Give It Up

Ephesians 2:1-10

Lent 4

March 15, 2015

William G. Carter

You were dead through the trespasses and sins in which you once lived, following the course of this world, following the ruler of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work among those who are disobedient. All of us once lived among them in the passions of our flesh, following the desires of flesh and senses, and we were by nature children of wrath, like everyone else. But God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved— and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the ages to come he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness towards us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God— not the result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life.

One Sunday morning in her house in South Dakota, Kathleen Norris cooked breakfast for a house guest. Her husband David had brought him home from the bar he tended. He was in no condition to drive, and spent the night on their living room couch. Now the bacon and eggs were sizzling, and their guest Willie was in a talkative mood.

He was between jobs, he said, having done a number of jobs on the oil fields. He made a lot of money, blown most of it, and schemed about making some more. Somewhere in Wyoming, he met up with some drug dealers. The possibility of making some really big money emerged, and Willie found himself hanging around some colorful new acquaintances. One of his colleagues had disappeared, he said, only to be found tied up and full of bullet holes on the Gulf of Mexico. Kathleen poked the bacon and turned down the burner.

He and his main partner were doing pretty well, he said. They had a lot of contacts, the network was building, and Willie felt good to connect with somebody who had a lot of experience. Then one day, as they were riding down the road in a small city, his partner pulled off onto the shoulder and came to a stop. He had just passed somebody driving in the opposite direction and thought about turning around to follow him.

Reaching under the seat to pull out a gun Willie did not know was there, the man said matter-of-factly, “I need to kill him, but he’s with someone, and I don’t know who. So it will have to wait.” Kathleen listened to this, and flipped the eggs with a spatula.

Willie said, “It was right then I decided to get out. It was over my head.” Kathleen said she looked out the window, saw the neighbors walking to church, and said, “Well, Willie, I think you did the right thing.”[1]

It’s a wild story, but maybe not so wild for people in church, because it’s a story of salvation. Christian people, like the Jewish people before them, have plenty of stories about being saved, about getting rescued from danger or delivered from a terrifying threat. That’s what the word “salvation” is all about. Life is full of situations that are over our heads. We might have been wiped out or lost, but God came to help at the appropriate time.

In the Jewish scriptures, the verb “to save” (yasha) occurs in military battles, as God or someone God appoints intervenes to rescue the people. Moses raises his arms or God sends a great wind, and the people are saved.

The New Testament word is “sozo,” which has connotations for health. Remember what Jesus says to countless people? “Your faith has made you well” – which can also be translated, “Your faith has saved you.”[2] Saving is a kind of healing. It is a restoration of the whole person, a setting-right of what has been damaged and broken.

God comes to save. That’s the theme announced in our scripture texts. From Psalm 107, “Let the redeemed of the Lord say so, those he redeemed from trouble” (107:2). And the Psalm remembers all kinds of trouble: wandering in the desert, stumbling in the dark, at risk at sea, and sick to the stomach from the effects of sin. God saves one person after another, so “let the redeemed say so.”

From the third chapter of John: God sent the Son into the world to turn on the lights, and the world shouted back, “Turn out the lights!” We can understand that. I remember checking into a hotel room, unlocking the door, and turning on the lights. There was a lot of motion along the floor. If I had not turned on the lights, I would not have seen the cockroaches. That’s what happens when Jesus comes as the light of the world: you see all the disgusting stuff that has been flourishing in the dark. Jesus comes, not to condemn, but to save us from it.

And then, the second chapter of Ephesians, one of those passages that ignited the Protestant Reformation: “You have been saved by grace through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God.” It is one of the clearest statements of truth in the entire Bible. God is the One who does the saving. God is the One who is gracious to those who really don’t deserve it. Out of the richness of God’s mercy, out of the great love with which God loves us, even in the midst of the great disasters we create for ourselves and others, God shows us “grace in kindness towards us in Christ Jesus.”

Somebody paraphrased those words at the church door last Sunday. Those of us who were here heard Paul’s description of the cross in First Corinthians, as “God’s weakness, stronger than human strength,” and “God’s foolishness, greater than human wisdom.” And one of you said to me, “I suppose if we could have saved the world through human strength and human wisdom, it would have already gotten done. So God had to save the world through Jesus.” Bingo, that’s right.

Here in the second chapter of Ephesians, it’s pretty clear the world is a mess. You think that’s a new diagnosis? No, it’s the same old mess it always was, except now we have cable TV, video games, and other complications from technology. It’s pretty much the same old mess. In our text, the early church preacher describes it a number of ways:

Following the course of the world,

Following the ruler of the power of the air,

Living in the passions of our flesh,

Following the desires of flesh and senses,

We are by nature children of wrath, like everyone else

I wanted to say, “Wait, that’s pretty cruel,” but then I drove downtown after yesterday’s parade. There were still a few glimpses of human wreckage on Lackawanna Avenue. Some bare-chested kid was covered in green paint. A blond co-ed was weaving on her feet, propped up by a couple of friends. A bar bouncer was escorting a guy with a black eye. I suppose they all went there to have a good time. I saw it as evidence of what the New Testament calls “the desires of the flesh.” That’s code language of doing whatever you want, whether it’s tossing down a gallon of Guinness or riding in the front seat with a murderous drug dealer.   

