The Ideal King Has Wounds

Colossians 1:11-20, Luke 23:33-43

Christ the King

November 24, 2019

For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross.

I was twenty-five years old when I discovered a new hymn. Having grown up in the church, I thought I knew them all. We sang from the old red Presbyterian hymnal in the church where I grew up, the 1955 edition with all the hymns that were fit to print. Thanks to our pastor, we sang them all. I learned as much faith from those hymns as I ever did from pulpit or classroom.

So when the graduating class at my seminary took a poll to select our graduation hymn, I naturally made a lot of suggestions. My family took me to church every week. I was loaded with recommendations. To my astonishment, I was vastly outvoted. My classmates picked something I had never heard and never sang. When I inquired, a friend said, “I think it’s a Lutheran hymn.”

I had never heart of it. He said, “You never heard it? What’s wrong with you?” A few weeks later we lined up to process down the aisle of the Princeton University Chapel. The organ fired up, a brass quartet blended in, and we sang, “Lift High the Cross, the love of Christ proclaim.” It was stirring. It was powerful. It was triumphant -and therefore a little weird.

“Lift High the Cross”? Celebrate the crucifixion? It portrays the death of Jesus as a joyful event, puts the “good” in Good Friday. Have you ever considered how strange that is?

Years ago, the gothic chapel at Duke University was rented out for a movie set. The film was Margaret Atwood’s novel, The Handmaid’s Tale. The original film was filmed at Duke before it recently was re-created for cable TV. The producer booked the chapel during spring break, and then erected a gallows on the lawn outside the chapel. They filmed a terrifying scene of an execution outside of this enormous Christian chapel. Word spread, critics called it sacrilegious, tempers flared.

When the chapel preacher arrived on Sunday morning, here’s this gallows erected outside his church. It wasn’t just any Sunday. Spring break coincided with Palm Sunday! People were furious. He said, “Now, wait a second. I agree this is scandalous, horrifying, and wrong. But if you look inside the chapel, right behind the altar, you’ll see the cross, an instrument of capital punishment. If we are true to the Christian story, the cross was a first-century Roman gallows.”[1]

He's right about that. The Roman Empire crucified troublemakers to display as a bad example. That’s why the crucifixion of Jesus took place right along a heavily traveled highway outside of Jerusalem. It happened at Passover, when the traffic was higher than any other time of the year. The message was clear: don’t do what these people did. Keep in line or this could happen to you.

Crucifixion was a brutal death. Arms extended, full weight of your body bearing down, the prisoners died of suffocation. It could take three to five days, unless you were beaten severely as Jesus was. Then it might take three hours.

And that anybody would look on this scene, and then sing, “So shall our song of triumph ever be: praise to the Crucified for victory… Lift high the cross!” What is it, that turns this horrible, wretched scene into a moment of triumph?

The New Testament suggests a lot of answers, all based on the deep reflection of people of faith. One of the most common is that “Jesus died for our sins.” (1 Peter 3:18). We hear that a lot, even say it a good bit. It’s a scapegoat idea, drawn from the sacrifices of Jewish temple religion. In the 16th chapter of Leviticus, the priest presents a goat to be sacrificed – a scapegoat. The blood of that pure animal atone for the sins of the people.

Some Jewish writers like the apostle Paul thought of the cross of Christ this way. As he wrote to the Corinthian church, “God made (Christ) to be sin who knew no sin so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” (2 Cor. 5:21). Paul says this was done “for our sake.” Christ died for sins.

Over the years, as Christian people thought about this, and thought some more about this, theological circles were added. Some declared it was God’s will that Jesus should suffer, drawing on the words of the prophet Isaiah. Then somebody else said it was God’s intent from the dawn of time to send Jesus to die; however that seems to speed by all the life-giving work that he did (the healings and the feedings) and all the life-giving wisdom he taught. Everything is reduced to the cross, an event set on autopilot at creation.

The problem with reducing all this is that it ignores the mess that people generally keep making of things, and the original intent of God to make a beautiful world in a beautiful universe. As surely as we can say “Jesus died for our sins,” we can equally say he died as a result of our sins. People crucified the Lord. The cross is a collision between the will of God and the willfulness of human beings. It is the worst thing we have ever done.

So why do we lift it up high? What’s the Good in Good Friday?

Well, listen to what Luke hears. In the third Gospel, the Son of God comes into our midst with prophetic love for all, and we do away with him. Just like all the prophets before him! It’s an enormous mistake. We do our worst – yet on the cross, God in Christ does his best. Luke hears Jesus say, “Father, forgive them, they know not what they do.” Or to translate that more literally, “Father, forgive them, they are clueless…”

According to Luke, that is the recurring diagnosis of the human family. It’s still going on. Breathe in toxic substances, and we wonder why our lungs are damaged. Put toxins in the atmosphere, and we wonder why the weather goes haywire. Sell weapons to people of other nations and wonder why they turn on us. Give violent video games to our children and wonder why they are combative and unable to concentrate. We know better, but we don’t really get it.

So hear Jesus pray: “Father, forgive them.” That’s the prayer that he offers with that sign over his head, “This is the king of the Jews.” Father, forgive us, all of us. I tell you the truth, the Gospel truth: my life depends on the answering of that prayer. So does yours.

When Christian people speak about the cross, one way or another they declare it is inevitable. Either God set it up or people cooked it up. It could be either; it’s probably both. What matters is what happens there: Christ prays for forgiveness – for the cancelling of the sins that put him there – and we trust God has answered this prayer. That’s what make all the difference.

In the high language from our reading in Colossians, the event is a reconciliation, a balancing of accounts, a cancellation of debt and debtors. It’s the making of peace between heaven and earth, and it happens, says the text, “through the blood of his cross.”

