Listen to Him

Listen to Him

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

February 26, 2017

Scripture: Matthew 17:1-9

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

We’ve all heard it: “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved.” It’s a quote of Acts 16:31, and for some reason it’s usually recited in that archaic, King James language. It’s been posted on a billboard on I-5 down north of Vancouver at least since 1970 when I first moved to the Seattle area. It is what became Christianity’s most common message throughout most of its history: Believe on (or in) Jesus. That’s what’s required for salvation. That’s what God wants from us. Just believe in Jesus. That’s the thing you need to do. Christians have proclaimed this message so loudly for so long that it has virtually drowned out any other message the faith might have. It says that just believing in Jesus is what is important in our relationship with Jesus. “Believe in him” here usually means take as factually correct that he is who the faith has long said he is, believe the right things about his identity. Accept as fact that he is the Son of God Incarnate. Accept as fact that he is your personal Lord and Savior. That’s it. Believe. Just believe.

Now, of course there’s nothing wrong with believing that Jesus is the Son of God Incarnate and that he is our personal Lord and Savior. I believe those things too. I take them as correct and as full of meaning for my life and for yours. My confession that those things are true connects me with God. It gives my life meaning. It gives me hope in a world that can so lead us only to despair. It gives me courage in the face of illness and pain, and it gives me courage even in the face of death. So yes, indeed. Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ. It’s doing that which makes us Christians.

Now, that is indeed all very well and good. It is nothing less than divine, but there’s something else about that I always feel compelled to say. See, if Christianity is only about believing in Jesus, then Christianity isn’t about anything else. If all our faith asks of us is to believe in Jesus, then nothing about Jesus really matters other than that we believe that he is who our faith says he is. If believing in him is all there is to Christianity, then it really doesn’t matter what he said or did. It only matters who he was. Folks, I am convinced that if we really understand our faith we will find that there is a lot more to it than just believing in Jesus’ divine identity. What he had to say really does matter.

Which, for me at least, makes the story of the Transfiguration, which appears in all three Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke), particularly striking. In that story, as Jesus is transfigured and talks with Moses and Elijah, a voice comes out of a cloud. Pretty clearly we are to understand that it is the voice of God. It says: “This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased….” Matthew 17:5 NIV And then it says one more thing. The voice issues a directive to Jesus disciples, represented by the three who went up the mountain with him in the story, and through them to us. What does that divine voice say? Does it say “believe in him”? No. To what I imagine must be the chagrin of a great many Christians it doesn’t say “believe in him.” It says: “Listen to him.” Listen to him. In this story, and I believe in truth, what God wants from us is not only that we believe in Jesus but also that we listen to him.

And here’s the problem: Believing in him is so much easier than listening to him, at least if we mean by “listen” not merely hear but heed, which I am sure is what the voice in the story means. Believing in him is something that we can do just with our minds. Believing as it is usually understood here means merely giving intellectual assent to what the Christian religion says about him. That’s easy, once you make the decision to do it. You say: OK. I agree. I believe in him. And you’re done. You’re saved. No problem.

Listening to him, hearing and heeding him, now that’s another matter altogether. It’s another matter altogether because what he says is really radical. It’s really difficult. Here’s one big thing he said. He said that God is a God of justice. Not justice as due process. Justice as caring about and for all people. Justice as every person having the necessities of life. Not just a privileged few having them. Everyone having them. That means no one having too much. When some have too much, some don’t have enough. That’s what Jesus said. That’s one of the things God wants us to hear him saying.

Jesus also said that God is a God of radical nonviolence. We heard the primary texts on divine nonviolence in Matthew in our service last week. There are others, but I think we all know that Jesus taught nonviolence as God’s way. Jesus taught nonviolence because violence always hurts at least some of God’s people. Jesus taught nonviolence because people who resist evil violently usually become evil themselves. The voice on that mountain in the Transfiguration story said “listen to him.” That means, among other things, listen to his proclamation of nonviolence as God’s way.

Jesus said other things that we need to listen to too. He said God loves you. He said God loves each and every one of you. He said God forgives you. He said God forgives each and every one of you. Always. No matter what. Most of us probably find that part of what Jesus said easier to listen to than his calls to justice and nonviolence, but not everyone does. Some people are so trapped in self-doubt and even self-loathing that they can’t believe God loves them. That God loves them unconditionally. They can’t hear Jesus saying that, and they can’t accept it. They’re the ones we need to say it to most of all. Maybe some of you are among those who need to hear it most of all. Maybe I am too. So let’s listen to Jesus speak of God’s love as much as hear him speak of God’s challenge. Listening to him the way the divine voice says we’re called to involves hearing all he had to say, what we find easy and what we find hard.

Our world today needs Christians who will listen to Jesus and not just believe in him as much as it ever has. Our world needs to hear his call to justice. We need to hear his call to care for the poor and the marginalized. We need to hear and follow his call to love our neighbor, even when our neighbor is an alien or a stranger. We need to hear his call to peace, for the world is so torn by violence and conflict.

And we need to hear his word of God’s love. Far too many people today can’t love themselves. They can’t love themselves, so they lose themselves in a vain search for worldly success. Or in alcohol. Or in drugs. Or even in suicide. They can’t love themselves so they can’t truly love anyone else either. So they hate people who are different from them. They hate foreigners. They hate people of different faiths. They hate people who love differently than they do. They hate people who look different from them. The world’s great spiritual traditions all say that if you want to transform the world, start by transforming yourself. Jesus says that too, and God calls us to listen to him when he does. Start by loving yourself the way God does, for the Great Commandment says “love your neighbor as yourself.” Jesus taught and showed us that God is love. Let’s start listening to him, shall we?

