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.

Hold the Fireworks

Hold the Fireworks

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

October 9, 2016

Scripture: 2 Kings 5:1-14

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.

Do you like fireworks? I mean the pyrotechnics that that we set off mostly on the fourth of July. I sort of do, and I sort of don’t. I sure don’t like it when people in the neighborhood where I live set off so many of them on July 4 that we have to take our dog and flee to Canada to get away from them. But then there are the fireworks we saw in Moscow. The Russians are really good at fireworks. They set them up at different places around the huge city of Moscow, then set them off from all the sites simultaneously. They light up the whole city. We could seem them from our dorm room at Moscow State University. Very impressive, and great fun. The first time I saw them was on what the Russians call “Den’ tankistov,” which translates to “tank soldiers’ day.” I suppose they have a tank soldiers’ day because it was mostly the Soviet tanks that defeated the Nazis. Whatever. We saw them again for the celebration in November of the October Revolution—ask me later about why they celebrated the October Revolution in November if you want. We saw fireworks on May 1, which the Soviets celebrated as international labor day. The Russian fireworks I saw were really impressive, and fireworks generally can indeed be really impressive. They’re bright and colorful. They’re loud. They streak and swirl and sparkle. Everyone looks at them and says “ooh!” and “ahh!” We like to be impressed, and fireworks are quite impressive.

Which is all very well and good, but here’s the thing. We like to be impressed by more things than just fireworks. We like to be impressed by all kinds of things. We like flashy impressive movies. We like shiny impressive new cars. We like big impressive displays of flowers. We like music that knocks our socks off more than we probably like quieter, more contemplative music. Same with art. We like to be impressed. We like to be bowled over by things we experience. We like big and colorful and impressive in all areas of life. That may not be all we like, but we do like that stuff a lot.

Unfortunately, we often translate that love of the big, loud, colorful, and flashy to God. We want God to be like that too. We want big displays of divine power. We want thunder and lightning. We want angels blowing trumpets. We want God to demand big things from us, important things, things that impress people, things that change the world. Or at least a lot of people want God to be like that. A lot of people always have. We heard about one of those people in that long story we just heard from 2 Kings, the story of Naaman, the commander of the armies of the king of Aram, Aram being the ancient name for Syria. It is, frankly, one of my favorite stories in the whole Old Testament. I’ll just recap it briefly.

Naaman is a great man, but he suffers from some skin disease that our text calls leprosy. His soldiers have taken a Hebrew girl as a slave, and she tells Naaman that there is a prophet in Israel who could cure his disease. That prophet turns out to be Elisha. So the king of Aram whom Naaman serves sends him to the king of Israel with a badly worded letter of introduction, one that gets the Israeli king all upset. When Elisha hears about it, we aren’t told how, he has the king send Naaman to him. Then the story gets really interesting. When Naaman arrives “with his horses and chariots” at Elisha’s house, Elisha doesn’t even come out to greet him. He just sends a messenger, who tells Naaman to go to the Jordan river and wash himself in it seven times. That, the messenger tells Naaman, will cure his skin disease.

Whereupon Naaman, that great man, gets all upset. “I thought that the prophet would come out to me and stand and call on the name of the Lord his God, wave his hand over the spot and cure me!” My rivers back home are better than the stupid Jordan!” So he stomps off in a rage. Then one of his servants says, essentially, what’s up with that?! If he’d asked you to do something difficult you’d have done it, right? So why not do this easy thing?” Whereupon Naaman goes to the Jordan, dips himself in it seven times, and his skin disease is cured.

Now, Naaman of course wasn’t just an any-man. He was a great military commander who traveled with horses and chariots and probably an armed guard. He wanted to be treated like the special man he thought he was. When he wasn’t given special treatment, he went into a huff. But he’s upset about more than the prophet’s failure to give him the reception he thought he was due. He’s upset because Elisha didn’t do anything impressive. He didn’t do any magic tricks. He didn’t make the earth shake. There was no thunder and lightning. Naaman wanted a show, and he didn’t get one; so he was upset.

