What If?

What If?

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

May 28, 2017

            Scripture: Acts 1:6-8

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.

In our passage from Acts we encounter Jesus’ disciples talking to him after he has risen from the grave. These people had given up their previous lives and had spent at least the last year following Jesus. They had listen to him teach. They had seen him do seemingly impossible things. Yet there is plenty of evidence about them in the New Testament that suggests that for all their devotion to him and for all the time they had spent with him Jesus’ disciples never really got what he was all about.

For example, there’s the story in Luke of the two disciples walking on the road to Emmaus. In that story those two say to the risen Christ, whom they hadn’t recognized as Christ, “We had hoped that [Jesus] was the one to redeem Israel.” Whatever they may have meant by “redeem Israel” (more about that in a moment) it’s clear that they thought Jesus hadn’t done it. “We had thought,” they say. They were disappointed, disillusioned even. Jesus simply had not done what they wanted him to do and maybe expected him to do.

Then there’s the question the disciples ask the risen Christ in our passage from Acts. Unlike the two disciples on the road to Emmaus, these people know that they are talking to Jesus raised from the dead. But like to the two going to Emmaus they don’t get what Jesus was really about. They ask him if now he was going to “restore the kingdom to Israel.” I take them to mean essentially the same thing as the Emmaus disciples meant by “redeem Israel.” Whatever they meant, it is clear enough that they had expected Jesus to do something he hadn’t done. They didn’t get it that what they wanted him to do wasn’t at all what he had come to do or had any intention of doing.

Now, what I and a lot of scholars think that these disciples wanted Jesus to do that he hadn’t done was drive out the Romans and recreate the fabled (if perhaps largely mythic) kingdom of David. The Romans were the ones almost everyone in Jesus’ day identified as the cause of all the people’s problems. Oh sure, I suppose there were certain advantages to being occupied by the Romans. Jesus lived during a time called the Pax Romana, the Roman Peace. That was a period of about two hundred years during which Rome was able to establish and maintain relative peace throughout the Empire through the application of massive amounts of force. By the bellicose standards of the ancient world the Pax Romana was indeed a time of relative peace. It facilitated trade and cultural relations throughout the Empire. Nevertheless, most Jews living in the Jewish homeland experienced Rome as an oppressive Gentile power that taxed the people into poverty and violently suppressed any disorderly expression of Jewish identity. Most Jewish people in Jesus’ time wanted nothing so much as to be rid of the Romans.

       Now, getting rid of the Romans wasn’t exactly an easy thing to accomplish. The people of Palestine tried a few times to do it through armed force. A few decades after Jesus, in the year 66, they managed to drive the Romans out of Jerusalem for a time; but Rome came storming back, retook the city, destroyed the temple, and dispersed most of the people. Most of the people in Jesus’ time understood that they could never defeat the Romans through military force, but they couldn’t imagine defeating Rome any way but through military force.

That’s why so many of them looked to God to do the job for them. Many people in Jesus’ day longed for the coming of a Messiah, and they understood the Messiah as essentially a savior come with the power of God to defeat the Romans and drive them into the sea. When those disciples on the road to Emmaus said they had hoped Jesus would be the one to redeem Israel, and when the disciples in our story from Acts asked if Jesus was then going to restore the kingdom to Israel, they probably meant that they had seen Jesus as that militaristic Messiah or least hoped that that was what he would become.

But look at how the risen Christ responds to the disciples question about whether he was finally going to restore the kingdom to Israel. He first says that it is not for them to know “the times or dates the Father has set by his own authority.” That line suggests that God did have a plan to intervene and restore the kingdom but that God wasn’t going to tell anyone when God would do it. OK, but then look at what Christ says next. He says “But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” When we read the risen Christ saying that we have to ask, I think: Why would the disciples need power from the Holy Spirit, and why would they have to be Christ’s witnesses, if God were going to step in and take care of things through direct divine intervention like the disciples apparently wanted? What Christ says here suggests something quite different from that to me.

So I ask: What if? What if, instead of saving the world through direct divine intervention like so many people hoped God would do, God instead was saying to us: No. Not me. You. I’m not going to do it through direct divine intervention. Instead I am going to give you the power to transform the world yourselves. What if God is saying: I will give you the power, and I will be with you to guide you, enable you, encourage you, support you, and forgive you as you go about transforming the world, What if God is saying yes, it’s my world; but you are my agents in the world. You can rely on me, but I in turn am relying on you to do my work in the world. What if God is saying don’t rely on me to come exercise divine power. Rather, I’m going to give you the power to do the work yourselves. What if that’s what the risen Christ meant by “you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you”?

Folks, I am convinced that that is precisely what our risen Savior meant when he said to those disciples that they would receive power from the Holy Spirit. It appears to be true that the earliest Christians believed that Jesus would return soon, very soon, to finish the work of cleaning up the world. But what happened? Did that happen? No, or at least it didn’t happen the way so many of them wanted it to happen. The things we’re looking at here happened two thousand years ago. Two thousand years may be the blink of an eye to God, who subsists beyond time; but it is an awfully long time to us. So do you think we’re just supposed to sit around, be concerned about the eternal fate of our souls but not about the condition of God’s world, and wait for God to do the heavy lifting of recreating the world? Maybe some of you do, but I don’t. I am convinced that God has made the transformation of the world our work, always with God’s help and inspiration and always consistent with God’s ways and will of course.

