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A LIVING PEOPLE AND OUR LIVING GOD

5/26/2024

2 Timothy 3:16-17
All scripture is God breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness. It teaches us what is right.

Romans 15:4
Everything that was written in the past was written to teach us so that we might have hope.

Last month I attended our region’s 2024 Annual Gathering. It was two and a half days of greeting old friends I don’t get to see very often any more as well as quite a few folks I’d never met before. I came home pretty excited by what I saw and heard there.

I was excited because all I had seen and heard, both in formal presentations and in personal conversations, showed me a gathering of people – young and older and everything in-between -- all dedicated to following the way Jesus had modeled for us 2000 years ago and equally dedicated to doing so right in the here and now, in this 21st century, in a world still battling poverty and racism and all the other -isms that keep us from living as one family of God.

The most exciting part for me was hearing all the new ways that churches are finding to BE church, to live in the way of Jesus. So many different ways, all of them based in love.

Two Sundays ago, I told you that I was getting frustrated with reading the same old scripture readings in the same old words over and over. and feeling like we weren’t really hearing the story of Jesus coming through anymore. Then I read some random readings from modern writers that I thought conveyed the same messages but in ways we could really hear.

Then last week we read the story of Pentecost Day as retold in a modern writer’s own words to show how much more REAL it became – not different, just more like something that actually could and did happen instead of a story someone told once upon a time.

All of which is to say that I’ve been thinking a lot lately about ways to study the bible without losing what is there for us to learn. I don’t believe it’s there for us to change at whim, but I do believe we are meant to interpret it freshly according to the places and times in which we live. This isn’t some new-fangled concept. Much of what is in the bible was interpreted and re-interpreted while the various books were still being written. Years later, ordinary humans determined which books they felt should be included and which excluded as not truly God’s word. It’s been going on for thousands of years!

It’s not a book of hard and fast rules for all time. It’s an on-going conversation between a living God and God’s people.

And all that re-interpretation is OK.

Author Rob Bell tells a wonderful story about an act of interpretation that occurred largely in his own imaginings. It’s too long to read here, so I’ll try for a shorter synopsis.

While cleaning out his basement he came upon a painting he had purchased years before. Not that it was great work of art, but simply because it was a perfect example of roadside kitsch – a painting of Elvis done on black velvet.

It appears the main reason he bought it was the sheer unconscious arrogance of the artist’s signature – a single large capital letter painted in the corner. To Bell, the artist seemed to be saying, “I don’t need to put my whole name here – this painting is so great that everyone should know my name!”

Letting his imagination carry his thoughts even further, Bell imagined the painter announcing to the world that that he or she had painted the world’s greatest painting and therefor there was no need for anyone ever to paint another – this one was perfect, and nothing could ever surpass it.

Bell likened this wild idea to those who insist that the bible was completed in its perfection 2000 years ago and that nothing of any value could ever be added to it. Not only that, but no new interpretations could ever add or subtract from those 2000-year-old understandings.

In Bell’s book (titled, obviously, Velvet Elvis) he tells his story and expands on it much more than I could in my drive-by discussion here. The point being, as I stated earlier, the Bible is an on-going conversation between a living God and God’s people.

It is not a dead document for us to obey, slavishly – with all its 2000 year old cultural references and beliefs – many of which we don’t “get” at all because what they refer to is no longer part of our everyday thinking. The Bible is a living thing from which we derive history and answers and hope to guide us in our own relationships with God.

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PENTECOST DAY

5/19/2024

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“When Jesus let go of his last breath – willingly, we believe, for love of us – that breath hovered in the air in front of him for a moment and then it was set loose on earth. It was such pungent breath – so full of passion, so full of life – that it did not simply dissipate as so many breaths do. It grew, in strength and in volume, until it was a mighty wind, which God sent spinning through an upper room in Jerusalem on the day of Pentecost. God wanted to make sure that Jesus’ friends were the inheritors of Jesus’ breath, and it worked. There they were, about a hundred and twenty of them, Luke says, all moping around wondering what they were going to do without Jesus, when they heard a holy hurricane headed their way. Before any of them could defend themselves, that mighty wind had blown through the entire house, striking sparks that burst into flames above their heads, and they were filled up with it – every one of them was filled to the gills with God’s own breath. Then something clamped down on them and the air came out of them in languages they did not even know they knew.”
― Barbara Brown Taylor, The Gospel of the Holy Spirit

Today is Pentecost Sunday. Easter season has ended and a whole new world has been ushered in. Pentecost was originally – and still is – a Jewish celebration that took place on the 50th day after Passover (Pentecost means 50th).