Is Jesus the scapegoat? The sacrificial Lamb? Is he the Passover lamb, as the Gospel of John suggests? Is he the innocent victim of the Gospel of Luke? All the above, and then some. The truth about Christ and what he has accomplished is far great than one specific description . . . because he is the king, the true king even on the cross.

To speak of Jesus and what he has done will always lead us to the brink of paradox, which is exactly how the New Testament portrays the immensity of his grace. We will have a taste of this in the hymn by Sylvia Dunstan which we will sing in a few minutes. The title itself is a paradox: “You, Lord, Are Both Lamb and Shepherd.” Well, which is it? Is he the Lamb? Or is he the Shepherd? The New Testament says, “yes.” Listen to what the hymn goes on to declare:

Clothed in light upon the mountain, stripped of might upon the cross,

Shining in eternal glory, beggared by a soldier’s toss…

You, who walk each day beside us, sit in power at God’s side.

You, who preach a way that’s narrow, have a love that reaches wide…

Worthy is our earthly Jesus! Worthy is our cosmic Christ!

Worthy your defeat and victory; worthy still your peace and strife…

You, who are our death and life.[2]  

All of it is true – and it is held together in the truth of God. A month from tonight is Christmas Eve. We will light candles and sing, “Silent Night, holy night, Son of God, love’s pure light…Jesus, Lord, at this birth.” Have you ever considered the immensity of what we sing? That a child, born to peasants and laid to rest in a feeding trough, is the ruler over all things. It’s mind-boggling. It doesn’t compute easily – because it’s that enormous. It’s the stuff of paradox.

Or the subject for today: the profound truth that the King of the Universe rules from a cross. A couple of jokers put a sign above his head that said, “Here’s your king.” He has no crown, so they weave him a crown of thorns. He has no royal robe, so they give him a make-believe robe, make fun of him, and then take it back and gamble it away. He possesses nothing, yet he gives us everything – for he prays, “Father, forgive them.” Rather than punish us, God answers that prayer.

So maybe we shouldn’t live by punishment, since God has forgiven all of us.

·        Maybe we should be careful about punishing others, since God in Christ has already forgiven them.

·        Maybe we should lighten up and refuse to punish ourselves, since God in Christ has forgiven us too.

·        Maybe we could reconsider a lot of the ways the evil world works and work a good bit harder at living by mercy, if only because the mercy of God is the only reason any of us are still here.  

I think that’s the good news. What do you think?

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

---

[1] https://indyweek.com/culture/screen/forgotten-handmaid-s-tale-movie-filmed-durham-missing-link-classic-novel-hulu-hit/

[2] Sylvia Dunstan, “You, Lord, Are Both Lamb and Shepherd,” Glory to God, # 274.

Equipped for Every Good Work

2 Timothy 3:10-4:5

Ordinary 31

November 3, 2019

William G. Carter

Now you have observed my teaching, my conduct, my aim in life, my faith, my patience, my love, my steadfastness, my persecutions and suffering the things that happened to me in Antioch, Iconium, and Lystra. What persecutions I endured! Yet the Lord rescued me from all of them. Indeed, all who want to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted. But wicked people and impostors will go from bad to worse, deceiving others and being deceived. But as for you, continue in what you have learned and firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it, and how from childhood you have known the sacred writings that are able to instruct you for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. 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 the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and in view of his appearing and his kingdom, I solemnly urge you: proclaim the message; be persistent whether the time is favorable or unfavorable; convince, rebuke, and encourage, with the utmost patience in teaching. For the time is coming when people will not put up with sound doctrine, but having itching ears, they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own desires, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander away to myths. As for you, always be sober, endure suffering, do the work of an evangelist, carry out your ministry fully.

A good friend tells how he learned the Bible. It wasn’t in church or Sunday School; no, by the time he was old enough to sit still for all of that, he already knew the scriptures. It began on his mother’s lap. From the time he could remember anything, his mother used to read to him a chapter from the King James Bible, a chapter a day. If he wiggled, she said, “Be still. You need Jesus.” He later discovered that’s how she was raised, too.

She was no fundamentalist, but she had been raised to take scripture seriously. It is a gift from those who came before us, offered to keep our lives rooted in the love and justice of God, so that we are able to withstand whatever life throws at us.

And when my friend’s mother was dying, he sat beside her bed to read her a chapter out of that same, well-worn King James Bible. “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures. He leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul.”

So old Paul says to young Timothy, “As for you, continue in what you have learned and firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it, and how from childhood you have known the sacred writings that are able to instruct you for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.” 

What is the first Bible passage that you learned? When did you learn it? Think back for a minute and see if you recall.

That favorite psalm, Psalm 23, is one of the first engraved on my memory. I don’t know if it came first from church or at home, but it’s never left me. As the English translations of scripture change and evolve, that old version from 1611 is the one that sticks with me. I don’t spend enough time in green pastures. Nor do I sit sufficiently beside the still waters. But my soul has been restored over and over again. The One who restores it is the Creator of the green pastures and still waters. The Bible names it, even before I believe it.

When Paul speaks of scripture, he is thinking of his Jewish Bible. Not the Christian Bible, because that was far from finished; this letter would not be declared authoritative to the church for another three hundred years. Paul was referring to the Torah, to the foundational stories. God created the heavens and the earth, God created you and me and declared us “good.” When we went bad, God wiped out the world with a flood, saving only Noah’s families and the animals; then God realized that punishment was a big mistake and put the rainbow in the sky as a perpetual Post-It note: “Don’t do that again.”

