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THE TIME IS ALWAYS NOW

4/24/2016

Revelation 21:1-6

   Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying,
   "See, the home of God is among mortals.
   He will dwell with them as their God;
   they will be his peoples,
   and God himself will be with them;
   he will wipe every tear from their eyes.
   Death will be no more;
   mourning and crying and pain will be no more,
   for the first things have passed away."
   And the one who was seated on the throne said, "See, I am making all things new." Also he said, "Write this, for these words are trustworthy and true." Then he said to me, "It is done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. To the thirsty I will give water as a gift from the spring of the water of life."

Last week we read from the Book of the Acts of the Apostles – Acts, for short. I talked then about how our present day view of Acts is as a discrete and separate document rather than a simple continuation of Luke’s gospel - which is what it is. Our misunderstanding comes about because of the way our modern day Bible is arranged – which is a fairly arbitrary arrangement set several centuries ago, grouping the gospel accounts together and the various letters together, regardless of the order in which they were written. Our thinking is influenced by where a specific text is located within the larger compilation.

Those of us in the western world tend to think in a linear pattern – we start with “A” and march purposefully on to “Z” – whereas much of the Eastern world has long seen life as a spiral or a series of cycles. I have no intention of drifting off into philosophical speculation (or at least not too much) but simply hope to make a point about today’s reading. The fact that the Book of Revelation is situated as the final book in our Bibles has led us for centuries to see it as a book about The End of Things – the “Last” book.

Now, you probably have noticed that I almost never preach on Revelation. That’s because, over the centuries, a massive amount of garbage has been written and preached about this book. So much that it seems almost impossible to stem the tide of “what everyone knows” – especially when so much of what everyone knows is simply wrong.

Take “the Rapture” for instance. Everyone knows about that, right? Straight out of scripture - right? Wrong. Our modern idea of the Rapture was basically invented in the mid-1800's through a series of misinterpretations, bad translation, and a whole lot of classic wishful thinking. If we hope to learn anything from scripture then we absolutely must put aside wishful thinking and all the indoctrination in what “everybody knows” and learn to simply read what the words actually say – not what we want them to say.

Marcus Borg was a New Testament scholar and teacher - one of the best. He died last year but thankfully left us a good-sized body of written work. In one of those books – The Evolution of the Word – he discussed what he believed Is the chronological order of the books of the New Testament. Here is what he had to say about Revelation:

*The book of Revelation, which of course comes at the end of the familiar New Testament, is almost in the middle—number 14 of 27 documents [in a chronological arrangement]. When the book of Revelation comes at the end of the New Testament, it makes the whole of the New Testament sound as if we’re still looking forward to the second coming of Jesus and what is popularly called ‘the end of the world.’ When the book of Revelation appears more or less in the middle, we see it, hear it and understand it as a document produced in a particular time and place that tells us about what that Christ- community, and the author, John of Patmos, thought would happen soon, in their time—rather than it being ‘Oh, this is still about the future from our point in time.’ *

It changes our whole way of seeing Revelation when we are reminded that it is just one story among many others like it - stories of the first Jesus followers and their experience of living in the kingdom of God while still living in this world.

Again, we run into the problem of a difference in perception between our view from 2000 years down the road and the view of the very first Christians. Revelation is presented as a vision. Now, take a moment and think about this - if you hear a person today described as “a man or woman of vision” what do you think? Do you think they are having some kind of magical mystery hallucination or do you hear it as saying this person has a clear way of seeing what is and how it can be?

Oh sure - I suspect John's community had a dream of Jesus riding in on a white horse and magically rescuing them all from their troubles. Don’t we all, from time to time, when things are getting rough, dream of someone coming to magically make it alright? But, I firmly believe, these early Christians were as anchored in the reality of their present day as any of us ever manage to be.

Remember, all of this is about Jesus – a Jesus who still lived in and among them – not a distant historical figure but the one they saw as a real here-and-now Lord who still lived right in their midst. The same Jesus who told them repeatedly that the Kingdom of God is here and now present among them. They looked around themselves, perhaps, and it didn’t always look so very kingdom-ish, but they still claimed it for their own truth. Jesus said it and they believed it. We still claim the same thing today and it mostly still doesn’t look particularly kingdom-ish.