I think in the way he wanted an impressive show and was upset when he didn’t get it makes him very human. After all, don’t we all sort of want God to show up and do big, impressive things? Don’t we want the blast of angel trumpets, and earthquake, though maybe a not too destructive earthquake, to announce God’s coming, blinding light and heavenly choirs singing triumphant music? After all, we’re talking about God here. God, we think, is big and powerful, “almighty” to use the adjective we so often use for God that has become a noun that is virtually God’s name for us. We want the God Who parted the Red Sea for the escaping Hebrews. We want the God of Revelation who does powerful things on earth, although probably not as violent a God as we get in that book. We want our God to be a cosmic Superman doing really impressive things.

Well, here’s the thing about all of that. Yes, there are stories in the Bible about God doing really big, impressive things. There is that story in Exodus of God parting the Red Sea. There are other stories of God doing really big things, but for the most part in the Bible God doesn’t act that way. Take for example a story from the tales of Elijah, the predecessor of the Elisha we get in this morning’s text. It’s at 1 Kings 19:11-12. In that story Elijah is running away from King Ahab and Queen Jezebel, who are out to kill him. He’s hiding out on a mountain. God comes to him and says to him that “the Lord is about to pass by.” The text reads:

Then a great and powerful wind tore the mountains apart and shattered the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake came a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire came a gentle whisper.

A different contemporary translation, the NRSV, has the verse end with there being “a sound of sheer silence.” The old King James Version has it end with “a still, small voice.” That’s where the Lord, where God, was. However we translate the original Hebrew of this story, God isn’t in the fireworks. God isn’t in the big, impressive, attention grabbing things. God is in the silence, or the gentle whisper, or the still small voice.

That’s how it was with the great Syrian military commander Naaman and the prophet Elisha too. Naaman wanted the respect he was so sure was due him. He wanted a show. He wanted fireworks, and the prophet didn’t even come out to see him. The prophet didn’t put on a show. There were no fireworks. Through a messenger he just told Naaman to do something really simple. God dip yourself in the Jordan seven times. That’s hardly impressive. It certainly isn’t difficult. It’s no great heroic feat. Yet God was at work in that simple act of dipping oneself in the waters of the Jordan river. That’s where God was, in the still, small act of bathing in a river.

That’s how it mostly is with God in our lives too. I know that God has spoken to me, and I’m sure God has spoken to many of you too. Yet God has never overpowered me. God has never shown up with fireworks. God has never made a lot of noise in my life. God has spoken to me gently, quietly, silently really. God has come not as a great wind but as a sense, a feeling, a pull, a push, more as a question than an answer. Yes, I know that some people describe experiences of the presence of God in more dramatic terms, but I really think most human experiences of God aren’t like that. Most of them are like Elijah’s on the mountain, where God wasn’t in the big show but in the quietness. Or like Naaman’s, where God wasn’t in any kind of spectacular display but in the words of a prophet’s messenger and a simple act in an ordinary river. I am convinced that that’s mostly how it is with God.

So when we seek to know God’s will for us either personally or as a church, let’s not look for a big show. Let’s not expect fireworks. Let’s hold the fireworks and listen for something soft, something gentle, something indirect even. That’s where God is likely to be. Sure, it would be easier if God would just show up the way we sometimes wish God would, but for the most part God doesn’t do that. God asks us to listen attentively. To discern carefully. God usually comes in a still, small voice, not in fireworks. So let’s listen attentively and discern carefully shall we? Amen.

Nonetheless

Nonetheless

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

October 2, 2016

Scripture: Habakkuk 1:1-4; 2:1-4

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.

You know, the Bible truly is a remarkable book. The newest parts of it were written nearly two thousand years ago, the oldest parts of it more like three thousand years ago or more. Yet sometimes when we read a passage in it we could swear that it is talking about the world today. I suppose that’s largely because, as the depressed author of Ecclesiastes says, there is nothing new under the sun. Our world is different from the worlds of the Bible in many ways, but the people of the Bible were just as human as we are. I suppose that truth explains some of why the Bible sometimes sounds so contemporary. Maybe the Holy Spirit has something to do with it too. Whatever the reason, somehow the Bible has spoken to people of vastly different cultures, times, and places for a very long time, which I suppose is why we still turn to it as a source of spiritual and worldly wisdom. The book of the prophet Habakkuk from which we just heard a couple of passages dates from the around the turn of the seventh to the sixth century BCE, that is, from around the year 600 BCE or so. It is very ancient; yet when we read those passages we just heard during the clergy lectionary group that I attend on Monday mornings, my colleagues in that group and I all were struck by how much it sounds like this ancient Hebrew prophet was describing our world today.