This coming week we enter the season of Lent, starting with Ash Wednesday three days from now. Lent is a time of preparation for Holy Week, especially Good Friday, and then, only after Good Friday, Easter. This year may our Lent be a time in which we prepare not just to believe in Jesus but to listen to him. That’s what God told Peter, James, and John to do on that hilltop so long ago. That’s what God calls us to do today. So yes, we believe in Jesus. I believe in Jesus with all my heart and soul, and I hope you do too. But there’s more to being a Christian than that. There’s also listening to him. There’s listening to his call to justice, peace, and love. May God give us the wisdom and the courage to listen and to follow. Amen.

A Third Way

A Third Way

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

February 19, 2017

Scripture: Matthew 5:38-48

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.

Human life, you know, is filled with conflicting opposites. We deal with them all the time. Self and others. For many, family and work. For many, work and play. Chocolate cake and a bulging waistline. Politics and ordinary life. Duty and desire. Companionship, even intimacy, and solitude. Loving your grandkids and finding them absolutely exhausting. For far too many marital fidelity and a roving eye. The yard needing to be mowed and the Seahawks playing an afternoon game. We run into competing opposites all the time.

The scripture of the Christian faith is filled with conflicting opposites too. God and creation. God and the nation. Earth and heaven. Self and others—that one shows up in the life of faith as much as it does in other aspects of our lives. For far too many, politics and faith. Charity and personal spiritual practices. Charity and social justice—they aren’t the same thing you know. The body and the spirit—far too many Christians make these two competing opposites when they really aren’t. Personal desires and Christian morality—far too many Christians make that one something it doesn’t have to be too. In the life of faith as in all of our life we run into conflicting opposites all the time.

A great many Christians insist on seeing God and Jesus Christ only on one side of our conflicting opposites. They think God calls us always to choose between conflicting opposites. When faced with conflicting opposites they think there’s this way, and there’s that way, and God is only on one side or the other. Choose between them, they say. Take one way or the other. There’s no third choice, and only one of the choices is moral, only one of them is Christian.

Well, I want to tell you this morning that when faced with conflicting opposites Jesus rarely took one way or the other. He usually found a different way, a third way, his way, God’s way. It might not be obvious, but he’s actually doing that in the passage we just heard from the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew. In that passage Jesus is addressing the question of violence as a means of opposing evil and oppression. In our English translations he says “Do not resist an evil person.” He says if someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other cheek. If someone sues you to take your tunic, give him your cloak as well. If someone forces you to go one mile, go a second mile with him. Sure sounds like he’s advising meek passivity in the face of oppression, doesn’t it? Well, he’s not. The late great theologian Walter Wink taught us that the word that gets translated as “resist” in the phrase “do not resist an evil person” actually means something like do not resist with armed force. Wink taught us that turn the other cheek, give the cloak also, and go the extra mile are actually examples of assertive, creative, nonviolent resistance to oppression. It sounds to us like Jesus is making a choice between meek acquiescence in oppression and violent resistance to oppression and choosing the former. He’s not. What he’s doing is finding a third way, a way that incorporates the sacred in each of the two options and rejects that which is itself evil in them. He found a third way. Not a way of compromise but God’s way between two sinful human ways.

Jesus does that in areas of concern other than the choice between passivity and violence too. Take the question of whether the life of faith is about personal piety and salvation on the one hand and transforming the world in the direction of divine justice on the other. Christians usually see an either/or choice here. Faith is about personal spirituality and salvation of the soul or it is about transforming the world. We think we have to choose between those two polarities. Both sides of the divide over that supposed choice, which today splits American Christianity in two, think they’re the ones choosing God’s side and think those who choose differently have lost touch with what God really wants.

Well, Jesus actually chose neither of those sides of the social justice or personal salvation question. He found a third way between them. He found the divine way of transforming the world through inner, personal, spiritual transformation. He rejected an exclusive focus on the world, and he rejected an exclusive focus on heaven. He proclaimed God’s radical justice for the poor and the marginalized, and he called his followers to develop a healthy inner spirituality that brings peace and salvation. He said don’t resist oppression by taking up arms against it. He said resist it by driving the oppressor out of your heart, out of your spirit. He thought that if enough people would do that, transformation of the world would come as a natural and unavoidable consequence of that inner transformation. He found a third way. He found God’s way, and he calls us to do the same.

We see this kind of either/or choice when we look at the future of the church. The future of this little church to be sure, but the future of the entire Christian church as well. We think we have a choice between being big and financially well of on the one hand and being small and probably dying on the other. I am convinced that if Jesus were here in person today he would tell us that that is a false choice. He would call us to find a third way. He would call us to find a way that rejects what is bad about both ways and keeps what is good about both ways, the good in the large church and the good in the small church rolled into one.

Big churches can be vital. They can be alive. They are filled with people, and those people can and often do perform great works of charity in their communities. But big churches can also be, and usually are, difficult places for new people to fit into. They are difficult places for new people to find true community. They often have big and quite rigid bureaucratic structures. Sometimes they hold together only because they have a charismatic preacher. When he leaves so do many of the people. Big churches also far too often preach really bad theology, theology for example that condemns women and gay people simply for being the way God created them and expects people to turn their brains off when they pass through the church door.

Little churches have their virtues and their challenges too. It is much easier for a small church to be community for people than it is for a big church to be that. It’s usually easier for new people to fit into the life of a little church than it is for new people to do that in a big one. Here are some examples: Our vice moderator Jesse is a newcomer to this church, but he has already become part of its leadership. Other new people have become active here in recent times too. Beate works with the deacons. Lisa sings with the music group, works in the kitchen, and has gotten us doing a better job of recycling than we’d been doing before. That would not happen in most big churches. It’s easier for people to make their voice heard in a small congregation than in a big one because there are far fewer voices clamoring to be heard in a small church than there are in a large one. Little churches definitely have their sacred virtues.

