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GOD'S WORDS

6/30/2024

Deuteronomy 11:18-21
“You shall put these words of mine in your heart and soul, and you shall bind them as a sign on your hand and fix them as an emblem on your forehead. Teach them to your children, talking about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise up. Write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates, so that your days and the days of your children may be multiplied in the land that the Lord swore to your ancestors to give them, as long as the heavens are above the earth.

For the past few weeks we have been talking about scripture, focusing particularly on the New Testament and stories about Jesus.

There hasn’t always been a written New Testament, of course, and yet how often do we remember to consider that when we are approaching a reading from scripture?

Although there are those who will tell you everything in the Bible comes directly from God’s mouth, straight to a scribe’s pen, the majority of modern scholars accept that the sagas, histories, and biographies that make up both the Old and New Testaments come from ordinary people sharing their best recollections of events they participated in personally, or at least witnessed.

In other words, all these books that make up the Bible, came from ordinary people, sharing what they deeply believed.

There were a number of years after Jesus’ death that all that people “knew” about Jesus came entirely from word of mouth – Jesus stories, shared and re-shared – some from people who had actually been there, many from people who “knew someone” who had been there, and probably a lot of “I heard from someone that someone told them...”

The first of the gospels to be written down, Mark’s, was written about 70 AD, a full 40 years after Jesus’ death. The earliest writing of any kind to be found in the New Testament, was Paul’s letter to the emergent church at Thessalonica -- written about 50 AD – 20 years after Jesus’s crucifixion. The last book, Second Peter, was written possibly as late as 150 AD. Therefore, the various books of the New Testament were written over a 100+ year interval – none of them within the generation that touched on Jesus’ actual life here on earth.

There were also several variations on what collection of books actually made up the New Testament – also known as the Christian Scriptures. When the early church Fathers were compiling the New Testament – somewhere in the very late 300’s -- it made sense to them that the writings specifically about Jesus should be first – since he was the reason for any of this – so the four gospels appear at the beginning of most NTs. And since the book of Revelation purports to be about the end times, it made equal sense to them that it should be placed at the close of this new compilation. And so it has remained ever since in most bibles.

Biblical Literalists, who believe every jot and tittle of the bible was divinely inspired in exactly the way the King James version – first published in 1611 -- presents them, would reject any attempt to re-order anything, but most modern seminaries and universities teach that the bible grew more organically over time from bits and pieces of memories, and eventually, from testimony.

Someone, I think it may have been Marcus Borg, once explained the difference between memory and testimony. Memory is the recollection and repetition of things someone has seen or heard for themselves. Testimony, on the other hand, is what one feels and believes based on the compounded statements and feelings of a community – in this case, the early church.

Much of the New Testament is written as if it is personal memory but it is actually testimony, based on the shared stories – told and re-told from memory -- stories about Jesus and about the church. Told in the most part by people who had never met Jesus in real life.

So what we have here is a collection of stories – some of them true memories, most of them communal version made up of a little of this and a little of that, written over a hundred and fifty year span by people living in different countries or provinces – and this is only the New Testament we’re talking about here, remember, and written in several languages – don’t forget the languages.

Frederick Buechner left us a wonderful example of how languages – particularly in translation – can change what we think we’re hearing or reading.

He uses the phrase “Blessed are the meek,” from the Sermon on the Mount. That of course is the English version. If we were to read this same line in a French translation it would, according to Buechner, read “Heureux sont les debonnaires,” (“Happy are the debonnaires.” ) That doesn’t sound much like ‘Blessed are the meek’ to me.

I only include this to show how little certainty there is in absolute historical accuracy any time we deal with old writings that have gone through many hands over a long span of time.

We end up judging them with our gut feelings as often as not. Does this sound like something the Jesus I think I’ve learned to love over the years would say? Would the Jesus who teaches and heals and feeds and comforts do or say such things? So we end up with our own best guess, the word of experts we trust, and the agreement of our community.

And love. We do our best, approaching each question with love, and we trust that love to get us through.

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SLEEPING IN THE BOAT

6/23/2024

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Mark 4:35-41
On that day, when evening had come, he said to them, “Let us go across to the other side.” And leaving the crowd behind, they took him with them in the boat, just as he was.