Then God said to Abram and Sarai, “I choose you to be a blessing to all the families on the earth, with descendants as numerous as the grains of sand on the seashore.” That’s when the story got interesting. And Paul says, “Everything we need to know is there in the book.” Do you want to know who you are? Where you come from? It’s in the book.

Someone in one of our Bible reading groups was grumbling about the book. Specifically, she and her group were reading through the prophets. I could sympathize. The prophetic books are full of unpunctuated sermons, mostly written as free-verse poetry. You can’t tell who is doing the speaking – is it God? The prophet? Or the people? Can’t always tell.

It’s also difficult to tell the context. God was speaking through the prophets over hundreds of years. A lot of things can happen over eight hundred years. But if your country is coming unraveled, and your leaders are lying to you every day, and the very few at the top of the food chain are getting exponentially richer while everybody else is struggling, suddenly the biblical prophets make a lot of sense especially when they speak of justice and righteousness and truth.

When I was growing up during the Civil Rights era, we didn’t hear anything about the Bible’s prophets. They were not mentioned in our Sunday School material. We never heard any of them speak, unless it was the week before Christmas, and old Isaiah would say, “The Messiah is coming!” That was how it was in the white church where I was raised.

Meanwhile in the African American churches, they heard from the prophets every week. Martin Luther King Jr. loves to preach sermons on texts from the prophet Amos. His “I have a dream” speech was inspired by the dreams of the prophet Isaiah. When they tried to get King to quiet down, he could quote the prophet Jeremiah, how the good news burned within like a “fire in his bones.” In response, he was treated like a prophet. Somebody tried to silence him as they tried to silence all the prophets – yet his voice rings out. He found his voice in the Book.

The prophets of God speak of the holy day of judgment that cast out the evildoers and establish God’s justice. If we didn’t have the scriptures, we would be misled to think the evildoers will always win. But we know better. We have been shown the mind of God.

We have the Torah, God’s instruction; we have the Prophets, God’s light in every season of darkness. In between, we have proverbs, the love poetry of Solomon, the wisecracking cynic of Ecclesiastes, and we have the Psalms. It has been said – and I now believe – that everything we need to know about God is in the Psalms.

The overarching theme of the Psalms is that God rules over all things. Take note that it doesn’t say that “God is in charge;” that is a distortion by those who have control issues, but rather it says God rules over all things. “The Lord is in his holy temple; let all the earth keep silence.” Of course, the people of earth ignore that and chatter away. If we spent more time in silence, we might discover that God inhabits silence.

The Psalms declares our help is not in the mountains. The mountains are where the fake minor league deities of the Canaanites hang out. They can’t save you. They merely invite you to consume more and waste what you have. God is so much bigger than that – for God created the mountains, and created the storms, and created the sun and the moon and the stars. So who are we? We are the children that God created a “little less than the angels.” It’s in the book. That’s why we have the book.

Keep thumbing through the Psalms, and you find the deep questions and paradoxes that beguile us. Why do the wicked prosper? How long will selfishness and perversity persist?  Why does God linger when we are in trouble? The Bible is honest enough to ask what we are afraid to ask. As surely as we read the Bible in our search for wisdom, we discover that the Bible reads us. God knows who we are – because God rules over all things.

So when the Bible announces how God so loves the world to enter the world through Jesus and rescue us, that’s good news! And when the Bible calls us to join in the work of Jesus, we know who we are, we know what we’re up against, and we know who is ultimately going to win – for God rules over all.

I suppose people come to church for all kinds of reasons. Some people come because they like to sing, others because they like to eat. Some come because they are seeking something important to do.

There’s that story of the Jewish man who asked his father, “Why do you go to synagogue?” “There are many reasons why a person would go to synagogue,” replied his father. “Take Silverberg. He goes to synagogue to talk to God. Me? I go to synagogue to talk to Silverberg.”[1]

There is no shortage of reasons why we are here. At the heart of them all is the central act of opening the Bible and releasing it into the air. This is the book that contains the Breath of God. As one poet says so well,

I open the Bible and a wind comes out of the book.

I close the Bible and the wind keeps blowing.[2]

That’s the true meaning of “inspiration” – the Spirit of God blows this Book alive and “we are equipped for every good work.”

Without the scriptures, and the preachers and teachers who open it, we are prone to a lot of opinions. As in the days of Paul and Timothy, there is no shortage of crazy ideas and looney tune notions.

One so-called “spirit store” sells high-priced quartz crystals, professing if you hold them a certain way, they will reveal the mysteries of the universe. Wow, the mysteries of the universe, you say? You still need to pick up a quart of milk on the way home.

Somebody else declares she is true-blue guru and invites you to the mystic waterfall of a South Seas island. The price tag for the trip is $12,000. Before you go, ask her: how did you get to become a true-blue guru? “I paid somebody else, took the trip myself, and there the earth called out to me.” Really? Well, you still need a ride home from the airport.

“Put your hands on the television set and you will be healed,” says the preacher with the white shoes and the hair that defies gravity. Wow! Does this mean that I can get along without medical insurance? Hmm… did you ever notice those faith-healers don’t work in hospitals?

So we come together, open the Bible together, and wait for God to speak. Sometimes the Voice is immediate. Other times the Voice is mediated through human words and deeds. Most of the time the Voice seeps in secretly, sinks down deeply, to be brought alive when the time is right.  

Old Paul says to young Timothy - and old Timothy says to us - “As for you, continue in what you have learned and firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it, and how from childhood you have known the sacred writings that are able to instruct you for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.” The scriptures are the meeting place for God and God’s people. And they are sufficient “to equip us for every good work.”

