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GRASP YOUR ONE NECESSITY

10/31/2021

I mentioned in passing a few weeks back, that the area around my computer desk is littered with post-it notes, stuck all over every surface. Once in a while they carry a phone number or an appointment reminder, but most of the time they are thoughts or quotes that somewhere along the way caught my interest and I stuck them up there for further reflection.

Today’s quote is one of the latter. In fact, this may be the grandmother of all the sticky-note quotes scattered around. I’m sure it is the oldest one here. The quote is from Annie Dillard, who is an incredible wordsmith, absolutely one of my favorite writers. She writes with a poetic quality – not the hearts and flowers kind of poetry – but sometimes with a sharp edged, painful poetry and meaning in her words.

Since it’s the one stuck right in front of my face, I’ve read this quote every day – for years – and still I hesitate to try to say what she means here. I think I know what she means, but I’ve read enough of her work to be aware that I might be completely wrong, too.

But I’m feeling courageous today, so this is how it goes:

“I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you.”

This comes, by the way, from her book, Teaching a Stone to Talk.**
“I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you.”

I think I grasp it well enough in the context of our everyday social lives, referring to those things we’ve always dreamed of, longed for, obsessed over – whether it be a who or a what, an idea or a concrete something. But I don’t think what she is talking about here is that simple. I suspect that she intends something of a more existential question – why am I here?

I decided to go back to the original book to see what her context there was – and found that it comes in a chapter where she is telling a story about weasels. Yup, weasels – those sinewy furry creatures. It is entirely characteristic of Dillard’s writing that she may seem to be on one subject and then it turns out she’s been writing about something else all along.

Since the point of my messages in this current series is to find an intriguing quote and then connect its message to some part of scripture, this last revelation got me to wondering how often Jesus seems at first glance to be talking about one thing, but then turns out to be pointing towards something else instead.

His parables often seem to work like this – he’ll start out with a story that appears to be going to some obvious conclusion, but then takes a hard left and ends up somewhere else entirely.

The many “Call” stories that mark the beginning of Jesus’ public ministries are often straight forward enough, such as this one from the first chapter of Mark’s gospel

As Jesus passed along the Sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and his brother Andrew casting a net into the sea—for they were fishermen. And Jesus said to them, “Follow me and I will make you fish for people.” And immediately they left their nets and followed him.

Or this short bit from Matthew:

As he went from there, he saw two other brothers, James son of Zebedee and his brother John, in the boat with their father Zebedee, mending their nets, and he called them. Immediately they left the boat and their father, and followed him.

These appear pretty blunt and straight forward. Jesus calls and they respond by following him. This pattern is repeated in most of the gospel call accounts as Jesus gathers his tribe of followers. But then, there is one like this version, from Luke’s gospel, 9th chapter:

As they were going along the road, someone said to him, “I will follow you wherever you go.” And Jesus said to him, “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.” To another he said, “Follow me.” But he said, “Lord, first let me go and bury my father.” But Jesus said to him, “Let the dead bury their own dead; but as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God.” Another said, “I will follow you, Lord; but let me first say farewell to those at my home.” Jesus said to him, “No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.

I’ve always been intrigued by this particular pericope because, counting Jesus, there are four different people here (five actually, if you want to count the readers of the story as one), and none of them seem to be having the same conversation. Like Dillard and her weasels, I’m not sure that any of us are actually talking about the same thing.

Probably we are talking about the same thing but we see it – each from our own perspective – and our perspectives are so different that it sounds like we are all speaking different languages.

And finally, this brings us back to my original connection with Dillard’s quote. Are all these different call stories just different ways for Jesus to teach us to grasp our one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes us?

Is the point then, not so much the dropping of whatever it is we’re doing to follow him, but our recognition of what that one necessity is – that thing we suddenly see as so utterly necessary for us that we are willing to give up everything else to follow after it – to dangle from it limp wherever it takes us?

There’s one more call story I want to share here. This one comes from John’s gospel, but unlike the others, it’s not from the start of the story, but from the end of his life here as one of us. It’s found in the 21st chapter of John, after the cross and after the resurrection, when Jesus is talking with Peter on the beach beside the sea.

Twice he has asked Peter if he loves him .....

He said to him the third time, “Simon son of John, do you love me?” Peter felt hurt because he said to him the third time, “Do you love me?” And he said to him, “Lord, you know everything; you know that I love you.” Jesus said to him, “Feed my sheep. Very truly, I tell you, when you were younger, you used to fasten your own belt and to go wherever you wished. But when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will fasten a belt around you and take you where you do not wish to go.” (He said this to indicate the kind of death by which he, Peter. would glorify God.) After this he said to him, “Follow me.”

This so much more than a simple, “Come, and walk with me.” This is a call to go where Jesus goes, and do what he does – feed my sheep – and eventually follow him all the way to the kind of death he is describing here. Follow him with every fiber of his being until the very last breath in his body.

