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POURING OUT BLESSINGS

6/25/2023

2 Corinthians 9:8-9

God can pour out blessings in astonishing ways so that you’re ready for anything and everything, more than just ready to do what needs to be done.

God’s right-living, right-giving ways never run out, never wear out.

Way back in the long-ago times when humans were first gathering into what we call early civilization, we recognized that sometimes things went well, and sometimes they didn’t, and we also recognized that we didn’t have much control over that and so gods came into our lives.

There were gods for everything – and when things went well for us, we credited it to the gods and thanked them – and when things went badly for us, we put the blame on the gods. Then later down the historical road, we switched up that second part a bit. The gods still created whatever disaster had befallen us, but now it was all our fault. We had done something terrible and the gods had been forced to punish us.

This was how the world was viewed in the Late Bronze/Early Iron age in which the earliest biblical stories are set. In the millennia since the beginnings of the Judeo-Christian worldview a lot of things have changed in how we Judeo-Christian humans see the world.

We’ve gone from multiple gods to one God, and we, mostly, no longer blame God for earthquakes and tornados. You’ll notice I qualified that last statement as “mostly”. There are, unfortunately, still many who call themselves Christians, who are quite ready to blame such catastrophic events on God – but only because we have somehow angered God with our bad behavior and disobedience and God is therefore required to punish us.

Have you ever been told that God is a loving God – but then – in the same discussion – been told that God has given us rules that absolutely must be obeyed or else? -- that ‘or else’ generally involving some form of punishment? Even as a child, hearing those bible stories, I recognized the punishment was usually all out of proportion to the supposed sin, and it all left me with a very confused idea of the God who supposedly loves me.

Over the years I have gradually eliminated any tolerance for teachings that choose to depict God as an abusive parent. I do not believe God is an abusive parent. Period.

There are scripture stories that depict God as drowning an entire civilization, or ordering babies to be killed in brutal ways, or lashing out in anger when one of God’s most devoted servants accidentally transgressed a rule while trying to save something created for God.

Just take a minute to think about Noah’s Ark – and notice that we call it “Noah’s Ark” when we teach it in Sunday School, not “The Great Flood.” Noah’s Ark sounds all cute and cuddly – all those little animals – but in reality it is a horror story in which God is depicted as little better than a toddler having a temper tantrum and destroying a large part of the world because he’s mad. Where is the love in that?

Stories like these tell us less about God than they tell us about ourselves. These are stories where the writers seem to have created God in their image, with all their pettiness and their hunger for power.

The are more examples of a loving God in scripture than there are of the abusive parent variety. The writer of First John, for instance, wrote this:

Let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God... Dear friends, since God so loves us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.

That pretty much says it. This particular bit comes out of the 1st Letter of John, chapter 4. I suggest you read the whole chapter. It’s pretty good. There is a whole lot of love to be found there.

If you want to see God’s love made real in this world, just stop for a moment and actually see the world around you. Watch a sunset or sunrise. Look deeply into a flower and see how carefully it is formed. Watch children playing and laughing together. Observe how complete strangers can come together to help each other after an accident or a larger disaster. Find an opportunity to serve food to hungry people. I could go on and on.

Before we finish here I want o go back to the reading with which we began this message. It comes form Paul’s 2nd letter to the Church at Corinth:

God can pour out blessings in astonishing ways so that you’re ready for anything and everything, more than just ready to do what needs to be done.....God’s right-living, right-giving ways never run out, never wear out. (2 Cor 9:8-9)

God can pour out blessings – I love the sound of that.

God loves us – that’s the base of it all.

May God pour out blessings.....

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LORD OF THE HARVEST

6/18/2023

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Matthew 9:35—10:1, 5-8

Jesus went through all the towns and villages, teaching in their synagogues, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and healing every disease and sickness. 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.”

Jesus called his twelve disciples to him and gave them authority to drive out impure spirits and to heal every disease and sickness.

