Category: Sermon

Our time for looking at this extraordinary piece of scripture from the prophet Isaiah is somewhat limited this morning, so let me say, without any lead in, what I want to say.  Then, as the wise preaching adage goes, say it and then wrap up by telling you what I said.  Or, at least, what I thought I said.
What I want to say is motivated by the difference between Isaiah’s vision of God who will come with a vengeance, or as one translation simply puts it, “God comes to avenge!” and what I take Jesus’ vision of God to be — namely one whom saves by coming in love. I think there is not as much tension in the difference as at first seems.
II.
On Friday afternoon, December 3, I was helping Lori Morse move her ladder so she could paint yet more trim on the building that we worked on for three days.  The ground beneath the eve she was painting was soft and the ladder was not resting evenly as a result.  Lori thought that we were actually working in a flower bed.  Not only was the ground soft, but she thought there were some bulbs coming up, just around the corner.
I was struck, numerous times, I think we all were, at the sense of dislocating Christmas from our usual winter time associations.  But it was not just the green leaves on the trees and flowers in the gardens, I think we also felt it for not being in stores all week, for not seeing Christmas decorations.  The darkness too, that is so heavy here at this time of year, was less and I noticed it on Wednesday evening when we went to a local house of worship, where there was only one brief allusion to the season we are in right now.
So much did I feel all of these things, almost weighing upon me, that when Lori mentioned that she thought she’d seen a bulb in that soft soil  — I thought, aha, a first sign of advent. For it was the promise of a fresh shoot out of an old stump, it was the promise of a bloom in a dry desert, these natural, but non-winter experiences that served as metaphorical bridges to the profound experience of God in the midst of horrible times for the people of jerusalem.
For Isaiah, the desert had two meanings, one literal — their homeland was, in fact, desert-like, and the other meaning was metaphorical.  Isaiah’s prophecy begins and the book hinges upon his struggle with Jerusalem not to sell out their moral sensibilities by making a Faustian bargain with the Assyrians, aka the Babylonians, in order to defend themselves against their nearer neighbors, the Northern Judeans and the Damascans.  The people’s failure to place their trust in God and instead make a deal with their enemy ends not only in the destruction of Jerusalem and the exile of its inhabitants, but also their metaphorical loss of that which would alone support them through times of trouble. Isaiah speaks about history and he speaks about humanity.   And he speaks to us today. His meaning is metaphorical — not to be understood literally.
I had another Advent experience in Biloxi, though I did not name it as such at the time.  I was working in the Micah Center at Back Bay Mission.  Micah Center is a drop in facility where homeless folk can get their laundry done, take a shower and meet with people who can help them find work or navigate the bureaucracy.  A woman arrived with a 10 year old in tow.  I was cleaning the showers and while the boy was taking a shower she and I shared a laugh together.  She told me her story.  He was her grandson.  Her husband, a Samoan, struggled with english and, after losing his job on the fishery because of the oil onslaught, was drifting from job to job.  They were getting too old for this she said, sleeping in the back of his pick up each night.  They’d discovered that the parking lots of the casinos were good places to stay, they could blend in with the rv’s.  And she was trying to home-school her grandson, whom she said was in her care because his parent were drug dependent and had split up, unable to take care of Shawn.
I have worked with homeless people like her enough to know that there is a good possibility that I was receiving the varnished truth.  But it didn’t matter.  One does not walk into a homeless center without a fundamental need for help.  It is the human desire to maintain a shred of dignity that leads us to stretch the truth a bit in circumstances like that.
I don’t know what happened to her when she left the center that day.  I do know that one of the staff at the Center overheard us talking, and when she’d finished her shower, that staff person engaged her in her office to help her find better shelter than the back of a pickup truck.  I am not so naive to think that she received that aid and is moving into a more settled situation.  But I also hold onto hope that her experience in the Micah Center,  has given her a leg up, and was like a bulb coming to life in a December flowerbed on the sunny side of a group home in Biloxi.  I share the joyful hope of Isaiah, that a highway is before her, and that on that Way, she might find new life.
III.
Commentators and preachers alike say things, during Advent, like “Isaiah’s vision declares that God’s reign will transform a world of limitation and leanness into one of possibilities and wholeness.”  While that’s a nice, optimistic sentiment — it’s not the bible. That’s something instead out of Chicken Soup for the Soul.  One decent scholar of the bible puts the reality like this, “The great anonymous host of sufferers….are a cloud of witnesses who point the finger of scorn upon all the neat and tidy optimisms which try to sweep all this accumulation of suffering under the carpet and offer us a tidy scheme.” (John Macquarrie) The hope of Advent must somehow take seriously the tragically anonymous hosts lost in the scores of hovels of the poor.
This morning I’ve tried to say that Isaiah’s beautiful, hopeful vision of what life can be like is not mere optimism.  Isaiah did not write “Chicken Noodle Soup for the Soul.”  His stories contain unexpurgated violence and despair.  But not because he’s a downer. Instead he sees human life as inevitably, and inextricably engaged in the tragic.  And that’s not a bad thing.
In fact, Jesus described his ministry, this way, “the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have the good news brought to them.” In the encounter of one with the other, in the spirit of good news, the tragic falls aside for a moment and the outcast is brought into a circle of love, and the voiceless poor, the ones dead to the power managers is raised.  And that’s all we’re promised, because anything else steals our humanity and dims the greatest picture of all — the joy of another human being in this godly encounter.
Let me read again that poem that I read when we lit our Advent candles this morning, this time, instead of imaging yourself in church watching a family light the advent candle, place yourself in an encounter with the other.
Lighting the Advent Candles by J. Barrie Shepherd
Families are asked to do it,
infants toddling to the front to lisp responsive affirmations with their parents
and the people in the pews concerning light in darkness.
You brought a different light
to bear upon our litany of hope. Your participation shed
a gentle, unaccustomed brilliance
across all we have meant by family,
household, living in a lifelong bond
of trust and full commitment. The candle that you lit will—I pray—
not soon go out but, beating back the dark,
will light a path to recognizing family
wherever love binds past and future
tight within the radiance of an eternal grace.