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

---

[1] Quoted by Thomas G. Long, “Why Are We Here?” The Princeton Seminary Bulletin, Vol. 10, issue 1, p. 52

[2] From Tom Troeger, 2001 meeting of the Homiletical Feast.

Word Wrangling

2 Timothy 2:8-19

Ordinary 30

October 27, 2019

William G. Carter

Remind them of this, and warn them before God that they are to avoid wrangling over words, which does no good but only ruins those who are listening. Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved by him, a worker who has no need to be ashamed, rightly explaining the word of truth. Avoid profane chatter, for it will lead people into more and more impiety, and their talk will spread like gangrene. Among them are Hymenaeus and Philetus, who have swerved from the truth by claiming that the resurrection has already taken place. They are upsetting the faith of some. But God’s firm foundation stands, bearing this inscription: “The Lord knows those who are his,” and, “Let everyone who calls on the name of the Lord turn away from wickedness.”

If Paul is offering advice to Timothy about the Christian life, it’s only a matter of time before he talks about words. The Christian faith lives and dies by its words – its words! Words are important.

·         Words express the Gospel: “Remember Jesus Christ, raised from the dead, a descendant of David.” Paul says these words are his Gospel. They release the truth of God into the air.

·         Words like that can get you into trouble, even if they are righteous words. Paul is in prison again, chained like a criminal. But (he winks) when God speaks, nobody can chain that! God is free, the Holy Spirit is free. So, in a real sense, Paul is free.

·         Words give encouragement: “If we have died with Christ, we will also live with him. If we endure, we will reign with him.” So hang in there. Stay faithful. Keep your chin up. Trust God to endure.

So given the importance of the syllables that we put into the air, how striking it is that words would become the basis of arguments and the kindling of division.

Sometimes the words are important, important enough they become fighting words. In church history class, we learned the first big Christian fight (Christians versus Christians) was over two words: “homoousios” and “homoiousios.” You remember that battle, right? Those words differ by only one letter – but they reflect a world of difference.

In 325 AD, the church wanted to know: “homoousios” (literally “the same substance”) or “homoiousios” (“similar substance”). Is Jesus Christ the same substance with God the Father? Or is he of similar substance? They battled that out in Nicea, a town in northwestern Turkey, and “same substance” won. The city of Nicea is long reduced to rubble, but the Nicene Creed is still around. The words were that important.

They were so important that, seven hundred years after the Church wrote down those words, there was another divisive battle over the same words. This had to do with the word “Filioque” which had been left out of the Nicene Creed. Does the Holy Spirit proceed from the Father? (the original Nicene Creed) Or should they add the word “Filioque,” as if to say, Does the Holy Spirit proceed from the Father and the Son?

Now, you are free to argue over that one over lunch. You might even say it’s hardly worth a fight, so “pass the ketchup.” But the addition of that word was enough to develop into split of the Eastern Church from the Western Church in 1054 AD. Why is are the Eastern Orthodox churches separate from the Roman churches? The division began with a single word.

What strikes me about the three paragraphs we heard today from Paul’s letter is that sometimes the words are important enough to work at getting them right. He mentions a couple of jokers in Timothy’s church, Hymenaeus and Philetus. They have been goofing up the word “resurrection,” declaring Jesus came back from the dead, and that’s all there is to that.

What they don’t understand is that the resurrection of Jesus was just the beginning. It was the sign that God will restore the whole broken-down world, raising up everything that’s dead, establishing justice, and re-creating the whole cosmos the way it was intended to be. Hymenaeus and Philetus trivialize all of that and make it smaller, as if to say, Easter is a brief flash of enlightenment and everything after that is business as usual.

Paul says no! Don’t reduce God’s free and liberating word into something bite-sized and easily dismissed. The Gospel is enormous. The Gospel has the power to transform all of life. Don’t presume to shrink all of God’s transforming power into a fleeting emotion or warm fuzzy in the heart. It matters that we work on the words, and see them in the immense power of the grace and truth of God.

But this is also Paul, the apostle Paul, the pastor Paul – and he knows, all too well, that the heart of God’s church “is not lifted up, the eyes are not raised too high, and it does not occupy itself with things too great and marvelous” for itself (Psalm 131).

In his memoirs, Garrison Keillor fondly remembers Sunday afternoons. Sunday mornings were long and tedious, especially in the fundamentalist church of his childhood. Sermons were made to be endured, long endurance preferably. Yet Sunday afternoons were quite entertaining.

His family had no television, which was just as well. Keillor’s parents would have wrinkled their brows at watching football games, denouncing football as a waste of God’s good gift of the Sabbath. No, the entertainment came after the family pushed back from the Sunday dinner table and Uncle Louie and Uncle Mel would start discussing theology.

A transcription of the conversation might have looked like a discussion. However the word “argument” was far more accurate. Uncle Louie might lightly toss a thought into the air. Uncle Mel clenched his jaw into a smile to correct Uncle Louie. As Keillor recalls,

I forget the Scripture verses each of them brought forward to defend his position, but I remember the pale faces, the throat-clearing, the anguished looks, as those two voices went back and forth, straining at the bit, giving no ground – the poisoned courtesy (“I think my brother is overlooking Paul’s very clear message to the Corinthians…,” “Perhaps my brother needs to take a closer look, a prayerful look, at this verse in Hebrews…”) as the sun went down, neighbor children were called indoors, the neighbors turned out their lights, eleven o’clock came – they wouldn’t stop!

“Perhaps,” Grandpa offered, “it would be meet for us to pray for the Spirit to lead us,” hoping to adjourn, but both Louie and Mel felt that the Spirit had led us, that the Spirit had written the truth in big black letters – if only some people could see it.”[1]

Ah, the poisoned courtesy of those who bicker with one another! This seems to be the recurring habit of lawyers, politicians, and Christians who are convinced they are correct. It’s nothing so great as a conversation about the immensity of God’s grace. Paul sees it as something far smaller yet deeply destructive. He calls it “wrangling over words.”