Maybe, as Christ says or at least implies in our passage from Acts, God does have some time in mind to come finish the work Godself, but whether that is true or not is not for us to know. So are we supposed to just sit and let the world go on living with war, starvation, environmental destruction, and rampant injustice? What if we aren’t? What if instead of that God wants us out there in the world serving God’s people and working for an end to war and oppression? What if God wants us to be like the prophets of old, speaking divine truth to power even, or rather especially, when power doesn’t want to hear it? What if God wants us to begin the transformation of the world by first transforming our own hearts and minds so that they conform to the ways and will of God rather than to the ways and will of the world? What if all that is more true than is the hope that God will step in and do it for us?

If that is true our world and the dominant strains of our faith tradition are turned on their heads. If that is true the Christian life of faith doesn’t look much like a great many Christians have thought it looked like for a very long time. If that is true God still calls us to lives of prayer and other spiritual disciplines to calm our souls and bring us closer to God. But if that is true those things are only part of the Christian life. The other part is getting out there caring for people in need and speaking out against violence and against injustice against any of God’s people.

Folks, the world in which the church lives and works isn’t just changing, it has already changed. People today aren’t drawn in large numbers by talk of how we save our souls. People are drawn much more by talk of how we save the world. Yet even if that were not true God’s call would be the same. Next week we will celebrate Pentecost, the coming of the Holy Spirit upon the Christian community that the risen Christ suggested in what he said to the disciples while he was still with them. God has given us power. God is with us, but doesn’t want us just sitting here. God wants us here, and God wants us out there. Out in the world. Doing the work of God. So once more I ask: What if? May we have the courage to ask that question, answer it faithfully, and then act on the answer. Amen.

A Vital Church

A Vital Church

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

May 21, 2017

Scripture: Acts 17:22-31

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.

We’ve talked a lot about church vitality around here the last couple of days. We’ve had some good discussions. This morning is my chance to talk, and I’m going to talk about church vitality. I trust you’re not quite sick of the topic yet. I’ll start with this observation: I’ve noticed something about people that seems to be pretty universal. Maybe you’ve noticed it too. We don’t like not knowing things. When we don’t know something it bugs us. It bugs us so much that we speculate about possible answers to the things we don’t know. We speculate about things we can’t possibly know. I hear people doing it all the time. Say we see someone do something, and we don’t know why. So we try to figure it out. We say: “Maybe they did it because ­­_______.” Fill in the blank. Or “maybe she thought ________.” Again, fill in the blank. We can’t possibly know the answer to our question. We aren’t inside the head of the person who did the thing we observed, so we can’t possibly know what that person was thinking; and we can’t stand it. We need to know. We feel driven to understand. So we guess. We speculate. “Maybe they _____________.” We just can’t stand not knowing. We need definite answers even in situations in which no definite answer is possible.

So as a general rule we need answers to any questions we have, but I’ve noticed something else in my years of working in the church. There’s one area of our lives where it seems to me that we are so content to live without answers that we don’t even know that there’s a question. That area is the life of the church. Oh sure, we ask a lot of questions in church. Who’s bringing the food next week? Who’s going to lead worship in three weeks when the pastor’s away? Maybe even at times, how are we going to find our next pastor now that our former pastor has left or how are we going to make budget this year? Yes, we ask questions around the church all the time.

All of those questions I mentioned and an almost limitless number of others are important; but still, most of the time there are questions that we are so comfortable not answering that we don’t even know they are questions, and these are the most important questions of all in the life of any church. They’re a whole lot harder to answer than one about who’s going to do the coffee hour next week. Maybe that’s why we so rarely ask them and even more rarely answer them. Those questions are questions like these: Who are we as a church? What is our identity? What is our mission? Why are we here, and would it make any difference if we weren’t? What is God calling us to do in this time and place? Who is God asking us to be right here and right now? Who is God calling us to be in the future? Sometimes churches ask big questions like that and seek to discern answers to them, but in my experience most of the time they don’t. Most of the time we go on being church the way we’ve always been church. We don’t stop to think that there are deeper questions before us. Deeper questions we need to ask. Deeper questions we need to answer. But those deeper questions that we so regularly ignore really are before us, and we really do need to seek answers to them if we are going to be a vital church.

What do these questions have to do with church vitality? Here’s what. Vital churches ask those questions. Churches that lack vitality usually don’t. Vital churches seek to discern answers to those questions. Churches that lack vitality usually don’t. Put another way, vital churches know who they are. They have a clear identity. Vital churches know what their mission is, why they are there, and what God is calling them to do. Churches that aren’t very vital usually don’t. So let me say a bit more about what questions vital churches ask and the answers they give.

First of all, a vital church knows that it is not there for itself. It knows that it is there for God, for Jesus Christ, for the Holy Spirit and their work in the world. That means that a vital church doesn’t spend all its time focusing narrowly on itself. It looks upward and outward not mainly inward. A church that focuses too much on its own narrow concerns will not be vital, will not be alive. A church that focuses primarily on questions like “How are we going to get more people here so we can make budget” won’t get many new people there and will continue to have difficulty making budget. A church that asks rather what is God calling us to do outside these walls, who is God calling us to be outside these walls in this time and place, will be much more alive than a church that never asks those questions. Because that church will be more alive it will almost certainly grow even though it isn’t focusing primarily on growth.

Small churches like ours almost always think they need to get bigger, but here’s the thing. Church vitality does not depend on church size. There’s no reason why a very small church can’t be a very vital church, a church alive in the Holy Spirit. A vital church doesn’t spend all its time worrying about the people and resources it doesn’t have. It looks instead to the people and resources it does have and asks what God is calling it to do not with resources it doesn’t have but with the ones it has. If there is a church at all there are people who make up the church, and people have gifts. People have resources. Sure, there will be gifts and resources a small church doesn’t have. So what? A vital church looks at what it does have and serves God and God’s people in every way it can with those resources.

