Matthew 3:1-12
Advent 2
December 5, 2010
William G. Carter
“I baptize you with water for repentance, but one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to carry his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and will gather his wheat into the granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.”
John the Baptist is an awkward character for Advent. He usually shows up at this time of year to splash some cold water on our Christmas preparations.
While the shopping mall cranks up the carols before the Halloween candy goes stale, John stands up on a desert rock to shout “Repent!” At a time when people survey the catalogs and pick out nice clothes for loved ones and themselves, John simply wears the same garb – the skin of a camel, fleas and all. He will not RSVP for holiday parties. He probably won’t send a thank-you note if you send him a gift. He will sing carols at your front door.
If you want to see him, you have to travel to where he is, out in the austere desert somewhere southwest of Jericho. People speculate about him and wonder where he comes from. That’s easy: his father was an old man, a priest in Jerusalem. John takes his religion outdoors. He preaches to the snakes, both reptile and human. He has one sermon. It is very brief: “the kingdom of heaven has come near.” And all kinds of people go to hear him.
They take a bus of tourists out to see him. The road is dusty and the air conditioning doesn’t work. The fat people get off the bus, cameras around their necks. The host minister leads them in a brief prayer, and then explains that John is something of a throw-back. “He’s the last prophet of the Old Testament,” explains the minister. “Dresses like Elijah, eats like Elisha. Takes no prisoners whenever he preaches.”
The little band of tourists traipses around a large rock, looks for a place to sit, and there is no place to sit. It’s just as well. John sees them, screams at them, and condemns them for wasting money on a bus when they can walk. One of them says, “I’m glad we don’t have a preacher like him.” Pretty soon, their hair is blown backwards. So they leave to find a nice store with olive wood souvenirs.
As they leave, they pass some religious leaders on a retreat. These guys are easy to spot in their formal gowns. They have taken off time for the weekend, and gone reluctantly to hear this preacher. A few of the more-than-usually-stuffy ones are concerned about John’s rhetoric. He is preaching without a license, teaching without certification. That concerns them.
The rest of them wonder why so many people are slipping out of town to go hear John preach. They are curious. What is the attraction? What does he say? Why are so many people going to hear him? Well, they never find out. When John sees them, he picks up a rock and hurls it at them. Then he screams, “Go back to the fires of hell where you came from!” With that, he spins around and walks away.
What is the attraction of this man? Why do the Gospel writers want us to see him?
It’s not so simple to claim that John is preaching against the establishment. There is no evidence that he is taking on organized religion. He speaks of the same God. He speaks of the same Kingdom. Everybody agrees that John is grounded in the same scriptures as everybody else in Israel. “This is the one,” says Matthew, “who embodies the very promise of Isaiah – he is a ‘voice hollering in the wilderness.’ This is the one who prepares us for the way of the Lord.”
John makes that hope concrete. “There is somebody coming who is greater than me. I splash you with water, but he shall burn you with Holy Spirit. He will take a big hooked fork and separate the grains of wheat from the lifeless stalks. Then he will burn that chaff with unquenchable fire.”
You know, given the choice, I think I’d prefer John the Baptist to the One he’s talking about. With John, you get your hair blown back by a sermon and then you get wet. But to hear him speak of Jesus – John makes it sound like Jesus is going to change us.
For what does John say? “Even now the axe is swinging at the root of the tree, and the fruitless tree will be thrown into the fire.” John doesn’t have an axe – all he has is a sermon. And he points toward Jesus as the one who separates the fruitful from the dead.
Then John says, “You can’t say ‘leave me alone, I come from a good family.’” The Kingdom of God is not a status system where some people are better than others, where some people are better connected than others, where some people act more pious than everybody else. People enter only one at a time. Either they come to God, having turned away from everything else. Or they will be exposed as selfish and manipulative, trying to scam God and prove they are better than they really are.
John’s point is well taken. We cannot come to God, flash our passing report cards, and assume that we are good enough on our own to enter a kingdom that does not begin or end with us. Something else is needed. Something like faith, hope, and love.
God plants faith as a small seed in our hearts and then waits to see if it grows. Will the seed of faith grow to take over the work we do? Will it determine the ways we spend our time and our resources?
God announces hope; it’s not a hope in our own striving, not a hope in our own achievements – but rather, a hope that history is moving somewhere, a hope that God will finish everything once began, that God will transform all things with grace.
And then God surrounds us with love: there was love before we were born, there is love all around us. Every day, God comes to us as love. Then God watches to see if that love is actually shared. Are neighbors enriched by our love? Are the little ones protected? Are the hungry fed? In the ways we live and give, is there any evidence that we have been loved?
I used to think that John the Baptist was the harsh one, the demanding one. This time through the text, I realize he is pointing to Jesus. What does he say about the One who comes? Jesus will swing the axe, carry the winnowing fork, clear the threshing floor, and throw the chaff into the fire . . . Jesus is the One who will change us. Either he will make us more loving (and therefore more holy), or he will have little use for us (which would make us expendable).
The text for today is more about Jesus than it is about John. John takes his bony finger and points to a Savior who really can save us. He can save us from superficial religion that aims to merely make us feel good. He can save us from the presumption that sitting in church is all it takes to be a Christian. He can save us from ourselves and all the stupid things we do; if we hand ourselves over to him, he will not only rinse us clean, but burn away all our destructive urges.
Jesus can change us, save us, but he will not do it cheaply. Just as it once cost him his life, it’s going to cost us everything. He will do surgery on our souls, and it will take away our reputations. It will reduce us to becoming dependent, humble, and completely available. All our arrogance will need to be amputated. The path of healing will take a while, especially if it’s going to last. Yet this is the only way to keep us from missing the kingdom of heaven.
We have a God who not only wishes to untangle our crooked paths but expects us to be honest about them. This is the kind of Advent God who comes to us in Jesus. It’s the kind of God that John knows – a God with the power to raise us up from dead and lifeless stones, a God who makes us a tribe of children who hunger and thirst for the world to be healed.
Such healing will not come cheaply. We remember that, as we come to this Table and taste broken bread and the poured-out cup. And we hear the promise once again: healing can come; it can come for those who want it more than anything else.
Is this what you want?
(c) William G. Carter
All rights reserved
Sunday, December 5, 2010
Sunday, November 28, 2010
Nobody Knows
Matthew 24:36-44
Advent 1
November 28, 2010
William G. Carter
“But about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. . . Therefore you also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.”
Today is the first Sunday of Advent. The candles are on their ring. It’s beginning to look a bit like Christmas. The church gets dressed in Hopeful Purple and Royal Blue. We pull out the hymns that we sing once a year and we sing them once again.
But did you hear the text from Matthew’s Gospel? Advent is not the favorite season for anybody who likes to be in control. It sneaks up on us when we aren’t looking. Jesus speaks of the coming of God, and does so abruptly. "The day is coming . . . and nobody knows when. "
Last Sunday, on the final day of the church year, we heard Jesus speak from the cross about the lack of human knowledge. "Father, forgive them, they don't know what they're doing." Today, on the first day of the new church year, he speaks once again about the limits of what we can and cannot know.
The subject is the coming of the Lord. We don't know when it will happen. Three times Jesus says we will not know the time. And presumably we will not know what it's going to look like, because he is careful not to tell us.
In this section of Matthew's book, there are seven parables in a row that tell us to be alert. To stay on our toes. To keep our eyes peeled. God is on the way, and we need to be as ready as we can. Then, as soon as Jesus says this, he add, "but nobody knows -- not the angels of heaven, not the Son, only the Father."
When God arrives, it will be like the time of Noah. People were putting away the turkey, and pouring themselves another glass of wine. Their kids are home from college to announce their breakups or their engagements. Things are going on schedule, when suddenly it began to rain. And it rains and it rains, and most of them had no clue knew it was coming. When God get here, it's going to happen like that. Nobody will expect it. "Because," says Jesus, "when God comes to us, God arrives like a thief in the night."
That's the gist of what this passage is saying. And the challenge for you and me is to simply come to terms with this description of God.
In our theological galleries, we carry a lot of pictures of God. The Lord is my shepherd. God is a loving father who welcomes home every prodigal. God is a mother hen who gathers all the chicks. But today, Jesus draws a picture that I would never think to choose. According to Jesus, God is a Thief.
"Your Lord is coming," said Jesus. If the house-owner knew when to expect the thief, she would have stayed awake. But she didn't know. And thus she was prone to have her house plundered.
This is what God is like. It's not a picture that provides much comfort.
A man had his toaster stolen from his apartment. After the burglary, he did a survey. That's the only thing he found missing. So you know what he did? He changed apartments.
I can understand, can't you?
A woman I know recently lost her husband. It happened without warning. The heart attack came as a complete shock. And before the funeral was held, the first thing she did before she could sleep in her own house was to install a security system. Death broke in once; she didn't want any more intruders.
I can understand it, can't you?
Some of us remember when a thief broke into a church member's car while she was sitting here in worship. It was parked out on the edge of the parking lot. Sometime between the call to worship and the benediction, a criminal smashed into the car and stole a lot of money. That led the stewardship committee to remind everybody that it’s a good idea to bring our wallets and purses to worship. But the situation is not funny. It's not funny at all. It was a robbery. If you have ever been robbed, you know how it feels. Violated. Intruded upon. Broken into. Someone has come into a place that you held sacred, and they have plundered it against your will.
This is the picture of God on the first Sunday of Advent. God is a Thief who breaks into a place we thought was safe. And we can't protect ourselves from the plundering of our own houses.
The New Testament draws this picture on a number of different occasions. Two times Jesus speaks of the day of the Lord as the intrusion of a Thief. Twice in the book of Revelation, Jesus himself says, "I will come like a thief." The apostle Paul warned the people in one of his churches, "Don't let God jump you unawares, like a thief in the night." He had to warn them about it, for the simple fact that God is sneaky. God is not obvious. God is usually up to something when it doesn't look like God is doing anything.
In his commentary on Matthew, Dale Bruner says, "One of the most surprising facts in Jesus' end-time teaching is that the last times will be normal. According to our passage, there will be parties, gourmet meals, courtships, and weddings right into the cataclysmic coming of the Son of Man . . . The Great Tribulation occurs while superficially all seems well. To the unobservant, it's party time. Thus Jesus' teaching of end-time normalcy should move disciples to look beneath surfaces to the deep structures of life - to see what is happening at levels we do not usually think to look."