They have virtues, but they also have drawbacks. A little church can’t do as much in its community as a big church can. This little church is in pretty good financial condition, but many little churches aren’t. Churches with very limited financial resources can find it hard to call a pastor. People in little churches can think that their church doesn’t matter as much as a big one does. They can fear the future more than people in big churches do because their financial and human resources are quite limited.

Jesus call us, Jesus calls you, to find a third way between being a stereotypical big church and being a struggling little church with no future. Jesus says the third way of being church is to be a little church that is every bit as alive as the big churches sometimes seem to be. Keep the virtues of being small church. Love one another. Be community for one another, as indeed in many ways you are. Listen to each other. Not just to the longtime core members but to the new people too. But, Jesus says, drop the bad stuff about being a small church. Stop being panicked about your future, for God will be with you in whatever that future holds. Stop worrying that there is relatively little you can do outside these walls. Keep doing what you can. Keep doing what you have done and rejoice in it, giving thanks to God. When I’m gone seek a new pastor, yes; but don’t despair if you have trouble finding one. You’ve been church without a pastor before. You can do it again if you have to, and you’re better off with no pastor than with a bad one. There are lots of materials readily available online to help you do church by yourselves.

So: find God’s third way. Keep what is holy about you, and there is much that is. Don’t let that which is not holy in you stop you. Keep praying together. Keep coming together for worship and for work. Keep coming together for companionship and community. Keep listening for how God is calling you to be church in this time and place. There is a way. There is God’s third way. I pray that with the help of the Holy Spirit you will find it. Amen.

Choose Life

Choose Life

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

February 12, 2017

Scripture: Deuteronomy 30:15-20

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

Benjamin Franklin famously said that the only things that are certain are death and taxes. Taxes may or may not be spiritual issues—I actually think that they are—but death is definitely a spiritual issue. Life and death: Two profound realities of human existence. All of us here today are physically alive, and most of us have been for quite some time. All of us here have experienced death. Not our own of course. Not yet, but we have experienced other deaths. Maybe for you, like for me, the first death we experienced was the death of a pet. I’ve heard it said that one reason for children to have pets is so that they can begin to experience death. Most of us at least have experienced the deaths of people too, often the death of someone we have deeply loved. A grandparent perhaps, or a parent, a spouse, maybe even a child. Most of us Americans don’t like to think about death much. Our culture does a pretty good job of avoiding the subject most of the time. Yet of course we can’t avoid it forever. It is too much a reality of human life. All humans, all animals, are mortal. We usually live ignoring that reality, and perhaps we must in order to keep on living. Still, there it is. It breaks into our lives. Eventually it will end our lives. That’s just how it is whether we like it or not.

The setting of our passage from Deuteronomy this morning is just before the Hebrew people cross the Jordan River to occupy Canaan, the land they believe their god has promised to give them. Deuteronomy, which actually dates from many, many centuries after the time of Moses, is set as Moses speaking to the people. He calls on them to choose life rather than death so that they may live long and prosper in the land they are about to enter and possess. In Deuteronomy choosing life basically means following and worshiping Yahweh. That’s fine, although I think Deuteronomy misses the mark when it says that doing that guarantees long life and prosperity. Still, this passage points us to something really important. In it Moses says “love the Lord your God and hold fast to him, for the Lord is your life.” The Lord is your life. God is your life. That is profound truth, one of the most profound truths in the whole Bible. Deuteronomy nails it with that one.

Deuteronomy nails it with that one, or at least it does if we understand the word “life” properly. Yes, God gives us physical life. God is the Creator of all that is, and that of course includes us. But I think there is another profound truth here, one that is if anything even more important. “The Lord is your life.” What does that mean? It means, I think, that the life God sets before us and asks us to choose is something more than merely being physically alive. The life God sets before us and asks us to choose is life with God. It is life in the spirit. It is the fullness of life, not merely the external characteristics of life.

Life in the spirit is something that is always open to us, but if you’re like me (and I suspect that in this respect most of you are) you don’t often choose it just as I don’t often choose it. In our American culture when we think of life we typically think of being biologically alive. We don’t so often think of life as being spiritually alive. Yet many of us know at some deep level that truly being alive means being spiritually alive. To be spiritually alive is to know that all this material stuff all around us, including the material stuff of which we’re made, is not all there is. To be spiritually alive is to know that there is so much more to life than material abundance and social prestige. To be spiritually alive is to know that God is that reality in which, as the book of Acts says, we live and move and have our being. To be spiritually alive is to live with a steady awareness that God is with us and in us every minute of our lives. That God is the ultimate reality to Whom we can always turn for comfort and for guidance. We do that through prayer. We do that through spiritual exercises like meditation or other practices that work to connect us with God.

Now of course whether or not to live in the spirit, whether or not to live life fully, is always a choice we have to make. In our reading from Deuteronomy it’s Moses who puts the choice between life and death before the people. I believe that God puts that choice before each and every one of us every day. We can choose life, real life, abundant life; or we can choose a physical life that is really a spiritual death. Moses said to the people “Choose life.” I say to you, and I say to myself, choose life. It’s up to us.

We are coming to a change in our lives. We are coming to the time in a few weeks when I will no longer be your pastor. I think perhaps both you and I regret that reality, although it was my choice and one I still am convinced I must make. As we come to that parting the choice between life and death lies before both you as a congregation and me as an individual who has been called to ministry. I won’t ask you to worry about my choice, but I urge you in the time ahead to choose life for this congregation. You are alive. You are good folk who are today’s incarnation of a church that has been alive in this community for well over one hundred years. You are a church where people have found welcome. Where people, including several new people who have been here less time than I have, have found a spiritual home. Keep being that spiritual home for all who come here. You will choose life if you keep loving one another. You will choose life if you keep serving this community.