That’s a suggestive turn of phrase – “wrangling,” as in a cowboy roping a runaway calf or a rider throwing a saddle on a horse to chase after some poachers. We wrangle with words, toss them around, if not hurl them at one another. The words are not in service to pursuing the truth, you understand. They are weapons for bullying, exertions of power, bald attempts of pushing through, obliterating opposition, and getting your way.

Paul’s advice to Timothy is “Avoid this, for (wrangling words) does no good but only ruins those who are listening.”

I chew on that for Reformation Day. For all of his biblical insight and Gospel wisdom, old Martin Luther was not above insulting his opponents. In fact, there are websites with titles like “29 of Martin Luther’s Most Hilariously Over the Top Insults.” Here are a few of the more modest ones that I can dare to repeat:

• “You people are more stupid than a block of wood.”
• “I would not smell the foul odor of your name.”
• “You seem to me to be a real masterpiece of the devil’s art.”
• “I am tired of the pestilent voice of your sirens.”

 … and so on and so forth. He was a great reformer of the church, although he had a tendency toward being obnoxious, especially with his words. It makes me wonder if we must not merely be correct with our words – but also be kind. So I also recall an elegant eulogy from a former president at Friday’s funeral of the Honorable Elijah Cummings. In part, he said,

“Listening to Elijah’s daughters speak… I would want my daughters to know how much I love them, but I would also want them to know that being a strong man includes being kind. That there is nothing weak about kindness and compassion. There is nothing weak about looking out for others. There is nothing weak about being honorable. You are not a sucker to have integrity and to treat others with respect.”[2]

Are our words inhabited with respect? That seems to have been a problem in Timothy’s church. Paul warned that the deacons of the church must not be “slanderers,” to beware of the “the hypocrisy of liars, to “have nothing to do with stupid and senseless controversies.” In the first letter, Paul said, “Watch out for the young widows, especially the gossips and the busybodies, saying what they should not say.” He could have also warned of the young widowers, too; in my experience, gossip can be a team sport, without gender limitations.

Words, words, words… Christian growth comes from paying attention to our words. Not just checking the half-truths, innuendos, or the bald-faced lies, but speaking kindness and speaking the honest truth about Jesus.

A good friend is a published poet. He offers a few stanzas of rhyme on this text in a poem called “Stop the Music.”[3]

We flap our gums and state our case

with heavy hearts and frown of face

convinced our words will save the race

while the devil does a dandy little dance.

We pick at nits and quote from books

with stained glass voice and pious looks

assured our view exposes crooks

while the devil does a dandy little dance.

One speaks for pro, another, con,

each one vibrant, each one “on.”

Food for thought to chew upon…

while the devil does a dandy little dance.

While we debate we cannot do—

we can’t proclaim the hope that’s new,

or show a neighbor “God loves you,”

so the devil does a dandy little dance.

The devil dances to our tune;

hopes our “music” won’t end soon.

We bark and bite from June to June

and the devil does a dandy little dance.

It’s time to end the endless song

which brings such comfort to great Wrong!

United and with Jesus, strong

Stop the music so the devil cannot dance.

That’s good advice for word wranglers, nitpickers, liars, and bullies. It’s really good advice for preachers three steps out of reach and listeners with their feet on the floor. God’s invitation for us is not only to speak about Jesus, but to speak like Jesus.

And today it’s a helpful reminder that, even if Martin Luther could be sassy and rude, on a few things he was dead-on right. Like the second stanza of the hymn that will later conclude our worship service:

And though this world, with devils filled, should threaten to undo us,

We will not fear, for God hath willed his truth to triumph through us.

The Prince of Darkness grim, we tremble not for him;

His rage we can endure, for lo, his doom is sure.

One little word shall fell him.

Hear that good news? Words matter. Evil is defeated by a single Word, the Word of God, the Word called “Jesus.”

So take heart, good friends. And watch what you say.

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

---

[1] Garrison Keillor, Lake Wobegon Days (New York: Viking Press, 1985) p. 107

[2] Barack Obama, “Eulogy for Elijah Cummings,” The Atlantic Monthly, 25 October 2019. Available online at t.ly/d5Lww

[3] James E. Thyren, “Stop the Music,” The Presbyterian Outlook, March 23-30, 1998.

Rekindling the Faith

Rekindling the Faith

2 Timothy 1:1-14

Ordinary 29

October 20, 2019

For this reason I remind you to rekindle the gift of God that is within you through the laying on of my hands; for God did not give us a spirit of cowardice, but rather a spirit of power and of love and of self-discipline....Guard the good treasure entrusted to you, with the help of the Holy Spirit living in us.

A good friend tells about something that happened to him. He was driving one day to the school where he was teaching, mulling over a series of moments from that morning.

He is a contemplative sort of guy and begins each day with stretching exercises and a long period of silent prayer. This day, however, he was running late on his usual schedule. Anxiety crept in. His wife commented about it and he snapped at her. She said, “So what good does it do you to sit in there and meditate?” He grabbed his car keys and headed out the door.

On his way to his school he realized he was living through a spiritual crisis. There was a widening gap between what he professed about his beliefs and the nagging sense of emptiness in his soul. He was a minister, of all things, going to teach and converse with adults about matters of faith. But inside it felt like he had little to share with anybody else. The nameplate on his office door declared him an expert, a professor of spirituality – and for the moment his entire professional life seemed like a sham.