Jesus sent out the twelve with the following instructions: “Do not go among the Gentiles or enter any town of the Samaritans. Go rather to the lost sheep of Israel. As you go, proclaim this message: ‘The kingdom of heaven has come near.’ Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse those who have leprosy, drive out demons. Freely you have received; freely give.

What, actually, is a disciple? The dictionary definition of “disciple” is pretty generic, and goes like this: A person who believes in the ideas and principles of someone famous and tries to live the way that person does or did.

In the more recent past, those who were followed might have been movie stars, or financial wizards who could show you how to become rich in just one month, or strange cult leaders who would lead you to enlightenment. In these days of omnipresent social media we have the interesting phenomenon of “Influencers” – people who have hundreds of followers who want to dress like them, or decorate their homes like them, or just live like them. Folks who try to imitate them, and emulate their lifestyles, to make them their own.

But we are here in church, so it is fairly obvious that we are interested in disciples in the biblical sense – those who lived with Jesus and were taught by him and who followed him – both figuratively, and literally.

When I wanted to find a way to describe Jesus’ disciples, I – of course – went to my default expert on people and things in scripture, Frederick Buechner – a writer who showed us both a person’s theological standing and their simple humanity.

[He tells us] There is no evidence that Jesus chose the first disciples because they were brighter or nicer than other people. In fact the New Testament record suggests that they were continually missing the point, jockeying for position, and, when the chips were down, interested in nothing so much as saving their own skins. Their sole qualification seems to have been their initial willingness to rise to their feet when Jesus said, "Follow me." As Saint Paul would put it later, "God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise, God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong."

In the tenth chapter of his gospel account, Matthew names the disciples that Jesus first sent out “into the harvest field”: First Simon Peter and his brother Andrew; James and John, the sons of Zebedee; Philip and Bartholomew; Thomas, and Matthew the tax collector; a second James, this one designated as the son of Alphaeus, and Thaddaeus; Simon the Zealot; and finally, Judas Iscariot, who betrayed him.

About as ordinary (for their time and place) a group of people as you could hope to find: Peter and Andrew were fisherfolk; James and John were fishers too; Matthew was a tax collector, of all things; Simon the Zealot was a member of a revolutionary sect trying to incite rebellion against the Roman empire (Jesus was not the only revolutionary in the group); and then, of course, there was Judas who would betray him to his death. None of them being rich and famous, none having a shred of earthly power.

Returning to Buechner:

When Jesus sent the twelve out into the world, his instructions were simple. He told them to preach the Kingdom of God and to heal the sick and wounded, with the implication that to do either of these properly, was in effect to do both. Fortunately for the world in general and the church in particular, the ability to do them is not dependent on either moral character or IQ. What they were told to do was to do these things in the name of Christ, and not by their own wisdom and power.

This should be a great comfort to us. Why? Because we are called as well -- called to do many of the same sorts of things – and I don’t know how you feel about your own skills, but I can, as Buechner put it, ”miss the point” right up there with the best of them.

Most of us are no more capable of performing these miracles alone than were any of the long-ago twelve. I’m comfortable enough with the things I know—I can preach and I can teach, I can comfort, and I can feed the hungry—at least some of them—and I can help to clothe the naked. Those things fit comfortably enough in my world.

But to go further than that requires a ton of grace. It would require that I step aside and trust God to be there to work through me. That must be how the disciples felt when Jesus sent them out to do impossible things.

And they did them. They did impossible things--and more. And with faith and love and trust in God’s word, we could do impossible things, too, if those things were in God’s will for us.

With love and faith and trust in God’s word to us we can speak the truth and comfort the grieving and we can change the world for somebody somewhere. Thanks be to God.

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FOLLOW ME

6/11/2023

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Matthew 9:9

As Jesus was walking along, he saw a man called Matthew sitting at the tax booth; and he said to him, "Follow me." And he got up and followed him.

Think about it – is there any place in the scriptures that tell us about the life of Jesus here among us where he tells those who follow him to “worship me?” Instead, what does Jesus actually tell them to do?

