettled matters of life and call us to view them in the light of the coming of God.

God’s coming always takes place in a context. John’s message is rooted in a history. It recalls a day when another prophet was swimming upstream. Languishing for a full generation in exile, uprooted from home and tradition, the prophet Isaiah’s congregation felt anything but hopeful. The idea of returning home was itself ominous. It wouldn’t be a motor trip in air conditioned comfort, and it certainly wouldn’t be an airlift. It would mean a return to the wilderness–a long arduous trek of challenge and danger. It would be, to use terminology of our day, a matter of survival in a situation of extreme reality. “Remember the God who sustained your fathers and mothers on the first wilderness journey so long ago?” Isaiah asks. “Remember the God whose faithful presence saw the formation in the wilderness of a brand new people of God? This is the same God who beckons today.”

The way home is not without peril. Its challenges are depicted in the mountains that must be leveled, the rough and crooked places that must be negotiated along the way. It involves trust in a God adequate for the challenge. It is about one who has traveled that way before, one who specializes in giving power to the faint and strengthening the powerless. In the tradition of Advent, it is about waiting upon that God, and not settling for a more palatable, a seemingly more reasonable alternative.

God’s coming calls us to repentance. John’s message about the ax at the root of the tree and his depiction of those who come for baptism as “a brood of vipers” hardly seems to be good news. In our quarters, a God of judgment is not particularly welcome. Most of us feel we have heard enough judgment to last us a lifetime. Is there anything of hope here?

Consider the alternative. Consider that instead of John and later Jesus saying “Repent the kingdom of God is at hand;” they had said instead, “Never fear. Nothing much is going to change. Adapt a few things here and there, but for the most part, go on doing that which makes you comfortable.” How hopeful is that?

The judgment we encounter in the prophets and in the preaching of John and Jesus calls us to hope. It calls us to anticipate that our lives and the world in which we live can and will be different. The coming of God comes into direct confrontation with all that is evil, all that is unjust, all that is violent, all that robs human beings of dignity and freedom whether that evil, that injustice, that violence, that inhumanity resides within our hearts or in the society to which we bear responsibility. The coming of God does not leave things as they are. Repentance does not mean that we are left in a pool of despair, buried under a weight of guilt. It beckons us toward a new future and it calls to responsibility for a new future. It is about joy, but not a cheap joy. It is about challenging evil, injustice and suffering. It is about stiff demand. It is about a new righteousness beyond the old, accommodating sense of compromise that makes us at home with things the way they are.

God’s coming calls us to live out of a new reality. Advent is about waiting for God, but it is not about passive waiting. It is about seriously seeking to discern who God is and where God is, but it is also about living our lives in the presence of God. It is about preparing the way for God’s type of kingdom right here in our midst.

Luke makes an interesting turn in his story about John. Different from Matthew, who has scribes and Pharisees and people coming out from Jerusalem to hear John in the desert, Luke speaks of ordinary people, including despicable tax collectors and Roman(?) soldiers. These respond to John’s preaching as the first audiences of the apostles’ preaching will respond in Luke’s second volume, the book of Acts: “What then should we do?” How do we respond to this one who is coming? Do we run to the hills and wait for him in the clouds? Do we withdraw into our closets and perfect our spiritual well-being? What do we do in the presence of this God?

The answer is so simple that anyone can do it. If you have two coats, share. If you have food, share. As you go about your work, deal in honesty. If you have power, consider it a trust to be used compassionately, wisely, in remembrance of the God of compassion. What do we do to prepare the way for God’s coming? God’s kingdom? We live all of life as if we expect God at any moment to be right here in the midst of us.

So, then, do we concern ourselves with AIDS in Africa? Genocide in Darfur? The debates over Guantanamo, torture, immigration and the quality of political discourse? We concern ourselves with each of these matters as they impact upon any of God’s children. We make our political, our economic our personal, day-to-day decisions as if they are a rehearsal–a rehearsal for living in the kingdom of God.

Barbara Kingsolver, author of the award winning The Poisonwood Bible, tells another story. Her novel Animal Dreams tells the story of a young horticulturist, a woman named Hallie, who goes to Nicaragua to aid the peasants. Writing to her sister back home, Hallie tries to explain what motivates her:

Codi, here’s what I’ve decided: the very least you can do in life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof. What I want is so simple I almost can’t say it: elementary kindness. Enough to eat, enough to go around. The possibility that kids might one day grow up to be neither the destroyers nor the destroyed [p. 299].

Would we prepare the way for the coming of God into our world, into the context of our realities? Then let us live within the hope of God’s kind of world. Let us admire it, not from a distance, but with the substance of our very lives. Let us hope, let us live so that “kids may one day grow up to be neither the destroyers nor the destroyed” but the beloved children of God.

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Advent I: The One Who Is to Come
Malachi 4:1-6; Revelation 1:4-8 December 2, 2007 larry dipboye

      By 2002 the Tim LaHaye-Jerry Jenkins novels on the second coming of Christ had sold over 50 million copies. Only the novels were novel. The idea of a “Rapture” in which the faithful would be jerked out of their earthly existence leaving behind the secular world and all of its people dated to early 19^th century England with J.N. Darby and the Plymouth Brethren and was later popularized in the footnotes of the Schofield Reference Bible. Apocalyptic thought found in Revelation reaches back to post-exilic Israel centuries before Christ. In 1903, Albert Schweitzer made a major contribution to New Testament study in identifying Jesus with Jewish apocalyptic thinking. The kingdom/reign of God would be established when the Son of Man came on the clouds bringing justice on the earth. First generation Christians continued to look for the Son of Man in the immediate return of Christ. Early Christians found themselves in the same situation of the Jews waiting for Messiah. Demonic tyrants continued to rule on earth, God’s people continued to suffer, and the Christ did not appear. The prayer of the early church was, “Come, Lord Jesus.” But setting a date for the second coming was an exercise in futility. Some of the most embarrassing moments in Christian history were registered by radicals who claimed to hold the secret timetable for the end of the age. The insanity that accompanied speculation caused a reaction to eschatology, the theology of the end-time. While Christians kept Revelation in their Bibles, they politely ignored it. At the worst, speculation about the end produced charlatans who exploited Christian hope and fostered violence. At the best, the book of Revelation gave assurance that God is not finished with the creation.
      The Left Behind novels echo Hal Lindsey’s 1970 book on the second coming of Christ The Late Great Planet Earth in which the author speculated that Christ would return in the 1980's. Incredibly his book continued to sell into the 1990's, long after his predictions had failed. One is led to wonder, what is the attraction of this kind of theology? George Santayana observed: “Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” The Left Behind novels repeat some of the worst of Christian history. Some believe that it is entertaining fiction, not significantly different from the Harry Potter novels. Others note the wild speculation about the end of the world that follows the end of a millennium. One might add that the steady news of world war, global warming, overpopulation, and world hunger produce ominous speculation about the future. Jewish apocalyptic emerged in times of anxiety about world conditions. At times when human effort seemed to be futile, the only hope was for God to come down out of the clouds to rescue earth.
      So, why are we revisiting apocalyptic on the First Sunday of Advent? What does the visionary message about the Day of the Lord and the return of Elijah in Malachi and the salutation of John’s vision in Revelation have to do with the coming of the Christ? We need to be reminded that Advent is more than a backwards extension of Christmas. With John, we do not seem to have a problem in understanding God as one, “who was and who is.” The God of Advent is one “who is to come,” the God of the future, the God of hope.
      We gather here in good company: with Zechariah and Elizabeth expecting the birth of John, “with the spirit and power of Elijah”; with Mary and Joseph looking for a kingdom without end; with the elders Simeon and Anna, “looking forward to the consolation of Israel.” Advent is waiting in hope. It occurred to me in a recent conversation with a Jewish friend that Christians and Jews have in common not only faith in the God of creation, but the ordeal of waiting for Messiah.
      We share a troubled world. John Newport was a seminary professor who often worked with non-Christian college students during Christmas holiday retreats. He said in class that he was limited in the point of departure for dialogue. He could not assume agreement on one God, the Lord’s Prayer, the Ten Commandments, or the Sermon on the Mount. He could assume that we share common problems in a common world.
      Our Jewish friends begin the celebration of Hanukkah on Wednesday. Contrary to popular Christian myth, Hanukkah is not the fabrication of a holiday to compete with Christmas. It is the Feast of Lights that commemorates the rededication of the Temple after the Maccabean revolution. Jesus recalled the Maccabean era when he mentioned the abomination of desolation of Antiochus Epiphanes, who slaughtered a hog on the sacred altar of the Temple. His reign over Israel became a symbol for bad government and tyrannical kings. Jews, who suffered under the oppressive policies of Persia, Greece, and Rome, came to remember the brief respite under the Maccabees as the golden age. But the age of freedom came to an end. Jesus was born in a world of Roman domination. The Jews looked in two directions. Some hoped for a new military messiah like the Maccabees to overthrow Rome and establish Jewish independence. Others looked to the heavens for God to sweep down and rescue the faithful.
      Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann made an interesting observation comparing the arrangement of Hebrew scriptures in Jewish and Christian Bibles. The Jewish Canon ends with 2 Chronicles in a political hope for the restoration of Israel through the benevolence of King Cyrus. The Christian Canon ends with our passage from Malichi offering a vision of the return of Elijah. Brueggemann does not choose one over the other, but notes the bi-polar outlook. Political solutions rest on human genius. Apocalyptic hope looks for God to overpower the human mess of history. The biblical history of Israel swings back and forth between the poles.
      We cannot ignore the realities of history in the coming of Jesus. He was born in poverty under the oppressive government of Rome. He lived in conflict. He died as a criminal. It was not a nice world then either.
      I was shocked to discover as a young pastor that not everyone finds this to be the season to be jolly. As I conducted funerals, visited the sick and dying in hospitals, tried to comfort the divorced, and sympathized with the unemployed, all in the month of December, I came to realize that the troubles of the world are not suspended because of holiday celebrations. Advent acknowledges a real world in which we share the human plight. Advent refuses to gloss over the personal and global disasters that bring people down to despair.
      We live by hope. Jurgen Moltmann wrote, “all theology is eschatology.” God is certainly the God of the past, the God who was, but God is not buried somewhere in history. We certainly need to understand history, but no one can repeat history. Celebrating great events in the past is an aid to understanding the present, but no one can turn back the clock and relive the past. Looking back into time to celebrate an event in salvation history is a trend we share with our Jewish family, but we cannot live backwards toward the past.
      God is certainly the God who is. Christian existentialism called people to decision. God is present and active and we are responsible for the world we have, but we do not save ourselves or our world through the power of positive thinking. Tom Long noted that Joel Osteen, the pastor of Houston’s gargantuan Lakewood mega-church, focuses exclusively on the present tense, Your Best Life Now.
      With John’s vision of Revelation, we need to look to the One “who is to come,” the God of hope. God is not finished with us or with this world.
      When Carolyn and I were moving toward marriage, she spoke often about her maternal grandmother who had lived across the street from her family and was heavily involved in Carolyn’s childhood. She was in a nursing home in her last days when the news came that her granddaughter in Germany was expecting a child. The time for the birth of the child and the time of her death were coming together. The power of hope in the coming of the child helped her to hold on to life. Then she died. We have often talked about the power of hope in her life. Like Simeon waiting for Messiah on seeing the child Jesus, she could pray, “Lord now dismiss your servant in peace. . .for my eyes have seen your salvation.”

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Realism and Hope
Jeremiah 8:18-9:1; Isaiah 65:17-25 November 25, 2007 carolyn dipboye

The numbers are staggering; as a matter of fact, they are so staggering that they are the source of emotional overload. We tend to hear them and go into a state that psychologists call “psychic numbing.” We hear them and, overwhelmed at the suffering they represent and the seeming impossibility of alleviating it in any significant way, our eyes glaze over, our ears go deaf, our hearts are steeled and we turn our gaze elsewhere. It isn’t that we don’t care. It’s just that there seems to be so little that we can do.

And yet, they keep turning up. They keep reminding us that they are out there. An image moves fleetingly across our TV screen of an emaciated child or a child orphaned by AIDS or a whole sub-Saharan village so debilitated by AIDS that it no longer has workers to tend the fields. We catch a glimpse of a Serbian mental hospital where children’s limbs are grossly distorted after being strapped in their beds for years on end, or we hear the story of a bridge collapsing in Bangladesh from the sheer weight of the masses of people gathered there frantically seeking food aid in the wake of devastating floods. And we are reminded. We are reminded of the suffering of people created in the image of God. We are reminded of a God who commands in Scripture, “Be compassionate.” Why? “For I am compassionate.” And, "When you reap the harvest of your land, do not reap the edges; leave them for the poor and the alien.” Why? “Because I am the Lord your God." And when you do business, "you shall have only a full and honest measure.” And, "When you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame and the blind."

Is it any wonder that religion that touts a narrowly limited range of “spiritual values” sells well in this day of global communication? Is it any wonder that all of us are tempted to draw the line and focus only on those areas where we know “we can do some good?”

What does faith in the God of Israel and Jesus ask of us? Is it about being guilt-ridden? Is it about focusing on the dark side of life and beating ourselves to a pulp? What kind of good news is that?

Faith is about more than feelings. It is about more than feeling guilty; and it is about more than feeling compassionate. It is about taking our cues from who God is. As we say in courses on Christian ethics, it is about first asking the question “Who is God?” And then, “What am I to be and do?”

God is a God who weeps. Jeremiah has often been called “the weeping prophet.” Preaching in the late 7^th and early 6^th century B.C.E. as Judah teetered and then went over the edge of Babylonian captivity, Jeremiah’s message was one of hard realities and not well received. He suffered many reprisals, ranging from mere mocking to being placed on trial to being thrown into a pit and left to die. Unique for its extended personal laments, the book of Jeremiah reflects not only the suffering of the prophet, but an equally intense suffering on the part of God. Sometimes, as in chapter eight, it is difficult to distinguish between them.

Far from a God who is remote, untouched by the pain and evil of the world, the God of the prophets, like the God of the psalmist and the God of covenant love is a God of pathos, a God of intimate concern. The God, then, of Israel and Jesus is loving parent, not simply a judge. God is, in the words of Abraham Heschel, “a lover engaged to His people, not only a king.” God stands in intimate relationship to humanity and God’s love or anger, mercy or disappointment is an expression of profound care. “There is,” Heschel observes, “an eternal cry in the world: God is beseeching [humankind]. Some are startled; others remain deaf. We are all looked for. An air of expectancy hovers over life. Something is asked of [us], all of [us]” [Man Is Not Alone, 244-245].

Hear, then, in the words of Jeremiah the suffering not merely of a saddened prophet, but the suffering of a God deeply moved, deeply grieved: “My joy is gone, grief is upon me, my heart is sick. For the hurt of my poor people I am hurt, I mourn, and dismay has taken hold of me. Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there? Why then has the health of my poor people not been restored? O that my head were a spring of water, and my eyes a fountain of tears, so that I might weep day and night for the slain of my poor people!” [8:18-9:1.

Rabbi Irving Greenberg tells of his own personal struggle for faith in the aftermath of the Shoah or Holocaust. Unable to shield his thoughts or his faith from the devastating realization the Hitler’s murderous carnage had wiped out 2/3's of the European Jewish population and 1/3 of all the world’s Jews, Greenberg acknowledges that despite heroic efforts to maintain faith, a seemingly insurmountable obstacle had arisen between himself and God. Tormented by the question of why had God not acted, he searched for understanding. In the process of caring for his own small son, he was stricken by a depth of new insight. “I suddenly understood that God was with God’s people . . . being tortured, degraded, humiliated, murdered. . . . The realization hit how much God had been suffering in the Shoah, but the pain had been infinite as only an Infinite Consciousness could experience it. Then I burst into tears; a surge of pity for God flowed through me. A sense of compassion, a desire to heal the Divine, breached the wall of polarized anger and complaint that had arisen between us” [For the Sake of Heaven and Earth, 25].

And where is God when 37 million people are suffering from HIV/AIDS? When 22 million were dying of AIDS? While sub-Saharan Africa staggers under the impact of a debilitated population and 14 million children are orphaned by AIDS?

Where is God when 10 million children under the age of 5 die each year of largely treatable causes? When 1 out of 6 people in the world lack access to safe drinking water? When 1 out of 10 people in the U.S. are hungry?

Where is God? Do Jeremiah’s words not speak to God’s continuing pain? “Grief is upon me, my heart is sick. For the hurt of my poor people I am hurt, I mourn.” If God is there in the midst of the suffering, is that not motivation for us to turn our eyes and our lives toward the pain as well that we with Greenberg might seek to alleviate the Divine pain?

God is a God of hope. Just as the prophets paint God as a God who confronts and bears the pain of human reality, they also depict a God who hopes and invests in a different kind of future. The first thirty-nine chapters of Isaiah, like Jeremiah, are caught up in the anguish of Israel’s coming destruction at the hands of the Babylonians. The remaining twenty-seven chapters speak hope to a people in the midst of exile and immediately following their return home. The long hoped-for homecoming, the opportunity to rebuild was itself painful. In the midst of the rubble, dissension among the people had soared; opposition from surrounding nations was aggravated by opposition from those who had been “left behind” during the exile. Resentful of a ruling elite facing up to the task at hand, they did everything in the power to throw the recovery off course.

God’s word of hope through the prophet is the promise of a new creation–a creation so extraordinary that it overshadows every act of mercy, every act of deliverance God has undertaken in the past. No longer a source of pain, the new Jerusalem will be to God a source of joy and delight. “No more shall the sound of weeping be heard in it, or the cry of distress. No more shall there be in it an infant that lives but a few days, or an old person who does not live out a lifetime.” No longer laboring to satisfy the insatiable appetites of the oppressor, the people will “build houses and inhabit them;” they will “plant vineyards and eat their fruit.” No longer will the lives of society’s vulnerable infants and children be cut short. No longer will they bear children whose lives are robbed of laughter by the curse of want, deprivation and incessant warfare. A relationship once broken will be restored: “Before they call I will answer, while they are yet speaking I will hear.” And finally, the beautiful metaphor of peace that has claimed the hopes of the last two-and-one-half millennia: “The wolf and the lamb shall feed together, the lion shall eat straw like the ox. . . They shall not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain, says the LORD” [Isaiah 65:17-25].

Concern to alleviate God’s pain at human suffering moves us to address the source of God’s pain. Isaiah’s vision is of a restored people in the midst of the earth, serving as a healing balm, a source of renewed strength and hope for all the earth. Hear then, the signs of hope toward which Isaiah points and toward which we together must work: Drastically changing the lives of children so that they no longer die in infancy and can know a life of security, joy and freedom. Safeguarding the vulnerable elderly. Giving workers their just due. Devoting the energies of our lives to ending warfare and securing a just and lasting peace.

Pipe dreams? No. According to leading economic and political experts, for the first time in history, we have at hand the necessary technology, know-how and delivery systems for eliminating extreme poverty and addressing the diseases primarily responsible for the premature deaths of millions–HIV/AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis. For example, during the past 20 years, the proportion of people living in poverty in the developing world fell by half—from 40 percent to 21 percent. Life expectancy in developing countries has increased by 20 years, the number of children dying before the age of five has been reduced 50 percent, and adult illiteracy has been halved to 25 percent. In the last decade, significant progress has been made in the cost and access to AIDS drugs, which can now cost as little as $1 a day. A mosquito net can save a child’s life at a cost of only $5. It costs as little as $2 to purchase the most effective malaria treatments. A well provides clean, safe drinking water for 20 years at a cost of only $20 a person.

Hope, you see, is not wishful thinking. It is rather the willingness to invest our lives in keeping with the God who calls us into the future. It is a matter of the people of God of all colors and stripes and creeds making themselves available to be planted in the midst of God’s good earth to be a source of blessing.

Will we do it?

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The Ties that Bind
Philippians 1:2-11 November 18, 2007 larry dipboye

We were in one church for fourteen years before moving to Oak Ridge. The church was not perfect, and they had a less than perfect pastor, but the bonds of friendship with people in that church have continued through the years, and our memories have been like a warm fire on a cold day. I was pastor at the 50-year mark. In addition to a big day of celebration, including lunch for about 350 people, we published a history of the church. Getting in touch with the memories of the people had a lot to do with the koinonia, the strong bonds of friendship with the people. I learned that their first worship service as a congregation was on Thanksgiving Day in 1928. We started a tradition to remember our roots. On Thanksgiving morning, the men cooked breakfast. We gathered as a church family to enjoy being together and to offer thanksgiving to God. We remembered the beginnings of the church and the legacy of the saints as we reminded each other of the blessings of God that continued to pour on us. The lessons in gratitude were also lessons on being church. The accident of history that connected our church to Thanksgiving Day, helped us to build our church on the foundation of thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving is an act of memory. I talked with my uncle last week. His wife, my aunt, has had a massive stroke and has been sent home to die under the care of hospice. I identified myself by name and asked, “Do you remember me?” He said, “How could I forget?” We remembered good days, younger days. We talked about Mary’s medical situation. Finally, I pledged my prayers and offered help. He responded as most of us do, “Just remember us.” We want to be remembered before God in prayer without expectation of turning back the clock or healing, and we want to be real in the minds of the people we love.

Out of my own nostalgia and gratitude for the people who have brought meaning and joy into my life, I resonate with the word of greeting in Paul’s letter to the Philippians: “I thank my God every time I remember you.” Morna Hooker believes that the Epistle is a thank-you note. Paul is sitting in prison, probably in Rome, awaiting his final sentence and death. The aging apostle is contemplating his life and mission. A messenger arrives with an offering from the Philippian church. Some interpreters believe that Paul lacks social graces because he does not get around to specific mention of the gift from his friends until the end of the letter. Then, he said in effect that he could have gotten on without the offering: “I have learned to be content with whatever I have.” And, “I can do all things through him who strengthens me.” Yet he writes, “it was kind of you to share my distress.” That’s it. Maybe the gift was small and not worth mentioning, or perhaps there is more to be thankful for than money.

Paul directed his gratitude to God for the covenant bond in the church. The offering is only a symbol of that bond. Love cannot be measured in dollars. Nothing counts more than the love and support of friends which Paul finds grounded in the gospel of Christ. Maybe Paul is not as crass as he appears. His letter to the Philippians is loaded with terms of endearment. The opening statement is among the most affectionate messages to be found in Paul’s correspondence. Paul gets around to expressing gratitude for the offering sent to him by his friends, but his real gratitude is focused in remembering who they are. Relationships in the family of faith can never be based on things. So, what counts with Paul is the koinonia of the gospel, the good work that is coming to fulfillment in Christ, the sharing of God’s grace, and their overflowing love.

Values are rooted in thanksgiving. The medieval mystic Meister Eckehart wrote, “If the only prayer you ever say in your life is ‘thank you,’ that would be sufficient.” Ethicist James Gustafson views gratitude at the foundation of morality. The absence of any sense of indebtedness or responsibility for others, the absence of conscience, is a mark of a sociopathic personality. The greed that drives the world of high finance and big business filters down to the grassroots of our society like a caustic acid burning away all semblance of community. The simple exercise in a family of giving thanks before a meal teaches gratitude. The author of 1 Timothy says that everything God has created is good so long as it is received with thanksgiving. The prayer of blessing over a meal makes it sacramental.

The national holiday began in 1789 with George Washington’s proclamation of thanksgiving. The nation had survived the revolutionary war. The Constitution had been ratified. It appeared that we had become a nation. The annual presidential proclamation continued until 1815. For a half-century presidents dropped the tradition. During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln revived the practice and established a national holiday. Since Lincoln, every president has issued an annual proclamation of national thanksgiving. Congress finally established the annual event in 1941 on the fourth Thursday of each November. Thanksgiving Day is one of the few formal traditions of civil religion. I have found Thanksgiving to be one event in the year where the community can gather around a common value. Even secular people recognize the ethical value of gratitude.

Worship is thanksgiving. We do not need an act of Congress to give thanks to God. One of the more significant discoveries in the Dead Sea Scrolls was a collection of about twenty-five Thanksgiving Psalms following the pattern and content of our Psalter to serve the offering of thanksgiving to God in an act of personal and congregational worship. The Psalms are personal, written in the first person singular and plural, expressing both private and congregational praise to God. Specified in Leviticus 7:11ff, the Thanksgiving sacrifice was a spontaneous act of worship in response to one’s sense of well-being and gratitude to God. Unlike the feasts that marked the Jewish calendar, the Thank Offering might be presented on any occasion in which one was moved to gratitude. It might have been a general sense of God’s grace as expressed in the gospel hymn “Count Your Blessings”; or a specific experience of God’s bounty and grace.

The Jewish theologian Martin Buber has recorded a Hasidic story about Abraham. When the guest had finished his meal and wiped his chin, he rose to thank Abraham and Sarah for their hospitality. Abraham asked the man, "Was the food that you have eaten mine? You have partaken of the bounty of the God of the universe. Now praise, glorify, and bless the One who spoke and the world was.” The Hasid reflected, "Whoever enjoys any worldly pleasure without benediction commits a theft against God."

A neighbor kid contracted polio in 1946. I recall the strong emotion that pulsed through the entire church as prayers were offered to God for his life and health, but his story had a good ending. He survived without any evident paralysis. The same church that had offered prayers of petition to God became a chorus of thanksgiving. I’ll never forget his first day back in Sunday school. The teacher said that one of us had been specially blessed by God and suggested that “someone” might have something to say. We all knew who she was talking about. Joe just stared at the floor. After a long period of awkward silence, she went on with the lesson. Joe did not come to church with a sermon that day. He did come into a community of worship focused on thanksgiving to God for his life and health.
When Jesus gathered for the last time with his disciples, they remembered the final blessing, "When he had given thanks," the Eucharist, and his church through the ages has continued to remember.

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Covenant Sunday: One Body in Christ
Romans 12:1-8 November 4, 2007 larry dipboye

           We were in the same second grade class. Jimmy lived a couple of doors from my grandparents, within walking distance of my house, so we shared a lot of afternoons and Saturdays together. Jimmy had an unusual collection of toys. I still remember his spring-powered tin band. Each musician was colorful both in appearance and action. The complex wind-up mechanism made each character come alive with independent activity. One beat the drum, another stroked the guitar, another clapped cymbals, and others tilted their heads with the rhythm of blowing horns. The toy was impressive enough for me to remember. When you think about it, the mechanical complexity required significant engineering ability and time. But the fascination for two seven-year-old boys never lasted more than a few minutes. The repetitive movements never varied. The band did not do requests. You could watch the band play, but you could not play with the band. Like many children's toys, this one was designed for adults, for sales appeal. After a few minutes, we were off to explore the outer world of our neighborhood and the inner world of the imagination.
            When Paul gets down to practical counsel for the Christians in Rome, he is keenly aware that the church is a living body of living bodies, not a mechanical toy. The church is people, in the Hebrew tradition, “the People of God.” The church is not a pecking order or ecclesiastical structure developed with the precision that would make Bill Gates blush with envy. Paul writes to real, live, warm, human persons with keen awareness that no two people are alike even in the church. When something good happens, it usually can be traced to the active gifts of the members, but not all members share the same gifts. Any expectation of uniformity ignores the human nature of the body. Although Paul offers a lot of practical advice–do this, don’t do this, focus your mind on this, not this, Paul is concerned with the nature not the structure of the church. Good behavior comes from who we are, not how we are ordered and organized. So, Paul reminds Roman Christians that they are “one body in Christ.” They are not cogs in a machine. They are not things to be used and discarded. They are not tools on a divine work bench. They, like Christ himself, are embodied persons. When we come together with our lives centered in the work of Christ, we are the body of Christ.
            In To Dream Again, Robert Dale warns about the human tendency to fiddle with the organizational structures of the church as if we were dealing with a mechanical toy. Maybe it is a side-effect of our hi-tech society or an undercurrent of the corporate world of business. He observed that churches invariably want to toy with the organizational structures as the cure-all. I recall in one of our early meetings to decide what kind of church we would become, I brought up the subject of “church polity” and watched everyone’s eyes roll back. Polity is about structure, about how the church is organized and operates. Who makes the decisions and how? We had to talk about it. We had to decide how to decide. We developed organizational structure and rules, determined a division of labor, set up a rhythm and schedule of meetings, and began to develop traditions. The organizational mechanics of church had to be addressed, but we decided very early that we will come together by covenant, by the promises we make to God and to one another. We will hold on to our identity as “the body of Christ.”