You will choose life if you open yourselves to the calling of the Holy Spirit. God the Holy Spirit is not likely to call you only to remain what you have been in the past. God rarely calls anyone merely to remain what they have been in the past. It isn’t so much that the world around you is changing; rather, the world around you has already changed. Church as it used to be is not church as it will be. It will be up to you to decide how you will be church in the future. Will you have a pastor? Not necessarily. There are models out there of churches being vital, being alive, without a pastor. Will you stick with old, familiar theology? Or will you open yourselves to new insights and new ways of imaging and speaking about God? Only you can say. The choice lies before you. I say to you as Moses said to his people so long ago: Choose life.

God sets before us every day the choice between life and death. God calls us always to choose life. God calls us to choose life for ourselves individually and for the church collectively. That choice isn’t always easy, but here’s the good news about it. As we face that choice God is always with us, holding us in unfailing grace, calling us forward, nudging us in the direction of life. God wants us all to have a life that is full and abundant.

God will help us find that life; but here’s another thing we can’t deny. Eventually death comes to all of us. None of us is immortal. Institutions like churches aren’t either. Death is part of God’s creation, here’s what we always need to remember. Death never separates us from God. Ever. God is always calling us to new life, and God calls us to new life even beyond death. There is life for its people after the death of an institution too. So I pray that this church will choose life, and I beg you not to be afraid. God is with you. God loves you and holds you. God is here to help you. I pray that you will find this time of parting to be as much opportunity as loss. I pray that it will be that for me too.

So I say to you and I say to me: Choose life. Choose life with God, for God will never desert either you or me. God sets the choice before us. What we choose is up to us. So choose life. I pray that I will, and I pray that you will. Amen.

A True Fast

A True Fast

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

February 5, 2017

Scripture: Isaiah 58:1-12: Luke 10:25-37

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.

To fast. Ah, now that to me is a great mystery. To refrain from eating food. I’ve got to be honest here. I don’t much like refraining from eating food. Yet I know that every spiritual tradition in the world teaches fasting as a powerful spiritual discipline. They say you fast to take your mind off of worldly things so it can concentrate on divine things. Christianity teaches that. So do Judaism and Buddhism. In Islam fasting is elevated to the level of one of the five basic “pillars” of the faith. During the month of Ramadan Muslims fast from sunup to sundown for that whole month. In Christianity the season of Lent that we’ll be entering soon was originally a time of fasting something like Islam’s Ramadan. I’m sure many of you remember the old Catholic rule about eating fish on Friday. The rule was actually that you refrain from eating red meat on Friday. That was seen as a kind of partial fast. Fasting has a long and honorable history in the world’s faith traditions; and frankly I don’t get it. Refrain from eating to take your mind off of worldly things so it can concentrate on divine things? I’ve got to tell you. When I’m really hungry my mind is continually on the very worldly thing of being hungry. So like I said. Fasting is a great mystery to me.

In our reading from Isaiah this morning we hear that fasting was a spiritual practice of the ancient Hebrews. In those verses Isaiah (actually probably so-called Third Isaiah, but never mind) tells us that the people of his time fast and expect God to reward them for doing so. They say “Why have we fasted, and you have not seen it?” They know that fasting is a spiritual practice that can be pleasing to God. So they do it, and they expect a reward. When the reward doesn’t come, they question God.

And that’s where this text gets really interesting. It tells us that God rejects the people’s fasting because they’re hypocrites when they do it. Isaiah has God say “On the day of your fasting you do as you please and exploit all your workers.” On their fast days they quarrel and fight. God says “You cannot fast as you do today and expect your voice to be heard.” They think they humble themselves. They bow their heads. They even sit in sackcloth and ashes, traditional symbols of repentance. God asks them the rhetorical question ”Is that what you call a fast, a day acceptable to the Lord?” Apparently the people think that it is. The suggestion so far in this text is that the problem isn’t that the people fast, it’s that they don’t do it in the right spirit.

Yet in this passage it turns out that the problem with the people’s fasting isn’t that they do it in the wrong spirit. The problem is that they do it at all. In this passage it appears that God doesn’t want fasting. The problem is that the people think fasting is what God wants, and they’re wrong about that. The problem is that they don’t understand what God really wants from them.

So God tells them through the prophet what God really wants from them: “Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen: to loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and break every yoke? Is it not to share your food with the hungry and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter—when you see the naked, to clothe them, and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood?” God says God will bless the people if they “do away with the yoke of oppression, with the pointing finger and malicious talk, and if you spend yourselves in behalf of the hungry and satisfy the needs of the oppressed.” That’s what God wants. Not that we convince ourselves that we’re righteous and God owes us one by undertaking some spiritual discipline that is for us an empty, external ritual. Justice. That’s what God wants from us. Feed the hungry. Clothe the naked. Take in the stranger and give her shelter. Stop oppressing people, especially your workers, your employees. I suppose that means stop making them work under horrible working conditions and pay them a living wage. God says I don’t care about your rituals, rituals that are actually meaningless to you except that you do them to get some reward from me. Stop oppressing people. Care for the needy and the traveler. God says that’s the fast I want, using I guess fast as a metaphor for the life acceptable to God. Not fasting. Justice. That’s what God wants.

Folks, that passage from Isaiah was written around 2,500 years ago, but it speaks a powerful divine truth to us today. Today our nation has said to the hungry, weary traveler, to the refugee, or at least some of them: No! Not here! You are not welcome here. We won’t let you come in. We will not give you shelter. We will not be a safe place for you, for you come from the wrong country and practice the wrong religion. You’re not like us. So No! Go away! We don’t want you!

That, my friends, is a powerfully unchristian position that the executive branch of our federal government has taken. It violates the foundational ethics of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition. The ancient Hebrew prophets said shelter the wanderer. Jesus said respect the hated Samaritan. The Jews of Jesus’ time hated Samaritans the way far too many Americans hate Arabs and all Muslims. In his famous parable that we heard Jesus said No! Do not hate the Samaritan because of his nationality or his faith. Look at what the does. If he does what’s right accept him. Welcome him. He can be a hero even though he’s not like you. Folks, God knows how much we need to hear that lesson today. The ones you think are righteous may be getting it all wrong. Today Christians who hate Muslims and want to keep them all out of our country are getting it wrong. Isaiah said a true fast is doing justice. Jesus said love the foreigner you think you hate.