Once again, I return to the insight of last week’s back door theologian. If the world could get saved by our strength or wisdom, it would have been done. If only we could save the world by educating everybody, or organizing everybody, or spreading the wealth around, or spreading democracy around, or getting the money out of politics, or reducing carbon emissions, or whatever else is going to be proposed . . . if only, if only…

The letter to the Ephesians knows we are pretty much helpless to improve our lot. Oh, there are things we can do: “give up malice,” “tell the truth,” “work a honest day’s work,” “share what you have with the needy,” “use words to build up and not tear down,” “honor your parents,” “love your loved ones,” and “be kind to one another.”[3] All of this is good advice from Ephesians.

But the world’s struggle is a cosmic struggle. We are not merely contending with human frailty but with evil that has turned loose in the cosmos, with the powers and principalities (6:12). So the God of heaven has had to deal with this through the death and resurrection of Jesus. In a supreme act of rebellion, the world put the Son of God on a cross, but God used that event to kill off the final power of all that is evil. Evil still sputters, but in heaven it has been defeated.

And in the raising of Jesus from the dead, God has shown us where everything is headed. Here is how Ephesians puts it: “We have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace that he lavished on us” (1:7-8). Faith is trusting this is true.

I have never made breakfast for a former drug dealer in my kitchen. At least, I don’t think so. But I had a moment in high school where a friend asked me to do him a favor. He was a basketball player, a really great guy. I admired him. He was good looking, friendly, as athletic as I wanted to be.

One day, I was visiting at his house and he said, “Can you take this shoebox and keep it for me?” It was a size 13 Converse box, wrapped tightly in masking tape. I said, “What is it?” He replied, “I’m not going to tell you, because it’s better if you don’t know.” He was secretive about it, and lowered his voice: “My parents have gotten nosy and I don’t want them to find out about this. Keep it for a while.”

So I did. I put it on the top shelf of my bedroom closet, way in the back, right next to my box of Boy Scout merit badge pamphlets. That night, I didn’t sleep a wink. Every creak in the hallway, I was sure my parents were going to bust in and bust me – and whatever was in that shoebox wasn’t even mine. Next night, I slept a little better, and then the week went on and I didn’t think about it.

A couple days later, I got home from school, went up to my bedroom, and my mom is poking around in the closet. I just about died. It was all I could do to keep from looking suspicious, which meant, of course, that I looked guilty as hell. Mom looked up at me and said, “What did you do?” I stammered out, “Nothing…” She replied, “I’m getting rid of your some old shoes.” She stood with an armful, and I helped her out the door.

When I recovered from my near-heart attack, and when the coast was clear, I took the shoebox back to my friend and said, “I can’t have this in my house.” He looked at me, somewhat sorrowful, and said, “I don’t want it either. It was a really big mistake.” So we walked down his street, saw a garbage can outside somebody’s garage, and dropped the box inside. I never learned what was inside it, although I have a few ideas.

I tell you the story because of three particular emotions that touched my soul that afternoon.  The first was relief, profound relief. I could have been caught, I could have been found out,  I could have been grounded until I was thirty-five – but I got off without so much as an accusation. The second emotion was guilt, dark, heavy guilt. I was sure I was doing something wrong, that my friend had been wrong, that we were part of some nasty business that had to be covered up.

But here is the third emotion, the one that counts the most: I was feeling freedom. By some heavenly protection, I was steered away from a situation that could have turned out badly. I could have been punished – perhaps my guilt was my punishment – but the guilt was now lifted, the bad business was cancelled, the evil shoebox was gone, and I was free. Completely free. That’s the first time I can remember what the grace of God is all about. And I knew that grace so strongly that I decided, then and there, to never get tangled up in a mess like that ever again. Instead I have gotten tangled up in hundreds, thousands, of other messes, many of my own making.

Here’s the thing: God saves us an act of grace. Not because we are good, but because God is good. “Rich in mercy” is how our scripture text says it. Spend a little Sabbath time this afternoon remembering all the moments in your life that could have gone a lot worse than they did. Breathe a sigh of relief, let go of the guilt, and take the freedom to start anew.  

This is what it’s like to let go of our sins and become alive in Christ. We drop the crazy lie that we have done everything right. We turn away from the things that are killing us and killing other people.  We ask for forgiveness and make whatever amends we can. And then we give it up to God - we give all of it up - and say, “Lord, you are so rich in mercy; let’s begin again.”

“Now to him who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever. Amen.” (Ephesians 3:20-21)

(c) William G. Carter. All rights reserved.

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[1] Kathleen Norris, Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith (New York: Riverhead Books, 1998) 18-20.

[2] See, for instance, Mark 5:34.