“Follow me...walk my path”

How did we get from walking long dusty miles with an itinerate Jewish preacher, listening to his deceptively simple teaching stories and feeling compelled by our own hearts to keep on walking and listening – how did we get from that to sitting in a building one day each week, singing songs of praise to a wonder-working God, listening to readings from the “holy book,” and reciting written prayers? Where did we get the idea that this is what we are called to do?

“Follow me...?”

I have a lot of questions in this message today and I don’t have too many ready answers, so maybe we can think about them together.

Regarding my first few questions, the entirely human Jesus we meet in the three synoptic gospels is a very different person from the Christ we find in John’s gospel and the various letters that were composed and circulated years after Jesus’ life here. I find it easy to picture Jesus, the itinerate Jew, as firmly anchored to the earth he walks upon, laughing and occasionally joking with those around him, lending a hand with the fishing, just like those he calls to walk with him.

The Christ of Christianity’s later years, however, appears to be always at a slight remove, somehow shining in his spotless white robes. It is hard to imagine him ever sweating. He has become divorced from this earthly setting that we inhabit and is now a majestic entity residing in the heavens.

Before going any further I want to be clear that I am not against worship, nor singing hymns, not any or that. I am a church minister, after all. I am simply curious about how we got from there to here.

I was set off on this train of thought by a meme that was floating around the internet a few weeks ago. It’s a quote from Robin R. Meyers, writing in his book, Saving Jesus from the Church. In a passage where he had been referring to the Sermon on the Mount, he writes:

Consider this: there is not a single word in the Sermon on the Mount about what to believe, only words about what to do. It is a behavioral manifesto, not a propositional one. Yet three centuries later, when the Nicene Creed became the official oath of Christendom, there was not a single word in it about what to do, only words about what to believe!

Jesus, the wandering Jewish sage, followed the Old Testament prophets in recognizing that our deeds do not always match the words and actions we claim. It is our actions, more than our words. that best announce who we truly are.

The teachings Jesus brought us were about empowering the powerless, caring for the poor, building and demanding justice where in-justice was the norm. His words and his actions were about lifting up those who tend to be bullied by the world at large, and building a new world of caring and justice for all God’s people – these were the things that God desires from us.

Jesus’ teaching was filled with action verbs – Go, Do, Feed, Care – and, yes, believe in and honor God and follow God’s laws. And yet, in the first two or three hundred years after the death of the human Jesus, the church that rose around his memory was much more concerned with gaining its place in heaven. The early creeds rarely, if ever, speak about justice and appear to focus on following the rules that will earn us eternal life.

The biggest shift we find after those few hundred years is that the church was well on its way to becoming a seat of worldly power – a movement that always requires accommodation of the world’s ways. The human person who walked all those dusty miles in order to share his stories no longer fits here. Instead, he is replaced by the shining and glorious Son of God, radiant on his throne.

I’ve been reading Robin Meyers’ book, the one the quote about the Sermon on the Mount came from, and a little further on there is another line that snagged my thoughts:

Before there were bishops lounging at the table of power, there were ordinary fishermen who forsook ordinary lives to follow an itinerant sage down a path that was not obvious, sensible, or safe. He might as well have said, “Come die with me.”

As I said at the beginning here, I have lots of questions today and few hard and fast answers -- so I’m not saying any part of this is right or wrong, but, do we ever ask ourselves how we got from there to here, and if anything of importance might have been lost along the way?

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HOW DO WE KNOW THE SPIRIT?

6/4/2023

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1 Corinthians 2:11-16

Who knows what you’re thinking and planning except you yourself? The same with God—except that God not only knows what they’re thinking, but lets us in on it as well. God offers a full report on the gifts of life and salvation that are given us. We don’t have to rely on the world’s guesses and opinions. We didn’t learn this by reading books or going to school; we learned it from God, who taught us person-to-person through Jesus, and we’re passing it on to you in the same firsthand, personal way.