The prophet cries: Violence, and he thinks God doesn’t answer. His world was indeed filled with violence. The ancient world in which Israel tried to exist was a world of empire after empire acting the way empires always do. Empires are violent. They invariable use military force to try to expand their borders or at least their power over other people. Israel often bore the brunt of that imperial expansionism. By the time Habakkuk cried out against the violence of his day the Assyrian Empire had already wiped the northern of the two Hebrew states of the time off the map for good. The Babylonian Empire had conquered the Assyrian Empire by force and was expanding toward Jerusalem in an attempt to expand its borders and create a buffer between itself and the Egyptian Empire to the west. The ancient world in which Habakkuk lived was a world filled with violence at every turn. It was more technologically primitive violence than is the violence of our world, but it was still violence.

Habakkuk cries that God isn’t paying attention: “Why do you make me look at injustice? Why do you tolerate wrong?” The world is a mess! There is injustice everywhere? How long, Lord, how long? I don’t know about you, but think I know what Habakkuk was feeling. See, I know that there is a lot of good in the world. I know that there is a lot of love, compassion, and justice in the world, but these days it’s so easy to forget all that and just see the violence and the injustice. The Russians just bombed a hospital in Syria. I don’t know how many innocent people, most of them Black, have been shot in our country in the last 24 hours, but far, far too many. Heck, one is too many. A grade school boy who was shot at school has died. A grade school boy! Really? What’s going on in this country of ours, in this world of ours? There is way too much shooting. There is way too little justice. I get it when Habakkuk screams “How long, Lord?” I feel like screaming the same thing.

Well, in our passages from his book this morning Habakkuk gets his answer from God. God tells him that there still is a divine vision for a better future. That vision is not false. It will come in due time. Then God tells Habakkuk how he is to live in the meantime. Our passage ends “but the righteous will live by faith.” God tells Habakkuk, and tells us, that God calls us to live by faith in the teeth of all the violence and injustice in the world. God’s answer, for now, to us who live in a far from perfect world is: Live by your faith.

Folks, that, I think, is one of the great things that having faith does for us. I allows us to live when we know that things should be different in our lives and in our world. There is a great Canadian theologian whose work is foundational for much of my understanding of the Christian faith. He’s quite old now, and he’s retired from many years of teaching at McGill University in Montreal. His name is Douglas John Hall. Maybe some of us can read some of his work together sometime. In one of his great books he tells us what faith is, or at least one of the things that faith does. He says that faith is the ability to look reality squarely in the eye and say “nonetheless.” Actually, he says look reality squarely in the eye and say “dennoch,” because for some reason he thinks it sounds better if he says it in German. But dennoch is just a German word that means nonetheless. Faith in God and Jesus Christ gives us the strength to look all the world’s evil squarely in the eye and say nonetheless I believe. Nonetheless I will keep on living. Nonetheless I will keep working for peace and justice. Nonetheless I will believe that God is good and that the good will eventually prevail. Folks, faith is the only thing that can do that for us.

I frankly don’t know how people with no religious faith deal with the world except by ignoring everything that’s wrong with it. With faith we don’t have to ignore what’s wrong with it. With faith in God’s compassion and justice we can not only see what’s wrong with the world, we can work to make what’s wrong right. With faith we can live nonetheless. May God help us as we do. Amen.

Love in Action

Love in Action

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

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.

“Love. It’s what makes a Subaru a Subaru.” Or at least it is according to an ad I saw on the TV this morning. This morning I want to talk to you not about Subaru but about love. You know, love is a really big deal. It’s a big deal in popular music for example. Nearly all of the songs that become popular are about love, romantic love that is, either requited or unrequited. Love’s a big deal in the movies. I’m sure thousands of movies have been made with the plot structure boy and girl get together, boy and girl separate (usually because of some silly misunderstanding), boy and girl get back together for a happy ending. Love’s a big deal in our personal lives too, or at least it is, thank you Lord, in mine and I hope in yours. Out there in the world love is a really big deal.

