Be Salty: a sermon for the Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost

Mark 9:38-50

³⁸ John said to Jesus, “Teacher, we saw someone throwing demons out in your name, and we tried to stop him because he wasn’t following us.”

³⁹ Jesus replied, “ Don’t stop him. No one who does powerful acts in my name can quickly turn around and curse me. ⁴⁰ Whoever isn’t against us is for us. ⁴¹ I assure you that whoever gives you a cup of water to drink because you belong to Christ will certainly be rewarded.

⁴² “ As for whoever causes these little ones who believe in me to trip and fall into sin, it would be better for them to have a huge stone hung around their necks and to be thrown into the lake. ⁴³ If your hand causes you to fall into sin, chop it off. It’s better for you to enter into life crippled than to go away with two hands into the fire of hell, which can’t be put out. q⁴⁵ If your foot causes you to fall into sin, chop it off. It’s better for you to enter life lame than to be thrown into hell with two feet. r⁴⁷ If your eye causes you to fall into sin, tear it out. It’s better for you to enter God’s kingdom with one eye than to be thrown into hell with two. ⁴⁸ That’s a place where worms don’t die and the fire never goes out .s⁴⁹ Everyone will be salted with fire. ⁵⁰ Salt is good; but if salt loses its saltiness, how will it become salty again? Maintain salt among yourselves and keep peace with each other. ”

Let the words of my mouth

and the meditations of my heart

be pleasing to you,

LORD , my rock and my redeemer.

I thank God every day that Nickelsville isn’t a town in which we have to compete with other churches. Yeah, I know that the Baptist church is the biggest in town, and by a considerable ratio, but I almost never get the impression that we feel like we’re competing with them, or trying to be like them.

The most vital ministries in Nickelsville happen when people are working across denominational lines. I’m sure you’ve seen that, because it’s something I noticed right away.

And I think that’s fantastic! It’s a gift that a lot of communities don’t have. More often than not, churches and different local groups may come up with all the same ideas (because to some degree, people who live in one defined area tend to think alike), but while they have all these similar and compatible ideas, they want to promote only their church, their group, their sub-community.

That’s a problem.

First, it’s a practical problem because when you have a bunch of smaller communities or groups trying to do exactly the same thing (VBS, food pantry, handymen ministries, etc.), their project is only going to get so far. Everybody will be competing for the same resources and the same population. And what you’ll end up with is a bunch of minimally successful or completely unsuccessful ministries spread out over the area.

Second, it’s an image problem. Every community has a lot of people outside of the church. People who are too busy, too disinterested, too badly burned by churchy people to ever darken the door of a church again. And they are extremely critical of and cynical about the institutional Church. When what they observe is that a bunch of churches in an area can’t get along well enough to do something together, in a culture where even outsiders in the church are fundamentally aware of Paul’s theology of one Body with many members, they realize that what we’re doing isn’t Church. What we’re doing is trying to maintain our own local club.

We are being competitive about ministry.

For a couple years at Buffalo Mountain Camp, there were some songs that groups would sing as they hiked up and down the road. One of them got pretty fierce:

We love Jesus, yes we do!

We love Jesus. How about you?

And a group would always sing it at another group. And the other group would respond. And the kids wouldn’t just get excited; they’d get riled up to the degree that you only see at UT football games.

But Brandon, that’s good! Our kids are fired up for Jesus!

No. No, they’re not. They’re fired up about being louder and fiercer than someone else, which is not the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Ministry should never be competitive.

Ministry should never be about I’m-right-and-you’re-wrong. Ministry should never be about we’re-allowed-but-you’re-not.

That’s what the disciples don’t get.

Teacher, we saw someone throwing demons out in your name, and we tried to stop him because he wasn’t following us.

We tried to stop him.

Oh, we read this today and we think, How could they dare? And that’s too bad, because we should read this today and think, Oh, I just said that.

I’d like to blame behavior like that on election season, but really, that us-against-them mentality has been prevalent for a long time. I couldn’t point to a time when our churches weren’t that way. If I were to hazard a guess, which I suppose I’m doing right now, I’d say that the followers of Christ have never not been that way.

We get fired up about being right all the time, about our ministries being the most important, the most vital, the most relevant, the most scriptural, the most Jesus-like, the most welcoming, whatever. But what does the Holy Spirit have to say about that?

I think the Holy Spirit shakes her dreamy head and smiles and reminds us of what Mark remembers:

No one who does powerful acts in my name can quickly turn around and curse me. Whoever isn’t against us is for us.