Other boats were with him. A great windstorm arose, and the waves beat into the boat, so that the boat was already being swamped. But he was in the stern, asleep on a cushion, and they woke him up and said to him, “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?” And waking up, he rebuked the wind and said to the sea, “Be silent! Be still!” Then the wind ceased, and there was a dead calm.

He said to them, “Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?” And they were filled with great fear and said to one another, “Who then is this man, that even the wind and the sea obey him?”

Recently we have been talking about scripture – where it comes from, who’s written what – and on and on.

Our reading for today is one of the many stories about Jesus that we find in the four gospels. In fact, if we stop and think about it, all that the know about Jesus comes from these stories. There is no historical record – just stories. This particular story can be found in three of the gospels.

The base, the core of the story is pretty much the same in all three. It’s the part that comes just before that core, and the parts that come after that teach us the most about Jesus, and who he is as a person. A real person -- and what we learn here in this story is that Jesus, like every one of us at one point or another is worn out and in dire need of a rest.

Driven by his “calling” from God as well as his own love for all of us, he has been dealing with a lot of people and their needs in the past few days. This particular day has been pretty much non-stop. The three gospels vary in these “before” stories but all three show us a busy and often besieged Jesus. He may be God’s Son, the Chosen one, but he is also a human being, and just like any of us he needs a couple of hours away from all the demands – he needs a nap, at least, if not a good night’s sleep.

In his book, Peculiar Treasures, Frederick Buechner gives us a list of people and events Jesus has dealt with just in this one day alone, taken from both Matthew’s gospel and Mark’s:

People had been flocking up to Jesus the way they always seemed to when word got around that he was in the neighborhood. A Roman officer came up to ask if he would do something for a paralyzed servant back home, and Jesus said he'd go have a look at him. When the officer said he hated to take that much of his time and asked if he couldn't just do something from right there where they were standing, Jesus was so impressed by the way the man trusted him that he told him he'd see to it that what he trusted would happen, would happen indeed, and when the officer got home, he found his servant up and around again. Later on, when Jesus dropped in at Peter's house, he found Peter's mother-in-law in bed with a fever, and all he did that time was touch the old lady's hand, but that turned out to be all it took.
A scribe showed up and in a burst of enthusiasm said he was all set to follow him any place he went, to which Jesus answered, "Foxes have holes, and birds have nests, but if you stick with me, you'll find yourself out in the cold" (Matthew 8:20). One of the disciples asked for a few days off to attend his father's funeral, and Jesus said, "Look, you've got to follow me. No time for funerals.” (Matthew 8:22).
When he saw a big crowd approaching, he figured he didn't have enough steam left to do much for them that day, so he went and climbed into a boat for a few hours' peace, only to find that the disciples were hot on his heels and wanted to go along too. So he took them. Then he lay down in the stern of the boat with a pillow under his head, and went to sleep.

He went to sleep ... for a few hours at least, only to be awakened by his panicking followers, crying that they were drowning, and Jesus, quite possibly still sleep deprived and sounding just a little bit cranky, snaps at the wind and the water to “Be silent! Be still!” and then the wind ceased, and there was a dead calm, leaving even those who thought they knew him best to say, “Who then is this man, that even the wind and the sea obey him?”

It isn’t the heavenly theology that draws us to Jesus – it’s the stories that show us his humanity. Hey, he gets tired and sometimes cranky just like us . . .

His calling is to touch as many hurting, frightened people as he can – to teach us how loved we are – to welcome everyone into God’s family and he mostly does it one human at a time. And we see him and welcome him as someone like us who meets us where we are -- wherever that is -- someone who understands us.

We think therefore that we understand him but we are still so often brought up short by the question, “Who then is this man, that even the wind and the sea obey him?” We have so very much yet to learn.

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BABY STEPS, Redux

6/16/2024

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Mark 4:26-34
Jesus said, "The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground, and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how. The earth produces of itself, first the stalk, then the head, then the full grain in the head. But when the grain is ripe, at once he goes in with his sickle, because the harvest has come."

He also said, "With what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable will we use for it? It is like a mustard seed, which, when sown upon the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on earth; yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes the greatest of all shrubs, and puts forth large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade."

