For People Like Us

For People Like Us

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

December 20, 2015

Scripture: Luke 1:39-55

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

So Christmas is almost here. On this coming Thursday evening we will gather for our traditional Christmas Eve service to proclaim the birth of Jesus and welcome him once more into the world. We’ll read the old familiar stories. We’ll sing the old familiar carols. The choir of my former church, Monroe Congregational UCC, will join us and share their music with us. Our music group will sing too. We’ll light our candles from the Christ candle in the Advent wreath and take the light of Christ into our hearts and out into the world. It really is a special time of year. Thanks be to God!

We just heard a couple of those old familiar stories that we’ll hear again on Christmas Eve. Both of our readings this morning come from Luke’s story of Jesus’ birth. They are among the only true Advent texts in the whole Bible because they are among the very few texts that actually talk about a coming birth of Jesus Christ. They are about Mary going to visit her relative Elizabeth after he has been conceived in her by the Holy Spirit but before he is born. We hear of Mary’s meeting with Elizabeth, whom the text calls Mary’s relative. Then we hear Mary sing of the promise her as yet unborn son will bring to the world. She does that in the second reading we heard, the magnificent poem known as the Magnificat, from its first word in Latin. Many of us have sung it in Latin: “Magnificat anima mea Dominum.” The Magnificat is beautiful ancient poetry. It’s so beautiful that it’s easy to overlook how revolutionary it is, but I’ll leave that issue for another day. Today I want to focus on Mary’s praise of God and her description of herself, of her station in live. There’s a lot for us to learn and to celebrate there, so come along as we join Mary as she begins her hymn to God.

The Magnificat begins with Mary saying “My soul glorifies the Lord and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for he has been mindful of the humble estate of his servant. From now on all generations will call me blessed, for the Mighty One has done great things for me—holy is his name. His mercy extends to those who fear him, from generation to generation.” NIV Mary is fully aware of the awesome thing that God has asked her to do. She is to do nothing less than give birth to the Son of God. God the Holy Spirit has created God’s own Son within her, and she will bring God’s own Son into the world. That’s the great thing God has done for her. Now, that would be a truly remarkable thing for God to do with any women, but Mary is aware that it is particularly remarkable that God has done it with her. In her song she refers to her “humble estate.” Now, we actually know very little about Jesus’ mother Mary. The Christian tradition, especially the Roman Catholic and Orthodox traditions, have spun a lot of stories about her. They have constructed whole doctrines around her. That’s OK I guess, but we Protestants don’t go in for that sort of thing so much. We want to know what the Bible says, and the Bible says next to nothing about Mary. About all we know is that she was a woman from the tiny backwater town of Nazareth. We think her husband was a carpenter, or perhaps a stonemason. In Mary’s world that would mean he amounted to essentially nothing, for tradespeople like carpenters were the lowest of the low and poorest of the poor in that world. We know that Mary was Jesus’ mother, and there are references in the Gospels to Jesus having had brothers and sisters, presumably but not definitely from Mary. We know that Matthew and Luke say that Jesus’ conception was from the Holy Spirit, not from Mary’s husband Joseph. That’s about all there is in the Bible about Mary.

It’s not much, but it is enough to tell us at least one really important thing. It tells us that Mary was a person of utterly no significance. Only her family and friends knew she even existed. No one else had ever heard of her. She’s done nothing to bring attention to herself. She’d accomplished nothing remarkable before she became Jesus’ mother. I think she means all of those things about herself when she sings of her “humble estate.”

She wasn’t anyone special, yet she is the one God chose to become the mother of the Son of God. Some parts of the larger Christian tradition say that was because she was especially virtuous; but the Bible doesn’t say that, and I think it’s really important that it doesn’t. See, we learn from Mary—and from many other stories in the Bible—that God prefers to work primarily through people of no special repute in the world. God works through ordinary people. God even works through sinners. Not that Mary was much of a sinner, but Jacob was. He cheated his brother out of his inheritance, was married to two sisters at the same time, and had children not only by them but by their maids. David was. He raped Bathsheba and had her husband killed to cover up his crime. Moses was. He was a murderer, having killed an Egyptian who was abusing a Hebrew slave. Paul was. He approved the mob stoning St. Stephen to death before Paul’s own conversion to the faith of Jesus Christ. I guess compared to these titans of the Bible’s stories Mary was a bit of a saint, but she wasn’t anyone special. God chose someone in no way special to be the mother of God’s Son.

God chose someone in no way special to be the mother of God’s Son, and that, folks, is extraordinarily good news indeed. Jesus came into the world by a mother who was no one special. He came into the world as no one special. He grew up as no one special, an insignificant boy in an insignificant town, probably learning to follow in Joseph’s footsteps as a carpenter or stonemason. And all of those truths about both Jesus and Mary tell us something really important about both Jesus and the God he represents on earth. See, Mary and Jesus were people like us. Or at least Mary was, and Jesus was until he began his extraordinary ministry of teaching and healing and living into his identity as the Son of God. They were people like us. Good enough people. Decent, caring people, but not people of any extraordinary importance. Not people the world knew anything about, at least at first. Not famous people. Not powerful people. Not rich people. In other words, about as much like us as a person from that very different world could be.

They were people like us, and God came through them precisely to people like us. God didn’t have to come into the world as a nobody, but could we really relate to a Christ who was rich and powerful? I don’t think I could. I don’t know what it’s like to be rich and powerful. I’ve never been much of either. But I have been, and am, a person a bit like Jesus and Mary. A person of no particular repute. A decent enough person, but not a special one in any significant way. Jesus came as a person like us for people like us. O yes, Jesus may be for the rich and famous too; but mostly Jesus is for people like us. People the world doesn’t think much of but people God loves more than we can ever imagine. People God loves infinitely, and our finite minds can’t ever grasp fully what that means. We can understand that God came precisely to people like us. Ordinary people doing the best we can. Ordinary people deeply needing God’s forgiveness. Ordinary people deeply needing God’s grace. Ordinary people needing to know that even if the world doesn’t think much of us we aren’t insignificant in the bigger picture of things. Ordinary people who need to feel God’s love and God’s care. That’s what we’ll celebrate this week at Christmas. God coming through a woman like as a man like us for people like us.

That my friends is the great good news of Christmas. The Son of God born as a traveler with no place to stay come not to people of worldly importance but to people like us. Come to show us that to God we matter. To God we matter a lot. To God we matter enough to be born for and even enough to die for. Come to show us that God loves all of God’s people, not just the ones the world thinks matter. That’s what Christmas is all about. Thanks be to God! Amen.

Advent series part 2

Who Are We Waiting For? Part 2 Jesus as Divine: What Are We to Make of the Incarnation?

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
December 6, 2015

Scripture:
Matthew 1:18-24 John 1:1-5, 14

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

In my sermon last week I insisted at considerable length that before Jesus was anything else he was a real human being. That is true, and it is important; but for the Christian tradition it is not a complete answer to the question of who Jesus is for us. It is not a complete answer to the question “Who are we waiting for?” Jesus was a human being, yes; but the Christian tradition has said almost from the very beginning that, while not ceasing to be a human being, Jesus was also much more than a mere human being. Almost from the very beginning the Christian tradition has said that Jesus of Nazareth was God Incarnate, God become human. What are we to make of that contention? Does it have any meaning for us? If so, what is that meaning? To those questions we now turn in this second part of our Advent sermon series.

Although some Christians today see Jesus as merely a man (trust me, I see them all the time in my work on the UCC’s regional Conference Committee on Ministry), I remain convinced that the classic Christian doctrine of the Incarnation is indispensable to true Christianity. Although its classic theological formulation didn’t come until the fourth century CE, the doctrine of the Incarnation has its roots in the New Testament, where it is stated in various ways. However it is stated, the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation holds that Jesus was, at the same time, both fully human and fully divine.