Yes, we have legitimate security concerns, and our nation has been doing a pretty good job at protecting us. Not perfect, but then nothing human is perfect. Refugees seeking asylum in our country go through a vetting process that can take as long as 2 years. No one from one of the seven countries on President Trump’s banned list has committed an act of violence in our country. Ever. Most of the 9-11 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia, and that nation isn’t on the President’s list. Arbitrarily banning people from entering our country because of their nation of origin is un-American. More importantly for us, it is un-Christian. It is not doing the justice Isaiah demands from us. It is saying the priest and the Levite are the heroes of Jesus’ parable rather than the Samaritan, the real hero of the story.

So let’s focus on what Isaiah says is a true fast. Doing justice. Caring for people in need. Not oppressing people. That is the fast God wants from us. Spiritual disciplines like fasting can be powerful tools in the life of faith. They can be acceptable and even pleasing to God. But they are that only if they lead us into a true fast, the fast of justice. Today more than ever we need to understand that truth. More than understand it we need to live it. May God give us the wisdom and the courage to do it. Amen.

Micah 6:8

Micah 6:8

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

January 29, 2017

Scripture: Micah 6:1-8

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.

Years ago my mother gave me a sweatshirt. Here it is. Can you read it? It says “Do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with your dog.” As some of you know, my wife Jane and I have a Pembroke Welsh Corgi. I don’t think it’s possible to walk with a Pembroke Welsh Corgi any way other than humbly. I mean, people are much more attracted to our Corgi than they are to either Jane or me. Lots of people in our neighborhood know the Corgi’s name—Ringo—and know neither Jane’s name nor mine. Walking with a dog as cute and appealing as a Pembroke Welsh Corgi is truly a humbling experience. I think he’s smarter than we are too. Walking with a corgi is a good spiritual exercise. It is an exercise in walking humbly, albeit with a dog not with God.

I imagine you all know those famous lines from the prophet Micah. The NIV we use here translates those lines as “He has shown you, O man, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.” But different translations of the Bible render it in slightly different ways. Here’s my favorite one: “He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” NRSV It’s closer to what’s on my sweatshirt, and I prefer the word kindness to the word mercy. So I’ll use kindness here instead of mercy. Don’t worry about it. If you prefer mercy that’s fine. That’s the word the NIV uses.

As I contemplated that famous verse this last week thinking about what to preach this morning one thing jumped out at me. Micah’s admonition sounds so simple, but over the centuries people of faith have been so good at making the life of faith so much more complicated than that. I think Micah was reacting against people in his day who were making their faith a lot more complicated than that. His day is some 2,700 years ago, and Micah tells us that people then were making the faith be about something far different from Micah’s beautiful instruction. They were making it be all about a complex system of sacrifices. Burnt offerings. Calves precisely one year old. In a bit of hyperbole thousands of rams or ten thousand rivers of oil. Referring to what may have been a very ancient practice of the Hebrews but hadn’t been for a long time by the time Micah came along maybe even a person’s firstborn child. The ancient Jewish laws around these sacrifices could get really complicated. You had to know just what to sacrifice for any particular purpose. You had to do the sacrifice at the right time and in the right way. Beyond that, all those sacrifices weren’t really about how you live your life. Some of them were about obtaining forgiveness of sin, but the laws of sacrifice didn’t tell anyone about how God wants us to live. So Micah says it’s not at all about sacrifice. Do justice, love kindness, walk humbly with your God.

People in Jesus’ time we making the life of faith perhaps even more complicated than they were in Micah’s time. The Jewish leaders of his day, both the Sadducees and the Pharisees, made the faith be all about obeying the laws of Moses. Those are the laws found in the Torah, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, our Old Testament. They said obey them. Obey all of them. Do you know how many of those laws there are? 613. That’s the traditional number for laws of Moses. I have trouble remembering all of the Ten Commandments. I wouldn’t have a chance of remembering all 613 Torah laws. Like Micah, Jesus said you don’t have to. He said “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all you mind, and love your neighbor as yourself.” It’s not that doing that is always easy, but it’s sure a lot easier than remembering all 613 laws of Moses and obeying them.

People in our time make the life of faith a lot more complicated than Micah did too. We have a lot of latter day Pharisees among us. They make the Christian faith be all about rules. Don’t you dare break the rules, they say. They do that in particular around rules of sexual behavior, but many of them have a lot of other rules too. They’re mostly “don’ts.” Don’t drink alcohol. Don’t dance. Don’t play cards. Don’t work on Sunday. Don’t miss church on Sunday, even if the Seahawks are playing an early game in the eastern time zone. Don’t get divorced, no matter what. For some extreme modern Pharisees it’s women don’t speak in church and don’t presume to teach men and for heaven’s sake don’t let the thought of being a preacher or a pastor cross your mind. Don’t, don’t, don’t. Rules, rules, rules. That’s what the Christian faith is for an awful lot of our fellow Christians today.

Micah knew better. Do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with your God. Three little admonitions that are more like encouragements than like rules or laws. Still, there are always questions about any saying actually means in practice. I think it helps us know just what those admonitions mean for us if we look just briefly at their meaning. Do justice. Biblical justice, the justice Micah had in mind, isn’t about due process, like justice so often is among us today. It is about caring for people in need. The ancient Hebrew prophets often specified three categories of people toward whom God calls us to do justice. They were the widow, the orphan, and the stranger, that is, the non-Hebrew living among Hebrew people. I think that last one, justice for the alien, speaks to us particularly powerfully today when the dignity and rights of foreign immigrants and refugees are under strong attack by President Trump and his supporters. The thing to know about all three of those categories is that they were the most vulnerable people in Hebrew society. Micah’s “Do justice” comes down to taking care of the most vulnerable people among us, no matter who they are or where they come from.