Funny. Matthew and Luke say exactly the opposite.

Whoever isn’t with me is against me, and whoever doesn’t gather with me scatters.

Tricky.

The context is a little different. In Matthew and Luke, Jesus is telling the authorities that he isn’t doing the Devil’s work, essentially. But in Mark, Jesus is advising the disciples to let people who are doing Kingdom work keep doing Kingdom work.

Oddly, the bottom line is the same. If you’re doing the work of Christ, you’re in good standing with Christ. If you’re showing fruit, you’re growing on the vine.

(Just to mix our metaphors a bit.)

So I am glad that the Nickelsville community has some really good models of ecumenical ministry, but I’m not sure we’re really good at welcoming others into our little ministry circles, even when they are fundamentally cooperative.

And I’m also not sure that the spirit of cooperation plays out more broadly than a couple group of friends who’d be hanging out together anyway.

As an example, I want you to observe what kind of a group we have gathered here in worship this morning. We have, today, all three churches of the Nickelsville Circuit gathered in this one beautiful space to worship together.

Now, look around at who’s not here.

I know that there are some folk with valid, real reasons not to be with us this morning. I get that. But I also know, because people have voiced this concern directly to me, that there are those of our friends who will never attend a cooperative service like this because that’s not my church.

Let’s set aside the fundamental theological problems of claiming any local manifestation of God’s church as our own, and of neglecting the reality of the Church as one, holy, apostolic, and universal, and never, ever just a local phenomenon.

Let’s just juxtapose that complaint with the plethora of other criticisms I hear that boil down to, “We don’t want to do church like that because we’ve never done it that way before.” Every criticism I hear like that is only a poorly veiled request to make our worship and our way of doing things exactly like every other ministry around.

Bland. The same. Unseasoned. Saltless.

Forget that, y’all! Let’s do something else! Let’s do something different! Let’s be salty!

Let’s shut up our fears and our discomfort and our preconceived notions and let the Holy Spirit guide us for a change!

Listen, we’re about to dismiss and find our way around tables to dine with each other as one community. Isn’t that a great venue for conversation?

Here’s what I want you to do. We’ll sing a song, we’ll have a benediction and a blessing, and we’ll feast and share. I want you to be brave like Esther and sit with someone you know less well, and I want you to ask them:

What dreams do you have for ministry in Nickelsville?

What people does God put in your line of sight who need the mercy of Jesus?

What gifts do you have that God wants to put to work in our community?

And let me tell you, not everything that the Church does is purely about evangelism. James reminds us to be in ministry with the suffering, the cheerful, and the sick. Jesus reminds us that whenever we have offered mercy to those who are hungry, thirsty, stranger, naked, sick, and imprisoned, we have offered mercy to Christ. The prophets time and again remind us that God is deeply concerned with the poor, the widow, the orphan, and the alien in our land.

Do you have a dream or a gift you can share with them?

Let’s sing together, as one body with all the Church around the world this morning, and let the Holy Spirit guide us from here.

One Who Fears the Lord; a sermon for the seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost

Mark 9:30-37

³⁰ From there Jesus and his followers went through Galilee, but he didn’t want anyone to know it. ³¹ This was because he was teaching his disciples, “ The Human One p will be delivered into human hands. They will kill him. Three days after he is killed he will rise up. ” ³² But they didn’t understand this kind of talk, and they were afraid to ask him.

³³ They entered Capernaum. When they had come into a house, he asked them, “ What were you arguing about during the journey? ” ³⁴ They didn’t respond, since on the way they had been debating with each other about who was the greatest. ³⁵ He sat down, called the Twelve, and said to them, “ Whoever wants to be first must be least of all and the servant of all. ” ³⁶ Jesus reached for a little child, placed him among the Twelve, and embraced him. Then he said, ³⁷ “ Whoever welcomes one of these children in my name welcomes me; and whoever welcomes me isn’t actually welcoming me but rather the one who sent me. ”

Let the words of my mouth

and the meditations of my heart

be pleasing to you,

LORD , my rock and my redeemer.

Are children special?

Once upon a time, and still in some cultures, when there is a meal given, children are the last served. Some of you remember that. But not now. When there’s a pot luck dinner, like we’ll have next week at New Hope, we send our children through first. We do that to make sure they’re fed well, to minimize whining, even though some of our adults are a lot whinier than our kids, and sometimes to just corral kids who would otherwise be underfoot and into everything. On a regular weekday morning, I get Karoline out the door and to school, and I sit the kids down to breakfast, supplying yogurt, oatmeal, cereal, juice or milk, toast or bread with butter or jam, and/or fruit per request. Then, if they’re not finishing up by the time I get all that provided to each of them, I sit down and shove into my mouth whatever I have time for before the first kid says, “I’m done!” and we have to start into the routine of getting dressed and ready for school.