Love is a really big deal in the Christian faith too. The creedal confession of our mother faith, Judaism, contains the line “love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.” Deuteronomy 6:5. Jesus took that line as part of what we Christians call the Great Commandment. In the oldest form of it we have it says, among other things, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength,” and “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Mark 12:30-31. At 1 John 4:8 we read that “God is love.” Ask a lot of Christians what their faith is about and they might well say “love.” Christianity is founded in love. Christianity is grounded in love. Jesus, the one we confess to be our Lord and Savior, is all about love. You just can’t have Christianity without love.

Which all sounds well and good of course, and it is well and good; but here’s the thing. Christians as much as anyone else are unfortunately prone to throwing words around without being sure that they know what the words mean. We tend to assume what words mean, and we tend to assume that everyone who uses a word means the same thing by it. In reality when we’re pressed to define a word we’re using we often can’t do it. And another reality is that two people may be using the same word but meaning very different things by it. It may sound like they’re agreeing with each other. They may think they’re agreeing with each other when in fact they aren’t really agreeing with each other at all because they are assuming different meanings of the word they’re using.

Well, the same thing is true about the word love. What does that word mean? What is love? Those are really important questions for a faith that claims to be founded on and grounded in love. So this morning I want to talk to you about what Jesus meant by the word love, what the Bible means by the word love, especially the New Testament.

The New Testament was written in a particular form of the Greek language. That language had several different words for different kinds of love, but the one that gets used throughout the New Testament is the word agape. It is used both as a noun and in a different form as a verb. We are to live agape. We are to have agape for God and our neighbors. So what does that Greek word agape really mean? It gets translated as love, but love after all can mean several different things. Sometimes it means no more than “like a lot.” We may assume that we know what love is, but it really is a pretty vague word that we use to mean a lot of different things.

Well, that Greek word agape isn’t nearly as vague as our English word love. It means a particular kind of love. It doesn’t mean like a lot. It doesn’t mean have warm feelings about. It doesn’t mean be fond of. It doesn’t mean want to spend time with. There are all kinds of things it doesn’t mean. What it does mean is to sacrifice, to give of oneself, for another. One online definition of it I found says it means “selfless, sacrificial, unconditional love.” It is love that says at least I love another as much as I love myself, or maybe more so. It is love that cares so much for another that it will give up its own comfort, its own wealth, even its own life for the other. In the Gospel of John Jesus says no one has greater love than to sacrifice his or her life for a friend. In Matthew Jesus says we are to love our enemies, which I suppose means be willing to give up one’s life for one’s enemy, as hard as that may be to understand and even harder to do. It’s not that those other things that we mean by love are bad or wrong. They aren’t, or at least they don’t have to be; but Jesus means something quite specific when he says love. He means give of yourself. He means think of the other first. He means understand that other people, even people you dislike or even despise, are as important to God as you are and that God loves them as much as God loves you. Love is really big deal for Jesus. It’s what life is all about, and the love he’s talking about can be pretty scary stuff. Love like that people I think I hate? Really? Yes. Really.

Now, it’s actually pretty easy to look up the definition of the word agape and say what it means. It’s a whole lot harder to figure out what that kind of love means for us as we go about our lives. Our lesson from Luke this morning gives us a pretty good example of what living agape does not mean. The rich man in Luke’s story of the rich man and the poor man named Lazarus pretty obviously wasn’t living agape. He didn’t care that Lazarus was suffering. Lazarus, a poor man apparently of no worldly estate, was nothing to him. Lazarus was ill, hungry, thoroughly miserable. The rich man of our story didn’t care. He feasted on rich food every day and gave Lazarus nothing. Luke uses an image of a tormented or blessed afterlife to say that God condemns what the rich man did, or rather didn’t do, and loves Lazarus as much as God loves the rich man, or maybe more. Living biblical love is first of all not being uncaring. It is not ignoring the needs of those who suffer. By the way, this story is one of the very few places where the New Testament actually has an image of a blessed or cursed afterlife. Sadly, our faith has come to be largely about what kind of afterlife we’re going to have when in fact the Bible is hardly about that question at all.

