The Courage of Faith

The Courage of Faith

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

December 25, 2016

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.

There’s a story that’s told from the horrible years of World War II. It’s legend not history. It never really happened, or at least the details of it didn’t happen although the historical background of the story did; but it’s a great story. It goes like this: The Nazis overran one of the countries of my ancestors, Denmark in this case. And they did what they did all over the lands they had conquered. They began first to harass the Jewish people of those lands, then to round them up, then to ship them off to the death camps. The first thing they did was make them put Stars of David on their clothing so everyone could see that they were Jews. One day King Christian of Denmark rode out of his palace on a fine horse. Sewn to his coat was a Star of David. He wasn’t Jewish. As a Danish king he was certainly Lutheran. But he was the king. He was the king of all the people of Denmark, and he knew it. He valued all of his people, be they Christian, Jewish, or anything else. So he sewed a Star of David on his coat in solidarity with his Jewish subjects. Many other Danes did the same thing. Because they did, many of the Jewish citizens of Denmark were saved.

Here’s another story that I know is true. It happened in Billings, Montana, during the holiday season of 1993. There was a Jewish family in town named the Schnitzers. It was the season of Hanukah, and the Schnitzers had put menorahs in their windows. The menorah is the symbol of Hanukah, kind of like the Christmas tree is our symbol of Christmas. It’s a candelabra with eight candles on it. Young Isaac Schnitzer was sitting at a desk in his house that wasn’t in his bedroom doing his homework. His parents weren’t home, but a babysitter was with him. Suddenly he heard a loud crash. When he and the sitter went to investigate they found that someone had thrown a rock through the window of his bedroom, a window that had a menorah in it. The sitter called Isaac’s parents. They came home and called the police. A wise police chief came. He told the Schnitzers that he would do everything he could to find the culprits who had done that hateful thing. But he also said that the whole town needed to respond to this act of hate. There had been other acts of hate in Billings in those days. African Americans and Native Americans had been targeted by skinheads filled with hate. A Christian woman named Margaret MacDonald and the chief called a meeting of all of the people of Billings, and many came. She had heard the legend about King Christian and the Danes during World War II. Mrs. MacDonald said “Why don’t we all put menorahs in our windows to show that we stand with the Schnitzers and won’t tolerate acts of hatred in our town?” And they all agreed to do it. A certain Rev. Torney, pastor of the First Congregational Church of Billings, said he would talk to other religious leaders and get them on board. (See? We Congregationalists really do have a history of standing up for what’s right and not insisting that everyone has to be like us.) Soon there were menorahs in windows all over Billings. And the incidence of hate crimes went down.

Today we have a President-elect who says he wants to register all Muslims in our country. Many of us Christians have stood with our brothers and sisters against this and other kinds of discrimination for a long time. We have stood against demonizing people who are different from us. We need to do it again today. Many of us have said that if our government tries to make Muslims register we will go and register as Muslims even though we aren’t. If we do we will be taking a risk. Standing up for what is right always involves a risk. Many Danes really did help many Jews escape to unoccupied Sweden. They took a risk. The people of Billings took a risk when they put menorahs in their windows. The haters smashed some of those windows. Doing what is right always involves a risk.

And we wonder how we can have the courage to take such a risk for someone else, for someone not like us. Here’s how. We can have the courage to take that risk because today is Christmas Day. Today we celebrate how God took an enormous risk by becoming human. God took the risk of being rejected. God took the risk of being scorned. God took the risk of being tortured. God even took the risk of being killed. And all of those things happened to God in Jesus Christ. And God overcame it all. God raised Jesus from the dead. Through Jesus’ resurrection God inspired a movement that we now call Christianity that has brought more people to God than any other movement ever has. That has brought more people more peace, strength, comfort, and hope, than any other movement ever has. That has inspired more human acts of generosity, kindness, and courage than any other movement ever has. That has inspired more people to take great risks to do what is right than any other movement ever has. Yes, Christians have done horrible things too, but that’s not a topic for this day of celebration. Today we celebrate God taking the risk to come to us as one of us. If God was willing to take that risk, how can we not take much smaller risks to do what is right?

So in the year to come, if we see something wrong, let’s have the courage to stand against it. Let’s have the courage to do what’s right. Maybe people won’t like us when we do. Maybe we won’t be able to stop evil when we do. The Danes couldn’t stop the Nazis from killing some of the Jews if Denmark. We might even get hurt when we do. But we can still do what is right. We can still do our part to make God’s dream of a world of peace and justice for all people a reality. We can still say thank you, God, for your gift of Jesus by doing what Jesus would have done, by doing what’s right. He comes to us today as a helpless infant. He comes to us every day as the Spirit of  hope, peace, joy, and love. Let’s have the courage of Billings and Denmark. Let’s have the courage to do what’s right. With Jesus as our help and our hope, we can. Amen.

Do Not Be Afraid

Do Not Be Afraid

A Christmas Eve Meditation

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

December 24, 2016 

Scripture: Matthew 1:18-25 

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. 

Imagine poor Joseph. He’s engaged to Mary but not yet married to her. They have not lived together as husband and wife, although in Joseph’s time and place there wasn’t a sharp distinction between being engaged and being married like there is with us. Mary and Joseph have not come together as husband and wife, but Mary is pregnant. What was poor Joseph to think? That Mary had been unfaithful, of course. There was no other possible explanation. So Joseph decides to do what the religious law and the cultural norms of his day told him he had to do. He had to divorce Mary. It was the righteous thing to do. Joseph, Matthew tells us, was a “righteous” man, so he planned to do the righteous thing, the thing the law required. Yes, he was a decent man, so he planned to do it quietly for Mary’s sake rather than make a big public scene out of it; but he knew he had to divorce her, to dismiss her from his life.

That was bad enough, but then things got worse for poor Joseph. He had a dream. In the dream an angel of the Lord appeared to him. This angel began to speak by saying do not be afraid, which is what biblical angels usually say; but this angel has something very specific in mind with her “do not be afraid.” She says do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife. Why would Joseph be afraid to take Mary as his wife? The reason why might not be immediately apparent to us, but take a closer look at what was going here for Joseph. Joseph, we are told, was a righteous man. He knew, and the religious leaders of his day would tell him if he didn’t, that marrying Mary would be a violation of the Jewish religious law. The law said he had to dismiss her. If he married her he’d be breaking God’s law. He’d put himself out of right relationship with God. Marrying her would be an unrighteous act; and, being a righteous man, he quite understandably was afraid to commit that act of unrighteousness.

Yet the angel tells him not to be afraid to marry her. The angel tells him that Mary’s child is of the Holy Spirit and tells him to name the child Jesus, a name which in its Hebrew or Aramaic form means “God saves”. So Joseph overcomes his fear and marries her. Joseph didn’t have to fear violating God’s law because Mary’s child was of God, the child’s conception was God’s work; so Joseph going along with what God was doing could hardly violate God’s law or get Joseph out of right relationship with God. He need not be afraid to marry Mary.

Joseph was afraid, and, like Joseph, we are often afraid too. Perhaps we’re not afraid to violate a first century understanding of God’s law the way Joseph was, but we’re afraid nonetheless. Afraid of life and all the challenges it brings. Afraid of illness, afraid of death. We’ve got plenty to be afraid of, maybe these days especially. Joseph’s angel allayed his fear, but Joseph’s angel telling him to go ahead and marry his fiancé frankly doesn’t do much to allay our fears, does it. They’re different fears, and we need a different message if we’re going to get beyond our fear.

Joseph’s angel spoke to him but doesn’t much speak to us, but fortunately there is in this passage from Matthew something else that does speak to us and that can allay all our fears. Matthew goes on to give more of an explanation of what’s really going on here than Joseph gets from the angel. He quotes the prophet Isaiah—misquotes actually, but never mind. Matthew says that the birth of Jesus will fulfill an ancient prophecy about the birth of a future ruler who will be called Immanuel. Immanuel means “God with us.” Matthew tells us that what’s going on with the coming birth of Jesus is that in him God will be with us. This isn’t an ordinary birth. This is a divine birth. It is nothing less than God coming to us as one of us in the person of this as yet unborn child. With the coming of Jesus, God is with us. Not distant from us. Not against us. God is with us. God is present, and God is on our side. That is the assurance we receive through the coming of Jesus.