For those with eyes to see, God is always up to something. And the spiritual life begins with the practice of paying attention. Keeping spiritually alert. Asking: what is God doing around here? How has God broken into this situation? What is God up to? We pay attention to questions like that, and trust this will open us to sainthood.
And yet, God doesn't wait for us to pull together all the answers. God never waits to act until we get ready. God is free to act in any way conceivable or inconceivable. And the Thief will disrupt us.
That's how the story of Christmas began, after all. God broke in, regardless of whether anybody was ready.
Picture young Mary as a teenager. An angel arrives to say, "Mary, you're going to have a baby." She didn't ask for it. She didn't expect it. In a very real sense, God intruded on her . . . and life was never again the same.
Joseph was chopping wood out behind the shop. His arms stiffened like a timber when she broke the news to him. All his dreams of settling down to a comfortable future vanished in an instant. He loved her, but he didn't sign on for this. God had burglarized his settled household and his predictable future. And nothing would ever be the same.
That's how it is when God climbs through one of the windows after dark. Everything we thought was settled is now turned upside down. And there isn't a thing we can do about it. Nothing to do, but to get with God's program.
Now, this is hard for some of us. For most of us. I set two alarm clocks for Sunday morning because I never want to wake up late. We want to show up on time, take charge, and know what’s going on. I was sitting at a meeting in a country church last Monday night. Somebody said, “Who’s playing football tonight? I want to know if I need to go home early.” So the moderator of the meeting clicked his iPhone, and declared it was merely the San Diego Chargers. We could meet as long as we needed.
It’s nice to have the kind of information, that kind of certainty, that kind of control. Check the weather, read your e-mail in church, make sure the Lord didn’t arrive early and leave you behind. All of us do this. I do it. I picked up a used GPS unit for my car. Then I fired it up, and got directions to my parents’ house. The people in my car laughed at me, hooted at me. “But look,” I said, “it tells me the precise time that we are going to arrive!” They didn’t hear me; they were texting on their cell phones and posting on Facebook about my control needs.
Now, to be fair, wouldn’t it be wonderful if we get God to come on schedule? If we could get God to show up when we want God to show up? If we could force God to jump into those situations that we want fixed right now? It doesn’t seem to work that way. And in the absence of any real control over our lives, we manufacture all these different ways, all these different gadgets, to think we actually have control over our lives. It’s a lie.
God has the authority to turn out the lights, cut the power, and break into our house. I'll be the first to admit it. This is not a comfortable description of God. But this is the most honest picture we're going to get. God comes to us like a thief in the night.
And it forces me to face the truth about life and death. I take out insurance policies, but ultimately there's no insurance against an act of God. I'm saving money to use twenty years from now, but it may not even be necessary. Who am I kidding? My life hangs by a fragile thread. The people I love and hold so dearly are temporary residents here, as I am. All those toys I have accumulated, all those possessions I am hoarding, all those things are depreciating as I speak. And most of the gadgets that I cling to in this life are the things that give me the illusion that I don't need to depend on God. My money and my stuff tempt me to ignore the claim that God has on my life.
If I only knew what time the Thief was coming, I could stay awake and keep my house from being robbed. But guess what: I don't know what time the Thief is coming. No one knows the time, except the Thief.
I don’t have a lot on this year’s Christmas list. But I just wrote down the title of a book that I want Santa to put under my tree. It’s called Hannah’s Child and it is the memoir of a theologian named Stanley Hauerwas. He was one of Phil Muntzel’s classmates at Yale Divinity School, taught at Notre Dame and Duke. It was a single quote that caught my eye. Hauerwas writes:
For me learning to be a Christian means learning to live without answers. Indeed to learn to live in this was is what makes being a Christian so wonderful. Faith is but a name for learning how to go on without knowing the answers . . . that’s why I find that being a Christian makes life so interesting.”
I saw the quote, I wrote down the title of the book. Because I need people of faith to remind me that to trust in God is to trust in God. We don’t run the world. To honor God above everything else is to watch and wait when we aren’t always sure what is going to happen next. To honor God is to let God break in however and whenever that happens – - and in the meantime to hang on and trust in God’s covenantal love that everything will turn out well.
We do this because this is the kind of God that Jesus believed in. It’s the kind of God that Jesus reveals. God comes as sneaky as a thief. Ready or not. Advent is the season to prepare for this intrusion, and we prepare by keeping our hearts awake.
(c) William G. Carter
All rights reserved
Advent 1
November 28, 2010
William G. Carter
“But about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. . . Therefore you also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.”
Today is the first Sunday of Advent. The candles are on their ring. It’s beginning to look a bit like Christmas. The church gets dressed in Hopeful Purple and Royal Blue. We pull out the hymns that we sing once a year and we sing them once again.
But did you hear the text from Matthew’s Gospel? Advent is not the favorite season for anybody who likes to be in control. It sneaks up on us when we aren’t looking. Jesus speaks of the coming of God, and does so abruptly. "The day is coming . . . and nobody knows when. "
Last Sunday, on the final day of the church year, we heard Jesus speak from the cross about the lack of human knowledge. "Father, forgive them, they don't know what they're doing." Today, on the first day of the new church year, he speaks once again about the limits of what we can and cannot know.
The subject is the coming of the Lord. We don't know when it will happen. Three times Jesus says we will not know the time. And presumably we will not know what it's going to look like, because he is careful not to tell us.
In this section of Matthew's book, there are seven parables in a row that tell us to be alert. To stay on our toes. To keep our eyes peeled. God is on the way, and we need to be as ready as we can. Then, as soon as Jesus says this, he add, "but nobody knows -- not the angels of heaven, not the Son, only the Father."
When God arrives, it will be like the time of Noah. People were putting away the turkey, and pouring themselves another glass of wine. Their kids are home from college to announce their breakups or their engagements. Things are going on schedule, when suddenly it began to rain. And it rains and it rains, and most of them had no clue knew it was coming. When God get here, it's going to happen like that. Nobody will expect it. "Because," says Jesus, "when God comes to us, God arrives like a thief in the night."
That's the gist of what this passage is saying. And the challenge for you and me is to simply come to terms with this description of God.
In our theological galleries, we carry a lot of pictures of God. The Lord is my shepherd. God is a loving father who welcomes home every prodigal. God is a mother hen who gathers all the chicks. But today, Jesus draws a picture that I would never think to choose. According to Jesus, God is a Thief.
"Your Lord is coming," said Jesus. If the house-owner knew when to expect the thief, she would have stayed awake. But she didn't know. And thus she was prone to have her house plundered.
This is what God is like. It's not a picture that provides much comfort.
A man had his toaster stolen from his apartment. After the burglary, he did a survey. That's the only thing he found missing. So you know what he did? He changed apartments.
I can understand, can't you?
A woman I know recently lost her husband. It happened without warning. The heart attack came as a complete shock. And before the funeral was held, the first thing she did before she could sleep in her own house was to install a security system. Death broke in once; she didn't want any more intruders.
I can understand it, can't you?
Some of us remember when a thief broke into a church member's car while she was sitting here in worship. It was parked out on the edge of the parking lot. Sometime between the call to worship and the benediction, a criminal smashed into the car and stole a lot of money. That led the stewardship committee to remind everybody that it’s a good idea to bring our wallets and purses to worship. But the situation is not funny. It's not funny at all. It was a robbery. If you have ever been robbed, you know how it feels. Violated. Intruded upon. Broken into. Someone has come into a place that you held sacred, and they have plundered it against your will.
This is the picture of God on the first Sunday of Advent. God is a Thief who breaks into a place we thought was safe. And we can't protect ourselves from the plundering of our own houses.
The New Testament draws this picture on a number of different occasions. Two times Jesus speaks of the day of the Lord as the intrusion of a Thief. Twice in the book of Revelation, Jesus himself says, "I will come like a thief." The apostle Paul warned the people in one of his churches, "Don't let God jump you unawares, like a thief in the night." He had to warn them about it, for the simple fact that God is sneaky. God is not obvious. God is usually up to something when it doesn't look like God is doing anything.
In his commentary on Matthew, Dale Bruner says, "One of the most surprising facts in Jesus' end-time teaching is that the last times will be normal. According to our passage, there will be parties, gourmet meals, courtships, and weddings right into the cataclysmic coming of the Son of Man . . . The Great Tribulation occurs while superficially all seems well. To the unobservant, it's party time. Thus Jesus' teaching of end-time normalcy should move disciples to look beneath surfaces to the deep structures of life - to see what is happening at levels we do not usually think to look."
For those with eyes to see, God is always up to something. And the spiritual life begins with the practice of paying attention. Keeping spiritually alert. Asking: what is God doing around here? How has God broken into this situation? What is God up to? We pay attention to questions like that, and trust this will open us to sainthood.
And yet, God doesn't wait for us to pull together all the answers. God never waits to act until we get ready. God is free to act in any way conceivable or inconceivable. And the Thief will disrupt us.
That's how the story of Christmas began, after all. God broke in, regardless of whether anybody was ready.
Picture young Mary as a teenager. An angel arrives to say, "Mary, you're going to have a baby." She didn't ask for it. She didn't expect it. In a very real sense, God intruded on her . . . and life was never again the same.
Joseph was chopping wood out behind the shop. His arms stiffened like a timber when she broke the news to him. All his dreams of settling down to a comfortable future vanished in an instant. He loved her, but he didn't sign on for this. God had burglarized his settled household and his predictable future. And nothing would ever be the same.
That's how it is when God climbs through one of the windows after dark. Everything we thought was settled is now turned upside down. And there isn't a thing we can do about it. Nothing to do, but to get with God's program.
Now, this is hard for some of us. For most of us. I set two alarm clocks for Sunday morning because I never want to wake up late. We want to show up on time, take charge, and know what’s going on. I was sitting at a meeting in a country church last Monday night. Somebody said, “Who’s playing football tonight? I want to know if I need to go home early.” So the moderator of the meeting clicked his iPhone, and declared it was merely the San Diego Chargers. We could meet as long as we needed.
It’s nice to have the kind of information, that kind of certainty, that kind of control. Check the weather, read your e-mail in church, make sure the Lord didn’t arrive early and leave you behind. All of us do this. I do it. I picked up a used GPS unit for my car. Then I fired it up, and got directions to my parents’ house. The people in my car laughed at me, hooted at me. “But look,” I said, “it tells me the precise time that we are going to arrive!” They didn’t hear me; they were texting on their cell phones and posting on Facebook about my control needs.
