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THE SCRIPTURES WE CHOOSE TO IGNORE

4/26/2015

1 John 3:11, 14b-18
For this is the message you have heard from the beginning, that we should love one another.....Whoever does not love abides in death. All who hate a brother or sister are murderers, and you know that murderers do not have eternal life abiding in them. We know love by this, that he laid down his life for us—and we ought to lay down our lives for one another. How does God’s love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses help? Little children, let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action.

The lectionary reading given for today is the Good Shepherd. I’ve preached on this scripture several times over the years, but I never feel terribly successful with it because, even up here in northern California, we are basically “townies” – and the symbols of an agrarian, pastoral world just don’t resonate with us any more. We get it intellectually, but I’m not sure most of us get it viscerally. So I decided to pass on that reading.

When you get right down to it, the main point of that reading is Jesus’ love for us, the sheep, so I have just chosen to speak on love – Love and Not-Love. Last week, if you recall, I wore my “don’t-hate-the-sin-and-love-the-sinner, just Love” tee-shirt, and pointed out how often people use that phony not-real scripture as justification to go ahead and hate the sinner anyway. This week I decided to skim the internet looking for other non-scriptures that get quoted as if they came straight from God’s mouth but I got side-tracked, as I often do, into the realm of things that actually are in the Bible – but that we choose to ignore.

I’ve been your pastor here for quite awhile now and if there is anything you have heard me say over and over ... and over ... it is that ‘fact’ and ‘truth’ are not necessarily the same things. Similar, yes, but synonymous, no. Those of us who seek the ‘truth’ in scripture have an easier time, I’m sure, than those who look for facticity. We can, without damaging ourselves, accept that certain unwieldy sayings are merely cultural artifacts of the time and place in which they were written, and not necessarily the eternal word of God, even though they are in the Bible. If you are here today, you clearly don’t place any huge importance on Paul’s command that women should sit-down and shut-up in church and none of us (I hope) are in the habit of dashing out the brains of babies when we invade a new territory.

Those who believe in the Bible as literal fact have a more difficult time with this kind of scripture and often end up tying themselves in knots trying to explain them away. Many of these verses come out of Leviticus. Some are deadly serious but others are just plain silly to our way of thinking today. Like, you can’t wear clothing made of mixed fibers. It’s an abomination. Anyone here today wearing pure linen all the way down? I didn’t think so.

Anyone here ever read a fortune cookie or looked at your horoscope in the newspaper? The penalty for that is permanent exile from the tribe.
How about you men - you look clean-shaven ..... abominable.

Without meaning to pry, are any of you here descended from an illegitimate person? If so, you’ll have to leave - you can’t be here. Scripture says.

OK - have you ever eaten shrimp? Lobster? Clam chowder? Too bad - abominations, every one of them. (I am in trouble, because I’m not giving up clam chowder.)

Now these as I said are basically silly in our context and while we recognize them as maybe important to their time and culture we are perfectly happy to ignore them today. There are a lot more – a lot more -- but I want to move into a few that are not so humorous.

How about a man who has been unfortunate enough to have testicular cancer? Thrown off the boat. Those 'things' are really important in the religious life, you know. And a woman, who seeing her husband attacked, had better not rush in to help defend him, because if her hand touches the genitals of the attacker, her hand has to be cut off – no exceptions. Says so, right there in Leviticus.

Absolutely no tattoos allowed. Tell that one to today’s world. That shuts a whole lot of people out of the worshiping community.

And then, of course, there is divorce. This is one of the few of these prohibitions that shows up in the New Testament, too. Scripture is really quite clear and blunt. Don’t do it. Human decency might point out that forcing anyone to remain in a failed and miserable marriage is hardly a sign of loving each other, but some churches do remain hard-nosed about this. It is interesting, though, to see the numbers of biblical literalists who manage to slide right past this one, rather than shut the doors to people who put money in the collection plate.

And then, of course, there is the main “clobber verse” used to excuse all manner of hateful behavior against gays. In the middle of all these ridiculous prohibitions – right there with don’t wear polyester and don’t eat clam chowder and if a lizard falls into a clay pot you have to break the pot, the writers of Leviticus tells us “do not lie with a man as a woman,” and from that one small sentence – lost in the midst of page after page of other “do not’s” – that we mostly happily ignore – our sad country has lost it’s mind in an orgy of hate-spewing – all in the name of obeying a loving God.