And that assurance really can allay our fears. If God is with us, what do we have to fear? Bad things may still happen to us. God with us doesn’t mean only good things will happen, but God with us tells us that in whatever happens we are safe. We are ultimately, existentially safe because God is with us. We are safe because God is holding us always in God’s unfailing arms of grace. We are safe because God with us tells us that nothing in all creation can separate us from the love of God.

So tonight we celebrate that divine birth. We celebrate Immanuel, God with us, coming to us in the newborn child Jesus. And as we do we know that we need not fear. We need not fear anything in life or beyond life. He is Immanuel. He is God with us, and we know that we are safe. So whatever you are finding scary in your life, do not be afraid. God is with us. God is with you, and God always will be. That is the Good News of Christmas. That is the news we celebrate tonight, and it is the best news there ever was or ever could be. Thanks be to God. Amen.

Love Came Down at Christmas

Love Came Down at Christmas

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

December 18, 2016

Scripture: Luke 2:26-38; Matthew 1:18-25

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.

Sometimes the poets say it best. Christina Rossetti said it this way:

Love came down at Christmas,

Love all lovely, love Divine.

Love was born at Christmas,

Star and Angels gave the sign.

Love came down at Christmas. Jesus was born at Christmas. Jesus is love. Jesus is God’s love come to us as a helpless newborn infant. That’s what Christmas is about. Oh, sure. Our culture makes Christmas be all about retailing. It makes it be all about getting the retailers in the black by the end of the year. It makes it be all about exchanging gifts to prove to people that we love them. It would have my wife Jane believe that because I don’t give her diamonds I don’t love her, and she doesn’t even like diamonds. It makes Christmas be all about a northern snowy winter even in places that never have snow. It makes it be about hanging ornaments on a northern evergreen tree even in places where you’re a whole lot more likely to see palm trees than firs. It makes it be about a Christian saint named Nicholas from Asia Minor becoming a jolly old fellow who lives at the north pole and has flying reindeer who somehow magically make it possible for him to deliver toys to all the children in the world in one night. It makes it be about green wreaths with red bows and silver bells. Our culture makes Christmas be about all of those things.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with any of those things, or there wouldn’t be anything wrong with them if we didn’t take the retailing and gift giving part of it to such ridiculous extremes. Most of that stuff that we turn Christmas into is OK, and it certainly can be a lot of fun. It can be a time of great joy, of time spent with family and friends, although we must never forget those for whom Christmas is not a time of joy because they miss departed loved ones or are alone. Most of that stuff is OK and can be good, but here’s the thing. None of that is what Christmas is really about. What I want to talk to you about this morning is what Christmas really is about.

Now obviously, Christmas is about the birth of the baby Jesus. Historically speaking it isn’t exactly Jesus’ birthday. Christmas means Christ mass, and it is the day in the liturgical calendar of the church when we commemorate and celebrate Jesus’ birth, not necessarily the day when we think he was actually born. We don’t know when he was actually born, but it doesn’t matter. What matters is that we remember and celebrate the truth that he really was born. And we remember and celebrate that he really was born because of who he is. He is our Lord and Savior. He is the Son of God. He is the Word of God Incarnate. He is the one in and through whom we have forgiveness of sin and the promise of eternal life. Thanks be to God!

Jesus is all of those things, but Christina Rossetti reminded us in her beautiful poem that we can think of him in a somewhat different way too. She says Love came down at Christmas and Love was born at Christmas. She’s right. Jesus Christ is all of those other wonderful things because he is first of all love. He is, as Rossetti says, love Divine. He is the love of God become human. He is the love of God in a form we can see. He is the love of God in a form we can relate to because that form is as human as we are. He is God’s love tenderly held in his mother’s arms. He is God’s love with his earthly father alertly keeping watch for any possible harm that might come his way. He is the love of God with no special honor. No military guard. No crown and no throne, not earthly ones anyway. He is God’s love as helpless and vulnerable as every human baby is at first. But for all that he is God’s love Incarnate, the fullness of God’s love come to us as one of us. Jesus was born at Christmas. Love came down at Christmas.

Love came down at Christmas, yes; but just what is that love that came to us that blessed day so long ago? It certainly isn’t apparent just what that love would be when all we have is newborn baby Jesus. He’s just a baby. Now of course every birth is something of a miracle. Those of you who have given birth, and those of us who have been present as our children have been born, know that truth well enough. But in his birth, if not quite in his conception, Jesus is just a baby on Christmas day. What the love that he incarnated actually was would become clear only in his adult years as he pursued his ministry, did his teaching, performed his miracles, suffered his crucifixion, and rose again to glorious new life.

The love that Jesus brought and that Jesus is has many aspects to it, but I’m not going to go into all of them this morning. This morning I just want to celebrate. This morning I just want to bask in the warmth that is the love of God in Jesus Christ. This morning I just want to revel in the reality of Christmas that God loves us, all of us, all people, all of creation, more than any of us can even imagine. In Jesus God is willing to give God’s all even for the likes of us. Even for us, we people who always fall short, who always sin. We know that we do, and in Jesus God says maybe you do, to me it doesn’t matter. At least it doesn’t matter so much that I will never forgive you. It doesn’t make me love you any less. I love you so much that I became one of you to bring you my love. To show you my love. To love you in person. To love you in a way you can understand. Not remotely but intimately. Not abstractly but personally.

In the baby Jesus love came down at Christmas. Love divine not merely human. Love greater than any human love. Love such as only God can give. Love that says you are safe with God no matter what. That’s what Christmas is about. That’s why we celebrate. That’s why we feel such joy at Christmas. Love came down at Christmas. Love all lovely, love divine. So as we celebrate Christmas this year let’s remember what this day is really about. Let’s remember the real reason to celebrate. Love came down at Christmas. God’s love came down at Christmas. Thanks be to God! Amen.

Someone Else?

Someone Else?

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

December 11, 2016

Scripture: Psalm 146:1-6; Matthew 11:2-16

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 we’ve come to the third Sunday of Advent, the Sunday whose Advent theme is joy. That’s why today’s Advent candle is pink not purple. Purple was originally the color of Lent. It signifies royalty, but it also represents suffering. Advent is later adaptation of Lenten traditions set before Christmas, so it took over Lent’s purple color. That’s why I’m wearing a purple stole. Eventually the church sought to moderate the original Lenten tone of Advent, so it changed the candle for the third Sunday to pink, pink being, I suppose among other things, the color of joy.

Doing that seems quite appropriate to me. After all, in Lent we prepare first of all for Christ’s crucifixion and only after that for the joy of Easter. In Advent we prepare for the birth of Jesus, an event of great joy with, if anything, only a vague foreshadowing of his suffering to come. We don’t have to go through tragedy and loss to get to Jesus’ birth the way we do to get to his resurrection. So maybe all the Advent candles should be pink, except of course Jesus hasn’t been born yet. We’ve still got waiting to do, and purple is also the color of waiting. But today, though we still wait, we get a foretaste of the joy to come on Christmas Day.

Now, maybe it’s obvious to us why we should feel joy at Christmas. Yes, if we’re lucky we feel joy at the opportunity to spend time with friends and family. Maybe we enjoy exchanging gifts around the Christmas tree. Maybe we enjoy sharing in meals that are great feasts. There are lots of reasons to feel joy at Christmas, but of course these things are not the real reasons, not the most significant reasons, to feel joy at Christmas. The real reason for joy at Christmas is of course that on Christmas Day we remember and celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ. You probably have heard that corny old saying “Jesus is the reason for the season.” Well, like many corny old sayings, this one speaks an important truth. Jesus is the reason for the season, and he is the reason we can and should feel joy as we first await, then celebrate his birth. Without Jesus there would of course be no Christmas. Without him this time of year would just be cold, dark, and dreary. With him it becomes a time of joy. Thanks be to God!