Now, to be fair, wouldn’t it be wonderful if we get God to come on schedule? If we could get God to show up when we want God to show up? If we could force God to jump into those situations that we want fixed right now? It doesn’t seem to work that way. And in the absence of any real control over our lives, we manufacture all these different ways, all these different gadgets, to think we actually have control over our lives. It’s a lie.
God has the authority to turn out the lights, cut the power, and break into our house. I'll be the first to admit it. This is not a comfortable description of God. But this is the most honest picture we're going to get. God comes to us like a thief in the night.
And it forces me to face the truth about life and death. I take out insurance policies, but ultimately there's no insurance against an act of God. I'm saving money to use twenty years from now, but it may not even be necessary. Who am I kidding? My life hangs by a fragile thread. The people I love and hold so dearly are temporary residents here, as I am. All those toys I have accumulated, all those possessions I am hoarding, all those things are depreciating as I speak. And most of the gadgets that I cling to in this life are the things that give me the illusion that I don't need to depend on God. My money and my stuff tempt me to ignore the claim that God has on my life.
If I only knew what time the Thief was coming, I could stay awake and keep my house from being robbed. But guess what: I don't know what time the Thief is coming. No one knows the time, except the Thief.
I don’t have a lot on this year’s Christmas list. But I just wrote down the title of a book that I want Santa to put under my tree. It’s called Hannah’s Child and it is the memoir of a theologian named Stanley Hauerwas. He was one of Phil Muntzel’s classmates at Yale Divinity School, taught at Notre Dame and Duke. It was a single quote that caught my eye. Hauerwas writes:
For me learning to be a Christian means learning to live without answers. Indeed to learn to live in this was is what makes being a Christian so wonderful. Faith is but a name for learning how to go on without knowing the answers . . . that’s why I find that being a Christian makes life so interesting.”
I saw the quote, I wrote down the title of the book. Because I need people of faith to remind me that to trust in God is to trust in God. We don’t run the world. To honor God above everything else is to watch and wait when we aren’t always sure what is going to happen next. To honor God is to let God break in however and whenever that happens – - and in the meantime to hang on and trust in God’s covenantal love that everything will turn out well.
We do this because this is the kind of God that Jesus believed in. It’s the kind of God that Jesus reveals. God comes as sneaky as a thief. Ready or not. Advent is the season to prepare for this intrusion, and we prepare by keeping our hearts awake.
(c) William G. Carter
All rights reserved
Sunday, November 21, 2010
Save Yourself – and Us!
Luke 23:33-43
Christ the King Sunday
November 21, 2010
William G. Carter
The church practices a strange kind of politics. We call today “Christ the King” Sunday. We sing of Christ as sovereign. We declare Jesus is raised in glory, higher than every authority. When the world says, “Prove it!” we point to a cross. This is strange politics.
All the other kings of the world do whatever they can to save their own necks – they lie to get elected and immediately start running for re-election. They colonize other lands and declare it is their “divine right.” They blame predecessors for all the problems, cook up crazy schemes, tax their subjects to pay for those schemes, make people fearful to keep them in power, and generally foul up the air.
Nothing new about that. In introducing the biblical books of First Kings and Second Kings, the Bible scholar Walter Brueggemann says the titles of those books should end with question marks: “Kings?” You call these ‘kings’?!?” They know nothing about governing all the people and pander only to their friends. They know absolutely nothing about the common good.
The church says, “Jesus refuses the crown that Satan offered in the wilderness” and then we point to the cross. Listen to what happens there . . . (read the text)
//
There are a lot of things going on in that story. Some of them specific, some of them symbolic. What draws my interest, again and again, is the brief prayer attributed to Jesus on the cross: "Father, forgive them; they do not know what they are doing."
It is a Good Friday word. When ministers in a town gather on Good Friday, sometimes they decide to preach through the seven last words of Jesus. I feel sorry for the preacher who gets picked to preach on the moment when Jesus says, "I thirst." What more can you say about that?
At least this prayer from Luke 23 gives us something to struggle with, if only because there are many people who don't think that this verse belongs in the Bible.
If you followed the reading in a pew Bible, you might have noticed there is a footnote after Luke 23:34. The footnote says these words do not appear in many early versions of the Gospel of Luke. Back when scribes had to copy the Bible by hand, some scribes left out this verse. Maybe by accident, maybe by intent; we don't know what they were doing. All we know is that they left it out.
It could be, as Raymond Brown says in his commentary on the passion story, that there were some Christians who didn't want to believe Jesus actually prayed for the people who nailed him on the cross. Specifically some in the early church thought it was too favorable toward the Jews. So they told their scribes to take out that verse.
I don't know if that's the case, but I can understand how they felt. It is one thing to hear Jesus say, "Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you (6:27-28)." It's another thing to see those words put into practice. It is a hundred times easier to blame somebody than it is to forgive them.
Whatever the reason for its slippery heritage, the verse belongs in the writings of Luke, because Jesus says, "Father, forgive them, they don't know . . ."
According to Luke, that is the fundamental characteristic of the human race: we don't know. In Luke's second volume, the book of Acts, he tells a story about the apostle Paul. Paul stands up in Athens and says, “I passed an altar to the Unknown God, the One of whom you are ignorant. Let me tell you who that is: that unknown God is our Creator. That unknown God is the very One we all seek. And yet, we don't know him."
What was the testimony of the early church? Listen to what Luke says in the third chapter of Acts: "You and your leaders killed Jesus, the author of life, and you did it out of ignorance. You did not know." (3:14-17)
Or in the Gospel of Luke, in the Palm Sunday story, Jesus comes down the hill, around the bend, and sees the Holy City. And he weeps, "Jerusalem, Jerusalem, if only you knew the things that make for peace. But you do not know."
So it’s no surprise that Luke (and only Luke) reports what Jesus said on the cross: "Father, forgive them. They don't know what they're doing. (23:34).” They are ignorant.
I don't know how you feel about that. Those of us who are parents tell our children, "Don't ever call anybody "stupid." Yet that is the blanket description given to all people everywhere. Agnostos, literally “they don’t know.”
For Luke, it doesn't seem to matter who we are. We can have doctoral diplomas hanging on the wall. Or we can graduate Magna Cum Laude from the School of Hard Knocks. Some of the people who put Jesus on the cross had advanced degrees in theology. Others were adjunct professors in Political Science. Jesus says of both, "They are ignorant." You see, it is one thing to know. It's another thing to know.
That is the ignorance of which Jesus speaks, the gap between knowing -- and knowing. It is possible to memorize all the Bible verses in the world, and still be ignorant. We can gain all kinds of practical knowledge and still not “get it.” We can enroll in Bible School and earn a four point average, and still miss the point. That is the problem.
"Forgive them . . . they don't know what they are doing." That’s the prayer of Jesus. O come on, now, they know what they're doing. They're getting rid of a trouble-maker. They knew about trouble-makers. They had a Bible. They read the prophets. They knew what happened to God's prophets, and they kept doing it themselves, in their own time and place. You see, it is one thing to know. It's another thing to know.
It’s tempting to think you and I have overcome the ignorance. This is the age of instant information, after all. We have more knowledge at our fingertips than any generation before us. If we don't know it, we can download it in a few seconds. Maybe the world’s problem is that it needs more education. What do you think?
I will never forget what they told me as they gave me a tour of the Lackawanna County prison. It was before it got a makeover, when it still looked like a scene out of a Dicken novel. The grim surroundings matched the grim looks in the prisoners’ eyes. We were told not to speak to anybody, just look at them. Back outside, one of the jailers said, "Our society needs to educate people so that they don't commit crimes and end up in a place like this."
Then we got in a van and continued the seminar in an office park. They took us to a sound-proof conference room and spoke of employees who steal computers, raid the loading docks, and take drugs. Those were white-collar problems. What is the solution? They said, “Education. Education is the answer."
Later on I began to wonder. What kind of education keeps people out of jail? When some people would rather die than give up drugs, is their problem a lack of schooling? I may be wrong, but I do not know a school in Lackawanna County that provides a class that teaches thieves to stop stealing.
Yet we keep believing the old line that we can make progress if we accumulate more knowledge, fund more research, build bigger hard drives. We stockpile our facts and nothing really changes. We know all kinds of information, but we miss the Mystery of the Gospel, that in Jesus Christ “all things hold together."
The more I think about it, the more I believe this is the crux of the matter. Jesus says, "Jerusalem, you did not know the time of your visitation." The King came into your town and you did not recognize him. You didn’t even notice him when he prayed, "Father, forgive them. They don't know."
What don't they know? They don't know who that is, hanging on the cross.
Let this be a reminder that, before we point fingers at people who did not recognize the God who came in Christ, we can miss him too. This is part and parcel of “not knowing.” In fact, there is never an occasion in the whole Gospel of Luke when a single human person affirms Jesus as the Son of God. According to Luke, the only ones who really know Jesus are the angels and the devils. Nobody else.
Luke says that, on the day Jesus rode a donkey into the city, the crowd shouted, "Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord!" (19:38) Just a few short days later, some jokers took a magic marker and wrote an inscription over his head on a two-by-four, "This is the king of the Jews." (23:28). They did not know who he was, nor did they know what kind of king God had crowned him to be.
And do we know? We cannot claim any superiority in this. The text is a warning to good, upstanding church people. We are not better than anybody else when it comes to recognizing God. If we think we are superior, we run the risk of becoming shrouded in a fog of self-importance. It is possible to become so preoccupied with expertise and spiritual success that we miss the heart of the Gospel. And the heart of the Gospel is this: God helps those who cannot help themselves. God saves those who are otherwise un-save-able.
No amount of spiritual sophistication can unveil a hidden God. No level of education will open our eyes to glory. No scientific knowledge can carry us into the presence of the Holy One. Something else is needed. All we can do is to stand bare-headed, broken-hearted, open-handed, and say with all humility, "God forgive us; we don't know."
Today, the promise is that the prayer has been answered. That's the crux of the matter, isn't it? "Father, forgive them." The gospel is defined by forgiveness. The gospel is coming home to God and discovering that, through no work of our own, all our debts have been cancelled. All our sins are forgiven. All our pettiness has been wiped away.
It’s like the story Jesus tells of the prodigal son who comes to his senses in the pig-pen. He decides to try one more time to take advantage of the Old Man. So he cleans himself up, practices a pious little repentance speech, and goes home. When he appears at the far end of the driveway, his father drops everything. The father breaks all Middle Eastern customs and runs to his returning son. The father cuts off the canned repentance speech and throws a big "Welcome Home" party before either of his two sons can do anything about it.