Ever have a moment like that? Maybe you’re sitting here in church and you find yourself doubting if you believe any of it. Perhaps you’re sitting next to somebody who sings exuberantly and prays fervently, but you’re not so sure if anybody’s up there actually listening.

Or something good happens, and everybody all around you is cheering, but you aren’t so sure. You might be waiting for the other shoe to drop. Or the whistle to blow and the referee’s flag to fly. It’s not simply a matter of getting up on the wrong side of the bed. More likely it’s the feeling that something that used to fit together has come disconnected and you don’t know how to cobble it back together.

That’s what I want to talk about today. If your faith is tuned up and humming perfectly, this sermon probably isn’t for you; you are welcome to take an eighteen-minute nap. But for those who wish faith was stronger and the heart was on fire, let’s have a chat.

The first thing to acknowledge is the experience of darkness is common. It happens regularly. After Mother Teresa of Calcutta had died and was on the canonical escalator to sainthood, they discovered a collection of her letters. She was riddled with doubt. She wondered sometimes if God was really there, if her work for the poor actually accomplished anything. She feared the long silences of heaven – and the Roman church called her a saint.[1]

As she wrote to a colleague, “Jesus has a very special love for you. As for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great that I look and do not see, listen and do not hear.” This was Mother Teresa, who inspired millions with her charitable work on behalf of Christ, who wanted those letters destroyed after her death.

I cannot judge her because the story is a common one. I’ve had moments, even seasons, when faith wavered, when clarity became confusion, and I’ll bet the offering plate that I’m not the only one. Faith comes and goes; that’s the nature of faith.

In the letter we heard today, Paul commends Timothy for his “sincere faith.” Yet this sincere faith did not come naturally. He wasn’t born with it. It was a gift. The very thing that Paul commends didn’t originate with Timothy. It came from somewhere else.

The apostle says, “There was faith that lived in your grandmother Lois. It lived in your mother Eunice, too.” Lois and Eunice were two Jewish women (Acts 16:1). There’s no mention of Timothy’s father or grandfather. No, it was the women who came before him. Faith came to them; now faith came to Timothy. We can presume they told him Bible stories, taught him to pray, took him to worship.

And if he had been in my family, he wouldn’t have had a choice about it. He would have spent three hours in church on Sunday – Sunday School at 9:30, worship at 10:45, and coffee hour with parents who were always the last ones to leave. Then home for roast beef, potatoes, and conversation about the sermon. That’s how I was raised. My family shaped me in preparation for my belief.

Some of you know my story: every Sunday, we sat in the same pew, all four kids strategically separated by Mom and Dad. The quietest kid got to put the envelope in the offering plate; it was a contest.

The sermons were dull, so I took a pencil and filled in all the zeros and O’s in the worship bulletin. And we sat still, until one day, I began to understand what the preacher was talking about. It began with the Jesus stories, but then more and more, comprehension increased. Faith crept in. I didn’t have it. It had me. It came from somewhere else. Paul reveals the clue to Timothy, “with the help of the Holy Spirit living in us.”

Faith sneaks in. It’s not from us, it’s a gift from God. If you hear enough Bible, and pray enough prayers, and learn the language of belief, faith can find a home. It can linger a while.

But faith can also slip away. That was my friend’s experience. It’s happened to me on occasion. Maybe it’s happened to you sometimes. There is a hint in today’s text suggesting it may have happened to Timothy too.

The hint comes when Paul reminds him “to rekindle the gift of God that is within you.” “Rekindle” is a word from the fireplace. It’s what you do when the hot flame has died out and the remnants of some coals remain. You build a small nest of thin sticks over the coals called “kindling.” You blow on the coals – or as I saw somebody do, you use a hairdryer. If the fire comes alive, you must be ready to feed it with thicker sticks and rebuild the fire.

“Rekindle the gift of God within you.” It’s a suggestive phrase. How might we rekindle a faith where the fire has gone out?

I can tell you what my friend did. He did a few different things. First and foremost, he gave up on being an expert, especially about matters of belief. It was very humbling. There he was, teaching graduate courses on Christian spirituality -- and his own spirit was dry and disconnected. It was hard to confess, but he decided not to fake it.

That opened him to a series of surprises. One surprise was how much happened that did not depend on him. The sunrise was brilliant, the sunset was stunning, and neither happened because of him. The world seemed to get along just fine without him having to run it. He was free to breathe and take it in.

He also began to notice how much good there is in the world. That was significant, because he had just been through a patch of personal mishaps, a newspaper full of bad news, national tragedies, and international suffering. Yet, for all of that (and it had been weighing heavily on him), there were heroic efforts for goodness. All the darkness could not snuff out the light. Maybe Christ is risen, God is alive, and the Spirit is busy. He had stopped paying attention.

And then, a seemingly random invitation to visit another worshiping community refreshed him. He had gotten stuck and overcommitted in his own congregation. He went regularly, sat in the same place every week, but it made him grumpy. But when a friend took him to a sanctuary of believers from another culture, it was disturbing in the best kind of way. Those people were joyful. The energy was pulsing from the center.

He said, “I had fallen into thinking there was only OTC – one true church. Suddenly I was thrust into seeing that if, in fact, Christ is risen, God is alive, and the Spirit is busy, perhaps Christ, God, and Spirit are busy somewhere else.” It was a jolt, so he lingered a while. In time, he returned to his familiar church - and he sat in a different pew! A fresh perspective.

