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Friends, After a time away, due mostly to computer/email/internet/blog glitches, I am back to writing. No, I didn’t fix any of these glitches, I am just choosing to ignore them and hope that they have gone away.
This Sunday marks the beginning of a new Church Year, as we move into the season of Advent. If you are like me, you didn’t know about Advent growing up, or maybe you had heard of an Advent calendar and little goodies in the calendar for each day of Advent. I came across the celebration of Advent several years into my life as minister and have come to really embrace Advcent just in the last 10 years or so. Unfortunately, what I find very often in discussions about Advent centers around the music of the Advent season (as in, “Why aren’t we singing Christmas songs in December?” Over the years I have moved from caring way too much that we sing “only” Advent hymns until Christmas Eve, to now probably caring too little about this whole music divide.) No, what stirs my thinking during Advent now isn’t about the music. It’s about the hoping.
This past Sunday we finished out the Church Year, celebrating Christ the King (or Reign of Christ) Sunday. We ended that church year, as we do every church year, with the strong reminder that the basis of our faith and hope is that Christ is Lord, that Christ is King, that Christ’s reign is coming among us. As we read last Sunday in Revelation 1, we celebrate and praise the Christ who was and is and is to come. But if we are to be honest, life seems to be less than fully filled with the reign of Christ among us. We live in a nation involved in 2 wars right now; we know personally of loved ones and friends who are serving in these wars. We continue to read of financial crises in our nation and world; the unemployment rate will not stop its rising. The political atmosphere in Washington seems to be as divided and negative as ever, now with a Democrat in the presidential hot-seat. As a minister of First Christian Church, I see much that seems to deny our proclamation that Christ indeed reigns. Our prayer list never lacks for names. Indeed, when one name comes off (often because that person passes away), two more names are needed to be added. And I won’t even begin to talk about our church’s financial straits. So, in sum, it might seem a bit silly to proclaim that Christ is Lord, over all of this.
Which is why the season of Advent is so important. Because in Advent, we start over. We have spent a whole Church Year proclaming the story of Christ and Christ among us, and with Advent we begin to tell the story all over again. Yes, we have told the story before. Yes, we are still waiting for Christ to return and make all things right. Yes, the world is still in dire need of a redeemer. In Advent, we begin this journey of telling the story all over. And we begin it by preparing ourselves, we launch ourselves into another year of proclaiming Christ as Lord by waiting for Christ to come. We will see in the Christmas story that Christ comes in the most surprising and unexpected ways. In Advent we prepare ourselves for Christ coming in more surprisingly and unexpected ways.
Our culture’s celebration of Christmas, on its best days, carries in it some of these ideas I have mentioned. The surprise of an unexpected gift, the gathering together in love and sharing and giving. The occasional moments of rest and Christmas cheer in the midst of the busyness. The fascinated look in the eyes of children on Christmas morning. All these elements of Christmas are wonderful, and I strive every year to embrace these moments when I want to pull out my best Scrooge-ish dismissal of materialistic excess. BUt none of this will ever be enough. What IS enough is that which we begin to proclaim this Sunday, the fervent hope that Christ is coming.
May this Advent season be a time of joy-filled hope!
This week’s texts is one of the most familiar texts in the Gospels, at least it’s familiar to me. So familiar that I am finding it difficult to get any lights flashing on what to possibly say about it. Maybe you can help light me up?
The text is Mark 10.35-45, I hope you’ll read it over before moving along.
One reason that this text is so familiar to me is that I have heard, many times, the sermon that Martin Luther King preached on this text. “The Drum Major Instinct,” to me perhaps the most powerful words I have heard from King. Maybe that’s why I can’t get the lights turned on, in thinking that King spoke in a time where the call to service for others was a very needed word for folks, especially white folks, to hear. (Some of you reading this might not have such good thoughts of Dr. King, and see him more of a trouble-maker or adulterer etc. To you I must say, frankly, I think you have missed the boat, badly, in that you choose to see a few bad trees in the midst of a wonderful forest.)
