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.