[3] See Ephesians 4 and 5.

Ugly Beauty

1 Corinthians 1:18-25

Lent 3

March 8, 2015

William G. Carter

For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written, ‘I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.’ Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God decided, through the foolishness of our proclamation, to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling-block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.

It is the season of Lent, the season of forty days before Easter. From the early days, the church wisely decided we cannot get to Easter without some time for preparation. Resurrection is going to happen, with or without our consent, so why not prepare? We can pray, we can fast from the world’s goods,  we can give alms. But the best preparation is to speak of the cross.

The heart of the Christian faith is that Jesus died and was raised from the dead. Everything we do and say is funneled through that truth. When springtime finally thaws, when the birds sing their doxologies and the daffodils explode in yellow glory, it is easy to speak of resurrection. Life begins again, especially after a long cruel winter.

In our office, we have been shopping for worship bulletins for Easter. Most of them have scenes from spring time, happy and colorful glimpses of nature in its Northern Hemisphere glory, even though Easter has nothing to do with nature. Easter is the breaking of the laws of nature. It is the raising of the dead, not the recycling of the seasons. Resurrection is strange and odd and unprecedented. It runs counter to everything we observe about life – that we are born, that we grow, that we mature, and that we die.

But the cross is no less difficult to comprehend. Jesus was born, and he grew. Sometime in his early thirties, he was put to death. The stories say he did nothing wrong. To the contrary, he did everything right: He healed the sick, he fed the hungry crowds. He lifted up the lowly. He exposed the superficial and cracked open the calcified. He told the truth about God, he told the truth about us. And for that, he was put to death. 

What are we going to say about this?

The apostle Paul said, “This is what I preach. This is all I know. This is all I want to know: Christ crucified.” His detractors said, “Don’t you have a new sermon?” But Paul replied, “This is my only sermon.” Everything he lived for was subject to the cross. His years of study to  learn the laws of God, his earnestness for living a holy life, his zeal for keeping God’s people pure – all of it was placed at the foot of the cross. And he knew from practical experience what many marketing experts have long since decreed: you can’t grow a church by talking about the cross.   

People want success and the cross is one man’s failure. People want life and the cross is a death. People want to win and the cross is a loss. And Paul says, “This is what I preach.” Such an unusual thing to preach.

Tomorrow night at 8:00, millions of hopeful romantics will tune in to see an Iowa farmer named Chris select the woman who will free him from being The Bachelor. Who’s going to win? Who’s going to lose? Speculation is high. People we know talk about it every day. They have watched “The Women Tell All” episode and formed their opinions. Tomorrow they will give up three hours of their evening to see who alone shall win and discuss who deserves to lose. And they will do this because they live in a world that says winning is the only thing that matters. Even though there is only one person who will win, it’s all about winning.

And Paul says, “I talk about the cross.” No wonder he says it’s pretty foolish. He calls it a scandal, a stumbling block. In a world of me-first, survival of the fittest, winning at all costs, it is something the world at large cannot comprehend. But the cross is the heart of the Christian mystery, and so we talk about it.

But why? Why the cross? A number of reasons, I suppose. Here is the first: because the cross exposes the way the world is. God sends Jesus into the world, to teach and heal, to reveal God’s grace and truth, and the world kills him for it. We live in a world that resists its own healing. That’s what the cross reveals. This is not a world that can save itself. The whole world needs God.

If we ask a lot of Christians what they believe about the cross, they will quickly say, “Jesus died for our sins.” True enough, but let’s hear that for what it is- that is a statement of faith. It is an affirmation, it is a proposition. Yet before we rush to say it and move on, let’s take the crucifixion as the people saw it day: a young man who did nothing wrong, nailed on wood between two thieves, surrounded by onlookers who jeered him, soldiers who spat upon him, abandoned by his friends, piercing the heart of his mother who watched all this, in excruciating pain, left to suffocate by his own weight.

There was no obvious atonement visible to those people who surrounded Jesus on the cross. On that Friday afternoon, regardless of what the preachers have told you, it was not obvious that Jesus died for our sins – but it was crystal clear that he was dying because of our sins. As the centurion says who presided over the execution says in the Gospel of Luke, “Truly, this man is innocent.” (Luke 23:47).

Call it sin, call it sickness, call it a rebelliousness that pushes away God. As Paul says in his writings, “We have no excuse” (Romans 2:1).

Fifty years ago yesterday, American citizens who were denied the right to vote marched across a bridge in Selma, Alabama. They were confronted by Alabama state troops, who had been ordered by Governor George Wallace to stop them. Joined by a quickly deputized posse of white men, these unarmed people were beaten by clubs, dragged by horses, and chased back across a bridge that was named after a Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan.

Here’s the thing: that march happened on a Sunday afternoon in Alabama, at a time and place where every Christian church had probably been full that morning. In fact, it is not a stretch at all to believe that some of the same people who beat the marchers had gone to church that morning, sang the hymns, heard the scriptures, and threw a few bucks in the offering plate. Of course, it was Alabama, 1965.