The people of the early proto-churches didn’t just sit around waiting for Armageddon. They went to work building the kingdom. Just as we do today, these people had a choice to believe that everything is hopeless and ugly or to believe in goodness and grace. So they gathered together for meals and to share their stories and their lives - just as we still do today. And they told others about how good it was to live in this way - in this kingdom – following the example Jesus had given them – just as we do today.

And none of this is for some glorious day far off in the future, it is Now, with a capital “N”. The beautiful promises of this reading are not for some mythical “someday,” they were for the people of that time and place just as they are for us here today. It is the same Now and it will always be the same Now because the reign of God’s grace is always Now. The “home of God is among mortals,” says John of Patmos in his vision. “The kingdom of God is here,” said Jesus to his disciples – it always has been, it always will be. The reign of God is in and among you. Now.

* from a conversation with Candace Chellew-Hodge, published in RELIGION DISPATCHES – January 2, 2013

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LORD, YOU CAN'T BE SERIOUS

4/17/2016

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Acts 9:10-19
   There was a disciple in Damascus by the name of Ananias. The Master spoke to him in a vision: “Ananias.”
   “Yes, Master?” he answered.
   “Get up and go over to Straight Avenue. Ask at the house of Judas for a man from Tarsus. His name is Saul. He’s there praying. He has just had a dream in which he saw a man named Ananias enter the house and lay hands on him so he could see again.”
   Ananias protested, “Master, you can’t be serious. Everybody’s talking about this man and the terrible things he’s been doing, his reign of terror against your people in Jerusalem! And now he’s shown up here with papers from the Chief Priest that give him license to do the same to us.”
   But the Master said, “Don’t argue. Go! I have picked him as my personal representative to non-Jews and kings and Jews. And now I’m about to show him what he’s in for—the hard suffering that goes with this job.”
   So Ananias went and found the house, placed his hands on blind Saul, and said, “Brother Saul, the Master sent me, the same Jesus you saw on your way here. He sent me so you could see again and be filled with the Holy Spirit.” No sooner were the words out of his mouth than something like scales fell from Saul’s eyes—he could see again! He got to his feet, was baptized, and sat down with them to a hearty meal.

   Acts 9:31-35
   Things calmed down after all the initial excitement over Saul/Paul and the church had smooth sailing for a while. All over the country—Judea, Samaria, Galilee—the church grew. They were permeated with a deep sense of reverence for God. The Holy Spirit was with them, strengthening them. They prospered wonderfully.
   Peter went off on a mission to visit all the churches. In the course of his travels he arrived in Lydda and met with the believers there. He came across a man—his name was Aeneas—who had been in bed eight years paralyzed. Peter said, “Aeneas, Jesus Christ heals you. Get up and make your bed!” And he did it—jumped right out of bed. Everybody who lived in Lydda and Sharon saw him walking around and woke up to the fact that God was alive and active among them.

We are moving through the book of Acts by leaps and bounds, which is a shame to my way of thinking, because Acts is one of the richest, most jam-packed books in the Bible. In just this ninth chapter, from which our readings came today there is the conversion of Saul, the Christian hunter, into Paul, the apostle of Jesus by a voice from above and a dazzling light, then blindness, followed by a man named Ananias being sent to go and heal that blindness.

At first, many of the new Christians distrusted Paul – it’s not difficult to understand why with his history among them – but then gradually began to trust him. The traditionalist Jews who most likely had cheered Saul on in his Christian-hunting now viewed him as a traitor and apostate and plotted to murder him, leading to Paul’s dramatic escape from Damascus by being lowered over the city wall in a basket.

After escaping Damascus, Paul went to Jerusalem, where, once again, the Christians – knowing only his past performance among them, refused to trust him until Barnabas spoke up for him, and told the story of what happened on the Damascus road and Paul was gradually accepted here as well.