I think maybe it’s because we are preparing precisely to celebrate the joyful event of Christ’s birth that I was struck this week by one line in the reading we just heard from Matthew. In that reading we hear that John the Baptist is in prison. We know that that doesn’t turn out well for him, but for now he’s still alive. He sends disciples to Jesus to ask a specific question: Are you the one who was to come, or should be expect someone else? Jesus, in typical Jesus fashion, doesn’t answer directly, but he pretty clearly indicates that yes, I am the one who was to come. Only the one who was to come, that is, the Messiah, could do the things I’ve been doing. So yes, I am the one who was to come. Don’t go looking for someone else. I’m the one you’re looking for.

And of course that’s why we feel such joy at Jesus’ birth. He is the one God sent. He is the one who comes bringing salvation. He is the one who comes bringing a new revelation of God’s will and God’s ways. He and no one else is Emmanuel, God With Us. We Christians don’t need to look for someone else because we have Jesus, the one who was to come, the one whom God sent. Jesus didn’t give John’s disciples  direct answer to their question, but we can. Yes, Jesus is the one who was to come. No, you don’t need to expect anyone else.

I am convinced to the marrow of my bones that Jesus is the one. That we don’t need someone else. That there won’t be someone else to displace Jesus. So I really wonder: Why do so many of us Christians keep looking for someone else? Because we do, you know. Oh sure. We may call that someone else Jesus Christ, but we spend an awful lot of time actually looking for someone other than the Jesus God really gave us. If that statement puzzles you, let me explain.

I think we Christians look for someone besides Jesus in many different ways, but I’m only going to mention two of them this morning. The first is that we turn the Jesus we have, that is, the Jesus of all four Gospels, into a Jesus we want. Into a Jesus we like better than the one we got. Some Christians do that by reading only, or at least primarily, the Gospel of John. That’s the Gospel in which Jesus is clearly God Incarnate, the Word made flesh, God walking around in human form telling everyone that they must believe that that is precisely who Jesus is in order to inherit something called eternal life. Many of these Christians misunderstand what the Gospel of John means by eternal life, but that’s a subject for another day. What matters today is that these Christians, and there are a lot of them, tend to ignore the other three Gospels. Those Gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, call us less to believe in Jesus than they call us to work to create the Kingdom of God here on earth. People don’t like that, so they turn to John’s Jesus and ignore the Jesus who calls them to something they don’t like.

Then there are the Christians who tend to read only, or at least primarily, Matthew, Mark, and Luke and who tend to ignore (or even intensely dislike) John. For them Jesus becomes only a man who proclaims the Kingdom of God, a man who is all about social, political, and economic relationships and who is hardly at all about spiritual health. These Christians, and I know a lot of them, misunderstand Jesus as much as those who rely only on John do. For the Jesus whose birth we now await is the fullness of God. He brings both the way of spiritual health and the way of right social relationships. He does both, and so many Christians want him to do only one of the other. They seek someone else, not the Jesus whose birth we celebrate at Christmas.

The other way in which we Christians look for someone else that I want to mention briefly this morning is one that hits pretty close to home for me. People of faith, and not just Christians, do this one all the time. We know that the ancient Hebrews did it because we hear them being warned against it in the reading we heard from Psalm 146. This way of looking for someone else has people looking for salvation not from God or Jesus Christ but from some mere human. Psalm 146 says: “Do not put your trust in princes, in mortal men who cannot save.” This is the temptation to look for a human savior not a divine one. I must confess that I am sometimes guilty of this one. I think that’s why I took (and take) the result of our recent presidential election so hard. I tend to put my trust in princes, or in politicians, which amounts to the same thing; and they always disappoint. The ones I don’t like disappoint and, more importantly, even the ones I do like disappoint. They are as fallible as I am, yet over and over again I put my trust in them, only to be let down. I look for someone other than Jesus, and it just doesn’t work.

Perhaps you have other ways in which you look for someone other than the Jesus we got. Maybe you do that by pinning all of your hope on a second coming of Jesus rather than the first coming that we really have. In any event, in this Advent season, let us not expect someone other than the Jesus we actually got. We don’t need someone else, and no one else will do. Psalm 146 says blessed is the one whose help is the God of Jacob, whose hope is in the Lord his or her God. For us Christians that means whose help and hope are Jesus Christ. So let’s get clear on just who that Jesus is. He is indeed the Word, or if you prefer the Son, of God Incarnate. He is Immanuel, God With Us. He is the one in whom God comes to us to reveal God’s ways to us and to call us to follow those ways. Those ways are the ways of faith and spiritual health. When we turn to God in and through Jesus Christ God meets us and helps to make us whole. He is the one in whom we find salvation for our spirits in this life and our souls in the next.

But he is also the one who calls to a radical transformation in our thinking about how things are supposed to be in this life. He calls us to turn the ways of the world on their heads. He calls us to honor the poor not the rich. He calls us to include the ones the world excludes. He calls us even to love our enemies, and boy would the world be a different place if enough people would do that.

In all of these ways Jesus is the one. He is the one who was to come and who came to us from God so long ago. And he comes to us from God even now, every time we turn to him in prayer. Every time we lay our troubles at the foot of his cross and pray for help. Jesus comes to God’s people every time they commit themselves to do good work in the world, when they feed the hungry and when they try to figure out why so many people are hungry in the first place and try to do something to change that tragic reality. Jesus is the one. We don’t need to expect another. We don’t need to look for another. So in this Advent season let us prepare to welcome the who comes, the one who came, the one who is enough. Thanks be to God! Amen.

Turn Around

Turn Around

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

December 4, 2016

Scripture: Matthew 4:1-12

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 imagine we’ve all seen it, or at least we’ve seen a caricature of it. A rather disheveled looking man, perhaps with long uncombed hair and a scraggly beard, standing on a street corner and holding up a sign. The sign reads: “Repent! The End is Near!” The theology behind that sign, I guess, is that in order to be saved at the end of the world we have to repent now. Whether you accept that theology or not, it certainly is undeniable that repenting has long been a big deal with Christians. Unfortunately, it has become a big deal mostly with Christians of a very conservative bent with whom I have significant theological disagreements, but it’s been a big deal with other kinds of Christians too. One source I looked up on line says that the word repent appears 74 times in the New International Version translation of the Bible that we use here. That’s a lot of times for one otherwise rather obscure word. Repentance is indeed a central Christian concept.

We were talking about repenting last Monday at the clergy lectionary group I attend in Seattle. Bobbi Dykema, whom many of you know from the times she has covered for me here, piped in. She said the lines of the Matthew passage for today about repentance reminded her of a line from a Leonard Cohen song: “When they said repent, repent, I wonder what they meant.” I don’t actually recommend that song to you because at least one line in it is quite obscene, but that line took the words right out of my mouth. Or at least it took the question right out of my head. Just what does repent mean anyway? Why has our faith made such a big deal out of it? Well, whatever repent may mean, I can tell you one thing that I used to think it meant that it doesn’t mean. I used to think it meant feel bad about something you’ve done that’s wrong or something that’s right that you haven’t done. I thought it meant feel guilty about what a horrible person you are. I thought it meant confess what a louse you are. That, folks, is definitely not what repent means. It just flat doesn’t.

That it doesn’t mean feel guilty is in some ways good news. It’s certainly no fun going around feeling guilty all the time. That’s not an abundant way to live, and it’s hard (for me at least) to imagine that our God of love wants God’s people going around feeling guilty all the time. The problem is that there’s a bit of bad news in discovering what repent really means too. See, what repent really means turns out to be a good deal harder to do than just feeling guilty about what a terrible person you are. The best definition I’ve found of what the Greek word used the New Testament that usually gets translated as repent is “have a fundamental change in thinking that leads to a fundamental change of behavior or way of living.”

When I found that definition of repent I said “Ouch!” Fundamental change in thinking? Fundamental change of behavior or way of living? Do the people who call us to repent really know what they’re calling us to do? Do they know they are calling us to fundamental transformation? Do they what fundamental means? Our word fundamental comes in part from a Latin word that means depth. Fundamental means in depth. It is the opposite of superficial. It is the opposite of easy. To repent is to transform the most basic parts of our thinking. To repent is to transform just about everything we do. It is to make radical changes in how we live. Ouch! That sounds really hard. It sounds like something I don’t much want to do. My guess is that you don’t much want to do it either.