All the neighbors say, "Look at that! Such shameful extravagavance, wasted on a sinner!" And Jesus smiles a sly smile and says, "You’d better look, all right. That's the very picture of God's good news."
Can you believe it? The key is in the prayer of King Jesus on the cross. "Father, forgive them." In that prayer, he uses the word "aphiemi." It means "a great big cancellation." The point is: God doesn't merely forgive our sins; God cancels them. God lets them go. God sends them away, dismisses them. That’s the word “aphiemi” – to cancel, to send away, to dismiss.
This is disruptive grace. Just imagine: even in God's heavenly domain, there's a hallway of cubicles, each one filled with accountants and bookkeepers. Every day at 2 p.m., God walks down the hall, knocks on a door post , and says, "Give me the ledger book that you have been keeping on Larry Jones." And God finds that page, finds the line where every sin have been recorded. God pulls a gallon bucket of White-Out of a robe pocket and spills it all over your page. Then God says, "Well, that's that."
You never had to ask God to do that, because Jesus has already asked him on your behalf: "Father, forgive them; they do not know what they are doing." In that prayer is the essence of the Gospel!
I like the words of an Episcopalian priest named Robert Capon, who puts it this way:
There is no sin you can commit that God in Jesus hasn't forgiven already. The only way you can get yourself in permanent Dutch is to refuse forgiveness. That's hell. The old baloney about heaven being for good guys and hell for bad guys is dead wrong. Heaven is populated entirely by forgiven sinners, not spiritual and moral aces. And hell is populated entirely by forgiven sinners. The only difference between the two groups is that those in heaven accept the forgiveness and those in hell reject it. Which is why heaven is a party - the endless wedding reception of the Lamb and his bride - and hell is nothing but the dreariest bar in town.
Jesus died for those for whom he prayed. His love is self-giving, and it is the sign and signal of God’s heart. Our part is to trust this is true, to believe God can love us so much as to give us a fresh start, a new beginning, by cancelling the wrongs we have done and the pain we have perpetuated. “Father, forgive them . . .” This is the true King’s prayer – and we trust it has been answered.
This is a strange politics. The real ruler of the world is the One who refuses to save himself. He chooses instead to save all of us, provided, of course, that we want to be saved.
(c) William Carter
All rights reserved.
Christ the King Sunday
November 21, 2010
William G. Carter
The church practices a strange kind of politics. We call today “Christ the King” Sunday. We sing of Christ as sovereign. We declare Jesus is raised in glory, higher than every authority. When the world says, “Prove it!” we point to a cross. This is strange politics.
All the other kings of the world do whatever they can to save their own necks – they lie to get elected and immediately start running for re-election. They colonize other lands and declare it is their “divine right.” They blame predecessors for all the problems, cook up crazy schemes, tax their subjects to pay for those schemes, make people fearful to keep them in power, and generally foul up the air.
Nothing new about that. In introducing the biblical books of First Kings and Second Kings, the Bible scholar Walter Brueggemann says the titles of those books should end with question marks: “Kings?” You call these ‘kings’?!?” They know nothing about governing all the people and pander only to their friends. They know absolutely nothing about the common good.
The church says, “Jesus refuses the crown that Satan offered in the wilderness” and then we point to the cross. Listen to what happens there . . . (read the text)
//
There are a lot of things going on in that story. Some of them specific, some of them symbolic. What draws my interest, again and again, is the brief prayer attributed to Jesus on the cross: "Father, forgive them; they do not know what they are doing."
It is a Good Friday word. When ministers in a town gather on Good Friday, sometimes they decide to preach through the seven last words of Jesus. I feel sorry for the preacher who gets picked to preach on the moment when Jesus says, "I thirst." What more can you say about that?
At least this prayer from Luke 23 gives us something to struggle with, if only because there are many people who don't think that this verse belongs in the Bible.
If you followed the reading in a pew Bible, you might have noticed there is a footnote after Luke 23:34. The footnote says these words do not appear in many early versions of the Gospel of Luke. Back when scribes had to copy the Bible by hand, some scribes left out this verse. Maybe by accident, maybe by intent; we don't know what they were doing. All we know is that they left it out.
It could be, as Raymond Brown says in his commentary on the passion story, that there were some Christians who didn't want to believe Jesus actually prayed for the people who nailed him on the cross. Specifically some in the early church thought it was too favorable toward the Jews. So they told their scribes to take out that verse.
I don't know if that's the case, but I can understand how they felt. It is one thing to hear Jesus say, "Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you (6:27-28)." It's another thing to see those words put into practice. It is a hundred times easier to blame somebody than it is to forgive them.
Whatever the reason for its slippery heritage, the verse belongs in the writings of Luke, because Jesus says, "Father, forgive them, they don't know . . ."
According to Luke, that is the fundamental characteristic of the human race: we don't know. In Luke's second volume, the book of Acts, he tells a story about the apostle Paul. Paul stands up in Athens and says, “I passed an altar to the Unknown God, the One of whom you are ignorant. Let me tell you who that is: that unknown God is our Creator. That unknown God is the very One we all seek. And yet, we don't know him."
What was the testimony of the early church? Listen to what Luke says in the third chapter of Acts: "You and your leaders killed Jesus, the author of life, and you did it out of ignorance. You did not know." (3:14-17)
Or in the Gospel of Luke, in the Palm Sunday story, Jesus comes down the hill, around the bend, and sees the Holy City. And he weeps, "Jerusalem, Jerusalem, if only you knew the things that make for peace. But you do not know."
So it’s no surprise that Luke (and only Luke) reports what Jesus said on the cross: "Father, forgive them. They don't know what they're doing. (23:34).” They are ignorant.
I don't know how you feel about that. Those of us who are parents tell our children, "Don't ever call anybody "stupid." Yet that is the blanket description given to all people everywhere. Agnostos, literally “they don’t know.”
For Luke, it doesn't seem to matter who we are. We can have doctoral diplomas hanging on the wall. Or we can graduate Magna Cum Laude from the School of Hard Knocks. Some of the people who put Jesus on the cross had advanced degrees in theology. Others were adjunct professors in Political Science. Jesus says of both, "They are ignorant." You see, it is one thing to know. It's another thing to know.
That is the ignorance of which Jesus speaks, the gap between knowing -- and knowing. It is possible to memorize all the Bible verses in the world, and still be ignorant. We can gain all kinds of practical knowledge and still not “get it.” We can enroll in Bible School and earn a four point average, and still miss the point. That is the problem.
"Forgive them . . . they don't know what they are doing." That’s the prayer of Jesus. O come on, now, they know what they're doing. They're getting rid of a trouble-maker. They knew about trouble-makers. They had a Bible. They read the prophets. They knew what happened to God's prophets, and they kept doing it themselves, in their own time and place. You see, it is one thing to know. It's another thing to know.
It’s tempting to think you and I have overcome the ignorance. This is the age of instant information, after all. We have more knowledge at our fingertips than any generation before us. If we don't know it, we can download it in a few seconds. Maybe the world’s problem is that it needs more education. What do you think?
I will never forget what they told me as they gave me a tour of the Lackawanna County prison. It was before it got a makeover, when it still looked like a scene out of a Dicken novel. The grim surroundings matched the grim looks in the prisoners’ eyes. We were told not to speak to anybody, just look at them. Back outside, one of the jailers said, "Our society needs to educate people so that they don't commit crimes and end up in a place like this."
Then we got in a van and continued the seminar in an office park. They took us to a sound-proof conference room and spoke of employees who steal computers, raid the loading docks, and take drugs. Those were white-collar problems. What is the solution? They said, “Education. Education is the answer."
Later on I began to wonder. What kind of education keeps people out of jail? When some people would rather die than give up drugs, is their problem a lack of schooling? I may be wrong, but I do not know a school in Lackawanna County that provides a class that teaches thieves to stop stealing.
Yet we keep believing the old line that we can make progress if we accumulate more knowledge, fund more research, build bigger hard drives. We stockpile our facts and nothing really changes. We know all kinds of information, but we miss the Mystery of the Gospel, that in Jesus Christ “all things hold together."
The more I think about it, the more I believe this is the crux of the matter. Jesus says, "Jerusalem, you did not know the time of your visitation." The King came into your town and you did not recognize him. You didn’t even notice him when he prayed, "Father, forgive them. They don't know."
What don't they know? They don't know who that is, hanging on the cross.
Let this be a reminder that, before we point fingers at people who did not recognize the God who came in Christ, we can miss him too. This is part and parcel of “not knowing.” In fact, there is never an occasion in the whole Gospel of Luke when a single human person affirms Jesus as the Son of God. According to Luke, the only ones who really know Jesus are the angels and the devils. Nobody else.
Luke says that, on the day Jesus rode a donkey into the city, the crowd shouted, "Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord!" (19:38) Just a few short days later, some jokers took a magic marker and wrote an inscription over his head on a two-by-four, "This is the king of the Jews." (23:28). They did not know who he was, nor did they know what kind of king God had crowned him to be.
And do we know? We cannot claim any superiority in this. The text is a warning to good, upstanding church people. We are not better than anybody else when it comes to recognizing God. If we think we are superior, we run the risk of becoming shrouded in a fog of self-importance. It is possible to become so preoccupied with expertise and spiritual success that we miss the heart of the Gospel. And the heart of the Gospel is this: God helps those who cannot help themselves. God saves those who are otherwise un-save-able.
No amount of spiritual sophistication can unveil a hidden God. No level of education will open our eyes to glory. No scientific knowledge can carry us into the presence of the Holy One. Something else is needed. All we can do is to stand bare-headed, broken-hearted, open-handed, and say with all humility, "God forgive us; we don't know."
Today, the promise is that the prayer has been answered. That's the crux of the matter, isn't it? "Father, forgive them." The gospel is defined by forgiveness. The gospel is coming home to God and discovering that, through no work of our own, all our debts have been cancelled. All our sins are forgiven. All our pettiness has been wiped away.
It’s like the story Jesus tells of the prodigal son who comes to his senses in the pig-pen. He decides to try one more time to take advantage of the Old Man. So he cleans himself up, practices a pious little repentance speech, and goes home. When he appears at the far end of the driveway, his father drops everything. The father breaks all Middle Eastern customs and runs to his returning son. The father cuts off the canned repentance speech and throws a big "Welcome Home" party before either of his two sons can do anything about it.