You know, as I type this about Dr. King, I wonder about myself, and the Church: Have we given up the hard edge of the Gospel, to either settle for a little bit of it or to make it sound “nice” with the hope that people will like it, and like us as well?
Here’s what I mean, maybe: When Jesus turns upside down James and John’s desire for greatness as measured by “success”, he turns upside down as well so much of what is ingrained in our culture. Because so much of our culture bases “greatness” on bigness and “better than” and being on top, even in the church. We don’t like to admit it, especially those of us like me in churches whose “greatness” took place decades ago, but we admire those churches with bigger numbers, and better finances, and cooler programs for the kids, and worship services which make us feel better about ourselves when we leave them. Now, none of these things are bad in themselves, and trust me, I’d love if our church had more of all the above. BUt when this becomes our focus, then the hard edge of today’s text gets tossed aside. Because, in this text today, which immediately follows Jesus’ third and last prediction of his arrest, suffering, death, and being raised in 3 days, Jesus calls us his followers to be servants, slaves of all, and makes this the measure of greatness. And Jesus tells the brothers James and John that they will indeed follow in his way, a way that calls for drinking the cup and being baptized with Jesus’ baptism (both of these are metaphors for death). And no matter how much we preachers might do our best to muffle the sound of this text, and twist and contort the words of Jesus to make them sound “nice”, even we preachers will end up saying what runs against what folks (including us preachers) want to hear.
Let me close this ramble with something that I saw last weekend. On Sunday afternoon, I had taken my 3 and 5 year olds to the park, to let them burn out some energy. There’s a big gazebo at the park, and after a short time at the park, I began to notice many people flocking to the gazebo, many of them wearing name tags. I then bumped into a friend of mine, who told me that this was his church meeting at the gazebo that afternoon, having a picnic and fellowship time for folks. I heard some music playing, so I glanced over to see what these church folks were doing in their worship service. Here’s what I saw: It starts with a guy, wearing a hugely wide green tie and a similiary silly-looking outfit, standing in front of the group and juggling to music. From what I could tell, this went on the rest of the time my kids and I were at the park, about 15 minutes. And when I left, I thought to myself, Is this what we have to do to get folks to listen to us now? Is the Gospel so alien to us that we can’t bear to hear it?
Anyway, there is more in this metaphor, but life calls me to stop today. I’d love to hear from you.
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I missed out on blogging my thoughts for last Sunday’s sermon, one reason being that my thoughts were so all over the place for most of the week that I was too embarassed to try to put them in writing. And I almost didn’t offer up thoughts on this week’s text, but for another reason. The sermon text for this Sunday is Mark 10.2-16, I encourage you to read it before moving along.
Trusting that you have read the Mark text, maybe you can begin to sense my hesitation in writing this week? If still no clue, what if I tell you that I have been through a divorce in my life? If still no clue, maybe I could tell you about some of the women I came across earlier this week, during my morning as volunteer chaplain at the Family Justice Center: about the woman who looked to be about 16 but who was seeking an order of protection against an abusive husband? or maybe the two women who, in their writing their stories about why they want to move away from domestic violence situations, asked for extra pieces of paper because their stories were too long for just one full page? And if still no clue, maybe I could tell about the conversation I had with someone this week, in which she told me of living in an abusive household growing up but whose parents stayed together “for the children”, while the children wanted nothing more than the parents to separate?
Why my hesitation on the text for Sunday? Because in it Jesus speaks against divorce, in it he talks about God’s intention of “two becomiong one flesh”.
One of, if not the, hardest things for most people to do is to let people see the brokenness within their lives. Especially us church folks, who will go to great lengths to let others (especially other church folks) know that they are doing “fine”. And such an atttitude is understandable, since no one truly wants to be broken, none of us revels in the less-than-perfect life we really live. No, we want all to be good, and we even want our time at church to be all about good and positive and happy and feel-good. And for some of us, we long for the good and positive, because so many other places of life are indeed broken, whether the brokeness be public and for all to see, or hidden behind “I’m fine” and concealed within our hearts.