We may not much want to do it, but the Gospel’s call to repent is still there. We heard it in our reading from Matthew this morning. It’s the first word in John the Baptist’s call to the people: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near.” He calls the Sadducees and Pharisees who come to him to “produce fruit in keeping with repentance.” I take him to mean show in how you live that you have repented. Transform your thinking, then transform your lives. John’s message, including his call to repentance, became Jesus’ message, or at least part of Jesus’ message. We can make fun of slightly off kilter people holding signs on street corners, although having compassion for them would be more Christian of us. What we can’t do as Christians is ignore the Gospel’s call to us to repent.

So let me offer you a phrase that gets at what repentance really is, a phrase that might make it a bit easier to deal with. That phrase is “turn around.” To repent is to turn around. That’s really what the Greek word the Gospels use literally means. Turn around. That’s God’s call to us. That’s Jesus’ call to us.

Now, to turn around involves a couple of different things. It means first of all turning away from something. Then it means turning to something else. Jesus’ call to repentance is a call to us to turn around, to turn from something and turn to something else. So to understand what repentance means for us we must understand what Jesus calls us to turn from and what he calls us to turn to.

I’ll start with what we’re called to turn to. That’s actually the easier part of repentance to understand. Jesus’ call to repentance is a call to turn toward God and God’s ways. It is a call to turn to the ways of love, peace, hope, joy, compassion, forgiveness, and reconciliation. God calls each and every one of us to turn to those things, to that way of thinking and living. Now, I don’t mean to suggest that living that way is easy. Often it isn’t. I mean, it cost Jesus his life. Still, it is at least fairly easy to specify those things we are called to turn to.

Understanding what we’re called to turn from is, I think, harder, at least when it comes to specifics. In general terms we are called to turn from the ways of the world. We are called to turn from the things that are the opposite of the things we are to turn toward. That means we are to turn from the ways of hate, violence, despair, indifference, judgment, and conflicted separation. That’s easy enough to understand. Where it gets hard is when we try to discern precisely what it means in our own lives. Exactly what that I think or do am I supposed to turn from? Who am I supposed to love? Who am I supposed to forgive? For whom am I supposed to have compassion? Those are questions we all face most every day. Often finding the answers is hard. More often we find the answer and don’t like it. Well, we may not like it, but we’re still called to do it. That’s what repentance is all about.

Here’s another bit of good news. As hard as we may find it to repent, we can do it because we know that God is always with us, calling us, prodding us, but most importantly holding us and forgiving us as we struggle with the task of repentance. So the Gospel’s call to us today and every day is to turn around. To turn from the sinful ways we have learned and to the blessed ways of God. In this Advent season, as we await Christ’s birth, let’s listen to that call. Let’s turn around. Amen.

Prophet of Peace

Prophet of Peace

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

November 27, 2016

Scripture: Isaiah 2:1-5

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.

Today is the first Sunday of Advent. Advent is the season of the church year when we anticipate and prepare to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ at Christmas. Advent is in some ways a rather theatrical season. We suspend our disbelief and pretend that Jesus hasn’t been born yet, never mind that he was born over two thousand years ago. Advent is not Christmas, it is preparation for Christmas. Out there in the world it’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas, as the old song goes. In here it isn’t Christmas. It’s Advent. Christmas is coming. It’s on a Sunday this year, so in addition to our Christmas Eve service on the evening of the 24^th we will have a service on Christmas morning at our regular time. It will be Christmas then, but not now. Now it’s Advent.

Every year as we enter the season of Advent one question occurs to me more than any other: Who are we waiting for? The obvious answer of course is Jesus, but for me that response raises more questions than it answers. Who, after all, is Jesus? What does he mean for us? What does he mean for the world? How are we to understand him? The Christian church has long answered those questions by saying that he is the Son of God who came to earth for the purpose of suffering and dying to pay the price of human sin so that those of us who believe in him can go to heaven when we die. If that answer works for you, OK I guess. I won’t argue about it with you; but I am convinced from reading the Gospels that that is not primarily what Jesus was about. He was more about how God calls us to live this life.

Mostly he was about reviving the voice of ancient Hebrew prophecy. That part of the Hebrew tradition was already ancient by Jesus’ time. The voices he heard and echoed date mostly from the 8^th century BCE, more than seven hundred years before Jesus. That would be like someone today reviving a message from the 1300’s, which I’m sure sounds like a long time ago to all of us. It is a long time ago, and the Hebrew voices of faith that Jesus revived came from a long time ago in his time. One of those voices was the prophet Isaiah from whom we just heard in our first scripture reading. That passage gives us a wonderful vision of a glorious future of peace and international understanding and cooperation. It imagines that many people will come to Jerusalem to learn the way of the Lord, that is, of the god Yahweh, the god of the Hebrew people, the God we know as the one and only true God. It says God will settle the peoples’ disputes, which I think we can take to mean that the people will settle their own disputes peacefully because all of them will be seeking to follow the ways of God. Then there will be no more war. In some of my favorites lines from the whole Bible Isaiah says “They will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not take up sword against nation, nor will they train for war anymore.” Always reminds me of the old spiritual with the refrain “I ain’t gonna study war no more.” Isaiah then calls his people, and calls us, to that way of living when he says: “Come, O house of Jacob, let us walk in the light of the Lord.”

And I suppose it’s natural to ask at this point: Why does the lectionary give us this text for the first Sunday of Advent? After all, it doesn’t mention Jesus. Christianity has long thought that Isaiah predicts the coming of Jesus (which I don’t), but there’s nothing in this passage that sounds like a prediction of a person. So why this text for the first Sunday in Advent? I think it’s because, although this text doesn’t predict Jesus, it points to something profoundly true about Jesus. This vision of a world at peace with no war is a vision that Jesus picked up hundreds of years after Isaiah. It is a vision he developed and proclaimed to his world and to ours. The ancient Hebrew prophetic call for a world at peace resonated in Jesus’ soul because he knew that God is a God of peace not war, a God of peace not violence, a God of peace not fear, a God of peace not anxiety. We Christians call him the Prince of Peace, and indeed that is what he is. He spoke of the Kingdom of God as a time on earth when God’s vision of peace for all the world becomes a reality.

For me, when I think of peace, I think first of all about an end to war and to all physical violence between people. Indeed, Jesus is our prophet of that kind of peace; and that kind of peace is really important. But it is equally true that peace is like an onion. There are many layers to it. I remember a quote that I think is from the Dalai Lama, although I couldn’t find it online. It goes something like: If you want peace in the world, begin by being at peace in yourself. The idea is that outer peace begins with inner peace. That’s an idea Jesus would fully embrace, for he sought to transform the world by transforming individual souls. So today as we think of peace, let’s think first of all about the inner peace we can find in our Lord Jesus Christ. He calls us first of all to inner peace, and we can find that inner peace in him. In him we can be at peace because in him we know that God loves us unconditionally. We know that God forgives us unconditionally. We know that God is our eternal home that awaits us at the end of our time on earth. He said “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.” He said “I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.” Matthew 11:28-29 That’s the inner peace we can find in him—rest for our souls. That peaceful rest in Jesus is the beginning of peace not only for our souls but for the whole world. If you want peace in the world, start with finding peace in your soul. That is a message I desperately need to hear today. Perhaps you do too.

Now, I’m preaching on peace today; but the Advent theme for this first Sunday of Advent is actually not peace but hope. So it occurs to me to ask: Is there really any hope for peace in the world? I sure struggle to find that hope these days, but I know that the answer to our search for a hope of peace is God. God is always the answer to any kind of hope. God is how we can hope for that which seems so unattainable in our lives and in our world. We can hope for peace or any other great thing that we lack because we know that God is present and active in our lives and in the world. God’s presence and activity in the world are always subtle. They’re always quiet. They can be hard to perceive, but they’re always there. Always working. Always calling us and the whole world to build that peaceful Kingdom of God of which Jesus spoke. So hope for peace? All the worldly evidence to contrary notwithstanding, yes. Yes, because God.