All the neighbors say, "Look at that! Such shameful extravagavance, wasted on a sinner!" And Jesus smiles a sly smile and says, "You’d better look, all right. That's the very picture of God's good news."
Can you believe it? The key is in the prayer of King Jesus on the cross. "Father, forgive them." In that prayer, he uses the word "aphiemi." It means "a great big cancellation." The point is: God doesn't merely forgive our sins; God cancels them. God lets them go. God sends them away, dismisses them. That’s the word “aphiemi” – to cancel, to send away, to dismiss.
This is disruptive grace. Just imagine: even in God's heavenly domain, there's a hallway of cubicles, each one filled with accountants and bookkeepers. Every day at 2 p.m., God walks down the hall, knocks on a door post , and says, "Give me the ledger book that you have been keeping on Larry Jones." And God finds that page, finds the line where every sin have been recorded. God pulls a gallon bucket of White-Out of a robe pocket and spills it all over your page. Then God says, "Well, that's that."
You never had to ask God to do that, because Jesus has already asked him on your behalf: "Father, forgive them; they do not know what they are doing." In that prayer is the essence of the Gospel!
I like the words of an Episcopalian priest named Robert Capon, who puts it this way:
There is no sin you can commit that God in Jesus hasn't forgiven already. The only way you can get yourself in permanent Dutch is to refuse forgiveness. That's hell. The old baloney about heaven being for good guys and hell for bad guys is dead wrong. Heaven is populated entirely by forgiven sinners, not spiritual and moral aces. And hell is populated entirely by forgiven sinners. The only difference between the two groups is that those in heaven accept the forgiveness and those in hell reject it. Which is why heaven is a party - the endless wedding reception of the Lamb and his bride - and hell is nothing but the dreariest bar in town.
Jesus died for those for whom he prayed. His love is self-giving, and it is the sign and signal of God’s heart. Our part is to trust this is true, to believe God can love us so much as to give us a fresh start, a new beginning, by cancelling the wrongs we have done and the pain we have perpetuated. “Father, forgive them . . .” This is the true King’s prayer – and we trust it has been answered.
This is a strange politics. The real ruler of the world is the One who refuses to save himself. He chooses instead to save all of us, provided, of course, that we want to be saved.
(c) William Carter
All rights reserved.
Sunday, October 17, 2010
Spotting the Counterfeits
2 Timothy 3:1-17
Ordinary 29
October 17, 2010
William G. Carter
All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that everyone who belongs to God may be proficient, equipped for every good work.
In one of her books, Kathleen Norris recounts the tale of an old-timer in her South Dakota town, a man named Arlo. Arlo sat down with her at a steak house one Saturday night, and out of the blue he began talking about his grandfather. Granddad was a deeply religious man, or as Arlo put it, "a damn good Presbyterian." He went to church. He prayed regularly. More to the point, when Arlo got married, his grandfather gave him a Bible. It looked like an expensive gift, bound in white leather, with the young couple's names embossed in gold letters on the cover.
"I left it in its box and it ended up in our bedroom closet," Arlo said, "but for months, every time we saw granddad he would ask me how I liked that Bible. My wife sent a thank you note, and we thanked him in person, but somehow he couldn't let it lie. For years, every time we saw him, he always asked how we liked that Bible. I always thanked him, again and again, and he would ask me about it the next time I saw him."
"One day," he said, "I discovered the joke was on me. I finally took the Bible out of that closet and I found that granddad had placed a twenty-dollar bill at the beginning of the Book of Genesis, and at the beginning of every other book, over thirteen hundred dollars in all. And he knew I'd never find it."
It's a funny story, and it says two things which are important as I start this sermon. First, the Bible is a special book, full of all kinds of hidden treasures. And second, the Bible seems so special that we are inclined to keep it in a closet a lot longer than we should.
The text for today is a text about texts. It's one of the few passages where the Bible talks about itself. That, in itself, is instructive. Usually the Bible is too busy pointing to God, or speaking about God, or revealing what is doing for the world in Jesus Christ. It doesn't talk about itself. Not much, at least.
The psalm for today is one exception. Psalm 119 is the longest chapter in the Bible -- 176 verses -- and it is a sustained meditation upon the benefits of reading the Bible. "Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path."
At the other extreme, another place where the Bible talks itself is the last chapter of the second letter of Peter. The writer refers to the letters of Paul, which were circulating around the church at that time. "There are some things in them hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other scriptures. You therefore, beloved, since you are forewarned, beware that you are not carried away with the error of the lawless and lost your own stability. But grow in grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ." (2 Peter 3:15-18)
What is striking in our text for today is that this is the only place where the Bible refers to itself as inspired. According to this writer, "All scripture is inspired by God."
Now, for a lot of people, "inspiration" is a spooky word. Since this is the only place where that word is used in referring to the Bible, it's not clear what that means.
A few hundred years ago, with the rise of the scientific method, a number of inspiration theories began to emerge. Someone said, "Obviously God whispered the divine message into the ear of the writers, and they wrote what they were told." Someone else said, "The Holy Spirit came, and overwhelmed people, and their hands began to move mysteriously, and they began to write the words the Spirit wanted them to write." I don't know what you think about it, but such ideas sound a bit far-fetched for me. That doesn't explain why the gospel of Mark has three different endings, or why part of the eighth chapter of John (7:53-8:11) is missing from the oldest manuscripts.
The Bible has a history. It was written over thousands of years by a lot of different people in different circumstances. That's where God was -- not whispering, or moving people's arms -- but by putting the writers in the right place, at the right time, so they could tell what they had seen and heard. And the more we know about the Bible and its history, the better we can appreciate the subtle ways God has worked through the writers of Scripture.
There's a hymn by the contemporary writer Brian Wren which points to the ways in which the Bible came to be written (PH 330):
Deep in the shadows of the past, far out from settled lands,
Some nomads traveled with their God across the desert sands.
The dawn of hope for humankind was glimpsed by them alone:
A promise calling them ahead, a future yet unknown.
While others bowed to changeless gods they met a mystery:
God with an uncompleted name, "I am what I will be";
And by their tents, around their fires, in story, song, and law
They praised, remembered, handed on a past that promised more.
From Abraham to Nazareth the promise changed and grew,
while some, remembering the past, recorded what they knew,
and some, in letters or laments, in prophecy and praise,
Recovered, held, and re-expressed new hope for changing days.
For all the writings that survived, for leaders long ago,
who sifted, chose, and then preserved the Bible that we know,
Give thanks, and find its promise yet: our comfort, strength, and call,
The working model for our faith, alive with hope for all.
("Deep in the Shadows of the Past" (c) Brian Wren)
The Greek word for "inspiration" seems to have been coined for the occasion. The word is theopneustos. Theos means "God," pneustos means "breath." So the term is "God-breathed." From God's respiration came the Bible's inspiration. This was a way of announcing the Bible's authority and importance.
But ever since, people have gotten nervous about burning the Bible in the same way they are nervous about burning a flag. There was a church that was cleaning its closets. Someone found a pile of tattered Bibles. Some of the covers were missing, the pages were worn. So she threw them into a dumpster in back of the church. A Sunday School teacher was shocked. She climbed into the dumpster and tossed them out, all the time mumbling, "This is a disrespectful way to treat God's word." Then she tucked the worn-out Bibles in a closet where they could collect mildew and mold.
Like I said a few minutes ago, the Bible seems so special that we are inclined to keep it in a closet a lot longer than we should. The problem is, it doesn't do any good that way. You can point to a Bible on the shelf and say, "Behold the Word of God," but so what? I think the one thing the church must press itself to do is to take the Bible out the museum and put it in our heads, our hearts, and our souls. Inspired? Yes. But it also ought to be helpful.
It matters where we get our input. A preacher friend once preached a stewardship sermon that I thought was pretty good. Before your eyes glaze over at the mention of a stewardship sermon, I need to say he was speaking about the stewardship of our spirits, about taking care of our interior life. He notes,
"There are so many things which tempt us, with which we can fill our hearts and minds. There is music which denigrates people and extols destructive power, and music which celebrates life in its wondrous facets. We can focus on what's wrong about life and blame God, or we can consider what is right and give God glory. We can enjoy the exposes of human weakness and evil or we can marvel at human achievement and generosity in spite of weakness . . . The decision to set our minds on higher things is an act of will. It is a decision we make every day, consciously and unconsciously. It is a way of thinking and living. As we choose to guard our hearts and minds in Christ Jesus, the healing and redemption in Christ will break in upon us, and our lives will reflect it. Whatever we choose to think on makes all the difference." (quoted in Speaking of Stewardship)
That seems to be the essence of what this text has to say. God has breathed out a Bible. It's chock-full of stories, wise sayings, songs, and prayers. In giving this gift, God has given us something to think about, to reflect upon, to turn toward. Without it, it would feel like being stranded in an elevator for sixteen hours, and there's nobody interesting to talk to, and no word from beyond your own circumstances. Sooner or later, you would start bending in on yourself. But when you hear somebody announce from beyond the door, "I'm coming to help you," it makes all the difference in the world.
The fact is, there's a lot at stake. That's what prompted a church leader to write this letter to a young pastor. He knew what we could become if we simply went with the flow, took life as it comes, and coasted in the currents of the world. Did you hear how our scripture text began?
"People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boasters, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, inhuman, implacable, slanderers, profligates, brutes, haters of good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, holding to the outward form of godliness but denying its power." (2 Timothy 3:2-5)
It matters where we get our input. And it matters that we have a church to help us work it through. "As for you," says the writer, "continue in what you have learned and firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it, and how from childhood you have know the sacred writings that are able to instruct you for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus." Do you hear the presence of the church? Teaching, learning, believing, instructing. This is no private enterprise, but the building up of the whole body of Christ.
Maybe you heard about the man who turned to the Bible for guidance. He decided to pray, flip open his Bible, and put his finger down. Wherever he put his finger, that was God's word to him. So he prayed, flipped it open, and put his finger on Matthew 27:5. "And Judas went and hanged himself."
That didn't sound very inviting, so he did it again. He prayed a brief prayer, opened up the Bible, and touched down on Luke 10:37. "Go and do likewise."
Now he was starting to worry, so he decided to try one more time. He prayed. He flipped open the Good Book. He put his finger on John 13:27, where it is written, "Do quickly what you are going to do."