Things went smoothly for awhile but then there was a second plot to murder Paul, from those who disagreed with him, and he was once again smuggled out of town and this time ended up in the north in the city of Tarsus.

Peter, all this time was traveling around the nearer countryside preaching and house churches were springing up around Israel and the nearby country. In the town of Lydda, Peter healed a man named Aeneas, a paralytic for eight years, then down the road in Joppa Peter raised Tabitha, one of the well-beloved local saints, from death back to life. And the faith continued to grow and spread.

Now all of this I’ve just run past you takes place in chapter nine – one chapter! And chapter nine is not an anomaly – most of the Book of Acts is this crammed with action. You can see how easily some of the smaller stories could be overlooked, which is why I’ve chosen this brief vignette about Saul-slash-Paul and Ananias. With blinding lights and death threats and wild escapes over city walls, this story could so easily be lost, and it shouldn’t be lost because I believe it speaks to all of us average Christians – the ones like you and me who don’t get death threats and have never yet healed a paralytic or raised anyone from the dead.

Ananias is one of those characters who are scattered all throughout scripture who argue with God. The people whose mantra is “you want me to do what?”

There are the obvious ones like Moses who constantly whines to God that God has made a big mistake and clearly meant to call someone much better qualified than himself. Or Abraham who bargained God into acting with mercy when God planned to destroy everyone – the innocent along with the guilty – in the city of Sodom for their arrogance and lack of hospitality. God still destroyed the town but first sent angels to tell the innocent to flee before the city was destroyed.

And then there’s Job who took God to court, like a trial court lawyer, demanding that God justify God's actions toward Job. But my favorite of all time is, of course, Jonah – rasty, crabby Jonah, who does not like to be pushed into doing something he doesn’t want to do. Childish, sulking Jonah. I identify so much with Jonah.

Like all the above, and many more, my whiney human mantra has often been an incredulous “you want me to do what?” And so we come back around to Ananias:

“Master, you can’t be serious. Everybody’s talking about this man and the terrible things he’s been doing, his reign of terror against your people in Jerusalem! And now he’s here ... to do the same to us.”

Based on the information available to him so far, I think Ananias’ is an entirely reasonable response. And God listened to him, and God explained God’s reasons for this assignment, and then Ananias went out and did as he was told.

There are those – I call them merchants of fear and dread – who sell a religion of terror – those who would have us believe that God is out to get us and is constantly on the lookout for a reason to destroy us, to punish us. Those who blather endlessly about hellfire but almost never about love. Theirs is a God of wrath whose favorite thing to do is send folks to hell forever – those who teach that we must believe and act exactly as they do in order to avoid eternal torment in never-ending fires.

I hope it goes without saying that I think these people are wrong – way wrong – psychologically and emotionally damaged people who lash out from the pain inside themselves. But one thing they have managed to insert into many people’s mainline faith is a belief that it is somehow wrong to question God in any way. But I believe the story of Ananias – and those of Moses, Abraham and even cranky old Jonah – show us that God is entirely willing to be engaged when we don’t “get it” and need to have things explained to us. I've long maintained that if all God wanted was blind obedience and unquestioning devotion, God would have stopped with dogs and bypassed the idea of humans.

It’s OK to question God...as long as we listen to God’s answers. Some of us, like Ananias, get it with a short answer. Others, like Jonah, need to spend some time in fish guts before we finally understand. And that appears to be OK with God.

And that’s the reason this story is here – for us to know that we are OK with God, even when we don’t understand – as long as we are trying. And sometime we still don’t understand but we do what God says anyway – and that may best of all.

And I came to realize, while putting this message together, that the reason the whole Book of Acts is here just may be found in the last sentence of our second reading, the story of Peter healing Aeneas: Everybody.....woke up to the fact that God was alive and active among them.

Oh, one more thing here while we are still in Acts. Because of the way in which the story is presented to us in the average Bible, we tend to read it with a full stop at the end of Luke's Gospel, and then we start a whole new story with Acts. But that is not the way that Luke wrote the two books and that is not the way the early Jesus-followers lived out the story. That division was added on after the fact. It is an artifact of our western literary traditions, not history.