Recently I have seen two things that seem to me to be signs of a possible peace in the world. They are, of all things, two television commercials that are running this holiday season. One of them is an ad for amazon.com. In it a Muslim imam goes to visit his friend. An imam is a Muslim prayer leader, the closest thing Islam has to a priest or pastor. His friend is of all things a Catholic priest. They have a friendly visit. They talk. They laugh. In the course of their time together they both show signs of having knee pain. The imam bids his friend the priest good-bye. After he leaves, both of them unbeknownst to the other go online and orders his friend a pair of knee pads, from amazon.com of course. Both are surprised when their unexpected gift arrives. They both put on the pads and go to their places of worship, the imam to his mosque and the priest to his church. They both kneel on their new knee pads and pray. The ad doesn’t say so, but they’re both praying in their different ways to the same God, to the God of reconciliation and peace. That ad nearly brings me to tears, for it is a sign that some people in the world get it. They get it that peace and reconciliation are the way of God.

The other ad is for Apple, the computer company. It features Frankenstein’s monster. In the ad he appears as a large, dark, unhappy creature. The first thing he does is record a music box playing the song “There’s No Place Like Home for the Holidays.” He records it on an i phone of course, for this is an ad for Apple. Then he screws red and green Christmas lights into sockets in his neck, where they light up. He walks into a town where people are celebrating Christmas. The people shrink back. They’re afraid. They don’t know what this man who looks like a monster will do. He starts to play his recording and to sing “There’s No Place Like Home for the Holidays.” One of his Christmas lights goes out. A little girl beckons him to come to her. He does, and she tightens the light on his neck that has gone out so that it comes back on. She sings with him. Then everyone sings with him. They all relax and welcome him to their town. It turns out that this creature who everyone saw as a monster was just a lonely man looking for friendship and acceptance, looking for home. The ad ends with a line on the screen that reads: “Open your heart to everyone.” And I say thank you Apple, and amen. Open your heart to everyone indeed. That is the way of peace. That an enormous corporation like Apple would run an ad like this in a world like this is a sign of hope for peace, that peace we so lack and so badly need.

So in this Advent season as we await the birth of Jesus Christ, let us be at peace. And let us hope for peace in God’s world. Let us be hope for peace in God’s world, and let us start by being at peace in our souls. Let us begin by caring for the other, the stranger, the one very different from us, the ones who pray differently, the ones we might think are monsters when they really aren’t. Let us begin by opening our hearts to everyone. Then perhaps we will find the peace that Jesus brings. The peace that Jesus is. Thanks be to God. Amen.

Light in the Darkness

Light in the Darkness

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

November 13, 2016

Scripture: John 1:1-5

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.

(Take off stole) For a moment I’m going to speak for myself here. That’s why I have taken off my stole, the symbol of my status as an ordained minister and as your pastor. I’m going to speak for myself because I have to. If someone tells me that I can’t do that, that I’m only up here because I am the pastor of this church, I won’t argue with them; but I’m going to speak for myself anyway. I’m not speaking now in my role as your pastor. I’m speaking only as an American citizen. For me, last Tuesday, the world became a very dark place, much darker than I had ever thought of it being before. I don’t need to tell you about the result of our election of that day. You know it already. You know who won, and you know as much about that person as I do, maybe more. Some of you already know how I took that result. For the rest of you, I took it very badly. I reacted to it with powerful negative emotions, emotions of depression and even anger. I see nothing but harm coming from it, harm to our nation, harm to the world, especially harm to the vulnerable, to minorities, immigrants, non-Christians, and people with disabilities like my six-year-old granddaughter Calnan, who has a significant visual disability that will probably only get worse as she grows up. I grieve the result of our presidential election, and I suspect that I will for years to come. I never thought my country would make a decision I consider to be this bad, but it did. So I have prayed for help for my nation and for myself as we enter what I fear will be a very difficult time for us and especially for the ones Jesus called “the least of these.” I have struggled and continue to struggle with the question of how I can keep doing the work, the ministry, that I have been doing for years, for last Tuesday’s result frankly makes it all seem small and meaningless. Tomorrow I am going to a two-day retreat for UCC clergy on the subject of how to be the church. I am hoping that spending time with my UCC colleagues, as far as I know all of whom have reacted to the election much as I have, will help me get my feet back under me; for they sure haven’t been under me since last Tuesday. I hope you understand that I had to tell you what’s going on with me, for you need and deserve to know.

(Put stole back on) OK. I’m back as your pastor. One thing that Christianity has always known is that the world is a dark place. Our world today is hardly unique in being a dark place. There has always been war. There has always been injustice. There have always been charlatans and reprobates in seats of power. The good has always struggled with evil. Indeed, sometimes it seems to us Christians that the world is nothing but an arena for the cosmic struggle between good and evil. Frankly, I have never understood how Christians can see the world any other way, for we follow a Lord and Savior whom the darkness of the world tortured and executed as a common criminal, as a threat to public order. Yet we call our crucified savior the Son of God. We call him Emmanuel, God With Us. We call him God Incarnate. And the world killed him as if he were nobody. Yes, he rose again, but our faith truly grew out of the darkness of the world.

Our New Testament knows that. We heard it say it in our reading from John this morning. I used the New Revised Standard Version translation of those verses because they are the form in which I have long known these verses and because I think they are a better translation than the NIV we use here, especially in their last phrase. Those verses are the New Testament’s most profound proclamation of Jesus as God Incarnate. And they know that Jesus came precisely into a world of darkness. They are so profound that I’m going to recite them to you again. They say:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

Jesus is the light of all people, and he came into darkness. His light shines in that darkness. And this Bible verse says “the darkness has not overcome it.” That’s the line that’s translated better in the NRSV than in the NIV. The darkness has not overcome it. Folks, I’ve had a hard time holding onto that one since last Tuesday, but I know it is true. The darkness of the world has never overcome the light of Christ. He is the light in our darkness. Thanks be to God.

This last week one of you forwarded to me a letter that proclaims not the light of Christ in the world exactly, for its author is Jewish, but the light of God in a world of darkness. That’s the same light that shines in Jesus. This letter is from Rabbi Will Berkovitz, the Chief Executive Officer of Jewish Family Services in Seattle. It is so beautiful and so powerful that I am going to share most of it with you. Last Wednesday Rabbi Berkovitz wrote:

"What happens now?" was the question my children asked me last night as I was putting them to bed. "What can we do? What will we do?"

We can hold our place while not denying others theirs. We can walk with the vulnerable so they know they are not alone. We can be a place of peace and not darkness. We can be kind with ourselves and others. And we can transform that kindness into deeds of love. We can acknowledge the fear and uncertainty that may exist within us, but to which we must not succumb. 
 
With clarity and conviction, we will re-affirm the core beliefs that have always guided us. We will value the dignity of each individual. The one who prays differently or not all. The one whose color, gender, education, sexual orientation, abilities, aspirations, ethnicity or geography is not the same as ours. The one whose experiences and worldview are different than our own. 

We will look within and re-commit ourselves to the work ahead. We will be a place of refuge and gathering where we respect and offer compassion to those who are most vulnerable, embracing the orphan, the widow, the stranger, the poor and the brokenhearted. 

One more time, we will remind our children and ourselves of our collective story, so each of us learns anew and remembers always there are reasons we are obligated to do all we can to repair what is broken. And we will come together to build sanctuaries of peace with the power to shine light out into the darkness.