With many such parables he spoke the word to them, as they were able to hear it; he did not speak to them except in parables, but he explained everything in private to his disciples.

[Before we get into today’s message I need to acknowledge that this is mostly a sermon I wrote and used several years ago. Because of my eye surgery this past week and follow-up appointments I’ve had neither the energy nor the bandwidth to create anything new, but then I stumbled on this oldie, which actually is the lectionary reading for today, and which has an interesting link to our recent on-going discussion of reading scripture from different cultures and across the centuries.]

This is a familiar story, one of the many times Jesus used an agricultural reference, because in his time and place these were references that everyone who heard him would understand. We today get the general idea from Jesus’ illustration, but it is somewhat puzzling for those of us who live in the western U.S. where mustard is either grown for its greens and harvested early or else is a weed, used as a field mulch, growing wild and spindly - certainly nothing that would support a bird’s nest.

Let's stop a moment and see the way The Message translation tells this story. It’s not a literal translation but it is one that makes sense of the story for western listeners (and it fits in nicely with what we’ve been discussing lately):

“How can we picture God’s kingdom? What kind of story can we use? It’s like a pine nut. When it lands on the ground it is quite small as seeds go, yet once it is planted it grows into a huge pine tree with thick branches. Eagles nest in it.”

Now, told this way, the story makes sense to us - we live surrounded by pine trees – and we eat pinoles (few things tastier than some lightly toasted pinoles scattered across a salad or a plate of pasta.) Told this way, the story gives us visual pictures to hold in our minds. This familiar little pine nut gives us this familiar huge tree. We get it. Living where they were, I suspect Jesus’ first listeners would not have gotten his message with this particular kind of illustration. Mustard -- the kind that grows there -- made much more sense to them.

The point being that Jesus wasn’t talking about the holiness of mustard - he was talking about small things growing, in time, into much bigger things.

I looked at Jesus’ actions among us through the light of this parable and realized that everything the gospels tell us that Jesus did was a relatively small action. Even when he fed the 5000, he didn’t cause a banquet to suddenly appear – instead he took a mere 2 loaves of bread and a handful of dried fish and broke them up and said, “here - pass this out” – and somehow everyone was fed.

He did not ever -- so far as we know -- announce a mass healing of all blind beggars - instead, he touched the eyes of one man and gave him sight, and we are still talking about it today. One crippled young man picked up his mat and walked home; one young already deceased girl, being prepared for burial, was told to get up – and did; one dearly loved friend, already buried, was called back out of his tomb. Just one – but we get the larger message.

Probably the single most visually spectacular thing Jesus ever did – that we know of – was the transfiguration on the mountain top - and that was before a severely limited audience - just 3 of his disciples. Later, when he was betrayed in the garden and some of his followers sought to defend him he told them to put up their weapons saying, “do you think that I cannot appeal to my Father, and he would at once send me more than twelve legions of angels?” He clearly understood that he had the power to do things on a large scale, but he chose instead to model small actions for us – presumably hoping that we could understand that, while we may be incapable of the big ‘ta-da’ moments, we can do the little things, we can take baby steps. And our baby steps, just like a little pine seed or mustard seed, can one day grow into something much bigger, and reach and touch many people.

We simply don’t know how far the ripples from our actions may extend. They may affect only one person or they may, in some way, reach out to touch many, many others.

Back in the days when we handed out bag lunches here in town we used to reach maybe 40 or 50 people directly, sometimes more. We fed the folks who were right there. We’d usually had several left over lunches and a couple of the regulars who were there every week liked to take the extras to give to others they met during the day – folks who hadn’t been at the distribution site. There was one gentleman in particular who found a special joy in being given the wherewithal to help someone else down the line as we were helping him. He told us a story once of a family he had met the previous week and the joy on the children’s faces as they dove into the simple pb & j sandwiches.

Ripples reaching out.

Did we change the world? Probably not very much, but we were allowed to create some joy and some peace in this world for a short time. Baby steps, indeed, but baby steps are where every journey begins. We are small - but God is the trail-guide here. Who knows how far the ripples from our actions may travel.

We can’t know how big those seeds we scatter may one day grow to be. We just keep on planting them.