Texts:
Micah 6:6-8
Mark 1:21-28; 40-45; 2:1-11
To do justice, to love kindness and to walk humbly with your God.
Micah 6:8.  But also the motto for the Back Bay Mission where 14 of us will be headed on Friday for a week’s worth of work helping to feed the hungry, clothe the tattered and house the homeless, to paraphrase Jesus.
That said, I do not plan on talking about Back Bay mission before I’ve been there.  Instead I want to talk about the common cause for justice which we all share as fellow citizens of humanity and suggest that the usual distinction or division between the realm of the sacred  and the realm of the secular only helps to perpetuate the abhorrent condition of poverty around the world.  If we are to win the battle against poverty, we will have to take upon ourselves, whether we be Christian or Jew, Buddhist or atheist, responsibility for the task. In other words, I want to suggest that there can be no meaningful division in the meaning of morality between the religious and the non-religious, or in our case today, between those of us heading south to minister in Biloxi and those of you staying home to minister at home. Continue reading “Nov. 21 — More Than Lip Service”

Texts:  Haggai 2:1-9
Luke 20:27-40
In preparation for today’s All Saints service , I asked Lesley to look through all of the bulletins from the past year in order to pull together a list of the people that we knew about who had died since last we celebrated the memory of the saints.  Which she did.  Including a burial for a person with the last name Currier.  She asked me who it was, as there was no first name listed.  All it said in the calendar was Currier burial.  I looked puzzled and responded from my office that I did not do a service for anyone named Currier last summer.  But there it was, in black and white.  Now, as I write, several hours later, I vaguely recall going to the S. Duxbury cemetery for the service.  I do not know now whether the burial was for a man or a woman, young or old.  (My apologies to the family.)
Last month, I began to take seriously the fact that I have a significant gap in my memory of about 6 months.  Certain events stand out.  But to be pressed for a recollection of a burial say, or an email to which I might have responded (to say nothing of the ones I did not) I am very hard pressed to remember anything. The summer, for all its apparent brilliance was a greyish blur to me.
Now, I am quite often wrong (although I’ll deny it!)  in my recollection of details about events, but I rarely forget that there was an event.   This experience, among others recently,  led me to think that it might be a way to think into the experience of the Hebrew people.  They are supposed to remember this grand thing, called the Temple of Jerusalem.  But there is no one left who does.
Continue reading “Nov. 7 — More Than It Seems”