Jesus is our light in the darkness, but other faiths also know that God is light in the world’s darkness. Rabbi Berkovitz speaks powerfully here of what God’s light, the light we know through Jesus Christ, means in the world today—and not just since last Tuesday. He speaks of what it means for all people of faith to be called to be that light in the world. For us it is Christ’s light, for Rabbi Berkovitz and others it is the light of God known in other ways, but it is the same light. To live in that light, indeed to be that light, means we walk with the vulnerable so they know they are not alone. We become a place of peace. We are kind with ourselves and others. We perform acts of love. We value the dignity of every person, even, or rather especially, those who worship differently than we do or don’t worship at all, those who differ from us in color, gender, education, sexual orientation, abilities, and ethnicity. We become a place of refuge where we offer respect and compassion to the most vulnerable among us. In the grand tradition of Jewish prophecy Rabbi Berkovitz lists the orphan, the widow, the stranger, the poor, and the brokenhearted as those who are most vulnerable. Those yes, but there are others too. Women, whose equal human value and dignity we men so often disparage and deny. Racial minorities, who live among us in a land founded in and deeply tainted by racism. Sexual minorities, who have been told for millennia and are still told today that they are somehow broken when they are no more broken than the rest of us. The immigrants living far from what was their home, hoping for a better life for themselves and their children. Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, and other religious minorities whom we Christians have told for centuries that their faith is false and they are damned if they don’t become Christian, a diabolical falsehood that far too many Christians still believe and still proclaim.

As Rabbi Berkovitz says, there are reasons we are obligated to do all we can to repair what is broken. The world didn’t break last Tuesday. It has been broken from its beginnings. It didn’t get dark last Tuesday, it has been dark from its beginnings. The reason we have to know that we are obligated to do what we can to fix it, that we are obligated to be Christ’s light in today’s darkness, is that we are Christians. We say that we follow Jesus of Nazareth as the Christ and as our Lord and Savior. He came as the Word of God in human form to be light in the darkness, and he came to tell us that we too are to be light in the darkness. We are to carry the light he brought into the world’s darkness and make the world brighter.

Folks, today God’s call to us to do that is more urgent than ever. More people than ever will need help. More people than ever will be afraid and need a safe place to be. Many already are and do. Some of them may be Christians, but most won’t; and that doesn’t matter at all. Some of them may be straight, able-bodied, and white like most of us, but most won’t; and that doesn’t matter at all either. Those things matter not at all in how we are called to be there for them, to be the light of Christ, the light of God for them, to assure them that they are dearly beloved children of God. To say you are valuable. To say you are loved. To say that regardless of what the world says to you, regardless of what your government says or does to you, you matter. You matter to us, and much more importantly you matter to God.

Being and doing those things is what it means to be Christian today. Not to be and do those things is to fail in our call to follow our Lord Jesus Christ. Are we willing to be Christians today? Are we willing to be the light of Christ for a dark and hurting world? May it be so. Amen.

What God Wants

What God Wants

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

October 30, 2016

Scripture: Isaiah 1:10-18; Luke 19:1-10

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.

Earlier this past week Jane and I went to breakfast at the Mountain View Diner in Gold Bar, something we do most every Tuesday morning. Recently they’d had a white board in their little entry way with sayings written on it. Last Tuesday there was one they identified as a Japanese proverb. It read: “Vision without action is a day dream, action without vision is a nightmare.” Now, that’s not a specifically Christian saying, but it points to a question that is an issue for all faith traditions, not just our Christian one. What is the proper relationship between religious belief and actions? To put it in more traditional Christian language, what is the proper relationship between faith and works? Are we saved only through God’s grace which we access through faith, as Paul, Martin Luther, and John Calvin contended? Or is faith without works dead, as the New Testament’s Letter of James contends? To put the question yet another way, what does God want from us? Does God want our faith in God and Jesus Christ? Or does God care more about how we live our lives, what we do and don’t do? To go back to the language of that Japanese saying I saw last week, does God want us to have vision, or does God want us to undertake good actions? That truly is a central question of the Christian faith.

I think our two scripture readings this morning shed a good deal of light on that question. I’ll start with the Isaiah. There the prophet Isaiah of Jerusalem, claiming to speak for God, condemns the people of Israel in very harsh terms, especially the leaders and rulers of the people. He calls them rulers of Sodom and people of Gomorrah, two notoriously sinful cities of Hebrew scripture, sinful mostly for how they abused strangers among them. Then he soundly rejects the people’s religious practices. In these passages God condemns and rejects their sacrifices, offerings, incense, religious holidays and festivals, even their prayer. Now, some people today may think that God is rejecting those things not because they worship but because they are the wrong kind of worship. After all, we don’t worship God by sacrificing, that is, ritually killing, animals. No Christians do, and I wouldn’t be a Christian minister if being meant I had to do that. We don’t use incense in our worship, although some Christians do. We don’t celebrate “New Moons.” So maybe we think that all those things that Isaiah lists and condemns are just the wrong kind of worship. But see, everybody in Israel in Isaiah’s time, including the prophet himself, was sure that all of those things were precisely the right kind of worship. This ancient Hebrew text is not saying that the people need better worship. It is far more radical than that. It is saying that God doesn’t want even the right kind of worship from them. God doesn’t even want their prayers, and surely prayers are appropriate from people of faith. God doesn’t want their worship or even their prayers because, the text says, their “hands are full of blood.” Because of the people’s “evil deeds.” Because they are “doing wrong” rather than doing right.

OK, but what’s wrong and what’s right? Our text from Isaiah certainly poses that question, and it answers it too. Immediately after it tells the people to “learn to do right” it says: “Seek justice, encourage the oppressed, defend the cause of the fatherless, plead the case of the widow.” That’s what right. Directly or indirectly Isaiah here raises the three types of people the Hebrew prophets typically called the people to protect and take care of. They are first of all the stranger, that is alien in their midst. Isaiah doesn’t mention this group explicitly, but he does indirectly when he calls out people he calls the rulers of Sodom. In the story in Genesis of Sodom a mob of supposedly straight men want to gang rape men who were staying temporarily in that city. The sin of Sodom is hostility toward the stranger, and Isaiah mentions it in our text. The other two groups the prophets typically call out for defense are the widow and the orphan. Isaiah here says the fatherless not the orphan, but in that strongly androcentric culture being without a father made you an orphan even if you still had your mother. Isaiah specifically mentions the widow. In that society a woman without a man to protect and take care of her was in a terrible state. These are the groups the prophets typically lift up because they were the most vulnerable people in those days, the ones who couldn’t care for themselves and had no one else to care for them either. So that’s what’s right. To care for the vulnerable. To lift up the oppressed.

Then there’s our reading from Luke about Jesus and Zacchaeus. Perhaps we miss the story’s point that Zacchaeus is a really bad dude. See, he wasn’t just a tax collector, which would have been bad enough. He was a “chief” tax collector. That’s a sort of wholesale tax collector. He paid assessed taxes to the Romans in advance, then hired others to go collect taxes from the people. They had to get enough to pay the chief tax collector back what he had already paid to the Romans plus profit for themselves and for him. Zacchaeus was so good at it that he’d gotten rich. The original audience for this story would have hated Zacchaeus with a passion as soon as they heard that he was a chief tax collector. Jesus saying that he was going to stay with Zacchaeus made the people angry with Jesus, and understandably so.

Yet in our story Zacchaeus apparently gets religion. He says he gives half of all he has to the poor. He says he will repay anyone he has cheated plus what in US law we call treble damages. Whereupon Jesus praises him highly. He says “Today salvation has come to this house, because this man, too, is a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man came to seek and to save what was lost.” It is perhaps an odd way of praising Zacchaeus. What does he mean calling Zacchaeus a “son of Abraham?” Does that mean only that Zacchaeus was a Jew? Probably not, because Zacchaeus was always a Jew even when he was extorting excessive amounts of money from people. What Jesus means here, I think, is that Zacchaeus has finally figured out what being a person of faith, in his case the Jewish faith and in our case the Christian faith, is really about. It is about doing justice. The kind of justice Isaiah was taking about more than 700 years earlier. Justice as care for the poor and vulnerable. Justice as respecting all other people as children of God regardless of their life circumstances. Justice as honoring especially those society and culture dishonor. Lifting up those human society and human culture trod down. Lifting up those society and culture oppress. Affording equal dignity to those against whom society and culture discriminate. Supporting people and movements that advocate and do all of those things and opposing people and movements that don’t or that even advocate perpetuating society’s ills. That’s what Jesus is saying when he honors Zacchaeus, the former sinner, calling him a child of Abraham.