Are children special? We sure treat them like they are. And to us, they certainly are.

But I ask that because we often take today’s gospel reading to understand that children are elevated to a special place in Jesus’ eyes.

But I don’t think that’s what’s happening here. And I say that as a parent of three beloved, beautiful children myself.

The disciples are arguing about who’s better, who’s more important among them.

Jesus says, y’all don’t get it. This isn’t about being served. It’s about serving.

See this kid? She’s beloved in God’s eyes.

And what Jesus doesn’t say is what’s unspoken in that culture.

See this kid? She’s powerless. She has no vote, no say, no opinion that you value. In fact, she has no value, and the likelihood of her making it to adulthood isn’t all that great. She is, essentially, worthless.

But not to God.

To God, everyone is worthy. Everyone has value, inherent value, because God has created every one and God loves every one.

It’s not ultimately about this child. It’s about every child. Everyone who ever was a child. Everyone who ever will be a child.

God loves them all.

God values them all.

It’s not about children, specifically. Just like, in the long view, Proverbs 31 isn’t just about a worthy or capable woman. Those are characteristics of a godly person, regardless of gender.

But what needs to be said, in the context of the audience of the Proverbs, is that a woman can be of worth, that a woman can own property, that a woman can be strong, that a woman can be an entrepreneur, that a woman can speak and preach wisdom, that a woman can be happy.

Come to think of it, that needs to be said today, too.

Because God loves and empowers not just men, but women, too.

And God loves and empowers not just adults, but children, too.

God loves and empowers not just Americans, but people from all over the world, too.

God loves and empowers not just Christians, but also those who have been wounded by the Church, and those who will never darken the door of a church again, and those who have never heard the name of Christ, and those who will never be able to hear the name of Christ and not associate it with hatred and violence.

God loves and empowers all people. Everywhere.

We don’t have a monopoly on the work of God. We don’t even have a monopoly on the Holy Spirit.

That’s what we Wesleyans understand that a lot of people don’t get about grace.

We sing, “Amazing grace… that saved a wretch like me,” but what we really think is “Amazing me who saw God’s grace and accepted it. Way to go, me!”

That’s not grace.

Grace is that whisper in your heart, in your head, that’s always saying to you, “I love you. I know you. I know you and I still love you. I want you to know me. I have great things planned for you.”

Grace is that nudge that God puts in our gut from the moment we are imagined that reminds us that we are never alone, but calls us out of our comfort to follow.

Grace is also that voice that is always telling us, be kind, be considerate, be compassionate, be forgiving, be welcoming, be real, be understanding, be serving.

Because that is how God is calling us to be. Because that is how Jesus shows us to be. Because that is the life the Holy Spirit is breathing into us.

Whoever wants to be first must be least of all and the servant of all.

Whoever wants to follow must follow all the way.

Whoever claims Christ must live as Jesus.

The Human One will be delivered into human hands. They will kill him. Three days after he is killed he will rise up.

Whoever claims Christ must give of himself completely.

Grace is the evidence that God desires to be in relationship with us, that God desires us to be in healthy relationship with each other, that God desires us to follow.

But grace is also the evidence that God’s love for us never quits. That God sees the deepest, most fundamental part of us, and God sees all the junk we pile on top of that created potential, that hides the blessing we truly are. Grace is evidence that through all that, God loves us.

Over and over, scripture testifies to us that God loves us. That God’s love isn’t just for the powerful and the strong. That just because a person is prosperous, a person isn’t necessarily blessed. Prosperity is absolutely not the sign of God’s favor.

Grace is the sign of God’s favor.

And that grace is poured out upon old and young, rich and poor, male and female, dark and light, slave and free, straight and gay, clergy and lay, methodist, baptist, catholic, mormon, muslim, hindi, atheist, and agnostic. Grace is bestowed upon everyone.

Because God loves us all.

And the question is, How do we respond? Do we respond in our own interests, or do we follow the call of Christ and welcome - seriously welcome, without judgment or bias, making physical and emotional and spiritual space for - all of God’s children?

Some of us are good at welcoming people. Some of us just can’t get over ourselves and see people unlike us, people we disagree with, people we just can’t stomach; we can’t see them the way God sees them.