The cross teaches us that we should never be surprised when people do terrible things to one another. That’s the kind of world we are in, and it’s the kind of world that gets into us. Paul says, “I have to preach that.”

Not only does the cross show us what the world is like, the cross also reveals what the Christian life is like. We follow Jesus. We care about the things that he cares about. We do the daily deeds that he has done. That means we get involved in other people’s lives. We dress wounds and promote healing. We spend time with people that the world rejects. We do not back off from the call to service. We do not ignore deep human need. We go to those who are most vulnerable and we stand with them.

This is hard work, but there’s no reason we should expect otherwise. There are a lot of religious con artists who will see you a bill of goods. They promise achievement and success and simple two-calorie answers to life’s persistent problems. And so enticing to think that faith will live you about difficulty, that prayer will always be answered, and that God will always give you whatever you want. 

That’s not the truth. Sometimes faith pushes you deeper, stretches you wider, or cracks your heart open to love those you don’t want to love. And the hardest prayer to say is the one that Jesus prayed on the night before he died, “Not my will, but Yours be done.” It is our desires that end up crucified, our willfulness that must be set aside, our schemes that must give way to God’s way.

In this sense, the Christian life is never about getting ahead of others or improving our lot in life. It’s about following Jesus. It’s about doing what he calls us to do. The Christian life is a cross-shaped life. The dog-eat-dog world doesn’t understand that, the rich and famous are confused by it. It simply doesn’t make sense that the way of the cross is the way of self-sacrifice, non-violence, and persistent, purifying love.

“But this is the Word I speak,” says Paul, “the word of the cross.” That’s the word made flesh in Jesus the Christ, the word that becomes enfleshed in those who follow him. It exposes the world for what it is, it maps ot the road of discipleship.

But there is an even bigger reason why we speak about the cross: because this is where we see God. Not high up on a cloud, not detached and indifferent like the small deities of Greece and Rome, not immovable, inflexible, and unemotional like all the legends that people tell about God – but God who comes to us in Jesus, willing to enter our suffering, willing to live among the likes of us, willing to risk everything to claim us and win us back, willing to cancel the sin and evil that nailed him to a tree. That’s the most amazing thing of all.

God is in the crucified servant Jesus – and what looks like an all-too-visible weakness is the holy power that will save us. This doesn’t compute for those who are logical. It doesn’t impress those who hope for a miracle. But in the cross God reaches right down into the grime of our lives and declares, “I have found you, I am with you, I will redeem you.”

And if you know how it feels to be found, you know the saving power of God. God comes to us in a simple woodcutter from Galilee. God comes in a man who knew what it’s like to get a splinter in your hand or dirt between your toes. God comes in a peasant who was not born in great privilege, who never had a lot of money, who never stepped into a palace until the last day of his life.

God comes to us, hidden in a man who was rejected, condemned, and crucified – and God says, “”You are mine, nothing can separate you from my love. If you are broken, I will rebuild you. If you have failed or lost, I will give you a new beginning. If you have no purpose, I will give you work to do.” Do you see why Paul speaks of the cross? Because this is how Paul speaks of God – a God who sets aside his power to catch us when we fall, a God who holds us together, then declares, “Let’s get about the work of a new creation.”

God turns it all upside down. The world looks at the cross and sees only weakness. For those of us who know what God is like, we see the power to save the world.

Paul says, “This is what I preach: the crucified Christ as the wisdom of God.”  Me too.[1]

(c) William G. Carter. All rights reserved.

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[1] Thanks to Fred Craddock, beloved teacher, now a saint in God’s eternity. He ended a sermon on this text this way.  

And If God Forgets

Genesis 9:8-17

Lent 1

February 22, 2015

William G. Carter

God said, ‘This is the sign of the covenant that I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you, for all future generations: I have set my bow in the clouds, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and the earth. When I bring clouds over the earth and the bow is seen in the clouds, I will remember my covenant that is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh; and the waters shall never again become a flood to destroy all flesh. When the bow is in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is on the earth.’

I’m sure you noticed: God is doing all the talking. Noah can’t get a word in edgewise, and he doesn’t dare interrupt. After forty days and nights of rain, after the terrible washing-away of sin and sinful people, God gives a speech to the handpicked family that survived his flood. The speech can be summed up in one word, a word God uses seven times in nine verses. The word is “covenant.”

“Covenant” begins as God’s word. That’s the word we are going to live with during Lent. A covenant is an agreement. When God makes a covenant, it is usually pretty one-sided.

As we’ve heard today, the very first covenant is given to Noah and his children. That means it’s a covenant with us, an agreement with the whole human family. Every person alive today is not only a child of Adam and Eve, but also a child of Noah and his wife. All of us are great-grandchildren of the flood. All of us are survivors of God’s terrible judgment.