What are we to make of Jesus’ words today? I’d love to hear what you say on all this.
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This week I am wrestling with another text from Mark’s Gospel, and I would love to hear your thoughts on the text and/or my sharings on the text. This week’s text is Mark 9.30-37, I hope you will read it over before moving along.
OK, here’s a little context on this text. Last week we read the first of Jesus’ predictions of his future betrayal, death, and resurrection; today is the second of these predictions. In between these readings, Jesus goes up on the mountain with Peter, James, and John and is transfigured (“his clothes became dazzling white”), Elijah and Moses appear and talk with Jesus, then as quickly as all this started it stopped, and the 3 disciples and Jesus go back down the mountain. Very soon after this, Jesus finds out that the disciples had been asked to heal a boy with an unclean spirit but couldn’t do it, so before he heals the boy, he gets onto the disciples, “How much longer must I put up with you?” In short, it’s been an up and down time for the disciples since last week’s text.
Today we read the second prediction of Jesus, the last one will take place right before Jesus will enter into Jerusalem on what we call Palm Sunday, which begins his last week of life. If you were to read all three prediction stories, you would find a familiar pattern: Jesus shares his prediction (always referencing his betrayal or arrest or suffering, his being killed, and his being raised after 3 days), and after each prediction the disciples show that they don’t understand Jesus here (last week, Peter rebukes Jesus, this week we read that they didn’t understand (v. 32), then prove by their arguing in the next verse). Then, Jesus will have a time of teaching to help the disciples understand (last week Jesus called the disciples to deny selves, take up a cross and follow, for those who look to save their lives will lose them, …; this week he says that the first must be last and servant..)
OK, enough of the bookish stuff. Now the questions: So what? What is Jesus saying here, and specifically, what is Jesus saying of me here? What is Jesus wanting me to do here?
So here goes some of my own poking around:
*I bet I know why the disciples were “silent” when Jesus asked them what they had been arguing about. The Message translation here says that “the silence was deafening”. They had been busted, that’s why they are quiet. There’s been a time or two (or hundreds) in my life when I get busted by those in charge, with them knowing what I had done and me knowing that they know that I know that I had done what I shouldn’t have done. Yes, a deafening time of silence for sure. What was it about arguing about being “the greatest” that would have the disciples feel like they had been busted? And don’t give an answer that talks about the first are to be last/servant, because that comes only after the silence. Could it be in the prediction itself, that speaks against what the disciples get busted doing?
*What does the “little child” mean in this story? I don’t want to say much on this, since as of right now I am thinking my sermon Sunday is gonna move somewhere toward this. But I would like to share what one of our small group members shared last night in our discussion on this text. She’s a teacher, her comment was that children are very often “overlooked”. Hmmmm.
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This week’s tests are Proverbs 1.20-33 and Mark 8.27-38. I hope you’ll take a minute to read them before coming back to my thoughts on these texts.
Trusting that you have now indeed read these texts by now, I will go ahead and say it: As of right now I’m not getting much out of them. I think I have either preached on or taught on the Mark 8 texts a dozen times, at least, during my time as a minister. And usually I have wrestled with this text during the season of Lent, as we wrestle with the texts of Jesus as he makes his way to the cross of Good Friday. This time, though, I don’t even have Lent to lean on, cause we’re not anywhere close to that time of year.
And then in the Proverbs text, there’s that whole cry from “Wisdom” out in the streets. Pretty much we read Wisdom (here personified as a woman crying out in the street) calling out for folks to listen to her and to follow her. Then she spends much of her time railing on those who ignore her calls. In the end those who disregard Wisdom will face an ignoble end, but those who do listen will be “secure and live at ease.” Here’s my wonder: Where is some of this wisdom that Wisdom wants to dole out to those who will listen? Where’s the 3 steps that will lead to living at ease? Where’s the clear-cut thoughts that Wisdom offers that will have us avoid the “distress and anguish” and have us in the place of security and ease?