How in heaven’s name are we to understand that contention, that someone who was human like us was also God Incarnate? To get at how we are to understand the Incarnation we have to start, I think, with understanding the experience that the first Christians had of Jesus. Clearly both during his lifetime when he was physically present with them and after his death and ascension to heaven when he was spiritually present with them, the earliest Christians experienced the presence of God in Jesus in some unique way. In him they saw a revelation of the nature and will of God unlike anything they had experienced before. They felt the very presence of God in him in a way they had never felt before. They somehow knew that he communicated truth about God in a unique way, and they felt that he not only taught that truth, he somehow was that truth.

This experience came first, then the earliest Christians struggled to find language with which to express that experience of the presence of God in Jesus. We see them doing that in our Gospel readings this morning. Matthew turned to the prophet Isaiah and found the term Emmanuel, God with us. The author of the Gospel of John turned to the wisdom tradition of Israel and found the Word, John’s term for a concept that in earlier Jewish literature was called Wisdom. Later, the bishops gathered at the First Ecumenical Council at Nicaea in 325 CE would use more philosophical language, the language you may know from the Nicene Creed, primarily that he was “of one substance” with God the Father. Whatever language Jesus’ followers found to express their experience of the human being Jesus being somehow also God, their language for him was always grounded in an experience of him that precedes the language. The language is symbolic, that is, it points beyond itself to a truth that can never really be captured in human language. That truth is found first of all not in language but in an experience, the experience of Jesus’ followers then and now that in him and precisely in his humanity we meet God in a unique way. As is the case with all human truth, experience comes first. The experience of Jesus as manifesting the presence of God comes first. Then we try to find language to express that experience.

That really is what the Incarnation, what the understanding of Jesus as divine, is all about. We aren’t to understand it literally. We aren’t to think literally that somehow there was a human Jesus and a divine Jesus both living in the same body. Rather, we are to understand that in the human being Jesus we see and come to know God. My favorite way of putting it is to say “if you want to know what God is like, look at Jesus.” Jesus is divine because in him we see God, we see what God is like.

And just as Jesus being truly human really matters, so does Jesus being truly divine also matter. To understand how it matters, think of Jesus as being all about relationship. As a human being he shows us how we are to relate to God. We see the human Jesus relating to God in faithfulness to God’s calling to him, in faithfulness in proclaiming and living out the Kingdom of God, in a life of prayer, and in a life of compassion for all of God’s people. As human Jesus shows us how we are to relate to God.

As divine Jesus shows us how God relates to us. A mere human being can reveal to us a lot about being human, but a mere human being can’t really reveal anything to us about God. It is in his divine nature that Jesus shows us who God is. Because we confess him as God Incarnate we see in him not only ideal humanity. We see also as much of the nature and will of God as we humans are capable of comprehending. We see how God relates to us humans and to all of creation. It is because we confess that Jesus is God Incarnate that we can understand his teaching as coming not just from another human being but from God. It is because we confess that Jesus is God Incarnate that we come through him to know God as compassionate, nonviolent, passionate about justice, and always forgiving of our human failings. It is because we confess that Jesus is God Incarnate that we see the way in which he turned the wisdom of the world on its head not just as the teaching of a fellow human being but as the teaching of God.

And here’s the main thing for me: Because we confess Jesus as God Incarnate we see in him how God relates to human life and more importantly to human suffering and to human death. Because we confess Jesus as God Incarnate we see in his death not merely the death of a martyr, although surely it was that. We see how God relates to us when we suffer and when we die. We see God not preventing human suffering and death but entering into them, sanctifying them, and being always present with us in them. We see all of that in Jesus on the cross, and we couldn’t see any of it without our confession that Jesus is God Incarnate. When we reduce Jesus to a mere human being his death loses all of its meaning for us; and for me, that is a loss of immense magnitude that takes much of the meaning out of Christianity. We lose our hope in the face of our mortality. We lose the comfort that God’s presence can bring when we suffer and when we die, as we all surely do. In times of grief and pain I have looked to Jesus on the cross and known that God feels my grief and my pain and is present with me in them. That knowledge has brought me great comfort. But that knowledge has brought me that comfort because when I see Jesus on the cross I see so much more than a fellow human being. I see God in human form entering into human suffering and death and demonstrating in fullest measure God’s solidarity with us in those unavoidable human conditions.

The Incarnation, the notion that Jesus is not just fully human but is also fully divine, is the best news that our Christian faith has to give us. I said in my sermon last week that God is an abstraction, and I think our word God is that indeed. Jesus is not an abstraction. He is a man, and we individual humans aren’t abstractions. In Jesus as God Incarnate we see God in a way we can understand. A way we can strive to emulate. In Jesus as God Incarnate we see that God doesn’t despise our human condition, our human failings. Rather we see God taking them into God’s own person, sanctifying them, and showing us in the clearest possible way that God accepts and loves us no matter what. So let us celebrate Jesus not just as a great man but as God become a man. That’s why Christmas is so much more than the remembrance of the birth of a man. It is the celebration of nothing less than the birth of God. Thanks be to God! Amen.

Advent Sermon Series, Part 1

Who Are We Waiting For, Part 1

Jesus as a Human Being

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

November 29, 2015

Scripture: Mark 8:27-30

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

It’s Advent. We talked about what that means during our 9 o’clock session this morning. If you weren’t there but want to know more about Advent I’ve got a handout I prepared on the subject. Let me know, and I’ll get you one. To recap very briefly, Advent is the season of the church calendar when we intentionally anticipate, wait for, and prepare to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ as Christmas. We’re preparing to celebrate the birth of Jesus, but I have an important question about why we’re doing that. That question is: Just who is it whose birth we are preparing to celebrate? That may sound like a dumb question, but it isn’t. Just who Jesus is is perhaps the central question of the Christian faith. In our reading from Mark this morning Jesus asked his disciples who they say he is. He asks us that question too. It’s a really important question, and it is the question I want to focus on in a sermon series this Advent. So here goes.

The question of who Jesus is arises in the context of a Christian tradition that has seen Jesus as God Incarnate and as Savior more than it has seen him as a human being. Yet whatever else he may have been Jesus was a human being, and it is with his humanity that we must begin our effort to understand who he is for us. So today you get part one of this sermon series, Jesus as human.

As we await the birth of Jesus more than anything else we await the birth of a human child. A human baby. A baby boy not different from all the baby boys we have known in our lives. A squalling, pooping, nursing, spitting up baby boy. “Away In a Manger” may say “but little Lord Jesus no crying he makes,” but come on. We’re talking about a human baby here. A human infant at risk for SIDS, likely to get chicken pox, measles, the flu, or worse. A human being who would die one day like the rest of us. A baby born to a poor, unwed, teenage mother. A poor boy of no worldly status, with no real prospects for getting ahead in life. With a human father at the bottom of the social ladder. A real nobody in the eyes of the world, all those stories about his birth to the contrary notwithstanding. They were all written much later by people for whom he had gone from being nothing to being everything. But at first, at his birth, he was just another baby boy of no account in the world. It is certain that when he was born nobody but his parents even noticed.

And I need to ask you: Does it shock you, even just a little bit, to hear me talk about Jesus like that? I confess that it shocked me a little bit when I composed those lines about Jesus as an ordinary baby boy, as true as I think that they are. I think there’s a good reason for that shock. The Christian church has for so long proclaimed Jesus as God Incarnate, as God walking around on earth looking like a human being, that it’s really easy to think of him as God and forget that he was a human being; but before he was anything else, he was a male human being, first a baby boy, then a child, a youth, and finally a young man. Before he was anything else Jesus was a man, a human being like any other human being in his bodily make up. Before he was anything else, he was one of us.

He was one of us, and that really matters. It really matters because his call to us is to follow him. His call to us is to be like him, and if he were only God there’s no way we could be like him. I’m not at all sure I can really be like him even with him being truly a human being, but I know that I couldn’t be like him at all if he were only God. None of us humans could. We aren’t God, or even gods. In other mythologies of other cultures gods sometimes appear as humans, but they never truly are humans. Jesus is truly human, and that really matters. We can’t follow someone who only appears to be human but is really a god because we don’t just appear to be humans and not gods, we are humans and not gods. The great virtue of Christianity is that it says that in Jesus God didn’t just show up on earth appearing to be human. God actually became human in the person of Jesus. In Jesus we can see a model of what it truly means to be human only if Jesus truly is human. He was truly human, and that is why we not only should try to follow him, we actually can follow him.