All of us have room to grow. Will we show God today, tomorrow, next week, each day we wake, that each of us, you are and I are, one who fears the Lord?

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Bride of Christ

I'm going to weigh in on this because I can do it briefly, which is unlike most other commenting I can offer.

An ancient fragment of papyrus has very recently come into the public eye that quotes, in coptic, “Jesus said to them, ‘My wife...’ ”

1. The fragment is a fragment. Have you ever gotten a pre-approved credit card in the mail and promptly ripped up the envelope and its contents so that no one could piece together any sensitive information in it? The point of shredding the document is to make it unreadable, to turn it into nonsense, because that's what happens when we take a piece of something out of context. We turn it into nonsense. That's what's happened with this fragment. It has no surrounding pieces. It has been thoroughly decontextualized. It has been rendered essentially into nonsense.

2. The piece is dated about four centuries later than the life of Jesus of Nazareth. It's not exactly an eyewitness account. That's not to say that only eyewitness accounts of Jesus are authoritative; that argument would throw Paul into considerable scrutiny, and we don't have any first-century texts anymore, anyway. Every piece of biblical literature we have is copy that is assuredly much farther than seven degrees away from Jesus. But that this fragment appears so much later, in a language Jesus probably didn't speak, doesn't help gain it any authoritative traction.

3. Who cares? What does our theology - our God-talk - gain by putting faith in Jesus' abstinence and/or celibacy? The theological effect of holding Jesus above the rest of humanity because he never got married and/or had sex is the damnation of sex regardless of its relational context. If we say Jesus is more holy because he never had sex, whether in or out of marriage, then we claim that sex itself is a problem, a sin regardless of whether or not we are in a committed, God-blessed relationship. That is ridiculous! Sex is nothing to be ashamed of. It is a sign of health and intimacy in a relationship, a sign of trust and adoration between people committed to each other. It is a gift from God, not a sin.

Maybe Jesus was married. Maybe not. There's a lot about Jesus we don't know because nobody bothered to write it down. One of these days, maybe I'll ask Jesus about his wife, but in the meantime, I'll just do my best to live like he showed me.

On the Word God Is Speaking; a sermon for the Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost

^{John 6:56-69}

⁵⁶ Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me and I in them. ⁵⁷ As the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever eats me lives because of me. ⁵⁸ This is the bread that came down from heaven. It isn’t like the bread your ancestors ate, and then they died. Whoever eats this bread will live forever. ” ⁵⁹ Jesus said these things while he was teaching in the synagogue in Capernaum.

⁶⁰ Many of his disciples who heard this said, “ This message is harsh. Who can hear it? ”

⁶¹ Jesus knew that the disciples were grumbling about this and he said to them, “ Does this offend you? ⁶² What if you were to see the Human One u going up where he was before? ⁶³ The Spirit is the one who gives life and the flesh doesn’t help at all. The words I have spoken to you are spirit and life. ⁶⁴ Yet some of you don’t believe. ” Jesus knew from the beginning who wouldn’t believe and the one who would betray him. ⁶⁵ He said, “ For this reason I said to you that none can come to me unless the Father enables them to do so. ” ⁶⁶ At this, many of his disciples turned away and no longer accompanied him.

⁶⁷ Jesus asked the Twelve, “ Do you also want to leave? ”

⁶⁸ Simon Peter answered, “ Lord, where would we go? You have the words of eternal life. ⁶⁹ We believe and know that you are God’s holy one. ”

Let the words of my mouth

and the meditations of my heart

be pleasing to you,

LORD , my rock and my redeemer.

Are y’all tired of hearing about bread?

The last time I went through this series of texts in John, I preached the entire five weeks on Holy Communion, and we broke bread every week.

Some of you are glad I didn’t do that. Some of you wish we had.

Yeah, me too.

On the other hand, some of you probably haven’t realized that’s been happening.

<sigh>

Well, this week is the last, and John is finally shifting out of this obsessive conversation and talking about spirit and life instead of bread, and when they’re not hearing what they want to hear any more, the crowd disperses.

Good thing that doesn’t happen in our churches today. We would never come to church to feel comfortable and good about ourselves.

That Jesus’ words are spirit and life doesn’t mean, after all, that they are always - or even often - a pat on the back or a nice warm hug. If that’s your impression, I encourage you to read the gospels again. Take Jesus’ message seriously, and see just how comfortable and warm and fuzzy it makes you feel.