Here’s a trick I learned from Rev. Mike Denton, the Conference Minister of the UCC’s Pacific Northwest Conference. I think it may be quite useful in leading a church to focus on what matters, to look outside itself rather than only inward. After every answer a vital church asks “so that?” Here’s an example. Say a small church is having trouble paying for the maintenance of an old building that it owns. They say we need the resources to maintain this building. A vital church than asks: “So that?” Well, so that we’ll have a place to gather for worship. “So that?” So that we will survive as a church. “So that?” A vital church will answer so that we can witness to the Good News of the Gospel in this time and place. “So that?” A vital church will answer so that we can do the work of the Holy Spirit in this time and place. There’s the bottom line of the church’s call. To do the work of the Holy Spirit in its time and place. A vital church then asks: Do we really need this building to do that? Maybe the answer to that question is yes, but quite possibly the answer is no. Maybe it makes more sense for that church to sell its building, to meet for worship somewhere else, and to use the proceeds from the sale of the building for good work in the church’s community. Continually asking “so that” can lead a church to what’s really important about its life and its mission. Give it a try. It just might help.

A vital church knows the answers to the “so that” questions. A vital church knows its true reason for existing and is committed to living for that reason. It knows what its specific mission is and is committed to living out that mission. Just having a mission of being a church isn’t enough. Spiritually dead churches are churches too. A spiritually alive church knows who it is, why it’s there, what its identity and mission are specifically. And a vital church is so committed to living out that mission that living the mission colors everything it does. A vital church either knows what that mission is or is working systematically to discern what that mission is.

So ask: Does your church know what its identity and mission are? If so, great. Get on with living that mission. But if not, are you working to discern what they are? If so, great. Keep up the good work; but if not, then you’ve got a problem. Then you’ve got a problem that threatens the long-term survival of your church. So start working on discerning who you really are and why you really exist. Start working on discerning who God is calling you to be and what God is calling you to do. And once you think you’ve answered those questions, live those answers. But always understand that this discernment is not something you do and then stop doing. A vital church never stops asking who are we and what is God calling us to do. A vital church lives always in a process of discernment, and it always relies on God to be with it and to guide in that process.

So, what is a vital church? It is a church that knows who it is, why it is, and what God is calling it to be and to do. It may be a very big church or a very small one. Either way, it is a church in which no questions about its identity and mission are out of bounds. It is a church that is always working to discern its identity and mission even when it thinks it knows the answers to those questions. Any church, big or small, that does that can be a vital church. May we be such a church, relying on God’s grace. Amen.

The Way

The Way

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

May 14, 2017

Scripture: John 14:1-14

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.

“I am the way the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” That’s what it says right there in the Gospel of John. Jesus is the only way to God, or so at least it sounds like it says. It’s the Christian exclusivist’s favorite verse, especially the “no one comes to the Father except through me” part. It’s Jesus or nothing. It’s to heaven to Jesus and to hell with everyone else. There it is. Right there in the Gospel of John, the Christian exclusivist’s favorite Gospel. But before we jump to that conclusion, let’s take a closer look at what this verse actually says and what it doesn’t say.

In that verse John’s Jesus says “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” I’ll get back to that part of the verse in a bit. It’s what John has Jesus say next that I think we need to wrestle with. He says “No one comes to the Father except through me.” Now, if you’re like most Christians you probably hear Jesus saying “no one comes to the Father except through believing in me.” If that’s what you hear you’re in good company, but here’s the thing. That’s not what Jesus says. People read the “believing in me” part into this line all the time, but the words “believing in” simply aren’t there. I’m not making that up. They aren’t there. I’m not reading out of the verse something that’s there, I’m just not reading into it something that isn’t there. Now to be sure, in the Gospel of John Jesus talks a lot about believing in him, but he doesn’t say that in the verses the lectionary chose for this morning. John 14:6, the verse I’ve been quoting, just doesn’t say “through believing in me.” It just doesn’t. It just says “through me.”

Our verses do mention one “who has faith in me.” It has those words, but look again at what the text does with them. It doesn’t say that those who have faith in Jesus will come to the Father. No, it says that the consequence of having faith in Jesus is something quite different from that. It says: “I tell you the truth, anyone who has faith in me will do what I have been doing. He will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father.” John 14:12. Those who have faith in Jesus will do what he has been doing and more. There’s a lot to be said about what Jesus has been doing, but I want to ask a different question here. I ask not what has he been doing but where has he been doing it? The answer of course is here. On earth. Mostly in Galilee, a specific place on earth. Kris and Walter were there last year. That’s mostly where Jesus did what he did. The necessary conclusion from this verse about faith in Jesus is about how we live this life, not about how we get to the next one.

Now, don’t get me wrong. Neither the Gospel of John nor the Christian faith as a whole denies the afterlife. Our verses this morning contain one of the relatively few places in the New Testament that seem actually to be about an afterlife. John 14:2 reads: “In my Father’s house are many rooms. I am going there to prepare a place for you.” John’s Jesus sure seems to be talking about an afterlife in heaven. So it’s not that the Gospel of John denies the afterlife, it’s just that the afterlife isn’t what it is primarily about. So these verses aren’t about believing in Jesus as the only way to heaven. They are mostly about what happens in this life when you have faith in Jesus.