Jesus calls us human beings to be like him, and because he is truly human we can be like him; but of course in order to do that we have to know who he was as a human being. What sort of human being was he? What does it mean for us to follow him? There is a term for Jesus that I’ve heard Jesus called that I think sums up pretty well who he was as a human being. Jesus is a Galilean sage. Sage here doesn’t mean an herb you use in turkey dressing. It means a wise person. As a human being, quite apart from whether or not he was anything more than a human being (more about that next week), Jesus was a wisdom person. He taught wisdom and he embodied wisdom. He taught and he embodied the wisdom of God. Of God yes, but he did it as human being; and that means we can do it too.

OK. Jesus was a sage, a wisdom person; but just what was the wisdom that he taught? There’s no way to give a complete answer to that question in a short sermon, or even in a long book. So let me suggest something that characterized his teaching generally rather than spend too much time on specific teachings, important as those are. We all know something about worldly wisdom. We know how the world works. We know what the world values. The world values power. The world values wealth. The world values success, prestige, and status. The world looks up to those who succeed in acquiring those things, and the world doesn’t much care how they got them or who got used and exploited along the way. The world is organized into nations, and the nations of the world routinely use violence against each other and against their own citizens. They use violence to gain territory, access to natural resources, or other things they think they need; and they don’t much care who dies in their efforts to get them. They use violence against their own citizens. They execute people they believe are criminals. They unleash the riot police and even the military on crowds that are making demands that those in power in the nation don’t like. All of those things are the ways of the world—the ways of Jesus’ world and the ways of our world.

If you want to know what Jesus taught about any particular subject, look first at what the world says about that subject. You’ll be pretty safe in assuming that Jesus taught the opposite. He taught nonviolence. About that there is no doubt whatsoever. He taught justice, and by justice he meant what the great prophets of the Jewish tradition meant by it—care for the poor, the needy, the marginalized, the vulnerable. He meant inclusion of the outcast. He valued the ones the world dismisses and ignores. He made the last first and said see me in “the least of these.” Jesus taught compassion not condemnation, love not hate, care not purity. In everything he said and did he turned the world’s wisdom on its head and taught the wisdom of God in its place.

And it is so easy to dismiss all of that teaching as some sort of otherworldly ideal that is so impractical as to become impossible in the world. Maybe it’s the wisdom of God, but we aren’t God. Maybe it gets lived out in some sort of heaven on some other plane of existence; but we live in this world, and in this world Jesus’ vision just doesn’t work. It is so easy to come to that conclusion, and that is why Jesus being first of all a real human being is so important. It is so important because the reality of Jesus’ humanity means that living in the wisdom that he taught and that he lived is a human possibility not merely a divine one. His thoughts are not beyond us, for they are the thoughts of a human being. His way of life is not beyond us, for it is the way of a human life. Jesus being truly human and not merely appearing to be human really does matter.

It really does matter, and it’s really good news too. It’s really good news precisely because, like I’ve already said, as a human being we can relate to Jesus. We can be close to Jesus. Jesus can come to us as one we can understand and as one who can understand us. Yes, we love God. Of course we do. But let’s face it. God is an abstraction. God is spirit yes, buy spirit isn’t flesh and blood like we are. Jesus is flesh and blood like we are. So hold onto Jesus. Invite Jesus into your heart like you invite a friend into your home. Because he’s human you can do that. Because he’s human you can love him intimately, and he can love you intimately. Who are we waiting for? The human being Jesus. That’s not all he is, but it is a big part of who he is. He’s coming to us as one of us. Thanks be to God! Amen.

A Thanksgiving Sermon

Into the More

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

November 22, 2015

Scripture: Matthew 6:25-33

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

Happy Thanksgiving! Yes, I know. Our country’s official Thanksgiving day isn’t until next Thursday, but I suppose it’s better to mark it in church early rather than late. Besides, next Sunday is the first Sunday of Advent, and we’ll want to focus on that change of the church season next Sunday. So today Thanksgiving it is. We Congregationalists like to think that Thanksgiving is somehow especially our holiday, what with all the stories of the Pilgrims celebrating what we call the first Thanksgiving. I’ve heard some things recently that suggest that those stories are mostly made up and aren’t real history, but never mind. Thanksgiving it is. Thanks be to God.

Now, for most of my life I have loved Thanksgiving. That’s partly because I love the traditional Thanksgiving meal of turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing, and gravy. Especially the gravy, although frankly I can do without the cranberries. But there’s more to my old love of Thanksgiving than that. For much of my life my late wife Francie and I would take our two children to my parents’ house in Eugene for Thanksgiving. We’d stuff ourselves full on Thursday, then on Friday we’d leave the kids with their grandparents and go spend Friday and Saturday on the Oregon coast as a little personal get away time together. We’d come back to Eugene on Sunday, pick up the kids, and drive home. The traffic was often horrendous, but otherwise we always looked forward to that break every year. Those were some very good times.

So yes, I have loved Thanksgiving, but there’s something I need to confess to you. This year I’ve really been struggling with the notion of giving God thanks for the blessings in my life. It’s not that I’m not grateful for those blessings. I am. Here’s what I’m struggling with. How can I give God thanks that I have a dry, warm home, plenty to eat, a good education—more education than anybody has any reason to have actually, good health care, a safe community to live in, good work to do, a loving family, and so many other blessings when I know that so many other people in the world don’t have all of those things, or may not have any of them? Maybe all the images of those Syrian refugees who have lost everything makes that question especially poignant for me this year. When I give thanks for all of the blessings I enjoy it feels to me like I’m somehow putting myself above all those other, less materially fortunate people, or worse, that God has put me above them. I find that feeling very uncomfortable. I don’t think God loves me more than God loves anyone else. I don’t think that God has somehow chosen me for a blessed life and chosen others for a difficult or even impossible life. When I thank God for my blessings I just can’t help thinking of all of the people who don’t have those blessings. The homeless. The mentally ill. The physically ill with no access to health care. The lonely. The hungry. The refugees—these days especially the refugees. The victims of violence—these days especially the victims of violence too. So many other ways in which people’s lives are difficult or even impossible while my life is neither difficult nor impossible. I’ve really been wrestling with my difficulty with Thanksgiving this year. I have, fortunately I guess, had some thoughts about how to resolve my difficulties with Thanksgiving, and that’s what I want to share with you this morning.

I think the reason I have so much trouble with Thanksgiving is that I’ve thought that Thanksgiving is about giving thanks for the wrong things. I’ve thought that I was supposed to give thanks to God for all of those material, earthly things in my life that I think of as blessings, but as I’ve wrestled with the very notion of Thanksgiving this year I’ve come to the conclusion that those things are not what Thanksgiving is all about; and it was our reading this morning from Matthew that led me to that conclusion. In that text Jesus tells us precisely not to worry about the material things of our lives. He says “Do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear.” He’s telling us those things are not the things we’re supposed primarily to be concerned with. Not that those things don’t matter at all. He tells us in our passage not to worry about what we will eat, drink, or wear and says “indeed your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things.” Yes, we need them, and other things as well. Jesus fully recognizes those realities of human life. But he’s telling us here they aren’t the most important things. They are not primarily what God wants for us. They’re necessary. God knows they’re necessary, but they sure aren’t what God want us to focus on. I think we can say in this Thanksgiving season that they are not the things for which God most wants us to give thanks.

So what does God want us to focus on? For what does God want us to give thanks? About all he says about that here is: “Is not life more important than food…?” He is telling us, I think, that life is more than its physical requirements. Life is more than we usually take it to be. Jesus here is inviting us into that more, into the more that life can be, the more that God wants our lives to be. So if that’ what Jesus is doing here, and I think it is, he presents us with a bit of a problem, doesn’t he. He presents us with a pretty significant question: Just what is the more that life supposedly is? Just what is the more that Jesus is inviting, or calling, us into?