Members One of Another carolyn dipboye

           He was approaching the end of life. He had staked his reputation and spent the best years of his life as a preacher of the Gospel of Christ. Now he was coming to the end, facing off against detractors and wrestling with doubts that arose from deep within himself. Beset by a physical ailment–his so-called “thorn in the flesh”–he had nevertheless dragged himself practically over the entire known world in faithful pursuit of his calling in Christ. Yet here he was approaching the end, facing off against questions within and accusations from without–real questions and hard, mean-spirited accusations. “Physician, heal yourself,” they spat at him. “Anyone who lays hold to the truth that you proclaim can surely restore his health.” “You Hellenist, you outsider, brag about your impeccable training if you will, but beware: Your standing as a son of Israel will always be tainted by the place of your birth.” And deep from within himself, the anguish: “What about the Jews? What about the people of my heritage? What about my kin?” The Gentiles had responded in great numbers, but what about his own people–the people of Israel?
            Reading scripture, knowing something about how history is going to flow, we tend to minimize the struggle. We rip passages from the real life context that birthed them and make them about us. “Romans,” we say, “is about our struggle against sin–‘For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want’” [Rom. 7:17]. “Yes,” we nod, “Paul certainly knew us well.” Before turning to what Romans says to us, what if we really tried to come to terms with what it says about Paul? What if we read in it a struggle that went to the depths of Paul’s very being? What if we read the questions he raises as if they are real questions: “Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?” [8:35].
            Reading Paul’s questions as if they are real, seeking to come to grips with the torment with which he wrestled concerning the fate of his family of birth, has an effect on how we read the last several chapters of Romans, beginning with chapter 12–the section often spoken of as Paul’s ethical treatise, which follows his earlier theological treatise. Rather than Paul’s counsel being little more than a few pious strokes that put the icing on the cake, fulfilling common place expectations and amounting to little more than how we treat Granny and the cat, we begin to realize that Paul had a choice to make. All the way through his letter, he has made no pretense about the struggle. He gives no indication that all the challenges that are out there are not in fact real. He knows all too well and admits to his readers that, far from living in an ideal situation, “the sufferings of this present time” are heartfelt and heartrending. Far from riding above it all if we just put our trust in Jesus, he knows that in Christ the blinders come off and we cannot but see and feel in the depths of our very souls “the groaning” of “all creation . . . and [of] we ourselves” [8:22].
            Taking the world of frustrations and challenges that Paul confronted seriously, just as we have to take the frustrations and challenges of the world in which we live seriously, radicalizes the ethics, the lifestyle choices to which he points. Rather than focusing on the interior struggle with sin that we confront individually, each on our own, Paul calls us to the hope of community–a community so radically changed by the “mercy upon mercy” that we have encountered of God in Christ that we dare to build in the midst of all the chaos and enmity and discontent and competitiveness of the world in which we live a community that is different–a community that lives out of hope. Just as a person who has gone through long years of alienation and a painful divorce can harden themselves against future disappointments, future hurts, by vowing never to love or hope again, so we, made “wise” by the disappointed hopes we have encountered in life, can close ourselves off from hoping and trying again. Paul’s counsel, however, is not on the order of that of the billy goat whose “high hopes” keeps him butting against a seemingly immovable wall. Paul’s counsel resides in the risk of loving. We are, he acknowledges, different. “We have many members . . . [with] gifts that differ.” We are imperfect–Do not “think of yourself more highly” than you should. We can and do and will at times come to into conflict with each other. But, Paul counsels, live as if you are “members one of another.” And this is how you do it: “Love one another with mutual affection; outdo one another in showing honor. . . . Rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering, persevere in prayer. . . . Contribute to the needs of the saints; extend hospitality to strangers. . . . Bless those who persecute you” [12:10-14].
            It has a familiar ring. In touch with the groaning of the world in which we lived and aware that relationships can disappoint, some thirty-five people came together four years ago promising that, living out of the love of God in Christ, we would build a community of hope. And this, we said, is what it should look like: It should be an inclusive fellowship with no one thinking more of themselves than they ought. It should consist of a people committed to priesting one another, practicing a stewardship of gifts and possessions. “We will live in harmony with one another respecting the diversity of our Christian experience with no expectation that we shall walk in lockstep or wear a theological uniform.” And, “We will encourage one another toward responsible discipleship, knowing that the integrity of our faith is manifest in the way we treat others inside and outside the church.”
            No small promise, built upon no small amount of hope. Everyday in every way may it be at the center of all that Grace Covenant Church seeks to be and do. Like Paul, we live out of the mercies of God. May our life together reflect it.

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Find Us Faithful
Hebrews:11:32-12:2 November 4, 2007 larry dipboye

It has something to do with having more of your life behind you than ahead of you. Something happens around the mid-century mark in life. History takes on a whole new level of importance. Even if you have always been bored with academic history, even if your philosophy of life has always been “full speed ahead,” looking back, you discover treasures covered by the passing of time that you completely missed the first time around. Some people get immersed in genealogy or start attending family reunions. I was sitting with Glen Davis making small talk after the Thanksgiving holiday a few years ago. I asked about his trip to West Tennessee to a family reunion. He got a little spacey as he recalled watching the kids in the back yard playing. He commented with the tone of discovery, it seemed like only yesterday that he was one of them. I recognized a condition common to our age.

Nostalgia is a disease of aging. It means home-sickness, a deep longing for the past. If you cannot turn back the clock, you can at least revisit places and people from the past. If you cannot go there, you try to remember being there. To preserve memory against the inevitable loss of brain cells, you may record history on paper or media. You might try collecting your memories in picture albums and memorabilia. My grandmother decided about age eighty to write down the important memories of her life in an autobiography. She lived to be ninety-nine long enough to make eighty seem young. You can cringe with regret, smile with satisfaction, or sigh with relief, but you cannot change what has happened.

Five hundred years before the time of Christ, Greek philosopher Heraclitus warned, “you cannot step in the same river twice.” The Evans family, back home, had a funny clock they kept on their family room wall. It looked like a large gold pocket watch, chain and all. But the numbers were backwards, and the hands ran counter-clockwise. It was a joke from a novelty shop, and we always gave it an appropriate chuckle, but it also had a message. Real time runs in one direction. Whether you are young or old, your only power over the passing of time is what you are doing about today. We cannot change history. We can only attempt to understand the past and act on the present to change history for future generations.

Remember who you are. No one knows who wrote Hebrews. Maybe it was one of Paul’s disciples. Ruth Hoppin suggests that Priscilla wrote Hebrews and that her name was deleted because of embarrassment over a female theologian. Whoever the author, I’ll bet she was over sixty. The treatise is addressed to Jewish Christians caught in the first wave of Roman persecution of the church. It is a book of memories, a refresher course on Jewish theology and religious practices; but, more than that, it is a nostalgic journey into the past. The parade of heroes in Chapter 11 is a family picture album about the ancestors buried deep in the archives of Israel. Remember Cain and Abel? How about Noah, and Moses? The rest are mostly walk-ons to illustrate the point. Abraham stands at the center, in the leading role. Do you remember Abraham?

During my student days in Louisville, pastor of Crescent Hill Baptist Church John Claypool periodically preached biographical sermons on biblical ancestors under the repeated title, “Remembering Who We Are.” His visits to the Hebrew Scriptures was a way of keeping in touch with roots. In fact, we cannot begin to understand who Jesus was or who we are supposed to be without some knowledge of the Hebrew Prophets of God. The Passover Seder stands behind the Lord’s Supper. The new command that Jesus gave to his disciples to love one another has a vital connection to the Shema Israel, “You shall love the Lord your God,” and the God of steadfast love revealed in the events of Jewish history. Hebrews understands the cross in light of the sacrifices at the Altar of the Temple.

Henry Ford was wrong. History is not bunk. We live out of history the way a tree grows from the soil. Without roots a tree is dead. People without roots are lost. Jesus told the story of the lost son. He cashed in his inheritance, moved to a foreign country, wasted his bankroll as well as himself. When he came to himself in a pig sty, hungry enough to dine with swine, he remembered his roots. He remembered who he was, and without Thomas Wolfe’s permission, he dragged himself out of the pit and went home again. Without memory, there was no place to go.

Hold on to the ties that bind. We are family. No one of us is born in a vacuum. Our lives are tied to the past like the umbilical cord that links us to our mothers. Early Christians could not picture life apart from the community of faith, the family of God–past, present, and future–extending from their individual existence. The first reference to the “Communion of Saints” and the practice of invoking the aid of the martyrs emerges in the fourth century. Some believe that the doctrine has ties to the plurality of gods and demons in the Roman world. Under Christian domination the old ideas with pagan roots found new application in the extended community of saints, living and dead. In my youth, I dismissed the Communion of Saints with an air of superiority as “Catholic superstition.” I have found at least two reasons take a second look at saints. Our biological selves are drawn from our parents and grandparents and we are connected genetically to our siblings and ultimately to all of the people around us. Early Jews found their hope, not in the resurrection of the dead, but in the passing of tradition from one generation to another. Hope was centered in one’s children. Despair was a state of childlessness. Long before Darwin, the Jews knew that the biology of life is not a state of being; it is a flowing stream–an evolution from generation to generation. We are also spiritually connected to the generations before and after by virtue of our common life in the same God. So, whether on not you believe that the dead can participate and assist with the living, you cannot shake your connections to others, living and dead, who have lived and who will live in the flow of time.

Building on the bedtime stories of their childhood, Hebrew Christians are admonished to live out their faith as athletes running the course of a race in knowledge that they are surrounded by “a cloud of witnesses.” A cloud was a common figure for a mass of people. “Witnesses” turned out to be the word for “martyrs.” These are dead, departed saints, but they are not out of the picture, and they did not die in vain. We are connected. They cheer us on, as we are working to finish out the meaning of their lives.

Keep on going. More than one scholar has compared Hebrews to John Bunyan’s book The Pilgrim’s Progress–an allegory about the journey of life. Bunyan’s story is about the adventures of Christian as he travels the road of life. It is important to know that the story of pilgrim (traveler) is the journey not the destination. The Celestial City, the destination, gets very little attention in the end. The credo in Deuteronomy 26:5 begins, "A wandering Aramean was my ancestor.” Hebrews picks up the theme that life is a venture in faith, a pilgrimage to the Holy City, a trek across the desert toward the Land of Promise. The heroes in Hebrews 11 were all pilgrims, but not a one of them arrived. “Yet all these, though they were commended for their faith, did not receive what was promised.” That’s a sad commentary on the effort to live out the calling of God until you read the rest of it: “since God had provided something better so that they would not, apart from us, be made perfect.” Maybe the Christian story is not as much about destination, going to heaven, as we have assumed.

On our last visit with Mother in her home, she pulled out a bundle of old family photographs either for Carolyn’s entertainment or to satisfy some unresolved need for revenge against her son. Most of the black and white prints came from our 1956 family vacation to Los Angeles. I was 16 with a new drivers license in my pocket. I had intended to stay home with my summer job, but my boss encouraged me to go, and Dad offered to let me drive–and drive I did–almost every mile from Houston to Los Angeles. For the very first time in my life, I met my grandfather and several uncles and cousins I had never seen before. We visited Disneyland and Knott’s Berry Farm, the Grand Canyon, Las Vegas, and a few other interesting places–all in two weeks. As I recall, that was typical of family vacations. Dad had a life-long romance with the automobile. He came of age with the car and developing highways in the United States. It took awhile for me to catch on, but I finally realized a few years ago that, for Dad, the Grand Canyon took second place to Route 66. A vacation was not about arriving somewhere. The vacation was the trip. Someone said that life is what happens while you are planning something else. Dad may have been right. Life is more about the journey than about arrival at some utopia.

Remember who you are. Hold on to the ties that bind. But, for heaven’s sake, keep on going; for you are not only claiming your own existence; you are completing a link in the chain of time that gives meaning to those who have gone before you and lays a foundation for all you come after you.

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Faith in Dialogue VII: Committed and Inclusive
2 Corinthians 5:14-20 October 28, 2007 carolyn dipboye

It was the spring of 1992 and the city of Los Angeles was exploding in anger. Scenes of Rodney King being beaten by white policemen had triggered pent-up emotions which came boiling out in rage. We were transfixed as our TV screens and the front pages of our newspapers seemed to be reaching back into the 60's, splashing images of Reginald Denny pulled from his truck and beaten by black gang members, streets crawling with looters carrying merchandise on their backs like so many huge ants, and whole city blocks engulfed by flames.

Professor Miroslav Volf, then a Los Angeles resident, recalls that on his desk there lay, at that very moment, an invitation to speak to a gathering in Potsdam on "God’s Spirit and God’s People in the Social and Cultural Upheavals in Europe." Ethnic conflicts were heating up across Eastern Europe as old enmities erupted among peoples previously under the thumb of the Soviet Union, and right wing neo-nationalist and neo-fascist groups were spreading at an alarming rate in western European cities, particularly those of the re-united Germany.

Invited to the gathering as a native of the former Yugoslavia and the rising independent state of Croatia, at that moment caught in a life and death struggle against a Serbian onslaught, Volf was haunted by the images of three cities: Los Angeles, Sarajevo and Berlin. Noting 50 similar hot spots around the globe where ethnic conflict was transmuting into hot war, a special edition of the Los Angeles Times observed,

In Georgia, little Abkhazia and South Ossetia both seek secession, while Kurds want to carve a state out of Turkey. French Quebec edges toward separation from Canada, as deaths in Kashmir’s Muslim insurgency against Hindu-dominated India pass the 6,000-mark. Kazakhstan’s tongue-twisting face off pits ethnic Kazakhs against Russian Cossacks, while Scots in Britain, Tutsies in Rwanda, Basques and Catalans in Spain and Tauregas in Mali and Niger all seek varying degrees of self-rule or statehood. The world’s now dizzying array of ethnic hot spots . . . starkly illustrates how, of all features of the post-Cold War world, the most consistently troubling are turning out to be the tribal hatreds that divide humankind by race, faith and nationality – Robin Wright, "The New Tribalism, " LA Times , June 8, 1992, H1.

What do we as Christians have to say when the world around us seems to be degenerating into tribal warfare? When politics exploiting difference raises its ugly head to turn neighbor against neighbor? In a conscientious effort to get to common ground, should we feel compelled to put away our differences? In a world where our religious identities are so diverse, is religion indeed helpful? Or is religion a part of the problem?

With the helpful insight of Charles Kimball in When Religion Becomes Evil, his best-selling book of several years ago, we can agree. Yes, religion can be a problem. But, yes, religion can also be helpful. It all depends on what we take of religion when we enter the arena of conflict, when we come face-to-face with one whom we would identify as "the other."

As Christians, we take our model from God in Christ. Writing in 1972, the esteemed Mennonite theologian John Howard Yoder bemoaned "modern ethicists who have assumed that the only way to get from the gospel story to ethics, from Bethlehem to Rome or to Washington or Saigon, was to leave the story behind" [in Volf, Exclusion and Embrace, p. 22]. Admittedly, it matters drastically what we take with us from our story, and whether we present it as a demand for conformity from others or whether we take it to inform us on how we respond to the other. "Only at one point, only on one subject–but then consistently, universally–is Jesus our example: in his cross" [Ibid]. In God’s self-emptying love in Jesus Christ, we find our clue.

Paul said it, too. His letters to the Corinthian church address a situation of conflict in which a sense of the distinctive differences of "the other" were acute. In a city benefitting from the cosmopolitan atmosphere of extensive commerce, masses of the poor lived in the shadow of the wealthy and masses of the uneducated lived in the shadow of the cultured and elite. A diversity of national/cultural/religious backgrounds collided in the church. Contending leaders led factions of the church in one direction or the other. Paul, a Jew from Rome, was held highly suspect by Jews of Palestinian origins. Proponents of varying spiritual gifts contended with those claiming the priority of other gifts. Some believers flaunted their freedom in Christ to the point of license while others trumpeted moral responsibility. Differences concerning the role of gender and class raised their ugly heads in the context of worship. In a word, as Teresa Okure has observed, the Corinthian church, "exceptionally endowed in ‘all speech and knowledge,’ ‘not lacking in any spiritual gift’ (1 Cor 1:5, 7), was equally rich in ‘factions’ and ‘divisions" ["The Ministry of Reconciliation," Mission Studies, 23, #1, 2006, p. 110].

Paul pointed this conflicted and competitive group of "others" to the God who acted in Christ. On behalf of those who were far off, God crossed the distance and died "for all," not "for some." The differences of race, gender, sexuality, religion, goodness or badness notwithstanding, Christ died for all, breaking down the walls between us and bringing us together as reconciled children of God.

Identified with Christ, we become ambassadors of reconciliation. Paul was speaking to inner church conflict; however, the implications of what he was saying for divisions beyond the church, including divisions between religions, are monumental. When we commit ourselves to the reality of God’s reconciling presence in Christ, Paul says, everything becomes new. From that point on, "we regard no one from a human point of view." You might say, we put on new glasses. (Remember the shocking difference new glasses made the first time you put them on as a child?) Seeing things through Christ, we evaluate human differences, which do continue to exist, in a different way. Recognizing that those differences are not hindrances to God’s love, we become ambassadors of reconciliation. Urged on by the openness we have known of God in Christ, we are compelled to open doors that have been too long closed and lower walls of prejudice and exclusion that have crisscrossed our spiritual and physical landscapes for generations. In service to the reconciling God who came in Christ, we find ourselves, as we say in our Covenant of Grace, valuing all persons "without regard to the outward distinctions by which the world separates, classifies, and discriminates."

As we go out into the conflicted areas in the broader world and as we seek dialogue with other religious faiths, we go much as an ambassador goes out to represent his or her own country in a foreign country. We go not to uproot those to whom we go from honored heritage and traditions. We go not to denigrate and destabilize. We go knowing where home is, valuing home and taking the best of home with us. But, as an ambassador, we are commissioned not for the purpose of establishing one-way communication but for the purpose of seeking to listen, share, and learn in the patient, day-to-day process of building bridges of understanding. Taking our cues from the reconciling work of God in Christ, we go to extend community, to broaden our concept of neighbor and to join hands in pursuit of a better, safer, kinder world.

The hymn writer, Lloyd Stone, got it right:

This is my song, O God of all the nations,
A song of peace for lands afar and mine.

This is my home, the country where my heart is;

Here are my hopes, my dreams, my holy shrine;

But other hearts in other lands are beating

With hopes and dreams as true and high as mine.

My country’s skies are bluer than the ocean

And sunlight beams on cloverleaf and pine;

But other lands have sunlight, too, and clover,

And skies are everywhere as blue as mine.

O hear my song, O God of all the nations,

A song of peace for their land and for mine.

__________________________________

WHO ARE THE SAINTS?
Romans 1:1-7                       October 21, 2007                        Robert Puckett
          Pope Benedict has indicated a desire to place Pope John Paul II and Mother Theresa on a fast track to sainthood. Time magazine recently ran an extensive article on Mother Theresa revealing that her inward struggle was far different than her outward appearance.

The whole world looked upon Mother Theresa as a saint, but her book of confessions reveal that she did not experience a sense of intimacy with God throughout most of her life as a missionary. She longed to feel God’s presence, but it came only in brief moments that did not last, her sense of spiritual emptiness caused her grief. She often prayed for a sense of closeness to God and fulfillment but never really achieved it. And yet, the whole world knows that Mother Theresa was indeed a SAINT - with capital letters. While she was seeking the reality of God, the world saw the reality of God in Mother Theresa. As the little nun sought to reach out and touch Jesus, Jesus reached out and touched the poor of Calcutta Through her. While God’s presence was dim to her, it was very real to the people whose lives she touched with love and compassion.

And that is exactly what it means to be a Saint. Being declared a Saint by a Pope does not necessarily make one a Saint, but showing Christian love and compassion to others does!

Not all the Popes have been Saints. Some were downright rascals. There have been 266 popes, 82 of whom have been declared to be saints. The last one to be so designated was John XXIII. He was in office less than 5 years (1958 - 1963). But in that time he called Vatican Council II, which opened the windows and let fresh air into the Roman Church and opened it to the modern world, reformed the liturgy and other practices of the church. He published an encyclical called Pacem en Terris that sought reconciliation not only among Christians but between the nations. To the Jews he said, “I am Joseph, your brother.” He was universally loved and admired for his jovial and humble spirit. His ecumenical spirit opened the door for better relationships with Protestants, Jews, and other great religions of the world. It is my opinion that all Popes are called to be Saints, but not all of them have made it!

Who then are the real Saints? Who comes to mind when you think of Saints?

I suspect that the only saints some people think about are the New Orleans Saints - the football team. Others may think of the jazz musicians at Preservation Hall in New Orleans playing “”When the Saints go Marching In.”

Happy Lee, one of my college and Seminary classmates, complains that it is hard to live with his wife, Laura, because everyone thinks that she is a saint. The thing of it is that she would have to be a saint in order to live with him all these years. As a matter of fact, she does have a quality of saintliness about her. She goes out of her way to show kindness to people in need. She was for many years a hospice volunteer who spent time ministering to terminally ill patients, and she is always eager to offer hospitality to anyone who shows up at her door.

I also suspect that few people these days think about saints at all. Many people in the modern world think only of saints as ancient pious people with a halo around their heads.

But that’s not the picture the Bible paints of saints.

Paul addressed his letters to the saints in the various churches to which he wrote: “To all God’s beloved in Rome, who are called to be Saints” (Romans 1: 7). “To the Saints who are in Ephesus and are faithful in Christ Jesus” (Ephesians 1:1). If you read Paul’s letters carefully you will discover that some of those people that he called saints were not super pious folks with halos around their heads. Yet they are the foundation upon which the Church is built.

When Jesus picked the disciples, he did not pick them from among the most pious people he could find. They were not necessarily the nicest people he could find either. Even by today’s standard, they were somewhat crude. Almost all came from the ranks of the poor and some were unlettered fishermen. Some were not all that bright. According to the New Testament, they were always missing the point, competing with each other for position, and could not be depended on when the chips were down. Their primary qualification seems to have been in their willingness to follow Jesus when he invited them.

If Jesus had wanted people with the best credentials he should have chosen the Pharisees, but instead he took the people society said to were nobodies. The Pharisees were considered the best of society. They took the scriptures seriously and tried to be strict observers of the law and moral values. But they were also pompous, judgmental, and quick to condemn others who were not as self-righteous as themselves.

I tend to agree with something Harry Truman once said, “When someone prays too loud, you better go home and lock up the smokehouse.” Privately Truman was deeply religious but he did not trust super pious people.

So, who are the saints as the New Testament describes them? Instead of being people who are exceptionally good with a halo around their head, many of the the saints have been people with a touch of rascality in them, and if they had a halo at all, it was slightly bent.

SAINTS ARE SALTY. Many of the Saints in my life have been salty. They were more likely to be salty than sweet. Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount: “You are the salt of the earth; but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trodden under foot by men.”

When I was a boy I spent lots of time visiting my grandparents farm. I watched my grandfather kill hogs and preserve the meat to last through the winter. My grandmother cooked the best ham, sausage, bacon, eggs and biscuits I ever tasted. She cooked on a wood stove, but best of all they raised everything right there on the farm. They did not have electricity, thus no refrigeration. So how did they keep the meat from spoiling? They put it in a huge box filled with salt to cure it. Salt was the primary means of preserving things before the advent of modern refrigeration.

And when I think about saints, I remember what Jesus said about them being salt of the earth. Their primary purpose is to preserve what is good on the earth.

Saints can be downright salty in their language when the occasion calls for it. Carlyle Marney was one of the saints in my life. He once said that “Some preachers don’t have enough ego to damn a church mouse, and if you can’t damn some things you can’t bless anything either.”

Saints are not so heavenly minded that they are no earthly good. They do not piously talk about heaven all the time. I have know a few people like that who thought they were saints, but as the old spiritual has it, “Everybody talkin’ bout Heaven ain’t a going there.”

Real saints are people whose feet are firmly planted on the ground. They are practical people who preserve life at it's best right here on earth.

They are people who reach out to heal the hurt of the world, encourage others to make the most of their lives, and make a difference where they live.

They build hospitals, work for peace, seek justice, educate children, care for the homeless, feed the hungry, nurture children, and seek to make the world better. They are the salt of the earth!

SAINTS SERVE. A detailed study of the saints mentioned in the New Testament reveal that they were all different. They represented a wide diversity of character, attitude, opinions, and personality. Most of them were not overly pious, most of them were simple down-to-earth ordinary people. They represented the diversity of people who make up the world in which we live.

The main thing they had in common was their commitment to follow Jesus...to serve as he served and love as he loved. Saints are faithful to their commitment to follow Jesus.

I once read a memorial to a dog. His name was Winston, a Schnauzer with big dark eyes, ears turned up to listen, tongue sticking out with a smile. He was 13 years old. His family was broken hearted at his passing because at some point family pets stop being pets. They become full-fledged members of the family.

It is amazing how dogs can win our hearts. When we come home they welcome us like returning heroes. They give us unconditional love. Sometimes they sense when something is wrong and cuddle up beside us, rest their heads on our lap and administer a healing balm.

You can talk to dogs. Confess your deepest secrets. Express your deepest fears. And they will sit there, and...like a good friend...simply listen. They can change our lives for the better without ever saying a word. They are like the best of the Saints who reach out to others in their time of need and make a difference. Saints make life better through their presence and through their service.

Jesus reached out with love and compassion to the sick and lonely, to those who were rejected and despised, to the poor and hopeless, making the broken whole again. And he calls upon us to join the ranks of the Saints who do the same.

We are all called to be Saints--to be the salt that preserves the best, and to reach out to others with our presence and service in times of great need to make life better.

Are you one of the Saints? Will you be in that number when the saints go marching in?

______________________________

Faith in Dialogue VI: Global Faith
Jonah 3:1- 4:4; John 12:44-50 October 14, 2007 larry dipboye

Right out of college our son was employed by Matsushita Electrical in Chicago in the computer programing division. I had heard of the company but had little knowledge of their size or strength. I soon learned that Matsushita is the mother company of numerous electronics subsidiaries like Panasonic and RCA. At the time, it was one of the largest corporations in Japan in the process of extending operations around the globe. I have always found it a little amusing that the Chicago operation turned to a twenty-year-old college graduate to help communicate with home base. This was the beginning of my education in the world of economic "globalization." Riding on advances in computerization, telecommunications, and travel, globalization is tied to the economic transcendence of multinational corporations, although it has also been applied to the extended influence of al-Qaeda and international crime.

Bigger is not always better. For the past 30 years, the economic diplomacy of large corporations has overcome more barriers and crossed more borders than heads of state, diplomats, or missionaries have managed in 30 centuries. According to Forbes magazine, the largest multinational corporations enjoy a cash flow that exceeds the gross domestic product of all but the most productive nations. Marquette theology professor Daniel Maguire calls the globalization of economics "the first truly world religion." Its religious center is "moneytheism." It assumes the role traditionally played by religion, telling us what is valuable, what is sacred, and how to behave. (Sacred Energies, p. 11) But, Maquire warns that the focus of interest is purely secular, devoted to the success and growth of the company, not the welfare of people. While large corporations provide jobs in Third World countries, they exploit poverty and sometimes divert precious resources from the production of necessities for the workers to profits for the shareholders.

We are reminded that a global vision is not in itself a virtue. Hitler, Napoleon, Julius Caesar, and Alexander the Great shared a global vision of running the world.

Isolation is not an option I had just finished ninth grade. I was attending the high school graduation commencement of my sister. The year was 1954. The commencement speaker was a Houston judge, representing the political conservatism of the time. In retrospect, the address was amusing. The message was just what most high school seniors were sitting on the edge of their seats to hear. He warned that the U.S. should heed the advice of our first president to stay out of European affairs. The speaker was certain that we had no need of the United Nations. Our nation was self-sufficient. We had nothing to gain by involvement in international politics. We needed to withdraw aid to other countries and focus the national economy on domestic need. Of course, the speech took a few shots at the Soviet Union and the global threat of encroaching communism without any apparent contradiction. I really don’t know why I remember the address except that it is a quaint relic of days gone by. Perhaps a few voices can still be heard calling us away from foreign involvements, but isolation is no longer an option for any nation, whether political or economic.

Globalization is a religious vision. Jonah is one of my favorite Bible stories. It seems to be connected to an obscure prophet mentioned in 2 Kings 14:25 and is viewed by scholars as a parable rather than a history. The fish story, although significant the Gospels, is a means rather than an end to the message. Jonah is a prophet called by God to go to a foreign city Nineveh to warn of an impending doom. Rather than obeying the call, Jonah goes to sea, where it is assumed that God cannot get to him. To his dismay, God is also Lord of the sea. In a storm, the sailors toss Jonah into the sea; he is swallowed by a fish and vomited on the beach outside Nineveh. Jonah reluctantly decides to obey orders. He travels the three days walk across Nineveh delivering the message, "Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!" To Jonah’s further dismay, the king gets the message and orders the repentance of the entire population including animals and God reverses the intended disaster. Then Jonah goes into a pout. He is angry with God and offers an I-told-you-so protest to the Almighty: "I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and ready to relent form punishing." What kind of God is this who cares what happens to Assyrians?

No one knows the exact occasion of this story, but the best guess is that it follows the time of Jewish Exile. Nineveh was once the capital of the Assyrian Empire that had destroyed Israel and carried the leaders of Judah into exile. The destruction of Nineveh in 612 BCE signaled the end of the Assyrian Empire, a celebrated event for Jews. The story of Jonah challenges Jews to remember the God of steadfast love. Against voices calling for isolation from the world, the story of Jonah calls for a global vision anchored in the God of creation, Lord of all peoples. Considering the facts that Israel was never a world power and that Old Testament Judaism was a national religion, a world vision seems strangely out of place.

Jesus was almost as obscure as Jonah, a rabbi associated with the insignificant town of Nazareth and a handful of followers; yet, he announced the inauguration of the Kingdom of God that seemed to pose enough of a threat to Rome to be cause for his execution. The Greek kosmos appears 188 times in the New Testament, 104 times in the writings of John. Jesus does not come across as a local prophet. Indeed, John writes, "God so loved the world that he gave his only Son." God loved the kosmos, the world of people. Jesus is heard to cry out, "I came not to judge the world, but to save the world." That is a pretty big order for a peasant rabbi with no ties to big government or big religion.

We need a global faith. The authenticity of the church and the claim to validity for Christian religion is the global vision of Christ. The story of Christianity, unlike Jonah, is a determined movement out into the surrounding world with a message of universal love, peace, and hope. The Christian global vision has always been anchored in the teachings of Jesus even when it has been distorted into a play for world power, even when it has ignored the message of Jesus that he did not come to condemn the world. Sometimes Christian missionaries have marched behind colonial armies representing the power of the throne of England more than the rule of God. Christian missions have sometimes distorted the vision of Christ into establishing western culture over the good news of God’s love. In spite of the human hubris and frequent distortion of the messsage, the Christian world mission has also been effective in building trust and establishing peace between the peoples of the earth.

Sam Rankin was a medical missionary to China. He left for the states with a child needing surgery just before the hospital where he worked was overrun by the armies of Mao Tse-tung and the missionaries murdered. He returned to work in Hong Kong and helped to establish a hospital. Finally, he was forced to retire from his mission when his wife was diagnosed with cancer. Several years after the death of his wife, he married Irene and retired to Oak Ridge. Sam was very upset when the leaders of his denomination decided that all missionaries had to invest most of their time and energy on religious conversion of the people. Sam’s calling was to heal in the name of Christ and to allow the love of God to take its course in the lives of those he touched. He said that he could not do what the powers demanded and be obedient to the calling of Christ.

In spite of differences, the people of this world have one simple thing in common: we literally stand on the same ground. We share space on planet earth. We may disagree about where the earth came from or how it got here. We may have vast differences of belief about the nature of nature and the nature of God. Yet, our human destiny is intertwined with one another and inseparable from the fate of the planet. We cannot be the church of Jesus Christ and ignore the world. With Paul, I believe that God was in Christ reconciling the world and commissioning all of us to a ministry of reconciliation.