OK, but what about the line “I am the way, the truth, and the life”? To get at what those words are about, let me tell you a story. Once a Christian exclusivist was working as a missionary in India. He confronted a Hindu holy man with that verse. “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” What do you say to that, our zealous missionary asked the Hindu sage. To the missionary’s surprise the Hindu man replied: “Oh yes. I believe that absolutely.” The missionary was nonplussed. This Hindu man had expressed no interest in converting to Christianity. So how could he say he believed this verse from John? I imagine the missionary standing there saying “Huh? How can you possibly say that?” The Hindu teacher explained: “Jesus says he is the way and that no one comes to God except through him. To understand that statement we must ask: What is the way that Jesus is? It is the way of love, compassion, justice, and forgiveness. And yes. Absolutely. That is the way we are to live. That is how we connect with what is eternal, what is sacred, what Jesus called the Father. That way is how we live in harmony with the universe, with the ultimate, with the holy behind everything that is. Yes, that verse you quote from your Bible is absolutely correct.” Our missionary friend didn’t know what to say. Surely he had never heard this verse interpreted that way before. He was sure it means you’re damned for all eternity if you don’t believe in Jesus the way he did. I’m sure he went away puzzled but as sure as ever that only people like him are saved and the Hindu man he had spoken with was condemned to hell despite his talk of love and compassion because he didn’t believe the right things about Jesus.

Well, I’m Christian not Hindu, but I am convinced to the marrow of my bones that the Hindu wise man of this story understood Jesus better than the Christian missionary did. Over the centuries the Christian tradition has come to see Jesus as essentially someone we are supposed to believe in so that our souls will go to heaven not hell when we die. Yet the more I work in Christian ministry, the more I preach the Gospel, the more I try to find ways that Jesus makes a difference in my life and in the lives of the people I minister with the more convinced I become that getting people to believe in him so that their souls would be saved simply wasn’t what Jesus was primarily about. You all know that I’m a professionally trained historian, so the history of most anything is important to me. When we look at the earliest years of the Christian faith we find that in the beginning Christianity wasn’t much about souls going to heaven at all. Before our faith was called Christianity it was called “The Way.” And it wasn’t a way to heaven as much as it was a way to live this life. We have evidence that the first Christians really did live differently from the non-Christians around them, differently in fact than they had lived before they became followers of Jesus Christ. They lived in Christian community. They cared for one another. They rejected all violence and sought to live in peace with everyone. They took care of other people too. When a terrible plague hit Rome most Romans who could fled the city to try to save themselves. The Christians didn’t. They stayed. They cared for the sick and dying. Some of them died themselves from the disease that was devastating the city, but it appears that their death rates were lower than they were among other groups. Their courage and care for others so impressed people that many Romans converted to Christianity because they wanted whatever it was that these Christians had that led them to lead such appealingly different lives. Christianity was a way of life before it was a religion.

And the Hindu sage in my little story was absolutely right about what that way was. It was the way of Jesus. That meant it was a way of love, compassion, peace, and forgiveness. It was a way radically different from the ways of the world in which Jesus lived. More importantly, it is radically different from the ways of the world in which we live. It is a way that praises the hated Samaritan, welcomes the prodigal home no questions asked, and includes those whom culture and even religion exclude. It is a way that values the spiritual over the material. It is a way grounded in prayer and gratitude toward God in everything that happens. It is a way in which people strive always to transcend their selfish tendencies and find their satisfaction in serving others. It is a way that knows that violence doesn’t solve problems, it only causes death, destruction, and more violence. It is a way that knows that God is real and that death is not the end for any of us. Jesus said “I am the way.” All of those things are the way he was and the way he is. They are the way to which he calls us today.

So, is Jesus the way, the truth, and the life for us? Absolutely. Is belief in Jesus the only way to God? Absolutely not. God calls us to follow the way of Jesus. Can we? Will we? May it be so. Amen.

Abundant Life

Abundant Life

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

May 7, 2017

Scripture: Acts 2:42-47; John 10:1-10

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.

It’s shocking, I know. It’s shocking, but there it is. Right in the book of Acts. Jesus’ first followers were communists! They weren’t Marxist communists of course like the Communists of the Soviet Union were. Marx, after all, didn’t come along for another 1,800 years; and Marx denied the reality of God, which these first followers of Jesus certainly did not. But still, there it is. Right after Jesus’ death and resurrection his followers were communists. I can tell you this, based on my years of study of Russian history and my experience of having spent time in the USSR. Marx pretty clearly got his vision of a blissful future from the Judeo-Christian tradition. What, after all, was Marx’s vision of an ideal society? It was a vision of a society in which all were equal and property (or at least the means of production) was held in common for the common good, not by individuals for private gain. The Soviets of course turned that blissful vision into a hell on earth. That happened at least in part because the denial of God that the Soviets got from Marx eliminated any need to treat human life as sacrosanct. People became mere means to a goal not a goal in themselves. So if you needed to kill millions of them so what. Still, that hellish Soviet reality doesn’t change what Marx’s vision was. It isn’t too much of a stretch to say that Marx got his vision from the book of Acts.

Just what does the book of Acts tell us about those earliest Christians? We just heard it. Acts says that in the earliest days of the Christian movement “all the believers were together and had everything in common. Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to anyone as [they] had need.” I guess maybe there were like some 1960s hippies who lived in communes and treated all property and income as belonging to the group not to an individual. Resources were there for anyone who needed them. That essentially is a communist way of living. If you really can’t stand the word communist use communalist instead. For our purposes they mean the same thing. Acts tells us that those first Christians were communists, or communalists if you prefer. Acts gives us a vision of a way of living very different from the way the people in western cultures, ourselves included, actually live.

Our reading from the Gospel of John gives us a vision of a way of living too. It’s less specific than the one in Acts, but it’s still a vision of a way to live. Our passage from John is, frankly, odd. I’ve never quite understood any of it except the last line. It talks of someone who does not enter the sheep pen by the gate and says that one of a thief and a robber. Clearly Jesus is using a metaphor here, but it’s not one I understand very well. What does the sheep pen symbolize? The Christian community? Maybe. Who are the sheep? Christians? Jews? All people? Beats me. Then Jesus says he is the “gate for the sheep.” Really? A person is a gate? Maybe the Gospel means here that Jesus is the access to God. For us he certainly is that, but if that’s what this passage mans it sure could have said it more clearly.