* Sermon originally given, June 2015

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"OLD STORIES OR TODAY'S STORIES?"

6/9/2024

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Luke 10:30-35
“A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, when he was attacked by robbers. They stripped him of his clothes, beat him and went away, leaving him half dead. A priest happened to be going down the same road, and when he saw the man, he passed by on the other side. So too, a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side.

But a Samaritan, as he traveled, came where the man was; and when he saw him, he took pity on him. He went to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he put the man on his own donkey, brought him to an inn and took care of him. The next day he took out some money and gave it to the innkeeper. ‘Look after him,’ he said, ‘and when I return, I will reimburse you for any extra expense you may have.’”

There is a question asked that prompts Jesus to tell this story in Luke’s gospel: “Who is my neighbor?” The same question in a slightly different form is asked at the end of the story: “Which of these men was the victim’s neighbor.”

This may well be one of the best-known of Jesus’ many parables. Although in Jesus’ day the religious cleanliness laws might legitimately have provided an excuse for the priest and the Levite to walk on past the beaten and battered man, our culture today would find their actions to be morally unacceptable and so there is no mystery for us. Besides which, we, as a whole, hold no cultural animosity against Samaritans, as did the Jews of the time so it is easy for us to get the “correct” answer right off the bat.

If you have spent any time studying mythology or folklore you have probably noticed that certain themes show up in multiple cultures – the same stories pop up in different locations, in different centuries and languages. Some themes just seem to be universal.

Earlier this week my husband sent me a link to a story he’d seen on an internet news feed. It was an update of a story that originally happened in 1996. As I read this update I realized I remembered the original that appeared nearly thirty years ago and I realized this would be the easiest sermon I've ever composed. Some of you may remember it, too.

This was a time of particularly tense relations between people of color and the Ku Klux Klan. One day, in Ann Arbor, Michigan, the Klan was putting on one of their public marches to show how big and tough they were and then another group of counter-protestors also showed up.

An 18 year-old black teenager, Keisha Thomas, was there to show her support for the counter protestors. Things began to get rough when the yelling turned into shoving and then sticks and bats were being used to beat people down. One Klan member got cut off from his group and was being shoved hard by the counter-protestors who were enraged by the man’s Nazi tattoos. He ended up knocked down and found himself the one being kicked and punched instead of being the hard-man himself.

Even though the man was there with no intention but harm for people like Keisha, she didn’t even hesitate before jumping in and throwing her own body across the man on the ground, shouting at the other protestors to stop attacking him, while receiving punches and kicks herself as she protected him. I remember seeing the photograph of her using her own body to save this despicable man. She let compassion guide her actions and possibly saved his life.

Who did Keisha Thomas see as her neighbor that day? Whose neighbor was she? Her sympathies were surely with the counter-protestors yet her Christian teaching and her basic decency sent her to defend the Klansman. It’s a story at least 2000 years old, and who knows how many times the same story has been told in how many countries, each time with a different cast of characters.

There will always be those who want to strut and be tough, thinking they’re better than others, for no other reason than the color of their skin, or the country they’re from, but there will also always be those who have chosen love and compassion, just as with the despised Samaritan of Jesus’s story or the teenaged Keisha Thomas.

Since this news story was a follow-up to the original story, written 10 or so years earlier, one of the questions that was asked was what had Keisha Thomas done with her life in those intervening years?

Well, it seems she's done everything from volunteering after 9/11 to distributing food to Hurricane Katrina victims. She also walked from Selma, Alabama to Washington D.C. for voting rights with the NAACP, and volunteered at a hospital in Haiti.

I don't recall seeing if the Klansman actually repented of his actions that long ago day, but he was quoted as saying he was very grateful to the young woman who saved him -- and the best part of all came when the man's two children -- young adults by this time -- said that they were repulsed by their father's actions and absolutely did not share his Klan-shaped opinions.

Keisha Thomas, like so many others, has heard the voice of Jesus telling her to care for her neighbors – and she apparently is quite clear that her neighbors are any and all of God’s children.

I like to think that if Jesus were here with us today, he might be telling the parable of the Klansman and Keisha Thomas, instead of the one about a kindly Samaritan man. After all, it’s all the same story of loving your neighbor as yourself.