Last year, a group of friends from Chicago spent a weekend gambling in Las Vegas. One of the men on the trip won $100,000. He didn’t want anyone to know about it, so he decided not to return with the others. He took a later plane home, arriving around 3am. He immediately went out to the backyard of his house, dug a hole, and planted the money in it.
The following morning, he walked outside and found the hole had been dug up and the money stolen. He noticed footsteps leading from the hole to the house next door, which was owned by a deaf mute. On the same street lived a professor who understood sign language and was a friend of the deaf man. Grabbing his pistol the enraged man went to awaken the professor, and he dragged him over to the deaf man’s house.
“You tell this guy that if he doesn’t give me back my $100,000, I’m going to kill him! He screamed at the professor. The professor conveyed the message to his friend, and his friend replied in sign language, “I hid it in my backyard, underneath the cherry tree.”
The professor turned to the man with the gun and said, “He’s not going to tell you. He said he’d rather die first.”
I must say that it’s rare when I get a joke, or come across one during the week prior to a sermon that actually works for it. I want to suggest that this joke works this morning for this reason. The story of Jesus’ conversation with the Herodians about the image on the denarius does not have to do with the separation of things political from things religious, as seems to be the usual line. Think about it for a minute – other than the fact that these are two of the three things you don’t talk about in polite company, and therefore you might think would have good reason for being kept apart, why would Jesus argue that somethings don’t properly belong to God when the whole point of his God is that God is the one whom we are to love with our whole mind, body and soul? It does not make sense.
The point of my sermon is to say the opposite – to be a disciple of Jesus, is to experience the love of God so convincingly that nothing anyone can do or say can take it away. Even upon threat of death. The joke, at least in this context is a parable. Not meant to be taken literally, but to point to the reward and the risk of discipleship.
The story of the conversation Jesus has with some Jewish scholars about the image on the coin is part of popular culture. The famous line– render unto Caesar that which is Caesar that which is Caesar’s and to God which is God’s is quoted by people in ordinary conversation to mean that you have to buck up and learn to sort out your priorities. We all need to make decisions – some of which are harder than others. This refers to decisions of the most difficult sort.
Preachers like it for pledge drives, because we can lean ask you to lean a little harder on the God side of the equation and politicians lean on the Caesar side of the equation to justify taxation. Given what I’ve already said about the joke, you might sense that I’m going to suggest that this common reading has got it almost completely wrong.
II.
As usual, a glance at the context helps. Mark has been painting an increasingly ominous picture of Jesus and his struggle with the powers that be. Here, in this last chapter before Mark goes berserk with warnings of the sky turning to blood and the end crashing in, the ongoing legal match between Jesus and the legal authorities has reached a pitch point. The Herodians are ready to take Jesus, but cannot do it, because of the crowds, unless he condemns himself.
So they seek, through their rhetorical skills to make him say something stupid. But Jesus does not. He is far quicker than they give him credit for.
But back to the context.  Four points:

1. rural land was being taken over by big city, rich landlords and the peasants of Galilee were  losing their land;
2. mounting debt, payable to both Roman officials and priestly aristocracy;
3. farmer laborers were being forced onto the unemployment line, and
4. a new Roman taxation system was extracting nearly every last cent.