Love kindness. A lot of Christians seem to think that the Christian life basically comes down to being nice. Actually, the Christian life is about a whole lot more than that, but Micah’s call to us to love kindness is important. Even though they think being Christian means being nice, Christians can be awfully mean. There’s no fight like a church fight. I’m not sure why, but that sure seems to be true. So Micah reminds us to be kind toward one another. That doesn’t mean we all have to agree about everything. We don’t. It does mean that we are to respect each other even, or especially, when we disagree. To be gentle with one another. To take care in our relationships that we not cause unnecessary harm. Love kindness. A really good reminder.

Walk humbly with your God. This one may be a bit more obscure than the other two, or at least it is for me. I mean, don’t we always walk humbly with God? How can we be anything but humble toward God? Well, somehow we often find ways. So often we people of God get very arrogant toward God. We do that when insist that we know the one absolute truth about God and other people who know something different than we do are just plain wrong. Sometimes we go way beyond saying they’re wrong and say they’re damned for all eternity because they know God differently than we do. That attitude is pure human arrogance. It claims what we cannot claim, that we know definitively and eternally who God is, what God is like, what God does, and what God wants from us. Yes, we have our ideas, our confessions about those things; and they are important. But when we claim absolute certainty about them we forget a couple of really important things. We forget that God is infinitely beyond us. God is so beyond us that we can never fully know who God is or what God wants. Yes, we act on our understandings of those things, but God is so much bigger than we are that we must always remain humble about them. We must always leave room for the possibility that we may have gotten something wrong. We may have misunderstood. Somebody else may have understood something important about God that we have missed.

When we claim to know absolute truth about God we also forget that God is God and we are not. We people of faith set ourselves up as gods all the time. We want to take responsibility for our lives, forgetting that God is charge and we aren’t. We want to take responsibility for fixing the world, forgetting that it is God’s world not ours. Forgetting that God calls us to work with and for God, not to be God. That’s not walking humbly with God. That’s being arrogant toward God.

So let’s thank God for Micah’s instruction here. Do justice, love kindness, walk humbly with your God. When we understand what those things really mean they become a sacred guide for the life of faith. They remind us that the life of faith isn’t about a whole bunch of complicated laws and rules. It is about living a life that is faithful in the sight of God. It is about always remembering the basics, the foundational things of the life of faith. Do justice. Love kindness. Walk humbly with your God. May God help us to do it. Amen.

Immediately?

Immediately?

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

January 22, 2017

Scripture:

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 Matthew told us a story this morning. In that story several men are plying their trade as fishermen on the Sea of Galilee. As far as we know, they’ve never even heard of Jesus, much less met him or gotten to know him. He comes walking along the shoreline where they are working. He calls to them, and they immediately they drop what they’re doing and go off following him. Two of them leave their poor old father Zebedee to do the family work without them. That’s the story Matthew tells.

Let me tell you another story. There was a man. Many people thought him wise, for he had many letters after his name—MA, PhD, and JD. He was a lawyer. He went about his work practicing law. He analyzed his clients’ cases. He did his legal research. He drafted his pleadings. He wrote his briefs. He tried his cases. He won a few, and he lost some too. He wasn’t a great lawyer, but he was a good enough one.

Then, over the course of a couple of years, things started to go wrong for him. He was finding it hard to keep practicing law. He became depressed. He knew something was missing. He knew there was something else he was supposed to be doing, but he didn’t know what it was. He had one idea about what he wanted to do, but that idea was so wildly impracticable that he knew he’d never do it—and he never did. Something deep inside him told him he was a preacher, but he didn’t pay that much mind. It made absolutely no sense. It had never consciously occurred to him to be a preacher. He had been a Christian of sorts most of his life, but for reasons he can’t tell you to this day he started to study Christian theology, the best theology there was at the time, Paul Tillich, John Dominic Crossan, and most of all Douglas John Hall.

Then something incredible happened. A university in his town created a ministry program for Protestant students even though it was, and is, a Catholic university. He knew he had to enroll. He didn’t really know why. He didn’t know what he would do with a ministry degree, for it had never really occurred to him that the thing he was supposed to be doing was parish ministry. He sure didn’t know how he was going to pay for it. Something just told him he had to do it. So he closed his law office, took a part time job in a legal services office providing free representation to low income tenants in eviction cases, and went to seminary. He went into debt to pay for it. While he was there he did intern work at a local church, and that’s when the light really came on. He said to Jesus “Really? This is what I’m supposed to be doing?” And Jesus answered “Yes, my son. This is what you’re supposed to be doing.” So he followed Jesus, and he has been doing parish ministry most of the time ever since. After he got his first call and not long before she died of breast cancer his wife of thirty years said to him: “I’m so glad you finally are who you really are.”

Those are two stories of God and Jesus Christ calling people to follow them, to be Christians not just in thought but in deed, in what they did with their lives. The first story is the story from the Gospel of Matthew of Jesus’ call to Peter, Andrew, James, and John to become Jesus’ first disciples. In that story everything happens really fast. The men Jesus calls immediately drop everything and follow him. The second story is, in rough outline at least, my story. When I compare my story to the story the Gospel of Matthew tells of Jesus’ calling of the first disciples, it causes me to wonder. Did Peter, Andrew, James, and John really just walk off all at once and leave their lives behind when some stranger they didn’t know walked by and said follow me? That’s sure not how it happened with me. It’s not how it happened with a lot of Christian pastors I know. When I went to my first orientation session at Seattle University, the university that created that ministry program for Protestant students in its Catholic School of Theology and Ministry, it became a joke among us beginning students that God called, and we hung up. We’d all resisted. We’d all had enormous doubts. We all said earlier in our lives “Sorry, God, you’ve got the wrong person.” We were like the prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah. Isaiah said I’m not worthy. Jeremiah said I’m only a boy. God didn’t care. God called them to be prophets anyway, and they went and did God’s bidding. So did those first four of Jesus’ disciples really do it immediately, just like that, apparently with so little thought? Maybe they did, but most of us don’t respond to Christ’s call with such alacrity. We hesitate. We hem and haw. We deny. We try to get out of it. And Jesus will have none of it. If he’s going to call you he keeps after you until you give in and say alright already. I’ll go. Maybe it happens all at once like it did in Matthew’s story. Maybe it happens over the course of several years, like it did with me. However it happens, it happens.