In that scenario, we expect the Spirit to make all the connections. It borders on the sin of tempting God; that is, demanding God to give us just what we need, at the moment when we need it.
What we have is the Bible. What we've been given is the Bible. And the Bible teaches us that the first commandment is, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, your soul, your mind, your strength."
Let me speak a pastoral word here: if you are not involved in some systematic study of scripture, your soul may be in a lot of trouble. If you come to church for a few tidbits or trivia, you're missing the great riches of our faith. If the only place you get your news is from the Wall Street Journal or MSNBC, then reality is filtered through somebody else's lenses . . . and you may not be getting the full picture of a God who loves you so much that he did not spare his own son.
The Bible is inspired; but it matters more if it's useful. And the only way to understand its usefulness is to pick it up and read it.
Peter Gomes, the Harvard University preacher, tells about the time when an anonymous benefactor offered to donate as many Bibles as were needed to fill the pews at Harvard's Memorial Church. The donor didn't specify any particular translation, so Gomes suggested the Revised Standard Version. Before the order was placed to the publisher, however, he decided to run the idea by colleagues on the staff and faculty. They were suspicious. "What is the benefactor up to?" someone asked. Another said, "If you put Bibles in the pew racks, you are only inviting people to steal them." Somebody else warned, "People will think this is a fundamentalist church if they see Bibles lying around. You might have an image problem."
Gomes realized his colleagues meant well, but he went ahead and accepted the gift. Bibles were placed in the pews of Harvard's Memorial Church, and fortunately, he says, quite a few have disappeared over the years.
You know, the highest compliment you could ever give me is if you met me at the back door and said, "I've decided to take the Bible home with me." That would be great; provided, of course, that you don't keep the book in the closet.
(c) William G. Carter
All rights reserved
Ordinary 29
October 17, 2010
William G. Carter
All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that everyone who belongs to God may be proficient, equipped for every good work.
In one of her books, Kathleen Norris recounts the tale of an old-timer in her South Dakota town, a man named Arlo. Arlo sat down with her at a steak house one Saturday night, and out of the blue he began talking about his grandfather. Granddad was a deeply religious man, or as Arlo put it, "a damn good Presbyterian." He went to church. He prayed regularly. More to the point, when Arlo got married, his grandfather gave him a Bible. It looked like an expensive gift, bound in white leather, with the young couple's names embossed in gold letters on the cover.
"I left it in its box and it ended up in our bedroom closet," Arlo said, "but for months, every time we saw granddad he would ask me how I liked that Bible. My wife sent a thank you note, and we thanked him in person, but somehow he couldn't let it lie. For years, every time we saw him, he always asked how we liked that Bible. I always thanked him, again and again, and he would ask me about it the next time I saw him."
"One day," he said, "I discovered the joke was on me. I finally took the Bible out of that closet and I found that granddad had placed a twenty-dollar bill at the beginning of the Book of Genesis, and at the beginning of every other book, over thirteen hundred dollars in all. And he knew I'd never find it."
It's a funny story, and it says two things which are important as I start this sermon. First, the Bible is a special book, full of all kinds of hidden treasures. And second, the Bible seems so special that we are inclined to keep it in a closet a lot longer than we should.
The text for today is a text about texts. It's one of the few passages where the Bible talks about itself. That, in itself, is instructive. Usually the Bible is too busy pointing to God, or speaking about God, or revealing what is doing for the world in Jesus Christ. It doesn't talk about itself. Not much, at least.
The psalm for today is one exception. Psalm 119 is the longest chapter in the Bible -- 176 verses -- and it is a sustained meditation upon the benefits of reading the Bible. "Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path."
At the other extreme, another place where the Bible talks itself is the last chapter of the second letter of Peter. The writer refers to the letters of Paul, which were circulating around the church at that time. "There are some things in them hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other scriptures. You therefore, beloved, since you are forewarned, beware that you are not carried away with the error of the lawless and lost your own stability. But grow in grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ." (2 Peter 3:15-18)
What is striking in our text for today is that this is the only place where the Bible refers to itself as inspired. According to this writer, "All scripture is inspired by God."
Now, for a lot of people, "inspiration" is a spooky word. Since this is the only place where that word is used in referring to the Bible, it's not clear what that means.
A few hundred years ago, with the rise of the scientific method, a number of inspiration theories began to emerge. Someone said, "Obviously God whispered the divine message into the ear of the writers, and they wrote what they were told." Someone else said, "The Holy Spirit came, and overwhelmed people, and their hands began to move mysteriously, and they began to write the words the Spirit wanted them to write." I don't know what you think about it, but such ideas sound a bit far-fetched for me. That doesn't explain why the gospel of Mark has three different endings, or why part of the eighth chapter of John (7:53-8:11) is missing from the oldest manuscripts.
The Bible has a history. It was written over thousands of years by a lot of different people in different circumstances. That's where God was -- not whispering, or moving people's arms -- but by putting the writers in the right place, at the right time, so they could tell what they had seen and heard. And the more we know about the Bible and its history, the better we can appreciate the subtle ways God has worked through the writers of Scripture.
There's a hymn by the contemporary writer Brian Wren which points to the ways in which the Bible came to be written (PH 330):
Deep in the shadows of the past, far out from settled lands,
Some nomads traveled with their God across the desert sands.
The dawn of hope for humankind was glimpsed by them alone:
A promise calling them ahead, a future yet unknown.
While others bowed to changeless gods they met a mystery:
God with an uncompleted name, "I am what I will be";
And by their tents, around their fires, in story, song, and law
They praised, remembered, handed on a past that promised more.
From Abraham to Nazareth the promise changed and grew,
while some, remembering the past, recorded what they knew,
and some, in letters or laments, in prophecy and praise,
Recovered, held, and re-expressed new hope for changing days.
For all the writings that survived, for leaders long ago,
who sifted, chose, and then preserved the Bible that we know,
Give thanks, and find its promise yet: our comfort, strength, and call,
The working model for our faith, alive with hope for all.
("Deep in the Shadows of the Past" (c) Brian Wren)
The Greek word for "inspiration" seems to have been coined for the occasion. The word is theopneustos. Theos means "God," pneustos means "breath." So the term is "God-breathed." From God's respiration came the Bible's inspiration. This was a way of announcing the Bible's authority and importance.
But ever since, people have gotten nervous about burning the Bible in the same way they are nervous about burning a flag. There was a church that was cleaning its closets. Someone found a pile of tattered Bibles. Some of the covers were missing, the pages were worn. So she threw them into a dumpster in back of the church. A Sunday School teacher was shocked. She climbed into the dumpster and tossed them out, all the time mumbling, "This is a disrespectful way to treat God's word." Then she tucked the worn-out Bibles in a closet where they could collect mildew and mold.
Like I said a few minutes ago, the Bible seems so special that we are inclined to keep it in a closet a lot longer than we should. The problem is, it doesn't do any good that way. You can point to a Bible on the shelf and say, "Behold the Word of God," but so what? I think the one thing the church must press itself to do is to take the Bible out the museum and put it in our heads, our hearts, and our souls. Inspired? Yes. But it also ought to be helpful.
It matters where we get our input. A preacher friend once preached a stewardship sermon that I thought was pretty good. Before your eyes glaze over at the mention of a stewardship sermon, I need to say he was speaking about the stewardship of our spirits, about taking care of our interior life. He notes,
"There are so many things which tempt us, with which we can fill our hearts and minds. There is music which denigrates people and extols destructive power, and music which celebrates life in its wondrous facets. We can focus on what's wrong about life and blame God, or we can consider what is right and give God glory. We can enjoy the exposes of human weakness and evil or we can marvel at human achievement and generosity in spite of weakness . . . The decision to set our minds on higher things is an act of will. It is a decision we make every day, consciously and unconsciously. It is a way of thinking and living. As we choose to guard our hearts and minds in Christ Jesus, the healing and redemption in Christ will break in upon us, and our lives will reflect it. Whatever we choose to think on makes all the difference." (quoted in Speaking of Stewardship)
That seems to be the essence of what this text has to say. God has breathed out a Bible. It's chock-full of stories, wise sayings, songs, and prayers. In giving this gift, God has given us something to think about, to reflect upon, to turn toward. Without it, it would feel like being stranded in an elevator for sixteen hours, and there's nobody interesting to talk to, and no word from beyond your own circumstances. Sooner or later, you would start bending in on yourself. But when you hear somebody announce from beyond the door, "I'm coming to help you," it makes all the difference in the world.
The fact is, there's a lot at stake. That's what prompted a church leader to write this letter to a young pastor. He knew what we could become if we simply went with the flow, took life as it comes, and coasted in the currents of the world. Did you hear how our scripture text began?
"People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boasters, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, inhuman, implacable, slanderers, profligates, brutes, haters of good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, holding to the outward form of godliness but denying its power." (2 Timothy 3:2-5)
It matters where we get our input. And it matters that we have a church to help us work it through. "As for you," says the writer, "continue in what you have learned and firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it, and how from childhood you have know the sacred writings that are able to instruct you for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus." Do you hear the presence of the church? Teaching, learning, believing, instructing. This is no private enterprise, but the building up of the whole body of Christ.
Maybe you heard about the man who turned to the Bible for guidance. He decided to pray, flip open his Bible, and put his finger down. Wherever he put his finger, that was God's word to him. So he prayed, flipped it open, and put his finger on Matthew 27:5. "And Judas went and hanged himself."
That didn't sound very inviting, so he did it again. He prayed a brief prayer, opened up the Bible, and touched down on Luke 10:37. "Go and do likewise."
Now he was starting to worry, so he decided to try one more time. He prayed. He flipped open the Good Book. He put his finger on John 13:27, where it is written, "Do quickly what you are going to do."
In that scenario, we expect the Spirit to make all the connections. It borders on the sin of tempting God; that is, demanding God to give us just what we need, at the moment when we need it.
What we have is the Bible. What we've been given is the Bible. And the Bible teaches us that the first commandment is, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, your soul, your mind, your strength."
Let me speak a pastoral word here: if you are not involved in some systematic study of scripture, your soul may be in a lot of trouble. If you come to church for a few tidbits or trivia, you're missing the great riches of our faith. If the only place you get your news is from the Wall Street Journal or MSNBC, then reality is filtered through somebody else's lenses . . . and you may not be getting the full picture of a God who loves you so much that he did not spare his own son.
The Bible is inspired; but it matters more if it's useful. And the only way to understand its usefulness is to pick it up and read it.