Now of course, we’re all at different stages of life. We all have different abilities and different resources. Of course God know that, and God doesn’t expect precisely the same things from all of us. Most of us come to a time in life when we are the ones who need care and aren’t in much of position to give care. God knows that. God respects us and is with us when we come to that point in life. There is grace in receiving care as much as there is grace in giving care. That’s all true. It is indeed divine truth. It is truth too many of us too easily forget. We want to be the care givers not the care receivers. Well, if what God wants from us is caring for those in need, then God cares for those in need. God cares for us when we are ill. God cares for us when we are poor. God cares for us when we are weak. God cares for us as we near the end of our lives on earth. Nothing in God’s desire that we do justice means that we are not also to receive justice, to receive care, when we need it.

That being said and truly meant, I am convinced that we Christians badly need to remember a truth that our faith tradition so easily forgets. Yes, God wants our faith. God wants our belief. God wants us to trust God and to rely on God. God wants us to see Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior. But God also wants that faith of ours to change us. To transform us. To make us people of divine justice, the kind of justice Isaiah demanded. The kind of justice Zacchaeus demonstrated once he repented, once he turned around. I disagree with Isaiah here a bit. I think God does want our worship, but God wants our worship not because God needs it but because we do. God wants our worship because God wants us to repent, to turn around, to be transformed the way Isaiah wanted the people of ancient Israel to be transformed. The way Zacchaeus was transformed. That’s what God wants. Are we ready to hear? Are we ready to follow? May it be so. Amen.

Transformed

Transformed?

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

October 23, 2016

Scripture: Luke 18:9-14

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.

Let me ask you what I think is a really important question. What is the Christian life about? What is Christian faith about? Is it about believing in God? Yes, whatever “believing in” actually means. Is it about believing in Jesus? Again yes, whatever “believing in” actually means. Is it about doing what you need to do to make sure you get to heaven when you die? Well, maybe kinda sorta, but mostly not despite the fact that a great many Christians think that is precisely what it is about. Is it about living a moral life, doing what’s right and not doing what’s wrong? Yes, although of course a lot of people who aren’t Christians live perfectly moral lives and a lot of Christians live pretty immoral ones. All of those are legitimate questions about the Christian faith and Christian life, and those are to a greater or lesser extent legitimate answers to those question; but none of them gets to what I think the Christian faith and life properly understood are mostly about. They don’t get to the most profound understanding of Christian life and faith, to the most faithful understanding of Christian life and faith. To get at what Christian life and faith are really about, let’s take a look at that story we just heard from Luke about the Pharisee and the tax collector praying in the temple.

Luke sets up that little story by saying that Jesus told it “to some who were confident of their own righteousness and looked down on everybody else.” This little parable gives us two characters. They’re both praying in the temple in Jerusalem. The first character we’re introduced to is a Pharisee. The Pharisees were a prominent sect of Judaism in Jesus’ time. They stressed strict observance of the Torah law as what Jewish faith was about and as what God wants from God’s people. The Gospels don’t treat them kindly, but for the most part they weren’t bad people, no worse than most people anyway. They were practicing their faith as they sincerely believed it should be practiced. Yet this Pharisee pretty clearly isn’t practicing his faith in the proper spirit. He prays: “God, I thank you that I am not like all other men—robbers, evildoers, adulterers—or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get.”

Now, before I go on let me say this about this man giving a tenth of all he gets, presumably to the temple. That’s not where he goes wrong. You all might consider following his lead in that regard. Still, this guy pretty clearly gets the life of faith all wrong. He thinks he does what his faith requires, which is more or less OK. But he also thinks that his obeying the commandments of his faith, or at least some of them, makes him superior to other people. His thinking that leads him to condemn all other people as sinners, which he pretty clearly thinks he is not. Our Pharisee thinks he’s righteous. He doesn’t get it that he too is a sinner. At the very least he’s guilty of the sin of pride. He is, I think we can say, a self-righteous jerk.

Then there’s the tax collector. Now, In Jesus’ world a tax collector was nothing like one of our honest and honorable civil servants working for the IRS. Most Jewish people of the time hated tax collectors, and they had good reason to hate them. The tax collectors worked for the despised Roman occupiers. Roman taxes were the only governmental taxes there were, and the people who collected them were mostly Jews working for the Romans. That was bad enough, but the way these tax collectors supported themselves was by taking more money from the people, most of whom were dirt poor, than they actually owed to the Romans. They gouged people for as much as they could get out of them, and people hated them for it. Jesus gives us one of those hated tax collectors as the second character in his parable.

The tax collector prays very differently than the Pharisee. He can’t even look up to heaven but beats his breast, a sign of spiritual or emotional anguish. For his prayer he says “God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” It’s a prayer of confession grounded in this man’s profound sense of his own sinfulness, his own unworthiness before God. Jesus ends the parable saying “I tell you that this man, rather than the other, went home justified before God. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted.”

Now, I don’t know about you, but I’ve always thought of the tax collector as the hero of this story, the one we’re supposed to be like. I’ve thought of the Pharisee as the villain of the piece, the one we’re not supposed to be like. I think that’s probably what Jesus intended. It turns his audience’s expectations upside down, which Jesus’ parables almost always do. But as I read and contemplated this parable this past week something occurred to me that I’d never thought of before. Jesus presents these two characters as diametrical opposites, one self-righteous and arrogant and one humble and contrite. Yet I think that these two characters have more in common than at first it appears that they do. What they have in common is that they are both in need of radical transformation. Let me explain.

Pretty clearly the Pharisee needs to be transformed. He needs to be transformed out of his self-righteousness and pride. That’s clear enough, but what about the tax collector? To see how he needs transformation let’s look at what this parable does not tell us about him. It doesn’t tell us that he knows that God has already forgiven him. Neither does it tell us that he was going to stop being a tax collector. It doesn’t tell us that he was going to practice his duties as a tax collector more honestly, that he would stop taking more from the poor tax payers than they could afford and line his own pockets with the excess he got from them over what he had to give the Romans. Jesus doesn’t tell us that the tax collector had any such intentions, so I think it’s safe to assume that he didn’t. But even if he had such thoughts as he prayed in the temple he still had to go out and follow through on them. He probably needed transformation in his thoughts, and he definitely needed transformation in his life and his work.

That’s what these two characters have in common. They both need to be transformed. They don’t need to be transformed in the same ways, but they both need to be transformed. One needs to be transformed out of arrogant self-righteousness. The Pharisee is arrogant, and the true spiritual virtue is humility. He’s self-righteous, thinking that his own actions get him right with God. The true spiritual virtue is recognition that none of us is truly righteous on our own, that if we are in right relationship with God it is only because God puts us in right relationship, not that we do. He thinks that only other people are sinners in need of God’s grace, when the truth is that in one way or another we are all sinners in need of God’s grace. The Pharisee doesn’t get it about God, sin, and grace. He needs transformation in his understanding of God, himself, and others.

It is perhaps less obvious how the tax collector needs transformation. Unlike the Pharisee he knows that he is a sinner. Unlike the Pharisee he isn’t self-righteous. He doesn’t think he’s better than other people. In all of these ways he is spiritually healthier than the Pharisee. But notice some other things about him. He prays for forgiveness, but apparently he doesn’t know that God has already forgiven him. In a way he’s too hard on himself. He’s not living into God’s grace because though he prays for mercy he doesn’t know the reality of God’s graceful mercy in his life. Beyond that, this little parable says nothing about what the tax collector does after he leaves the temple. Simply by virtue of his being a tax collector he surely needs transformation in his life, as we’ve already seen. He needs at least transformation in how he does his work, but perhaps there is no way he could adequately transform the work of being a tax collector. After all, no matter how he did that work he’d still be doing it for the Gentile occupiers and oppressors of his people. Perhaps the transformation he needs is to give up being a tax collector altogether and find some other more moral or ethical way of making a living. In any event Jesus’ audience certainly would have thought that this tax collector needed transformation not only in his knowledge of God’s grace but also in how he did his work and lived his life. Surely they were right about that.

So this little parable gives us not one character in need of transformation but two. It is primarily a story about people’s need for transformation. It is a story about everyone’s need for transformation, not just about its two characters’ need for transformation. It is a story about our need for transformation, about your need for transformation and about my need for transformation.