Along the way, he had a realization – another gift from the heavenly headquarters. There was something more than religion, something far superior to religion – and that was faith. He remembered two quotable quotes. The first was a stanza from a song by the Grateful Dead:

Once in a while / you can get shown the light

In the strangest of places / if you look at it right.  (“Scarlet Begonias”)

The other was a line from the 17^th century monk, Brother Lawrence. He had assigned the text to his students many times, but until now it had never occurred that the words might speak to him. Brother Lawrence said, “I can sometimes say, ‘I no longer believe, but I see.” He could see what matters most, what is living and true – even if it was awkward, even if he had to give up the old certainties that had become so confining.

His story reminded me of a tale told by a college student. She had gone off to her fall semester, moved into the dormitory, and started her classes. A few weeks later her parents moved to another city a couple of hours away. When she went to visit them at Thanksgiving, “home” wasn’t home anymore. Same parents, different town. It was profoundly disorienting. All that had been familiar was gone. The old places were gone.

When she came out of the fog of dislocation, here is how she made sense of it all. She said, “Home had moved, and I didn’t know where it was anymore. So I had to figure out where home was now going to be.” At the heart of it all, she discovered she was on a journey.   

All of us are on a journey. It’s the same journey. We come from God and we return to God. The longer we live, it can seem like God is elusive and ever on the move. Yet if God is our home, our one true home, faith is chasing after God until we find God – and God finds us.

In one of her books, the Presbyterian writer Anne Lamott writes,

I have a lot of faith. But I am also afraid a lot, and have no real certainty about anything. I remembered something (someone) had told me – that the opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty. Certainty is missing the point. Faith includes noticing the mess, the emptiness and discomfort, and letting it be there until some light returns. Faith also means reaching deeply within, for the sense … to go for a walk.[2]

So we walk on, best in the company of one another. There’s no better way to “rekindle the faith” within us than by reaching beyond us, welcoming one another as strangers, building trust, and becoming companions on the way. As Paul reaches toward Timothy, so we can extend ourselves for one another. None of us ever need to travel alone.

We are on the journey of faith and trust together. When we can affirm that, no matter how far off and distant it seems, it feels like going home. That’s when we know the journey is God’s journey, too, “with the help of the Holy Spirit living in us.”

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

---

[1] Daniel Trotta, “Letter reveal Mother Teresa’s doubts about faith,” t.ly/xvLwm

[2] Anne Lamott, Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith (New York: Riverhead Books, 2005), 256-7.

Our Primary Pursuits

1 Timothy 6:6-19

Ordinary 28

October 13, 2019

Of course, there is great gain in godliness combined with contentment; for we brought nothing into the world, so that we can take nothing out of it; but if we have food and clothing, we will be content with these. But those who want to be rich fall into temptation and are trapped by many senseless and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil, and in their eagerness to be rich some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pains. But as for you, man of God, shun all this; pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, endurance, gentleness. Fight the good fight of the faith; take hold of the eternal life, to which you were called and for which you made the good confession in the presence of many witnesses.

In the presence of God, who gives life to all things, and of Christ Jesus, who in his testimony before Pontius Pilate made the good confession, I charge you to keep the commandment without spot or blame until the manifestation of our Lord Jesus Christ, which he will bring about at the right time—he who is the blessed and only Sovereign, the King of kings and Lord of lords. It is he alone who has immortality and dwells in unapproachable light, whom no one has ever seen or can see; to him be honor and eternal dominion. Amen. As for those who in the present age are rich, command them not to be haughty, or to set their hopes on the uncertainty of riches, but rather on God who richly provides us with everything for our enjoyment. They are to do good, to be rich in good works, generous, and ready to share, thus storing up for themselves the treasure of a good foundation for the future, so that they may take hold of the life that really is life.

I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of him, but Benny Hinn recently made big news in Christian circles. He is one of those televangelists, a longtime proponent of the prosperity gospel. His message that if you give his church a lot of money, Jesus will make you rich. For years, Benny laid the same sermon on his people: “Give God a thousand dollars, and it will come back to you tenfold.” Then he flew off in his private jet and preached the same sermon somewhere else.

Well, here’s the news: Benny Hinn has decided to stop asking people for money. “I don’t see the Bible in the same eyes I saw 20 years ago. I think it’s an offense to the Lord to say, ‘Give $1000,’ so I’m not going to do it anymore, because I think the Holy Ghost is fed up with it.”[1]

Now, this is big news in the TV Church world: a preacher in a white suit who has been preaching wealth and success for thirty years has started reading the rest of the Bible. He discovered the Bible is more interested in how you live than what you have.

There’s nothing new about this, except for Benny and his bunch. As we read the first letter to Timothy, we have heard Paul say the bishops of the church should not be “lovers of money,” and the deacons should not “be greedy.” And immediately before our text, Paul warns against the wacky Bible teachers of his own day, particularly those, he says, “who imagine that godliness is a means of gain.” (1 Tim 6:5). To put that in plain speech: they will tell you whatever you want to hear, in order to gain a profit.

The underlying assumption is that more money will make us more happy. It’s an enticing thought. Someone said to me the other day, “Wouldn’t it be nice to be a billionaire?” Well, it’s appealing. Wouldn’t it be wonderful, indeed, if every person we know could be a billionaire. It could repair poor roads, improve tough schools, and pay off college tuition bills. All of this swirls around. Here’s the assumption: if I could get money, even if it’s at the expense of other people, than I won’t have the same difficulties that they do.

In the late part of the first century, some people were coming along and saying, “You know, this has been a strand in Jewish thinking.” For instance, there’s a verse in the Psalms that says, “I have not seen the righteous forsaken or their children begging bread” (37:25). If you take God seriously, things will go well for you.

Perhaps we would like to believe it: the Christian faith promotes a generosity of spirit and says we should expect that generosity from God. If I show up for worship, my life will improve, right? If I keep praying, all my worries – particularly my financial worries – will drop away.