It is a feast day (Shavuot) that celebrates two major events – the first wheat harvest of the year and the commemoration of the day Moses received the Tablets of the Law on Mt. Sinai. For Christians, it has come to mean something very different -- the coming of the Holy Spirit, to be with and in us. It is still celebrated on the 50th day, but for us this is 50 days after Easter.

Barbara Brown Taylor is an Episcopal priest, a theologian, and a prolific author. She’s also high on my list of favorite modern writers who address bible stories and themes from a present day point of view and open our ears up to hear those stories in a whole new way. She is also the author of today’s Pentecost story reading.

I believe that stories read from the bible over and over too often become nothing more than words without any real meaning – words that have been rendered into meaningless mush by constant repetition. It is necessary, in my belief, to occasionally hear a story told using other words, or even other settings – to wake us up to truly hear what the story is trying to say to us.

In the reading we began with today Taylor is recounting the beginning of the Pentecost story as it is told in the 2nd chapter of Acts, but she uses her own words to create new images – living, breathing images which tell of the same events but help us see and hear it in a brand-new way and to pay attention to what is actually happening here.

Jesus breathes out his last breath and God holds that last breath until it is breathed out into the discouraged and disappointed and quite possibly, frightened disciples. Jesus’ breath is taken from him, but it isn’t wasted – it is held until it is passed on to all of us. Taylor’s words let us see that happening – it becomes not just words, but reality that we can see and hear and touch.

This story and others like it come from sermons Brown has preached. Thirty-nine sermons have been gathered into a small book titled, Home by Another Way, filled with images that bring new life to a group of old, old stories. Her word pictures bring us into the readings and people them with living, breathing characters experiencing things they’ve never known before – and we experience them with them...

“The disciples were all moping around wondering what they were going to do without Jesus, when they heard a holy hurricane headed their way. Before any of them could defend themselves, that mighty wind had blown through the entire house, striking sparks that burst into flames above their heads, and they were filled up with it – every one of them was filled to the gills with God’s own breath. Then something clamped down on them and the air came out of them in languages they did not even know they knew.”

It's as if we are in the room there with them. We know what comes next, and we can feel the breath of the Spirit in our lungs before it even happens.

God speaks to us in many languages – sometimes it’s the language of a chronicler from 2000 years ago, sometimes it’s the language of a particularly gifted writer from recent years, sometimes it’s from a Peanuts cartoon.

God is not limited in any way shape or form. Let us not limit ourselves in how we open ourselves to receive God’s word or Spirit.

Barbara Brown Taylor, The Gospel of the Holy Spirit -- found in Another Way Home

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NOT FOUND IN SCRIPTURE

5/12/2024

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“I’ve watched congregations devote years and years to heated arguments about whether a female missionary should be allowed to share about her ministry on a Sunday morning, whether students older than ten should have female Sunday school teachers, whether girls should be encouraged to attend seminary, whether women should be permitted to collect the offering or write the church newsletter or make an announcement . . . all while thirty thousand children die every day from preventable disease.

If that’s not an adventure in missing the point, I don’t know what is.”

― Rachel Held Evans, A Year of Biblical Womanhood

This is going to be a different kind of message today – different, at least, for me.

I became very frustrated when I read the selections for this week from the lectionary, I didn’t like any of them because it seemed to me that while the writers were extoling the blessings Jesus brought and our responsibility to love and serve Jesus -- at some point they also apparently felt obligated to reinforce their particular cultural belief that these blessings were ONLY for those who claimed Jesus as their Lord and savior – and most certainly not for any outside that limit.