_______________________________

Faith in Dialogue V: No Other Name?
John 14:1-6; Acts 4:1-12                   October 7, 2007                   carolyn dipboye
      One semester during my student years I spent several hours a week in the seminary’s preschool program in conjunction with a class I was taking. The school was located in Seminary Village, an apartment complex near the campus, and consisted of three classrooms of a dozen to fifteen three, four and five-year-old children whose parents were enrolled in seminary. My assignment was designed to be something of a “hands-on” opportunity to test out what I was learning in the classroom. I recall one particular early spring morning when the three-year-old son of John Loyola, a graduate student from Nigeria, walked into the classroom with his face literally beaming. “The moon followed me to school this morning!” he told me. His excitement delighted me on two counts. I was moved by the awe and pure joy he communicated; but, even more, I saw enacted before my very eyes a basic teaching I had only recently encountered in the classroom: Small children assume the world revolves around them. And that’s okay! It’s a life stage we all go through if we are healthy and secure and surrounded on every side by loving family and friends.
      It isn’t okay, however, if we stay there. Also very early in life, usually when we encounter siblings or enter social experiences with other three-year-olds, we begin learning that the universe is just a little bit bigger than we had anticipated; and, often rudely, we begin waking up to the realization we must share our space. I recall a wake-up call I experienced one summer working in New Orleans. Twenty-one college students were assigned to the city that summer to work in various places of ministry. My assignment was Carver Center, located off of Magazine Street in a lower income, African-American neighborhood. My partner and I worked alongside three women who lived and ministered there year-round, providing recreational and educational opportunities for the children. During the summer we utilized something of a Vacation Bible School format, working with younger children in the mornings and older children in the afternoon. One morning my partner was leading a “character study,” where each day we shared the life story of someone who had often overcome great odds to make a significant contribution to the world around them. The story for that particular morning was about Martin Luther. When Vee announced we would be talking about Martin Luther, the children’s faces broke into bright smiles; and one little fellow asked with glee, “Martin Luther King?” “Well, no,” she assured him, Martin Luther.” We chuckled about the incident later, but only as I had time to step back and reflect did I realize the enormity of our missed opportunity. In my ethnocentrism, I had failed to recognize that in 1967 there was no more significant character story that we could have shared with the children than that of Martin Luther King. I was shocked and embarrassed at my own lack of insight.
      John Hick, who has written prominently about the present day encounter of world religions, has called for a “Copernican revolution” in our attitude toward peoples of other faiths. Just as science made the earth-shattering discovery that the universe does not revolve around the earth, so must Christians mature beyond assuming that we alone are within God’s galaxy. We must move beyond insistence on Christianity’s occupying center stage to the recognition that it is God who is at center and all religions, including our own, revolve around God.
      The last century saw a maturing within the Christian faith as we began moving across denominational lines to celebrate our oneness in Christ. Today many voices within the church are calling us to move beyond our isolation and claims of superiority to embrace a deeper and wider ecumenism. More than merely learning to tolerate other faiths as we would tolerate a toothache, we are called to join hands and celebrate those we have labeled “other” as also God’s children.
      Is this a moment of opportunity? Or danger? Or both? It depends on what we do with Jesus.
      Is Jesus the only way to God? From our earliest years in Sunday school, we remember hearing John’s rendition of the words of Jesus: “I am the way, the truth and the life, no one comes to the Father but by me.” We also remember Peter’s words before the Temple authorities: “There is no other name under heaven . . . by which we must be saved." Most of us at some point asked the question, “What about the heathen? What about those who have never heard? What about people of other religions?” “It may seem unfair to us,” we were reassured, “but we have to leave that up to God.” We may have gone on our way, putting our questions to rest, until we began encountering people of other faiths. Then, just as we had grown to see that maybe Methodists, Presbyterians and Catholics also knew God, we began to see a God bigger still. This God had spoken the reassuring words through the prophet Jeremiah,” When you search for me, you will find me; if you seek me with all your heart, I will let you find me” (29:13-14). Surely, this God did not turn a deaf ear to the earnest prayers of any of God’s children. Many of us made our pilgrimage, feeling we had to bracket some rather significant teachings of scripture, but faithfulness to the God we had come to know in Christ would permit us no other choice.
      Although the Bible does at many points reflect the limited understanding of the human agents through which it came to us, much of our difficulty comes from our efforts to twist passages of scripture to speak to issues they were not intending to address. Jesus in John 14 is not speaking to the issue of world religions. Although the words John places on Jesus’ lips at a number of points seem more likely to reflect the struggle of the church in John’s day with Jewish authorities than what Jesus may have actually said, Jesus’ Farewell Discourse in chapters 14-17 is delivered in the intimate setting of the upper room. Jesus is not addressing the masses from the streets nor the Temple authorities. He is speaking to his own inner circle. The God of whom he speaks is not the generic God of many faiths but the God whom he called “Father.” “Know who you are,” Jesus is saying to his disciples. “You come to the Father by me.” To stretch what he is saying to mean that no one else has access to God is to take liberties with the text. He is not focused on other religions, other peoples, but his disciples. “It’s critical,” he says, “that you know who you are.”
      In a similar way, Peter’s words before the Jewish authorities are spoken in response to a specific challenge. “By what power or by what name did you heal this man?” the authorities ask. “By the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth,” Peter responds. Rather than a monologue on world religions, Peter’s response is again about identity. Facing the possibility of martyrdom, Peter says in no uncertain terms, “This is who we are. The power working through us is that of Jesus (Jeshua in Hebrew, literally, ‘God saves’). We act by this name and no other: not the name of Peter or John or John the Baptist or the high priest.”
      The Christian faith affirms the centrality of Christ. The central passages in Christian scriptures that we have used to exclude other peoples from access to God are not about their exclusion but our inclusion. Rather than turning Peter’s words in Acts into a denunciation of others, we should see them as a doxology for having encountered the loving mercy of God through Christ. Harvey Cox, a prominent Harvard Divinity School theologian, decries the degeneration of so many attempts at interfaith dialogue into just so much tedium. Christians, he observes, often feel they must “soft-pedal” Jesus and speak in the generic and abstract. “Jesus,” he argues, “ is not merely a background figure. He is central to the Christian faith. Wherever one starts . . . any honest dialogue Christians and others will sooner or later–and in my experience it is usually sooner–have to deal with Jesus.” Until that happens, we find ourselves engaging in ”the necessary pleasantries that often precede a genuine conversation but are not integral to it.” It is just this factor of Jesus, he suggests, that non-Christians are most interested and most eager to discuss (‘Many Mansions or One Way? The Crisis in Interfaith Dialogue,” Christian Century, Aug. 17-24, 1998, pp. 731+).
      Contrary to our suspicion that openness to persons of other faiths means that we must neutralize our beliefs, representatives from other faith traditions tell us just the opposite. Rabbi Abraham Heschel, who used to delight in reminding Christians and Jews of their need for one another, shared a story about the Balshem Tov, the 18^th century founder of Hasidism. Approaching a wealthy Eastern European Jew one day, he observed, “I think you should fire your wagon driver.” “Why would I do that?” the man asked. “Because I saw him pass his church yesterday, and he didn’t cross himself. The man is not to be trusted!”
      The Dali Lama on a visit to the West was asked by a woman if she should convert to the Buddhist faith. “No,” he told her. “It is better to drink deeply from one well than merely to taste the water from six wells.”
      We should be who we are. Not competing with others to show our superiority. Not slamming doors and drawing rigid lines of exclusion. But being who we are as people who take our cues from the very center of our faith–the Christ. Karen Thomas Smith, once a college classmate with our daughter, serves as Chaplain to the Christian Community at Al-Akhawayn University in Ifrane, Morocco. Supported in part by the Alliance of Baptists of which we are a part, she characterizes her ministry in a country that is 99% Muslim in terms of a witness that seeks to be diaconal, cruciform and dialogical.
“If the one we are preaching is Christ crucified, our witness should be in keeping with his character and his life. The way of the cross is one of humility and vulnerablity. When we live our faith alongside our Muslim neighbors humbly, vulnerably, and honestly, admitting our weaknesses and questions, acknowledging that we are not invulnerable, invincible, or infallible, but risking and hoping and trusting in God’s grace, our lives themselves are a cruciform witness to the Christ we seek to follow and serve ” [Review & Expositor, Winter 2007, p. 150].
      Karen shares a story of her early days in Morocco. Working in a local high school, she was assisting a class in a mask-making activity. Almost all of the students wrote in Arabic, “Allahu Akbar” somewhere on their masks. When she asked them what the words meant, one of the boys after a moment’s struggle said to her, “Miss, it means, ‘God is so, so big.’”
      And so it is with us. Placing the Christ of gracious love at the center of our faith and of all that we are and do, we open ourselves to a much larger world. Opening to those we have labeled as “other,” we experience them as God’s children, and as has happened so many times in the past, the God whom we serve becomes so much larger than any we have ever known. Thanks be to God.

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Faith in Dialogue IV: Authentic Religion
1 Corinthians 10:19-32; 1 John 4:1-8           September 30, 2007           larry dipboye
      A decade ago I supervised the international exchange students for my Rotary Club. For most of one school year we were the host family for a Turkish Muslim daughter. Ayben was a delightful teenager, anxious to leave a good impression of her country and her faith, but she was a bit lonely. Our children were grown, and no one her age lived in the immediate neighborhood. Then, her best friend at school, an exchange student from Finland, moved in with the Cates’ directly behind our house. For about five months the girls spent almost every waking hour together in one house or the other. Toward the end of the term, as the day approached to go home, Carolyn discovered a problem discussion between the girls. Ayben was Muslim, and Marite’s father was a Lutheran pastor. Marite had always been taught that non-Christians were going to hell. She could not imagine God not loving Ayben as she did. She discussed her problem with her friend as she struggled with her theology. Carolyn gave comfort to Ayben, while Marite worked out her understanding of God in regard to people of other faiths.
      The plurality of world religions is a fact of daily life. We were suddenly confronted by the fact of our common humanity that crosses all of the boundaries of ethnicity, nationality, race, and religion. Most of us have grown up with religious conclusions that are void of any direct personal experience. If your assumptions about people of other faiths are never challenged by new information or experience, you can pull up the covers of your little world over your head and avoid all of the theological problems presented by the big picture. In Structures of Prejudice, Carlyle Marney labeled this “Provincialism,” “prejudgment of community” (p. 67ff), a geographical limitation of one’s understanding of the world as if the little space in which we live is the center of the universe. In 1961, when Marney wrote his book, it was mostly about race, but the problem has expanded to issues of nationality and religion as the world has shrunk. Marney cites Freud’s phrase, “narcissism of small differences,” at the root of prejudice.
      Our perception of the world has changed radically since my childhood. In the Baptist establishment of my home town and school, we had no doubt that we alone possessed the one true religion. Outside of the study of Christian missions, we had no direct knowledge of people of other faiths. I recall one Jewish student in my school - no Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, or Sikh. The Jewish boy moved away. We could easily relegate people of other faiths to damnation without question. We never had to deal with non-Christians as real people. They were foreigners. We were consistent, however. We also had serious questions about Catholics, Methodists, and Presbyterians.
      The Varieties of Religious Experience (by William James) is no longer just a century-old book in a dark corner of the library; it is a fact of daily life in our schools and neighborhoods. The religious pluralism of our time is not unlike the religious situation of the New Testament churches. Although early Christian language centers all truth exclusively in Christ, Christians were a distinct minority surrounded by people of many different faiths. They faced the practical problem of coexistence with people whose values and faith perspective stood in stark contrast with the followers of Christ. Paul was among the early Christian leaders who struggled with living in the world without losing one’s Christian identity to the world. He devoted three chapters of his letter to Corinth to the peculiar question, “Shall a Christian eat meat that has been sacrificed before idols?” The whole discussion seems terribly tedious and irrelevant for the 21st century. In the final analysis, however, Paul suggests timeless principles from which we can find new footing for the world in which we live.
      Exercise spiritual discernment in determining the authenticity of religion. Paul was critical of the religious practices that surrounded the Corinthian church as well as the practices in the church. He labeled the gods to which meat had been sacrificed, “demons.” He prohibited the participation of Christians in pagan ritual. Where the religious practices of the community were in conflict with Christian values, Paul had no qualms about making statements of absolute denunciation. But, before we write Paul off as a Christian bigot with an emaciated, narrow theology, we need to examine the realities of some of the religious practices involved. Temple prostitution and sexual abuse of children were accepted practices in the Greek culture. One did not have to be Christian to see that the gods of Greek mythology were egotistical, capricious, and immoral by humanitarian standards of behavior. Paul called for the exercise of spiritual discernment for the culture, but he was equally critical of behavior within the church. One might even say that Paul’s harsh judgment was more intense when directed at people who should know better. He was an equal opportunity critic of religion, his own as well as others.
      In an article on “Religious Pluralism” in The Encyclopedia of Religion (XII, p. 331), John Hick describes three characteristic responses to religious pluralism in our world: Exclusivism that condemns all other religions as false; Pluralism that views all of the great religions as somewhat equal, but different, responses to the ultimate reality we identify as God; and Inclusivism that seeks out and affirms the good in other religions while affirming the central truth of one’s own faith. Both pluralism and exclusivism are lacking in discernment. I must confess my absolute denunciation of some acts done in this world within the context of religious devotion. I have no respect for Osama Bin Laden’s religious zeal leading to a mission of death and destruction for the Western culture. I think I am fair in saying that I have no greater respect for the Christian architects of the Spanish Inquisition who tortured and burned heretics in the name of Christ or of the Crusaders who slaughtered Muslims in service to God. I am convinced that authentic religion supports life and human dignity regardless of the language or names for God. The same humanity is common to all religions and the same standards of human worth apply to all even when our theology is different. Christians have not only the right, but the obligation, to exercise spiritual discernment of all religious practices with a will to reform whenever we find our thinking and our practices to be in conflict with the spirit of Christ.
      Communicate the grace of God in Christ to every person regardless of religion. The value of the person is central. In his final summary, Paul was able to look past the religious barriers to community to include every human being as a child of God. He came down to focus concern, not on protecting theology, but on concern for the welfare of the other person. The salient question was not the theological understanding of the meat on the table but the understanding of the other person at the table. I think that this was a big issue for Corinthian Christians and for Paul because of the mental connection to koinonia (communion), the Table of the Lord and the table of a neighbor in a shared meal. While he denounced the ritual practice of having communion with demons in participating in pagan ritual, he affirmed the practice of communion with neighbors even if the understanding of the meat on the table was not the same. The principle is pure gospel. We cannot forget that Jesus was criticized for associating with sinners and even eating with them.
      The very moment the church ventured into the world outside of Jerusalem and Judea, she had to deal with the radical differences of people with no Jewish or Christian roots. She had to face the social challenge to her own provincial understanding of the world.
      Early in my ministry I developed the wedding ceremony that I have used for some thirty years with regular modifications relative to the couple involved. I chose to focus on the language of 1John 4 that centers the identity of God in expressions of Christian love. It is the only passage in the Bible that simply states, “God is love.” Early on, I learned that Greek grammar does not allow for equality between the subject God and the predicate nominative love. Love (agaph) does not have an article and is not equal to the word God (o Qeos, “the God”). Paul Scherer calls it, “the love that God defines.”
      John opens the door to locate the evidence of God in human life in all expressions of authentic love transcending the barriers of religion. I have often talked with couples who come from vastly different religious backgrounds or no religious experience at all, who obviously manifested the self-giving love for one another that I would identify with Christ. I gradually grew to the conclusion that God is present and revealed in every authentic expression of human love. Even if you do not share my religion, even if you are not religious, you meet the God of authentic love at the point of contact in loving another person; for, indeed, “God is love.” The principle extends beyond marital love to all human acts of selfless giving to one another.
                Marite could not reconcile her exclusive theology with her love for Ayben: “Praise God from whom all blessings flow.” It was perhaps the only way she could climb the walls surrounding her religion. So it is with us.

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Faith in Dialogue III: How Do You Read?
Psalm 82; Micah 6:6-8; Luke 10:25-28        September 23, 2007        carolyn dipboye
      The year was 1893. Chicago was hosting the Columbian World Exposition, a forerunner of the world’s fair. Taking advantage of the influx of peoples from around the world, Western and Eastern religious leaders called a September meeting of the first World’s Parliament of Religions. Long touted as the beginning of the interfaith movement, it provided the West with its first genuine encounter with Buddhism and Hinduism. An address by Calcutta’s Swami Vivekananda met a particularly enthusiastic reception. His first words, “American Brothers and Sisters,” were greeted with an extended standing ovation. The Swami bemoaned “sectarianism, bigotry, and it's horrible descendant, fanaticism” that had long “filled the earth with violence, drenched it often with human blood, destroyed civilization, and sent whole nations to despair.” Recalling the tolling of a replica of America’s Liberty Bell that had called the meeting into session, he voiced fervent hope that the bell’s tolling would prove to be “the death-knell of all fanaticism, of all persecutions with the sword or with the pen, and of all uncharitable feelings between persons wending their way to the same goal.”
      Unfortunately, the initiation of the interfaith movement did not herald the end of religious rivalries and hatred. The twentieth century would be marked with some of the greatest religious violence of human history: Nazi Germany’s attacks upon the Jews, the confrontation of Catholic and Protestant in Northern Ireland, Muslims and Jews in the Middle East, Hindus and Muslims in India, and Sunnis and Shiites today. Nor has our own country been immune. Confronted on every side by the fear Americans harbored against Asian peoples and religions, Nobel Prize-winning Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore would leave America in the 1920's, charging that even “Jesus Christ himself could not get into the United States!”
      In 1983 vandals swinging clubs and hurling paint, desecrated a Hindu temple in Philadelphia, tearing its scriptures into shreds and leaving damage in the tens of thousands of dollars. A Houston temple was similarly attacked in 1987. In 1989 the Hindu temple of Troy, Michigan, was attacked on the anniversary of Kristallnacht, the night Nazis had burned and trashed Jewish synagogues and businesses in Germany. In 1993 the meeting house of Cambodian Buddhists was vandalized, and the message “Dirty Asian, Chink, Go Home” painted on the wall. Having fled the terror of the Khmer Rouge, the Cambodians found themselves targeted once again, only this time in America. In the late 1980's “Dot Buster” vigilante groups organized to rid the New Jersey area of Hindu immigrants. Harassment boiled over into violence when a thirty-year-old Indian immigrant was attacked and killed by a gang yelling “Hindu, Hindu!” A few weeks later a gang attacked a young medical resident, leaving him with severe neurological damage.
      A long string of attacks on Muslim mosques preceded September 11, 2001, with attacks escalating after that terrible day. An Indian American man was shot and killed at an Arizona gas station because someone mistook his turban as an indication that he was Muslim. Just this spring a Muslim Arab American woman, the mother of two and manager of a Sheraton Suites Hotel in Philadelphia, received a threatening note filled with venomous words and phrases such as "REMEMBER 9/11" … "You and your kids will pay" … and "death." Acting under the Hate Crimes Act, the Philadelphia FBI office with the assistance of the Muslim Public Affairs Council investigated and solved the case. FBI statistics document the spike in hate crimes targeting Arab, Muslim, and Sikh communities after 9/11. Last year 11 percent of the 1,314 hate crimes motivated by religious bias—128 in all—targeted Muslims. Federal officials admit the numbers do not fully reflect the reality. Abuse and discrimination often go unreported due to immigrant and minority communities’ fear of government authorities and sense of embarrassment.
      True religion manifests itself in the practice of mercy and justice. Although some of the perpetrators of religious hate crimes are sick individuals who interpret difference and vulnerability as a green light for violence, others act out of a distorted reading of their faith. All of the major world religions have at their base, however, core teachings of justice and compassion. Violence in the name of God offends the basic teachings of Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim and Christian faiths. The Hebrew scriptures in our Bible are replete with admonishments to treat the sojourner, the alien, the one who is uprooted and vulnerable with kindness and respect. “Remember,” the scriptures warn, “you were strangers in Egypt.” Not only the stranger, the immigrant, but any who are weak and vulnerable should be met with justice and mercy. Repeatedly, the law and the prophets link righteousness with justice. Apart from justice, religious piety leaves God unimpressed.
      Psalm 82 depicts an unusual scene. God puts the gods on trial. Whether they be the gods of other nations or the gods the Israelite people have put into God’s place, the charge is still the same. Their failure resides in their misappropriation of justice. “You judge unjustly and show partiality to the wicked,” God, the prosecutor, says. How are the gods to redeem themselves? Not by pious words. Not by demonstrating their orthodoxy. Their redemption, the indication that they are indeed on God’s side will be through showing mercy and justice for “the weak and the orphan,” “the lowly and the destitute,” “the weak and the needy.” In the absence of justice, the very foundations of the world shake, tilting the earth again into chaos.
      “With what shall I come before the LORD?” the prophet Micah asks. Imagine the religious pilgrim approaching the gates of Jerusalem to pay homage at the Temple. Approaching the keeper of the gates, he asks, “Should I offer not merely a newborn calf, but a more valuable year-old calf? How about if I bring not just one ram, an impressive act in and of itself, but a thousand rams? What if I bring not the customary vial of oil, but ten thousand rivers of oil? Even more, what if I place my firstborn child on God’s altar?” The best, only the best is good enough to give to God in worship. But, what is best?
      “It is no mystery,” the prophet says. “God has told you again and again what is required. Here it is again: ‘To do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God.’” Far from a mystery. Far from optional. This is it! Justice. Kindness. And humble, faithful obedience, day in and day out.
      “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” the young lawyer asks Jesus. Reflective of the religious snobbery that has dogged us through the years, we’re prone to make his question and the question of Micah’s pilgrim insincere at best and a trick question at worst. We then tend to slide into tongue clicking at the legalistic work ethic of the Jews. What would happen if we approached both questions as if they were actually genuine? What if we took them as seriously as if they were our own? “What must I do?” “What shall I give?” Notice that Jesus turns the question back on the man and us: "How do you read?" "Just this," the young man responds: “Love God from the very center of your being with all that you are and do. And render loving care to your neighbor.” This, Jesus affirms, is true religion. This is the gift pleasing to God.
      Love , justice and mercy spur action. Justice for the weak and needy, kindness and humble obedience to God, and love of neighbor certainly govern thoughts and attitudes, but more than that, they must manifest themselves in concrete actions. “ Do this,” Jesus says, “and you will live.” Justice, kindness and humility are not just another orthodoxy of the mind so that if we just think right, we’ve done our due. None of us would associate ourselves with the violence of religious hate crimes. All of us feel saddened and embarrassed when such acts crop up in our communities and nation. Embarrassment and sadness and feeling kindly toward the victims, however, is not enough. Far from counseling us to distance ourselves from the problem and certainly far from permitting hatred and discrimination toward other faiths, obedience to the God of Abraham and Jesus mandates that we extend ourselves to embrace them as neighbor.
      Minimally, we can give our wholehearted endorsement to hate crimes legislation that penalizes violence and discrimination against anyone. Minimally, we can raise our voices, bearing witness to a God of love and justice, when someone slanders another people of faith. Pontifications by prominent preachers who proclaim that God does not hear the prayers of a Jew or that Mohammad was an idolater and a pedophile are heard around the world. The least we can do is to put our multiple voices together to say with equal conviction that God hears the prayers and receives the worship of all who seek God’s face.
      In June 1999, three synagogues were torched in Sacramento, California. Two days later the Muslim Public Affairs Council and the Northern California Methodist Conference released statements condemning the actions and voicing solidarity with the Jewish congregations. The first Sabbath evening as members of one of the congregations gathered for worship in a 2000 seat public theater, they were shocked to find the room filled almost to capacity by a community of believers who, faithful to the mandates of their own faiths, would not leave this small congregation to stand alone.
      In December 1993 a cinder block was thrown through a Jewish child’s bedroom window because of the menorah placed in the window for Hanukkah. Five days later a sporting equipment store posted a sign on its huge billboard: “Not in Our Town!” Aware that the menorah had been the signal for the attack, members of the Billings United Church of Christ congregation agreed to put menorahs or cut-outs of menorahs in their own windows. The Billings Gazette soon got into the act, printing a cutout menorah for distribution to all of its subscribers. Estimates of the number placed in windows range from 3000 to 10,000. Either way, it made a significant statement.
      Simple acts, but acts that spoke volumes. Actions that were true to the teachings of a whole assortment of religious faiths. Actions that spoke of one God who calls and empowers people to be messengers of hope and truth.
      Our congregation affirms in our Covenant of Grace, “We believe that God was in Christ reconciling the world (2 Cor. 5:19), yet we set no limit on the reach of God’s love or the activity of God beyond the experience and faith of Christians.” How will we translate those words, those heartfelt sentiments into action? A whole world of possibilities stretch before us, calling for us to go beyond even this new brand of orthodoxy to find creative ways to be neighbor in our world today. “Go,” Jesus said, “and do.”

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Faith in Dialogue II: The Empty Pedestal
Isaiah 44:9-20; Acts 17:16-32                   September 16, 2007                    larry dipboye
      N. T. Wright in The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions (co-author, Marcus Borg, p157)tells about serving as chaplain at Worcester College at Oxford. Each year he took time to get acquainted with each new student. Occasionally, he would meet a student who attempted to terminate any future relationship with the chaplain by saying, “‘You won’t be seeing much of me; you see, I don’t believe in God.’” Wright developed a stock response, “‘Oh, that is interesting. Which god is it you don’t believe in?’” They usually described a censorious monster looking down on humans with disapproval, capriciously sending some to heaven and others to hell. Wright would reply, “Well, I’m not surprised you don’t believe in that god. I don’t believe in that god either.” Then, he would go on to say, “‘I believe in the god I see revealed in Jesus of Nazareth.’”
      The God-question is primary. Most people tend to stop short of asking the ultimate god-question. The existence of God is only a fragment of the issue. From the bottom up, from a purely human point of view, the identity of God is the ultimate issue of the ultimate question. Religion moves to life’s center stage and determines the entire course of existence as people interact with their image of god. We either live up or down to the idea of god we carry in our heads. This aspect of religion, more than any secular issue we can appropriate, explains the behavior of the men behind “9-11.” It also explains the equally astounding loving, sacrificial behavior of Mother Teresa in serving the poorest of the poor and dying in Calcutta. In the investigation of Mother Teresa’s sainthood, the Vatican has recently exposed Mother Teresa’s tormented uncertainty of God. We should not be surprised that the “saint” was lacking in absolute certainty. That is the nature of faith, an admitted fact of the human condition, as well as a characteristic of those qualified by the Vatican as saints.
      The identity of God is the issue in Second Isaiah’s story of the manufacture of idols. The prophet is a bit short on diplomacy in his ridicule of the neighbors. He accuses them of being satisfied with a god beneath the level of human, lacking in life, made of the scraps leftover from human sustenance. I think that most of us would agree that the very definition of the word god implies one greater than we are. If I can make it, manipulate it, or destroy it, it certainly is not God. The Creator is greater than the creature. So Hebrew scriptures focus on the God of creation; the unity/oneness of God; and the transcendence, thus, hiddenness of God in stark contrast with the animism and idolatry of other religions. The total rejection of idols led to a dearth of art in the Jewish culture. One of my seminary professors brought a small tourist trinket from Israel to class one day and noted the symbol printed on the bottom that indicated that it is not an idol. The impact of the prohibition of idolatry had reached all the way into modern Israel and the 20th century.
      The rejection of idols spilled over into the Christian view of God and was evident in Paul’s encounter with Greek religion in Athens. Paul was, “deeply distressed to see that the city was full of idols,” a normal reaction from a devout Jew. The apparent shock value of Paul’s visit make us wonder if this first Christian missionary was ignorant of the world outside of his native Tarsus. What did he expect to find at the center of Hellenistic culture? Perhaps Luke is exercising some literary license to provide us with a description of the religious situation in the Roman Empire. The Roman culture was very religious, in fact, the more religion the better. Every conquest of a new colony brought the possibility of a new form of worship into the religious pantheon (all-gods). So, Rome allowed for Jewish religion. The final Temple was constructed by Herod under the watchful eye of Roman approval. All that Rome expected in return was tolerant co-existence of religions and absolute obedience to Caesar.
      The God-question calls for a positive statement of faith. The religious toleration of Rome permitted Paul to travel and left him free to speak in the marketplace of Athens. The religious curiosity of the philosophers opened the door for his grand speech in front of the Areopagus. Paul was a bit more diplomatic than Isaiah. He was speaking to a different audience. Our language and attitude tend to change when we are speaking to outsiders. The Greeks had no background or understanding of Jewish tradition. Paul could not presume to quote from his Hebrew scriptures.
      In reference to the forest of idols, Paul observed, “I see how extremely religious you are in every way.” The Greek word literally means fear-of-demons, which the KJV translated “superstitious.” That would have been an insult to the Athenians, closing off further hearing of Paul’s sermon. Paul was speaking to the common understanding that the world is directed and controlled by spiritual powers, good and evil, under the umbrella designation of “demons.” Paul affirmed the spiritual hunger represented in the plurality of religions, while he turned attention to the wild card in the picture - an empty pedestal with the designation, “To an unknown god,” literally, “an agnostic god.” Then, he proceeded to identify the Jewish God of creation, the point of connection for all the peoples on the earth, and cited, not the Jewish scriptures, but a Greek poet, to identify the God of everywhere, “In him we live and move and have our being.” Paul made a connection between a Greek poet and the revelation of God in Christ, proclaiming that while we grope for god, God is here and now.
      Paul made a positive statement of his faith in Christ, but offended his hearers when he mentioned the resurrection. It is important for us to see that, in Athens, Paul did not see his task as negative and destructive. He did not attack the Greek understanding of deity. He sought common ground with Athenians that would allow him to speak of his Christian experience of God. One is hard-pressed to find anything positive to say about the behavior of the gods in Greek mythology. Yet, two great philosophers of Athens, Aristotle and Plato, had tremendous influence on the later development of Christian theology.
      The burden falls on the believer. I do not identify my God with the deity who called Israel to execute the innocents in the settlement of Canaan, nor do I see the God and Father of Jesus Christ in the cross of the Ku Klux Klan. I do not recognize my God in the gospel of prosperity heard from some TV preachers. I would challenge Islamic leaders to tell us what is positive about a god who calls people to suicidal violence toward themselves and homicidal violence toward innocent bystanders standing in their targets. All religious warfare, whatever the source, is a contradiction of the God who was in Christ.
      The God-question is open. Paul found something positive to say about an agnostic pedestal. Perhaps the pedestal was only a prop on the stage to provide fodder for Paul’s sermon, but I would dare to suggest that something more is implied about the nature of God. The God of the empty pedestal refuses to be locked up in our images. The hidden God of the Jews defied the idolatry that limited God to Jewish borders in Jonah and that denied the inclusion of the Gentiles for some early Christians. God defies the idolatry of Christian denominations refusing to become the exclusive property of one communion over another. In his first Papal encyclical, Paul VI declared to the world, “honesty compels us to declare openly our conviction that there is but one true religion, the religion of Christianity.” I am sure that was an honest statement of his belief, and that Jesuit John Moffitt was correct in noting that for Pope Paul VI “Christianity” was limited to the Catholic Church (Christian Century, Nov. 17, 1976). We were just as guilty in my early Baptist experience of slamming the door on God’s grace outside the Baptist “trail of blood,” that claimed absolute priority of Baptists over all other historical forms of Christian witness. Everyone wants to own God, but God is not a property to be possessed, never subject to limitation to any one cultural expression.
      Our pedestal for God is not exactly empty; we can make numerous, positive statements about the God we know in Christ; but our pedestal is certainly incomplete. No one has ever uncovered the whole mystery of God. Paul Tillich called for the world to look beyond every religious and theological statement to God above god - the God who is always more than we think or say. He affirmed the persistent Jewish challenge to idolatry and insisted that Christians need Jews to remind them that God is always beyond our grasp.