The last line of this passage speaks more clearly to me. That line reads: “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.” A more traditional translation of that line, or at least one I’m more used to, is “I have come that they may have life, and have it abundantly.” Either way, the Gospel of John tells us here that Jesus is about life not death; and he’s not about just any old life. He’s about abundant life. Life to the full. The fullness of life. Thanks be to God!

Well, thanks be to God, yes; but of course that line immediately raises a question, namely, just what is “abundant life,” or life “to the full”? This passage doesn’t say. Maybe the Gospel of John means the same thing by life to the full as it means by its thematic phrase “eternal life.” If so, then abundant life means life in the knowledge of the one true God and Jesus Christ, the one God sent. See John 17:3. But I think we can get a more specific notion of what the abundant life is if we turn back to our passage from Acts.

Now, I don’t mean to suggest that I think we all need to sell everything we own, move into a commune, and own all our property collectively. I mean, doing things like that has gotten a pretty bad aura about it in our time. Think, for example of the tragedies of Jonestown and Waco. I have no interest in either being a cult leader or following one. Still, I think there is something we can learn from those verses from Acts that we heard this morning if we look not at the specifics of how it says those earliest Christians lived but at the spirit behind those specifics.

Acts says all the Christians lived together, shared all their possessions, and gave to each person as each person had need. That tells us, I think, that these people had committed themselves to living not for themselves alone but for a bigger cause, for a community, for others more than themselves. This passage tells us that whatever the specifics of a truly Christian life are, the spirit of that life calls us to transcend our selfish concerns about our own private desires and to live out of ourselves for others, for the world, for God. That’s what those earliest Christians seem to have thought the Christian life was about, what they thought abundant life was about.

Now, it may be rather easy for us to agree in our minds that that’s what the abundant life that Jesus came to enable is about. We can give intellectual assent to that idea relatively easily. If we’re honest, however, I’m pretty sure we all have to confess that living that kind of life is a whole lot harder than just thinking it’s a good idea. I know living that kind of life is a whole lot harder for me than just thinking about it is. Perhaps it is harder for you too. Yet Acts tells us that our earliest forbears in the faith were doing it. John says Jesus came to make it possible, and apparently for his earliest followers he did. How? What is it about Jesus that makes living the abundant life of faith for others possible?

Maybe try thinking of it this way. Jesus makes the abundant life of living for others possible because in Jesus we know that we need not be overly concerned with ourselves. We know that because in Jesus we know that God is ultimately concerned with us, with each and every one of us, with each and every person in the world. In Jesus we know that we are ultimately, cosmically, eternally safe. In Jesus we know that we need not be overly concerned with our own safety and wellbeing because God has already guaranteed our safety and our wellbeing. God does that on the spiritual plane not necessarily the material one, but in Jesus we know that the spiritual plane is what ultimately matters. On the level of things that really matter we know in Jesus Christ that we are safe with God. Because we are safe with God we can turn our attention outward not inward. We can live as ourselves not only for ourselves but for others.

Of course, just what that kind of living looks like in any specific situation can be a complex problem, but the principles we are called to live into aren’t really that complex at all. In any situation we face we ask not what do I want but what is best for the common good. Then we act on our answer to that question. That’s the abundant life. That’s life to the full. It’s the life Jesus came to make possible. It’s the life he calls us to live. It’s not easy, but in Jesus Christ, relying on God’s grace, we can do it. Amen.

On My Decision to Withdraw Resignation

On My Decision to Remain As Your Pastor

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson

April 30, 2017

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.

As I think you all know by now, I have withdrawn my resignation as your pastor, and the Admin Board has accepted that withdrawal on behalf of the church. This morning I want to explain to you how I came to that decision and what it means to me. What it means to you is not for me to say, but I suspect, or maybe I just hope, that it means a lot.

You all know that back in February I submitted my resignation as your pastor. That resignation was initially to become effective on March 10; but I offered to extend the termination date to the end of May, and the Admin Board agreed to that modification. The Board (or at least most of the people on it) tried to talk me out of resigning. When I asked what the sense of the congregation was they said they’d find out. So they personally interviewed 30 of you and gave me the results of those interviews at the Admin Board meeting on April 10. I did a great deal of wrestling with whether or not to withdraw my resignation and remain as your pastor after I got those results. They showed that some of you have reservations about me and my work with you, but despite those reservations there was a clear consensus in those results, indeed a nearly if not quite unanimous expression, that you don’t want me to leave. I highly appreciate that consensus, and it has played a major role in the decision I have made to withdraw my resignation. I have however always been aware that the decision whether or not to withdraw the resignation was mine to make, not yours. I, after all, was the one who made the decision to resign in the first place. So why have I decided to stay as your pastor? I think there are several reasons that I want to explain to you.

First of all, why did I submit a resignation in the first place? I did it because I was aware, and am aware, that we are not a perfect match as pastor and parish. I used a cliché to explain my perception when I gave the Admin Board my letter of resignation. I said I was tired of trying to fit my square peg into your round hole. There are some ways in which we just don’t fit, or at least I thought there were. I’ll just mention here a few of the big differences between me and at least some of you for purposes of clarity. I am more liberal/progressive than many of you are both politically and theologically. I think Christianity is more about how we are called to live this life than about what we have to do to assure our salvation in the next. Not all of you see the faith that way. I think that Jesus is much more a revelation of the love of God for all of creation and for each and every person in it than he was a sacrifice to pay the price of human sin. Again, some of you do not see the matter that way. I do not think that God wrote the Bible. I think perfectly fallible men did. That idea is new and troubling to at least some of you. There is a lot more that I could say about our differences, but I’ll let it go at that for now.