Peter Gomes, the Harvard University preacher, tells about the time when an anonymous benefactor offered to donate as many Bibles as were needed to fill the pews at Harvard's Memorial Church. The donor didn't specify any particular translation, so Gomes suggested the Revised Standard Version. Before the order was placed to the publisher, however, he decided to run the idea by colleagues on the staff and faculty. They were suspicious. "What is the benefactor up to?" someone asked. Another said, "If you put Bibles in the pew racks, you are only inviting people to steal them." Somebody else warned, "People will think this is a fundamentalist church if they see Bibles lying around. You might have an image problem."
Gomes realized his colleagues meant well, but he went ahead and accepted the gift. Bibles were placed in the pews of Harvard's Memorial Church, and fortunately, he says, quite a few have disappeared over the years.
You know, the highest compliment you could ever give me is if you met me at the back door and said, "I've decided to take the Bible home with me." That would be great; provided, of course, that you don't keep the book in the closet.
(c) William G. Carter
All rights reserved
Sunday, October 10, 2010
Enduring Everything
2 Timothy 2:8-19
Ordinary 28
October 10, 2010
William G. Carter
Therefore I endure everything for the sake of the elect, so that they may also obtain the salvation that is in Christ Jesus, with eternal glory. The saying is sure: If we have died with him, we will also live with him; if we endure, we will also reign with him ... But God’s firm foundation stands, bearing this inscription: “The Lord knows those who are his.”
There was a picture in one of those real estate booklets that you can pick up at the supermarket. It was a beautiful home, like so many of the homes in this area. It had a generous amount of space, two fireplaces, and plenty of amenities. Given the zip code, it seemed competitively priced. But it was the realtor’s description that caught my eye: “Retreat here every evening,” it said, “in a stress-free, no hassle neighborhood.”
I had to look twice to see the address, only to confirm that no street was actually listed. I couldn’t imagine a stress-free, no-hassle neighborhood. In fact, I can’t imagine a stress-free, no-hassle home. Something is always perking in the place where I live, and I imagine that is probably the case for a good number of all of you. Yet that was somebody was trying to sell – a quiet retreat from the annoyances of everyday life, a peaceful spot where there was never any noise, never any troubles, never any hassles or stress. If somebody knows of such a place, perhaps they can share the address with the rest of us.
One thing we can say for sure: the realtor, the salesman, was not the apostle Paul. In the letter before us, Paul says he is in prison again. “I suffer hardship,” he says. “I am chained like a criminal.” It seemed like he was always running afoul of somebody or something. The New Testament accounts differ on the details, but all of them agree that Paul spent a lot of time behind bars. When he wasn’t in jail, he was often on the run. His life was met with one trouble after another.
Yet he made time to tell people that Jesus had come, to start congregations, to study and read and write letters. He preached constantly, taught the scriptures, raised money, stayed on his toes. As a direct consequence of what God commanded him to do, Paul was repeatedly getting into difficulty. He never had the luxury of a stress-free, no-hassle life. He rarely knew the blessing of a quiet retreat. Yet he kept going. He says in the text, “I am enduring everything.” How can we explain somebody like that?
Sometimes in his letters, he gets very specific. Like in his second letter to the Corinthians: “Here’s my list of woe,” he writes. “Afflictions, hardships, calamities, imprisonments, riots, labors, sleepless nights, hunger, and at least five different beatings.” It’s like he is singing the old spiritual, “Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen.” I wonder if, in fact, Paul invented that old spiritual.
It’s enough to make a sane person say, “Paul, take it easy. Catch your breath. Take a vacation. There’s no reason to put yourself into the ground.” Certainly we go through tough patches – all of us do. But for the apostle Paul, it never seemed to let up.
I wonder if he was one of those people who always need to have some kind of crisis going on. Maybe you know the type. Some of them are adrenaline junkies. Some of them are so accustomed to crisis that if they don't have a current emergency, they don't know what to do. They might even stir something up in order to feel alive. I think of my friend Lindsey in New Jersey. Something was always going on. Cash was always running low. Her mother gave her grief. The landlord was a pain in the neck. Her boss gave her trouble.
One day she applied for a new job with more benefits, better hours, and a higher salary. To her complete surprise, she got the job. Her first response was, "I don't know what to do. I'm expecting the other shoe to drop." Well, the shoe never dropped. She started to worry it would. She gave herself an ulcer waiting for problems that never actually came. In time, she made a ruckus at work. They let her go and she said, “See? I told you it wasn’t going to work out.”
All through Paul’s letters, he talks about his troubles. And then, there’s Luke, the main historian of the New Testament. In book of Acts, Luke tells a lot of Paul’s troubles too. The stress-free, no-hassle American church doesn’t know what to do with this old jailbird. He’s not very successful. He doesn’t have a television ministry. He doesn’t have a sanctuary with 25,000 people in the pews. At best, he has a couple of shirts with wide stripes and a number of wounds.
It’s enough to wonder how a guy like that can endure. How does he keep going? How does he stay at it? How does he keep his hope going?
Maybe it’s a personality trait. There are some people who are weathered. They have been staying at it for so long, that’s all they know how to do. I was talking to my grandmother yesterday morning. She was asking about last Sunday’s party here at our church. She said, “I’m amazed those people have put up with you for so long.” I said, “Grandma, suffering produces character.”
“Besides,” I said, “you are 96 years old. You have been putting up with me a lot longer than they have.” She said, “Yes, I have; I guess I’m stubborn.” She paused and then she said, “It’s a family trait.” Indeed it is.
Sometimes you stay at it because that is what you have to do. If money is tight, you don’t spend it. If love is painful, you don’t waste it. If illness threatens, you fight it. Sheer stubbornness gets a lot of people through a lot of things. It’s one of those endearing traits I’ve learned to love in the natives of northeastern Pennsylvania. Many of the transplants come in late and leave early. But the people who have lived in this region all their lives have learned to endure. The soil is rocky. The sunlight is limited. The winters are long. But by gum, they are going to hang in there. (That’s one of the reasons I married a woman from Shickshinny.)
For some people, endurance is a matter of habit. It’s what they know. If the New Testament tells us half of what the apostle Paul had to endure, it is obvious that he had accumulated experience in simply getting through things.
He had plenty of opportunity to rate the beds in the various prisons where he stayed. He had one-star accommodations most of the time. The beds were hard in Philippi, but an earthquake came at an opportune time. In Caesarea, a governor wanted Paul to give him a bribe, but the centurion was kind-hearted. In Ephesus, there was a riot that almost got him killed, but he befriended a runaway slave and led him to confess Christ. In one troubled situation after another, he simply stayed at it. And he wanted Timothy to stay at it, too.
The brief letter we hear today gives us some insight into the troubles in Timothy’s church. There were some mouthy people who loved to dispute anything that Timothy said. They were “wrangling over words,” bickering over opinions, letting the sulphuric acid of their criticism eat away at one another’s love. Paul says a little later in the text, “Have nothing to do with stupid and senseless controversies; you know that they breed quarrels.”
In Timothy’s church, the primary way that people hurt one another was through their words. They said nasty things. They told lies. They made up heresies. And they gossiped. Paul said, “Timothy, avoid all of that! All that chatter is like gangrene, eating away at the Body of Christ. It will kill all of you, so cut it out!”
Paul even names two of the resident wise guys, Hymenaeus and Philetus. There they are, now permanently named in scripture as two of the fellows who lied about Jesus. I wonder how their great-grandchildren felt about that, to open their Bibles someday and see their forebears’ names permanently inscribed. But Paul had to take a stand, and he tells us why: “they are upsetting the faith of some people.”
You know, that’s why Paul was willing to put up with all of the nonsense. That’s what he wants to impart to young Timothy – that you “do your best to present yourself to God,” for God’s approval alone, and you work hard, no matter what comes, so that people might claim the gift of “salvation that is in Christ Jesus.” If it kills you, well, remember that it killed Jesus. This prompts Paul to remember what the church has said from the beginning: “If we have died with him, we will also live with him; and if we endure, we will also reign with him.”
Every day, there is so much that all of us have to endure. Some people among us today are carrying burdens that are really, really heavy. Some need support, others are still figuring out what they need. Some of them are just plain durable pack mules – load it on, and they will keep carrying it. Others simply want their privacy and their dignity to stay intact; they will not be helped by corrosive gossip behind their backs.
Whatever our need, today we take our inspiration from the apostle Paul. “I endure everything,” he confesses. “I endure everything for the sake of God’s chosen ones, so that they might know the glory of God shines in our crucified Savior.” In a single one-liner, Paul synthesizes all that can be said of God’s covenantal faith: “The Lord knows those who are his.” That is why we endure: so that the glory of a faithful God can shine its saving light on everything and everybody who belongs to God.
That reminds me of a wonderful lyric by Leonard Cohen:
Ring the bells that still can ring / Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything / That's how the light gets in. (“Anthem”)
There's a minister I know by the name of Tom. He served a church near Utica, NY, and got along with everybody, everybody except for a man named Howard. If Tom met Howard at the door and said, "Good morning,” Howard would say, "What's so good about it?" If Tom said, “Nice day,” Howard replied, “That’s what you think.” If Tom suggested something new, Howard would say, "We've never done it that way before," and the leaders would vote it down. Tom felt opposed at every point, bothered at every opportunity, annoyed by one petty complaint after another.
Tom had a terrible time with the man. His only relief came by taking his friends out to lunch, and telling them how badly Howard behaved. "Wow!" they said to him. "You're really strong to put up with him." It made Tom feel better. He wore his bruised pride like a badge.
One weekend Howard went into the hospital for surgery. Tom wanted to see him, but he didn't want to have to endure all the trouble of seeing him. He flipped a coin, called out "heads." It came up tails, so he pulled on his coat and went to see Howard. This day, however, the old cuss seemed rather pleasant. His speech was gentle and affectionate. He smiled at his visitor. Tom thought: "Wow! This guy must be really sick!"
At the end of that brief visit, Tom said, "Howard, let's pray." Howard nodded. It sounded like a good idea. Tom took Howard's hand, closed his eyes, and paused for a second. Later he confessed that he wanted to pray, "Lord, if this is how Howard acts when he is sick, don’t let him get better.” But the only words that formed on his lips were, "Lord, make Howard well."
Even then, just then, just as Tom started to say it, Howard spoke up. "Lord," he said, "Tom is trying to be a good Christian. He has a lot of work to do, and he has a long way to go..." (Tom groaned and thought, “Here it comes. He never gives me a break.”