Now I wonder: Does anything that comes from Wisdom relate in any way to Mark’s story, and specifically to Jesus’ question, “Who do you say that I am?” BUt then again, if there is a clear-cut answer to Jesus’ question, as with Wisdom’s claims, then Peter seemed to fail it miserably. What gives?
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Welcome back to my ramble through the upcoming Sunday’s sermon text. This week we will be wrestling with Mark 7.24-37, I encourage you to read it before you read my first take on this text. I also hope you will write back with your thoughts as well.
We’re finally back in Mark’s Gospel after spending much of the summer in John 6, but this week’s text makes me long for the days of John 6. What bugs me about today’s text is the conversation Jesus has with the Gentile woman. This poor lady has come to Jesus, to ask Jesus to cast the demon out of her daughter. Certainly this woman, whose name is never given, has come to Jesus after having heard that he has done many healings, including dealing with the denoms. It’s not hard to imagine the desperation that must have been in her plea to Jesus, the plea of a mom for help for her daughter.
BUt then we get to the part that bugs me. Rather than Jesus being the nice guy we know him to be, he dismisses her plea for help. “Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” I trust you can see why this bugs me?
It doesn’t take much reading on the context of this story to know that Jesus here is stating that his ministry is first to the Jews, and later to the Gentiles. Jesus, who is a Jew, has come first of all to proclaim God’s good news to the Jews, as God’s chosen people. And out of the Jewish acceptance or rejection of this good news flows the good news to the Gentiles.
But how can Jesus be so dismissive of this woman? First of all, he speaks down to her, as some lesser person. Secondly, Jesus seems to say that there is a limited supply of “food” available, but just one chapter ago Jesus had fed 5000 people with a pittance of food. Not enough?
As I wrestle with the hardness of this text, it’s been funny reading how some scholars try to lessen the harshness of it. Some say that when Jesus calls the woman a “dog,” he is using the word “dog” to refer to a beloved pet. Not only is that an incorrect reference for the word “dog,” what if it was true? Would Jesus speak to us as pets? (as an aside, does that mean we would be put out in the yard if we poop on the carpet?) Another silly explanation offered for this saying of Jesus is that he was just trying to test the faith of this woman, to stretch her into expressing a stronger sense of faith in him. In other words, Jesus knew that what he was saying wasn’t really what he meant, and he wanted the woman to speak the real truth. Sorry, but I’d rather have Jesus talk down to this woman than to have him doing mental gymnastics with this despairing woman, just so she might grow in faith. And then there is the tried and true way of dismissing the harshness of this saying by Jesus: by asserting that he didn’t say it. Yes, some see this saying as originating from the post-resurrection community and not from Jesus, the reason for this being that the earliest church, with its majority presence of Jews and only recently welcome to Gentiles, needs reminding that Gentiles and Jews are welcome, and indeed that it is a Gentile woman who tells Jesus this truth.
Well, there is some good running through some of these explanations to explain away the hardness of what Jesus says. BUt to me, the hardness is still there, in a double whammy of hard: First, Jesus dismisses the plea of this woman. Second, when confronted by the woman with truth, Jesus changes his mind. Rather than buy into all the flavors of explanations to soften the hardness of this story, ie that Jesus isn’t compassionate and that Jesus changes his mind, I wonder what we might learn from listening to the hard parts of this story? I know I’m gonna be wondering, I would love to hear what you might wonder.
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Friend,
Sorry that I didn’t write up some thoughts this past week, to offer out for your comments. I’ll use the excuse that the start of school got me tied up. However, I have really appreciated the wide range of sharings about my ramblings on the sermon texts for the coming Sunday. I hope that if you have been shouting back at me, that you will continue to do this; if you haven’t responded, I encourage you too. Thanks for reading it regardless.
I’m not preaching this Sunday, cause I will be in Virginia celebrating a wedding with 2 very close friends who were a part of our church’s college/young adult group for several years. The fun I plan on having Saturday night at the wedding will not render me capable of being back in Knoxville Sunday morning. (BUt, Heather Godsey, who is very bright and very insightful and a good preacher, will be there for me, so don’t miss this chance to hear a good sermon!)