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Faith in Dialogue I: God is Present
Amos 6:1-8; 9:7-13                      September 9, 2007                      carolyn dipboye
She resides with her family in another state, but she was born and grew up in Tennessee. As a young woman she met and fell in love with a young Muslim. They married and moved away and became the parents of three children. I met her a year ago and was struck by this very warm, bright, outgoing American woman who has taken up the scarf and faith of Islam. She has related something of her parent’s struggle with her marriage, and I can only imagine the concern they must have carried for their daughter and grandchildren as anti-Muslim feelings have run so high in the years since 9-11.
      I could not help but think of her as I read Mohja Kahf’s article, “U.S. Muslims: ‘We Carry Pieces of Your Family Story,’” in the Knoxville Sentinel a few weeks ago. Also a young mother, raising children in a small Southern city, Mohja is the author of two books on Muslim experience in the West. She began her article: "A certain Middle Eastern religion is much maligned in this country. Full of veils and mystery, it is widely seen as sexist. Often violent, cometimes manipulated by demagogues, it yet has sweetness at the core, and many people are turning to it in their search for meaning [August 19, 2007, p. G3].
     Nodding my head sympathetically as I read, I was not ready for the sentence which followed: “I’m talking about Christianity.” Going on to speak to the growing distaste for Christianity among some in our country in reaction to the extremism of the Christian right, Mohja argues that neither all Christians nor all Muslims should be painted with the same brush. She points out that there are decent, good Christian and Muslim people who take their faith seriously while also being good American citizens. “Does wearing a veil make you less American than wearing a yarmulke or a Mennonite bonnet?” she asks. “Does reading the Quran . . . make you less American than reading the Bible?”
     Interestingly enough, a column a couple of pages over seemed to cast a different light. Georgie Anne Geyer recalls the euphoria of multiculturalism which met the rising number of U.S. immigrants with the “insulting idea” that they “had no culture or memory of their own–they were just like us” [p. G5]. "But now,” she pronounces, “the entire, miserable multicultural voyage has made a sudden port call.” She cites Harvard’s “liberal” public policy professor, Robert Putnam, author of the widely read Bowling Alone, whose most recent research on the civic disengagement afflicting our country reveals some startling information: "The greater the diversity in a community, the fewer people vote and the less they volunteer, the less they give to charity and work on community projects. In the most diverse communities, neighbors trust one another about half as much as they do in the most homogeneous settings. Although Putnam reveals that he found the results of his study so troubling that he did not release them until he could offer some answers to the problems they raised, Geyer does not bother to deal with those answers, leaving her own assessment of our “miserable” experiment in multiculturalism to stand.
      Is Geyer correct? Is the verdict in and does it sound the end of a noble, though naive experiment? Must we face up to the fact that we must bow to human nature and, as Geyer says, “common sense” and pull the welcome mat back into our borders? And, even if we were able to return our cities and towns to the safe homogeneity of a half century ago, could we even then escape the world at our doorsteps? In our growing global village of rapid transportation and communication, can we flee to the supposed simplicity of an earlier day?
      What does the fear of cultural and religious differences say to and about the church? How does my Christian commitment impinge on my attitude and actions toward my Muslim neighbor–or my Hindu neighbor or Buddhist neighbor–whether she live next door to me or around the world? Within mission circles, many have seen immigration as an opportunity to witness to a world brought to our very doorsteps. As we have gotten to know those who live at our doorstep, however, we have come to realize that many, committed to their own faith traditions, do not want our witness. The question is: Do they need it? Do we?
      We should beware of thinking that we own God. The times were good. After centuries of having their borders whittled away by more powerful neighbors, the nations of Israel and Judah had finally begun to regain ground. While the big guys were preoccupied with problems of their own, Israel’s and Judah’s kings had expanded their combined borders to rival the days of Solomon. Gaining control of prominent trade routes, the nations had realized exponential growth in lucrative weaving and dying industries and the rapid growth of a wealthy elite. Things couldn’t have been better, except, of course, for those left behind on the lower echelons of society.
      Onto this happy scene comes–you guessed it–a prophet, crying “Hoy, hoy,” “Alas, Alas” or “Woe, woe.” The cry of paid mourners in that day, a tumultuous “Hoy, hoy” was not unlike the tolling of the church bells in towns and villages of an age not so far removed from our own, alerting a community to the burial of one of its citizens. John Donne’s “Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee” would be a pretty good summation of Amos’ message.
      Throwing raucous parties that often lasted for days, lounging in indolence strumming on harps, consuming wine by the bowls full and meat undreamed of by most in their society, proud descendants of Jacob patted themselves on the back. “Who has a nation to compare to ours? So expansive, so blessed with resources, so resourceful, so religious, so blessed by God? Evil can’t overtake us. What a good God we have! What good, deserving people we are!”
      As often happens to people who possess the good news, the comfortable pious in Israel and Judah, like the comfortable pious of any age, had come to believe that they also possessed God. If you listen closely, you can almost hear Jesus’ parable echoing in the background: “Thou fool! This night your soul will be required of you.” From the mouth of Amos it is “I [God] abhor your pride and hate your supposed invincibility. You are headed straight for disaster, and you who are living it up now will be the first to go.”
      The limitations we would put on the reach of God’s love are ours, not God’s. Not simply an affliction of some 8^th century B.C.E. Jews, arrogance, self-centeredness and indifference are maladies that can strike any who claim to serve God. We can become dazzled with the lifestyle of the rich and famous and so comfortable in an orthodoxy that guarantees God is on our side, that we lack the insight to recognize what is really going on and grieve. “Look around you,” Amos says. “Are you better, are you greater than the peoples who surround your border? Are you not like the Ethiopians (or Cushites) to me?” God asks. “Did I not bring you up from the land of Egypt?” “Well, yes, of course. That’s a no brainer. It’s the central teaching of our faith,” Amos’ hearers would have responded. The questioning, however, continues. “Did I not bring you up from Egypt, and the Philistines from Caphtor and the Arameans from Kir?” Say, what? Just as the faithful begin nodding their heads to the obvious, Amos takes the reassuring, grace-filled verb that had always been used to speak of their exodus and applies it to their historic enemies. Who would ever have thought that they would have had an exodus? Even more, who would have thought that Israel’s God would have initiated it?
      “Appraise the value of your neighbor,” Amos is saying, “through ‘my [God’s] eyes,’ not through eyes blinded by self-serving prejudice. I, the God of creation and the exodus, have long preceded you in caring for and moving abroad in the world. I will be who I will be, not whom you would prefer me to be.”
      Amos does not deny Israel’s core understanding of herself as a people of the exodus. He denies only her “monopolistic claim” that she is God’s only exodus people. Israel’s “onlyness of Yahweh” as the only God whom she would serve had become, Walter Brueggemann suggests, “the onlyness of Israel” as the only people whom God could love. There is, according to Amos, "no single ‘salvation history,’ no fixed line of ‘God’s mighty deeds,” for such ‘mighty deeds’ happen in many” times and places with one identifiable core of coherence”: “God’s self-presentation is everywhere as an exodus God. That is who Yahweh is, and that is what Yahweh does. ‘History’ is a series of exodus narratives of which Israel’s [and Christianity’s?] is one, but not the only one [ Many Voices, One God, pp. 22-25].
      God is present among those we have labeled as “other.” Diana Eck, Harvard University professor, chair of the Pluralism Project and author of A New Religious America, tells of visiting in India with a beloved elderly Hindu friend, whom she knew as “Uncle” She admits to being taken back one day by a question Uncle posed: “Do you really believe that God came only once, so very long ago and to only one people?” [In The Life of Meaning, Abernethy & Bole, eds., p. 337]. Her friend’s obvious concern for a God who “could be so stingy as to show up only once, to one people, in one part of the world” pushed Eck to probe more deeply into whom she believed God to be and where God might be found. Her conclusion is similar to that of Amos. God is not limited in God’s ability to be present whenever and wherever God chooses. The limitation resides in us and our capacity to appreciate God’s presence wherever we encounter it–even when it is outside the boundaries to which we would assign it.
      So, is the grand experiment we called “pluralism” dead? Yes, it is dead, or yes, it must die if we have distorted pluralism to mean that we are really all just alike. But, no, it need not die, if, rather than perceiving threat in the diversity of our neighbors, we open our eyes to see evidence of God’s delivering love in manifold places and among manifold peoples. Far from an indifference, then, that merely “tolerates” or puts up with inconvenient differences, far from a willingness to settle into our own remote little ghettoes where each of us can go our merry, detached little ways, and far from the insistence that others must change to become like us, those of us who would serve the God of Amos and Jesus will grow our sense of community to embrace those we have labeled as “other.” In service to the God present wherever and to whomever God chooses, that’s all we can do.

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Hey! That’s Not Fair!
Matthew 20:1-16; Ephesians 2:8-10            September 2, 2007              larry dipboye
      The celebration of labor in America is associated with the annual, national holiday established by Congress in 1894 as Labor Day. The population center of gravity was shifting from the farm to the city, from an agrarian to an industrial society. The first Monday of September was chosen as a day of rest, an annual sabbath, for the worker as well as a day to demonstrate the unity and strength of the trade unions. Labor Day was one of the high holy days in the smokestack community of my childhood. The holiday marked the end of summer and the beginning of the school year, but it also was a time to celebrate the importance and dignity of work. I grew up on stories about the hardship of the Great Depression that usually ended with a call to gratitude for the good things we enjoyed because Dad had a good job at the local steel mill. I also learned with bowed head to thank the Union as our benefactor.
      The ethic of work is rooted in our faith history. The first story of the creation in Genesis, six days of creation followed by a sabbath of celebration, was the basis for understanding the rhythm of life for our Jewish forebears. The commandment to observe the Sabbath as a day of worship and rest had a companion order, “Six days you shall labor and do all your work.” (Deut. 5:13). We are often reminded that Jesus was a carpenter, perhaps even a contractor, prior to his rabbinic mission. Reformation theology has a strong affirmation of vocation, the calling of God, in every respectable work. Luther and Calvin dismissed the medieval boundary between secular and sacred. Luther viewed every vocation as service to God, and Calvin identified the world as God’s monastery. In early American history Max Webber viewed the Puritan work ethic as a source of capitalism. The virtue of work and the vice of laziness led to Franklin’s proverb, “God helps them that help themselves.”
      About the time I was born, my parents decided to abandon the struggle to farm in the Oklahoma dust bowl, and the family moved to New Mexico. Hearing of work available on a construction project, Dad showed up at daybreak. The job was for one day digging a ditch. The foreman passed out shovels first come, first served, and Dad missed the cut. After the work started, Dad decided to hang around, just in case. One of the men dropped his shovel on the ground and walked away, and Dad quickly picked it up and joined in the work. At the end of the day all of the men were paid the same.
      I didn’t know what to call it as a child, but I eventually learned to respect my father’s strong work ethic. He loved his job. Work stories dominated the dinner conversation. Dad would not miss a day of work. Once, he arranged to have his tonsils removed on Saturday morning so that he could be on the job Monday. He loved working overtime and holidays and a few times that I can remember when his crew worked double shifts. I knew his work companions by their nicknames and laughed at the stories about pranks during lunch breaks. I recall the grief when a workmate died in car wreck on vacation.
      The wage for vocation is more than money. In the American worship at the altars of success, we have developed a caste system based purely on monetary value. In this country we have tended to revert to the primitive theology that wealth comes to those whom God favors and poverty is somehow deserved. The TV news story was about Vanderbilt University. Students got involved in bringing pressure on the Trustees and the administration to pay the maintenance people a livable wage. With embarrassing news coverage and student pressure, finally a new standard was set. Rather than to set pay at the scale that was consistent with community standards, it was increased to life support standards. With some hostile intent, the story exposed the Chancellor’s annual salary of more than a million dollars. I did not hear any suggestion that the pay between maintenance workers and the Chancellor ought to be equal, but the question left unasked was whether a university with Christian roots and a divinity school should follow business standards. The obscene pay scales of American CEO’s as well as the below poverty pay of janitors are at issue.
      Dad’s story about the dropped shovel reminds me of our parable about the landowner who went out early in the morning to hire laborers for his vineyard. The workers agreed to the standard wage for a twelve-hour workday. For some undisclosed reason, the owner went back to the work pool at 9:00 AM, noon, 3:00 PM, and 5:00 PM and found men standing idle. He hired them for “whatever is right.” At the end of the day, the owner had his foreman call the workers in for wages. He deliberately paid them in reverse order, the last first, all the same amount. Guess what? The ones who had worked all day filed a grievance: “The last worked only one hour, and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the day and the scorching heat.”
      This story seems to violate every standard of justice that we can imagine. Why didn’t the owner follow the simple rule, equal pay for equal work? If he was going to be so generous to the last hired, he could have at least paid them last, so that the others would not be aware of the discrimination involved, or he could have given the first hired the surprise bonus that they seemed to expect. My primary sympathy here is with the plaintiff. The story brings out my blue collar, union roots with the protest, “Hey, that’s not fair!” Then, I begin to wonder, what in the world is this story doing in the Gospels? Where is the moral teaching here? Equal pay to unequal work rewards the lax and the lazy and punishes the punctual and the faithful. Furthermore, it seems to contradict the Puritan work ethic of Paul, “Anyone unwilling to work should not eat.” ( 2 Thessalonians 3:10b). If we are expecting a simple lesson for life, as we have come to expect from parables, we are bound to be disappointed.
      We can make some sense of the story by attention to the context. The story of the rich young man who could not turn loose of his possessions to follow Jesus immediately precedes the parable. Peter boasts about all the disciples had sacrificed for Jesus, and the final word leading to the parable is, “But many who are first will be last, and the last will be the first.” The maxim appears again at the close of the parable. Then, the same lesson is repeated in the contest among disciples over the chief seats in the Kingdom. So, worker justice here is not the issue. The parable concerns God’s bias toward the last and the least.
      Given Matthew’s focus on Jewish roots of the gospel, the parable is also about the ethnic conflict in the early church. The message justifies the place of the Johnny-come-lately Gentiles in the economy of the Kingdom of God. The vineyard as the place of service to God was a familiar Jewish symbol. We know from Acts and Galatians that resentment of Gentiles was a problem for Jewish Christians. The very idea that the same salvation is equally available to gentiles and Jews was a burning question for early Christians.
      Grace is greater than work. The complaint of the disgruntled workers in Matthew is almost identical to the complaint of the older brother in Luke’s story of the loving father (the Prodigal Son). The older brother complained to his father about working for “all these years” like a slave without complaint or disobedience, yet the father had never given him a party. Frank Stagg views the criticism of the Pharisees and scribes that Jesus “welcomes sinners and eats with them,” as the basis for Matthew’s as well as Luke’s parable.
      Human standards of justice are difficult to reconcile with the grace of God. For Jesus, the value of people is always greater than the value of things. His upside-down values are never comparable to the commercial assessment of success, although we continue to struggle with the same basic issues. What price shall we put on a human life? The question has to be raised in the face of war, but also in the system of justice especially for capital punishment. It is increasing the prime concern of a broken medical system in America. We are reminded daily of how much we spend on war against the absence of basic medical care for the working poor and increasingly for the middle class in America. What about the balance between corporate profit and worker safety? I have heard many complaints about the stupidity of some OSHA rules. Government intervention aside, how much should a company spend to protect the life and health of the workers? I grew up thinking that a strike on union contract years was a necessity of life. Dad always seemed to be able to find some work during the times out, and we easily justified the cost in light of the increased salaries and benefits that accrued. In a global marketplace, the issues are not as simple as they once were. The industrialization of third world nations opens brand new questions about worker justice.
      Grace is greater than work. Good parenting is done by grace, not by law. We were in an increasingly heated discussion in the Council (board) of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship. We had an elder parliamentarian, a retired judge, Joe Hairston. He often listened with closed eyes, but we learned that he never missed a comma. He stood to calm the discussion. He offered a family parable. In younger days, he had two small daughters. He loved both, but he never responded to them by rules of equality. He responded to need. They did not always go to the dentist or get new shoes on the same day, but the inequality was not a measure of love.
      As I listened to my brother in faith, I got a glimpse of the grace of the God who looks upon needs of all of the children in this world. The fact that Bill Gates has done well financially does not make him more loved of God, but it does give him a great responsibility and opportunity to be an instrument of God’s grace towards the last and the least.

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Making Peace VI: Daring Hope
Jeremiah 29:1, 4-14                        August 26, 2007                       carolyn dipboye
     Travel back with me, if you will, to the closing decades of the twentieth century and recall some of the landmark images of hope that flashed across our news screens. Thirty years ago this November, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat shocked the world as he put foot onto Israeli soil, initiating peace negotiations between two ancient enemies. Perhaps you recall the euphoria of the Camp David Accords the following year and the ongoing deliberations resulting in the Oslo Accords fifteen years later and accords the following year with Jordan’s King Hussein–accords he had been secretly and courageously negotiating throughout those sixteen years. Perhaps you recall the breathtaking moment when King Hussein spoke with poetic beauty of the meaning of that occasion for generations yet unborn.
     Perhaps you remember, too, that astounding moment when crowds of young people climbed atop the Berlin wall and, with great cheering and dancing in the street, turned whatever instrument they could lay their hands on to the task of dismantling the wall one blow at a time. Do you remember that decisive moment when masses of protestors in the streets of Moscow came face-to-face with Russian soldiers and placed flowers in the barrels of their guns? Or maybe you remember Nelson Mandella, newly freed from prison, embracing his fellow countrymen at the end of South Africa’s long dark night of the soul. And do you remember the first hopeful signs of peace emerging in Northern Ireland?
     I recall at some point in the midst of those historic developments sitting at dinner with my brother and commenting on the rising expectations that seemed to be breaking out all over the world. Just recovering from a serious heart attack that would have such serious implications for the rest of his life, his eyes uncharacteristically filled with tears and with a catch in his voice, he said, “It’s enough to make a fellow want to live to see it all come true.”
     Well into the first decade of the new millennium, we can’t help but ask, “What happened?” Just as we went into the last decade of the last century with hope rising, here we sit in the first decade of the new millennium with a rising sense of crisis. Renewed hostilities in Lebanon, warring factions in Palestine, new walls snaking their way along the West Bank and along our own nation’s southern border, a tragic, seemingly hopeless morass in Iraq, flagging hopes in Afghanistan and Pakistan, a spreading Taliban and mushrooming Muslim extremist groups, and a failed attempt at immigration reform in our own country that threatens to escalate into ugly, hateful, divisive rhetoric as presidential candidates, lacking positive strategies to address the issues confronting us, seek to distract us by whipping us into a frenzy of fear, division and enmity.
     What happened to hope? Can we get there again?
     The failure of dreams–dreams of freedom, dreams of peace and dreams of justice–is not new. It has tormented the hearts and lives of God’s children through the millennia. Dare we, then, to go on hoping? Dare we to go on working as if our dreams have any possibility of seeing the light of day?
     There are no short cuts to God’s shalom. The Hebrew scriptures are brutally honest. Far from painting a rosy picture of Israel and her leaders, they depict a people not unlike the people we meet everyday. Quaking before life-threatening challenges in the wilderness, they mourned, “Better we had died in Egypt!” Standing on the border of the land that flowed with milk and honey, they tittered, “There are giants in the land! We can’t go up against giants!” Moving into the land and becoming somewhat secure, they came to boast, “This is where God lives! Nothing can harm us here.”
     The prophet Jeremiah was called to speak truth in the face of those blinded by patriotic and theological arrogance. “Do not think,” he warned, “that you somehow have God all bottled up. Do not put your trust in the deceptive words: ‘This is the temple of the LORD, the temple of the LORD, the temple of the LORD’” (7:4). Presuming upon God’s protection while dabbling in greed, licentious living and chasing after other gods would not cut it. “Will you steal, murder, commit adultery, swear falsely, make offerings to Baal, and go after other gods, and then come and stand before me in this house and say, ‘‘We are safe’? You know,” God says, “I am watching,” (7:9-11).
     There are no short cuts to peace, Jeremiah warns. If you want peace, work for justice. Be fair in your dealings with one another. Take care of “the alien, the orphan, and the widow. Do not shed innocent blood. Do not go after other gods” (7:5-6).
     The way to peace confronts the realities of the moment. Up against those who counted God as a part of their arsenal and yet who sought to hedge their bets by striking a deal with Egypt, Jeremiah’s message was not well received. As you look over his resume, you realize that he is called “the weeping prophet” for good reason. Prophesying coming defeat to a nation more attuned to the false prophets who guaranteed “peace, peace” where there was no peace, Jeremiah was thrown into the dungeon, held prisoner in the guards’ court, abandoned to die in a cistern and saddled by God with wearing an oxen’s yoke, symbolic of Israel’s coming subservience to Babylon.
     Writing to those carried into exile in Babylon, Jeremiah did not offer pabulum. He did not join the chorus of those telling them what they wanted to hear. A near end to their suffering? No. A near return home? No. Seventy long years of exile stretched before them–seventy years of living as aliens in a foreign land. Rather than denying the realities of the situation, rather than putting their heads in the sand, they had better get used to it. They had better start turning their best thinking to how they were going to deal with it, how they were going to come through it intact.
     Peace finds its way forward through daring hope. In Jeremiah’s situation, revolution was not the way to go. Those who tried it succeeded only in bringing Babylon’s heavy hand down upon them. Jerusalem, previously spared, was now utterly destroyed. The temple was dismantled; its treasures were carried away; and the ranks of the exiles were not diminished but swelled by another wave of deportations.
     The way forward resided in faithful living in the present. “Build houses,” Jeremiah instructs the exiles, “and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters” (29:5-6). It’s an idyllic scene. It sounds almost like peace but for one glaring omission. This idyllic scene of love and care of family will be located in enemy territory. It will unfold in Babylon.
     Going on to add insult to injury, Jeremiah issues an even more unpalatable directive: “Seek the shalom of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the LORD on its behalf, for in its shalom you will find your shalom” (29:7). Hope, you see, does not reside in our withdrawing into our little isolated communities where we merely take care of our own. Withdrawal speaks of fear, not hope. The shalom of God is never our private possession. It always opens out to build and extend community. It includes the enemy.
     Finding ourselves to be living in a time or place of exile is not the end of hope. Living with disappointment, living with failed dreams does not mean that dreams must die. We are not, as German Psychoanalyst Viktor Frankel observed in the Nazi prison camp, always free to choose the conditions under which we live, but we do have at our disposal one final freedom which no one can take away from us–the freedom to determine how we will face up to the conditions under which we live [Man’s Search for Meaning, 205].
     Hope lives by placing one foot in front of the other. Hope lives, not by denying the present and seeking to retreat into an idyllic past. Hope lives out of God’s promise to the exiles of Israel and the exiles of every age, including our own: “I know the plans I have for you, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope” (29:11).
     Dare we in the midst of the disappointments of our day go on hoping? Dare we go on working as if our dreams have any possibility at all of seeing the light of day? Dare we who serve the God of Israel and Jesus do anything less?
     If you want peace, work for justice. If you want peace, give yourself to building a world for generations to come. If you want peace, place your hope in the God of promise and live and act every day in service to that hope.

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Making Peace V: Managing Anger
Mark 3:1-6; James 1:16-22                      August 12, 2007                     larry dipboye
     The issue is anger. If we agree that the shalom of God is our destination, then the management of anger is the way to get there. Much of our conversation about the shalom of God in the church is well-intended but lacking in practical application. It is like saying to children, “play nice,” without providing any limits or guidance for their games. We get heavy doses of ought at church without much help in the how department.
     In May, 2000, the National Parks Service in New Mexico conducted a “controlled burn” at the Brandelier National Monument in the Sante Fe National Forest. The wind changed direction and the controlled burn became a wildfire, driving 25,000 people out of the city of Los Alamos and destroying 47,650 acres of forest and 380 structures before it was finally extinguished. If the fire had started from lightening, it would have been considered a tragic act of nature. However, it was a government sponsored disaster. The public outrage led to a congressional investigation and an apology from the Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt. Fire is an act of nature; it is not necessarily evil. I like my steaks well-done, and I like to be warm in the winter. The practice of burning accumulated dead grass and trees in national forests to prevent spontaneous fires is an accepted means of preventing disaster. However, a “controlled burn” is supposed to be controlled. When it follows an unplanned course and destroys a city, it becomes a wildfire.
     Verbs kindle and burn are applied to events in which anger is loosed in fury in the Old Testament. Like fire, anger is a response to an ignition event. From that point, the issue is control. Moses was angry at the people of Israel for making and worshiping an idol while he was receiving the Law on the mountain. According to Exodus 32:19, “Moses’ anger burned hot.” He threw down the tablets of the Law. He had the idol burned and ground into powder which was mixed into the drinking water. Then he ordered the execution of 3,000 offenders. The behavior of Moses is described as an act of righteous indignation, only a prelude to the anger of God that would come down as a plague on the people.
     Like fire, anger is a gift of nature. These days, counselors, pastors, and politicians are struggling to decide whether anger is good or bad. Episcopal priest Garret Seizer attempted to locate the place for anger in the Christian life in his book, The Enigma of Anger: Essays on a Sometimes Deadly Sin. He believes that the blanket condemnation of anger as something that we ought to rise above or a problem to be solved is a denial of our essential humanity. Although bearing potential for destruction in an emotional explosion that can sometimes be nothing more than hasty judgment, anger is nature’s gift that can be a constructive response to a real threat. Like the pain one feels when touching a hot surface, a perceived threat that causes the body and mind to prepare for confrontation or flight is an instrument of protection that comes with the gift of life. Garret identifies anger with grace, a gift of God for which we need to give thanks. So, when you are infuriated by the cruel behavior of a tyrant and the suffering of the weak and the innocent, be thankful that you have the intelligence to perceive injustice and the compassion to care.
     Because we care for one another in church or family, we also get angry. Parents and children, husbands and wives, and friends who never get angry with each other are either indifferent or ignorant. Because human nature is less than perfect and often out of bounds, we are most likely to get angry with people we love.
     The biblical picture of a holy God whose steadfast love endures forever is also a holy God who demands justice. God is angered by evil and acts in judgment on the evil demanding repentance (total reformation) while moving the world toward peace. People of the Book always run the risk of distorting the picture of divine wrath as something to be relished, imitated, and claimed. One of my professors told of an encounter at Oxford University with an almost sadistic enjoyment of the wrath of God in biblical theology. At the beginning of a lecture in theology a student came in late, sat down beside him, and immediately whispered with some anxiety, “Has he started on the wrath?”
     The anger of God is distorted to the level of the demonic when people see themselves as agents of God’s wrath and the role of the church as judge, jury, and executioner of evil in the world. In my opinion, the reaction of Moses to the idolatry of Israel was a bit overdone. I always have a problem when a religion based in God’s forgiving grace chooses terminal solutions for evil in acts of violence like war or capital punishment.
     The energy of anger has the potential of shalom. The feeling of anger in response to injustice is a normal human emotion that should neither be denied nor suppressed. But, like fire, it needs to be controlled and directed.
     The problem emerges in actions. Knee-jerk reactions to conflicts in life cause sparks to turn into forest fires. James offers practical advice. Slow down anger and speech. Speed up listening. Be doers of the Word of God. James was aware of the basic flaw in human nature that makes all of us a part of the problem. To play God with one another can lead to the worst kind of violence.
     As was his custom on the Sabbath, Jesus entered the Synagogue. He immediately encountered a man with a deformed hand, and his critics began watching for a technical foul. Healing on the Sabbath would break the law of God. Jesus first questions his audience, “is it lawful to do good or to do harm on the sabbath, to save life or to kill?” Greeting the question with silence, the critics sit in judgment like a predator waits for the prey to enter the attack zone. Mark employs the word anger in describing the reaction of Jesus. Luke clearly attributes anger to the Pharisees, and the Synoptic Gospels agree that this is an event which leads to the cross. I like Mark’s account. In rapid succession Jesus is angry, then, grieved at the hardness of his critics. Finally, his action is not punitive or vengeful. He acts to heal the man in defiance of the critics. Jesus got angry, and healing took place.
     Walter Wink, Engaging the Powers, describes Jesus’ third way of dealing with evil. Anger is the “flight or fight” alternative to a threatening situation. Our usual knee-jerk reaction is either to turn-tail and run from the threat in cowardice or to go mad with violence. The third way of Jesus is redemptive confrontation. Wink’s analysis of the Sermon on the Mount, turn the other cheek, walk the second mile, insists that this is not passive or cowardly flight from a threat but a practical means of disarming the enemy by exposing the injustice. The poor man who has been taken to court by a creditor who sues for his coat is advised to take off his undergarment and walk out of court naked. Nakedness was taboo, and the one who was humiliated was the one who caused the event. Rather than submission to humiliation, the victim exposes the injustice of the creditor. The passage, “do not resist evil,” is better translated, “do not return evil for evil; do not mirror evil; do not behave like your enemy.” Jacques Ellul (Violence, p. 29) judged: “That violence is so generally condoned today shows that Hitler won his war after all: his enemies imitate him.”
     Gandhi did not teach passivity or cowardice; he taught nonviolent resistance to evil. Jesus’ third way is not passive submission to evil; it is resistance that exposes injustice. Josephus tells of Pilate’s assignment to rule Israel. He brought in standards bearing his own image to establish his dominance of the province. The Jews immediately viewed his action as idolatry and vigorously opposed his image. A group of protestors were gathered into an arena, surrounded by soldiers, and warned that they would be cut down if they did not acquiesce to the authority of Pilate. On cue, all of the protestors fell to the ground exposing their necks to the soldiers. Rather than having armed soldiers to butcher unarmed, nonresistant people, Pilate had the standards removed.
     In this world in which angry people fly airplanes into tall buildings as if directed by God, maybe we can direct our anger into better responses than to bomb and to kill the people who happen to live in the same part of the world or share some part of a common faith. Perhaps we can recognize that all people are the children of God and none are appointed to execute the justice of God.