Again, he doesn’t really answer that question here as directly as we might like. Jesus has a really annoying habit of presenting us with questions that he never quite answers. He does that on purpose, of course. He does it because he wants us to be active participants in discerning what the life of faith is for us in our time and place. He doesn’t want us to be merely passive recipients of prepackaged answers. He invites us on a quest, a quest for what he usually calls the kingdom of God, which we can take as a metaphor for the way God wants life on earth to be. He says life is more, then invites us to figure out for ourselves what that more is.

Of course, he doesn’t leave us on our own to do that. Jesus is our access to God’s grace. Jesus is our access to inner peace. Jesus is our access to spiritual strength and the courage to face whatever life throws our way with trust in God’s love and solidarity with us every step of the way. That inner peace and strength is what he’s talking about in this passage. He tells us to look at the birds of the air. He says that God sustains them and will sustain us too. He tells us to look to the lilies of the field, that grow and flourish in God’s grace just as we can if we will, as he says here, just stop worrying. “Do not worry,” he says. “Who of you by worrying can add a single hour” to his or her life? It’s a rhetorical question of course. He means that none of us can. “So do not worry,” he says. “Do not worry about tomorrow,” he says. That’s the message that comes through in this passage. Don’t worry. Trust God. Focus on the “more” of life, on the deeper things, on spiritual health more than physical health, on spiritual riches more than material riches, on God more than on the world.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I have to confess that I find those instructions often difficult if not impossible to live by. Anyone who knows me well knows that I’m a bit of a worrier. I tend to fuss about things more than I should. Perhaps some of you do too. Maybe that’s why I find this passage from Matthew so powerful. It’s telling me something I really need to learn. It’s telling you those things too. Don’t worry, it says. Trust God. God will see you through whatever you have to face in life. You are safe with God, even when you aren’t safe at all by the world’s standards. God cares about you and for you, and that’s the most important thing you need to know. Those are powerful words indeed. Words of comfort in times of troubles. Words of strength when we feel week. Words of courage when we are afraid. Words of solace when we grieve. I may find them hard to remember and to live by. Maybe sometimes you do too, but there they are. We can always turn to them. We can always find what we need in them. Thanks be to God!

Thanks be to God indeed. See, we can give thanks for material things I suppose, as long as we always remember to pray and to care for those who lack the material things they need. But these words are what we can truly give thanks for. They are so much more important than mere material things, and they are God’s words to everyone not just to us. They tell us that God is always there for us, caring for us, loving us, and holding us always in God’s unfailing arms of grace. For that I truly say thank you God. Thank you for coming to us in Jesus Christ and showing us your unfailing grace and love for all people. These things of God are the “more” into which Jesus calls us, and for that more we can truly give thanks.

So this week as we celebrate Thanksgiving, lets remember what we can truly be thankful for. Let’s remember the more of life. Let’s remember the more of God. Let us appreciate the earthly benefits we enjoy and give thanks for them, but even more than that let us enter into Jesus’ more. Let us remember God’s grace and the spiritual gifts God offers all people. Then we can truly be thankful in the way Jesus calls us to be thankful. Thank you God. Thank you for being who you are. Thank you for showing us who you are in Christ Jesus. Thank you that you are always there for us and for everyone. For that more than anything else, thanks be to God. Amen.

Are We Drunk

Are We Drunk?

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

November 15, 2015

Scripture: 1 Samuel 1:4-20

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

I wrote most of this sermon before the terrorist attacks in Paris last Friday. I haven’t changed it, but I think that in times like these, times of grief and fear, times of anger and outrage, the message I crafted before the attacks is if anything more important after the attacks.

It’s a really important story, but it may be one you aren’t very familiar with. It is the story of the birth of Samuel. Samuel is a very big deal in the Old Testament. He is the prophet who essentially creates the kingdom in Israel, anointing first Saul then David as king. Now, there is a pattern to the births of several major characters in the Bible. They are born to women who, biologically speaking, can’t conceive children. These women turn to God for help. God hears their prayers and, as the Bible puts it, “opens their wombs” so that they bear a son. That son turns out to be a major figure in the history of Israel. The first of these women is Sarah, wife of Abraham. God blesses her very late in life with the son named Isaac. Mary is the last of these women, and her conception is even more miraculous than is Sarah’s because with Mary, as Matthew and Luke tell the story, no man is involved in Jesus’ conception at all.

We met another of the women of the stories of divinely assisted conception in our reading just now from 1 Samuel. Her name is Hannah. She is married to a man named Elkanah, who has another wife besides Hannah. So much for the supposedly biblical idea of marriage, but I digress. The other wife has had children, but Sarah hasn’t because, as the text says, God has “closed her womb.” So she goes to the central place of Israelite worship before David moved the Ark of the Covenant to Jerusalem and David’s son Solomon built the first temple there. That place isn’t a temple, it’s a tent, called the Tent of Meeting. There’s a priest who is in charge there whose name is Eli. Hannah prayed to the Lord her God that she might conceive and bear a son. She prayed silently, but she moved her lips, apparently mouthing the words she was saying silently to God. Apparently that wasn’t how people normally prayed at the Tent of Meeting, for Eli promptly assumes that she is drunk. “How long will you keep on getting drunk? Get rid of your wine,” he says to her. Hannah explains that she hasn’t been drinking but was “praying here out of great anguish and grief.” That, by the way, is a good reminder to us pastor types not to jump to conclusions about or parishioners, for we’ll probably be wrong about them, but again I digress. Eli blesses her, she has relations with her husband, conceives a child, and gives birth to the prophet Samuel. It’s a really good story, and it tells us that Samuel will be someone special even before the text gets into stories about him.

Hannah apparently is the first person we come to in the Bible who prays individually rather than collectively. That alone makes her pretty remarkable, for personal, individual prayer became such a strong part of the Christian tradition. Hannah is then a good model for us. She hurts. She grieves her inability to do what women in her time and place were mostly supposed to do, namely, bear children, especially sons. She prays to God for relief from her distress. Good move. She is a great biblical model for at least one primary thing that we should do in our times of troubles. She turns to God. She models turning to God for us. We’d be well advised to follow her lead in this regard.

Yet there is more to Hannah’s story that can inform our own spiritual lives than just turning to God in prayer when we face difficulties. For one thing Hannah prays individually, but where she does it is important too. She doesn’t do it at home, not of course that we can’t or shouldn’t pray at home. Not at all. But in this story when Hannah is moved to turn to God in prayer she leaves her home and goes to a special place. She goes to her people’s central place of worship, that Tent of Meeting I just mentioned. In other words, she goes to church. She doesn’t go to any place anything like our contemporary churches, and she isn’t attending anything like a worship service, but she isn’t just at home either. She is at a place her religion considered sacred. She went to a place where she would feel closer to God. She went to a place of prayer and worship. She’s a good model for us in this regard too. We know, I suppose, that we aren’t actually closer to God in church than we are anywhere else, for God is present everywhere and always. Still, I don’t know about you, but I often feel closer to God in church than I do anywhere else. That makes church a particularly good place to pray. But there’s a broader lesson here too. Many people have places where they feel the presence of God more strongly than they do elsewhere. For many people in our part of the country that place is somewhere in nature. In the mountains. On the sound. In the San Juan Islands. If you feel closer to God in some natural setting, then that setting is a particularly good place to pray. Not because God will hear you better. Just because you feel closer to God there.

And there’s one more thing about what’s going on in Hannah’s story that is perhaps a bit less obvious to us. Our text says that Hannah is unable to conceive a child because “the Lord had closed her womb.” The story believes that it is God’s fault that Hannah is childless. Now, that doesn’t make much sense to me. I don’t think that God directly causes the things that happen on earth, either globally or in our individual lives, at least not as directly as this story supposes. Our story here expresses one of the foundational beliefs of the ancient world that produced the texts of the Bible. In that world people did believe that everything that happens on earth, both globally and in the personal lives of the individual people, was the doing of God or of one or more of the gods. Hannah apparently believes the same thing. God, her god Yahweh, is, for her, the cause of her distress. We may not believe that God causes anyone distress like that, but for purposes of this story we have to accept that Hannah believes that God does and that God did in her case.