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OYSTERS and BALLERINAS

6/2/2024

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“In one of his books, Robert Farrar Capon says that when human beings try to describe God we are like a bunch of oysters trying to describe a ballerina. We simply do not have the equipment to understand something so utterly beyond us ..... but that has never stopped us from trying.”

― Barbara Brown Taylor, Three Hands Clapping

The saying we began with today is clearly not from scripture as we would usually expect the reading before a sermon to be – it is, instead, Barbara Brown Taylor roughly paraphrasing from a piece by Robert Farrar Capon. Like Taylor, Capon was an Episcopal priest and author. (He passed on in 2017; Taylor is still very much with us.)

The saying caught my attention because we here are currently in the midst of our on-going conversation about scripture – where it comes from, who wrote it, how we can understand it? Is it just stories? How do we believe it? So many questions.

I’ve never read any of Capon’s stories that I’m aware of, so I’m grateful to Brown for mentioning it or I might never have met his bewildered oyster as it struggled to grasp something far beyond its ability to comprehend. That would have been a shame, because his story is a perfect analog for our often bewildered attempts to figure out God.

This is how I sometimes feel when trying to explain scripture, its function, and our response to it. It was written so long ago by people we know next to nothing about, and yet we’re taught that it is important. We have a terrible tendency to see these long ago people as “just like us,” and yes, in many ways we are the same, but in many other ways we are so, so different.

The social and cultural settings have always been the part of biblical studies that interested me most. The “Why” interests me much more than the “How”. Recently while reading Rob Bell’s Velvet Elvis I came upon a chapter that truly grabbed my attention. I’d like to quickly skim over some of the particulars included there.

When reading a bible story I would imagine that most of us don’t put too much thought into why that story was told in the particular way it’s told in scripture. Bell points out that the writers – both New and Old Testaments – often had very clear reasons for presenting their stories as they did.

Take John’s Gospel account for instance. In this gospel Jesus’ first miracle was changing water into wine at the wedding in Cana, which is in Galilee. This was followed by some traveling around the surrounding area and finally, returning to Cana, where he met a high ranking Roman official whose son was dying. Jesus healed the boy ... from a distance. This was his first healing miracle.

And then on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, Jesus is said to have fed 5000 people with nothing more then 5 loaves of bread and a couple of dried fish. Again, the first of his miracles involving feeding crowds.

We are all familiar with these three stories, but do we know why John presents them in this particular order? Other gospels have them in different orders, but yes, there is a reason. According to Rob Bell, the author of John's gospel had a very good reason.

John was writing his gospel account specifically to a part of Asia Minor where for centuries the traditional three primary gods worshipped were Dionysus, god of wine and the vineyards, Asclepius, the god of healing, and Demeter, goddess of grain and the harvest. John’s agenda here is very clear once we put it together – Jesus can produce wine, like Dionysus; he can heal the sick and dying, like Asclepius; he can produce food to feed the masses, like Demeter. He can do anything their prior gods can do – and he does it better.

We today aren’t likely to immediately link John’s stories of Jesus with the ancient gods and goddesses who had ruled this land for centuries – simply because those past ‘gods’ have no place in our current culture – but the people John wrote his gospel for would most certainly make the connection and understand John’s claim, without him ever having to say it out loud.

There are dozens more examples just like this – connections that we today miss entirely. Things we pass right by without hearing the importance of the stories they tell of the Good News of Jesus and the ways in which those early Christians spread that good news far and wide without coming right out and challenging the powers that be.

I suspect we don’t even come close to understanding how much we don’t know. A lot of it is out there to be learned but it is up to us to seek it out and decide if it changes anything about what we see and believe.

Like Capon’s invertebrates -- “... when human beings try to describe God we are like a bunch of oysters trying to describe a ballerina. We simply do not have the equipment to understand something so utterly beyond us.”

May we always place enough value on our relationship with God that we keep on seeking to understand all that God’s word is telling us and may we hear more of it, all the time.

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GOD'S WORDS

SLEEPING IN THE BOAT

BABY STEPS, Redux

"OLD STORIES OR TODAY'S STORIES?"

OYSTERS and BALLERINAS

Rev. Cherie Marckx

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