The funny thing is that the crowds are reacting to something we generally take for granted today: that body-and-blood argument, that life comes only from Christ. We may not take the time to think about it much today, but we take it for granted. We generally get that what Jesus is saying here reflects the modern phrase, “You are what you eat.” How much we take Jesus in - how much of his teaching and his model and his very life we ingest - is directly proportional to the degree we become like him and become remade into the image of God.

And I’m going to differentiate again here. We are talking about the living word of Christ, and I don’t just say out of redundancy. It’s not just because Jesus says, “The words I have spoken to you are spirit and life.” I’m saying that because the word Jesus says here isn’t the word John uses to describe Jesus when he opens his narrative. This isn’t the λογος of creation. Jesus is referring to the words he is breathing, the present, Spirit-inspired ρημα that is proclamation, announcement, immediate and vital right here and right now.

And that is the same word that Paul is using. Truth as your belt; righteousness, more well-known as justice, to protect your soft, gushy bits; “shoes on your feet so that you are ready to spread the good news of peace”; faith or trust as your shield; God’s saving power to protect your brain; and the sword of the Spirit, God’s word.

The sword of the Spirit. The sword that is the very breath of God. That πνευμα that inspires us, fills our lungs with good news. That Spirit is the still-speaking word of God.

Next time you read this bit - and I know it’s a popular paragraph - remember that. The word of God Paul is talking about, that Jesus is talking about, isn’t that handy reference text that some of you bring to worship. The word of God is more alive, more vibrant, more present than that. The word of God is…

Noah told me the other day that God didn’t talk to him.

I told him, basically, that he needed to learn to listen.

The question caught me off guard. I tried to offer him the hope that everyone can hear God, that we just have to learn how. But when all the stories he hears are of people who seem to be physically receiving the sound of God’s voice vibrating the air around them, how do I tell him that God almost never does that? That hearing God’s voice sometimes means listening carefully for the words of hope and grace from our neighbor? That hearing God’s voice sometimes means observing or receiving a gesture of mercy, even if no word is spoken? That hearing God’s voice sometimes means sitting on the bank of a creek and watching the wonder of nature changing and reshaping herself?

How do I tell him that God is everywhere, if we only learn to look?

We have to experience that. We have to still ourselves, to calm the plethora of other voices in our heads and around us, to focus in on where blessing and redemption are.

The word of God is being spoken all around us. No book can contain it. No church or idea can restrain God’s ability to speak Spirit everywhere we turn.

Solomon, in his wisdom, began to understand that the temple he built would never really be a resting place for God. It was only ever an homage, a gift to recognize how good God had been to him.

But how could God possibly live on earth? If heaven, even the highest heaven, can’t contain you, how can this temple that I’ve built contain you?

Oh, I say this to you all the time. We try so hard to fit God in a box, to conform the Holy Spirit to our own ideology, our own ethical system. And we’re in plentiful company to do so. Our own scriptures are full, chock full of people who tried very hard to fit God into a box. And occasionally we have a wonderfully redemptive story of someone whose conception of God got stretched when the epiphany came that God was much, much bigger than what they thought.

Solomon understands that.

The crowds following Jesus began to understand that. But instead of bowing in wonder and awe, they thought it was too much for them right then, and they left.

The word God proclaims threatens to change us. It threatens to transform us at a fundamental level, and it is just as threatening to those who have never tried to be in relationship with Christ as it is to those who were baptized decades ago and have spent all our lives trying to live into that relationship. Because the righteousness of God is so incredibly distant from our human experience! It is an ideal we can never reach; it is infinitely far away.

The spoken, still-spoken word of God is dangerous and uncomfortable. God is guiding the Church, which is not a building or a structure or a denomination, but rather is everyone who would be in relationship with Christ; God is guiding that Church into strange and new places, into ideas that don’t jive with what we are often willing to accept in our fervent religiosity.

And God is guiding us there not to wage battle with people, but to nurture them, to love them into relationship with Jesus.

Because the word of God isn’t a weapon of war; it’s a proclamation of peace.

We spend a lot of our conversation thinking that Paul is telling us to wage war with people who don’t represent what we expect of God’s will. But that’s an impoverished interpretation of Paul’s words.

Paul is being far more straightforward than that, I think. He specifically, concretely says:

We aren’t fighting against human enemies

but against rulers, authorities, forces of cosmic darkness, and spiritual powers of evil in the heavens. 