That’s not always obvious. The story of Noah and the ark is usually treated as a children’s story. It’s the subject of VBS lessons and youth group musicals. Kermit the Frog sang a rainbow song. Before he sank in deep water, Bill Cosby asked, “Hey Noah, how long can your tread water?” And you can go over to Toys-R-Us and buy the Fisher-Price version of Noah and the ark. For only $19.99, you get two zebras, two giraffes, two toucans, two old humans, and a big plastic boat that will float in your bathtub. Additional animals are available in pairs at an additional price. You might think this is a story about a big floating zoo…

… Except that it’s really a story about how God intended to get rid of all the people of the world. Like the cartoon that appeared in The New Yorker. God is standing on a cloud, looks down the earth, and says, “What was I thinking?” The Bible begins with abundance and joy and heavenly delight, but by the sixth chapter of Genesis, it has become a dark story, a terrible story. What God called “good” on the day of creation is now saturated by evil. And God regrets the whole mess.

Certainly God had his reasons. It was his world, and God made it, but it was turning out poorly. One day, God looked around and saw the cruelty and the violence that people inflict on one another. And God said, “All these people think about is evil. All they do is hurt and destroy.” So God decided to destroy all of them. God didn’t need these people to feel complete. God wasn’t very happy about making an imperfect world. So God decided to wipe the slate clean. Wash everything away. That would set God free to go other places and do other things.

The only kink in the plan is that God looked down and saw Noah. God remembered him, and said, “Well, Noah isn’t so bad.” And that’s the only reason that you and I are here today. If it weren’t for Noah, the human race would be extinct. But God remembered Noah, and God said, “I think I can work with him.”

When we read this story as grown-ups, we hear all kinds of legendary touches. Noah was five hundred years old when he became a parent. He was six hundred years old when the rain started to fall. At that advanced age, he was able to build a boat to hold two of every known species. He was able to line up two crocodiles and two elephants and two mosquitoes without getting hurt.

It sounds to a lot of people like an ancient legend. Just for the record, I think we can believe all of this without having to take it literally, because there is the deeper truth, and what it teaches us about God: that God had every intention of wiping out the human race until he looked down and remembered Noah.

It must make God very sad to create a world that doesn’t turn out very well. You create people with the capacity to love, and their hearts are bent on destruction. You give them seeds so they can plant gardens, and next thing you know some of them are hoarding the bread while others are going hungry. You give them hands to work with metal, and they start building spears. You give them beautiful acres of land to enjoy, and they start selling tickets for admission and strip-mining every available mineral.

God made the humans good, but they turned out worse than the animals. In the jungle, at least, animals survive by being fit. Human beings, on the other hand, manipulate, exploit, scheme, and plunder. They don’t have to sink their claws into one another, but they do. Unlike the wild animals, grown-up people torture one another, teenagers play mind games, and grade-school children humiliate other kids. No doubt, God has always had every reason to be very sad. In the words of one rabbi, “The great flood was supplied by God’s tears.”

But through the tears, God looked down and saw Noah. And God saw Noah’s wife (whatever her name was). And God saw Noah’s three sons, and Noah’s three daughters in law. Something softened in the Creator’s heart, and God thought, “Maybe I can work with them after all. Maybe I can make something of them without having to start over from scratch.”

A number of years ago, Bill Moyers brought together a lot of different people to talk about the stories of Genesis. It is a text in common for Jews, Muslims, and Christians. Moyers thought it would be fruitful to host some conversations around the ancient texts, and he was right. On one of the television shows based on those conversations, he asked the members of his panel what kind of headline each one would write to describe the Noah story. A newspaper editor responded with something predictable, like “God Destroys World.”

One of the other panelists was the Rev. Dr. Samuel Proctor, for many years the pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church, the leading church in Harlem. Dr. Proctor suggested an alternative headline: “God Gives Humans Second Chance.” Proctor went on to say he learned the Noah story from his father, a Sunday school teacher. “Sometimes we laughed at the ridiculous aspects of it,” he said with a smile, “but we didn’t try to rewrite it. We drew from it what it said right then to the people and went on.”

He said, “Every Wednesday, my daddy would press his trousers and go down to the Philharmonic Glee Club rehearsal. These sixty black guys – table waiters, coal trimmers, truck drivers – would give one big concert a year to the white population. We couldn’t sit where we wanted to, even though our daddy was singing – we had to sit in the back. But in the midst of all that rejection, hate, and spite, they went. And do you know the song they sang at the close of the concert? They sang. ‘Yesterday the skies were grey, but look this morning they are blue. The world is singing the son of the dawn.” Noah! Sixty black guys in tuxedos in the 1920s, with lynching everywhere and hatred. But they had something we need to recover right now. I can’t turn loose this story of Noah and the flood because after all of the devastation, there’s a rainbow. I can’t take that bow and the cloud out of my universe. I’m not going to live without that kind of hope. That’s what that story means to me.”[1]

Here is the hope: after every rainfall, there is a rainbow somewhere. God takes his bow, his very weapon of war, and puts it up in the sky. The point is there will be no more arrows from heaven to earth. God is going to live by another way. God will influence us without resorting to intimidating us. The next time a flood comes, we can be absolutely sure that it isn’t coming out of judgment or wrath. God tried that once, and decided never to try it again. There’s always Noah, that interesting 600-year-old man whose very presence suggests that the human race is worthy of a second chance.

