Blog Archives

THE SPIRIT IS CALLING US

6/28/2020

John 14:15-17
[Jesus said:] "If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever. This is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, because he abides with you, and he will be in you...I will not leave you orphaned; I am coming to you. In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me; because I live, you also will live.

This is obviously Jesus beginning to say good-bye to his followers. The meal on the night that Jesus would be betrayed and arrested, which is a matter of only a few paragraphs in the various synoptic gospels is a matter of several chapters in John’s gospel. In the middle of that long teaching is this small paragraph in which Jesus introduces the idea of his going away, but sending the Holy Spirit to take his place here among us.

The word used for the Spirit is variously translated as Helper, Comforter, and Advocate. It is the One who will help the Jesus-people as they struggle to not only find their way in the world without Jesus right there to lead them, but as they seek to continue Jesus’ work without him present at their side.

Yes, Jesus is leaving them, but he will not leave them orphaned and alone. Though he will not be with them in his human form, he will still be with them in the Spirit. By the time the writer of John’s gospel is writing this story, he already knows what happened. He knows the work the Spirit would do among the disciples.

But on that day, no one knew. They couldn't wrap their minds around the idea that Jesus would ever leave them, and they are as frightened as children, abandoned by their only safety and security.

So what is it Jesus asks them to do for him? All the long pages in John’s gospel generally boil down to this: to follow his commandments, which are all about loving each other. But it is not that he is asking them to do something new for him. It is more as if he is simply stating an obvious fact: If you love me (as you say you do) then you will love each other and all these others that I have also loved. And you will act accordingly. [They can’t reasonably do anything else.] And I will send my Spirit to be with you and in you so that you can see your way clearly to do this.

With Jesus’ coming death, which, again, only he is ready to acknowledge, the disciples are going to be tossed into a maelstrom of change. While hurt and grieving they are going to be expected to get back up and start straight out into the world, carrying out Jesus’ work. Without the Spirit in them they would be hopelessly unable to think or to move. But if they trust Jesus, and trust his promise of a Helper, they will find themselves able to do this.

While doing my reading for this study I discovered this gem of understanding from theologian Dianne Bergant, in which she says Spirit acting in our lives "enables us to interpret the signs of the times in ways very different from the ways of the world. It is the Spirit who works through us for the transformation of the world." The disciples were to be sent out on a mission of nothing less than transforming the world.

Our world is, I believe, in another such time of transformation. Those who have been silent are finally speaking out and saying “NO” to bigotry and violence. Those who have been taught to sell their lives for the money-makers’ gains are saying “NO” to the idea that their lives have no value in and of and for themselves. We are saying “NO” to the idea of destroying our planet for some nebulous idea of ‘progress.’

Many things are coming together at once and I don’t believe it is happening accidently. This is a time of change—and I believe the Spirit is leading us into and through this time. This is our work, just as was the work of the earliest disciples. A work to claim human dignity for all God’s children, everywhere. A time to say that we value all God’s creation – not just some group of “special” people somewhere.

The Spirit is nudging us out of our comfort zones and moving us out into the world to reclaim it for God. As long as I am quoting people, let me include another favorite, sometimes attributed to Mother Teresa, but actually from actor/politician Richard Attenborough: "There is a LIGHT in this world. A healing Spirit more powerful than any darkness we may encounter. We sometime lose sight of this force when there is suffering, and too much pain. Then suddenly, the Spirit will emerge through the lives of ordinary people who hear a call and answer in extraordinary ways."

It is time for us to pray and listen for the voice of the Spirit leading us, and --like the disciples—time for us to follow and answer and act.

0 Comments

TWO FOR A PENNY

6/21/2020

0 Comments

Matthew 10:29-31
Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground outside your Father’s care. And even the very hairs of your head are all numbered. So don’t be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows.

This reading is all about us, but we may not understand that until we put it into a context that would have made sense to Jesus’ first century hearers. To appreciate this reading we have to first understand the concept of substitutionary sacrifice—the ancient Hebrew concept that only blood could atone for sin. By Jesus’ day this had (thankfully) long-ago evolved from human sacrifice to the practice of bringing animals to the temple to be sacrificed in our place for our sins.

The rich could afford to offer large, showy animals—a calf or a sheep or, for the truly wealthy, even a bull, but as people went down the economic scale their offerings grew smaller and smaller. For the poorest of the poor, a pair of tiny, common sparrows was all they could afford. The well-off would have looked on such an insignificant offering with scorn.

But here is Jesus telling us that God, who created them, loves and cares for even those insignificant sparrows and knows their every feather. That is how intimately God knows them. And what’s even more astonishing, God knows us just as well, down to the last hair on our heads, and cares even more for each one of us—no matter how insignificant the world may think us. “Don’t be afraid. You are worth more than many sparrows.”