The atmosphere was potentially explosive.
As we know from the rise of the Tea Party – taxes are never popular. The difference between the modern Tea Party and the historical Boston Harbor tea party, however, is that in 1773 our taxes were going to a foreign government and that the land and its laborers were being abused by that government. It was a movement not based on greed, but on freedom.
And now you realize that Jesus is not just engaged in an academic exercise with the authorities – he was trapped. To refuse to pay taxes would be inviting a crushing military response. For Jesus to encourage this response is for him to incite violence and betray the ideals of the beloved community he wants to let flower.
On the other hand, to meekly pay taxes would be to alienate his base, to betray the people who so eagerly followed him.
III.
Instead of inciting violence or alienating his base, Jesus amazes with his answer. And the question for us is “why?” What does he say that amazes even his enemies?
First, he asks for a coin. When his questioners produce one, Jesus looks at it and asks them who’s on it. This is not a game like we play with our kids, “Whose on the quarter?” The emperor is on (almost) all of the money.
Some say that his response that we should pay the emperor what is the emperors and God what is God’s is ambivalent – a non answer that leaves everyone scratching their heads. They argue that the whole point of the story is simply for Jesus to confound us. Marcus Borg, with whom I quite often agree, says, “Jesus responded in a deliberately enigmatic way in order to avoid the trap set by his opponents. His response was never meant to be figured out. Rather, in this passage as in several others, we see his deft debating skill.”
Yes, Jesus’ Socratic skills are on vivid display here. But I think Borg is wrong to suggest that Jesus was purposefully confusing.
Here’s another idea.
IV.
Suppose we’re missing something from the story. This is not too far fetched an idea. These stories of Jesus were not written down immediately after the fact. Perhaps they were not written down for years or even decades. As we know from playing the game telephone in grade school, the oral transmission of stories can lead to some funny or even confusing results.
Imagine now, how adding gestures to the story complicates the issue – especially when the story begins to take written form. The gestures drop out – meaning is lost.
Recognizing this as a possibility one scholar (Rabbi Arthur Waskow) imaginatively adds another line to the story:
“Whose image is on the coin?” Answer: “The emperor’s.” Here’s where the imagination comes in: Jesus puts his arm on his interlocutor’s shoulder and asks, “And whose image is on this coin?”
Now that may not make immediately make much sense, but for Jesus’ contemporaries, whose primary form of social interaction and entertainment is centered around the Shabbat and the reading of the Torah, where God made the human race in the image of God, there was a smile of recognition. As if to say, “I know where Jesus is going with this.” In fact there is an ancient rabbinic teaching which they would have known about the fact that when earthly rulers put their images on coins, they all look alike, but when God puts God’s image on the human being, no two look alike.
Where is Jesus going?
V.
As it is written, the parable ends awkwardly – Henry David Thoreau’s famous criticism of Jesus is apt – he leaves us no wiser than before.
But the reading I have offered seems not only to get Jesus out of the trap with a Socratic elegance, but also serves once again to bolster Jesus’ claim that the community of love consists, not in divorcing the work of creating just societies, that is our political work, from the insights of religion, but in bringing our religious insights to the open table of conversation.
Now – and this has to be heard for what it is – especially in this charged election week climate – there is a difference between dying for your religious beliefs because you cannot reasonably defend them in light of the common good, and risking your life for your religious beliefs because you willingly bring them to the public conversation. In other words, Jesus is not talking about religious zealotry. He is instead pointing out that all political claims imply some principal or set of principals. And to the Herodians, and indeed to his friends, he says, show your cards. Let us talk about these principals and let us ask, do they move us in the direction of the community of love that is implied by the ancient commandment to love God with all your heart, mind and soul.
I close with the words of Rabbi Arthur Waskow and the slogan of our denomination – a slogan which for some of our new members, at least, is powerful and important.
The real task of rending properly our money is not to figure out what percent of our family budget goes to the church. In fact, says the Rabbi “Jesus has not proposed dividing up the turf between the material and the spiritual.  He has redefined the issue: ’Give your whole self to the One who has imprinted divinity upon you!”
The real task of discipleship, similarly, is not to figure out what the bare minimum is required of us, or what we have to do in order to be a member of a this community. In fact, we say, in the tradition of Jesus, “No matter who you are or where you are on your journey, you’re welcome here.” So ask I you now risk who you are and what you have because in that way, we will experience, afresh the power of God. Amen.