So let’s set aside our bitter, belligerent words that we reserve for our “enemies” and try speaking the word, the ρημα of God instead. A word that is peace, that is hope, that is love for each other. A word that is spirit and truth. A word that is praise of God, thankfulness and blessing. A word that is only threatening because of how powerful it is and how different it is from the human word.

Let us surrender our human words. Let us let God speak a word through us, and all our words shall be like the psalmist:

How lovely is your dwelling place,

LORD of heavenly forces!

Better is a single day in your courtyards

than a thousand days anywhere else!

My heart and my body

will rejoice out loud to the living God!

LORD of heavenly forces,

those who trust in you are truly happy!

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

The Beginning of Wisdom; a sermon for the twelfth Sunday after Pentecost

John 6:51-58

⁵¹ I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats this bread will live forever, and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”

⁵² Then the Jews debated among themselves, asking, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?”

⁵³ Jesus said to them, “I assure you, unless you eat the flesh of the Human One and drink his blood, you have no life in you. ⁵⁴ Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day. ⁵⁵ My flesh is true food and my blood is true drink. ⁵⁶ Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me and I in them. ⁵⁷ As the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever eats me lives because of me. ⁵⁸ This is the bread that came down from heaven. It isn’t like the bread your ancestors ate, and then they died. Whoever eats this bread will live forever.”

¹⁴ Let the words of my mouth

and the meditations of my heart

be pleasing to you,

LORD , my rock and my redeemer.

The Psalmist reminds us today that “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom”

. “Fear of the LORD is where wisdom begins”

.

That’s a little hard to read in a Christian context, knowing that God, the Three in One, three Persons in relationship as one God, calls us to relationship with Godself, to know the Parent personally, to know Jesus as friend, to be deeply and wholly inspired by the Spirit.

How do we fear someone who calls us to be so intimate?

I mean, this is the same God who says,

Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me and I in them.

You don’t get much more intimate than that.

So what’s with the fear?

Does it feel like I’m nitpicking? Maybe I am, but it’s important to make an attempt to straighten out this stuff in our heads so that all the ideas that are thrown at us about God and the way God does things don’t keep slamming into each other and fighting against each other. It’s one thing to talk all our contradictory ideas about God with our neighbors who all think the way we think. But the world outside the Church thinks more critically, and we need to either have these ideas straightened out in our heads, to be able to say that this idea is right and this idea is wrong; or we need to be able to have a serious (grace-filled!) conversation about why we believe that God is one way and another.

So yeah, maybe I’m nitpicking. I’m nitpicking because I want us to be faithful, functional disciples.

Because that’s why we’re here, right?

So how do we reconcile a God who is to be feared with a God who desires to be intimately known?

I hope it’s quite clear that that’s not how our human relationships should be. Marriage or parenting or friendship should never be about fear.

But then why should fear be a part of a relationship with God?

I would submit to you that fear is a natural human reaction to the unknown.

It’s not so much that it’s part of God’s nature to be fearsome. It’s human nature to be afraid. For that matter, it’s a trait that a lot of living things have in common: that fight-or-flight reaction to a stressor. Possums play dead, ostriches stick their heads in the ground, kangaroos box, and even rhododendrons curl their thick, stiff leaves when cold threatens them.

It’s natural to be afraid of something that’s unknown. And God is the greatest unknown in all creation. God is the unknowable, the infinite, the unfathomable.

The psalmist is right to point out that natural reaction, I think. And to point that out as a good starting point. Recognizing that God isn’t just some friend we’ve known all our lives, but is, in fact, far bigger and less predictable than all of creation’s collected consciousness could ever begin to imagine.

God is big. Unimaginably big. And it’s okay to be afraid of God’s bigness.

In fact, it’s wise to fear God’s bigness. And not because fear is a mature characteristic of our faith, or that it’s particularly smart or well-informed. Just because it’s a healthy choice.

But it’s a healthy choice to start with.

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom

We begin by recognizing that God is unsearchable, infinite in all ways. Then we move on from there.

We don’t talk about wisdom much in the Church today. We talk about faithfulness, about discipleship sometimes. In the United Methodist Church, we talk a lot right now about vitality. But we don’t talk about wisdom.

And that’s a pity. Because Jesus calls us to a very deep and holistic kind of wisdom.

Remember that Jesus sums up all the law and the prophets into one two-fold command: love God and love neighbor as you love yourself. And in his own sometimes subtle ways, and through Peter’s rooftop vision in Acts 10 in a much more direct way, the Spirit informs us that those old laws are for a people who were called to be set apart, but we are called to something different.

We are called to the wisdom of discerning what is loving and what is not.