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Making Peace IV: When There Is No Peace
Jeremiah 6:14-15; Matthew 10:32-42           August 5, 2007               larry dipboye
      On December 10, 1964, Martin Luther King, Jr., was awarded the Nobel Prize for peace in Oslo, Norway. In his acceptance speech, King reminded his audience of the 22 million African-Americans engaged in a battle to end racial injustice, of children attacked with fire hoses and dogs for demonstrating in Birmingham, of brutal murders of young people working for the right to vote in Philadelphia, Mississippi, and forty churches burned in that state for providing sanctuary for Civil Rights workers. He wondered why the prize for peace was awarded to a movement committed to struggle, a movement that had not achieved peace. Critics of the Civil Rights movement viewed King as an antagonist upsetting the American way of life, and they were right.
      King acknowledged the conflict inherent in the civil rights movement. The year before going to Oslo, he had written an open letter from a Birmingham jail to the white clergy critical of his timing and methods: “I am in Birmingham because injustice is here.” He reminded his colleagues in ministry that he was following the way of the Hebrew Prophets and the Apostle Paul: “We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.”
      King struggled with the issue that has plagued Christians through the ages: Can we arrive at peace in this world without creating conflict? When comedienne Julia Sweeney listed her proof texts to justify atheism, she zeroed in on Matthew’s quotation of Jesus, “ I have not come to bring peace, but a sword,” and called it a “hateful” thing to say. She certainly picked a passage that causes theologians to duck for cover. It seems to contradict everything else Jesus affirmed about his mission in the world. How could the same person call his disciples to love enemies while he admittedly creates division in families? Fred Craddock explains it as a Semitic peculiarity in which the effect of an action is viewed as the purpose. Disciples were called to radical commitment and had to leave family and home behind. Thus, if the effect of following Christ is division and conflict in the family, it must have been intended by Christ. The Jesus Seminar concluded that the statement does not belong to Jesus, but was an interpolation of the early church. It is inconsistent with the message of Jesus in the Gospels. Furthermore, Jesus does not usually make “I” statements.
      Certainly Jesus was not an advocate of using the sword to accomplish his mission. Hyperbole is common throughout the Gospels, so even if Jesus said it, one might easily conclude that he did not mean it literally. Luke softens the language a bit from “sword” to “division.” The crisis of division in the family is a citation of Micah 7:6; so Jesus was not advocating conflict so much as reflecting the time of crisis described by the prophets.
      Eduard Schweitzer recalled the false prophets in Jeremiah who cried “peace, peace” when there is no peace. The Kingdom of God was not about making false claims denying the evil in the world, but neither is it the holy war of the devout. “The sword is not in the hands of the disciples, but of their opponents.” (The Good News According to Matthew, p. 251). By the time of Matthew’s Gospel Christians were experiencing the “sword” of division, which they attributed to the gospel Christ proclaimed.
      Prophetic religion confronts the reality of evil. When Elijah went before Ahab (1 Kings 18:17) the king called the prophet a “troubler of Israel.” Elijah answered Ahab, “I have not troubled Israel, but you have.” When a prophet speaks truth to power, conflict is almost inevitable. Elijah, Jeremiah, and Jesus were all trouble-makers. It was inherent in their vocation to speak the Word of God in the face of injustice. The problem of division within families noted in the Gospel is minor compared to the conflict created in the social structures when the prophetic Word of God encounters the politics of domination.
      As a young pastor in Detroit, Reinhold Niebuhr was a strong advocate of the radical call to love enemies and work for peace found in the Sermon on the Mount. He discovered the real world one day in a conversation with a child in his church. When Niebuhr admonished the boy for fighting, he was told that he had to fight the other kids for a place to sell his papers so that he could take money home to feed his family. Niebuhr began to realize that we cannot be simple advocates for the ideal rule of peace apart from the reality of evil that presently dominates our world. Committed to peace, Niebuhr opposed the war with Germany until he came to terms with the stark evil of the Nazi government. A prayer that he offered as benediction in worship in 1934 became the official prayer of Alcoholics Anonymous: “God give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things that should be changed, and wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.” In the real world, some things need to be changed, and change is often accompanied by conflict.
      The way of the cross is the way of self-sacrifice. The seemingly harsh statement of Christ needs to be set in balance with the cross. When Jesus was arrested by the Temple police and his disciple (John says, Peter) cut off the ear of the High Priest’s slave, Jesus said, “Put your sword back into its place; for all who take the sword will perish by the sword.”(26:52) Some have raised a question about the possession of a sword by one of the disciples. Judas has often been identified with the radical revolutionaries, the Zealots, and his name has been associated with the assassin’s dagger. Although Jesus was never an advocate of violence, he was misunderstood as a revolutionary intending to overthrow Rome in order to establish the Kingdom of God in Israel. When he became the victim of crucifixion, his followers had to come to terms with the cross. Either it was a symbol of the victory of evil over good and a sign of the failure of Jesus, or it was something else.
      Walter Wink, Engaging the Powers, believes the “something else” of the cross is the way of nonviolence. He wrote, “The cross marks the failure, not of God, but of violence.” (P. 140) He illustrates with an example from recent history. Benign Aquino decided to confront Ferdinand Marcos Philippine dictator but to refuse to take up arms. He deliberately returned from exile and was shot to death by the military before he had even descended from the plane. It appeared that his death was a meaningless event that added strength to the dictator’s reign of terror. But history demonstrated that Marcos lost control of the people when Aquino was shot down. Two years later Marcos was removed from power without firing a shot. The death of Jesus on the cross was like that. The cross exposed the evil and eventually Rome died of exposure.
      That is the wisdom behind the word of Christ, “whoever does not take up the cross and follow me is not worthy of me.” The shalom of God is anything but passive before the powers of evil in this world.
      Martin Luther King, Jr., suggested an answer to any who would challenge a peace award to his movement: “this award which I receive on behalf of that movement is profound recognition that nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political and moral question of our time – the need for man to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to violence and oppression.” We cannot forget that less than four years passed before he was shot down in Memphis. Prophetic peace-making stirs conflict.

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Making Peace III: The Cry of Creation
Hosea 4:1-6; Isaiah 24:4-6, 18-20            July 22, 2007              carolyn dipboye
      If you didn’t know better, you would think that Israel’s prophets took the cues for this morning’s words off the front page of yesterday’s newspaper. Pick up the newspaper any day of the week and the news related to the state of our global ecology is grim. Consider, for example, ongoing revelations about the worldwide loss of cropland. In China, where 1 in 5 of the world’s people live, the loss of cropland in the last 30 years has been equal to all of the farms in France, Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands combined. Consider that it takes from three thousand to twelve thousand years to develop topsoil to form productive land. Yet on a typical day, 71 million tons of topsoil are lost. In the words of Christian ethicist Daniel Maguire, if we were losing huge quantities of gold, it would be a lesser tragedy [Sacred Energies, p. 3].
      In 2002, the United States was home to more than 2 million farms, covering some 900 million acres and yielding over $200 million in produce. Yet every day 3000 acres of American farmland are lost to encroaching development. Currently, 86 percent of our fruits and vegetables come from farmland that is in the path of development. Every day family farmers are having to give up land that in many instances they have owned for generations as development and corporate farming pushes small and medium-sized farms off the map.
      Consider that it took over 10,000 generations to reach a world population of 2.5 billion people, and only one generation to double it. Concern for feeding the burgeoning population is increased by the fact that over 90% of the growth in population today is in the poorest parts of the world. Add to this the fact that of the world’s 17 major fisheries, 9 are in decline and all of the others are threatened by unsustainable fishing practices. Per capita supplies of water, fish, meat and grain are declining. In our hunger education of the past several decades, we have emphasized that there is enough food to go around and the problem of hunger resides in poor distribution and our lagging moral and political will. And, indeed, there is enough food to go around, depending on how we eat, particularly how much beef we eat. At present, the world is capable of feeding only 3 billion people a typical American diet, and the world’s population is already over six billion.
      We are all well aware of the international concern over dwindling oil reserves. Yet the international conflict over oil may pale in comparison to conflict over dwindling water supplies. Major rivers all over the world are seriously polluted–a concern accentuated by the fact that only 1% of the earth’s water is safe to drink. In parts of Africa, only 18 percent of the population has access to safe water. Some 70% of children in upper Egypt have water-related diseases. As Maguire comments, “It has been said that if one glass of pure water was the cure for AIDS, most people in the world would not have access to it” [p. 5].
      And so what do we do? Is the occasional ecology sermon like the occasional obligatory sermon on tithing or witnessing that we politely hear and then just as quickly dismiss? As with all sermons on responsible stewardship, it depends on how seriously we read and how seriously we seek to pattern our lives by the teaching of scripture. Does our professed love of the Bible translate into the priorities by which we order our lives as individuals, families and a society?
      Creation has intrinsic worth. Although the Bible affirms the labor of human beings in utilizing God’s good gifts in creation to care for and feed their families, it does not give human beings the license to destroy the earth. Society has been quick to claim the first story of creation’s commissioning of human beings to “subdue” and have “domination” upon the earth. We have failed to grasp the implications of servanthood in that designation even as we have dismissed them in the second story’s depiction of human purpose as being “to till and to keep” God’s creation. Creation in Hebrew scripture is always valued in terms of its relationship to God. It never becomes God, but it comes from the hands of a loving God, who carefully and continually maintains and preserves it, who takes pleasure in it and endows it with purpose. True, God is the Alpha of creation, but God is consistently involved in creation and God’s ultimate goal is the Omega of creation. Creation comes from and goes to God.
      Creation, then, has intrinsic worth. Creation’s value exceeds its utility to human beings. As a matter of fact, we should be somewhat humbled by the observation of modern ecologists that just as the world got along fine for billions of years without us, it could get along fine without us again. The earth would go on spinning and plant-animal life could go on flourishing if human beings were removed from the face of the earth. On the other hand, the elimination of creeping, crawling life such as insects, spiders, worms, snails and protozoans would reduce the world to a scroungy mess of algae and bacteria.
      Far from the Greek mindset that dismisses the physical world as a necessary evil, the Bible regards nature with profound respect. Sometimes that respect expresses itself in fear before nature’s awesome power, but throughout there is a pervasive sense of mystery, beauty, wonder and delight in creation as God’s good gift. Little wonder, Abraham Heschel suggests, that so much of the Bible’s speech about nature is expressed in poetry. Those of us, then, who would be attentive to what the Bible has to say about how we approach the natural world, must approach the world with something more than a concern for its utility. "We meet the world not only by way of expediency but also by way of wonder. In the first we accumulate information in order to dominate; in the second we deepen our appreciation in order to respond. Power is the language of expediency; poetry the language of wonder" [Man Is Not Alone, p. 36]. Humankind will not perish for want of information, Heschel suggests, only for lack of appreciation. “The beginning of our happiness lies in the understanding that life without wonder is not worth living.”
     All of creation shares a common destiny within the purposes of God. The linkage of the welfare and future of human beings with the welfare and future of all of the rest of creation resounds throughout the prophets. God's punishment upon human beings is mirrored in nature where the earth dries up and is torn asunder. "The earth staggers . . . it sways . . . its transgression lies heavy upon it , and it falls, and will not rise again" [Is. 24:20]. "The land mourns," Hosea says, and the people, wild animals, birds of the air and fish of the sea perish [4:3]. "Disaster overtakes disaster," Jeremiah mourns. Fruitful land has become a desert and the heavens above grow black [4:28].
     The prophets are announcing God's punishment upon the people for their sinfulness--a sinfulness that so permeates the world that it shakes the earth's very foundations. The anticipated level of destruction is such that, as in the days of Noah, creation could be reduced to the chaos that existed before creation [Is. 24:18]. If we are honest, we will probably admit that the wrath the prohpets attribute to God makes us more than a little nervous. Many of us have heard enough of God's wrath, God's judgment to last us a lifetime. At your own leisure, go back and read the prophets’ warnings in more detail. Notice the anguish that permeates their words–the prophets’ anguish at the coming destruction of their own people, yes. But notice, too the profound grief of God. The sentence pronounced by God gives a hint of neither joy nor satisfaction. Nor does it smack of cold indifference. As Terence Fretheim observes, the reader will see that sentence is pronounced not “with the strict and icy indifference of a judge, but with the pain and anger of one whose intimacy has been spurned” [“Divine Violence in the Prophets,” Interpretation, Oct. 2004, p. 374].
      Note, too, that punishment is neither the first nor the last word. As in the case of Hosea, the story of Hosea’s pursuit of his wayward wife, symbolizing God’s undying love of Israel “though they turn to other gods" [3:1], precedes the pronouncement of judgment for Israel’s sins. Similarly, the pronouncement of judgment is followed by God’s assurance that God holds Israel with an everlasting love. God’s ultimate will is the salvation of God’s people and all creation. Mourning, the prophets affirm again and again, will not be the last word.
      We are probably more comfortable with Hosea’s interpretation of the natural consequences of sinfulness: “They sow the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind” [8:7]. In our desire for comfort, we should be sure, however, that we do not miss the prophets' unmistakable message. We are inextricably tied to all of creation. In service to a God who loves creation as well as us, we should hear creation’s cries and seek to bring relief.
      In the 1970's our family visited a church near Houston, Texas. In a town where demands for clean air and water that were just beginning to make their mark on the local steel mill and oil refining corporations, the pastor raised a significant question in his sermon. “Is pollution a sin?” He went on then to bravely answer his query. “No,” he said, “pollution is not a sin.” And then he went on to name all of the favorite sins people like to talk about in church–the sins of other people.
      Is pollution a sin? Is damage to creation a sin? I would say to you that reckless exploitation of our environment is sin and it is sin when we do not turn our best energies as a nation and as families toward adjusting our common and family life to reduce pollution and address our over consumption. Failure to use our influence in our democratic process for the enactment of meaningful legislation is a sin. Failure to recycle, to limit our use of fossil fuels, to take measures in our homes and churches to conserve energy are all sins.
      Will God get us for it? That makes as much sense as asking how much mistreatment we can get by with in our homes toward those we love. Love of God and love of God’s creation calls us to hear creation’s cries and join with God in doing everything we can to care for this gracious, wondrous gift God has placed in our hands.
      Let’s do it. Every day let us learn more and do more and be more for the love of the God who has gifted us with creation.

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Making Peace II: Decently and in Order
Isaiah 45:15-25                       July 15, 2007                        larry dipboye
      When speaking with other ministers away from the hearing of our own congregations, the community pastors enjoyed laughing at ourselves and our own denominations. The Presbyterian pastor said that the cardinal law for Presbyterians is, “all things should be done decently and in order.” Jimmy was young, just out of seminary, but he was neither malicious nor overly rebellious. He also spoke with genuine affection for his church, but he got irritated when it seemed that institutional order took precedence over real issues implying that the institution is more important than the people. The “cardinal law” was from 1 Corinthians 14:40 at the end of Paul’s dissertation on speaking in tongues and his controversial opinion, “women should be silent in the churches.” The real issue with Paul was neither the validity of tongues nor the worth of women. The issue was church order anchored in the nature of God. Paul reasoned, “God is a God not of disorder but of peace.” Paul was not a Presbyterian, but he was definitely a Jew, and his Jewish roots were exposed in his definite preference for order over confusion in the church.
      Chaos threatens to undo creation. One of my all-time favorite TV programs was the comic parody of the James Bond movies that ran from 1965-70, “Get Smart.” It starred the standup comedian Don Adams as Maxwell Smart, Agent 86, a spy for the good guys. Behind the slapstick repetition of the same gags the writers seemed to be aware of the primitive biblical cultures of Israel and her Near-Eastern neighbors. Maxwell Smart worked for “Control” in the battle with the ominous threat to civilization posed by the universal enemy “Chaos.” Get Smart was almost a mirror image of the biblical tension between the created order made by God before the persistent threat of the primordial mess that preceded the creation. Between the lines of the Old Testament stands the constant tension between the control of the Creator and the chaos of evil.
      In Genesis, the poetry of creation begins with a formless void, chaos associated with deep darkness and massive oceans of water in which no life can exist. The Spirit/wind of God moves over the waters of chaos and begins, piece by piece, to organize the mess. God brings light out of the darkness and separates the sea from the land. Out of the confusion of chaos comes the harmony of day and night and a habitat for living things. Then, life emerges from the harmony of nature under the control and direction of the Creator. The meaningless mess of chaos from which God ordered the creation is under control, but it does not go away. Like their Eastern neighbors, the Jews had nightmares about the impending chaos surrounding the order of nature and viewed this threat as the root of all evil. The recurring nightmare is pictured in the flood story of Genesis 6-7. The chaos of destruction ends like the beginning of creation with a wind of God moving over the water of chaos restoring the habitat for life.
      The universal fear has not disappeared with the emergence of modern science and technology. Physicist David Coffey spoke to our Forum on Religion and Science last year about known threats to human existence impending in nature. He sounded all of the common themes in movies about nuclear holocaust, invasion of asteroids, tsunamis, pandemic, terrorist attacks, fires, and storms. When I heard about all of the ways that our lives can end condensed in a twenty-minute summary of mass catastrophe, I realized just how little human control of nature has changed from the primitive world of the Bible. Sometimes poetry gets closer to the truth than prose or science. In the last century, the threat of chaos was found the poetry of T.S. Elliot, The Waste Land, and in Ezra Pound’s Cantos.. Although the fiction of horror movies is often more comedy than drama, the science behind the fiction and attempts to portray historical events within reach of memory are reminders that the threat is real. We really do live under a sword of catastrophe hanging by a hair over our fragile civilization. The nature of the hair that holds the sword is variously portrayed as the hand of God or the human genius and will to exist.
      The word of the Prophets was ominous. As the Exile threatened to extinguish the nation Israel, Jeremiah (4:23ff) portrayed the chaos:
I looked on the earth, and lo, it was waste and void; and to the heavens, and they had no light. I looked on the mountains, and lo, they were quaking, and all the hills moved to and fro. I looked, and lo, there was no one at all, and all the birds of the air had fled. I looked, and lo, the fruitful land was a desert, and all its cities were laid in ruins before the LORD, before his fierce anger.
      The Shalom of God transcends all human structures of order. The message of Isaiah to the Exiles was a word of reassurance that the God of Creation is still in control. The Persian King Cyrus had become an instrument in the hand of God to restore order. God was not the source of the chaotic mess in the world. The Creator made a world that would sustain life. Jacob (Israel) was not instructed to seek God in chaos. For Isaiah, history moved toward the day when every knee shall bow and every tongue swear before the one God of order, the Creator. No doubt, this passage had influenced Paul’s hymn (Philippians 2:10), “that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father.” The Prophet envisions, not only a new order for Israel, but a gathering of the entire Gentile world around the worship of the one God.
      The primordial darkness of the formless void creeps into our politics and religion and turns us into warring camps, all vying for control that no mortal can maintain. Not only nature, but the corporate life of humanity is threatened by the disruption of the order of things. Even our organized Empires do not hold back the waters of chaos. Cyrus was remembered as a servant of God in the return of Jews to their homeland, but history demonstrated that the Kingdom of God did not exist under Cyrus of Persia, nor did it come with Alexander the Great under Greek domination, nor with Augustus Caesar in the Pax Romana, the peace of Rome. Isaiah envisioned one big happy world in which the one true God is universally worshiped, something like the kingdom of God in the preaching of Jesus. Truth is, within the range of human memory, no civilization, no culture, tribe, or nation has ever achieved the utopian dream of perfect harmony.
      When we fail to achieve perfect peace, people longing for the shalom of God tend to settle for what they can get. I have found that the demand for order is not just a Presbyterian quirk. It expresses our personal discomfort with change, a natural resistance to revolution, and possibly something about attitudes in aging. The demand for order is the institutional cry of protecting our turf and trying to maintain the status quo. Both evolutionary and revolutionary change disrupt our lives and disturb our tranquility.
      So, we hear Paul offering an interim solution to Roman Christians: “Let every person be subject to the governing authorities; for there is no authority except from God, and those authorities that exist have been instituted by God.” Paul offers no ultimate vision of peace here, just a bridge to get through the mess of the moment. Living in the capital city of the universe at that time--Rome, Christian survival for the next generation depended on quiet acquiescence to Roman authority. As Christians would eventually discover, this is not the Shalom of God.

All of our attempts to maintain law and order fall short of the peace that passes all understanding in the ultimate vision of the Kingdom of God, and we need to recognize in our time that institutional order is not Shalom even when it is law of the church. I recall the arguments in the church against racial segregation in the 1960's. Civil disobedience, breaking through racist boundaries at lunch counters, movies, and churches were disturbing the peace. Baby-boomers called up to fight in the jungles of Vietnam for a government constantly being exposed for corruption and injustice protested the War and disturbed the order of things. How interesting that the political buzz word in the 1970's reaction was “law-and-order.” Fear of political, institutional chaos has long dominated establishment nightmares.

I haven't talked with Jimmy in twenty years. Times have changed. My denomination tood off in directions that I could not in good conscience follow. I probably turned out to be more of a radical than he ever was. He was right. Our rules keeping church institutions on the course of decency and order are little more than organizing the chairs on the deck of the Titanic. The only order that counts is the universal worship of the God of creation, before Whom every knee should bow and every tongue confess.

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Making Peace 1: The Beginning of Peace
Ephesians 2:8-22                      July 8, 2007                        carolyn dipboye
     Do you bowl? Have you ever been a member of a bowling league? Do you participate in a league now? Did you know that between 1980 and 1993 the total number of bowlers nationwide increased by 10 percent while participation in bowling leagues declined by 40 percent? Before you dismiss this gripping information as being somewhat on the order of trivia, consider that during 1993 nearly 80 million Americans went bowling at least once, which was nearly a third more than voted in the 1994 congressional elections and roughly the same number that claimed to attend church regularly.
         As sometimes happens with seemingly remote academics, Harvard Professor of Public Policy Robert Putnam hit upon these numbers (and a few thousand others) and drew them together in an article published in the January 1995 issue of the Journal of  Democracy, setting of something of a firestorm. Entitling his findins "Bowling Alone: America's Declining Social Capital," Putnamused the passage of bowling from a team sport to a solitary endeavor as a metaphor for the increasing loss of social engagement in our country. Noting that Alexis de Tocqueville, following his visit to the United States in the 1830's, had rooted this country's unprecedented ability to make democracy work in the unmatched involvement of its citizenry in voluntary associations, Putnam pointed to figures on every had indicating a withdrawal from such engagement in the 1990's. Putting the national decline in voter turnout, church attendance, labor unions, parent-teacher associations, volunteering and fraternal organizations alongside indicators of lowered levels of public trust, Putnam documented the numerous points at which an earlier sense of "we" in American society was being displaced with an increasingly isolated and even embattled sense of "I," cuasing us to reflect on the diminishing quality of our social fabric and how that bode for our future.
       The United States, even more than when Tocqueville characterized it as “a nation with the soul of a church,” continues to be, in Putnam’s words, “astonishingly ‘churched,’” having more houses of worship per capita than any other nation on Earth. Nevertheless, religion seems to be becoming less tied to institutions and increasingly more individualized. “I’m spiritual,” some people say, “but not religious.” Or, “I am a Christian, but I will have nothing to do with church.”

       From a faith perspective, does it matter? The church must take this as all social trends seriously. But should we bless it? Or curse it? Should we go on the offensive? Or the defensive? Should we find ways to challenge it? Or accommodate it?
       The church is founded on Christ. With respect to today's question and any question about the church, we must begin with Christ, for always the church first and most significant word is not church but Christ. Ecclesiology (study or words about the church) is rooted in Christology (study or words about the Christ). Every statement about Christ also implies a statement about the church" [J. Moltmann, The Church in the Power of the Spirit, 6].
       Christian scriptures lean over backward to make the point, stretching to use almost every preposition at their disposal to demonstrate the Christocentric (Christ-centered) nature of the Christian faith. Christ's church lives "in Christ," "through Christ," "by Christ," "with Christ" and "unto Christ." And so it is with the letter of Ephesians. Setting up a stark contrast, the writer describes what was once the case and what is now the case. "Once," the writer says, "you were far off, but now you have been brought near. Once you were not people, but now you are God's people. Once Greeks were barred from the temple, but now they are a part of a living temple. Once a dividing wall of hostility separated Jews and Greeks, but now the two have become one." And at every point, Christ is the deciding factor. The metamorphosis from hostility into peace, enmity into peace is accomplished at every turn by Christ, the cornerstone on whom the entire structure rests. All of this, the writer contends, was accomplished through his death--"by the blood of Christ," "in his flesh," "in [Christ's] body" and "through the cross." The writer makes not attempt to explain "how" this happened; only that it did. It isn't, as Craig McMahan observes, about dogma or orthodoxy. It is about doxology. "Ephesians 2:11-22 does not call [us] to theological calculation but to worshipful celebration of the reconciliation embodied in Christ and to obedient participation in the peace he has created with God and between persons" ["The Wall is Gone!" Review & Expositor (Spring, 1996), 265]. We are called to thanksgiving, worship and obedient lifestyles.

       Founded on Christ, the Christian faith is about community. We are called to live out a reality already present in Christ. Too often we dismiss the Christian faith as idealistic as if it were fashioned for a different world than our own. Too often the church acts as if it must accommodate rather than challenge things as they are. We acknowledge the church’s own contribution to its lowered status in contemporary society. We confess the sins of a church that has often been too self-absorbed to minister to the hurts of society, too ready to follow a society saturated with prejudice, racism and sexism than to lead it, too preoccupied with battles within to serve as a voice for moderation and peace.
        We confess the sins of the church, but rather than throwing our hands up in despair, we are called to return to our roots. We are called to reflect upon our foundation in Christ. Rather than give up on the church in self-righteous indignation, we are called, using the imagery of Ephesians, to construct a better building–a building that reflects the person and values of Christ. We are called to impart peace to people’s souls by accepting them solely on the basis that we ourselves are accepted–by the grace of God in Christ. Peace with God enables the careful nuturing, the careful day-to-day building and tending of a community of peace.
        Fred Craddock tells the story of returning to his hometown in western Tennessee every year at Christmas. At some point in every visit, he would drop by the café owned by his friend Buck and have a cup of coffee and piece of chess pie. One year when he dropped in, Buck asked him down the street for a cup of coffee. When they sat down, Buck asked him with some sense of exasperation, “You remember the curtain in my restaurant?” Craddock, knowing that the curtain separated black customers coming into the back of the café from white customers who came in from the front, responded “Yes, I do. I see it every time I come in.” “I’ve got to take that curtain down,” Buck insisted. “Good!” Craddock affirmed. “That’s easy for you to say,” Buck grumbled. “If I take that curtain down, I’ll lose my customers.” “Then wait,” Craddock counseled. “But if I don’t take it down, I’ll lose my soul!”

                Built upon Christ, the church cannot be a racial church. It cannot be a class church. It cannot be a sexist church. It cannot be a national church. Built upon Christ, the church values people according to the grace that they have received, not according to the standards by which, as we say in our Covenant of Grace, the world “separates, classifies, and discriminates.”
                The church is a community of peace, but not of withdrawal. The church is a community of a peace that comes from knowing that we have been accepted, and we are empowered to move from that acceptance to invest ourselves in meeting the hurts and needs and injustices of the world in which we live. Church, like family, does not happen automatically. It is a place where we must build community one brick, one step, one act of faithfulness at a time. Perhaps in the face of the disillusionment with church and society in out time, the most important thing we can do, the most important witness we can bear is to build here and now a loving, hopeful society of justice and peace.
             Could it be that our very souls depend on it?