I cannot preach this as God’s word because I do not believe it. It is an important piece of history about how Christianity began but it is NOT Good News at this point. God’s love is for everyone and always has been, human opinion aside.

So I decided to look outside the standard scriptures to find readings that teach what I believe to be true, and I was reminded that there are readings galore that do teach Good News. Many of these readings are not found in that collection of writings we call the Bible.

Many of the writers I particularly find spiritually helpful were not writing 2000 years ago but rather, within the last fifty years or so – like the piece we opened with today, written by Rachel Held Evans – a young woman who wrote about her awakening to an opening and welcoming Jesus instead of the teachings of the fundamentalist church in which she had been raised. Before her tragic and far too early death, she was one of the people I turned to to find a gospel for this world we live in – not a world from 2000 years ago. There is a world of writing out there today that connects me to Jesus far more than much of the bible.

I’m not talking here about strictly well written ideas – although that certainly matters. I’m talking about writing that stops you in your tracks, makes you go “whoa!” -- and forces you to recognize that you just read something really important – something that can almost bring you to tears with its beauty and simplicity and its insistence that you stop and pay attention.

If we spend all our time on the usual biblical teachings then we often find ourselves caught up in racist and misogynistic and classist ideas that may have been seen as perfectly acceptable in bible days but are no longer acceptable to us today. After all, what good is a church filled with folks who call themselves followers of Jesus but spend all their time squabbling over “rules” from a misogynistic culture from long ago instead of dealing with an actual present day issue as painful as the preventable deaths of thousands of children?

Misogyny is so commonplace in scripture that every woman who studies her bible knows to expect it and to automatically edit it out as they go along, but much of the bible is still sickening to read with its acceptance of gross violence against women as “normal,” for instance. Evans’ question forces us to see the idiocy in dwelling on such ridiculous questions instead of focusing on healing God’s beloved children.

Along with Evans I’ve pulled three other writers who are favorites of mine and who often force me to stop and ask questions I hadn’t considered before. These sources were chosen more or less at random. There are dozens more out there.

“Story is the umbilical cord that connects us to the past, present, and future. Family. Story is a relationship between the teller and the listener, a responsibility. . . . Story is an affirmation of our ties to one another.”
― Terry Tempest Williams, Pieces of White Shell

TTW is a naturalist whose writing stretches far beyond rocks and trees into all creation – God’s creation – where we learn as much of God’s greatness as we do natural history. She makes us aware that if the stories of faith we choose to tell – the ones we consider important -- are all from the Bible, then most of our connections are to the past and to people long gone. Terry Tempest Williams calls us to question where we go to find the stories of today.

The next quote, from Annie Dillard, has been part of my inner life since I first read it, probably somewhere around 1988 or so. It is from a book titled, Teaching a Stone to Talk, which I re-read at least once a year and every year I am gob-smacked anew. Every year.

“On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews . For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return. ”
― Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk

With this quote Dillard reminds us to check ourselves to see if we are taking our relationship with God for granted. Have we become lazy in our relationship with God? There is so much more to following Jesus than simply showing up in church every Sunday. There is power here. Are we even aware of it?

The final quote for today is from Rob Bell:

“Times change. God doesn’t, but times do. We learn and grow, and the world around us shifts, and the Christian faith is alive only when it is listening, morphing, innovating, letting go of whatever has gotten in the way of Jesus and embracing whatever will help us be more and more the people God wants us to be.”
“Jesus is bigger than any one religion. He didn't come to start a new religion, and he continually disrupted whatever conventions or systems or establishments that existed in his day. He will always transcend whatever cages and labels are created to contain and name him, especially the one called "Christianity.”
― Rob Bell, Velvet Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith

Times change and if we are still only looking to one source of information we are unlikely to grow and change, even when God calls us to change – to reach out in new paths – to seek new ways to be – new voices calling us to hear God’s desires for us.

There are so many wonderful voices pointing us in new directions and bringing new understanding to the old. -- helping us to see past the old limitations and share our faith with our limit-less God. Perhaps we could spend more time studying them to see what they have to teach us?