This short but important teaching comes in the middle of a much longer story. It begins when Jesus was going around the area healing people and preaching the Good News, and as it says a little earlier in Matthew: When he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. Then he said to his disciples, “The harvest is plentiful but the workers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field.” These harassed and helpless sheep needed, and deserved, help.

So almost immediately after that, Jesus called his followers together and he sent them out into the world to tell others about him and about his message. He warned them they will be threatened and bullied and harassed along the way by those who don’t want to hear the good news, those who don’t want their comfortable lives to change, those who enjoy their feelings of superiority or positions of power over others.

It is here that today’s reading comes into this longer story and the disciples are told how much they are loved and valued by the One who has numbered every hair on their heads. Jesus tells them, he, too, is going to be threatened and harmed, so it may well happen to them, but they are not to worry, because they are held in God’s love.

Then scripture goes on to say “Anyone who welcomes you welcomes me, and anyone who welcomes me welcomes the One who sent me. [In other words – you’ve got the big guns on your side.] Whoever welcomes a prophet as a prophet will receive a prophet’s reward, and whoever welcomes a righteous person as a righteous person will receive a righteous person’s reward.” So don’t be afraid. You are known and you are loved.

We are called to be in the world sharing the Good News, not just meeting in our churches and singing hymns (not that we can do that right now, anyway.)

We are called to be in the world – not knocking on doors or passing out tracts on the street corner – but caring for each other and recognizing that “each other” is so much more than those who look and sound like us. “Each other” includes all those we might formerly have never taken notice of.... the hungry, the dirty, the unhoused, the annoying, the angry, the jealous, the weeping, the lonely, the rich and the poor. As writer Brennan Manning once put it, "Jesus had no romantic notion of the cost of discipleship. He knew that following Him was as unsentimental as duty, as demanding as love."

“The harvest is plentiful but the workers are few.”

0 Comments

TEACHING, LEARNING, GROWING

6/14/2020

0 Comments

Micah 4:1-4
In days to come the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established as the highest of the mountains, and shall be raised up above the hills. Peoples shall stream to it, and many nations shall come and say: “Let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob; that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths.”
For out of Zion shall go forth instruction, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. He shall judge between many peoples, and shall arbitrate between strong nations far away; they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more; but they shall all sit under their own vines and their own fig trees, and no one shall make them afraid; for the mouth of the Lord of hosts has spoken.

This is a scripture about teaching and about learning. In Micah’s vision the “mountain of the Lord’s house” has been raised up and people are coming there from all over in order to be taught – taught the ways of God and how to live in God’s ways.

And the end result of this teaching is that the people learn to “beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore; but they shall all sit under their own vines and their own fig trees, and no one shall make them afraid.” Perhaps it’s time for us to acknowledge that we really do not know enough and that we, too, need to stop and learn from God.

Those of us especially who are white and middle-class are waking up to the fact that what we have long considered “normal” has not been normal for a whole lot of people for a whole long time. It has taken some of us a long time to wake up, and some of us are still denying it. But it has in recent weeks become a national scandal and we can’t pretend to not see it anymore. A huge number of our brothers and sisters DO live in fear and an absence of peace because we have not been listening or learning.

Somewhere along the way the idea of a straight, able, white, European culture has become our baseline “normal” and anyone else has to seek our permission to gain entry. Probably, we personally haven’t done this but by our silence we have allowed it to go on. African-Americans have been most prominently in the news recently, but Hispanics, all those we ignorantly lump together as Asians, and—most ironically—Native Americans, who were here long before the rest of us, have struggled for generations to be recognized as part of this country. June is Pride Month, reminding us once again that our LGBTQ+ kin are in many ways still struggling to exist. Trans people in particular right now are going to be seriously injured by recent actions from Washington. And people of differing abilities have long had to fight just to be seen—and not invisible to the world at large.

How did we go so wrong? How did we get so far from the Old Testament vision of a just and peaceful, shared world? And how did we get to the point where we who claim to follow Jesus can allow anyone to discard those who doesn’t look like them or act like them? When did we begin to look at the lives of some parts of God’s “it is good” creation as not having any value—as things to be casually used up and tossed away or ignored? As it has been pointed out a lot recently, for many, even the dark-skinned near-eastern Jesus would be outcast.

It is time for us to humble ourselves, ask pardon if we have been any part of this, and submit ourselves for some teaching—first, from the Word of God--we do have an entire book about this after all--and then from those who have been trying to wake us up for so very long. This is our task as Christians. To be an active part of building that world where “all can sit under their own vines and their own fig trees, and no one can make them afraid.” This is our work.

Jesus’ teachings all point to this. He could not have been any more clear: Love one another as I have loved you. Period. Loving that way is going to require some honest effort from us all. Prayer and an heartfelt desire to learn and change the way things are.

May God who loves us all, teach us, and may we learn. Amen.