Today my blog is going backwards, in that I want to comment on something that I read in my sermon yesterday. The gist of what I said yesterday, after rambling a while around the JOhn 6 text of Peter’s telling Jesus, “Where else can we go? You have the words of eternal life,” and the text from Ephesians 6, on the call to put on the “whole armor of God”, is that in Christ we have the opportunity to glimpse something of eternal life, of life beyond this life, of life as God intends. For the church one great time of glimpsing is in our worship together. Anyway, I tried to quote some of what someone wrote about a book by John Crossan, I want to go back to it.
Here’s the quote: “In The Essential Jesus, Crossan points out that one of the most popular visual representations of Jesus in the early years of the Christian movement was the feeding of the multitude. Long before Christians portrayed Christ crucified they showed him breaking bread. Crossan suggests that this reflects the context of the first Christians as urban poor people for whom bread was a daily concern. Perhaps it is also a reflection of a fundamental insight: Jesus and bread, eating and feeding, table fellowship and faith, food and life — these things go together. “Whoever eats me will live because of me.”
What hit home for me in that text is that it is in the practices of our faith, especially as they take place in the comunity of the church, we catch a glimpse of Jesus among us. In the eating and drinking, in the passing the loaf and cup, our minds and hearts are challenged and comforted. What might we catch a glimpse of in our practices of faith, that might point us toward what God intends?
It used to be that I would feel good when someone would walk out of church and say, “good sermon today, Scott.” (Yes, sometimes folks actually say that.) And I will take them at their word, that they mean it, and not just to make nice with me as they head out the door. I used to appreciate hearing that, but now I wish I had the gut to say back, “What in it might be good enough that you will wrestle with something, or do something different, or even get mad enough at the heresy I uttered to call me out on it?” In other words, I wish that in some way (whether what I said, or what I didn’t say) we the church community might be moved closer to something that is the Word in our time together, and that we use that something to seek out ways to carry it out into all the other places we go.
Maybe next time. Peace till then.
and for those of us counting, 12 days till the first game!
Thanks for coming back to my blog, I’ve been away from it for a couple weeks but am ready to offer some thoughts and hope you will respond in kind. The Scripture texts for this week are John 6.51-58 and Ephesians 5.15-20. I encourage you to read them before you move along to what is next.
It seems like we’ve been reading from John 6 forever this summer. That’s not true actually, this will be only the 4th week in it (with one more to go). I guess what bugs me is that it’s more of the same this week, but even moreso. The chapter starts with Jesus feeding the 5000, but then John moves to the metaphor of Jesus being the bread that comes from God. Familiar language for us who celebrate communion every week, but John keeps hammering away at it. And it makes me wonder, Are we weekly communion folks too familiar with this language?
One of the earliest condemnations of the church was that it was filled with cannibals. And if we didn’t know differently, it would be hard to NOT come to the same conclusion. I mean, here’s the person who call Christ, the head of the church, and here’s what he says: “unless you eat the flesh of the son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you…Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life…my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me and I in them..”
You get the point, I trust. In just this one reading, John hammers us with Jesus’ call to eat and drink. Not to eat a rectangular piece of non-tasting bread, not even a chunk from a loaf of bread. And not a sip of Welch’s grape juice, nor even a shotglass full of wine. Nope. Eat flesh, drink blood. Cannibals, all of us.
I wonder if this metaphor of body and blood has become too familiar? That this central moment in our worship has been made tame by our distance from the messiness, the gross-ness (is that a word? It is today, it’s my blog after all), of eating flesh and drinking blood?
I have heard of the documentaries out there which show video footage of how cows become pieces of meat that become our Quarter Pounders and Whoppers, of how chickens end up being the grilled chicken sandwich on my lunchplate. Many friends have shared with me that the horror of such violence and blood-letting have made them renounce eating meat, or make them resolve to stand against such violent measures to slaughter animals. How do I respond to such unveilings of animal slaughter? Well, I don’t watch those documentaries, and I try my best not to think about what my friends have told me when I order a Big Mac.