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In the Service of Liberty IV: Bringing Justice to Victory
Matthew 12:1-21                          July 1, 2007                          larry dipboye
      I don’t know of anyone I have disagreed with more over the past thirty-five years than Jerry Falwell. His judgmental spirit emerged in embarrassing, sometimes infuriating, public commentary, damning everyone who did not share his narrow theology or political opinions. On Pat Robertson’s TV show two days after the 9/11 attack, he charged pagans, abortionists, feminists, gays, lesbians, the ACLU, and People for the American Way with bringing down God’s judgment on America. He later apologized, but his apology was addressed less to the people he hurt than to his own public image. He was an astute politician and a shrewd power broker. Barry Lynn of Americans United for Separation of Church and State concluded that Falwell was wrong about everything, but he credited him with one historical accomplishment: “he will be forever the face of the religious right."
      Death is a line in history that calls out preachers and pundits to sum up the meaning of a life. Life is an accounting process. At the end, both friend and foe hit the total button and attempt to sum up the meaning. Falwell has been credited with a radical transformation of fundamentalist Christians. Before Falwell, fundamentalists viewed politics as a worldly endeavor unworthy of Christians. Falwell rallied them into a formidable voting block that elected officials, set public policy, and unapologetically claimed that the United States was intended to be a Christian establishment. Fundamentalism has been wrong at both extremes. Christians are responsible for the world and have not only the right but a responsibility to be a voice in the public square of politics and public policy. Falwell was right to call conservative Christians to political involvement. He was wrong to claim divine right for his narrow brand of Christian religion and to attempt to establish his religion as the law of the land.
      Separation can be schizophrenic. There is no separation of the Sunday world from the Monday world and no distinction between the operations of nature for religious and non-religious people. Jesus observed that the rain falls on both the good and the bad. Principles of Christian faith are operable both inside and outside the church. Although we rely on government to regulate behavior and the courts to dispense justice, there is no difference between secular and religious truth. To divorce religion from culture produces schizophrenic Christians and alienates faith from life. The principle applies to all areas of human life. To attempt to control science by the primitive biblical concept of a three-storied universe, created in six days by divine fiat, beyond question or examination by the human mind defies the very truth that the Bible attempts to reveal and that Christ came to proclaim.
      Winthrop Hudson (Religion in America, pp 105-6) observed a common misunderstanding of church-state separation in the public square. He cites a 1963 editorial in the New York Times that interprets the First Amendment to mean, “religion has no proper place in American politics.” Hudson identified this opinion as historical nonsense. Religious people serve public office, and religious opinions are freely voiced in the public square. The First Amendment separates the institutions of religion from the institutions of government, no establishment but free exercise of religion. Hudson is right about American history and Constitutional law. Although I strongly support the Constitutional concept of religious liberty through separation of the institutions of church and state, Christians answer to a higher court and are responsible to a more stringent standard of justice than the Constitution.
      In church, we tend to raise the question from another side. Right is less a matter of Constitutional law than a question of biblical understanding and commitment to Christ. Christian priority belongs to the Kingdom of God before the kingdoms of this world. The priority of the Kingdom came to the fore in the Roman Empire when Christians refused to burn incense to Caesar acknowledging his deity. During the age of martyrdom, many chose death over compromise of Christian conscience. In my lifetime, the priority of the Christian conscience was expressed during the Civil Rights Movement in civil disobedience defying Jim Crow laws supporting racial injustice. Christians in America have the same responsibility to stand against Adolf Hitler here as German Christians in the 1940's. The Barmen Declaration both defied Hitler’s claim to ultimate authority and declared a universal Christian responsibility to serve God before any human authority.
      Even religious law is a human creation subject to constant criticism and challenge. The laws governing Sabbath observance at the time of Christ were developed and defined with good intention, but they became a burden rather than a joy, and they often came into conflict with the value of life itself. Laws intended to give meaning to life and faith became an obstacle to justice. Like Martin Luther King’s civil disobedience, Jesus was guilty as charged of religious disobedience. All the Gospels note that he healed on the Sabbath preferring the gift of life and health to the sacrifice of human life on the altar of Sabbath sanctity. He was crucified as a political revolutionary by Rome but rejected by leaders in his own faith as a religious revolutionary. Frank Stagg characterized Matthew’s Gospel as a struggle between law and liberty. Jesus is portrayed as the new Moses bringing a way of life to the people, the law of love applied in the crisis of persecution. In the lineage of David, Jesus was universal King, the authority above all authorities: “the Son of Man is lord of the sabbath.”
      To conclude that the authority of Jesus establishes the political authority of one church over another, of Christianity over other religions, or religion over the secular world is no more justified than the Pharisees were right in overruling the spirit of the Sabbath with their rules and regulations. Matthew argues for the authority of God in Christ, not the right of his followers to rule the world. That, in my opinion, was the major fallacy in the Falwell concept of the Kingdom.
      Liberty and justice is for all. The longest citation of Jewish scripture in Matthew follows the Sabbath conflict and is offered as the prophecy which Jesus fulfilled. He is identified with the servant Israel, affirmed as God’s beloved. God has put God’s Spirit upon him to proclaim justice to the Gentiles. The Exile had brought the Jews under Gentile government. The justice of God had to be bigger than Israel. This servant of God will bring justice through gentleness without breaking a bruised reed or quenching a smoldering wick, but be assured: he will bring justice to victory.
      Matthew takes considerable liberty in quoting Isaiah. George Schweitzer observed that the quotation does not correspond to Isaiah’s text in either Hebrew or Greek. This is more than a proof-text for the authority of Jesus. It is a statement of God’s ultimate concern for human justice. There is no division between religious and secular justice, religious and secular truth, religious and secular hope. There is only one world created by the one God and subject to the same natural laws.
      As followers of Christ, we cannot be faithful to the gospel without concern for our world. We cannot support justice without involvement in the system of justice, without participation and advocacy in the secular world of government. What an irony! Christians who were persecuted for their faith in the early Christian centuries became after Constantine the guardians of orthodoxy persecuting all who differed from the prescribed doctrines of the Church. The error was repeated by the Pilgrims who settled the Colonies of early America attempting to control faith by the establishment of one brand of Christianity over another. The error has been extended by the religious right in commitment to power and control over liberty and justice.
      A former P.O.W. of the Vietnam War was in Oak Ridge a few years ago promoting his autobiography and telling the stories of his captivity. He spoke to several civic clubs, including my Rotary and described the brutality of his captors, repeated dislocation of his shoulders from being hanged by arms tied behind his back, electrical shock through electrodes attached to the most sensitive parts of his body, beatings, deprivation of sleep, and periodic isolation from other prisoners. Freedom became his obsession. He told of finding peace in the turbulence of captivity by retreat into the sanctuary of his soul. Worship and prayer were not permitted, but the spirit of the man was outside their reach. He found an inviolable sanctuary within. He fashioned a cross and made an altar in his tiny cell and found there a sabbath refuge out of the reach of his captors. There he found the spiritual resources to deal with the mental and physical insult to his person.
      In the final analysis, the soul is out of the reach of all tyrants and all human institutions. It is the basis of Christian liberty and the ultimate court of divine justice. Justice Robert Jackson was right: “no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.”

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In the Service of Liberty III: An Unfinished People of Faith
I Peter 2:1-10                       June 24, 2007                       carolyn dipboye
      Perhaps you have encountered the writings of John Muir, the late 19^th century adventurer, founder of the Sierra Club, and early leader of the modern environmental movement. Born in Scotland, he immigrated to the United States as a young boy. He attended the University of Wisconsin several years but left to enroll in “the university of the wilderness.” He took jobs as sheepherder, bronco buster and sawmill operator, enabling him to explore the wild surrounding Yosemite. His writings of what he encountered there became widely known and highly regarded. He introduced leading scientists to his mountains and his theories about their formation and took such notables as Ralph Waldo Emerson and eventually President Teddy Roosevelt into his wilderness. His efforts contributed to Yosemite being set aside as a national preserve, and his own special campaign on behalf of Yosemite Valley saw it added to the park some fifteen years later.
      The wild for Muir was a religious experience. No temple made with hands, he insisted, could compare with the grand temples of Yosemite. He relished the beauty and adventure of nature. The story is told of a particularly fierce December storm that moved into the Sierra Mountains from the Pacific. Desiring to experience the storm to the fullest, Muir climbed the highest ridge and, scrambling up a giant Douglas fir, clung to it for dear life as he thrilled to nature’s show of raw force.
      How do you define religious experience? Even if you do not go to the lengths of John Muir, do you think of religious faith in terms of a sense of wonder and risk?
      Linguists have battled for centuries over the root meaning of the word religion. Some locate it in the Latin term religere, meaning “to bind up, or tie up again.” It bears the image of gathering the scattered fragments of our lives into a meaningful whole or tying our lives down so that we are not blown about by every wind that blows. Other linguists point to the Latin term religare, meaning to connect (as, for example, a ligament connects) again. Going back to Augustine, it bears the image of being reconnected to God and one another. It carries within it the sense of the open-ended, the unfinished nature of relationship that grows and develops over time.
      So what are we doing as we gather on Sunday mornings? Do we come here to re-orient ourselves? To pull ourselves back together again so that we can brave the storm of the coming week? Or do we come to encounter the wonder of God? The mystery of unfolding relationship? Are we seeking to bundle our lives into some sense of meaning and wholeness? Or do we come to meet the unfinished nature of our lives face to face? Do we come seeking certainties, predictability, guarantees? Or do we come seeking strength for the journey? At bottom, does religion, does church speak to you of security or freedom?
      The church is the people. The writer of I Peter is written to Christians living in Asia Minor. A tiny minority, they were ostracized and ridiculed for their faith. Surrounded on every side by the lavish shrines and temples of their neighbors, they seemingly had no reason to boast, no long and proud heritage to which they could point, no place in the culture in which they lived and moved. Written to encourage them, the letter of I Peter reminds these seemingly new Christians of their conversion and baptism. Just as they stripped away old garments at baptism in order to don a new robe, so should they strip away old behaviors and attitudes of their former lives to put on new lives in Christ. They certainly did not have all of the religious trappings of their neighbors, but neither should they hang their heads in shame. Drawing on a heritage that was indeed their own, he recalls the experience of Israel. The smallest and most insignificant of people, repudiated and cast aside as worthless by the powerful nations, Israel was honored by God to become the chief cornerstone. Similarly, Christ, repudiated and put to death, had now become the living stone–the foundation and hope–of his new people, the church.
      Borrowing from the wealth of images that had been used to symbolize Israel as the people of God, the writer calls this new people to live out of who they are. “You are,” he says emphatically, “a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God's own people.” Every image he uses is a corporate image, a communal image, celebrating the church as the people of God. “You may not have buildings,” he is assuring them, “but it’s okay. It’s not about a pile of dead stones. It’s about living stones. It is about you–all of you. It’s about you, who like Israel, once were no people, but now you are God’s people. It’s about you, who had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy. Take heart and live out of that reality.”

      Every believer is a priest. Perhaps you have noticed that every Sunday morning our worship bulletin proclaims, “Every believer a priest.” The terminology of the priesthood of the believer was a central affirmation of the Protestant Reformation, but it is rooted in Christian scriptures where it is never used to speak of a select group of Christians, set aside as clergy or ministers. It does not reference “full-time Christian service" for the few, but embraces full-time service for everyone who bears the name of Christ.
      Our issue today is not about the confrontation within the Roman Catholic Church in the 16th and 17th centuries. It isn't about anti-Catholicism or what we choose to call our ministers. It is about a tragedy that besets Christ's church in our time. It is about church, in the words of Walter Shurden, becoming "a place to go rather than a people on the go." It's about church becoming "a building superintended by clergy rather than a body of Christ alive and active in the world through the laity" [The Doctrine of the Priesthood of Believers, xiv]. It is, you might say, about faith becoming nailed down, manageable, predictable and safe.
      The priesthood of the believer is about freedom. It speaks to the competency and the responsibility of every believer to read scripture and to hear and respond to God's leading. The faith of Christian scriptures is not a "proxy faith" where another believes and acts on our behalf. The faith modeled in Christian scriptures is about a people brought to birth by the surprising news of the Resurrection of its Lord. It is about a community of people, in the words of William Willimon, "still willing to be surprised, always to be reformed and radically recreated" [What's Right with the Church, 139]. It is about what we have come to speak of as the Protestant Principle. In service to the freedom of God to always be able to do a new thing and in service to the understanding that the church of Jesus Christ must always be unfinished, must always be open to the leading of its Lord, the church must ever be listening, ever ready to set aside the idols it would make of its structures, its orthodoxy or its fellowship. The church must ever be reforming itself, re-envisioning itself and recommitting itself to reflect the image of the one it serves.

We do come to church to remember again who we are. We seek here a stabilizing force to secure us against the winds of time. We do the church a disservice, however, when we become preoccupied with ensuring either our own or the church’s stability in anything other than a consistent commitment to following the leading of Christ. We rejoice and we quake before the open-endedness of that freedom. We cannot but detect in it a certain sense of uncertainty and risk. Our certainly resides solely in the trustworthiness of the one we would follow. Into his keeping, we commit ourselves to the journey.

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In the Service of Liberty II: Liberating the Bible
Isaiah 55:6-11; 2 Timothy 2:8-15                 June 17, 2007                   larry dipboye
      Based on George Bernard Shaw's 1916 play, “Pygmalion,” the 1964 screen play “My Fair Lady” revolves around the attempt of Professor Henry Higgins to transform the speech and manners of an uneducated flower girl into the aristocratic eloquence of a refined lady. The Cockney Eliza Doolittle finally reaches the outer limit of patience with her teacher’s incessant phonetic drills and erupts with, “Words, words, words! I’m so sick of words!”
      There are moments in our lives when most of us feel like Miss Doolittle. We grow weary of meaningless lyrics in popular songs, with empty promises in political rhetoric, with the irritating chatter of office gossip, and perhaps even with the drone of the pulpit on Sunday morning. In spite of my love for a well-turned phrase in the development of a sermon, I have learned to appreciate the admonition of Psalm 46:10, “Be still and know that I am God.” I can hear with Job (38:2) the voice from the whirlwind, "Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge?” and Jeremiah’s (6:14) complaint about prophets who speak, “’Peace, peace,’ when there is no peace.” James warns that the human tongue is a fire capable of burning down the forest, “From the same mouth come blessing and cursing.” (3:10)
      All human language is both potent and fallible. The story of the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11) is about the sinister potential of human language. The diversity of language in various human cultures was explained as an act of God to prevent conspiracy. In Eastern culture words were not necessarily holy, truthful, or constructive; but language was always powerful. The curse of drunk Noah and the blessing of blind Isaac were viewed as potent words that shaped the destiny of future generations. Attributing power to words is not limited to biblical culture.
      Sequoyah was half-Cherokee, born during the American Revolution near Fort Loudon, Tennessee. An injury to his foot left him with a disability that diverted his attention to working with his mind and his hands. He connected the power of the white settlers to their ability to communicate with marks on paper. He successfully created an alphabet by which to send messages in the Cherokee language. The Cherokee nation became the only tribal community with a written language.
      I recall a similar development in the cultural change associated with the introduction of television. The power of TV to communicate and entertain was so magical that it was not uncommon to hear someone solemnly report with authority, “I saw it on TV.” One did not have to be clairvoyant or a genius to know that communication through the magic of electronics had nothing to do with authenticity and certainly did not guarantee justice or morality. Nevertheless, the creedal formula "I saw it on TV" carried the stamp of authenticity.
      We have difficulty imagining a world without printing press or photocopy. The scribal task of reproducing books by the tedious process of verbatim handwritten copies set a value on the written word that suggested authority. The written word communicated laws governing society, thus, conveyed the power of life and death in the rule of kings. Finally, the mystique and authority of human language came across in two biblical phrases, “it is written,” and “thus says the Lord.”
      Yet, between the covers of the Bible, human language was never simply identified with the Word of God. 2 Timothy is presented as a prison epistle of Paul the Apostle to Timothy, a successor in ministry, addressing the task of communicating the truth of the gospel in the church. The elder apostle advises, “avoid wrangling over words,” but “Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved by him, a worker who has no need to be ashamed, rightly explaining the word of truth.” The message of the gospel of Jesus Christ stood at the center of the teaching ministry, yet the Gospels as we know them did not exist. The gospel was the story of God's work in Christ carried in the hearts of the people and passed from word of mouth in the church. Even when the Epistle addresses "the sacred writings" and declares, "All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness" (3:15-16), the reference is to the scriptures of our Old Testament, not to the books that we identify with the Christian scriptures.
      The "Battle for the Bible" of the past century has centered on a theory of verbal inspiration with claims of an infallible Bible. A casual reading of the Bible, reveals that the claim has no biblical support. The word inerrant cannot be found in the Bible. It was the creation of fundamentalism to defend against the encroachment of science on the biblical understanding of nature. Actually the Bible does not support the association of infallibility or absolute knowledge with any human experience. I recall hearing Carlyle Marney state that all language is human; there is no divine language. When Jerome translated the Bible into Latin around 500 CE, he was using the popular language of the time. Although Latin eventually became the mystical language of the church understood only by the educated, it started out as the Vulgate, the vulgar language of the people.
      The Word of God transcends human words. The simple equation of the Word of God with the Bible sets limits on God that cannot hold. The Epistle is written from prison from one "chained like a criminal"; but the Apostle declares, "But the word of God is not chained." He might well have written that the Word of God cannot be imprisoned in human words, not in our creeds, our hymns, our sermons, our theology, or especially not in our verbal battles over orthodoxy. Yet, perhaps you, like me, learned to think "Bible" every time you read "word of God" in the Bible. Karl Barth identified the Word of God with the dynamic of God at work among his people in the Spirit's guidance of the feeble words of the preacher from the pulpit, in the Spirit's guidance in reading the Bible that bears witness to the experience of God through the ages, and finally and most certainly in the presence of God in the person of Christ, the Word become flesh. The Lutheran scholar Paul Scherer identified the task of preaching as "The Word in search of words" (The Word God Sent).
      If we are going to hear the Word of God in the Bible, we have to turn loose of the idea that we have God trapped between the covers of a book. Our God is far too great to be prisoner to any religion, theology, or book. The Word of God cannot be passed from one generation to the next in dead documents. Words on paper can come alive and take on new meaning through the dynamic of the Spirit of God, but the Word of God is never captive to any human institution. We can elevate our institutions to the point of idolatry and close our ears to the hearing of the Word, just as people in the time of Christ could listen to the teachings of Jesus deaf to the Word of God, and witness his work, blind to the power of God.
      The message repeated in the Gospels, "Let the one who has ears, listen!" is the admonition to the church in our age. If we gather for worship in the spirit of anticipation, listening for the Word, the message of God for our hour, we might just hear. Invariably the claim for the absolute authority of God in the church associated with pope, priest, preacher, creed, or Bible usurps by human language and human persons the place that belongs only to God.
      Bill Leonard, Dean of the Wake Forest Divinity School and respected church historian, wrote a book at the end of the fundamentalist struggle to dominate the Southern Baptist Convention in1990, God's last & Only Hope. When I first saw the book, I had to read it to discover the source of the strange title. It is a quotation from an address at a Southern Baptist Convention in 1948 from Levi Elder Barton. The speaker arrogated to the Southern Baptist Convention the role of "God's last and only hope."
      God is far less likely to be known in human arrogance than in the humble quest in the call of Christ, "seek and you will find."

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In the Service of Liberty I: The Spirit of Freedom
Galatians 5:1-14                       June 10, 2007                       carolyn dipboye
      This past week, Larry and I added our signatures to a letter prepared by Clergy against Hate in support of strengthening and expanding national hate crimes legislation. The letter was forwarded to us by The Interfaith Alliance, and we each signed and returned it on our own. When we compared notes, Larry commented that he had indicated his religious affiliation as “Baptist.” We laughed when I reported that I had answered “Interdenominational.” We went on to discuss the significance of our Baptist heritage and how, despite our fully embracing ministry in an interdenominational church, we remember and cherish the gifts we have received from Baptists.
      Our emphasis on religious liberty in the coming four weeks will draw deeply on our Baptist roots. Despite the damage done to the name Baptist in our time, soul competency–the freedom, ability and responsibility of every person to respond to God–is uniquely a Baptist principle. As a matter of fact, at the end of this month the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty will host a rally on the steps of the National Capital in Washington, D.C., commemorating the historic occasion when George W. Truett mounted its east steps on Sunday afternoon, May 16, 1920. Speaking to a gathering of ten to 15 thousand people, he eloquently made the case for the Baptist defense of freedom of conscience before God. “Our contention,” he held, “is not for mere toleration, but for absolute liberty.”
There is a wide difference between toleration and liberty. Toleration implies that somebody falsely claims the right to tolerate. Toleration is a concession, while liberty is a right. Toleration is a matter of expediency, while liberty is a matter of principle. Toleration is a gift from man, while liberty is a gift from God. It is the consistent and insistent contention of our Baptist people, always and everywhere, that religion must be forever voluntary and uncoerced, and that it is not the prerogative of any power, whether civil or ecclesiastical to compel men to conform to any religious creed or form of worship, or to pay taxes for the support of a religious organization to which they do not belong and in whose creed they do not believe. God wants free worshipers and no other kind” [L. McBeth, A Sourcebook for Baptist Heritage, 469].
      The pride with which Baptists embraced the principle of liberty and the fervor with which they nurtured it during the years of my youth and college and seminary education made me a convinced Baptist. It is today a heritage I prize and a central identifying marker in my personal identity and in the ministry which Larry and I embrace. Although we learned it from the Baptists, we are convinced that it is not just Baptist but fundamentally Christian as well. Our congregation has embraced it within our Covenant of Grace both in our affirmation of the freedom of God to move beyond any preconceived human constructs that we might seek to enforce upon God or one another and in our commitment to “support a free church in a free state, advocating religious liberty through the separation of church and state.” So, it is Baptist in the best sense of that word; but it is also Christian and not just Christian, but a common mission that we share with others and most particularly with our Jewish brothers and sisters within our own country.
      Freedom originates within the free Spirit of God. Despite the great significance of the individual liberties we celebrate as a part of our national heritage, the freedom around which we gather in the church does not originate with any government, although it supports and informs and even demands that freedom. Nor does it even originate as an innate human right, although we affirm that it is the most basic of human rights–“the mother principle” of all human rights, as John R. Sampey termed it. Soul competency or the essential freedom of conscience is before anything else, a gift. It is the gift of a God who in creation chose to create human beings in God’s own image, placing within us the ability and freedom to respond to God. Or, as Sampey again put it, “God refuses to violate [our] moral nature even in order to save [us]” [Review and Expositor, (Winter 1999), 63].
      As Christians, we also acknowledge that God gifts us with freedom through Jesus Christ. The freedom to which Paul calls the Galatians and us is freedom accomplished in the past tense–“For freedom Christ has set us free.” It is a reality into which we are to live. It is the gift of Good Friday and Easter. It is gospel.
      Freedom is, however, fragile. It is never more secure than when we live out of the full realization that it is gift. It is never more insecure than when we seek to prop it up with other guarantees. “Do not,” Paul warns, “submit again to a yoke of slavery.” Do not, in other words, seek out an alternative gospel. Whether it be the path of constrictive legalism on the one side or libertine self-indulgence on the other, there is no half-way covenant. We either live in Christ, we either live by the Spirit, or we do not.
      The freedom of Christ manifests itself in community. The freedom extended to us in Christ is not, then, a matter of our autonomy. It is not the popular idea of freedom captured in the popular song of some years ago, “I gotta be me.” It does mean living out of a sense of giftedness even as we are gathered into loving community. “Through love,” Paul says, “become slaves to one another.” How strangely that must have fallen on ears carefully schooled in the ethics of Greek Stoicism whose ideal in life was ultimate detachment. How strangely it falls on Western ears carefully schooled in the pursuit of rugged individualism. Christ’s freedom, Paul says, frees us for relationship to God and one another. As a matter of fact, if you want to gauge the extent to which one is free in Christ, gauge the depth and the breadth of one’s relationships.
      Paul dismisses both self-centered libertinism or autonomy (literally translated, “self-law”) and legalistic perfectionism as destructive of community. We quickly get the first, easily recognizing the sins of the “flesh” Paul goes on to identify–fornication, impurity, licentiousness, drunkenness and carousing. We are less likely to notice the others--enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, and envy–all eight he also identifies with the flesh. All eight are a constant source of threat to the spirit of love within Christ’s church. All eight accompany a rising spirit of self-righteousness. All eight have to do with building walls of enmity instead of bridges of redemptive love. “You were running well,” Paul laments (v. 7) concerning the Galatians. What happened? Could it be that attempts to introduce not just circumcision, but after that more and more definitions of who is on the inside and who is on the outside, had turned the church into warring camps within itself? Does Paul see the deconstruction of Christ’s body going on before his eyes? Is that why he speaks in anguished tones about believers turning on one another, biting and devouring one another, being literally on the verge of consuming one another?
      Do not live by the flesh, Paul warns. And do not degenerate into self-righteous legalism. Live by the Spirit of love. Freedom in Christ is freedom for life in community, freedom for a life lived in mutual service of love. It is the opposite of divisiveness and contention. It is the opposite of judging and excluding. It is about the day to day building and the day to day nurturing of a community where “there is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female” (Gal. 3:28). It is about a community whose rivalries and enmities are put aside at the waters of baptism and around Christ’s table. It is about a community of people whose inclusive love gives all of creation now groaning in bondage a glimpse of “the freedom of the glory of the children of God” (Romans 8:21-22).
      It was in this spirit that this week Larry and I signed onto the Clergy against Hate letter in support of the Matthew Shepard Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act. Named in remembrance of the Wyoming college student so brutally tortured and murdered nine years ago because he was gay, the act extends the federal definition and prosecution of hate crimes to include violence against persons based on sexual orientation, gender or disability. In our land of freedom where the FBI has documented almost 114,000 hate crimes since the year 2000 and where the Southern Poverty Law Center has documented a 40% rise in hate groups in the same period of time, it’s the least we can do. The question remains for us as Christ’s free, inclusive church, how much more can and should we do and be?

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By Any Other Name
John 16:1-15                         June 3, 2007                       larry dipboye
     Perhaps the greatest English wordsmith of all times, William Shakespeare subtly exposed the universal problem with language in the well-worn line from Romeo and Juliet: “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet.” Shakespeare knew that the word does not change the reality of a thing, but one might also note that calling a skunk a rose does not improve the smell. Truth always transcends language. In conversation with a group of seminary students, I heard New Testament professor Bill Hull say about biblical language, “words have uses, not meanings.” That is why the process of biblical translation never ends.
     I dropped by the hospital to visit a church member a few years ago and stumbled onto a major medical crisis. Doctors and nurses were scurrying in and out of the room, monitoring the patient’s vitals and inquiring about the patient’s detection of change. When I finally had a chance to visit, the patient told me that he had been given a drug intended for someone else in the hospital, who happened to have the same name. Fortunately he was unharmed. Evidently the problem is universal. I was visiting a heart patient in the VA hospital in Louisville when orderlies came into the room to take him to surgery. Against his protest, he was loaded and wheeled into the hall. An alert intern intervened, checked the order for surgery, and sent him back to his room. Same name, wrong patient. These days it is not unusual to see a tag, “Name Alert,” over the patient’s bed to warn medical technicians of potential disaster.
     “Name Alert!” should perhaps be required on sermons, in the church section of the Yellow Pages, and on the cover of religious books. Churches that identify themselves with the same denomination are often miles apart in mission, theology, ethics, and behavior. Christians also have name problems with deity. Individual Christians use the word God with a wide variety of religious experiences and radically different understandings of the divine nature. On the other hand, different words for God in different languages and cultures or in different situations are often intended to apply to the same deity. During the aftermath of 9/11, we were getting numerous crash-courses on Islam. Repeatedly we were told that Allah is not the name of the Islamic deity or a different deity from the God of the Bible. Allah just happens to be the Arabic word for God. Historically and linguistically, that is correct; however, one does not have to be a theologian to detect major theological differences between Islam, Judaism, and Christianity, although the three great monotheistic religions of the world all proceed from the same biblical origin with Father Abraham.
     Speaking of God is always an audacious act for limited humans. On this day in the Christian year called “Trinity Sunday,” I always wonder whether I need to stop and ponder or just change the subject. The absence of the word trinity in the Bible is sufficient reason to dismiss the idea of a triune God for some biblical purists. Others find the history, conflict, and confusion surrounding trinitarian theology to be a clear indication that the God of love and peace had nothing to do with the Council of Nicea (325) that defined the Trinity for all future generations. Although the theological controversy about the person of Jesus needed to be addressed, the political disturbance may have been the major concern of Constantine the Great. That the Emperor Constantine called the Council of Nicea to pacify the Church raises some question about the motivation behind the trinitarian formula, if not the theology itself.
     Atrocities committed in the name of orthodoxy have often attached to the formula of Nicea. In 1531, Michael Servetus wrote The Trinitarian Error for which he was condemned by Roman Catholic authorities. When he fled to Protestant Geneva for asylum, he was arrested and with the support of John Calvin was burned as a heretic in 1553. In spite of the execution, his teaching was carried forward in Poland by Faustus Socinus and eventually emerged in Transylvania as the first Unitarians.
     Then, some believe the language of Nicea to be irrelevant to the modern age. Bishop John A. T. Robinson called for abandoning much of our traditional language about God. He even suggested that we drop the word god long enough to purge it of all of the misguided notions the word has gathered in history. Episcopal Bishop James Pike was tried for heresy for his rejection of the traditional language about God. He called the Holy Trinity an old bottle that is eventually going to burst and for which we should have no regrets.
     Although the Trinity is not a simple fact or an obvious teaching of our Bible, it also is not a ridiculous puzzle or a practical joke passed down from antiquity to haunt our modern world. The very instant we attempt to speak of God, we are in over our heads. Our words do not define or control God, but they guide us toward understanding. The problem comes in our Inquisitions. The demand that everyone use the same theological language requires that all humans be uniform in every other way.
     We experience God in community. Not even the Jewish images of God in the Old Testament could be limited to one word. The name JHWH distinguished the God of Israel from all of the other competing deities of the neighbors, and the “I Am” sayings of John may well be intended as a connection between the Jesus of the Gospels and the “I Am” of the burning bush. The substitute word for JHWH was Adonai (Lord). In addition, the Old Testament identifies God with the common words for deity, El and Elohim and derivitives, El-Elyon (God Most High), and El-Olam (God Eternal). God is called Shaddai (Almighty), Abir (Mighty One), Sebaoth (Hosts), and even Baal (Owner/Possessor) borrowed from the Canaanites. Old Testament monotheism contained diversity both in words and understanding of God.
     We should not be surprised that the New Testament speaks of Jesus with a variety of titles of which Son of God is only one. Although the fatherhood of God has roots in Judaism, the Gospels are unanimous in teaching that Father was Jesus’ favorite word for God. Especially in the farewell discourse of John, the relationship of Jesus the Son and God the Father and the Spirit of truth, the Paraclete, is preparation for the future of the disciples.
     Walter Brueggemann observed in Genesis that the creation of the human in the image of God is only in the plural. God did not create a person in the image of God, but all of humanity. He makes no claim to finality in understanding the image of God, but Brueggemann is certain that it has something to do with our relationships with one another. We do not live in a vacuum where we experience God in isolation or in private experience. We meet God in community and partnerships, even in the most sacred of all human bonds, human matrimony. Does the human need for community imply that God is also community? Jesus said, “I and my Father are one.” In marriage, husband and wife become one flesh, but they remain distinct individuals with an integrity of soul that makes the word one appropriate.
     It seems that we are most like God in harmonious community, when our relationships are healed, and we are one with each other.