0 Comments

RESTORING WHAT ONCE WAS WHOLE

6/7/2020

0 Comments

This has been a rough week for us all – a rough week for our country. We’ve seem sights we’d hoped never to see and had some cherished illusions challenged. We’ve been both uplifted and horrified by what we have witnessed as we have finally been forced to admit to the sin of racism that has poisoned us for too long. It is clear that changes are needed – have been needed for a long, long time now – and with God’s help they will come to be.

The night before I wrote this, I came upon this quote from Bishop TD Jakes: "There are two things that we're looking at here. One of them is racism, which is a condition of the heart. And the other one is injustice, which is a result of an imbalance of power. And we have to work on both of them."

We really have to work on both of them...

I'm using two readings here to show us how ancient this sin is, in the hope that if we listen well, they might help us find our way to a path of equal justice.

Genesis 1:1 - 2:4 (please read the whole scripture for yourself...)
This scripture is much too long to print out here, but please do refresh your memory and read it all. It is the story of Creation. The six days of making and the one day of resting. It is a story that makes it absolutely clear that all that is—sky, sun, oceans, mountains, birds, giraffes--even humans—all were created in love and seen by our Creator as GOOD. At the end of each day, scripture says, God looked at that day’s work and saw that it was good. That’s the important point here. All creation is GOOD. There is no suggestion that there is any hierarchy of value here—no sign that any one part is better than or more important than any other. God looked at it and saw that it was GOOD. All of it.

2 Corinthians 13:11-12
This second reading is from the ending of St. Paul’s 2nd Letter to the people of Corinth, in Greece. It is part of his closing message...
Finally, brothers and sisters, farewell. Put things in order, listen to my appeal, agree with one another, live in peace; and the God of love and peace will be with you.

If you recall from when we studied Paul’s letters, that particular community in Corinth was Paul’s first success, and he holds them very dear to his heart; but he is angry with them right now because they are constantly fighting among themselves. 1st Corinthians was also about Paul being angry with them – the Corinthians seemed to have trouble holding it together. Some people could say the same about us today.

Anyway, Paul hasn’t been back to visit for a long time, and in his absence false teachers have come along and tried to hijack his converts with, unfortunately, some success.

Paul, of course, taught them that Jesus had come to do a new thing, to teach a new way of living together as God’s people—a way that fully includes everyone, even Gentiles, non-Jews. These false teachers claim that righteous living is only possible if the new Christians lead a completely Jewish life—converting to Judaism before they can ever be called Christians – making it harder for the Gentiles, like the Greeks, to be part of the Jesus followers.

This challenge to what Paul taught them has divided them, with those who follow the false teachers claiming to hold the right view as taught in the Hebrew scriptures and that, of course, it follows that their's is the morally superior path, while those who remained true to Paul, believed, as Paul taught them, that all are equal in Jesus. They were a community badly divided among themselves because they could not or would not recognize each other as brothers and sisters--equals in God’s eyes. (This is the familiar-sounding part.)

We know from the Creation story that we are all created as God’s own beautiful children, and in God’s sight we are all good. So how is it that we too often fight among ourselves? How is it we sometimes see ourselves as better than others? Or others as somehow less than ourselves? It’s an old, old struggle, obviously, from Paul’s Corinth to here in our world today.

Unfortunately, too many of us have lived inside this web of "otherness" so long that we don't even see it. I've noticed, in on-line stories or on the news, whenever someone has been caught doing something egregiously racist, the first words out of their mouths are always, "I'm not a racist. This isn't who I am." How do we learn to see each other as brothers and sisters? Really see that – not just say the words, but really believe it? It is long past time to see how our actions and our words divide and hurt and destroy the unity God created at the beginning.

How can we claim to be believers when we so casually ignore Jesus' command that we should "Love one another has I have loved you," or Paul's admonition to "agree with one another, live in peace; so that the God of love and peace will be with you." And, having come as far from thse teachings as we have, how do we now heal all the ancient hurts?

The meta answer has long been right in front of us, given us by the prophet Micah ... and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?

Easy to say. It should not be so hard to do. And yet we make it hard every day, generation upon generation. We work so hard to separate ourselves. We've spent most of our human existence creating categories by which we can separate, judge, hate, and exercise power over each other - sex, race, gender, place of origin, religious belief, abilities. Is it possible that we could work as hard to break the chain of arrogance and fear and hatred that continually binds us to conflict and hurt as we work to build those chains? Can we work hard enough to come back into that unity into which we were created -- the one where God looked at all of us and pronounced "It is very good"?

Lord, heal us--guide us--teach us. Correct us when we’re wrong and strengthen us when we’re right.

Amen.

0 Comments

THE SPIRIT IS CALLING US

TWO FOR A PENNY

TEACHING, LEARNING, GROWING

RESTORING WHAT ONCE WAS WHOLE

Rev. Cherie Marckx

Archives