Let me instead specify some of the things I think we have in common. We are all people of faith. We all accept the reality of God. We may not all understand God in the same way, but none of us is an atheist or a secular humanist. We all accept that there is a spiritual side to reality that we can, at least to some extent, know and participate in. We all accept that God is the Creator, Sustainer, and Redeemer of all that is. We are all Christians. We may understand Jesus Christ and his saving work differently, but we all confess Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior. We may understand the Bible differently, but we all accept the Bible as at least the foundational book of our faith without which Christianity is simply impossible. I think we all believe that God calls the church and all people to live lives of caring, generosity, and concern for people in need and to live lives committed to justice and to peace. We all believe, I think, that God is a God of love, compassion, and forgiveness. We all believe, I think, that the fullest revelation of the nature and will of God that we have or can have is Jesus. That is a lot that we have in common, and what we have in common is foundational for our faith and our life together. It gives us a foundation to grow on.

So why have I decided to withdraw my resignation? I have decided to withdraw it first of all because I love and like all of you. You are good folk. You are kind, caring, Christian people. You do good work both as a church and in your individual lives. My significant disagreements with some of you around significant theological issues don’t change the reality that you are good people. I like being with you. I like serving you. I like working with you as we discern together where the Holy Spirit is calling us in these days, or at least I do when our theological differences don’t get in the way; and most of the time they don’t.

Yet of course I have always felt that way about you, so what has changed since I submitted my resignation nearly three months ago that has led me to withdraw it now? After all, something significant must have changed if I have changed my decision about resigning, assuming at least that the resignation wasn’t a mistake in the first place. I think what has changed is that both you and I have done a lot of discernment around my call since then. Things that were in the dark have been brought into the light. Differences between us have been put on the table and discussed. The interviews that the Admin Board did with so many of you produced what is by far the best review of my work as a pastor that I have ever had in all of my years of ministry. It produced lists of what you think are my strengths and what are areas in which you have questions or concerns that I find very helpful. Most of all those interviews produced, as I said, a broad consensus that you don’t want me to leave. I understand you better than I did. Whether or not you understand me better I frankly do not know, and that is for you not me to say.

Beyond that, in the time since I submitted my resignation I have sensed that at least some of you are curious about some new ways of understanding the faith and are open to learning about them even if you don’t accept all of them. My primary evidence for that claim is the way a good group of you has responded to the book The Heart of Christianity by Marcus Borg that we have been discussing on Sunday mornings. Borg gives a good introduction to some ways of thinking about the faith that, as he says, are emerging and that have been emerging in American Christianity for a long time but with which a great many Christians remain unfamiliar. I agree with most of what he says is emerging and think what is emerging is a good and necessary thing. I have done my own small part to contribute to what is emerging. I am encouraged that at least some of you are willing to listen to a voice that is new to you, whether it be Borg’s or mine. I have more hope today than I did three months ago that together we can find new ways of being faithful Christians together in this troubled time in which we live.

When, before they talked to all of you, the Admin Board asked me what they should say if they were asked about what my position was, I said you can tell them “I have heard your concerns, I take them seriously, and I will continue to preach the Gospel.” That is still my position, or maybe better it is still my conviction and commitment. I do take the concerns I have heard from you seriously. I will not ignore them, but here is something you must know about me. I am convinced that God does not call people like me to preach only what the people of a particular church want to hear. Jesus certainly didn’t preach only what the people of his time thought they wanted to hear. He preached what he knew to be God’s truth. I know full well that I am no Jesus. Far from it. I am as fallible a human being as anyone else. But I have responded to what I have perceived to be a call from the Holy Spirit to preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ as best I can. My discernment of that call has been affirmed through rigorous seminary education and the ordination processes of the United Church of Christ. I am called to preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ as best I can understand it, as best I can articulate it. I must and will continue to do that. I can modify my tone, or at least sometimes I can. I can take care in how I express myself. What I cannot and will not do is abandon what I am convinced is the truth of the Gospel. The Gospel of Jesus Christ is spiritual, but it is also social, economic, and political. The Gospel of Jesus Christ consoles and uplifts, but it also challenges. It calls us to new ways of thinking and new ways of living, not to earn salvation but in response to God’s grace. The preacher’s call is to bring all of the Gospel to his or her people, the consoling, uplifting parts to be sure, but the challenging parts too. In nearly everything Jesus said and did he turned the beliefs and expectations of his world, and of ours, on their heads. We are not true to the Gospel or to our Lord and Savior if we do not do the same. That is a core conviction of mine, and I will not abandon it.

So with all of that being said, I have withdrawn my resignation as your pastor. We do not have to agree on everything for me to be your pastor. I can respect the differences between us, and I hope you can too. We have work to do together. We have a vital small church to enliven, inspire, and, if it is the will of the Holy Spirit, to grow. We have the Good News of Jesus Christ to live and to proclaim. I have recommitted myself to doing that with you. Will you recommit to doing it with me? I pray that you will. God willing, we have a future together. May it be so. Amen.

The Symbols of Holy Week: The Empty Tomb

The Symbols of Holy Week:  The Empty Tomb

An Easter Meditation

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

April 16, 2017

Scripture:  John 20:1-18

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.