So what does she do? I might expect her to get mad at God. To say to God OK, if that’s how you’re going to be, forget it. I’m done with you. You’re being mean to me, so why should I give you anything? Why shouldn’t I hate you? I mean, that’s how we humans often react to people we think are doing us wrong, don’t we? Sure we do. I’m sure lots of people have reacted to God that way when things in their lives have been hard. It’s a perfectly understandable reaction. It’s understandable, but it’s not at all what Hannah does. Instead she turns toward, not away from, the One she understands to be the source of her grief. That is a profound expression of the nature of faith. God is God even when we think God has somehow turned against us, not that God ever actually does that of course. I suppose Hannah hoped that God would listen to her and change God’s mind about her. Indeed in this story Hannah does become pregnant and bear a son, but somehow I want to ask: Would Hannah have turned against God if, as she surely understood the matter, her prayer hadn’t been granted? I don’t think so. I at least like to think that Hannah’s faith would have remained strong to the end of her life even if she had never borne a son.

Now, like I said, I don’t believe that God causes things on earth nearly as directly as Hannah apparently did; but I think there’s still a lesson for us in the way she turned toward God not away from God. We hear all the time that people give up on the faith when their prayers aren’t answered the way they want. Yet we can learn from Hannah, I think, that that’s precisely the time to turn toward God with more prayer, not to turn from God with less prayer, or worse, no prayer at all. I don’t mean that if we just keep praying God will eventually do what we think we want God to do. No, not that, but something else.

I once read a message on a church reader board in Monroe that sums it up really well. It read “Prayer doesn’t change God. Prayer changes us.” That reader board message from a church with which I would probably disagree on almost everything reminds us that we so misunderstand prayer. We think the purpose of prayer is to get God to do what we want. Or to get God to give us what we want. Maybe that’s why Hannah was praying the way she was, but even if that is true it doesn’t change what prayer really is. Prayer really has one purpose and only one purpose. That purpose is to bring us closer to God and to make us feel like God is closer to us. Not to bring God closer to us, because God is always as close to us as God can be, closer, as it says in the Koran, than our carotid artery. No, not that; but to make us more aware of God’s intimate closeness to us at all times and in every circumstance. Maybe when we become more powerfully aware of God’s closeness we can find the resources we need to bring about the thing we’re praying for. Or maybe we find the spiritual strength to live without the thing we’re praying for. Either way, what prayer mostly does is bring us close to God and make us more aware of God’s closeness to us.

Praying has become sort of an odd thing to do in our culture, so many of our people have given up on faith. It has become so odd that when people see us praying they may think we’re drunk. They may think a sober, rational, sensible person wouldn’t be doing such a thing. Well, they’d be wrong about that. Prayer is the central practice of any life of faith. That’s why we pray when we’re alone. That’s why we pray together here at church. That’s why we teach our children to pray. To our secular culture it can seem odd at best and intoxicated or even deranged at worst. So be it. We people of faith know its power. We people of faith know its benefits. Not that we get everything we pray for, for we don’t. Not even that we have to use words to pray, for often silence is the most powerful form of prayer. No, we’re not drunk when we pray as Eli thought Hannah was. We are in fact as sober as we can get. So let’s keep on praying, shall we? It is what God wants of us. It is what we know we are called to do. We know how powerful it is. So let us be together in prayer, today and always. Amen.

A Beautiful Vision

A Beautiful Vision

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

November 1, 2015

Scripture: Isaiah 25:6-9; Revelation 21:1-6

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

Happy All Saints Day! Today is All Saints Day you know. Or maybe it’s All Souls Day, which for our purposes amounts to the same thing. I suppose we all know that last night was Halloween. I don’t know about you, but frankly I’m not crazy about Halloween. Perhaps that’s because my dog seems hardwired to the doorbell and the front door. Whenever anyone rings the bell or knocks on the door, he instantly goes ballistic. Woof woof woof! At full volume. It’s very annoying, so I very much prefer it when no one comes to my front door. But of course the American Halloween tradition is people, mostly but not exclusively children, coming to your front door, knocking or ringing the bell, and hitting you up for candy. So I always arrange for me and my dog not to be home, or at least to try to make it look like we’re not home by turning off the porch light and the light in the front room and hiding out in the back of the house. Not very hospitable I know, but it reduces the number of times the dog gets set off. Yes, some of the kids who come to the door are really cute, especially the little ones, but still. If you like Halloween, fine. I don’t much.

Which doesn’t change the fact that today is a significant day in the church calendar. It is All Saints Day, and we can understand the terms saints here as referring basically to everyone, or at least to every Christian, which is what the word originally means. It’s a day for remembering those who have gone before us in the faith and a day for remembering loved ones who have passed into the next life before us. The lectionary readings for All Saints Day seem geared to remembering those who have passed and to envisioning a future reality that is, frankly, a whole lot more pleasant than the world’s present reality. Our passage from Isaiah dreams of a day when God will prepare a rich feast for all people. It says God will wipe away the tears from all faces, a beautiful image of a world free of pain and grief. Our passage from Revelation picks up and repeats that image in some of the most beautiful language in the New Testament. It dreams of a new earth on which God is present with the people. Picking up that image from Isaiah it says that God “wipe every tear from their eyes,” meaning, I think, the eyes of all people. It always surprises me when I remember that such a beautiful image is in Revelation, a book that is full of images that are anything but beautiful. Our readings this morning give us a beautiful vision of a future time for all people. In that time all will feast and celebrate. God will be immediately present with all people. There will be no more chaos (that’s what the bit about no more sea in our passage from Revelation is about). There will be no more pain or grief, even no more death. It is a vision of a world transformed from a place of sin and hurt to a place of grace and joy. Beautiful, isn’t it?

Well yes, it’s beautiful. We humans create beautiful images of a future time and a better world like these because we know deep in our souls how imperfect, how flawed, our present world is. We know something just isn’t right. We know about all the violence that afflicts God’s world and peoples’ lives. We know about the injustice and the poverty that prevail over so much of the earth. We know about the pain and the grief we have experienced in our own lives, and we know about the pain and grief our loved ones have experienced too. We know that we don’t always do what is right and that we leave undone many things that are good, and we know that pretty much everyone else does too. We know that life could be better. We know that the world could be better than it is. So we dream of a better future, and we create some really beautiful images when we do.

Which, I suppose, is all very well and good, but here’s the thing. Do you think God wants us just to sit around and wait for a better world to come about through divine intervention? Sure, that may happen someday, but it hasn’t happened yet. It seems to me naïve at best to think that God calls us just to dream of a better future or just to hope that God will get moving and do something about it. I think those beautiful visions of the Bible serve a different purpose. I think they are there to show us not what God is going to do but to show us what God wants. They are not there to placate us, they are there to inspire us. They are there not to get God moving but to get us moving.

We all know saints whom we have loved and who have passed into God’s everlasting arms of grace. They lived in a world that was far from perfect. So do we. We can’t fix everything that’s wrong. We can’t make every vision in our texts a reality. I don’t know how to eliminate death, for example. But we can do a whole lot more than we’ve done. We can make the world a better place.

So today we remember our loved ones who are gone. We all have them, or we all will. We all honor them in our own ways. We keep them alive in our memories. We give thanks for the love we shared with them and ask their forgiveness for ways we may have wronged them. All of that is indeed very, very good. But we can do more. We can move the world closer to the kingdom of God, if only by a little bit. We can make the world they have left and we still inhabit a better place. We can make God’s beautiful vision a little bit more real. We can do it in memory of those who have gone before us. We can do it to the glory of God. Shall we? Amen.