Now, Jesus Christ calling people to change their lives isn’t always something that people welcome. It can be disruptive. It can change just about everything in your life. I’ve never made nearly as much money in ministry as I did in law. I had to learn how to live with less. Less material wealth, that is. But with that less material wealth came great spiritual wealth. More spiritual wealth than I had ever possessed before. With a drop of income came a miraculous increase in satisfaction with my life and my work. Peace that I had never felt before too, not that it’s always there, but mostly it is. The joy of knowing that my work has meant something really important to at least a few people. The fulfillment that comes from knowing, like my late wife said, that I am who I really am. Yes, I miss the boat I could afford when I was a lawyer, but other than that my decision to follow Christ’s call to me into professional ministry has been nothing but a blessing in my life.

Now, here’s the thing. Sometimes Christ’s call to us leads us into enormous, obvious changes in our lives. But sometimes that call is less dramatic. Sometimes it is less disruptive. It all depends on what we need. Peter, Andrew, James, and John needed to follow Jesus as intimate disciples. I needed to stop being a lawyer, something that inside I never really was in the first place, and become who I really am. And I know that God and Jesus Christ call each and every one of us in some way. Maybe they call you to go to school and change your profession when you’re way too old to do it and can’t afford it, like they did with me. But maybe their call to you is very different from that. Maybe their call to you is softer, quieter, gentler. Maybe it’s a call out of a life of fear. Maybe it’s a call to stop hiding your gifts and to share them with others. Maybe it’s a call to care for a sick neighbor. Maybe it’s a call to volunteer at the food bank. Maybe it’s a call to have peace and courage as you face the end of your earthly life.

Christ’s calls to people are as varied as the people whom Christ calls, but there’s one thing those calls all have in common besides their origin in God. See, God is with God’s people in each and every one of those calls. God is there to lift us up, to give us a nudge when we need it, to point the way, to forgive our mistakes, and to feed our spirits with God’s Holy Spirit every step of the way. That doesn’t mean accepting God’s call will be easy. It doesn’t mean we’ll always understand the call fully or know what to do with it. But see, in all of that God is there with us, continuing to call, continuing to prod, continuing to lead, until at last God leads us home. Home in this life. Home to who we really are. And home in the next life, to our eternal home with God.

So let me ask you: Have you heard God calling? Is there something in your life you need to be called out of? Is there something you dream of that you need to be called to? Whatever your circumstances, God is calling. God is calling you. Each and every one of you. Not all in the same way. Not all to the same thing. But God is calling, and God is promising. Promising you whatever you need to answer God’s call. Maybe God is calling you to do something immediate. Maybe God is calling you to get up and move now, right away, without delay, like Jesus called those first disciples. But maybe not. God’s call takes many forms. Sometimes it can take years for us fully to hear it and respond to it, and that’s OK. It’s OK because sometimes it’s how God works. However God is working in your life, God is calling.

So let’s listen, shall we? God is calling each one of you individually, and God is calling us collectively as a church. Where is God calling us to go? What is God calling us to do? Ah, those questions are much harder to answer than the question of whether God is calling. To answer them we need to listen. Most of all we need to pray. We need to be open to the myriad ways God calls and answers our needs. God answered my need in part by leading me to the perfect law job while I was in seminary, law that felt worth doing when most law no longer did. Then God led me to rewarding ministry, first in Monroe, then here. I don’t know how God will answer your need when you answer God’s call, but I know that God will. So let’s stay awake. Let’s be alert. Let’s pray. Let’s pray by listening. God is calling. Let’s not hang up, OK? Amen.

Called to Act

Called to Act

A Martin Luther King Day Meditation

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

January 15, 2017

Scripture: Isaiah 49:1-7; Psalm 40:1-11

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 a question: Why is it so hard for people of faith to speak up? I mean, we have trust in what we understand to be the most profound truth there is or ever was, the truth of God. Yet in my experience and in the experience of so many others we people of faith mostly keep quiet. Oh sure, some aggressive evangelicalistic types talk loudly and incessantly about how everyone has to believe like they do and think like they do to avoid spending eternity in hell; but that’s not the kind of speaking up I mean. I mean speaking up about the things that God really cares about. Things like social and economic justice. The things the eighth century prophets lifted up and proclaimed to the people of their time. The things Jesus mostly spoke about, about caring for people in need, about loving God and our neighbor as ourselves, with absolutely everyone, especially the ones we think we hate and the ones we condemn, being our neighbor. We know what God wants in all those areas of human life, and we know that God wants us to speak up about them; but mostly we don’t do it. Especially in less conservative, less evangelical churches we don’t do it. And I wonder why not? We say it’s because we believe in individual freedom of conscience, and everyone has a right to her or his own opinions. We say because the Gospel isn’t political, never mind that it really is. I think mostly because we’re timid. We’re uncomfortable with public speaking of any kind and really uncomfortable with public proclamation of prophetic truths. Whatever the reason, we mostly clam up and don’t publicly address public issues about which our faith really has a great deal to say.