The first covenant that God makes is a self-imposed restraining order. God says, “I won’t use nature to wipe out the human race.” Of course, if we choose to poison the environment or stir up storms through global warming, that is the result of our own stupidity, further evidence of our self-destructive tendencies. But God chooses to stick with us, with steadfast love and self-restraint.

The rainbow is God’s eternal Post-It note, a continuing reminder that the Creator of every person is in favor of the human race. And if God forgets about mercy, God has that rainbow in the sky. When God has a bad day, when God is disgusted with the manipulations and machinations of the human animal, God sees the rainbow, a wide spectrum of different colors each blended together to make the light of the world, and God decides once again that destroying all of us is no way  forward.

Elie Wiesel once said, “God created us because God loves good stories.” The story of the human family continues and moves forward. We can be sure that God is regularly disappointed with some of our plot twists. As God knows all too well, flooding the world never did wash away the human tendency to sin, and some of our stories still get stuck in the mud. But we can be even more certain that God chooses to keep living with the human story, if only because God is the beginning and end of it. God looks at the rainbow and remembers us, and the world is given another chance.

God remembers, and we shall remember. We can pray with Psalmist, “God, remember not the sins of my youth; Lord, according to your steadfast love, remember me” (Psalm 25:7). And maybe we will find in that prayer the strength to turn from all that is cruel and destructive within ourselves.

In the final word, it is entirely up to God, who creates us with good will, who judges us in complete fairness, who calls us to live holy and joyful lives. We may be genetically disposed to resist the God who loved us even before we were born. But our future is entirely up to God. We remember that, too.

So let us turn away from sin and turn to the One who can save us, praying ‘til the last possible moment, “Jesus, remember me, when you come into your kingdom.”

(c) William G. Carter. All rights reserved.

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[1] Bill Moyers, Genesis: A Living Conversation (New York: Doubleday, 1996) 133.

Don't Let Your Left Hand See Your Right

Matthew 6:1-4, Deuteronomy 15

Ash Wednesday

February 18, 2015

“Beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them; for then you have no reward from your Father in heaven. “So whenever you give alms, do not sound a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, so that they may be praised by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward. But when you give alms, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your alms may be done in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.

A friend of mine visits a lot of churches as a guest preacher. In one Tennessee congregation, he was greeting church members at the back door one Sunday. Meanwhile, the pastor’s son was running around in the sanctuary. He ran up and down the aisles, jumped up and down on one of the pews, and then scrambled into the pulpit. Suddenly he discovered, to his great delight, that the sound system was still on. He pulled down the microphone and yelled, “Is this thing on?” Sure enough it was, as everybody snapped around to look. Discovering he had an audience, he said, “Hey everybody, I’m up in front. Look at me, look at me!”

At the back of the church, the next person in line said to the visiting preacher, “Unfortunately, we’ve heard that sermon way too many times.”

I suppose all of us have. And not only as it’s been preached in this pulpit. All of us have heard people who talked too much about themselves, those who make every situation a personal stage, those who seek attention and will do anything to get it.

Jesus warns the church about this. You are the light of the world, he says, and your light is not to be hidden under a basket – but at the same time, don’t blast your spotlight into the eyes of others. Our spiritual behavior is never about our superiority. It is about giving ourselves to God and the needs of the world.

The example he gives is the giving of alms, the offering of our money for the needs of others. “Don’t blast your trumpet,” he warns. “Don’t stand before others and say, ‘Look at how generous I am!’” Others will be turned off, and God will not be impressed. No, whenever you give alms, do so quietly. It’s good advice.

Almsgiving is not mentioned very much in the New Testament. That’s not because the early church was stingy, but because the practice was assumed. Jesus says, “Whenever you give alms,” not “If you give alms.” Christians, like the Jews before them, are known by the ability to put themselves out for their neighbors. We cannot live together as a spiritual community if we don’t pay attention to one another’s needs. And if we blow the trumpet to say, “Look at me, look at me,” we obviously aren’t looking at the neighbor who needs our help.

As we begin the season of Lent together, we hear Jesus suggest a healthy kind of forgetfulness. “Don’t let your left hand know what your right hand is doing.” Don’t hover over how generous you are – that will only lead to pride and self-centered attitudes. Rather, focus on those who need the gift. Forget about yourself, forget about your importance, forget about your ability to help – and sink into the practice of generous of love. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer said of this teaching, “”Genuine love is always self-forgetful.” (The Cost of Discipleship, p. 178)

Or as one wise old sage said to me, “Get in the practice of giving so much that you no longer keep track  of much you have given.” Don’t let the left hand know what the right hand has given.