A Hollywood Ending

A Hollywood Ending

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

October 25, 2015

Scripture: Job 42:1-6, 10-17

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

We all know about Hollywood endings, right? The hero defeats the villain. The handsome leading man gets the beautiful leading woman. The forces of evil are vanquished by some great spy or action hero who has no qualms about killing all sorts of people in the cause of justice and righteousness. The people he kills are, of course, always purely and only evil, so that makes his violence not just acceptable but good. Someday I’ll talk to you about the myth of redemptive violence, but not today. Today I just ask you to remember all the cowboy movies in which the cowboys—always white of course—defeat the Indians, with the Indians defeat always depicted as a good thing, never mind historical reality. The rancher and the sheriff always capture the cattle rustler. Or the cops and robbers movies in which crime never pays in the end. Or the James Bond movies in which our virtuous hero defeats the forces of evil, sometimes years ago in the form of the Soviets or in the form of some totally unbelievable super-villain who, rather than just shoot Bond, James Bond, devises Rube Goldberg-like schemes and devices for killing him that he can always outsmart. Whether the movie is a romance, a comedy, or an action flick the good guys always win and the bad guys always lose. That’s the Hollywood ending. It’s made the Hollywood studios billions of dollars over the years. It has made matinee idols out of actors and heartthrobs out of handsome actors and beautiful actresses. We do love our Hollywood endings.

Hollywood didn’t invent the Hollywood ending. In fact, having stories end the way we want with the good characters at least living happily ever after is a very ancient literary device. We find it even in some of the very ancient stories in the Bible. Ruth marries Boaz. Esther saves the Hebrew people from genocide. And Job gets restored and lives happily ever after. We just heard that one. Scholars aren’t at all sure that it was part of the original story of Job, but never mind. It’s how the story of Job as we now have it ends.

You remember Job, don’t you? He’s a perfectly righteous man who has never sinned, yet a character called Satan gets God to let Satan inflict unspeakable loss and pain on Job, just about everything a human being can suffer short of dying, to see if Job’s faith, strong during the good times, would hold up during the bad times. Job loses all of his many possessions. His children are killed. He comes down with a painful skin disease. For Job it’s disaster after disaster, and he doesn’t deserve any of it. He questions God, because he, like most everyone else in ancient Israel, thought that God inflicted pain and loss only on the bad guys, not on the righteous; and Job is nothing but righteous. Throughout the book of Job three of his so-called friends keep telling him that he must have sinned, that he should confess, and then God would cause the suffering to cease. Job continues to protest is innocence. At the end of the book God appears to Job and says basically I’m God, you’re not, deal with it. God is here calling nonsense on Deuteronomy and what it claims to know is the way God works in the world, which I think is the main point of the book. Then we come to the passages at the end of the book that we just heard. Job gets it, at least sort of. He says to God “Surely I spoke of things I did not understand, things too wonderful for me to know.” He repents of having questioned God, which again I think is the main point of the book, that we are to accept what God does no matter what and not question it.

Then comes the Hollywood ending. The text says that the Lord “made [Job] prosperous again and gave him twice as much as he had before.” He fathers a new family consisting of seven sons and three daughters, all of them of course beautiful. He lived to a very old age and died “old and full of years,” living to an old age being considered a great blessing in ancient Israel. The text might as well have him riding off into the sunset on a white charger, wearing a white hat of course. For all but these last chapters of the book Job suffers horribly, but surely we can’t have a story end that way, can we? Well, somebody, either the story’s original author or some later editor, decided that we can’t. So Job gets restored. I’ve never understood how having new children could really make up for the deaths of earlier children in one’s life, but never mind. Hollywood ending it is. Job lives happily ever after.

Now, maybe I’m a little weird here, but I don’t like the Hollywood ending that somebody in the book of Job. It doesn’t ring true to the story. It really sounds to me like somebody couldn’t take Job’s unjust suffering so tried to make things all right for him in the end. I think the story would be a lot more powerful, and a lot truer to actual life, if it ended with Job’s confession, with the first of our two readings this morning. I don’t like the Hollywood ending, but I get why it’s there. We all like Hollywood endings. We want our heroes and heroines to live happily ever after. There’s a reason why fairy tales end that way, and there’s a reason why so many Hollywood movies end that way. Hollywood endings sell, and for good reason. We all like it when things go well for people in life. We have all known bad times in our lives, and we don’t like them. We don’t want to read about them. We don’t want to see them on the screen. I get it about Hollywood endings.

I get it, but here’s the thing. Life isn’t like that. The priests who wrote the book of Deuteronomy wanted us to believe that faithfulness to God produces wellbeing in this life. They simply were wrong about that. I wish they hadn’t been, but they were. No life, no matter how faithful, is free from pain, grief, loss, and death. We are humans not gods, and living nothing but Hollywood endings just isn’t there for us. We wish it were. I wish it were, but it isn’t. Maybe we like Hollywood endings so much because we all know at some level how rare they are in real life. Just take a look at your own lives for a moment. Have they always been happy? Have they always been prosperous? Has there never been loss? Have you never known grief? If so you are lucky. I almost said blessed there, but I think lucky is a better word. If you haven’t experienced sadness, want, loss, or grief just wait. The only way to avoid them in this life is to die before you experience them, and that isn’t such a great option either. Life can be full of joy, comfort, caring, and love too, and I hope that your lives are and have been. But those blessed things certainly aren’t all that life is about. Most of us don’t get to live a Hollywood ending for the entire course of our lives.

There is nonetheless a way that traditional Christianity sort of promises us a Hollywood ending. Christians have long believed that we all have an eternal soul that survives out physical deaths. Christians have long believed that at least some of those souls are destined for a blissful eternity in heaven. Certainly there are passages in the Bible that at least suggest that reality. It is a very comforting notion, and there certainly is good reason to believe that it is true. I find great comfort in it myself. I have had occasions when I have felt the continuing presence of people I have loved who have died, so the survival of some aspect of our personhood beyond death seems an established reality for me. Our being destined for eternal bliss after death sounds a bit like a Hollywood ending to lives that are often filled with pain and grief. That’s no reason not to believe in the reality of life after death, although perhaps it makes it a bit easier for atheistic cynics to make fun of Christian belief. So be it. I’ll take that belief over atheistic cynicism any day.

Yet I think that there is another way that we can understand how God relates to us and we relate to God beyond belief in an eternal life of the soul. This way of thinking about it is really good news, and it sounds a bit less like a Hollywood ending. It doesn’t promise us freedom from pain. It doesn’t promise us freedom from illness, loss, grief, heartache, or death. We all know that those things are part of life. No, this way of thinking about God gives us something that is actually deeper and more powerful than our vain hope for a Hollywood ending in everything that happens.

See, God isn’t in our lives to dictate outcomes or to prevent everything we think is bad. Rather, God is in our lives to be a sustaining, loving, forgiving, comforting presence with us in everything that happens. God is with us, holding us in unfailing arms of love in everything that happens. That, my friends, is a true Hollywood ending. It is a true Hollywood ending because it makes everything all right in a most profound, existential way. It is a true Hollywood ending because it tells us that whatever pain we feel, whatever grief we experience, even our unavoidable death are not the ultimate truth. They are not our eternal fate. And it tells us that we never face them alone. We always face them with God. Yes, that reality is not always easy to perceive. At the end even Jesus didn’t perceive it when he cried from the cross My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Yet even in that moment of deepest existential despair for Jesus, God was with him in his feeling of Godforsakenness. God is with us too, no matter how hard it may be for us to know that profound truth.

When my first wife was dying, on one of her worst days, she had vision. She saw herself and me held safely in God’s hands. After she died we put on her grave marker the words “Safe in God’s hands.” That’s our Hollywood ending. That’s the living and the dying truth of our lives with God. So will all our losses in life be restored the way the ending of Job says Jobs were? No. That’s not what God has for us. But we can know in the deepest recesses our souls that we are safe in God’s hands no matter what. Existentially safe. Eternally safe. Safe in a way Hollywood can never show us. Safe in the way Jesus shows us. Thanks be to God! Amen.