It has always been that way with people of faith. We see ancient Hebrew writers wrestling with it in our scripture readings this morning. The prophet who speaks to us across the millennia in our passage from Isaiah knows that God has formed him to be God’s servant in the world, formed him like a sharpened sword and a polished arrow. He knows that God wants him to proclaim God’s truth to the world, as he puts it do it as one in whom God will display God’s splendor. But he doesn’t want to do it. He says “I have labored to no purpose; I have spent my strength in vain.” He doesn’t want to do it because he thinks nothing will come of it. But God isn’t about to let him off easy like that. God says that this prophet will go not only to Israel but to all people to proclaim the faithfulness of the Lord God. True prophets are always reluctant prophets, and this prophet just wants to keep quiet. God says: Nope. That’s not what I created you to do.

Then we have Psalmist of Psalm 40. He too knows that God doesn’t want him to keep quiet. He says God has put a new song in his mouth to praise God. He says he wants to do God’s will because God’s law is within his heart. So he says: “I did not hide your righteousness in my heart; I speak of your faithfulness and salvation. I do not conceal your love and your truth from the great assembly.” He has God’s truth. He has God’s law, and he doesn’t keep quiet about it.

Folks, God doesn’t want us to keep quiet about God’s truth today either. In fact, I am convinced that today as much as ever, or maybe more so, God calls us to speak. Indeed, God calls us to do more than that. God calls us to act. God is always calling God’s people to speak and to act. Tomorrow is Martin Luther King Day. Dr. King was one who heard God’s call to speak and to act. He heard God’s cry against the brutal injustice of racial segregation and racial discrimination. He spoke against those evils with the words of prophets, with Jesus’ words, with the great words of the Jewish and Christian traditions about justice and peace. He spoke against hatred and discrimination with an eloquence few have ever matched. We all know some of his words:

I have a dream today!

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal."

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood….

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

I have a dream today!...

And all the people say Amen! Magnificent words. Powerful words. Words of God’s truth for all people in all times and places. King spoke them far better than I can, but we are all called to speak them. God does not call us to be silent. God calls us to speak.

But Martin Luther King knew that God calls us to do more than speak. He knew that God calls us to act. In April 1963, King and many others were arrested in Birmingham, Alabama, for violating a state court injunction that prohibited demonstrations in that most segregated of all American cities. While he was in jail he read a letter from eight clergymen, mostly Christian but also one Jewish rabbi, calling on him and his people to stop acting. To stop demonstrating. To carry on their struggle for justice only in the thoroughly racist courts of 1960s Alabama. King replied with a long essay that we know as A Letter From a Birmingham Jail. It’s not in the form of a speech, but it is one of the most powerful prophetic statements of God’s call to us to act for justice in all of American history. People told King just use the courts. They told him give it time, you’re moving too fast. They told him don’t do things that provoke the authorities to acts of violence against you. They said quiet down. Wait. Don’t be so pushy. Don’t be so public. And Dr. King replied to all that with the wisdom of the ages, the wisdom of God. He quoted Amos: “Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever flowing stream.” He said we are not violent, but the guardians of racism and segregation are. So be it. It is always the right time to act for the good, the right, the just. It is always the right time to act to end the suffering caused by injustice. It is never the right time to sit idly by while wrong rules the earth and oppresses God’s people. For King’s courage in speaking and even more for King’s courage in acting I say Thank you God. Thank you for your prophets of justice. Thank you for your prophets of nonviolent resistance to evil. Thank you for your nonviolent prophets of peace.

Dr. King was murdered almost fifty years ago. He spoke to the people of his time and place. He spoke of the ills of his time and place. But folks, it’s not all that different today. Yes, our country has made significant progress in race relations. We will soon mark the end of the presidency of our country’s first Black President, and that is significant. But as President Obama said last week American racism is far from a thing of the past. Institutional racism puts enormous numbers of young Black men in prison, numbers grossly disproportionate to their percentage of our population. Popular racism elects public officials who are themselves racist. The Senate will soon confirm as Attorney General of the United States a Senator from Alabama who was once denied a federal judgeship because he was too racist. The NAACP and Black Senators and Congressmen say he is still too racist to be Attorney General. Many overt racists love our President-elect Donald Trump whether he is really a racist himself or not. Racism is very much alive among us, and God calls us to speak and act against it just as God called Martin Luther King to speak and act against it all those decades ago.

There are other issues we are called to speak and act about too. Climate change and environmental degradation. Income inequality. Questions of war and peace. Immigrants’ rights. So many others. And maybe you don’t think those are proper issues to discuss in a Christian sermon. Well, they are. They are because the Gospel of Jesus Christ is about all of them. It is about social justice as much as it is about anything else. It is about care for the poor as much as it is about anything else. It is about nonviolent resistance to evil imposed by governments as much it is about anything else. Most of all it calls us to claim our voice on these issues and to act to bring about justice for the poor, the marginalized, the excluded, the unheard. That’s what Martin Luther King did fifty years ago. That’s what Jesus did two thousand years ago. King was a Christian pastor, and he said “We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people.” He condemned white church people like most of us for remaining “silent behind the anesthetizing security of stained glass windows.” Those powerful words from his Letter From a Birmingham Jail pierce my soul today. They convict me today. They convict us today. They convict us because they speak the truth. They speak the truth about our remaining silent, staying safe, doing nothing in the face of racism and other evils.

The Gospel’s call is different. It is loud, it is clear, it is strong. We are called to act. I don’t know yet exactly how we are called to act, although people all around us are already organizing, holding demonstrations and marches, mobilizing for justice in a time when justice is very much on trial among us. I don’t know how much courage I have to act, though I’m sure it is not as much as I’d like. But I do know that the Gospel of Jesus that I proclaim and preach calls me to act. It calls us to act. I don’t know if I will. I don’t know if we will. Perhaps with God’s help we will find the courage we need to do it. May it be so.