Oh, and there are also some dandy verses in there about not withholding food from the homeless but we don’t hear much about them today either.

My point in all this is not to make fun of others but to point out how deadly serious it can be when we set out to blindly enforce every word in scripture as if they were all of equal importance and without ever pausing to consider if it really sounds like the word of our living, loving God. So much of what passes for Christian faith today is powered by sheer, blind ignorance. Like the guy I saw who proudly had the words from Leviticus 18:22 tattooed on his arm in big letters. That’s the “do not lie with a man as with a woman” one. He was apparently blissfully ignorant that as far as Leviticus was concerned his tattoo was every bit as much of an abomination as the supposed “sin” he was advertising against.

We cherry-pick what we choose to believe. We all do it, but if we are going to do it, then let us do it deliberately rather than from ignorance. The Bible is too important to treat it so casually. We need to learn about it and read it prayerfully – listening for truth as much as we may look for facts. How about if more people actually chose to obey Jesus’ teaching that we not judge each other or that we love each other as he loves us? I wish the Christian world was as dedicated to those verses as that one short one back in Leviticus. And why are "Christians" ignoring Jesus in favor of Leviticus, anyway?

Listen to part of today’s reading again: We know love by this, that he laid down his life for us—and we ought to lay down our lives for one another. How does God’s love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods – [or God’s love or God’s compassion] -- and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses to help? ..... Little children, let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action.

Let us love.

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NOW YOU ARE NAMED

4/19/2015

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1 Peter 2:21-25 (MSG)
This is the kind of life you’ve been invited into, the kind of life Christ lived. He suffered everything that came his way so you would know that it could be done, and also know how to do it, step-by-step. He never did one thing wrong, Not once said anything amiss. They called him every name in the book and he said nothing back. He suffered in silence, content to let God set things right. He used his servant body to carry our sins to the Cross so we could be rid of sin, free to live the right way. His wounds became your healing. You were lost sheep with no idea who you were or where you were going. Now you’re named and kept for good by the Shepherd of your souls.

We’ve been talking since Easter about “beginnings” and about being “changed” by our Easter encounter with Jesus. Today I want to move into the realm of what that “being changed” thing looks like. I want to begin by reading a piece out of my husband’s* poem-reflection for this week – because he says it really well:

If, through Christ, salvation is a given, and I believe it is,
then our work is not to get “saved,” or “better-saved,”
but to do what we are told.
And what are we told to do? Act like Jesus. Be like Christ.
AND, doing this is two-fold – it’s called “praxis.”
Taking action -- what we do,
and then reflection on that action – how we pray.
Do we care, really care for the outsider?
Do we pride ourselves on being better than the downtrodden,
or do we go out of our way to lift them up?
The question is not, what would Jesus do?
It’s what Jesus did do – what do we do in Jesus’ name?

We name ourselves “Christians” – followers in the footsteps of Jesus. So, just where do we follow him? Where exactly is it those footsteps lead us? There are a lot of people out there who take the name of Christian, and the paths they follow don’t seem anything at all like the path I think I see in front of me.

Now I’m not saying that I am better than they or that I know Jesus’ wishes better than they. I am saying there seems to be a lot of confusion out there about just where following Jesus is supposed to take us. How do I know I am on the right path?

Part of the answer to that lies in that word “praxis” that Hilary uses in his poem. The word praxis means action or application. A theory remains just an idea until it is put into action – to see if it works or not. At its most basic, this is praxis, but in the areas of education and spiritual growth, praxis is always paired with reflection. (All this really does have application to what we are talking about here – following Jesus – be patient.)

We have an idea of what following Jesus means – we put that idea into practice - and then we reflect on the experience, we pray about it. Not just a quickie, toss-off prayer, but one where we try our best to listen and to hear God’s response. We look for the benefit to others in what we have done. We ponder how well our action matches up with what scripture tells us Jesus did. We analyze our own feelings about what we did. Then, based on that reflection-slash-prayer, we act again – perhaps with some modifications. And then we reflect and then we act and then we reflect – around and around – all the while (hopefully) growing in clarity of vision and understanding.
No one ever said that following Jesus was going to be easy. We humans are complicated, and – unfortunately – very good at lying to ourselves. Without a lot of hard work we can so very easily become self-convinced that we are doing something because “Jesus says” when in reality Jesus never said any such thing and it’s simply what we want to do and that we are more comfortable with that particular “belief.” People continually quote scripture to back up arguments but do so using “quotes” that simply don’t exist in scripture. I can't tell you how many times I've heard arguments supposedly ended by someone quoting "Hate the sin but love the sinner" as being definitive scripture. Only problem is -- it isn't. It's just a saying.