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Pentecost: Side-by-side
John 14:15-27                        May 27, 2007                         larry dipboye
     The Isaac Watts hymn “O God, Our Help in Ages Past” is a powerful statement of God’s eternal faithfulness, reminding us of that glorious refrain in the Psalms, “God’s steadfast love endures forever.” Especially at funerals, when we are brutally reminded of our mortality, we reach for this message of eternal hope. Except for one, every stanza proclaims the eternal vigil of a loving God. The one stanza sometimes left out of hymnals is a harsh reminder of our mortality: “Time, like an ever-rolling stream, Bears all its sons away; They fly, forgotten as a dream Dies at the op’ning day.” Isaac Watts hit a nerve when he dared to express our fear and to articulate the threat of death. We probably don’t want to hear it. That is why the editors of some hymnals leave it off. The constant passing of time is “an ever-rolling stream” that sweeps all people away. Not only sons, but daughters, spouses, parents, grandparents, friends, and enemies are caught in the sweep of time. Watts was right. Our hope rests in the eternal love of God, but he also observed correctly that our faith in God does not stop the toll of death and the raging current of history.
     We exist in time. We can pretend to be eternal. We can sing hymns that laud our glorious hope, but the fact remains: all of us exist in time, and all of us will eventually be casualties of history. Death is only a part of the problem. Actually death is servant to the ceaseless passing of time. Someone dropped the line into a popular song a few years ago, “stop the world, I want to get off.” Occasionally, we senior adults want to get nostalgic about our lives. We remember younger times in our lives that get distorted sometimes into “the good old days.” We grieve not only the passing of friends in death, but the passing of time itself. What happened to yesterday? Why am I not young anymore? Why can’t we just freeze a moment in time and hold on?
     The Gospels are unanimous, and even skeptics agree: Jesus died; he died as a criminal on a cross; he died a sadistically cruel death. Christian glorification of the cross does not change the historical truth. In fact, the cross intensifies the reality of history and the truth about history itself. Not even the one we proclaim as Son of God was exempt from the sweep of time. Death sweeps our sons away, the Son away. If you look behind the curtain of John’s Gospel, I believe you will find Christians huddled in fear.
     Some Christians have always attempted to avoid the fact. The problem is somewhat simple and obvious. If Jesus was Son of God and one with the Father, does that mean that God died on the cross? This simplicity found its way into theological literature during the 1960's in Thomas Altizer’s theological announcement of the death of God.
     Early Gnostics managed the problem by denying the historical reality of Jesus. Their docetic Christology claimed that Jesus only “seemed” to be human. He was not really subject to the trials and temptations of human existence, so he was not vulnerable to death or the threat of time. They preferred to deny death to proclaiming the resurrection, and they allowed a similar escape from the ravages of time and creation for all who were “in the know,” gnostic.
     In spite of the glorification of Christ in John’s Gospel, John, like Isaac Watts, determined to speak the truth about time. Jesus offered three words of hope. The table talk at the Last Supper was preparation for future generations of Christians to go forward in time and to carry with them the good news of Jesus Christ. First, in the face of death, John proclaims eternal life. We love to hear the promise, “In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places. . .I go to prepare a place for you.” Jesus looks toward being with God, the hope of heaven, but his message does not end with life after death. What do we do in the meantime? Second, consistent with early Christian expectation of the return of Christ, the Parousia, Jesus promised that he would come again. Some believe that is what he meant by the sending of “another Advocate?” So, in the meantime we do nothing. We are to wait for Christ to come again.
     Finally, Jesus identified the Advocate (paracletos) with the Holy Spirit of God. Time marches on. The life and ministry of Jesus fades into history. We have our memories bound in scripture, but we are not left dangling on the wheel of history. God, present and active in Christ, continues with us in the Holy Spirit, John identifies as the Paraclete, “one who is called beside.”
     The eternal God dwells with us in time. Every generation coins its own language. Youth love to throw out expressions that puzzle their parents, that only insiders can understand. I recall some thirty years ago hearing someone considerably younger than I say, “I’ll be there for you.” I quickly learned that the expression is about the kind of stuff we promise in wedding ceremonies, and perhaps the age of quick and easy divorce as well as the common practice of cohabitation without marriage contributed to the importance of sticking with one another. In the 1994 premier of the TV show “Friends” the theme song “I’ll Be There for You” began to catch on. Some Tennessee disc jockey pieced the song together and played it on the air. By popular demand, the Rembrandts finished the song:
  And I'll be there with you Whatever you do With all of my heart I promise you I'll be there with you
    Just know that it's true With all of my heart I'm there for you Wherever you go I'll be there
    Whatever we're up against Just know that I'll be there with you
     Our greatest fear in relationships is abandonment, so we cry out for presence and find our fears soothed by the promise to “be there for you.” In the real world, however, our promises are limited by the constant toll of time. In fact, no one can keep the promise to be there forever. As we grow older, we realize the significance of that marriage vow, “til death do us part.”
     What we fear and want the most from our human relationships spills over into our walk with God. Jesus could not promise to “be there” for his disciples, but he did the next best thing. He promised that God will be there. The Paraclete is not another god to fill another gap in time. Rather, the historical Jesus, whose life and ministry have a beginning and end like all other human persons, continues to abide with us through God’s Spirit. Jesus promised, “I will not leave you orphaned.” The message of Pentecost flows out of Easter. God does not come and go according to moods or seasons. The eternal God transcends all beginnings and ends. The eternal God is present with us in time. God is beside us in our struggle with life and death. But more important, God dwells within us and lives through us.
     A few years ago, I was pastor of an older woman in my church along with several of her adult children and grandchildren. I found something refreshing about the family. They were both physically and emotionally close to the elderly mother as she increasingly faced the hardship of failing health and limited movement. Early on, I also noticed tension between the siblings, and I shrugged it off as typical sibling rivalry like that which exists in most of our families. I learned that this was not a typical family story. The father had died at the height of the Great Depression. With a half-dozen children, the mother found that the very survival of the family depended on a painful but necessary decision. She had to choose which children could stay at home and which would have to move into an orphanage. Until the day of her death, the orphaned children harbored a resentment toward the others.
     I think I may begin to understand Pentecost. The promise of God in Christ is less about high energy, miraculous events, and speaking in tongues than it is about the Christ who promised, “I am with you always to the end of the age.”

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7th Sunday of Easter: A Glimpse of God
John 14:1-14                       May 20, 2007                       carolyn dipboye
      It is an age old question: How do we translate the Christian faith into terms that communicate in our time? Almost fifty years ago, H. Richard Niebuhr struggled with the question in a series of lectures at Austin Presbyterian Seminary in Texas. His thoughts were published a couple of years later in his book Christ and Culture–a book that for decades has been on the required reading list for seminary introductory courses in Christian ethics because it raises the basic question of how faith relates to the world and the time in which we live.
      William Willimon, never one to let the status quo in academia and church life go unchallenged, has taken Niebuhr’s question forward into the present day where the “postliberal church” struggles with how the church is going to “fit into” the pluralistic culture in which we live. How do we “do church” and how do we responsibly participate in a society that is composed of so many different religions and philosophies and no religion at all? Although Willimon applauds those within the church who care to take that diversity seriously rather than run roughshod over it, he argues that in the process of translation, we often throw the baby out with the bath water. Anxious to assure the world that we are not so different after all, we rush to replace terminology, concepts and demands judged out-of-date with those more palatable for the time in which we live. The Christian hope, for example, is reduced into this-worldly terms and talk about salvation is replaced with talk about self-esteem and personal fulfillment. The church rushes to speak to important issues, showing that we really do “care about the same things society cares about–and in the same way.” What we end up doing, Willimon suggests, is keeping people interested in the church “even when they no longer worship its God” [Christian Century (Ja 28, 1987), 84].
      Is that enough? Is it the best we can do? We certainly don’t want the church to slip into irrelevance. And we don’t want to take on the tactics of those seeking privileged status for the Christian faith at the expense of the conscience and well being of others. What are the distinctives of our faith? What are the non-negotiables without which we are no longer Christian? Do we indeed lay claim to truth and truths that set us apart? And can we bear witness to that truth in a way that respects the truth of others?
      Jesus is at the center of the Christian faith. Perhaps you remember encountering John 14:6 in younger years. “I am the way, the truth, and the life,” Jesus says. “No one comes to the Father except through me.” Perhaps in your youth and early adulthood you were even one of those Gail O’Day speaks of as having been bludgeoned into line with its words. Jesus’ words have too often been used as a litmus test. They have been used to silence questions and inquiry within the church, just as they have been used, as O’Day suggests, as “the rallying cry of Christian triumphalism, proof positive that Christians have the corner on God and that people of any and all other faiths are condemned” [New Interpreter’s Bible, IX, 743]. Despite the fact that Jesus’ words have often been turned into a weapon, they do give voice not just to what O’Day calls “the heart of John’s gospel,” but to the heart of the Christian faith itself. How do we deliver these critical words from the arrogant claims of Christian superiority and recapture their defining implications for faithful discipleship for which they were intended?
      As with any other question of scripture, our best first step is to step back and look at what was going on in John’s situation. What questions was he trying to answer? What purpose did he have in mind? In raising these questions, it is critical that we bear in mind one significant difference between John’s situation and ours: John is not speaking to a majority religious faith, but to a minority faith that struggles against overwhelming odds. Foundational to its very existence is its claim, reiterated time and again in the Gospel of John, that in Jesus it has encountered God, and, indeed, that Jesus and the Father are one. John is not addressing the question of Christianity’s place among the world’s religions. He is underscoring the central affirmation of what it means to be a Christian. He is not setting the Christian faith up for the purpose of arrogance and world domination; he is speaking to the single affirmation of faith which has brought the Christian community into existence–an affirmation for which they have already paid dearly.
      Jesus’ statement, then, that “no one comes to the Father except by me” is not an arrogant dismissal of peoples of other faiths. “The Father” of whom he speaks is not a generic god, but the God they have glimpsed as Father in Jesus. As O’Day points out, “When Jesus says ‘no one,’ he means ‘none of you’” [744]. John is writing to his own faith community, struggling to hold onto life and hope, and he is concerned to say to them, “This is what you hold onto. This is what defines who you are. This is the center of your hope.”
      We are called to committed relationship to God in Christ. The question John was struggling with is the question with which we also struggle: What defines us? What matters? What is central to who we are? The Jesus we encounter in John is not calling us to arrogance and exclusivism. This is, after all, the Jesus through whom God has “so loved the world.” The Jesus we encounter in John is calling his faith community to committed relationship.               The focus turns in John 14 from the identity of Jesus to the identity of his disciples and his church. Philip requests positive proof: “Show us the Father, and we will be satisfied” Jesus’ response of seeming exasperation reflects on the road he has walked with the disciples and how time people have refused to see his oneness with the Father reflected in his words and works. The question now becomes, “Will the disciples themselves, will the church of John’s day and everyday, including our own, believe?”
      It is not about lording our superiority over others. It is about knowing who we are. It is not about a litmus test of orthodoxy. It is about a life of loving, committed relationship. Wesley Ariarajah, a United Methodist minister from Sri Lanka who served for a decade on the staff of the World Council of Churches, demonstrates the difference: “When my daughter tells me I’m the best daddy in the world, and there can be no other father like me, she is speaking the truth, for this comes out of her experience.” Yet, he goes on to say, her claim is not true in another sense. Maturity on his part enables him to recognize that there are many other good fathers and even, in his estimation, some who are better. Her words are words of devotion and love. The language of the Bible, he goes on, is also a language of love and faith. We encounter a serious problem when we take these words of love and faith and turn them into denials of the truth claims of peoples of other faiths. “My daughter cannot say to her little friend in the next house that there is no way she can have the best father, for the best one is right there in her house. If she does, we’ll have to dismiss it as child-talk!” [In C Kimball, When Religion Becomes Evil, 70]. And so it is with us. Our worship of the God we have encountered in Christ should be rich and full and flowing up from the very center of all that we are and hope to be. When, however, we turn that devotion into words and actions of superiority and privilege, we have failed to grasp that God’s gift is the gift of grace; and we, in the words of Paul, have not reached maturity and “put away childish things.”
      Respect for others does not mean that we must abandon our faith. It doesn’t mean that we must water it down to the least common denominator nor force it into the mold of the culture in which we live. The good news that we have encountered in Christ is good news only if does indeed provide some word of meaningful hope, some criteria, some energy by which to make the world in which we live better. Citing five different relationships between Christ and culture, Richard Niebuhr came down to Christ transforming culture. Our faith is relevant to the world in which we live, but not in the sense of merely mirroring what already is, and not in the sense of coercing the world into our mold. The test of authentic faith resides in its transformation of human life. As William Willimon concludes,
      “The truthfulness of any set of convictions is not in their alleged ‘universality’ but in their practical force, the sort of lives they produce. Christians like Desmond Tutu and Mother Teresa of Calcutta are the only evidence we have that Jesus is ‘the way, the truth, and the life.’ Christianity is not another philosophy or some primitive system of belief; it is a community of people who worship the Jew whom Pilate sent to the cross” [p. 84].
      The question, then, comes back to us. What evidence do we bear both in our personal lives and in our common life together that bears witness to the truth that has claimed us? Think about it.

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Easter VI: The Integrity of the Church
John 17:13-26                       May 13, 2007                       carolyn dipboye
     I recall the first time I heard her story. It began with expulsion from the schools because of her Jewish ancestry and proceeded to imprisonment, first in the Polish ghettoes and then in a succession of Nazi concentration camps. She told of winters with minus thirty degree temperatures when families burned furniture for heat and bartered items of extra clothing for food. She recalled the blessed relief of a clandestine school which afforded a few hours of escape into the open precincts of the mind. She shared the horror of being herded through the streets by the SS and being among the 600 selected to return to forced labor while the town’s remaining 19,400 Jews were sent to the gas chambers. She told of other forced marches along routes littered with the bodies, of two-and-a-half weeks of being wedged into a coal car with other prisoners, of the stench of burning flesh, of rats and lice and typhoid fever, of final liberation by the British only to find that of the eighteen members of her family, she and her father alone survived. I recall the sense of being privileged to hear this one who willed herself to relive those five-and-a-half years of horror in a determined effort to expose the terrible toll of hatred and bigotry and to do everything in her power to guarantee that never again would such suffering be visited upon human society.
     Those of us who are neighbors and friends of Mira Kimmelman have been privileged to overhear her story. This past year, the Tennessee Historical Society released Living On, a documentary of interviews with Mira, other Holocaust survivors and the soldiers who liberated them from the camps, extending to us again the privilege of overhearing their experiences.
     Highly esteemed preacher and preaching professor Fred Craddock speaks often of the preacher’s responsibility to help the congregation overhear the gospel. Far from a dull recitation of “just the facts, Ma’m,” the telling of the gospel story takes on real life and blood when we ourselves seek to enter into the electricity of a moment that comes alive as Jesus shares a story, wrestles with his disciples over a dilemma that besets them or bares his soul that they may know as they are known.
     That is what John is seeking to do for us today. He is placing before us a moment of crisis–real crisis–and its resolution is not set in stone. It is not an accomplished fact. It leaves us hanging. It places before us an insistent question not just about whether those first disciples are up to the task, but whether we are as well. It is, you might say, a question of integrity.
     The integrity of the church is rooted in the source of its unity. John 17, Jesus’ extended prayer within his Farewell Discourse, seeks to put Jesus’ entire ministry within a nutshell. It summarizes the significance of his years among his disciples, and midway through reaches a turning point. “But now,” Jesus says, “I am coming to you [to God],” precipitating a crisis. Just at the moment his followers themselves become the target of the anger and hatred previously directed toward Jesus, they will be robbed of his physical presence. Jesus prays for them and not for them only, but for all of those who will down through the centuries “believe in me through their word.” The central petition of his prayer is for unity–“that they may all be one” (21,23).
     The situation John reflects is threefold. It reflects a concern Jesus must have keenly felt as he prepared his disciples for the grueling path that lay ahead. It reflects the situation of John, some fifty or sixty years later, as he wrestled with disharmony and division in the church. And it reflects the church’s brokenness in our own day. Notice, however, that John’s focus is not on the mechanics of manufacturing unity. His words are not about a show of unity or the political expediency of unity. The unity to which he points is not, in the words of Fred Craddock, a “mutual accommodation to error” or “agreement on the level of the lowest common denominator” [Preaching through the Christian Year, C, 270]. The unity for which Jesus prays is not about a show of unity. It is not about the utility of unity. It is not about structure or organizational techniques or revered traditions. It is about relationship–relationship to God in Christ.
     Far from leaving his followers orphaned, Jesus entrusts his church then and now to God’s protective care. The source and the model for our life together is not a business model, crafted for efficiency and easy success. The source of the church’s true unity, the model for our relationship with one another is one and only one: the oneness of God in Christ. As Gail O’Day puts it, “There is no ‘one’ without the ‘we’ of the Father/Son” [New Interpreter’s Bible, IX, 794]. It is our sole source of life. No gimmicks, no shortcuts will do.
     The church’s unity is also the church’s task. Jesus’ prayer for his church is a prayer of commissioning and dedication. “As you have sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world” (18). “Sanctify them in the truth” (17). The unity of the church is not just for the sake of the church, but for the sake of the world in which we live. Unity is not merely an attribute of the church, but also its task. Our oneness with God in Christ and with one another bears witness in the midst of the world’s brokenness and pain. The church, Jurgen Moltmann holds, is not “one” just for itself and its own private enjoyment. It is “one” for the sake of the world in which it moves. The unity of the church must be strong enough, sure enough to enable it to move into the midst of the world’s conflicts and, in the spirit of the Christ, work to make all things new.
        “The unity of Christ, which must not be divided, is not only unity with his disciples and the fellowship of believers but, based on that, is also his unity and fellowship with the oppressed, humiliated and forsaken. The church would not witness to the whole Christ if it were not a fellowship of believers with the poor, a fellowship of the hopeful with the sick, and a fellowship of loving with the oppressed” [Church in the Power of the Spirit, 798].
     Perhaps you heard the news reports this week about renewed efforts on the part of some within the church to make themselves heard on the issue of immigration. On Monday, a coalition of 100 leaders and organizations, largely evangelicals, called on Congress to strengthen border controls while also providing illegal immigrants already in the country ways to gain legal residency. Another group in New York, Chicago and other U.S. cities launched a new "sanctuary" movement, designed to extend hospitality and protection to help illegal immigrants avoid deportation and to unite faith-based groups in a push for immigration reform. As you heard the reports, did you ask yourself “Why”? Did you wonder about the advisability of churches wading into the political foray on such a hot button issue? Were you concerned that perhaps the rash actions of some might be endangering the unity of the church? Both groups, despite the points at which they might disagree, founded their efforts upon biblical injunctions about showing compassion for one’s neighbors, especially the weak and the alien. Both groups took the risk of disagreeing with one another and causing dissension in the church out of a sense of a higher calling–and perhaps out of a stronger sense of the security of Christ’s body and the diversity that it can and must contain.
     And so it has been through the ages. So it was with John Woolman and the Quakers in the face of American slavery, the Dietrich Bonhoeffers and Martin Niemollers in the face of Nazi Germany, Mother Theresa in the face of the abandonment of the untouchables dying in the streets of Calcutta, Martin Luther King in the face of a segregated South and Nelson Mandella and Desmund Tutu in the face of apartheid in South Africa.
     And so it must be with us. We move into the world’s broken places for the purpose of bringing healing because we, as the present Body of Christ, seek to go where he would go. Seeking to be incarnations of his love as he was the incarnation of God’s love, we minister to those to whom he would minister. Wholeness in Christ is about extending wholeness to others. Having received the costly grace of God in Christ, we can do no less.
     It is, after all, a matter of integrity.

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Fifth Sunday of Easter: All the Way to the End
John 17:1-13                                 May 6, 2007                         larry dipboye
      I have quoted the lines many times at funeral services or at grave sides. The words are attributed to the Apostle Paul as the end of his life was in sight: “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. From now on there is reserved for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, will give me on that day, and not only to me but also to all who have longed for his appearing” (2 Timothy 4:7-8). The message “mission accomplished” is sometimes appropriate for one who has lived a long and full life with many accomplishments, but regardless of age or achievement the word is always something of a misnomer. Truth is, most of us come to an incomplete end of life. Mission accomplished seldom corresponds to reality. Most of our symphonies are unfinished, left either for someone else to complete or to be left dangling in the imagination. Thus, perfection is not a word that finds easy application in human life. The command of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 5:48, “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect,” is overwhelming. It helps to know that biblical perfection is not about meticulous attention to detail , action above human error, or a life without sin. The word is telos. It means finished, complete, a life lived all the way to the end.
      What is the question? John follows a course that seems totally unrelated to the other Gospels. The final meal with his disciples begins with the washing of feet and contains no institution of the Lord’s Supper. Rather than going out into the garden of Gethsemane after dinner, John’s story seems to continue at the table with a long farewell message to the disciples that ends in prayer. Although John does not record either the Lord’s Prayer or the Gethsemane prayer of the Synoptics, John alone records the long prayer of chapter seventeen. It is a message for the disciples spoken to the Father, half prayer and half sermon. The teaching is not a direct instruction to the disciples but a message spoken for their hearing. In the sixteenth century, Lutheran pastor/theologian David Chytraeus called it “the High Priestly Prayer” of Jesus. Jesus takes the role of pastor/priest in an act of worship and intercession. Frank Stagg suggests that it is better named “The Lord’s Prayer” than the prayer we offer each Sunday. Westcott called it “the Consecration Prayer,” and C.K. Barrett preferred “The Farewell Prayer.” (Review and Expositor, fall, 1965, pp. 470-471). Typical of John, Jesus is not the victim agonizing over the cross as in Gethsemane, but he is, as in Gethsemane, the faithful Son whose will is identical to the will of the Father.
      Perhaps John was answering a question that ties to the WWJD trend of our time, “what would Jesus pray?” In the Synoptic Gospels, Jesus finds strength and wisdom through times of prayer, but the other Gospels never give detailed contents of the prayers. We may assume that no one was listening or that Jesus, like most of us, did not pray for an audience. The prayer in John, however, takes on the character of farewell addresses found in the Old Testament, like the farewell message of Moses that ends in a prayer of blessing on the people in Deuteronomy 33. It stands apart from the other Gospels but not unusual in Hebrew writings, and it was not unprecedented for prophetic characters of the Old Testament to pray a message for a listening audience.
      I believe that the question here is much deeper than the satisfaction of our curiosity about the prayer life of Jesus or an instructive sample of the appropriate language to use in prayer. The crisis issue for early Christians was the unfinished business of Christ. Did he not promise a speedy return to bring to fulfillment all of the longings of God’s people through the ages? Did he not preach the imminence of the Kingdom of God? By the time of John’s Gospel, some two generations had passed. Politically, socially, religiously the world was still a mess. The wail of the Psalmist, “How long, O Lord?” could be heard from the church.
      John sees Jesus as the risen, victorious, ascended Lord even in the moment before his arrest and crucifixion. His first word in prayer to the Father is, “the hour has come.” This hour of the cross has become the accomplishment of the messianic mission: “I glorified you on earth by finishing the work that you gave me to do.” And, remember, only in John does the crucified one cry out in his last breath, “It is finished! (19:30)” This is not a cry of despair or release from the agony of death. It is a cry of victory. Mission accomplished!
      The integrity of God is at stake. After spending two decades of our lives in Louisville, we never miss a Kentucky Derby on TV. Sometimes we are exposed to the favorites in the newspaper during Derby week, but the race for us is secondary to the nostalgia of the event. Last year we had never heard of Barbaro before the race, but we were caught up in the excitement when he won by six and one-half lengths, the greatest margin since 1946, and continued to extend his lead to 20 lengths before he could be slowed to claim the prize. He looked in every way like a super-horse, who would win the Triple Crown and become another legend like Secretariat. I was watching on May 20 when he shattered his leg in the Preakness and followed the reports on his eight-month struggle with pain and disability. On January 29, Barbaro was euthanized.
      The public response has been an interesting study in human nature. The death of a pet is personal, and the grief that follows within the range of understanding, but Barbaro was a national celebrity; not just an animal but a celebrity beyond our reach. Memorials have emerged, and the disposition of the horse’s ashes are under discussion. Apart from the natural affection that anyone might feel for these beautiful animals and the compassion and sympathy that we have for the suffering of all living things, the fact that Barbaro died undefeated and in his prime left the public hanging on the edge of what might have been may explain our grief. What would have happened if he had lived his life all the way to the end? With the rising toll of death and injury in Iraq, the atrocities of Darfur, the steady toll of AIDS, not to mention the uncounted loss of family and friends, why has this animal captured our grief? Barbaro is not just an animal; he is a symbol, a focus of all of our grief over the unfinished business of life.
      Was Paul given to delusions in his claim that he had finished the race? The tragic history of premature death goes all the way back to Cain in Genesis. The biblical saga is a chain of interrupted lives. Both Matthew and Luke trace a chain in genealogies behind the birth of Jesus, all, unfinished people. The Gospels are unanimous: just when the disciples were ready to settle in and build God’s kingdom on earth, Jesus was betrayed, beaten, publicly humiliated, and crucified. Where is the victory? The prayer in today’s text carries a triumphal note sounded on Ascension Sunday. That is the difference in John.
      Jesus is heard to declare before God that his work was finished, and he prayed for his disciples, “that they may have my joy made complete in themselves.” The integrity of God is revealed in the complete harmony of the Son and the Father, and it is extended to the life of the disciples in the body of Christ, the church. Even with Christ the mission is accomplished as it is passed to the next generation and the next.
      I have always preferred the very human Jesus in agony in Gethsemane to the glorified Christ of John. I understand the one, but not the other.
      Last week a friend from school days sent a note about the death of a classmate, who had been our high school choir pianist. My friend, an accomplished choral musician, noted her reference to a choral composition that the high school choir had performed, “Salvation is Created” by the Russian composer Pavel Chesnokov. His comments about the piece and question about the meaning of the simple text set me off on the road to discovery. Chesnokov was perhaps the greatest church musician in Russian Orthodox history. His creativity in church music was cut short by the Russian Revolution, but “Salvation is Created” later became the official hymn of the Russian Orthodox Church. Chesnokov died in 1944 without ever having heard his great work performed.
                The Orthodox church has a distinct preference for the glorious, risen Christ of John’s Gospel over the more human Jesus in the Synoptics. Rather than a crucifix displaying the lifeless body of Jesus, the Orthodox Churches prefer the triumphal Christ standing tall with outstretched arms. For the Russian people who have endured hardships beyond our imagination the triumphal Christ offers hope. One can almost hear him say, “Be of good cheer. I have overcome the world.” The one who was from the beginning waits for us at the end.