This is a story about what the life of faith is mostly about. To answer the question I started this sermon with, the Christian faith is mostly about transformation. It is about our need to be transformed in our thinking and in our living. It is about our need better to understand God, God’s grace, and how God’s grace calls us to live in response to it. The two characters in our parable didn’t need to be transformed in the same ways, and we all don’t need to be transformed in the same ways either. I have some ideas about how I need to be transformed. I share them with God and with appropriate people in my life. I don’t know how each of you needs to be transformed, although I’m pretty sure that you, like all people, do need to be transformed. I’m here to talk with any of you about that if you like. But today I’ll just leave you with some questions: Has your faith transformed you? Is it transforming you? Is my faith transforming me? Is our faith transforming us? May it be so. Amen.

Wrestling with God

Wrestling with God

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

October 16, 2016

Scripture: Genesis 32:22-31

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 a strange story, isn’t it. The story we just heard from Genesis about the Patriarch Jacob I mean. In that story Jacob first isolates himself from his household, which he sends across a stream called the Jabbok along with all of his possessions. The story doesn’t tell us why he did that rather odd thing, it just says that he did. Then it says that “a man” wrestled with Jacob until daybreak. It doesn’t say who the man is, not at first at least. It doesn’t say why the man wrestled with Jacob, only that he did. The man somehow puts Jacob’s hip out of joint. Then this man, who seems to be winning the wrestling match at this point, asks Jacob to let him go. We’d expect Jacob to be the one needing to ask for release, what with his hip out of joint and all, but the story puts it the other way round. An exchange between the two wrestlers follows in which the man, whoever he is, changes Jacob’s name to Israel. A translator’s note tells us that Israel means “struggles with God.” The man says he has changed Jacob’s name because Jacob has “struggled with God and with men” and has “overcome.” Really? When has Jacob struggled with God? And how could any mere man overcome God? I don’t know, but that’s what this man says Jacob has done. Jacob names the place where the wrestling match took place Peniel, which a translator’s note tells us means “face of God.” He calls the place that because, he says, “I saw God face to face.” Really? The only way Jacob could have seen God face to face at that place is if the man he wrestled with was actually God, and it turns out that that’s precisely what we are to understand. Jacob thinks the man is God, and pretty clearly we’re to think that too. Indeed, there’s a hint earlier in the story that the man must actually be God. It comes when the man changes Jacob’s name from Jacob to Israel. In the Hebrew scriptures God sometimes changes people’s names, but no one else does. Earlier in Genesis God has changed Abram’s name to Abraham and Sarai’s name to Sarah. In our story this morning the man acts like God and changes our hero’s name from Jacob to Israel. So the man must indeed have been God.

This story seems to serve several different purposes within the Jewish tradition. In the verses right after the ones we heard the text says that Israelites don’t eat the tendon attached to the hip bone of an animal because that is where this man/God touched Jacob, so the story explains an otherwise odd Hebrew dietary practice. The story explains how Jacob became Israel, Israel not Jacob being the name of the entire Hebrew nation that descends from him.

But mostly this story is about a man wrestling with God. Yes, the man is one of the Jewish faith’s great patriarchs, but he’s still just a man like any other man, a person like any other person. And yes, the story says at its beginning that a man wrestled with Jacob, but we’ve already established that we are to understand this man to be God, or at least a manifestation of God. There’s certainly no fully developed incarnational theology here. Judaism has always rejected incarnational theology, but somehow this man is still an appearance of God. I think wrestling with God is the central theme of this story. Jacob, the father of the nation named after his altered name Israel, wrestled with the eternal God. And he won! Yes, God wounded him on the hip, but the man/God of the story had to ask Jacob to let him go, not the other way round as we probably would expect. Quite a concept, isn’t it? A mere mortal wrestled with God and prevailed.

Now, this story would be amazing enough if it were only a story about an ancient patriarch and an encounter he had with God. But see, the great Bible stories like this one are never just about things that happened to other people a long time ago in a place far away. They are about us. They are about God and us. They are about our relationship to God and God’s relationship to us. When we read or hear about Jacob wrestling with God the Bible invites us to ask: What does this story say to us? What does it say about God? What does it say about our relationship to God and God’s relationship to us? Well, this one seems to say that our relationship to God and God’s relationship to us is one of wrestling. Jacob wrestled with God, and his doing so both tells us that we are to wrestle with God too and gives us permission to wrestle with God.

Yes, I know. We’re supposed to be meek and accepting in our relationship with God, right? Well, sometimes right, but sometimes not so right. Yes, our relationship with God can be one of peace and quiet, of quiet confidence in God’s grace and forgiveness. But I think if we’re honest we sometimes wrestle with God too, or at least we want to. After all, God is ultimately the great cosmic mystery, the power behind all that is that somehow relates in love to fragile, mortal creatures like us. How can we not wrestle with understanding a reality so utterly transcendent, so infinitely far above and beyond us, so great that we can’t even really begin to understand how great? I think we do wrestle with God, or at least a lot of us do. I wrestle with God. I wrestle with trying to understand God. I have wrestled with God in print in the books I have written and am writing. I wrestle with God publicly in my sermons. I wrestle with God in private. See, understanding God, coming to terms with God, isn’t all that easy when you really stop to think about it. If God were easy, how could God really be God? How could that which is infinite, omnipotent, omniscient, and utterly transcendent be easy? How could a reality infinitely beyond our reality be easy? Sure, we can make it easy. We can decline God’s invitation to a wrestling match with God, but if we’re really going to live into a deep and transforming relationship with God I think we need to accept that invitation. I think we need to wrestle with God.

How do we do that? Well, we do it first of all by reading and really trying to understand the Bible’s stories about God. Those stories aren’t easy. They present many different visions of God. In those stories God is variously violent and a God of infinite peace. God is both judge and cosmic forgiver. God is both male and infinitely beyond human categories like male and female. In some passages in Proverbs God comes pretty close to being female. God both demands strict adherence to the Torah law and says law isn’t at all what God wants from us. Sometimes the Bible says God wants correct worship. At other times it says God doesn’t care one whit about our worship but wants justice from us instead. God is infinitely beyond the human and with us as a human in Jesus. Wrestling with that wonderful, complex, confusing, and comforting book we call the Bible is one primary way that we wrestle with God.

We wrestle with God in our prayer life. We take our confusion about God straight to God and ask for help. We confess our sin and open ourselves to grace. We ask for help with troubles in our lives and know that God’s help may come not at all as what we’re asking for. We wrestle with God in our life together as a church. What does God want from us? Where is God calling us to go? Those are not easy questions to answer. They need wrestling with. We wrestle with God in our personal lives too. What does God want from us there? Love, yes; but what does that mean in the specific situations we must deal with? That one too needs wrestling with.

So yes, I think this story of Jacob wrestling with God calls us to wrestle with God too. And this story has some very good news in it about our wrestling with God. We see the good news in the story in the part where in his wrestling with God Jacob prevailed. God had to ask Jacob to let him go. That’s a symbolic way of saying that in our wrestling with God we too can prevail. God changes Jacob’s name to Israel, meaning Struggles with God, because Jacob had struggled not only with people but with God and had prevailed. We can prevail in our struggling, our wrestling with God too. This story is telling us that truth. But of course we need to understand what our prevailing in our wrestling with God actually means. Of course we can’t overpower God. I doubt that we even want to. What we can do is wrestle ourselves into understandings of God that work for us. We can learn to live with and to love a God we can never fully understand. We can learn that our living with God takes place precisely in our wrestling with God. We find the meaning of our living with God precisely in our wrestling with God. We might well get a hip put out of joint in the process, or something else that changes our lives, makes us different than we were before. Indeed, that’s very likely to happen if we truly wrestle with God. And yes, that struggling, that wrestling, includes breaks between the rounds of the match. It includes times when we can go to our opposite corners and rest from the wrestling. Those are precious times that we should seek and cherish. But they won’t make the wrestling go away. God is too big, God is too “other,” for the wrestling ever really to end.

So let’s wrestle with God, shall we? We can do it alone, and we can do it together. God calls us to the match. Are we ready to wrestle? I pray that we are. Amen.