Our reading from Peter’s letter open with this statement: This is the kind of life you’ve been invited into, the kind of life Christ lived – and then proceeds to list the many ways Jesus suffered, in spite of the fact he never did anything wrong. His chosen path conflicted with the comfortable path the world had chosen – that was his entire crime. He made them uncomfortable. This is the life we are invited into. Do we really want to go there?

When we say we follow Jesus do we really mean that we willingly follow him into possible suffering for ourselves? I’m not even talking about crucifixion here – although we have always been told that might turn out to be where it leads – but – we here, for instance, try to help feed the hungry. Did you know that cities all over this country are currently enacting laws forbidding people to feed the homeless – presumably in the hope that the homeless will then go “somewhere else”? It’s interesting that no one I’ve ever heard an interview with ever seems to have an idea about just where “somewhere else” might be – just as long as it isn’t in their town. Do you know that people, right now, today, are being arrested for the crime of continuing to feed the hungry? How would you feel about our bag-lunches if making and distributing them might get you arrested? Who do you listen to – the city council or Jesus?

One of my favorite stories this week concerns a chef in Texas who twice a week loads up a food truck and drives out to give away free meals to homeless people. She just got arrested. Bless her heart, she’s a successful chef and didn’t appear fazed by the fines - she just went out and did it again. And told them she was claiming her “religious exemption” right to do so – using a law designed to discriminate against those we don’t like, to justify feeding the hungry. She appears to know who she is listening to.

The point I’ve been working toward here is that when we undertake actions that we believe are part of “being a Christian” we need to know why we do what we do.

Is it because someone said it’s the right thing to do? Is it because we like looking good in the eyes of our fellow Christians? Because it makes us feel important? Are we trying to “buy” our way into heaven with good works? (And every one of these may have some small slice of the reality.) Or is it because we actually look into the faces of the ones we serve and love them as our brothers and sisters? Is it because we have met and know Jesus and want more than anything to follow in the path he laid out for us – however difficult or uncomfortable that path may be?

This scripture ends by reminding us, as Christians we have been called and we have been named – God knows my name – my most earnest hope is that my name will always be spoken on the side of love.

Amen.

*Hilary F. Marckx, pastor, Geyserville Christian Church

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WALK IN THE LIGHT

4/12/2015

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1 John 1:1-7, 2:2-6
From the very first day, we were there, taking it all in—we heard it with our own ears, saw it with our own eyes, verified it with our own hands. The Word of Life appeared right before our eyes; we saw it happen! And now we’re telling you in most sober prose that what we witnessed was, incredibly, this: The infinite Life of God himself took shape before us.

We saw it, we heard it, and now we’re telling you so you can experience it along with us, this experience of communion with the Father and his Son, Jesus Christ. Our motive for writing is simply this: We want you to enjoy this, too. Your joy will double our joy!

This, in essence, is the message we heard from Christ and are passing on to you: God is light, pure light; there’s not a trace of darkness in him.

If we claim that we experience a shared life with him and continue to stumble around in the dark, we’re obviously lying through our teeth—we’re not living what we claim. But if we walk in the light, God himself being the light, we also experience a shared life with one another.
.............
Here’s how we can be sure that we know God in the right way: Keep his commandments. If someone claims, “I know him well!” but doesn’t keep his commandments, he’s obviously a liar. His life doesn’t match his words. But the one who keeps God’s word is the person in whom we see God’s mature love. This is the only way to be sure we’re in God. Anyone who claims to be intimate with God ought to live the same kind of life Jesus lived.

Last week I stated that Easter morning was not a culmination – not the finishing of something God had been doing. Instead, Easter is a beginning. Our reading for today seems to me to reiterate that truth and I want to carry it a little farther.

We have been taught by much of the church, for so long, that Easter is the big climax, the healing stroke that sets everything right again – and ‘that is that.’ We are hereby saved and we can just go on and live our lives without thinking about it overmuch because Jesus took care of it all.