He wasn’t there.  The tomb was empty.  He had been there, but the tomb was empty.  He was dead, there was no doubt about that; but the tomb was empty.  Mary Magdalene, Jesus’ faithful disciple, had gone to the tomb to do what was customary for one who had died.  She went to put spices on the body, a sign of respect perhaps; or in Mary’s case perhaps an act of deep love.  But she couldn’t do it, because the tomb was empty.  Mary came to the only conclusion she could, that grave robbers must have taken Jesus’ body.  “They,” as John puts it, had taken his body; but surely Mary knew that that didn’t really make sense.  Jesus’ grave cloths were still there.  They were of linen, and they were valuable.  Surely grave robbers would have taken the cloth, which was the only thing of any monetary value in the tomb.  Beyond that, there was the matter of the stone.  There had been a great stone closing off the entrance to the tomb.  It would have taken more than a grave robber or two to move it.  Yet it was moved, and the tomb was empty.

That empty tomb is the central symbol of Easter.  On one level of course, on the level of the story the Gospels tell, the empty tomb is simply a fact.  Jesus’ tomb was a physical place.  It was probably a cave, a hole in very physical rock.  Yet like the other central symbols of Holy Week that are also physical objects—the donkey, the table, the cross—the empty tomb is so much more than a mere physical object.  It is a symbol.  As a symbol it points beyond itself to profound truth, truth about Jesus, truth about God, and truth about us.

The empty tomb is a symbol that points beyond itself to profound truth, yes; but what profound truth does it point to?  To get at an answer to that question let’s take a look at what we know happened as a matter of history before and after the Romans crucified Jesus.  We know that Jesus started a movement among the people of Galilee.  He had a following.  He was inspiring people.  He was exciting people.  Some of them proclaimed him as the long-expected Messiah.  Now, Jesus was and is unique for us Christians in many ways, but he was not unique in that way.  Galilee and Judea, the homeland of the Jews, had seen many charismatic leaders who started popular movements.  John the Baptist was one.  There were others too. The Romans and their collaborators among the Jewish leadership didn’t like these popular movements; and they had a way to deal with them, a very effective way to deal with them actually.  They killed the charismatic leader, and every time they did that leader’s movement died with him.  Even if the Romans didn’t kill all of the leader’s followers, the followers disbanded anyway.  They went home, like Peter and the beloved disciple in John’s story of the empty tomb.  Their movements came to a dead end, disappeared, and were never heard of again.  That’s what the Romans and the Jewish temple authorities were sure would happen with the Jesus movement too.  Publicly execute Jesus in the most cruel and brutal way, and his followers would disperse.  They would go home, figuring that they had been wrong about Jesus.  That would be the end of it.

Only that wasn’t the end of it.  The death of Jesus should have been the end of him.  It wasn’t.  His message about the Kingdom of God should have died with him.  It didn’t.  The community he created should have dissolved.  It wouldn’t.  Jesus died, that’s for sure.  As the coroner Munchkin says of the Wicked Witch on whom the house fell in the Wizard of Oz, he was “not merely dead, but really and sincerely dead.”  He was dead, and yet his followers knew that somehow he wasn’t.  He died yet he lived.  He died, but his truth kept marching on.  He died, but his community of followers lived on.  Death couldn’t hold him.  Death couldn’t defeat him.  For him, for his truth, and for his community death was most definitely not the end. The tomb was empty. Thanks be to God!

Here is one truth to which the empty tomb points.  God raised Jesus from the dead.  God emptied Jesus’ tomb so that we would know that he and his truth are eternal.  He appeared to his disciples to that they would know that his death wasn’t the end, so that they would stay together and continue to proclaim him and his truth even though the Romans really had killed him.  That’s a truth to which the empty tomb points for them, for his first disciples.

For them, yes: but what about for us?  The empty tomb isn’t really symbol of anything for us if it points only to a truth for them.  It isn’t even a real symbol for us at all if it points only to a truth about Jesus.  For the empty tomb really to be a meaningful symbol for us it has to point to a truth for us, and indeed it does.  The empty tomb points to the truth for us that with God death is not the end, and there are a couple of aspects to that truth.  One is that for God our physical deaths are not the end of us any more than Jesus’ physical death was the end of him.  Paul calls Jesus the “first fruits of the resurrection,” which means that resurrection is first of all for him but not only for him.  The empty tomb of Easter is God’s sign and seal that death does not have the last word, mortality does not have the final say.  With God life is eternal, even our lives are eternal. As the scholar John Dominic Crossan says, we don’t die to nothingness. We die to God. Jesus’ tomb was empty. Thanks be to God!

A second aspect of the truth for us to which the empty tomb points is just as important.  We all have, or if we haven’t we will, experience little deaths, metaphorical deaths in our lives.  Illness, despair, addiction, and depression are little deaths that we all, or most of us at least, experience in life.  We all experience loss, loss of love and relationship through death or separation.  There are other little deaths in this life too—loneliness, a sense of meaninglessness, a sense of purposelessness.  If we are honest I think that all of us who have lived any significant number of years have to admit that we have experienced some of those little deaths in our lives.  And we know that we will probably experience others before our earthly life comes to an end.

The empty tomb points to a profound truth about those little deaths.  It says they aren’t the end.  It points to life beyond those little deaths.  It gives us hope in those little deaths.  It says that God wants to and can sustain us in those deaths.  It says that God wants to and can lead us out of those little deaths just as Jesus walked out of that tomb and left it empty.

The empty tomb of Jesus Christ speaks to us.  It speaks truth to us.  It speaks divine truth to us.  It says death is not the end, not for Jesus, not for his first disciples, not for us.  It says that death is not the end both in this life and beyond this life.  That is truth we can cling to, truth that can sustain us, truth that leads us out of death and into abundant life, indeed into eternal life. That’s why Jesus’ Resurrection is the best news there ever was or ever could be. The tomb was empty. Death was not the end. Death is not the end.