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THE CHILDREN OF GOD

5/5/2024

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1 John 5:1-3 Living Bible (abridged)

If you believe that Jesus is the Christ—that he is God’s Son—God’s message of love to the world—then you are a child of God. And all who love a parent love their children too. So you can find out how much you love God’s children—your brothers and sisters in the Lord—by how much you love and listen to God. Loving God means doing what we are told to do, and really, that isn’t that hard at all-–simply love one another.

Before we get too deeply into what this reading tells us, I want to give a brief over-view of who and when. First John is the first of three letters traditionally attributed to John the Apostle. The three letters, the fourth gospel, and the book of Revelation, are jointly referred to as the Johannine writings.

It was accepted for hundreds of years that these were all written by the same person – John, Son of Zebedee, one of the original disciples. That is no longer the majority view, but it is believed that they all came out of the same Johannine community, as they share a language style and a similar point of view.

The three letters, however, have been, in recent years, accepted as having been written by one single author, but most likely not the Apostle John. They, along with a handful of others, such as the letters of James, Jude, and Peter are often referred to as the catholic letters (catholic here not referring to the Catholic church but used in the small-‘c’ sense of universal or general) because these letters were written to the Christian community at large, not addressed to a specific localized community as were Paul’s letters.

That was probably way more than you really wanted to hear on the Letters of John, but I do believe that when we are working from scripture, it is important to know who wrote it, and when, where, and why they wrote it—and maybe most important, to whom was it written? We can’t really understand scripture without at least some idea of these answers.

The various Johannine writings stand out from the other writings of their time because of their Christology. A “Low Christology”, such as in the synoptic Gospels, emphasizes Jesus’ humanity—he is “one of us” through whom God works and teaches. These writings tend to emphasize what Jesus said and what he did.

A “High Christology” on the other hand, emphasizes Jesus’ divine nature and his equal status with the Father. The various John writings tell a story of who Jesus was (and is)—not what he said and did. I’m not going into all that here today except as a reminder this is one of the reasons that this letter just feels different from other New Testament letters.

Another difference to be found in this first letter of John lies in the author’s insistent reminders that we are loved, and that we are here to love.

The reading with which we began today, from First John Chapter 5, is relatively simple and short – just 3 brief verses – yet the word love/loving appears seven times in this one short paragraph. Love is the central point of our relationship with God.

After I had almost finished putting this message together, I purely accidentally stumbled on a sermon I’d written back in 2018 that also covered First John. I ended up rewriting a large chunk of this message just to include what I was reminded of by that earlier sermon.

‘Love’ pops up a lot in all the “John” writings, whether the gospel or the three letters. As I mentioned earlier, they most likely all came from within the same community of believers so it’s not unusual that they focus on similar themes.

That community was apparently in the midst of some internal turmoil, because the writer is at pains to insist that the folks there are still obligated to love each other – turmoil or no turmoil. And the writer, whoever he or she is, continues to remind us we do not love because the people around us are all so loveable and agreeable – we love because God first loves us.

When we take up permanent residence in a life of love, we live in God and God lives in us. This way, love has the run of the house, becomes at home and mature in us, so that we’re free of worry.

We are loved, and we don’t need to worry that God is going to become something God isn’t just because we have trouble sometimes believing in God's reality. We are loved and there is nothing we can do about it. Every sunset and moonrise, every newborn’s first smile, every flower that insists on growing up through a slab of concrete, every unexpected smile from a stranger, every sunrise, every rainbow – each one tells us that we are loved.

When we are loved, we are allowed to love others in return. Not just the ones who are already easy to love but the often broken, messy others who – like us – are the beloved creation of a God who is love.

Just remember the message of today’s reading because it applies to us as much as it did to those who first heard it hundreds of years ago:

Loving God means doing what we are told to do, and really, that isn’t that hard at all – just accept that you are loved, and then, love one another.

We exist to love—love and be loved. First we were loved, so now we love.

Thanks be to God.

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A LIVING PEOPLE AND OUR LIVING GOD

PENTECOST DAY

NOT FOUND IN SCRIPTURE

THE CHILDREN OF GOD

Rev. Cherie Marckx

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