The word for “almsgiving” comes from the same word as “mercy.” When we give our money or our attention to somebody in need, we are extending mercy. We are making it real. The same mercy shown to us by Christ is what we offer to one another. In this sense we remember the Beatitude of Jesus: “Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.” It’s not a strategy for getting in God’s good favor. Rather it’s a promise that our own hearts will be transformed as we try to make a difference in the lives of others. Mercy breeds more mercy, unless we forget that it begins with God’s mercy for all of us.

That is the mercy that gathers us here. God has come to a broken world because God has mercy on us. We can choose to remain broken, to remain indifferent. We can look at a hungry child and say, “He’s not my kid,” or look from a distance at hurricane victims and say, “Glad that didn’t happen to us,” or we can view victims of violence and abuse and declare, “There but for the mercy of God…” Listen: if we know anything about mercy, we know that mercy doesn’t make us any better than anybody else. Mercy only makes sense when we share it with others.

That is the invitation for us. We remember tonight we are dust, nothing more than dust - and it is only by the mercy of Jesus Christ that we get rescued in the middle of the mess of this world. In our lostness, God found us, in order that we may find those who remain in need.

So when you give alms, when you care for another, do not blow your trumpet for attention. No, save all your attention for those around you. And let them know in tangible ways that all of us are precious to God.

(c) William G. Carter. All rights reserved.

Dazzled For Now

Mark 9:2-9

Day of Transfiguration

February 15, 2015

William G. Carter

Six days later, Jesus took with him Peter and James and John, and led them up a high mountain apart, by themselves. And he was transfigured before them, and his clothes became dazzling white, such as no one on earth could bleach them. And there appeared to them Elijah with Moses, who were talking with Jesus. Then Peter said to Jesus, ‘Rabbi, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.’ He did not know what to say, for they were terrified. Then a cloud overshadowed them, and from the cloud there came a voice, ‘This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!’ Suddenly when they looked around, they saw no one with them anymore, but only Jesus.

It’s a dazzling story. What can we say about it? Years ago, when I worked with an associate pastor, she accused me of always assigning her to preach on Transfiguration Sunday, the Sunday when this story is appointed to be read. Guilty as charged!

She said, “Every year, you have me preach on the story of Jesus climbing the mountain and glowing like the sun.” I replied, “Well, by now, you ought to have figured out something to say about it.” The fact is I didn’t know what to say about it. Still don’t!

Peter, James and John didn’t know what to say. Mark says they were terrified. They were everyday fishermen. They didn’t deal with mystical experiences. They dealt with the specifics of hard reality: where are the fish lurking today, how many did we catch. So when this mountain moment comes, the words in their mouths don’t work.

Ever the extrovert, Peter opens his mouth to see what he’s thinking. He calls Jesus “rabbi,” though it’s clear he is something more. “It’s good to be here,” he stammers, but he is too scared to be serious about it. And then, in the grand tradition of religious people who feel the need to capture a moment in a monument, he says, “Let’s put up a few tabernacles.” Mark says he was clueless and shaking in his boots.

It’s happened before. Peter, James, and John have been traveling with Jesus for eight chapters. They have been places and seen things that scared them half to death. Right after he called them to follow along, they went with him into the hometown synagogue. He started saying all this amazing stuff, then got into a shouting match with the crazy man in the fifth pew – and then Jesus cast away an evil spirit, and they said, “Whoa! What’s this? This never happens in church. Usually we let the evil spirits sit in the pews with the rest of us.” (1:21-28)

Peter, James, and John went with him on the day he healed the leper. They saw him touch the man that their Bible said you should never touch. The ancient book of Leviticus was clear: don’t ever get close to a leper. Make the leper yell to you as a warning so you never cross the invisible boundary. But Jesus steps right over that boundary. He refuses to let an old rule constrain him from doing the right thing, the holy thing. He touches the leper and heals him. I’ll bet Peter, James, and John were scared. (1:40-45)

Or there was that night on the boat. Jesus was tired out from teaching, and took a nap while the fishermen headed across the water. Suddenly a storm came out of nowhere, swirling around that punchbowl lake. They were hardy fishermen, but they grew nervous. Then they got really frightened, and shook him awake. “Don’t you care that we are going to perish!” He looked up and said, “Shut up!” And the storm stopped. Then they were really scared, and whispered, “Who is this?” (4:35-41).

Maybe we would like to think that life with Jesus would be pleasant and fun. It wasn’t at all. The disciples often looked sideways at one another. Like when that little boat ride was over, and they landed on the Gentile of the lake. When they got out of the boat, there was a cemetery there – that’s unclean if you’re a Jew – and another wild man was there, screaming at them. He was bad news. He lived among the tombs, Mark said, and bruised himself with stones. He was the first person Jesus met when he stepped ashore on Gentile land. There was another screaming match, and whatever was in that man jumped into some Gentile pigs and dashed them into the sea. This time, the whole town was scared of Jesus and asked him to leave (5:1-20).

Walking with Jesus was not a walk in a park. A woman who had been bleeding for years touched Jesus, and it made her well. Immediately he took Peter, James, and John into the bedroom of a dead little girl. And while people laughed at him, Jesus said, “Get up!” And the little girl was alive again. Sounds great, but I’m sure they were scared (5:32-42).