But listen to what Howard prayed, “Lord, Tom is trying to be a good Christian. He has a lot of work to do, and he has a long way to go. But Lord, you keep working with both of us. Amen." Did you hear that? He prayed, “Lord, you keep working with both of us."
That's what we want, isn't it? We want God to keep working with all of us, among us, with us, in spite of us, within us, beyond us. The Lord knows those who are his, and the circle is probably bigger than we think.
(c) William G. Carter
All rights reserved
Ordinary 28
October 10, 2010
William G. Carter
Therefore I endure everything for the sake of the elect, so that they may also obtain the salvation that is in Christ Jesus, with eternal glory. The saying is sure: If we have died with him, we will also live with him; if we endure, we will also reign with him ... But God’s firm foundation stands, bearing this inscription: “The Lord knows those who are his.”
There was a picture in one of those real estate booklets that you can pick up at the supermarket. It was a beautiful home, like so many of the homes in this area. It had a generous amount of space, two fireplaces, and plenty of amenities. Given the zip code, it seemed competitively priced. But it was the realtor’s description that caught my eye: “Retreat here every evening,” it said, “in a stress-free, no hassle neighborhood.”
I had to look twice to see the address, only to confirm that no street was actually listed. I couldn’t imagine a stress-free, no-hassle neighborhood. In fact, I can’t imagine a stress-free, no-hassle home. Something is always perking in the place where I live, and I imagine that is probably the case for a good number of all of you. Yet that was somebody was trying to sell – a quiet retreat from the annoyances of everyday life, a peaceful spot where there was never any noise, never any troubles, never any hassles or stress. If somebody knows of such a place, perhaps they can share the address with the rest of us.
One thing we can say for sure: the realtor, the salesman, was not the apostle Paul. In the letter before us, Paul says he is in prison again. “I suffer hardship,” he says. “I am chained like a criminal.” It seemed like he was always running afoul of somebody or something. The New Testament accounts differ on the details, but all of them agree that Paul spent a lot of time behind bars. When he wasn’t in jail, he was often on the run. His life was met with one trouble after another.
Yet he made time to tell people that Jesus had come, to start congregations, to study and read and write letters. He preached constantly, taught the scriptures, raised money, stayed on his toes. As a direct consequence of what God commanded him to do, Paul was repeatedly getting into difficulty. He never had the luxury of a stress-free, no-hassle life. He rarely knew the blessing of a quiet retreat. Yet he kept going. He says in the text, “I am enduring everything.” How can we explain somebody like that?
Sometimes in his letters, he gets very specific. Like in his second letter to the Corinthians: “Here’s my list of woe,” he writes. “Afflictions, hardships, calamities, imprisonments, riots, labors, sleepless nights, hunger, and at least five different beatings.” It’s like he is singing the old spiritual, “Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen.” I wonder if, in fact, Paul invented that old spiritual.
It’s enough to make a sane person say, “Paul, take it easy. Catch your breath. Take a vacation. There’s no reason to put yourself into the ground.” Certainly we go through tough patches – all of us do. But for the apostle Paul, it never seemed to let up.
I wonder if he was one of those people who always need to have some kind of crisis going on. Maybe you know the type. Some of them are adrenaline junkies. Some of them are so accustomed to crisis that if they don't have a current emergency, they don't know what to do. They might even stir something up in order to feel alive. I think of my friend Lindsey in New Jersey. Something was always going on. Cash was always running low. Her mother gave her grief. The landlord was a pain in the neck. Her boss gave her trouble.
One day she applied for a new job with more benefits, better hours, and a higher salary. To her complete surprise, she got the job. Her first response was, "I don't know what to do. I'm expecting the other shoe to drop." Well, the shoe never dropped. She started to worry it would. She gave herself an ulcer waiting for problems that never actually came. In time, she made a ruckus at work. They let her go and she said, “See? I told you it wasn’t going to work out.”
All through Paul’s letters, he talks about his troubles. And then, there’s Luke, the main historian of the New Testament. In book of Acts, Luke tells a lot of Paul’s troubles too. The stress-free, no-hassle American church doesn’t know what to do with this old jailbird. He’s not very successful. He doesn’t have a television ministry. He doesn’t have a sanctuary with 25,000 people in the pews. At best, he has a couple of shirts with wide stripes and a number of wounds.
It’s enough to wonder how a guy like that can endure. How does he keep going? How does he stay at it? How does he keep his hope going?
Maybe it’s a personality trait. There are some people who are weathered. They have been staying at it for so long, that’s all they know how to do. I was talking to my grandmother yesterday morning. She was asking about last Sunday’s party here at our church. She said, “I’m amazed those people have put up with you for so long.” I said, “Grandma, suffering produces character.”
“Besides,” I said, “you are 96 years old. You have been putting up with me a lot longer than they have.” She said, “Yes, I have; I guess I’m stubborn.” She paused and then she said, “It’s a family trait.” Indeed it is.
Sometimes you stay at it because that is what you have to do. If money is tight, you don’t spend it. If love is painful, you don’t waste it. If illness threatens, you fight it. Sheer stubbornness gets a lot of people through a lot of things. It’s one of those endearing traits I’ve learned to love in the natives of northeastern Pennsylvania. Many of the transplants come in late and leave early. But the people who have lived in this region all their lives have learned to endure. The soil is rocky. The sunlight is limited. The winters are long. But by gum, they are going to hang in there. (That’s one of the reasons I married a woman from Shickshinny.)
For some people, endurance is a matter of habit. It’s what they know. If the New Testament tells us half of what the apostle Paul had to endure, it is obvious that he had accumulated experience in simply getting through things.
He had plenty of opportunity to rate the beds in the various prisons where he stayed. He had one-star accommodations most of the time. The beds were hard in Philippi, but an earthquake came at an opportune time. In Caesarea, a governor wanted Paul to give him a bribe, but the centurion was kind-hearted. In Ephesus, there was a riot that almost got him killed, but he befriended a runaway slave and led him to confess Christ. In one troubled situation after another, he simply stayed at it. And he wanted Timothy to stay at it, too.
The brief letter we hear today gives us some insight into the troubles in Timothy’s church. There were some mouthy people who loved to dispute anything that Timothy said. They were “wrangling over words,” bickering over opinions, letting the sulphuric acid of their criticism eat away at one another’s love. Paul says a little later in the text, “Have nothing to do with stupid and senseless controversies; you know that they breed quarrels.”
In Timothy’s church, the primary way that people hurt one another was through their words. They said nasty things. They told lies. They made up heresies. And they gossiped. Paul said, “Timothy, avoid all of that! All that chatter is like gangrene, eating away at the Body of Christ. It will kill all of you, so cut it out!”
Paul even names two of the resident wise guys, Hymenaeus and Philetus. There they are, now permanently named in scripture as two of the fellows who lied about Jesus. I wonder how their great-grandchildren felt about that, to open their Bibles someday and see their forebears’ names permanently inscribed. But Paul had to take a stand, and he tells us why: “they are upsetting the faith of some people.”
You know, that’s why Paul was willing to put up with all of the nonsense. That’s what he wants to impart to young Timothy – that you “do your best to present yourself to God,” for God’s approval alone, and you work hard, no matter what comes, so that people might claim the gift of “salvation that is in Christ Jesus.” If it kills you, well, remember that it killed Jesus. This prompts Paul to remember what the church has said from the beginning: “If we have died with him, we will also live with him; and if we endure, we will also reign with him.”
Every day, there is so much that all of us have to endure. Some people among us today are carrying burdens that are really, really heavy. Some need support, others are still figuring out what they need. Some of them are just plain durable pack mules – load it on, and they will keep carrying it. Others simply want their privacy and their dignity to stay intact; they will not be helped by corrosive gossip behind their backs.
Whatever our need, today we take our inspiration from the apostle Paul. “I endure everything,” he confesses. “I endure everything for the sake of God’s chosen ones, so that they might know the glory of God shines in our crucified Savior.” In a single one-liner, Paul synthesizes all that can be said of God’s covenantal faith: “The Lord knows those who are his.” That is why we endure: so that the glory of a faithful God can shine its saving light on everything and everybody who belongs to God.
That reminds me of a wonderful lyric by Leonard Cohen:
Ring the bells that still can ring / Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything / That's how the light gets in. (“Anthem”)
There's a minister I know by the name of Tom. He served a church near Utica, NY, and got along with everybody, everybody except for a man named Howard. If Tom met Howard at the door and said, "Good morning,” Howard would say, "What's so good about it?" If Tom said, “Nice day,” Howard replied, “That’s what you think.” If Tom suggested something new, Howard would say, "We've never done it that way before," and the leaders would vote it down. Tom felt opposed at every point, bothered at every opportunity, annoyed by one petty complaint after another.
Tom had a terrible time with the man. His only relief came by taking his friends out to lunch, and telling them how badly Howard behaved. "Wow!" they said to him. "You're really strong to put up with him." It made Tom feel better. He wore his bruised pride like a badge.
One weekend Howard went into the hospital for surgery. Tom wanted to see him, but he didn't want to have to endure all the trouble of seeing him. He flipped a coin, called out "heads." It came up tails, so he pulled on his coat and went to see Howard. This day, however, the old cuss seemed rather pleasant. His speech was gentle and affectionate. He smiled at his visitor. Tom thought: "Wow! This guy must be really sick!"
At the end of that brief visit, Tom said, "Howard, let's pray." Howard nodded. It sounded like a good idea. Tom took Howard's hand, closed his eyes, and paused for a second. Later he confessed that he wanted to pray, "Lord, if this is how Howard acts when he is sick, don’t let him get better.” But the only words that formed on his lips were, "Lord, make Howard well."
Even then, just then, just as Tom started to say it, Howard spoke up. "Lord," he said, "Tom is trying to be a good Christian. He has a lot of work to do, and he has a long way to go..." (Tom groaned and thought, “Here it comes. He never gives me a break.”
But listen to what Howard prayed, “Lord, Tom is trying to be a good Christian. He has a lot of work to do, and he has a long way to go. But Lord, you keep working with both of us. Amen." Did you hear that? He prayed, “Lord, you keep working with both of us."
That's what we want, isn't it? We want God to keep working with all of us, among us, with us, in spite of us, within us, beyond us. The Lord knows those who are his, and the circle is probably bigger than we think.
(c) William G. Carter
All rights reserved
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