I can’t stand the sight of blood, that’s why I avoid all this discussion on animal slaughter. (I can’t stand the sight of my own blood, but that’s for another day.) So if I take what Jesus says in our text today at face value, I must admit, it grosses me out.
My grandfather used to catch rabbits in traps on his farm. Then he would fatten them up, I would try to pet them through the wire cages. I would try my best to forget what was gonna happen to the little bunny, and I made sure not to be around on the day that Pop would “behead” the bunny. And no, I never ate any of the bunny that my dad or he would cook up. That’s just too gross for me. Call me a city boy if you’d like, but I don’t think even growing up on a farm would have made me think less gross-ly (again, my blog, my words) of what Jesus says today. Eat my flesh, drink my blood.
Cannibals, all of us.
What you think?
Hi, just back from a week at the beach of St Augustine, Fl, still filled with cobwebs from my lack of thinking (feel free to add your own comment about me here), but here goes with some thoughts on this coming Sunday’s texts.
This week we will read from John 6.1-21 and Ephesians 3.14-21; this reading from John 6 and Ephesians will continue through the end of August. The John story involves Jesus’ feeding the 5000. Although next week we will begin a long discourse by Jesus, who expresses himself as the “bread of heaven,” (only John’s gospel has this discourse), the story of feeding the 5000 is less detailed in John than in the other Gospels. Also unique to John is the reference that this feeding story is a “sign” (ie, it points toward something else).
Here’s my question: What is this “sign”? The people in the crowd that day see this sign as an affirmation that Jesus is a prophet sent by God, and they determine to take Jesus “by force” to make him king. Because Jesus runs off to the mountains after hearing this plan, I think we can assume that the crowd interprets the “sign” wrongly. What might we say is the “sign” here?
Every time our church worships on Sunday, we celebrate another meal, what we call the Lord’s Supper. As I continue to poke and prod at our church’s Guiding Vision, which centers around the Feasting of the Table, my thinking right now is trying to get a sense of how our Table time serves as a “sign” that points us toward something even more.
What do you think? I’d love to hear what you might think!
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Friend,
Well, it’s another 2 weeks when I won’t be preaching, but I want to invite/beg/guilt/bribe you into doing some thinking with me. If you had been with us in worship this past Sunday (and chances are you weren’t, since our numbers were way down), you would have noticed that I tried to highlight our church’s Guiding Vision by lifting up some visual images (by way of google documents and help from the Lubke’s), images I chose to deliberately both comfort and discomfort us. Now I am thinking about doing more of this.
Like I said, I’m gonna be gone for a couple Sundays (going to the beach!!!), but when I get back, I am thinking about pulling out words/phrases from our Guiding Vision and poking around at them, both in what I might say in my sermon and through visual images. And here’s where I hope you might help me.
I am pasting at the end of this post our church’s Guiding Vision. I invite you to do what I hope to do: find a word/phrase that jumps out at you, and poke around at it. In your head, or in pictures you might come across or search out on the internet, etc., however you might do your thinking (frankly, I don’t know how to post pictures on the blog thing, but maybe you do?) Right now the words that are getting beat around in my head are the words “gather” and “celebrate”, just to let you know where I am.
OK, to perhaps encourage you to involve yourself in this: Whoever sends the most interesting image/idea based on a word or phrase from the Guiding Vision wins, from me, a beverage of your choice at the beverage establishment of your choice (as long it is near the church or my house).
peace, scott
Our Guiding Vision: Feasting at the Lord’s Table
“Every Sunday we celebrate the Word and Presence of Jesus at the Lord’s Table. We gather around a large, welcoming Table as children of God, a Table where we remember and practice our oneness with God. Our time at the Lord’s Table calls us to remember and practice forgiveness, acceptance, sharing, love, and the willingness to change, as we are being led by God’s Spirit among us”.