Even more frightening: now Jesus starts talking about the cross. It is inevitable. God sends Jesus into a broken, self-destructive world. He shows God’s mercy by fixing what he can – but there’s evil in the world, and it reacts, smacks him back, and resists – and evil will conspire to kill Jesus in order to stop him. Jesus says it is going to happen.

If you confront evil, it will talk back. If you feed the hungry, the tyrants will try to starve you. If you raise the dead, the zombies will attack you. There will be a cross for anybody who does the life-giving work of God in a world like this. Jesus says, “Watch what the world what the world does to me, because it’s going to happen to you, too.” Peter and the others were frightened. They didn’t know what to say.

And that’s exactly when the Transfiguration happens. “Six days later,” says Mark, they go up the mountain. It’s just the inner circle, Peter, James, and John. As they catch their breath from the climb, Jesus suddenly changes. He begins to shine like the sun. He had just been talking about death, but he’s so thoroughly alive. And not only him, but Moses the great lawgiver is alive, and Elijah, the greatest of the prophets, is alive. When Jesus shines, he stands among the Law and the Prophets, who are talking with him.

Mark will not separate this dazzling moment from what comes before or what comes after. There will be no sidestepping of the cross. Jesus will still be beaten and humiliated. You know the story: he will suffer and he will die. In this gospel, there is no question about that. Somebody once referred to the Gospel of Mark as “the passion story of Jesus’ death with a long introduction.” God’s Son will die.

Yet there is also the moment on the mountain: where there is power beyond all we know, where there is light beyond the thick darkness. It is Mark’s way of saying there is more holiness than we ever realize, and it’s close at hand. When Mark tells about the transfiguration, he gives the moment a time stamp: “six days later.”  It’s his way of saying suffering isn’t all there is. There is something more beyond it, through it, in spite of it.

“Why does God appear on high mountains, in barren deserts, and other fierce landscapes?” That is the question that Belden Lane asks in one of his books. You can probably guess some of the answers. In an extreme place, like a mountain, there are no other distractions. You see clearly what you don’t see at easier locations. And frankly, that’s when we most need God – when the going is really tough. The good news in the Transfiguration story is God is present all the time, in all power and glory, even if it mostly seems that God has blended in and remains out of sight.

Sometimes the veil drops and we see the truth, even if we don’t quite have the words to describe it. Like the funeral that I attended some time back. Cancer took a dear friend away after months of struggle. But in the last stretches of illness, my friend was gracious with everybody she met. Face to face, she would say, “I’m not afraid.” Before she ended each phone conversation, she declared, “I love you, honey.” She revealed the grace and glory of God even when she was worn out, and you should have heard us sing God’s praises at her funeral. For the moment, we knew death has no hold over those who trust God with everything.

Sometimes we see that the work of Jesus continues, long after he stood on the mountain. He fed the hungry and cared for those who have nowhere else to turn. That’s why people in our church are providing for the people in the city who have nowhere else to sleep or eat. There is no more room at the AME homeless shelter on these cold nights, yet when somebody knocks on the door, they are not turned away. That is precisely why we are working with our partners in that place. Housing the homeless, providing a hundred packets of oatmeal every morning, that is Kingdom work. It points to the glory of God in extreme human circumstances. It testifies that God really does care about everybody, beginning with those the world doesn’t notice.

I saw it last Sunday morning, when a friend introduced me to a woman named Daphne. He said, “Come here a second, there’s somebody I want you to meet.” Daphne runs a care program in the Methodist church I was visiting. She began by noticing two things: some people in the church were isolated by Alzheimer’s and other forms of decline, and the church had some empty space during the week. She said, “What if we invited those folks here and gave their families a break?” It’s the only program like that in their city. The church people started it without any budget. They cooked a hot lunch each day, volunteered to lead activities, and provided transportation.

“See that painting above my desk?” Daphne asked. “It was painted by a former five-star general who cannot remember his own name.” She paused, composed herself, wiped away a tear and said, “He’s so precious.”

This is what Christian people do: they step beyond their fear, they walk through human wreckage, they refuse to accept that suffering and pain shall define or constrain human life, and they point to the bright shining glory of a God who makes and loves us all. Just like Jesus they carry the cross of service and compassion, testifying to the holy power both in the midst of difficulty and far beyond it.

And if nothing else, that’s why we invite a Dixieland band to play on the coldest day of the year. This is a fun day, to be sure, but it is much more than that. Let the joyful music be a Gospel sign that there is far more to life than brutal weather. In the thick of bleak winter, we point to the abundant life given by God, even if we cannot see it yet.

That’s the way it has always been. Even before he moves toward the cross, Jesus reveals the life-giving power of God. We see it, too, and it beckons us to follow wherever Jesus goes, to serve wherever he serves, and to love all those he loves.   

(c) William G. Carter. All rights reserved.