And that, in and of itself, is intimidating. We are wise when we realize that we won’t always make the best and the most loving choices. We are wise when we realize that sometimes the choices we have all reside outside of black and white sensitivities of right and wrong, that sometimes the only choices we have are very gray.

We are wise when we realize that because there is a new covenant, we are now more responsible for our actions, and not because we are called to higher account, but because there is more of the decision-making process in which we have to participate. We now have to decide whether a behavior or a word shared is good or evil, whether it is blessing or curse, whether it is loving or hurtful.

Paul actually gives us a good model to follow, not because it’s a set of rules, but because it sets our hearts right when we practice it:

be filled with the Spirit in the following ways: ¹⁹ speak to each other with psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs; sing and make music to the Lord in your hearts; ²⁰ always give thanks to God the Father for everything in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ

Paul is suggesting that life become worship. Speak to each other in ways that are beautiful and uplifting like psalms and hymns. Instead of making monotone or discord, find a way to make your heart sing!

That is called “improved quality of life”, folks. That’s something God wants for us. It’s not all about getting to the end of the race. It’s about making the most of the time we have, making this life here and now a blessing, to us and to each other.

That’s called being satisfied, which is a gift only Jesus can give, a feast of God.

Our Old Testament readings for the next few weeks focus on Solomon, who is person on whom all our wisdom literature focuses. And it’s because of this request he makes that we share today, even though his particular request is very specific:

⁹Give your servant therefore an understanding mind to govern your people, able to discern between good and evil; for who can govern this your great people?

It’s a very important and relevant request for us today, when so many of our prayers deal with what we face right now, in this instant. We seldom see the big picture and talk to God about how God is guiding us through the larger span of our lives, let alone how God is guiding our communities and the Church universal through the miracle of salvation.

So as we talk about wisdom in the coming weeks, I want to encourage you to open yourself to God’s bigger story.

Solomon asked for wisdom in his particular context, for a sense of responsibility and discernment for the leadership role he was taking on at the time.

I encourage you to seek our wisdom and discernment in your own life, in your work, in your relationships.

Begin with the recognition that God’s unsearchable wisdom isn’t something you can comprehend, and that Jesus is leading us into a wisdom beyond our sense of rules and predictability.

Because it seems to me that when we open ourselves to God’s wisdom, we’ll discover that true wisdom isn’t learning to follow the letter of the law. True wisdom is simply learning to love.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

No Time for Wrath; a sermon for the eleventh Sunday after Pentecost

John 6:35, 41-51

³⁵ Jesus replied, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never go hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.”

⁴¹ The Jewish opposition grumbled about him because he said, “I am the bread that came down from heaven.”

⁴² They asked, “Isn’t this Jesus, Joseph’s son, whose mother and father we know? How can he now say, ‘I have come down from heaven’?”

⁴³ Jesus responded, “Don’t grumble among yourselves. ⁴⁴ No one can come to me unless they are drawn to me by the Father who sent me, and I will raise them up at the last day. ⁴⁵ It is written in the Prophets, And they will all be taught by God. s Everyone who has listened to the Father and learned from him comes to me. ⁴⁶ No one has seen the Father except the one who is from God. He has seen the Father. ⁴⁷ I assure you, whoever believes has eternal life. ⁴⁸ I am the bread of life. ⁴⁹ Your ancestors ate manna in the wilderness and they died. ⁵⁰ This is the bread that comes down from heaven so that whoever eats from it will never die. ⁵¹ I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats this bread will live forever, and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”

¹⁴ Let the words of my mouth

and the meditations of my heart

be pleasing to you,

LORD , my rock and my redeemer.

What I would like to think is that, as the Church matures, she learns to better live into the hope and the promise of Christ. I would like to think that faith matures over generations. I would like to think that we understand the Way of Christ better now than the authors of our first-century texts. I would like to think that Christ has shown us a better way to live than the way of violence that David knew.

Because Jesus never says, Go to war with your neighbor. Jesus says, Who lives by the sword dies by the sword.

That’s the weird thing about reading stories like our passage from 2 Samuel. David is a very warlike king. At the time, it was all people knew. You didn’t send diplomats to a neighboring kingdom; you didn’t negotiate two- or six-way talks with your enemies. You just waged war against them. That’s what Summer was for.

And during the season of war, people died. A lot of people.

Samuel reports that twenty thousand men died in this operation. That’s almost the entire population of Scott County. Imagine.

I like to think we’ve learned to move beyond that. That followers of Christ know better than to think that anything but violence will ever come of violence.