OK. Fair enough. Love is not being uncaring. But what else does it mean? Well, what it means for us depends on what circumstance we find ourselves in. It applies to most everything we do in life. If applies to our personal relationships with our family. It means caring at least as much about your spouse and children, if you have them, as caring about yourself. It means not insisting on getting your own way all the time when disagreements arise. It applies to relationships in the work place. If you are an employer or manager of employees it means caring about their wellbeing as much as your own. It means not exploiting them. It means paying them a fair wage with fair benefits. If you’re an employee it means caring about your employer too. It applies to our relationships in church. Here it means caring about what others think. It means not insisting on getting your own way. It means taking care of those of us who may be in need from time to time. It means paying your pastor a fair compensation. It means resolving disagreements amicably and loving the people with whom you disagree. Living agape means all of those things.

And it means a lot more than those things. Agape applies to our relationship to the world at large as much as it applies to our personal relationships. In the context of the larger world agape means caring about social justice. It means being committed to social justice, because as a very wise man once said, justice is love in action; and agape is much more action than it is feeling. Being committed to social justice is really nothing more than being committed to the wellbeing of each and every person on the whole planet earth. It means caring for the earth itself, for the earth sustains the life and the wellbeing of every living creature on it. Agape in the world means being committed to ending oppression and discrimination against all people. We don’t want those things for ourselves, so agape calls us to work to end them for everyone. Agape in the world means being committed to peace. Peace in every context. Peace as the absence of violence and the presence of justice. We don’t want violence and injustice for ourselves, so agape calls us to resist them for everyone.

So Jesus calls us to lives of love, and he means by that lives of caring and giving not for ourselves but for everyone else. He means lives of action grounded in love, not lives merely of feelings. Few of us do that kind of love very well, myself included. That’s where God’s grace comes in, for God loves us even when we fail at living agape. But God’s forgiving us when we fail doesn’t mean we aren’t called to keep trying. To keep striving to live lives of true Christian love for the people we know and for all the people we don’t know. Lives of caring in personal relationships and lives committed to justice and peace in our larger relationships. That’s Christ’s call to each one of us, and God is there to help us do it if we’ll just open ourselves to God’s care. Can we do it? Not perfectly of course, but better than we have. With God’s help. Amen.

Who Do We Serve?

Who Do We Serve?

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

September 18, 2016

Scripture: Amos 8:4-7; Luke 16:1-13; 1Timothy 6:10.

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.

I want to start this morning by asking you a question. What does the Bible say more about than it says about anything else? Sex? Power? Sin? Well, actually it says almost nothing about the first of those things. It talks about the second, power, but often only indirectly. It talks about sin but often doesn’t bother to define it. No, what the Bible says more about than it says about anything else is actually money. One site I found online says that the Bible has about 500 verses about prayer, fewer than 500 verses about faith, and over 2,000 verses about money. Jesus actually says more about money or wealth than he says about anything else. Money is a really big deal in the Bible.

The Bible says a lot about money, and it often says it in a context that makes money out to be something really bad, or at least really problematic. We heard one passage where money is associated with evil in our passage from Amos this morning. That passage doesn’t use the word money, but it pretty clearly is addressing, and condemning, people who have a lot of it. In that passage the prophet Amos blasts people who resent religious practices that keep them from making money, who cheat others, especially the poor, so that they get more money out of them, who “do away with the poor of the land,” meaning I suppose so abuse poor people that they actually die, which did happen quite a lot in biblical times. Amos judges the wealthy in some of the strongest language in the Bible. In one of my favorite verses in the whole Bible he says “let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream.” That’s at Amos 5:24. You can look it up. By both justice and righteousness he means social and economic justice, justice that protects and serves the poor rather than the rich. Amos doesn’t condemn money per se, but he sure condemns the people who have it. He condemns them for valuing money over people, all of the people of their time and place, and especially the poor. That is pretty much the whole Bible’s attitude toward money.

And I suspect that some of you may be thinking yes, that’s right, for money is the root of all evil. A lot of people think that the Bible says that money is the root of all evil. Well, here’s the thing. The Bible doesn’t actually say that. What it says is “The love of money is a root of all kinds of evil.” That’s at 1 Timothy 6:10. You can look that up too. See, in the Bible’s way of looking at the matter, money isn’t the problem. It’s our relationship to money that’s the problem. 1 Timothy says it’s the love of money that is a root of evil, not money itself. That verse often gets misquoted, but is about our relationship to money not about money itself.