We are told that Jesus lived and died and rose again to save us – and this is no doubt true (praise God!) – and yet Jesus’ own words, his teachings scattered all throughout the four gospel accounts clearly tell us that he is expecting more from us than to simply be the passive recipients of his work. There do not, in fact, appear to be too many passive recipients anywhere in Jesus’ thinking.

“Meet me in Galilee,” he told his disciples, and through them, us. “Go, and make believers of all nations; baptize them and spread the Good News.” This reading we just heard for today is from the first of three letters written to the early church by John the Evangelist, the same writer who (probably) wrote the Gospel according to John. That is the gospel that ends with a meeting at the seashore and Jesus questioning Peter three times: “Do you love me? Then feed my sheep.” Three times. I see nothing there that suggests everything is taken care of and finished now so we can all just relax.

There is nothing here to suggest that the work of Easter is finished. In fact, John makes it abundantly clear that if we make a claim to be followers of Jesus but nothing changes in how we live our lives, we are, quite bluntly, liars. He says it twice in just these few short verses I just read. Liars.

It is worth reading again. John is telling us what he heard and saw with his own eyes and ears. He’s telling us so we can know this glorious truth for ourselves: The infinite Life of God himself took shape before us, he says. We saw it, we heard it, and now we’re telling you so you can experience it along with us, this experience of communion with the Father and his Son, Jesus Christ. This is the miracle of Easter – that we, too, can experience this communion with God, not through our own deserving, but simply because the love is that great.

But there are consequences that come with accepting this love and John wants us to be very clear about these consequences: If we claim that we experience a shared life with him and continue to stumble around in the dark, we’re obviously lying through our teeth—we’re not living what we claim. But if we walk in the light, God himself being the light, we also experience a shared life with one another.

And later on: Here’s how we can be sure that we know God in the right way: Keep his commandments. If someone claims, “I know him well!” but doesn’t keep his commandments, he’s obviously a liar. His life doesn’t match his words. But the one who keeps God’s word is the person in whom we see God’s mature love. This is the only way to be sure we’re in God. Anyone who claims to be intimate with God ought to live the same kind of life Jesus lived.

John says it just about as simply as possible: If you truly understand and believe the things I am trying to tell you here – things I saw and heard my very self – you simply CAN NOT remain unchanged by them. Anyone who remains unchanged has missed the boat. Coming into contact with Jesus changes us – inevitably.

If we actually listen to Jesus’ words to us there is very little about sitting and thinking about it all. All four gospels are full of imperative statements – action verbs. Go, Do, Love, Heal, Feed ..... Let your light shine.

This is why Easter is just a beginning. Easter shows us Jesus – the who and the what and the why of Jesus. Not the Jesus we think we want but the one we actually get. The one with so much power and so much authority and so much love that no one can remain untouched by it. As Frederick Beuchner puts it, Jesus had a Christ-making power – the power to make Christs out of all of us. When we are touched by this kind of power we are going to be changed.

John - and the other disciples and apostles as well, tells us there is only one way to be sure we’re in God. Anyone, he says, who claims to be intimate with God ought to live the same kind of life Jesus lived. Easter is not the final triumph. Easter is showing the whole world just how God loves – and knowing this – maybe we can have the courage to step out in the faith that Jesus died and lives for – the faith that even we can become Christs in Jesus’ image.

Easter is when the changing starts, so let the work of Easter begin in you. Let us – each one -- consciously walk in the light -- and begin the work of Easter in the world around us.

Amen.

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MEET ME IN GALILEE - EASTER 2015

4/5/2015

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Mark 16:1-8
When the Sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices so they could embalm him. Very early on Sunday morning, as the sun rose, they went to the tomb. They worried out loud to each other, “Who will roll back the stone from the tomb for us?”

Then they looked up, saw that it had been rolled back—it was a huge stone—and walked right in. They saw a young man sitting on the right side, dressed all in white. They were completely taken aback, astonished.

He said, “Don’t be afraid. I know you’re looking for Jesus the Nazarene, the One they nailed on the cross. He’s been raised up; he’s here no longer. You can see for yourselves that the place is empty. Now—on your way. Tell his disciples and Peter that he is going on ahead of you to Galilee. You’ll see him there, exactly as he said.”

They got out as fast as they could, beside themselves, their heads swimming. Stunned, they said nothing to anyone.