Redefining Our Terms

Redefining Our Terms

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

October 18, 2015

Scripture: Mark 10:35-45

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

I don’t know about you, but I sometimes wish that Jesus weren’t so complicated. I mean, he brings us God’s grace. He demonstrates to us God’s love. He shows us that God is with us no matter what, forgiving, holding, sustaining, comforting, and inspiring us. He truly does all that, and all that is very, very good. Thanks be to God! I suspect that the reason we say we love him is precisely because he does all of those divine things for us, and indeed we should love him because he does those divine things for us. Jesus wouldn’t be so complicated if those things were all he did for us, if those things were all he was about; but see, those things are not all that he is about. Maybe we wish they were. Maybe we would like it better if all Jesus did was save us, whatever we may mean by being saved. Since about the fourth century CE the Christian tradition has pretty well reduced Jesus to just being our Savior. I don’t mean that he isn’t our Savior. He is. Thanks be to God! We have a big problem, however, when we try to reduce Jesus to that role. That big problem is the Gospels of the New Testament, especially the first three of them, Matthew, Mark, and Luke. See, in those Gospels especially Jesus does a lot more than bring us God’s grace, although of course he does that too. It’s that “a lot more” that I want to spend some time on this morning.

We get a good exposure to Jesus’ “a lot more” in our reading this morning from Mark. That reading begins with two of Jesus’ inner circle of Disciples, James and John, the sons of Zebedee, asking something of Jesus. They say to him “Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask.” Now, I’d think anybody was a fool who would immediately grant a request like that without knowing what the two were going to ask, and Jesus doesn’t quite do that. He asks them what they want them to do. They ask Jesus to give them the two places of greatest honor in Christ’s “glory,” that is I suppose, when he has ascended to heaven as ruler of the universe. Jesus never says no to them very directly, but he doesn’t grant their request either. He suggests that James and John won’t be able to bear the pain and death that must come before Jesus enters his glory, and he says that the positions they ask for aren’t his to grant, saying something obscure about those positions belonging “to those for whom they have been prepared,” whoever they are.

Then we get to the part of our reading that really is about Jesus’ more. He says to all of his Disciples “whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be slave of all.” I imagine Jesus’ Disciples at first reacted to these words much the way I do, which is I’m guessing the way many of you do. Say what? You say to be great be a servant, but servants aren’t great! Servants are lowly. Servants serve other people, which makes them subordinate to the people they serve. That’s not being great, it’s being servile. You say whoever wants to be first must be slave of all. Sorry Jesus. That doesn’t make a lick of sense. Slaves aren’t first, they’re last. They’re the lowliest of the servants. They aren’t even free people. It simply isn’t possible to lower than a slave. And you say that to be first be a slave? No sale, Jesus. You’re talking nonsense. Can’t you imagine Jesus’ listeners reacting that way? I can. Don’t you pretty much react that way yourselves? I do. Yet there it is. Jesus, whom we call Lord and Savior, says to be great be a servant and to be first be a slave.

This isn’t the first time Jesus has said something like this, and it isn’t the last time he will say something like this. A couple of weeks ago there was the passage in the lectionary readings from Mark 8 where Jesus says “Whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me and for the gospel will save it.” Mark 8:35 Sounds like more nonsense, doesn’t it? Lose your life by saving it and save your life by losing it? Nonsense! And Jesus is always spouting things that sound to us like nonsense. He says the Messiah must suffer, die, and rise again. That’s very un-Messiah-like behavior, or at least the suffering and dying part is. Love your enemies, he says; and the world response Nonsense! What’s the point of loving people who hate us? The last will be first and the first will be last, he says. Matthew 20:16 Say what? The last aren’t first, they’re last. The first aren’t last, they’re first. That’s why we call them the last and the first. Pure nonsense, we think. Lots of other examples of Jesus spouting apparent nonsense could easily be cited. Christians have thought for so long that so much of what Jesus says in the Gospels is pure nonsense that we’ve pretty much just ignored Jesus’ nonsense and pretend that he never said it.

We pretend that he never said it, but here’s the thing: He did say it. Maybe we wish he hadn’t. Maybe we wish we didn’t have to deal with the reality of his having said it; but he did say it, and we do have to deal with it. Here’s what we have to deal with. Time and again Jesus took what the world takes as wisdom the turned it completely upside down. He took what the world takes as common sense and stood it on its head. Jesus did nothing so much as redefine most of our terms. He took what the world means by words and gave them an entirely new meaning, a meaning that often is the polar opposite of what the world takes those words to mean.

We see him doing that in our passage from Mark this morning. In that passage he redefines the term great. We think great means superior, over and above others, exalted, maybe even worshipped. Dictionaries often use words like above in their definitions of the word great. Great means better than. Great can even mean a lot better than. When we apply it to rulers, like when we talk about Peter the Great or Alexander the Great, we mean powerful and aggressive, someone who accomplished extraordinary things, usually by means of force. And along comes Jesus and says Nope. Great doesn’t mean any of that. Great means be a servant of others. Great means take the lower place not the higher one in the social hierarchy. 

He does the same thing with the concept of being first. We think being first means winning. It means beating out others for some desired prize. It means defeating others. It means getting the job lots of people wanted. It means winning the race or the game or the election. It means exerting yourself over others. And along comes Jesus and says Nope. None of that is what being first is. To be first become a slave. Become so lowly that you have no freedom but must always be at the beck and call of another, of someone who has total control over your life. In both cases Jesus has completely redefined our words. Great doesn’t mean what we think it means. First doesn’t mean what we think it means. For Jesus, which of course means for God, those words actually mean pretty much the opposite of what we think they mean.

That’s how it is with Jesus and with God. Divine wisdom is radically different from worldly wisdom. We all have been formed by the worldly wisdom of the cultures in which we grew up. It cannot be otherwise with us humans. We are social creatures, and as we grow up and develop we take the ways and the wisdom of our culture into our very being. We must assume that the same thing happened with Jesus, since while also being God Incarnate he was as fully human as we are. But he overcame the limitations of his human culture, and of ours. He grew in divine wisdom not worldly wisdom, and he proclaimed that very different wisdom to his world and to ours. It’s easy to ignore and forget about Jesus’ statements of otherworldly wisdom, but when we do we diminish him and the gift that he is to us from God.

Now, it won’t surprise me is some of you take what I’ve said about Jesus so far as bad news not good news. After all, we all have our conventional wisdom. We all have our learned ways of thinking and our prejudices. We all think we know what great means, and we all think we know what it means to be first. Most of us probably think it’s perfectly appropriate to hate our enemies, and most of us probably think that it’s the wealthy and powerful who are blessed not the poor and the meek. Jesus’ audience knew all of those things too. In that they weren’t so different from us. Jesus knew that they knew those things, and he was powerful in denying them and putting out a very different view of reality. Many in his audience didn’t like it. We probably don’t either, but there it is. That’s what he did. I don’t think you can read the Gospels with any kind of open mind and not reach that conclusion.

We may not like the way Jesus stood the world on its head, but whether we like it or not there are powerful lessons in the way Jesus took on and reversed the wisdom of the world. It’s not just that we are to take the specifics of what he said seriously, although we are. I think there’s a broader lesson here too. See, Jesus didn’t and couldn’t have addressed every situation in which the ways of the world are a hindrance to the kingdom of God. He couldn’t do it even for his day. He couldn’t possibly do it for ours. So the broader lesson that he teaches us is that whenever we have a conventional way of thinking about anything we need to stop and ask: Would Jesus accept that way of thinking, or would he stand it on its head? Whenever we repeat a cultural prejudice we need to stop and ask: Would Jesus accept that prejudice, or would he tell us to knock it off?

It’s not always easy to answer those questions. Some of the moral issues we deal with just weren’t issues in Jesus day—environmentalism for example—so we get no direct guidance from him on them. We get no direct guidance, but we get really good indirect guidance. Jesus is always telling us to ask: Is something we think or do grounded in love? Is it grounded in love of God, ourselves, and others? All others by the way, not just others we like. If we can truly answer those questions yes, then we’re on solid moral ground. But if we can’t, Jesus calls us to reform our thinking. To turn it on its head the way he turned conventional wisdom on its head. That’s often very hard for us to do, and it probably doesn’t sound like good news. Yet what doing it does is bring us closer to God and God’s ways, and being closer to God is always good news. It’s not that God rejects us when we reject God, but fulfillment and wholeness of life come from living as God wants us to live. How God wants us to live is rarely how the world wants us to live. So let’s be careful, shall we? Is our thinking kingdom thinking? Is our living kingdom living? Never perfectly of course. Perfection is beyond us, but improvement isn’t. Can we listen? Can we respond? May it be so. Amen.