We heard it again in our passage from Luke. There’s that parable of the shrewd manager. It is perhaps a bit startling when it tells us to be shrewd, to use worldly wealth to gain friends. I suppose there are lots of sermons in that part of the passage, but what struck me this week about the text is how it ends: “No servant can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and Money’ Jesus, like the author of 1 Timothy, is talking here about our relationship to money, not about money itself. 1 Timothy speaks of the love of money. Jesus speaks of serving money. Both of these texts are pointing us toward something more than money itself.

Maybe it’s because by American standards I don’t have much of it, but I find it really easy to think that money in and of itself leads to various kinds of evil. I used to work in a world where a lot of people had a lot of money, a lot more than I ever had working there as an employee not a partner. I see how money corrupts American politics. I see the great gap in prosperity between the wealthy in our country and the poor. Last Monday I was up in Skagit County representing the Faith Action Network in connection with a vote to form a union by farmworkers, most if not all of them Hispanic. I was powerfully struck by the presence there of these poor laborers and the several quite opulent houses you see dotting the landscape. It’s really easy for me to think that money in and of itself creates social inequality and political corruption.

Yet that’s not what the Bible says about money. Now, clearly money created problems in the worlds of the Bible, as we see in our passage from Amos. But the Bible is in most respects quite wise, and it is often a lot more nuanced than are the people who use it as a weapon in support of various causes in our day. It doesn’t say money is the problem. It says that an unhealthy relationship to money is the problem. Serving money is the problem. Loving money is the problem. So what are we to make of these biblical warnings about the dangers of a bad relationship to money?

Well, maybe we can start to answer that question by looking at what our biblical texts imply about the nature of a healthy relationship to money. If loving money is the problem that creates an unhealthy relationship to money, then I suppose not loving money is part of a healthy relationship to it. If serving money is the problem that creates an unhealthy relationship to money, then I suppose not serving money is part of a healthy relationship to it. But what does it mean to love money? What does it mean to serve money? I think some of my life experience have a bit to say about that, so I’ll share a little of that experience with you here. Like I said, I used to work in a world where a lot of people had a lot of money, both the partner lawyers I worked for and many of their clients. I sensed quite strongly that, with a few exceptions, the people who had the most money were the people who cared the most about money. In biblical terms they were people who loved money and served money. Again with exceptions, it seemed to be general rule in that world of wealthy lawyers that the ones who cared the most about money cared the least about lawyer ethics. Many of them saw the ethical rules by which lawyers are bound as unnecessary interference with their ability to make more money. They didn’t care what people or what causes they represented as long as they could make money doing it.

I think we see the same dynamic in the larger world of our American society. Greedy wheeler-dealers on Wall Street caused the worst collapse of the American economy since 1929 a few years ago as they thought up ever shadier schemes to get more money out of people with little concern for what those schemes actually meant for the people whose money they were taking. A British petroleum company cut corners to save money and nearly destroyed the environment of Gulf of Mexico a while back. Many other examples could easily be noted. In all of those cases it wasn’t really money that was the problem. It was the love of money that was the problem. It was serving money not the common good that was the problem. In all of those cases loving and serving money hurt people and/or hurt God’s good earth. Love of money is indeed the root of all kinds of evil.

So if that’s what an unhealthy relationship to money looks like, what does a healthy one look like? I think Jesus implies a good answer to that question when he says that you cannot serve God and money. Clearly Jesus calls us to serve God in all aspects of our lives including in our relationship to money. We learn from Jesus that serving God means first of all serving God’s people, all of God’s people but especially those whom the world puts down, rejects, or oppresses. Serving God means caring for people. It means caring about their health and their wellbeing. It means caring about their opportunities to lead a whole life. It means not kowtowing to those in power but lifting up the lowly. It means, as we read in the Gospel of Matthew, feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, visiting the sick and the prisoners. If serving God means doing those things, and it does, then money can play a significant role in our service of God. It can pay for housing for the homeless. It can pay for clothes for the naked. It can pay for food for the hungry. It can pay for medical care for the sick and injured. Some people with a lot of money get that about money, Bill and Melinda Gates for example. They have a really healthy relationship to money. Yes, they keep a lot of it for themselves, but they also give enormous amounts of it away to support programs the aid the poor all over the world.