The tomb was empty. The tomb is empty!  Christ is risen!  He is risen indeed!  Amen.

Just the Gardener

Just the Gardener

An Easter Meditation

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

March 27, 2016

Scripture: John 20:1-18

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.

Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! It the most joyous proclamation of the Christian faith. It is the most joyous proclamation that there ever was or ever could be. It is the foundational proclamation of the Christian faith. Without Christ’s glorious Resurrection there would be no Christian faith. If Jesus had only died as he did, brutally executed by the Romans as a threat to public order, we’d never have heard of him. If he’d only died with nothing more his followers would have disbanded and gone home, disillusioned perhaps or at least gravely disappointed, but certainly not inspired to proclaim the empty tomb and continue his teachings. Jesus’ Resurrection is certainly the most amazing thing that has ever happened to any human being. I mean, dead people don’t just get up and walk out of the grave, only Jesus did. Jesus rose to eternal life, eternal life for him and eternal life for us. Easter is simply amazing. Easter is simply impossible, it just happened, that’s all. Christ is risen! Christ is risen indeed!

All of which leads me to ask: If Jesus’ Resurrection is so amazing, why do the Gospels make it sound so ordinary? I mean, they really do, or at least most of them do. Take John’s version that we just heard. First in that account Mary Magdalene finds the stone rolled away from the front of Jesus’ tomb. She assumes that something quite ordinary has happened. Mary stands outside the tomb crying. Two angels ask her why she’s crying; and she says it’s because someone has taken Jesus’ body, but she knows not what they’ve done with it. For her Jesus is still dead, and someone has removed his body from its tomb.

Then Mary turns around. She sees what she takes to be something perfectly ordinary. There’s a man standing there. He must have looked perfectly ordinary, for Mary just assumes that he’s the gardener and that he must be the one who for some reason has taken Jesus’ body out of its tomb. At first he’s just another man with nothing extraordinary about him. To Mary, at first, he’s perfectly ordinary; but he turns out to be the risen Christ.

How can it be that someone who just got up and walked out of his tomb can seem so ordinary? More importantly, why would God choose to have the risen Christ appear so ordinary to the first people who encounter him? I mean, God could have appeared in the risen Christ like Christ appears in so much Christian iconography: cosmic, immense, stern, surrounded by angels, appearing as judge of the world and everyone in it. Yet God didn’t do that. The risen Christ didn’t appear that way. No, God in the person of the risen Christ appeared as someone Mary Magdalene took to be just a gardener, a perfectly ordinary man. Certainly there is nothing wrong with being a gardener, but there’s nothing extraordinary about it either.

You know, I don’t think God ever does anything for no reason. And when God does something in the world there must be some lesson in it for us. It must have some significance. So what message would God be trying to send us by having Godself in the form of the risen Christ appear as someone so ordinary that one of Jesus’ closest followers didn’t recognize him and just took him to be the gardener? Well, during Jesus’ lifetime on earth he was forever turning the world’s expectations on their heads. Welcome the prodigal home without question. Praise the hated Samaritan and criticize the honored temple authorities. Pay those who worked one hour as much as those who worked twelve. Dine with people the world calls sinners and tells us to shun. Say the poor and the peacemakers are blessed, not the rich and the war makers the world so honors. In almost everything Jesus said and did he turned the world’s expectations upside down and showed us that God’s ways are very, very different from the world’s ways.

So why wouldn’t Jesus continue his revolutionary teaching and living in his new form as the risen Christ? Well, he would; and he did. See, what would the world expect of a man who was also the Son of God who rose from the dead? Fireworks, that’s what. We’d expect a great big show. We’d expect power and glory. We’d expect a Cecil B. DeMille movie. That’s what the world would expect, wouldn’t it? Sure seems to me like it would.

God and Jesus Christ of course knew that that’s what the world would expect, so they did exactly the opposite. They had the risen Christ appear as someone Mary Magdalene took to be a gardener. He rose with essentially no special effects. He rose with no fanfare, indeed with no human witnesses to the actual event of his rising. He rose looking perfectly ordinary. He rose looking like an ordinary working person, a man of and from the people, a man of no remarkable appearance or affect. He rose as a gardener. Only after Mary had seen him as a gardener did he reveal to her that he was actually the risen Christ.

Folks, there is a great lesson here for us. We so want to look for God in the spectacular. We want Jesus to return with all the power and fireworks that weren’t there when he rose from the grave. We don’t expect Christ to come to us looking like a gardener. Maybe we especially don’t expect that today because so many people in our context who work at gardening are Latinos, people so many Americans (for no valid reason) look down on and are suspicious of. We don’t expect it. We probably don’t want it. But there it is, right in the Gospel of John. The risen Christ looked like a gardener.

See, God is telling us something really important in that part of the Resurrection story. God calls us to look for God in the ordinary, the mundane, the unimpressive. God calls us to look for God among the poor, the rejected, the outcast. That’s where we should look for God among us, among those Christ came specially to save, the poor, the downtrodden, the scorned, the despised, the rejected, the excluded. That’s where we are to look. That’s where we will find God.

Christ rose from the grave. Yes, he did. That we believe. That we know. That we confess. And when he did he looked like a gardener. Not like a prince. Not like a king. Not like an angel. Like a gardener. God is in the midst of us in our ordinary, unexciting, everyday lives. God is present with us in those lives bringing us grace, peace, and salvation. To find God don’t look up as much as you look across and within. Find God where you live. Find God in how you live. Find God in your gardener. That’s what Mary Magdalene did, and it’s what Easter calls us to do too. Christ is risen! He is risen indeed. Thanks be to God. Amen.