The State of the Church

The State of the Church

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

October 11, 2015

Scripture: Isaiah 43: 18-21

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen

I don’t know about you, but I can hardly believe it. Tomorrow, October 12, 2015, is the one year anniversary of the first time I was here with you preaching and leading worship. One year ago I’m sure none of us thought that I would end up as your pastor. I guess maybe the thought had occurred to me that I might apply, but everything I thought I knew, namely, stories I’d heard from Ed Meyer up at my church in Monroe, told me that this church and I were no kind of a match. I thought maybe this church was so split and so conflicted that I’d want nothing to do with it. Kris had called me the previous August to ask if I might be willing to do pulpit supply for one Sunday. She knew I was only ¼ time at Monroe Congregational UCC, so maybe I’d be available. As I recall, my first response to her was “Kris, I’d have thought that I was the last person in the world Maltby would want to hear from.” She assured me that that wasn’t the case, I thought perhaps because she was desperate to get people for Sunday mornings during that time when this church had no pastor. She wanted me for a Sunday in September, but I wasn’t available; so October 12 became my first Sunday here with you.

Things kind of snowballed after that. I preached here twice in November, all through Advent, and all but one of the Sundays in January of this year. You voted to call me as your pastor on January 25. Now here we are, one full year since I first appeared up here in your chancel. Who knew? The Holy Spirit perhaps, but not much of anyone else. We are actually celebrating another anniversary around this time of the year too. Elsie tells me that the official founding date of this church is October 4, 1903. We missed that date last Sunday, so we’ll note it today. In light of those two anniversaries, of my first time here with you and of the founding of this church, let me share some reflections on where First Congregational Church of Maltby has been, where we have come to, and perhaps where the Holy Spirit may be calling us.

From its creation in 1903 this church has been a church in the Congregationalist tradition. That means several things of course. It means that the church lives in the Reformed or Calvinist side of Christian Protestantism. That fact has consequences for how we understand the Sacraments among other things, but that’s not the most important think about Congregationalism for us. Here’s one thing that is more important: First Congregational of Maltby is and always has been completely autonomous. The people of this church have always made their own decisions about their faith and about their life together. You still do. As is true of any church in the Congregationalist tradition some of the decisions you have made are good, some of them have, frankly, been quite bad.

Many of you know more about this church’s recent past than I do. I’ve heard a lot about it, but some of you lived it. So forgive me if I don’t get it completely right. This congregation of God’s people have come through some rough times in recent years. You had at least one pastor who, whatever pastoral gifts he may have had, was no kind of Congregationalist, making decisions on his own that were not his to make according to Congregationalist polity. You had a pastor, the same one actually, who wasn’t always exactly honest or ethical with this congregation. You had a lot of division between people in the congregation with different views of the Christian faith. Significant numbers of people have left the church in recent years. You have had an intentional interim pastor, and you have had times with no pastor. You have had times with lots of children in the congregation, and you have had times with no children in the congregation. You’ve been through a lot, and you’re still here. Thanks be to God.

When I first met you one year ago you were a small congregation made up mostly of older folks. I quickly got the sense that you didn’t quite know who you are as a Christian congregation. You didn’t know where the Holy Spirit was calling you, and by saying that I don’t mean to say that we’ve got it figured out yet. More about that anon. You wanted this church not just to survive but to grow and thrive, and you weren’t at all sure about how to make that happen. And I don’t mean to suggest that we have that one figured out yet either. I had a sense that perhaps this church was on the brink of something new, but none of us yet knew what that new something would be. One thing that I was pleased to learn was that you are financially healthy. That financial health is due in part to what you all give to the church, but it also results in significant ways from rental income from the parsonage and the fact that you have only a half time pastor whose compensation package, frankly, isn’t even quite a decent half time package. I’m not complaining here, just hoping that you all fully understand the state of your church’s finances.

We’ve come some distance since I first appeared before you. Most significantly, I think, we have new folks worshipping with us and talking about joining. We have children among us. Thanks be to God! We have new adults with energy and, I at least hope, a growing commitment to the church and participation in her life. We have a pastor-parish relations committee that you didn’t have when I started. We have a music group that wasn’t functioning when I started. We have an adult discussion forum that meets each Sunday before worship that you didn’t have when I started. These things are all signs of new life in this congregation. Again, thanks be to God!

We have had some losses, and we need to acknowledge that reality as we acknowledge the more positive aspects of our recent life together. Not everyone who was here when you voted on me could accept me as pastor because their Christianity is so much different from mine. I regret those losses; yet it is absolutely true that no church is for everyone, and no pastor is for everyone. I pray that those who have left us find a spiritual home that feeds them and brings them life. I have heard comments that suggest that we have on-going problems. I’m not entirely sure what some of you think those problems are, and I encourage those of you who find unhealthy things about us to come talk to me about what you’re experiencing here. That’s the only way we’ll be able to address problems and deal with them in a healthy way.

You’ve been through a lot. We’ve been through a bit together. I trust that our time together is still in its early stages. Now I want to talk a bit about what lies ahead. That’s why I chose that passage from Isaiah (which was actually my wife Jane’s suggestion) for this morning’s service. There the prophet that scholars call not Isaiah but Second Isaiah reports these words of God: “See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?” God is always doing a new thing. God is never static. God is never motionless, except maybe on the Sabbath. God is always present in the world working softly and peacefully behind the scenes urging God’s people forward to newness of life and to fuller faithfulness to God’s ways. I am convinced that God is doing a new thing with us too. I mean, just think about it. It had never once occurred to me before about a year ago that I would or could ever end up as the pastor of this church. I doubt that it had ever occurred to any of you that that guy you may have heard of or even met who was pastor of that Open and Affirming UCC church up in Monroe would ever end up as your pastor. It had never occurred to me that I would ever serve any church other than a UCC church. Indeed, it had never occurred to me that I would ever serve any church other than Monroe Congregational UCC. My sensing a call to be your pastor was God doing a new thing. You deciding to take a chance on me as your pastor was God doing a new thing. God’s new thing with us is under way. Thanks be to God!

Thanks be to God, yes—but. With me there’s always a “but,” isn’t there. God’s new thing is under way with us, but just what exactly is that new thing? What is its shape? What is its content? Is it simply enabling this church to continue to live as it has in the past? Perhaps. I guess a church not dying can be a kind of new thing. Yet some of you may have heard me say this before. There are what we in the professional ministry biz call “the seven last words of a dying church.” Those seven words are “We’ve never done it that way before.” We’ve never done it that way before. It is the response pastors most commonly get from church people when they suggest doing something new. For reasons I’ve frankly never quite understood, churches tend to be quite conservative in at least one way. They resist change. They like to do things the way they’ve always done them. People, including church people, like to stick with what they find familiar and comfortable. So do I, for that matter. Yet the professionals who know what they’re talking about will all tell you this: No institution can remain static for long. Institutions, including churches, are always changing; and if they think they aren’t changing that just means that they don’t know that they are dying. That’s as true of churches as it is of any other institution. That’s as true of this church as it is of any other church. Clinging to an experienced current reality really isn’t an option for them or for us. Going back to an imagined past most certainly isn’t an option for them or for us. That’s just how it is with churches. That’s just how it is with us.

In some ways I wish I could tell you directly what the new thing is that God is doing with us, but I can’t. More importantly, even if I could, discerning what that new thing is isn’t primarily my job. It is your job. It is our job together. God is doing a new thing. Perhaps we don’t yet perceive it. That’s OK. Perceiving what God is doing is never as easy as we’d like it to be. God doesn’t do any new thing without people who do good discernment and who make good commitments. That’s what we need to do together. Are you up for it? I hope so. Amen.