The early Christians didn't think in terms of Jesus alive among them and then Jesus not alive among them anymore. They realized that Jesus had always been with them and was with them still -- just in a different form. For awhile he walked and ate among them just as one of them, but then that human form died and then he continued to live among them still -- just not in a visible form. For the early church there never was the "full stop" between these two ways of being with them. When they recognized Jesus still living among them it was the real thing and no ghostly shadow of what had gone before. Jesus lived with them, walked with them, ate with them, and taught them -- just as he had always done.

And that is how is today -- no different. Jesus is with us now and forever. Thanks be to God.

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WHO AUTHORIZES US?

4/10/2016

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Acts 4:1-7
   While Peter and John were addressing the people, the priests, the chief of the Temple police, and some Sadducees came up, indignant that these upstart apostles were instructing the people and proclaiming that the resurrection from the dead had taken place in Jesus. They arrested them and threw them in jail until morning, for by now it was late in the evening. But many of those who listened had already believed the Message—in round numbers about five thousand!
   The next day a meeting was called in Jerusalem. The rulers, religious leaders, religion scholars, Annas the Chief Priest, Caiaphas, John, Alexander—everybody who was anybody was there. They stood Peter and John in the middle of the room and grilled them: “Who put you in charge here? What business do you have doing this?”

   Acts 5:17-20; 27-32

   [Several days later, hearing the men were still teaching and healing,] the Chief Priest and those on his side, mainly the sect of Sadducees, went into action, arrested the apostles and put them in the town jail. But during the night an angel of God opened the jailhouse door and led them out. He said, “Go to the Temple and take your stand. Tell the people everything there is to say about this Life.”
   Promptly obedient, they entered the Temple at daybreak and went on with their teaching.....
   Bringing them back, they stood them before the High Council. The Chief Priest said, “Didn’t we give you strict orders not to teach in Jesus’ name? And here you have filled Jerusalem with your teaching and are trying your best to blame us for the death of this man.”
   Peter and the apostles answered, “It’s necessary to obey God rather than men. The God of our ancestors raised up Jesus, the One you killed by hanging him on a cross. God set him on high at his side, Prince and Savior, to give Israel the gift of a changed life and sins forgiven. And we are witnesses to these things. The Holy Spirit, whom God gives to those who obey him, corroborates every detail.”

This is the second Sunday after Easter but we are, for some reason, jumping ahead to a post-Pentecost story. This is actually from last week’s lectionary readings, but since we missed our regular discussion last week, due to visiting Geyserville, I decided to do this one today since I don’t remember addressing this particular issue for awhile.

The readings may have sounded a little choppy because this story actually covers several days of events and a couple of chapters of scripture. I’ve had to edit it down severely to fit our time today. I’ll try to fill in the gaps as we go along. This story begins right after Pentecost and the baptism of the Holy Spirit with all the remarkable changes that came upon the nascent Christian community.

Peter, it seems, just couldn’t stop preaching. Wherever he was found he was compelled to tell those around him about Jesus and about the promise of the Spirit. Other disciples were doing the same. They preached. They healed people. And crowds began to follow wherever they went. Eventually, of course, this all came to the ears of the Jewish leaders who thought they had rid themselves of this particular problem, only to find it was still alive and well – and spreading – among them. This is the first part of our reading that we just heard today.

The temple leaders arrested Peter and John and threw them into jail and, after a mockery of a trial the next day, let them go with a stern warning to keep their mouths shut. We all know how well that went. The disciples went out and simply picked up where they had been interrupted. For the next several days – the readings we skipped over sound has if it might have been a matter of weeks – the disciples continued to preach and new “Christian” home-church communities began to form.

When news reached the same leaders that Peter and the other apostles were still preaching a resurrected Jesus and that the new Jesus People phenomenon was actually growing, they arrested the men again. This is the second part of our reading we just heard.