The unspiritual self, just as it is by nature, can’t receive the gifts of God’s Spirit. There’s no capacity for them. They seem like so much silliness. Spirit can be known only by spirit—God’s Spirit and our spirits in open communion. Spiritually alive, we have access to everything God’s Spirit is doing, and can’t be judged by unspiritual critics. Isaiah’s question, “Is there anyone around who knows God’s Spirit, anyone who knows what Spirit is doing?” has been answered: Christ knows, and we have Christ’s Spirit.

Last week we talked about the coming of the Holy Spirit among the Jesus followers left behind here after Jesus’ return to heaven, how that presence happened, and how it affected their lives from then on. I read somewhere that there were perhaps 120 disciples gathered in Jerusalem after the Ascension—I don’t know where that figure came from--but 120 is certainly not a large crowd to base a world-changing movement on.

The day after Pentecost, they were still the same people they had been before—nothing had changed externally. The difference lay in the fact that they shared a deep conviction that something momentous had changed in their world and in themselves. And they began to live differently.

As described in the Book of Acts:

All the believers lived in a wonderful harmony, holding everything in common. They sold whatever they owned and pooled their resources so that each person’s need was met.
They followed a daily discipline of worship in the Temple followed by meals at home, every meal a celebration, exuberant and joyful, as they praised God. People in general liked what they saw. Every day their number grew as God added to those who were saved. (Acts 2:44-47)

They continued to worship in the temple as they had always done, but now they shared everything. What really changed was that they lived and acted in true community, in one Spirit.

The reading with which we began today comes, not from Acts, but from 1 Corinthians – Paul’s first letter to the church he had gathered and founded in the city of Corinth in southern Greece, around the year 50—fifteen to twenty years after the death of Jesus, and this letter was written several years after the formation of this Christ-community—say, 25 years. Though we call it First Corinthians it actually is not the first letter Paul sent to them—it is the first we have available to us today. This letter refers to a previous letter but that one has been lost to history.

Paul hasn’t visited here for at the very least two years and now he is hearing that there are divisions appearing among them—divisions as to who they “belong to” with claims that one belongs to Paul, another to Apollos, even some claiming directly that they belong to Christ. Another division exists between the rich and everyone else.

But the one we are addressing today concerns the spiritual gifts and which ones are more “valuable” than others. Apparently, the more “showy” gifts such as speaking in tongues gain more respect than the simpler gifts, such as hospitality or caring for the sick.

When it comes to the Spiritual gifts, we don’t have to argue or make guesses as to which matter the most. They all matter, because they are given to each of us by the Spirit—and who are we to call the Spirit wrong?

Quoting again from our scripture reading, we hear Paul reminding us that:

God offers a full report on the gifts of life and salvation that are given us. We don’t have to rely on the world’s guesses and opinions. We didn’t learn this by reading books or going to school; we learned it from God, who taught us person-to-person through Jesus, and we’re passing it on to you in the same firsthand, personal way.

In times long past, God spoke to the people through dreams, casting lots and reading omens.. Later God spoke through the leadership in the Temple and through the prophets. Then, for one human lifespan, God spoke to us through Jesus, himself.

Now, God’s own Spirit speaks to us directly, to the Spirit which resides within each of us—no intermediary is needed, God’s Spirit and our spirits in open communion, as Paul puts it.

Spirit is with us—always with us—always guiding and teaching us. The problem here is that we humans can be remarkably oblivious when it comes to the Spirit’s leading. I know from my own experience that I do hear the Spirit’s leading, but more often than not I recognize it long after the fact. Sometimes years later I will look back and be surprised to find that what I thought at the time was an accident or a random choice was the Spirit, all along.

Sometimes we try to argue—“Who me? No, you must mean someone else.” Other times, we get it right away. We say, “Really? OK, thank you,” and go where the Spirit says ‘go.’

Spirit speaks to us through strangers, through children, through dreams, through casual remarks that just won’t let go, through other people’s wisdom, through chance encounters – any way that will reach us. So pay attention—listen. Pray, and listen. Spirit is speaking.

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POURING OUT BLESSINGS

LORD OF THE HARVEST

FOLLOW ME

HOW DO WE KNOW THE SPIRIT?

Rev. Cherie Marckx

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