None of us has that kind of money, as far as I know. If you do, let me talk to you about tithing. But we all have some money. And that means that we are all faced with decisions about what to do with our money. I often think that the old cliché WWJD, what would Jesus do, is flip and even silly, but in this context maybe it isn’t. Jesus had no money as far as we know, but it’s easy to see what he would have done with it if he’d had it. Feed the hungry. House the homeless. Help the sick. Oppose injustice and oppression. Those things are the marks of a healthy relationship to money.

So who do we serve, God or money? That, I think, is a challenging question for all of us, or at least I know that it is for me. So let us wrestle with that question. Let us seek to serve God rather than money. Only by doing that can we be faithful disciples of our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

Lost and Found

Lost and Found

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

September 11, 2016

Scripture: Luke 15:1-10

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.

So Jesus told a couple of little parables about things getting lost. We just heard them. In the first of them a sheep, one sheep out of a flock of 100 sheep, wanders off into the wilderness. The shepherd leaves the other 99 sheep in an unprotected place and goes looking for the one that got lost. He finds his lost sheep, takes it home, and throws a party to celebrate because the one that had been lost has been found. In the other a woman loses one of ten silver coins that she has. She searches high and low until she finds it. Then she calls her friends and neighbors in to celebrate because she too has found what she had lost. At the end of both of these parables Jesus says that there will be great rejoicing in heaven over one sinner who repents, more rejoicing even than the rejoicing there is over a larger number of righteous people who have no need of repentance, as if there actually were any such people. These little parables set up the much longer parable of a lost son that we know as the parable of the Prodigal Son, but we don’t get that one in the lectionary now. We get a lost sheep and a lost coin that get found. I think there’s a lot we can learn from both of these little parables, but this morning I want to focus on the lost sheep. A sheep of course isn’t a human being, but unlike a coin it is at least an living being with a will of sorts that reacts to situations in its life. So let’s talk about that lost sheep for a minute or two—or more.

The parable of the lost sheep is very short. It’s only 4 verses. Most of Jesus’ parables are very short, and because they are so short they usually leave us with a lot of questions that they don’t even explicitly raise much less try to answer. So it is with the parable of the lost sheep. Why, for example did this wayward sheep wander off? Curiosity maybe? Looking for something she didn’t have there in the flock with the shepherd? Absentmindedness, a simple failure to pay attention to where the flock was going? We don’t know. Jesus doesn’t tell us. Then how did our sheep filled with wanderlust react when the shepherd found her? Did she run to him for safety? Did she try to run away from him because she wanted her freedom? Was she entangled in thorns crying for help? Again, we don’t know. Jesus doesn’t tell us. How did she feel when the shepherd took her to his home instead of taking her back to the flock? Did she think she was about to become a mutton stew? Or was she pleased that so many people were celebrating over her discovery by the shepherd? Again, we don’t know. Jesus doesn’t tell us.

Now, I don’t think these are idle questions about Jesus’ parable of the lost sheep. See, Jesus’ parables are never merely about what they say. This parable isn’t really about sheep and shepherds. It’s about us. It’s about human beings who wander away from God and about how God responds to those wandering humans. And I think those questions are very real questions about how we humans are when we stray from God and when God comes looking for us and finds us. To illustrate, let me tell you a little of my own story of wandering away from God and getting found again. Perhaps I want to do that because I turned 70 yesterday, and that milestone birthday is feeling to me like an occasion for reminiscence and contemplation about my life, the life I’ve lived so far and the life I have left to live, however much life that may be.

See, I really identify with that lost sheep. I was raised in the church, First Congregational Church of Eugene, Oregon. I didn’t learn very much about God or about the Christian faith there, to be honest about it; but at least I was part of church in my early years. I was, but I wandered. I left the church when I was in high school. I told myself I left because all the good folks of that church were, in my arrogant teenage opinion, hypocrites. Actually, I left because I just didn’t fit in with the other teenagers of the church. I didn’t really fit in anywhere. I couldn’t leave school, but I could leave church; so I did. I didn’t feel any loss when I did. I perceived no need for God, no need for Jesus Christ, no need for a faith community. We all tend to be that way to some degree when we’re teenagers, I think. It’s part of our growing up, of our becoming independent, self-reliant people; and that’s not a bad thing. Be that as it may, I left the church behind; and I pretty much left God behind as well.