Holy Week is a roller coaster ride. It starts up high with the fleeting euphoria of Palm Sunday, then begins a slow descent to the night-time betrayal of Maundy Thursday, then straight into an abrupt oh-my-God-I’m-going-to-throw-up drop into the viciousness and horror and failure of Good Friday. On Holy Saturday there is absence and silence and just enough time to begin to catch our breath and look around us and try to figure what just happened, when here we are on Easter Sunday – and against all expectation – we are actually starting to climb again.

I say “starting” to climb again because Easter is not the culmination of a story but simply another beginning. What was lost is found. What was dead lives again. What was hopeless is suddenly filled with new hope. Jesus is risen!.....now what?

When you have watched someone you love die – when you have cleaned and buried his lifeless body and walked away from the wreckage of all your dreams it has got to take a little time to figure out what to do with the idea that he is now living again. Easter morning is only a beginning. There will be a long process of wrapping their brains around an impossible reality. There will – finally – be eyes opened to actually see a truth that has been right in front of them all along. There will be a complete rearrangement of their ideas of who this Jesus actually is..... and, maybe even more importantly, there will be a coming to grips with just who this Jesus thinks they are.

The gospel accounts of the resurrection are each slightly different. There are brief, scattered appearances in Emmaus and Jerusalem, but most accounts have the disciples making this return to Galilee for their final meetings with the risen Lord – Galilee, where it all began. Galilee, out in the “boondocks” where only the “hicks” live – far from the cosmopolitan splendor and might of Jerusalem.

In Mark’s gospel account which we just read for this year’s cycle, the angel at the tomb sends the disciples straight back to Galilee, telling them they will meet Jesus there. Now, according to one source I checked, it is somewhere in the vicinity of 70 miles from Jerusalem to Galilee, depending on where you’re going. It’s going to take them a day or two – or four or five – to walk that distance through rough country. They are going to have a lot of time to think about it all on their journey back to where it all started for them, three short years ago – back to where they first met Jesus. Back to the place from which they are going to start all over again – but this time, hopefully, with their eyes wide open.

Easter morning invites each of us back to Galilee – wherever our own Galilee might be. Where was it that you first met Jesus? Where did this stranger call out to you and invite you to follow him? Maybe there have been many different Galilees for you. Places where you met Jesus again and again, but each time with a new and different understanding so that it was almost like meeting him for the first time. Is it possible to return to Galilee? Can we get there from here? Is it easy for us?

I likened Holy Week to a roller coaster ride, but there are times when it feels like the car I’m in has come to a complete stop somewhere in Holy Saturday. When our souls are mired down in all the ugliness of everyday’s newscast it can feel like we might be stalled out here forever and we have lost our way back to Galilee.

But Jesus calls us there, nonetheless – and that, I suspect – is the true miracle of Easter – that after all the betrayal and the horror and the lies and the pain and the failure – Jesus still calls each one of us to meet him again in Galilee. I love the way Mary Luti put it in today’s reflection in our meditation book: “Even if...you have nothing to bring to the meeting but stupidity and stubbornness, fear and self-protection, betrayals and cowardice...Even if you can’t imagine why anyone should love you...Jesus wants you to go to Galilee. He’ll meet you there.”

I think it is important that we pay attention to the fact that when Jesus leaves them a message it’s not a sermon on how faithless they had been, there’s no blame for abandoning him, no post-game review of where it all had gone wrong. Instead there’s just “Well that’s taken care of - now meet me in Galilee and we’ll talk about where you go from here.”

As several people have mentioned this week, Easter is proof that Love Wins. Political corruption and religious fanaticism and greed and ignorance and human weakness may seem to have free rein in this world we live in – but Easter is proof that God is not through with us. Jesus is still calling the world to meet him again in Galilee. Calling us to take lift our eyes from the darkness around us and look for the light of Easter.
The author Willa Cather, once said something to the effect of "Miracles rest not so much upon healing power coming suddenly near us from afar but upon our perceptions being made finer, so that, for a moment, our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there around us always."

Love wins. Miracles happen. Christ is risen. Let us go to Galilee.

Amen.

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THE SCRIPTURES WE CHOOSE TO IGNORE

NOW YOU ARE NAMED

WALK IN THE LIGHT

MEET ME IN GALILEE - EASTER 2015

Rev. Cherie Marckx

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