I want to begin by relating an experience I suspect many of you have also had. I was sitting in the coffee shop a few days ago, with a few books out on the table. One was The Heart of Christianity and the other was Jesus Comes to Harvard. A woman, unknown to either of us at the table approached to say how nice it was that people loved Christ. Had we ever heard of RBC ministries, she asked. We shook our heads no, realizing that this was likely not to be a conversation either of us wanted to engage. The internal radar said this is a conservative Christian and Marcus Borg and Harvey Cox, the authors of the books I had out, would be like Greek to her for they do not espouse a set of fundamentals in which one has to believe.
It’s always an uncomfortable moment. I don’t like labels. I don’t like to put people into predetermined boxes. And yet, I’ve been in enough of these conversations to know that I don’t have the energy anymore that it takes to remain conversational with someone like this. Nor do I like being condemned for refusing to jump on board with these fundamentals.
In 1910, a highly influential set of essays was published by a conservative Christian business man and clergy man. It was called The Fundamentals. The Fundamentals was a defense of strict Protestant orthodoxy (whatever that is), and adherents to its set of doctrines came to be called fundamentalists. In a nutshell, the fundamentalists condemned basic enlightenment insights, which is interesting because the Protestant Reformation spurred on the intellectual and artistic renaissance that we now call the enlightenment.
I thought of calling this morning’s sermon “Fundamentals of a Liberal.” But again, I am gun-shy of labels. In fact, the last time I preached a sermon like this one person in the congregation could not hear a thing I said, so incensed was she that I was using the word liberal. Please listen to me. I am not talking here about any kind of politics.
What I do want to talk about is a relevant faith, not because we assert it to be relevant, but because it allows us to experience wonder without denying what we know about the situation of our existence in the world. Rudolf Bultmann was the first famous theologian to insist on the “abolition of miracle” for just this reason. One can not remain a modern and hold on to the ancient notion of miracle. But he was never about abolishing faith and the wonder that accompanies a life of faith. He was a Christian liberal.
Bultmann’s thinking about the relation of the Christian to the world has been widely vilified because the answer to the question he poses in the reading today, “Can the concept of wonder be retained if the idea of miracle is abandoned?” seems by many to be a resounding “No.”
But we have been exploring what it means to answer “Yes.” I have no doubt that the “Yes” we offer is shaded differently by of us. Certainly my aim is not to tell you what to think about these things, but to get us to think for ourselves about how we might shade our “Yes.”
Albert Schweitzer was another liberal in Bultmann’s footsteps. I think that Schweitzer took the project in the wrong direction, but his sense that Liberal Christianity was critically important to the successful promulgation of Christianity into the modern era is spot on. He wrote:

Liberal Christianity is as unpopular today as it has ever been, because the dominant spirit of our time attempts to smother free religious thought. On the other hand, it is a timely cause – as timely as ever – because it is a necessity for the spiritual life of our age. Every deep piety is reflective; every really deep thought is reverent. – Pilgrimage to Humanity.

My aim today is to move beyond those who argue that for God talk to remain God talk, it must also remain pre-liberal and to suggest that the fight for liberation and the ever-going battle against oppression can be more effective with some liberal fundamentals. And this is to say nothing of an experience of God that might truly comfort us in our darkest hours without resort to pollyanism.
I am using as my text, Paul’s words: “I am determined to know nothing among you, save Jesus Christ and him crucified.” I remember an occasion several years ago, sitting around a table with several other theologians talking about the central religious drive in Paul’s writing. It was asserted that for Paul, as for most Christians today, “The Resurrection” was the central theme. I questioned that assertion then, as I do today – Paul was very rarely interested in resurrection, except, perhaps to argue that it should not have such a central place. Paul’s main concern was, to paraphrase his letter, put aside the highfalutin and deal with the ordinary, He might have said, “I decided to know nothing among you except that which Jesus considered most fundamental. Continue reading “Oct. 24 — Some Fundamentals”