I didn’t really start to come back until the 1975-76 academic year. As some of you know, I spent that year in Moscow. Not Moscow, Idaho. Moscow Russia. Soviet Russia. Communist Russia. Aggressively atheistic Russia. That year my late wife Francie and I became regular attenders of the Anglo-American Church in Moscow, which is attached to the American and British Embassies. We became good friends of Pastor Mike Spangler, an American Presbyterian, and his family. Something about the gloomy, depressive atmosphere of Communist Moscow made faith in God and the Christian religion seem awfully appealing. When we came home in the summer of 1976 we joined what was then Pilgrim Congregational UCC on Capitol Hill in Seattle. I’ve been a church person most of the time since then. Was God using my time in Communist Russia to call me back home? Perhaps. It’s not always easy to know the answers to questions like that.

Those years between about 1963 and 1975 aren’t the only time I got lost and found in my life. I got lost big time starting in about 1994. That’s when I started to burn out on my profession at the time, law. That’s when something inside me first started to tell me that I’m a preacher not a lawyer. It took me three years of depression, of being really lost, before I had the courage and opportunity to accept God’s call to ordained ministry and go to seminary. During those years God called, and I said no. I said I can’t. I said that’s not what I want. I said I’m too old. I said I can’t afford it. Finally I said that those things may very well be true, but they don’t mater. Finally, I said yes.

And maybe that’s why I ask some of those questions about the parable of the lost sheep. See, in that parable all that happens is that the sheep gets lost, and the shepherd finds her. With us humans it’s a lot more complicated than that, or at least that’s what my personal experience of being lost and found tells me. I got lost. God found me, but I didn’t exactly go rushing back into God’s arms as the sheep in Jesus’ parable may have done when the shepherd found her. I resisted. I said no, and I think it works that way with a lot of us human types. I know that it worked that way with many of my colleagues in professional ministry. At the first orientation session I attended at seminary it just became a joke how many of us said “God called, and I hung up.” I suppose the shepherd could make the sheep go with him even if the sheep didn’t want to. It’s not that way with us. Our relationship with God is very much two-sided. Jesus told his parables about sheep, coins, and even sons getting lost to make the point that God is always looking for those who have gotten lost and always welcomes us back with joy and celebration. True enough, but of course unlike a sheep or a coin we humans are always free to say no. Yes, God seeks us. Yes, God finds us, but God doesn’t force us. Rather, God invites us. God calls us, but God doesn’t kidnap us. Whether we come to God or not is as much up to us as it is to God.

So here’s something I’ve learned as I begin my eighth decade on earth. When God calls, don’t hang up. When God finds you and invites you home, say yes. When God asks you to do some crazy, utterly nonsensical thing (like, say, go to seminary), say yes. When God calls you to do something you’re sure you can’t do and certainly don’t want to do, say yes. Because here’s the thing. The shepherd in Jesus’ parable took the wayward sheep home. That’s what God always wants to do with us. Take us home. Take us where we belong. Take us where we should have been all the time anyway. Take us to a place a safety, even if it may well not be the world’s notion of safety. Take us to a place of joy. Take us to a place of celebration over those who have said yes to God. That’s what I eventually got myself to do when God was calling me into ministry. People ask me if I like ministry better than law. I always say yes, going into ministry simply and quite literally saved my life.

That’s what God wants for everyone. Not going into ordained ministry, not for most folks although for some. But into something. Into some new way of being. Into some more faithful way of being. Into a way of being that leads to wholeness of life, that leads to a life filled with meaning and, at least at times, filled with satisfaction and even joy. That’s what can come from getting lost and then getting found. Found by God. Of course, being lost and getting found isn’t really something that just happens once. It is a lifelong process. So I ask: Where is God going to find me next? Where is God going to find us next? What’s the new home to which God is calling us? I pray that we will continue to work together to find answers to those questions. Amen.