I may regret saying this, but I will say it anyway: nothing is ever as easy as the preachers would want us to believe. Write that one down in the margin of your worship bulletin. Nothing is ever as easy as the preachers would want us to believe.

For one thing, riches are unpredictable. Anybody doubt that? Paul knew it at the end of the first century, and the Jews knew it and wrote that down in their Bibles, too. The apostle quotes from the book of Ecclesiastes, written a few hundred years before him: “As they came from their mother’s womb, so they shall go again, naked as they came; they shall take nothing for their toil, which they may carry away with their hands. This is also a grievous ill: just as they came, so shall they go; what gain do they have from toiling for the wind.” (Ecclesiastes 5:15-16)

500 years ago, John Calvin could declare, on behalf of all the Calvinists who would follow him, that hard work produces its own reward. According to Calvin and his bunch, a full day of work is what we need to put in, so that idleness would never taint our spirits. If we don’t have enough to do, or if we are between jobs, there’s always something to do – a neighbor to assist, a home to improve, a skill to develop. Hard work produces its rewards.

But sometimes it gets foggy, especially if you try to onnect such rewards to faith in Jesus Christ. Like I said, things are never as easy as the preachers would want us to believe.

Paul joins the conversation at this point. He is instructing Timothy to scratch below the surface of these causal connections between God’s love and financial blessing. There is no simplistic connection. He reminds Timothy of the same theme he has developed throughout this entire letter: that there is a quality of life that is independent of how well off we are, or how financially settled we are. He calls it “the life that really is life.” Or to be blunt about it -- “real life.” That is what the Gospel of the Living Christ offers us: real life.

It’s worth reflecting on what real life might be. What does it look like? Sometime back, David Brooks wrote a piece in the New York Times. “The 21st century will come to be known as the great age of headroom,” he said. People have built enormous houses and driven oversized cars. As he describes a town like Clarks Summit, the rule seems to be the Smaller the Woman, the Larger the Car.

He writes, “So you would see a 90-pound lady in tennis whites driving a 4-ton truck with enough headroom to allow her to drive with her doubles partner perched atop her shoulders. When future archeologists dig up the remains of that epoch, they will likely conclude that the U.S. was afflicted by a plague of claustrophobia and drove itself bankrupt in search of relief.”

That approach doesn’t seem to be working for many of us. Not anymore, if it ever did. And it raises the question, “What is real life?” As Paul writes to Timothy, he sets up a checklist. Food and clothing, check; they are good. Temptation, trapped by senseless desires, not so good. Love of God and contentment with what God gives, those are good. The love of money, that’s the root of all evil. Righteousness, faith, love, endurance, gentleness, put them on your list of good pursuits. Wandering away from the faith and piercing yourselves with many pains, not a good idea.

What is the life that really is life? I’m at the point in my life where I notice how all my high school classmates are turning out. Two of them went to nursing school. One married a software engineer who sold off his company and they now live in a 5100 square-foot house in the suburbs. Another heard the call to the mission field and started a health mission in the Dominican Republic. Both of them are Christians, but I’m guessing real life is different for each of them. The first one is very settled, has everything in place, and wants no disruptions of her affluence. She looks weary. The other has taken great risks for Jesus. Her eyes are crinkled from smiling so much.

Paul says to Timothy, “Look around! Pay attention to the pursuits of the people around you.” Pretty soon, the truth of their lives will be revealed. If all a person does is chase after money, they may get what they pursue, but they won’t have much of a life. Maybe that’s why some of the unhappiest people I have ever met are those who touched everything and turned it to gold, only to have their life tarnished. I wonder why that is.

And then there’s that monk in the New Mexico monastery. He walked away from a successful and lucrative career as an engineer. He gave up all his stuff and signed it over to the monastic community. Why? He said, “All my success was killing me. It robbed me of everything and everybody I loved.” So he gave up everything but God and devoted himself to a life of prayer. These days he just glows with the Holy Spirit.

Or how about that family we met on one of our church’s mission trips? There were nine family members bunking in a small home that had barely survived a hurricane. The grandfather invited me in and told the story. He said, “We lost everything, but we have one another, and most important, the Lord still has us.” His face lit up when I mentioned I was a preacher, and he asked me to sit down so we could talk about scripture. Is there a connection between his faith and his life? A life that really is life?

There is a connection, and it’s never as easy as any preacher wants us to believe. But the ancient insights of this New Testament letter raises the question of what we really value.

To the person who wants to be rich, the Bible has to ask: “What would you do with all of that money?” Would you get a big house, build a tall fence, install a security system to keep your stuff safe? And would you spend every night worrying that people valued you only for your money? What kind of life is that?

It reminds me of the fortune cookie that my friend Andy opened one day at lunch. He cracked it open and found the ancient wisdom in four words: “Greed leads to poverty.”

By contrast, Timothy is given the Christian charge. Paul writes, “As for those who in the present age are rich, command them not to be haughty, or to set their hopes on the uncertainty of riches, but rather to set their hopes on God who richly provides us with everything for our enjoyment.”

So Paul extends it into ethics: “Do good, be rich in good works, be generous and ready to share.” This is the invitation for every baptized person, every week, every day. We do not live only for ourselves. We live for God and God’s entire world. That is the good life. That is the real life. When we look at the bank statement, we may have a lot or we may have a little. But when you get right down to it, here is the truth. We are only as good as the good that we do.

Do good. Be rich in good works. Be generous and ready to share. This is how we store up “the treasure of a good foundation for God’s future.” This is how we “take hold of the life that really is life.”

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

---

[1] “Benny Hinn renounces prosperity gospel,” t.ly/MZ9gq