The disciples were thrown into jail – again. This is the part of the story where an angel appears in their jail cell and leads them out of jail, instructing them to return to the Temple steps and continue telling their story. When the temple leaders send for them the next day to appear before them for judgment, they hear that the doors remain locked but the men have simply disappeared. When soldiers are sent to hunt them down and bring them back they find them, right where the angel had told them to be, still preaching, right there on the temple grounds.

And here is where Peter gives his impassioned defense of the disciples’ actions and explains by whose authority they speak – words that have directed the actions of missionaries and preachers around the world for over two-thousand years:

“We must obey God rather than any human authority. The God of our ancestors raised up Jesus, whom you had killed by hanging him on a tree. God exalted him at his right hand as Leader and Savior that he might give repentance to Israel and forgiveness of sins. And we are witnesses to these things.....”

We must obey God rather than any human authority.....We know (or in some cases suspect) that in the case of the apostles, this path – chosen and followed – led to their deaths as martyrs for their faith. They were not to be the last by any means.

When things began going not-so-well for the Roman Empire, the earliest Christians, who at first had lived fairly peacefully among their neighbors, became an easy group to demonize as “other,” and they were for a time blamed for every problem and persecuted and hunted for their faith – for no other reason than that they were “different” for those they lived among. Many proclaimed Christians no doubt publicly recanted to save themselves, but others held to their faith and died for their beliefs. Many more have died in the two thousand years since.

Christians even today are dying in parts of our world for no other reason than their professed faith in God and Jesus. Of course, we have to remember that misguided Christians – convinced that they were somehow obeying God – have as often murdered others for refusing their faith, as well – or even those whose lived experience of the same faith was different – we have always not been above killing our own.

Choosing God over human authority doesn’t always lead to martyrdom and physical death. It can more often mean death to old beliefs, to old ways of seeing the world, to old rules that turn out to have always just been human rules masquerading as sent from God. The story of St. Francis illustrates this for us beautifully.

Francis, born a child of comfort and plenty, accepted the church and the faith he was born into and at least obeyed it on the surface. The Catholic Church was at this time in history – around 1200 – the most powerful entity in the western world, dripping with pomp and ostentatious wealth and claiming power over even kings and emperors. When Francis, much to his own surprise, found himself called to a life of poverty and simplicity, and when others eventually came to join him, he went to Rome itself seeking understanding and ended up challenging the prevailing view of God’s will for the church.

His was no violent revolution, simply a quiet refusal to accept the reigning view of what the church should be about. His quiet insistence on obeying God rather than human authority – although he would always choose to do both, as far as possible -- led to deep changes within the church – changes that still affect how we see our role as Christians today.

We live our lives hemmed in by so many human rules – we’re so used to them that we hardly see most of them and take it as “just the way things are.” But do the human laws around us ever conflict with God’s laws? In the past year or so we have seen an increasing number of laws passed by cities making it illegal to feed the hungry unless it is within an authorized shelter, out of sight, well wrapped in red-tape. What we do here in Ukiah would get us arrested in many cities. Some would-be helpers, I suspect, have been discouraged by this. Others go ahead and feed folks, get arrested, get out of jail and go right back to feeding people - regardless of the consequences -- placing God's law above that of the state..

Many people have a serious issue with their tax dollars going to support wars because they simple do not believe in war. They withhold part of their taxes in defiance of the law. The laws of our country support capital punishment and yet I myself stand firmly against it and am sickened anytime someone suggests a fellow human was executed “in my name.” It disgusts me that part of my taxes support research into “better” ways to kill people.

We exist right now in the middle of a cultural war with both sides claiming loudly to be obeying God’s injunctions. Some of us choose to listen to “love your neighbor” and “judge not” while others blissfully quote scripture right and left as their warrant to hate and discriminate against others. We cannot simply legislate these differences away. One side will always hate the other’s “laws.” I suspect only deeply humble prayer – a lot of it – is going to fix the mess we’re in, as long as everyone claims that God is on their side.

My claim is smaller. I just hope that it turns out that I am indeed on God’s side.

Amen.

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THE TIME IS ALWAYS NOW

LORD, YOU CAN'T BE SERIOUS

WHO AUTHORIZES US?

Rev. Cherie Marckx

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