I’d like to think that the Church would grow into Christ’s radical imagination, into God’s sense of relationship with each other and with the world, because it’s not us-against-them. It’s us-for-them, us bringing creation out of the mire that sin holds us in and declaring an end to it.

Paul’s message to the church in Ephesus isn’t just a random list of proverbs or advice. It’s a hint at a way of living in Christ:

²⁶ Be angry without sinning. Don’t let the sun set on your anger. ²⁷ Don’t provide an opportunity for the devil. ²⁸ Thieves should no longer steal. Instead, they should go to work, using their hands to do good so that they will have something to share with whoever is in need.

²⁹ Don’t let any foul words come out of your mouth. Only say what is helpful when it is needed for building up the community so that it benefits those who hear what you say. ³⁰ Don’t make the Holy Spirit of God unhappy—you were sealed by him for the day of redemption. ³¹ Put aside all bitterness, losing your temper, anger, shouting, and slander, along with every other evil. ³² Be kind, compassionate, and forgiving to each other, in the same way God forgave you in Christ.

I hope that you can take that seriously. I try. I don’t succeed all the time. But I try to let kindness and compassion and forgiveness be a more consistent way of living than bitterness, wrath, anger, shouting, slander, and all the other curses that do more damage to people than we’d ever realize.

I try. And I want to encourage you to try. You won’t get it right every time. You may not get it right most of the time, but if you try, and try, and try, and try, then your trying will become a practice, and your practice will become a habit, and your habit will become such a part of you that you couldn’t possibly be other than kind, compassionate, and forgiving.

It is vital that we do this, friends. Vital. Immediately necessary. Because this is no time for wrath.

The world has enough of wrath. I thank God every day that we cut off our cable, because I don’t have to listen to the political wrangling being shouted at me through commercial television time. I am surrounded by enough angry talk that I don’t need it in my down time.

The world has enough of wrath, coming at us from every angle. Wrath has been the way of humanity throughout history. It is so ingrained that often we imagine that there can be no means of solving conflict except through wrath.

Wrath is poison.

And poison isn’t the diet of someone who claims to follow Christ.

Our diet is living bread. Bread. Something that nourishes. Not something that destroys. Not something that causes death, but something that causes life.

Life is what Jesus offers us, not death. Life is what Jesus calls us to bring. When will we learn that? When will we finally turn our backs, as a Church, on wrath and on the cruel and senseless ways of the world?

I suppose it has to start with each one of us. We must, individually, choose that each of our interactions will bring peace instead of conflict. We must choose to

be kind, compassionate, and forgiving to each other, in the same way God forgave [us] in Christ.

That means holding the door for the neighbor with her hands full; listening and sitting with the neighbor who may have just had a bad day; not letting it ruin our day when our neighbor’s cat uses the flower bed as a litter box as a matter of practice, because any number of things we do are at least as annoying and troublesome.

Little things. Because God knows that we need to take baby steps. God knows that we can’t just turn around right away. Becoming a disciple is like dieting. Sure, you could go on a water diet and lose fifty pounds in a couple weeks, but you won’t be healthy and you won’t have actually changed anything permanently. Healthy living takes longer to learn and develop. Growing in our faith, growing away from wrath into loving-kindness takes time, just a coupe pounds each week, with reasonable goals that add up to big changes.

God is ridiculously patient with us, because God knows all the stuff that gets in our way and that can keep us from making the big changes that need to happen for us to learn to be disciples. And if God is that patient with us, shouldn’t we be that patient with ourselves and with our neighbors?

Therefore, imitate God like dearly loved children. ² Live your life with love, following the example of Christ, who loved us and gave himself for us. He was a sacrificial offering that smelled sweet to God.

We all are aware that the world in which we’re living is wounded and in need of healing. Let’s not make it worse.

Almost three centuries ago now, John Wesley set forth three simple guidelines for the people the world called “methodist”. In short, they are:

Do good.

Do no harm.

Attend upon the ordinances of God.

That is, make sure all the things you do are blessing, and not curse. Make a point of exercising lovingkindness rather than wrath. And pay attention to the things that make for a holy life.

If we live those three things in our lives, we will leave more and more room for the Holy Spirit to remake us, to reshape us into what God intends for us. And then God will revitalize the Church. And then God’s Kingdom will come into this wretched, wounded world.

Do good. Do no harm. Attend upon the ordinances of God.

Because this is no time - because we have no time - for wrath. We must make time for love.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.