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Fourth Sunday of Easter: Telling Evidence
John 15:1-17                         April 29, 2007                          carolyn dipboye
      Come with me on a brief tour of three times, locations and differing situations in three churches. The first cannot yet be called a church. Let’s call it a “fellowship.” We join it, as often happens with fellowships, around the table. Jesus and his disciples are gathered for their last hours together before turning toward the garden and Jesus’ arrest, trial and crucifixion. All are aware of the time of testing that lies ahead. It is a heavy, deeply serious moment. Jesus searches himself for words to prepare them, not just for the violent days that lie ahead, but for the extended time of his physical absence stretching even beyond that. The first three Gospels focus his words around the Eucharist–the Lord’s Supper. But John, in John’s way, puts on Jesus’ lips what we call the Last Discourse. Moving from one topic to another and praying his most extensive prayer recorded in Scripture, John’s Jesus in tender, very real concern seeks to prepare his church for what is to come. Can it possibly survive the turmoil?
      Fast forward fifty or more years to the community of the Beloved Disciple. John–or more likely one writing in John’s name–writes from within the struggle of his church. Division has raised its ugly head. Since day one petty divisions arise as they do anywhere people gather to contend for their own way and divisions over orthodoxy arise as the church begins the centuries-long task of discerning just who this Jesus is. Some, growing weary of the struggle within the church and fearful of the reprisals society is now determined to take against the church, have decided to give up on faith altogether. Others, homesick for the sense of sure identity and the roots of their youth, have turned back to their Jewish faith. Those remaining are heartsick. Expelled from the synagogue, the target of derision in the increasingly dominant Roman culture, grief-stricken by the passing of the first generation of Christians, torn apart by dissension within, can the church survive?
      Spring forward now, not just decades, but centuries. Step out of first century Near Eastern culture into the church of twenty-first century America. Survey the religious landscape, recognizing that only a short three or four decades ago, the church’s survival was very much in doubt. A quick glance at the front page of newspaper seems to say not only that the church survived but that, based on all the accumulating data, it flourished. The numbers of those attending church are up–at least they are up if you can believe the polls. Church campuses the size of malls dot the landscape. And successful networking has advanced some clergy and some churches and religious organizations to a level of political clout previously undreamed. Place alongside this seeming success uncertainties that are also finding expression. Can the church make itself heard on other than one or two social issues without sacrificing its unity and thus its clout? Can the church speak on even those issues in a way that represents its full diversity? Can it find voice to speak to issues of global warming? To the widening chasm in our country between the rich and everyone else? To the lack of healthcare for nine million of our nation’s children? To the issue of whether our nation utilizes the tools of torture prohibited in the Geneva Conventions? To the question of Guantanamo prison?   Can the church speak in more than one voice and be heard? Can it speak in differing voices and be something other than a tool for one political party or the other? Can the church, as we say in our Covenant of Grace, “become a voice for those who have no voice”? Can it champion religious freedom over religious privilege? Can the church be one place in our society where citizens of differing perspectives can sit down and have a civil conversation because they love Christ and they love their county and they love the world and all of humanity made in God’s image? As on the other two stops of our tour, the question of the church’s survival may be at stake. Given the seeming level of power and prestige enjoyed by the church, survival, however, doesn’t seem to be the issue unless. The more pressing question seems to be, not just whether the church will survive, but whether it will be the church.
      To be the church, the church must abide in Christ. John in seeking to instruct the church on how to be the church, how to survive the long years of struggle, pulls out a sugar stick. He uses the teaching vine long used in Israel’s faith to symbolize a people of God. Although it was an image often used to speak of Israel’s failure–a loving, gracious God had carefully planted and tended

Israel

as a vine or vineyard, only to be rewarded with her sour grapes–the vine was a favorite symbol representing the Jewish people. In Jesus’ day one of the main ornaments of the Temple was a huge gold vine with grape clusters the size of a man. In John’s day a vine adorned the coins of the Jewish revolt of 66-70.
      Just as John has presented Jesus as the real bread from heaven, the living water, the true light of the world in contrast to the bread, water and lights of the Jewish festivals, he now presents Jesus as the real, true or genuine vine. And he does so for two reasons: (1) in order to encourage wavering Christians to maintain their faith, even if it means exile from the synagogues and the faith of their heritage, and (2) in order to remind the church that its only source of life is the vine from which it branches. The church and individual Christians live only as they live in Christ.
      Rather than assuming the seemingly offensive mode of the first century, we today must interpret John’s words in light of his own church’s sense of crisis. Cut off from its mother faith (the faith of the Jewish people) the church was not left to wither and die, for the church’s lifeblood flowed from its connection to Christ. The branches John describes as withering and dying are not those of the Jewish faith, for Jesus describes them as having existed “in me.” They are those whose fearfulness and depression have driven them into retreat. They quietly and tentatively remain in the church but they bear no fruit. The branches also symbolize those persons who were abandoning the church of whom John will later write, “They went out from us, but they did not belong to us; for if they had belonged to us, they would have remained with us” [I John 2:19].
      We misuse John’s words if we make them the occasion for either anti-Semitism or a judgmental attitude toward our brothers and sisters in the church. The vine, John acknowledges, is strengthened to bear fruit as the deadwood and tentative are pruned. The branches, however, do not wield the pruning shears. The act of pruning belongs to the vine keeper. The choice of remaining vitally connected to the vine resides with the branches. The health of the vine is not even determined by the mere number of its branches. The health of the vine–and the church--is determined by the lifeblood that flows through it yielding fruit.
      To be the church, the church must be grounded in love. About fifteen years ago, my father began slipping into Alzheimer’s. In the early days when he recognized some of his losses, he began to exert a great deal of effort to communicate to us messages that were particularly important for him to impart while he could. He had always been somewhat quiet, seldom engaging in long discourses. Yet his very effort to speak and his increasing loss of easy, familiar phraseology seemed to make him search at deeper levels for things he wanted to say. Sometimes the result was nothing short of eloquent. One day as I was preparing to head home after a visit, he put his hands on my shoulders and looked me squarely in the eyes. “When you run out of anything else to think about,” he said, “study on this: I love you.” In the years since his death, nothing has meant any more to me. It was as if his final message, the message that he wanted to stand beyond the time when he could no longer form a sentence or would no longer be alive, was this: “I love you.”
      These are the words that John puts on the lips of Jesus in his final moments with his yet to be church. “As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Abide in my love.” And, as the lifeblood of my love flows through you, “love one another as I have loved you.” Interestingly, John expresses Jesus’ love command differently from the writers of each of the other three Gospels. Where they speak of love of neighbor and love of enemy, John addresses “in-house love.” One can’t help but wonder whether John’s shift reflects the fact that he has had the opportunity to experience another decade or two of what it means to be a part of Christ’s church. Just as we most frequently experience conflict with those with whom we spend the most time and love the most, so it is in the church. Our very love for Christ and for one another means that we cannot just throw in the towel and walk away from our common life and our common calling. With each of our differences, we must find a way to move forward together. Love is not about winning the argument and getting one’s own way. Within the Christian faith, love is about looking to the one who embodies the pure meaning of love. “Greater love,” Jesus said, “has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.”
      Some years ago David and Vera Mace, a mature couple who had long distinguished themselves in the area of family counseling, spoke of their method of conflict resolution. “When I find myself becoming angry,” David Mace explained, “I stop and say to Vera, ‘I am becoming angry. I don’t want to be angry with you. I love you. Please help me.’” And then the two of them would sit down and avoiding accusation, retrace the steps that had led up to their disagreement.
      In the end, that is the way it is with the church. Grounded firmly in Christ’s love and our love for one another, we do not and need not vote alike nor see issues exactly alike. But commissioned by Christ to build a loving church that ministers to the hurts of the world in which we live, we can say to each other, “I love you. Let’s sit down and talk."
      In a day when the venom of blame, accusation and enmity flows so freely, could there be more telling evidence of the love of God in Christ than a body of people who, though they do not, as we say in our covenant, “walk in lockstep or wear a theological [or political] uniform,” love and respect each other still?

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Third Sunday of Easter: Beyond CPR
John 11:28-44                               April 22, 2007                              larry dipboye
      Playwright Eugene O’Neill wrote “Lazarus Laughed” during the stormy religious turmoil of the mid-1920's. O’Neill never intended a serious interpretation of John’s Gospel; however, his attempt at writing a Greek Mystery raised the question most asked by biblical scholars about Lazarus: after the story, what happened to Lazarus? O’Neill imagines a messianic character surrounded by wonder and awe. Beginning with family, friends and neighbors and finally with Tiberius Caesar and Caligula, everyone wants a report from the other side of death. Lazarus responds with laughter–a holy, contagious laughter–and declares that there is no death. The laughter of Lazarus is a particular threat to the Romans. Caesar controls the world by the fear of death. Finally, Tiberius demonstrates his authority and has the man he calls a demon executed by fire to prove that death is real and that even Lazarus must die. As Lazarus is dying, Tiberius pleads for a final word from the grave, and Lazarus speaks of, “God’s eternal laughter.”
      In an attempt to be profound, O’Neill either stumbled onto the primary issue with Lazarus or he recognized the universal importance of the question, what happens after death? The only other reference in the Gospels to one named Lazarus is in Luke’s parable of poor Lazarus who lay at the rich man’s gate. It is a story about the other side of death and the rich man’s plea for Father Abraham to send Lazarus to warn his brothers. The point of the parable is almost identical to the response to the raising of Lazarus in John: “If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.” John describes the raising of Lazarus as the event that concluded the public ministry of Jesus. Some witnesses believed, but others concluded that Jesus must be destroyed. Caiaphas declares, “it is better to have one man die for the people than to have the whole nation destroyed.”
      CPR falls short of the Christian hope. In high school and university years, I worked as a lifeguard at the municipal swimming pool in my home town. I recall a water safety seminar in a spring refresher course led by the recognized expert with the Red Cross. He was an old man, relative to my twenty years, and his age as well as his reputation as a swimming coach and water safety instructor earned respect from everyone in the field. We were introduced to the latest technique in CPR, mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, and finesse in dealing with water safety and drowning victims. In the process, the old man told us about his personal experience with drowning. In his younger days, he swam to the bottom of a pool to make a repair on the intake grate and became entangled in the equipment. He lost consciousness before he was discovered and rescued by the primitive CPR available at the time. I can confess now that his assurance that drowning was a peaceful way to die did not provide a lot of encouragement. Even though I was a pre-ministerial student, at age twenty, I was a lot more interested in the present life than in eternal peace, and I wrote the whole experience off as the rambling of an old man, a lot closer to death than I was.
      A few years ago, the church janitor collapsed in the floor and several of us attempted CPR while we were waiting for the ambulance to arrive. We were too late, and all of our efforts were to no avail. Our son, in medical training at the time, offered some comfort in noting that even professionals in hospitals have a low success rate with CPR. We might say with Paul: “If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied” (1 Cor. 15:19). In response to Lazarus, if our hope is for a CPR rescue, we are to be pitied.
      The raising of Lazarus is the seventh of seven signs that frame the Fourth Gospel. The story, found only in John, stands directly in the pathway to the cross, the precipitating event that led to the arrest and crucifixion of Jesus. In John’s characteristic irony, Jesus was condemned to death for raising the dead. Thus, the internal chronology of the Gospel places the miracle somewhere before Holy Week. But it may fit better in a later development in the faith of early Christians. Alan Culpepper believes that the story answers the despair of early Christians over the death of friends and the delayed return of Christ. John’s realized eschatology calls Christians to live eternal life now, in Christ. Jesus is the resurrection and the life–right now!
      The raising of Lazarus bears strong resemblance to the Easter story: a tomb with a stone over the door, women weeping outside the tomb, a woman named Mary. For Martha and Mary the death of their brother is tied to the absence of Jesus, who had deliberately delayed going to his friends in need. The sisters are accusing in the repeated charge: “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” You can almost hear the accusation of early Christians as they extend the protest of Martha and Mary to the present age: Why have you left us here to keep on dying?
      At least in one respect, Eugene O’Neill’s interpretation is on target. Lazarus like all the rest of humanity is condemned by birth to a life that ends in death. Maybe that is why we do not hear so much about Lazarus and not one word in the Gospel about his experience in the tomb or insights into the realm of the dead. Always in John, we need to read beneath the surface. Even the Lazarus story is about Jesus, the resurrection and the life.
      Jesus, the resurrection and the life, is lord over death. We get a lot more insight into the personality of the sisters than of Lazarus. Lazarus never speaks a word in the Gospel. The conversations with Martha and Mary, seem to acknowledge the variety of human responses to death as well as the sensitivity of Jesus to individual need and inquiry. Much of the story is typical of John, with Jesus floating above the momentary crisis: Lazarus has passed into the sleep of death for the glory of God; Jesus is glad that he was absent so that his disciples might believe; Jesus reassures Martha, “your brother will rise again,” and proclaims, “I am the resurrection and the life.”
      The conversation with Mary raises more questions than answers. In response to Mary’s grief and the audible mourning of friends, Jesus is moved with deep emotion. He is shaken by the moment and John reports, “Jesus began to weep.” The deep emotion that erupts in tears is usually interpreted as sympathetic compassion for Mary, but the Greek behind the translation implies angry indignation. Was he angry at death, at the repeated accusation of Martha and Mary, at the loss of his friend in death, at the behavior of the audience? What? Raymond Brown finds a consistency in the four Gospels. Like Gethsemane in the Synoptics, Jesus resists the power of death. He is indignant at the power of death, the enemy that represents the power of evil in the world. Finally, through the Eucharistic (thanksgiving) prayer of Jesus and the loud cry, the Word of authority over death, “The dead man came out, his hands and feet bound with strips of cloth and his face wrapped in a cloth.” And, from that day forth and forevermore we never hear a word from the grave from Lazarus.
      You see, this is not about Lazarus. He is important, but not that important. He is the object, but not the subject. The subject is Christ, the power of God over death. The story of Lazarus is about Jesus, his death, his burial in a tomb, his resurrection to eternal life with the Father. It is about the response of the witnesses. It comes down to the question: what is your faith, your hope?

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Second Sunday of Easter:     Death in the Family
John 11:1-27                               April 15, 2007                            carolyn dipboye

     James Agee was one of Knoxville’s most famous literary native sons. His Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a report on the life of Alabama sharecroppers in the mid-1930's, has been praised as one of the 20^th century’s most significant works, despite the fact that, published in the midst of America’s preoccupation with approaching war, it sold only 600 copies. A celebrated literary and film critic, a screen writer, poet and novelist, Agee wrote A Death in the Family in his final years as he battled heart disease that took his life at the age of 45. Published posthumously, it was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. Its story is autobiographical, reflecting upon Agee’s own experience as a child growing up in a middle class neighborhood in the Knoxville of 1915. Its story focuses on a six-year-old boy and his family following the death of the boy’s father in an automobile accident. The little boy struggles to make sense of family tensions that come to light in the aftermath of his father’s death, and he struggles in particular with the pious assurances mouthed to cut short uncertainties and questions. In his six-year-old mind he wonders how a supposedly all-knowing, all-powerful God could have possibly benefited from the death of his father. How could God need his father more than he and his family needed him? Could it have been that Rufus himself had somehow caused his father’s death? Was God taking reprisals against his father for his unbelief or against Rufus for being a bad boy? Frustrated with the cold and heartless failures of a clergy and theology that was more concerned to protect the sanctity of its ironclad answers than to minister to the pain of the grieving family, we come to the end of the book applauding the honest doubt of a reprobate uncle.
“‘Some church,’ he snarled. ‘And they call themselves Christians. Bury a man who’s a hundred times the man he’ll [the priest] ever be. . . ‘No,’ [the priest says], ‘there are certain requests and recommendations I cannot make Almighty God for the repose of this soul, for he never stuck his head under a holy-water tap.’ Genuflecting, and ducking and bowing and scraping, and basting themselves with signs of the Cross, and all that disgusting hocus-pocus, and you come to one simple, single act of Christian charity and what happens? The rules of the Church forbid it. He’s not a member of our little club. I tell you, Rufus, it’s enough to make a man puke up his soul” [308].
     Questions and honest struggle in the face of death are not signs of weakness. They are signs of courage. Our Bible comes to us because others had enough faith to wrestle with the hard realities of life, and we do the Bible a disservice when we lift ready-made answers out of it without acknowledging the life-and-death struggle that brought them to birth.
     Go back in time to 85 or 90 C.E. Go back to an early church where the first generation of Christians has nearly faded from the scene. Go back to a moment that struck fear in the hearts of believers, who for a half century have been expecting the return of Christ at any moment. Have their hopes been in vain? Can the faith of the church withstand the deaths of the saints? Is it all a hoax? Death in the family of faith, like death in the family of one’s birth, is a crisis of belief.
     Turning now to John’s story of the raising of Lazarus, recognize that John is not merely trotting out some well-worn answers. Recognize that he, too, is struggling with the questions that tear at our souls. Can faith, can hope, can affirmation of an ever-present, loving God withstand the test? Or must we finally hang our heads in shame and back away from the faith we embraced in the happier, simpler days of our youth?
     The Gospel of Christ confronts a world of sin, evil, death and suffering. Jesus is in the area of Bethany of Peraea beyond the Jordan River, preaching in an area frequented by John the Baptist. The call comes from Martha and Mary some 35 miles away in Bethany of Judea, just outside of Jerusalem. Jesus delays two days before responding to their call, making a day’s travel to arrive four days after Lazarus has died. [For the first century way of thinking, four days indicated that Lazarus was indeed dead with no hope of being revived.] If we listen carefully, we can hear the frustration in Martha’s voice–the edge of complaint, if you will. Far from an all-knowing piety that would still the soul’s struggle with canned answers, the Jewish faith had long ago granted the faithful the wide freedom to bring their challenges before God. Songs and prayers of complaint are clearly registered in Israel’s Psalter. Indeed, Israel, the very name of the Jewish people, recalls Jacob’s struggle with the heavenly messenger, and signifies one who wrestles with God (Gen. 32). To be Jewish, in the words of Amy Jill Levine, is to wrestle with God. It is about honesty with God and faith’s permission to seek answers to life’s anguishing questions. The fact that Martha’s “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died” is not the accusation of one who does not believe is evident in the next words that come from her mouth. “But even now” in the midst of deep loss, “I know” that God will hear your prayer and do what you ask.
     The church has struggled for centuries with Jesus’ delay in responding to Martha and Mary’s summons. Was it merely that Jesus desired that Lazarus die so that he might restore him to life, thus overwhelming his detractors with irrefutable evidence? Jesus’ own conclusion to the story of the Rich Man and Lazarus would seem to say otherwise: “If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead" [Lk 16:31].
     John, the only Gospel to tell the story of the two sisters and Lazarus, couches it as the prelude to Jesus’ death. John begins the story recalling Mary’s anointing Jesus (v. 2) as Jesus will later say “for the day of my burial.” He speaks of Lazarus’ death as a route leading to Jesus’ “glorification”–code word for Jesus’ death and resurrection. He makes note of the disciples’ alarm over the trip taking Jesus into harm’s way (v. 8) and their resolve to go with him that they might “die with him” (v. 16). He places Jerusalem Jews on the scene. Some of them believe while others report the incident to Pharisees [45], who, fearful that everyone will now believe, determine to put Jesus to death [53].
     John’s entire telling of the story of the raising of Lazarus points toward Jesus’ death to the extent that Jesus’ own death, in the words of Fred Craddock, “bleeds through” with reminders of Gethsemane, Golgotha and Easter. Jesus is deeply moved and troubled [33,38]; he weeps [35]; the tomb, near Jerusalem, is a cave with a large stone that is rolled away [38]. Jesus cries out with a loud voice [43]; the undisturbed grave clothes are removed from one who was dead but now lives [44].
     The Gospel of Christ invites us to believe. Finally, the story of the raising of Lazarus is not about the crisis of one family or the resuscitation of one man out of the multitudes of people who die. It is about one who walks knowingly and steadily toward his own hour of suffering. It is about one who, far from being protected from the torment of death, is one who chooses death over abandonment. “I lay down my life. . . . No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord” [10:17-18]. It is about one, in the words of Isaiah, “acquainted with grief.”
   Death in John, like darkness, is a symbol of all of the misfortune, suffering, judgment and alienation that separate us from God. In his seventh and final sign in the book of John, Jesus makes the final revelation of his own identity. “I am the resurrection and the life” [25]. Those who believe in him and die, live. And those who believe in him and live, never die. In him the inevitable power of death meets the irrevocable promise of life with God and interprets everything we see and know.
     “Do you believe?” Jesus asks Martha–and us. We cannot escape our own deaths or crushing grief at the deaths of those we love. We stand before God, not condemned to submissive silence, but surrounded by the broad freedom of God’s grace. We do not have answers to all of our questions, but in our heart of hearts, we know that in the eternal presence of the God of love, we and those we love will be okay. With Martha we respond, “Even now I believe.”

_______________________________

Easter Sunday: To Those Who Wait
John 20:1-18                       April 8, 2007                     larry dipboye

     I was hooked by the 1960's nostalgia of watching the performance of Peter, Paul & Mary on PBS: ”If I Had a Hammer,” “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?”“Lemon Tree,” Blowin’ in the Wind.” The aging, bald, somewhat heavier singing group connected with my generation in raising money for public television. Bart Ehrman played a tune to the same crowd in a serious attempt to sort out history and legend from early Christian records in his book by the unlikely title, Peter, Paul, & Mary Magdalene. No one would question the importance of Peter and Paul in the drama of early Christian history, but Mary Magdalene? Her name appears a total of twelve times in the Gospels and nowhere else in the New Testament. Ehrman acknowledges the imbalance in Mary Magdalene’s contribution to the Christian story. However, he also declared, if Mary is short on performance in the New Testament, she is hands-down the favorite as the media star. No other New Testament character has drawn quite so much creative attention in character development. Bart Ehrman tells of his youthful encounter with the fictitious Mary Magdalen in Jesus Christ Superstar and goes on to recount her fame in fiction leading up to Dan Brown’s The DaVinci Code. Pope Gregory the Great (540-604) may have been the primary culprit. He connected unrelated dots in the Gospels to portray Mary as a prostitute and tied her to the woman who bathed and anointed Jesus’ feet in Luke 7. Christian art often portrays Mary with her hair down, characteristic of a sinful woman, before the risen Christ.
     In the only reference of identity, she is identified in Luke 8 among wealthy women, healed by Jesus, who followed with the Twelve and supported his ministry. According to Luke, Mary had been freed from seven demons. All other references center on her role as a named witness to the cross and resurrection. Contrary to speculation, she cannot be linked to the “sinful woman” who washed Jesus’ feet with her tears, or the woman caught in adultery in John 8, or to any romantic involvement with Jesus. She simply does not belong in the same company of Christian leadership with Peter and Paul. Truth be known, except for the popularity of Dan Brown’s novel The Da Vinci Code, Ehrman probably would not have chosen Mary Magdalene for his study.
     The Christian story begins with Easter. Mary Magdalene has one legitimate claim to fame. The Christian religion is grounded in the belief that Jesus was raised from the dead, and Mary Magdalene was the first witness. In the process of exposing a long history of wild speculation about a romantic relationship of Mary Magdalene and Jesus, Ehrman reached an interesting conclusion, “It is not at all farfetched to claim that Mary was the founder of Christianity (p. 229).” The four Gospels present various, sometimes conflicting, stories about the events surrounding the cross and resurrection of Jesus. They agree, however, that Jesus was opposed by Jewish leaders, arrested, tried by Pontius Pilate, was crucified, buried in a tomb, and that his body was missing on the third day after his death. The Gospels also agree that Mary Magdalene was the first person to find the tomb empty and that she (alone or with other women) informed the male disciples of the resurrection–this, in spite of the fact that the testimony of women was not held in high esteem. In spite of the fact that little-to-nothing is known of Mary Magdalene outside the story of the cross and resurrection of Jesus, Mary was the prime witness on Easter morning.
     Men have long acknowledged the necessity of women for their existence and the continuation of humankind. Men often speak tenderly of the personal importance of mothers and wives in the shaping of character, but men have deliberately excluded women from places of power and influence especially in religion and politics. If the Gospel accounts of the resurrection were, as Luke (24:11) reports, “an idle tale,” the focus on Mary Magdalene as first witness to the resurrection of Christ was an poor way to concoct a convincing story.
     There she is. In John, after the crucifixion on Friday, Mary went to the tomb early Sunday morning and found the stone removed from the entrance. She ran to Simon Peter and the beloved disciple to report the open tomb and missing body. The two men engaged in a foot-race to the tomb. The beloved disciple, perhaps the author of the Gospel we call John, arrived first. The race is probably more than literary detail. It may speak to the aging of Peter or to the primacy of Jewish witness to the resurrection. The beloved disciple noted the missing body, but did not enter the tomb. Peter arrived, entered the tomb, and observed in detail the arrangement of the linen cloth used to wrap the body of Jesus. The beloved disciple then claims to be the first believer. He alone at this point interprets the missing body as evidence of a resurrection. In spite of this rather astounding conclusion, the men quietly returned to their homes, and Mary was left alone in her grief weeping outside the tomb.
     Easter hope belongs to those who wait. Peter has the consistent reputation in the Gospels of being impatient and impetuous, which is, I am told, a male thing. The two males in the story go home. I assume that they have left to mull over the meaning of what they have seen. Perhaps the issue here is control. Knowledge is power. If I do not understand what I see, I am out of control. The men are not about to hang around at the center of mystery and extend the exposure of their ignorance. When they figure it out and have a handle on the problem, they will come back and start again. Then, they may have decided to drop it. What will people think of their report about an empty tomb with the wrappings of death lying in place? Better to be thought a fool because of one’s silence than to speak and remove all doubt. Let someone else go out on a limb and make astounding claims that cannot be proven.
     Mary is the one who stays. She does the woman thing. She sits down and cries. It is the weeping of grief because of what she does understand of the suffering and death of Jesus, but it also may be the weeping of frustration with the mystery. What has happened to the body? How do we get it back? Who would do such a thing? In the emotion of the moment she does something else that is characteristic of gender difference: expression of emotion is an opening the heart and mind to the moment. Emotional people may well be hysterically incapable of rational thought, but truth does not always connect to reason. One explanation for the diversity of the Easter stories is the personal differences we bring to every situation. Everyone see out of their own peculiar background, out of personal need and hope. Each witness tends to see what he or she is seeking.
     Whatever the difference, Mary, not Peter and John, meets with angels. Mary, not Peter and John, encounters the risen Christ. Finally, Mary, not Peter and John, reports back to the disciples the message of the resurrection.
A few days ago I heard the challenge to “miracles” in the practice of religion that often arises from the critical mind in a scientific community like ours. I readily admitted that I have no more proofs about God than anyone else on the planet, but I do not view miracles as a violation of nature even when the event reported has absolutely no rational foundation. The message of Easter, although the founding event of the Christian faith, is neither reasonable nor natural. It does not conform to what we experience of death or to what we see in nature. The hope of the resurrection speaks not to reason, but to the heart of faith. While our faith seeks understanding, Paul was right. We see in a glass darkly. One day we will see as we are seen, know as we are known. One day. . .well, we just have to wait.

________________________________

Palm/Passion Sunday: The Cup of Suffering
John 12:12-15; 18:1-12 April 1, 2007 carolyn dipboye

It was a moment of high drama. People were flooding into the city. As is often the case with thronging crowds, tensions were on the rise. Celebration of Passover with its focus on the Jewish people’s deliverance from oppression under the Egyptian Empire served as a reminder of life currently being lived under the thumb of the Roman Empire. In recent years, nationalistic fervor had boiled over into large and deadly riots. Rumors flew about the city. Fear, anticipation and speculation gripped the crowds. Jerusalem was nothing short of a tinderbox. Any spark could produce bedlam.

Picture two processions. Coming up from the imperial capital to the West: Pilate, governor of Judea, riding on a stallion at the head of a column of Roman soldiers, to take up official residence during the festival to assure crowd control. Coming up from the East: Jesus, purposefully riding on the back of a donkey, symbolizing humility and peace. Two royal kingdoms–the ruthless kingdom of Rome and the kingdom "not of this world"–moving into direct confrontation with one another.

Too often we have dismissed it all as a misunderstanding–or, better yet, a manipulation. We paint the Romans as something approaching innocent bystanders, twisted by evil Jewish leaders to turn on a harmless Jesus. We paint the crowds as being at best fickle–singing Jesus’ praise at the beginning of the week, only to call for his crucifixion at the end of the week. Is this the way it was? A misunderstanding? Did Jesus, indeed, pose no threat? Was the crucifixion of Jesus, after all, a mistake?

The Gospels do not depict a harmless Jesus. For any who knew Jewish scriptures, Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem spoke of anything but retiring simplicity. All of the Gospels’ and particularly John’s depiction of the scene have unmistakable elements of royalty. The entire scene recalls the prophet Zechariah "Look, your king is coming, sitting on a donkey’s colt" (9:9). Psalm 118, a royal song sung on the return of a victorious king from battle, is sounded in the crowd’s "Hosanna! [O, save!] Blessed is he who comes," and enacted in the "bind[ing of] the festal branches" as the king [Jesus] passes through the gate. John’s turning those branches into palm branches speaks specifically of the overthrow of another oppressive regime and the cleansing of the temple–potent imagery in the mind of any 1^st century Jew. In Matthew the crowd hails Jesus as the "Son of David" and in John, as "the King of Israel"–a meaning hard to miss even among the Romans.

Jesus’s entry into Jerusalem and the week of events that followed revealed Jesus on a collision course with Rome, and not just Rome, but with religious powers in collusion with Rome. "Shall I crucify your king?" Pilate will later ask, and in a revealing response the Chief Priests will reply "We have no king but the emperor" [19:15]. Far from acting contrary to the teachings of Judaism, far from disproving the validity of the Jewish faith, Jesus acted in accord with Judaism’s most prized heritage. Whether it was greed and the love of power manifested by the palace or the temple, the prophets spoke truth to power. And Jesus could do no less.

Palm Sunday, then, is no victory march. It is not about a king victorious in battle, but one who chose to take up the cause of all who suffer, even to the point of drinking that cup of suffering himself. It is about Christ and his choice. It is about us and our choice. Palm Sunday and all of the events of Holy Week are about the stark contrast that is drawn between the violence and the oppression of the kingdoms of this world and the Kingdom of God. As Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan have put it, The contrast is clear: Jesus versus Pilate, the nonviolence of the kingdom of God versus the violence of the empire. Two arrivals, two entrances, two processions–and our Christian Lent is about repentance for being in the wrong one and preparation to abandon it for its alternative.

What Is Truth?
John 18:28-38 April 1, 2007 larry dipboye

Like Judas, the name Pilate has become an icon of infamy. The stated fact in the Gospels that Pilate alone had the power of life or death over Jesus is uncontested. He is often pictured as a wormy little coward, who attempts to play the role of judge without having to carry the full weight and responsibility of his judgments. Actually more is known about Pilate than Jesus in the secular literature. He ruled Judea for a decade, from 26 to 36. He was from the lower ranks of nobility, perhaps under pressure to prove himself because of his limited prestige in Rome. The secular portrait is less than flattering. Philo attributes robbery, murder, and inhumanity to his rule. Josephus pictures him as a blundering idiot whose atrocities raise questions not only about his ethical judgment but about his intelligence. Nineteenth century French author Anatole France wrote the fictitious short story on Pilate, "The Procurator of Judea," in which the aged Pilate reflected on his career; he could not recall that he had ever dealt with the minor figure called Jesus.

At least on the surface, John’s picture of Pilate is more positive than the other Gospels and considerably more flattering of the regent than the secular literature. We are left to judge for ourselves whether John is a photographer concerned with the "truth" of history or if John is the artist painting his own picture of Pilate with a definite agenda. Is John more interested in pinning the blame on that blanket community he calls "the Jews," or is he trying to buy favor for Christianity under increasing suspicion by Rome? The irony of Pilate’s question, "What is truth?" is certainly the right question. What is the truth about Pilate, the truth about Jesus, the truth--period? Raymond Brown notes that John’s references to "the Jews" are more political than religious. The issue centers on the question of political rivalry, "Are you the King of the Jews?" Brown also notes that the most radical era of revolutionary resistance to Rome did not begin until 41, well after the crucifixion of Jesus. He identifies seven classes of extremists that presented problems to both political and religious leaders: charismatics, messiahs, would-be kings, prophets and charlatans, bandits, Sicarii or "knife-wielders, and Zealots. Do any of these describe Jesus?

Perhaps John wants to stimulate our imaginative inquiry: Can we ever get at the truth? Is reason the route to the final answer? Henlee Barnett taught Christian Ethics and was loved for his acid wit that was both entertaining and biting. He usually spoke with a twinkle in his eye and a chuckle in his voice, so you did not always know whether he was being serious or sarcastic. One day I heard him assess the role of philosophy in the pursuit of truth as a blind man, chasing a back cat, in a dark room at midnight.

Is Pilate really interested in truth? Does he really want to get to the bottom of reality or to chase black cats in a dark rooms? The irony is inescapable. Here stands a peasant Jew, bruised and bloodied by Roman soldiers, before a Roman regent with the absolute power of life and death. The rabbinic wisdom of a Jewish peasantry is pitted against the educational elitism of the Roman nobility. The tone of the conversation has the character of a political debate or chess match, yet Jesus rides above the pain, above the differences in class and station, unimpressed by either authority or emotion. The victim is really in control. That is John’s final answer. Followers of Jesus may never know the answers, but the truth of God revealed in the face of Jesus is bigger than fa

† Grace Covenant Church

. . . An Unfinished People of Faith

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