Maybe this is not the particular necessity that drives you – and it doesn’t have to be. But this is the intensity that should drive us and our necessary things. As usual, the scriptures speak to us across the centuries, and still address the issues that drive our lives. There is still wisdom to be found here if we use our minds and read and listen with open hearts.

Let us have the desire and the courage to follow where Jesus -- not the world’s desires, but Jesus -- leads us.

** Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters; (c) 1982, Annie Dillard; Harper & Row Publishers

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READING SCRIPTURE IN CONTEXT

10/24/2021

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The quote that is the anchor for today’s message does not come from some theological text nor from anyone’s current blog. It is actually just a bit of snark created and posted by my pastor friend Jeanne Loveless (thank you, Jeanne). It’s printed on a coffee mug and it reads thusly: I can do all things through a verse taken out of context.

I’m going to get back to that coffee cup in a moment but first I want to lay out my position on who wrote the Bible.

If you are a confirmed biblical literalist that means you accept every word, every jot and tittle, as coming directly from the mouth of God. The classic illustration of this shows a man with a pen and paper (or parchment) with God (presumably) whispering directly into his ear.

It means that you have to give equal weight to every word in the Bible -- no picking and choosing the verses that confirm your biases while ignoring the ones that disagree with you. It means the God who dictated all this put in some bizarrely pointless things as well as some accidently hilarious stuff, mixed in with the parts that matter. Such a belief also includes accepting that the God you worship enjoined the people newly returned from exile in Babylon to rejoice as Babylonian infants were beaten to death in retaliation: “O daughter Babylon, you devastator! Happy shall they be who pay you back what you have done to us! Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rock!” (Psalm 137:8-9)

Ummm – No. If I thought for a moment that God actually enjoyed the thought of babies having their brains beat out against the rocks, I would not follow, believe in, and certainly not love any such being.

If that’s not your style either, then let’s spend some time talking about reading scripture in context. To read scripture in context is to accept the reality that the Bible is not a single book, but a library, a compendium of books, written in different centuries by people with differing beliefs and cultural mores. It is the story of a people’s growing and evolving understanding of who God is and of their relationship with that God.

What we call the Bible was written over the course of roughly 1500 years, written down by more than 40 different writers writing in multiple languages. Its time span covers wars and the rise and fall of kingdoms. It also covers the slow metamorphosis of the Hebrew religion from a polytheism similar to its neighbors, to a strict monotheism and a belief system centered in one God and one God only. That's a lot of evolutionary change for a faith system to go through and the people who followed it had to grow and evolve as well.

Some parts of the Hebrew Scriptures – what we today call the Old Testament – were written by priests of the Temple whose version of history always gives the Temple leadership precedence. Other parts were written by those associated with the royal line and their writings features the leadership of the royal government as predominate.

Major parts of the Old Testament are written as a history of the people. Some parts are prophecy, some poetry. Other parts are pure mythology stolen from neighboring nations.

Large parts of the Bible are xenophobic and horribly misogynistic. Many parts are sickeningly violent as I illustrated earlier. And this book is notorious for contradicting itself all over the place. Whatever it says in one spot, there’s bound to be another spot where it says the exact opposite.

Does any of this mean the Bible has no value? Absolutely not! It means it is a human document written and compiled by humans who are notoriously fallible. But it is also written by people trying their best to tell their truth as they knew at that time -- and this is a key piece for us to remember.

Which leads me to my main point – that we have to put some work into reading scripture. We have to learn to read the Bible in context. Who did the writing? Who were they writing it for? What was their time frame and their political status at that time? What were their primary cultural beliefs? Were they the top-dog or the underdog in their cultural setting? We read it in our time, but they wrote it in theirs. Whatever the answers to these questions, we cannot just pull random single sentences out, ignoring their context, and build whole theologies on them.

Horrible, sinful things have come from people reading scripture without context. Passages from scripture taken out of their rightful contexts were used by the church in our country to justify enslaving and mistreating African people, claiming the Bible said it was right to do so. More recently the Germans used scripture to justify their murder of six million Jewish people by quoting scripture passage that did not mean what they thought they meant.

Likewise, writings attributed to Paul and Timothy, among others, applied with no cultural context have caused untold misery to generations of women and girls by those who wish to strictly hold with first century mores (as they mis-interpret them). Mis-translated words also have caused terribly results when readers didn’t have the awareness to recognize that the translation was faulty. Twentieth-century terminology dropped into concepts lifted from the first century with no attempt to rectify cultural references have justified terrible actions against LGBTQ people -- all in the name of God.

Much of scripture is simply unhelpful, such as this gem from St. Paul: I wish those who unsettle you would castrate themselves! Really? This is wisdom for the ages. While we can understand Paul’s frustration with those who followed behind him seeking to undo all he had taught, I can’t find anything actually helpful in this verse. Certainly not without its context explained.

As a pastor, probably the verse I have heard misquoted more than any other is Deuteronomy 32:35 which is always presented to me as “Vengeance is mine!” as if scripture is giving the speaker permission to enact vengeance. When you read all of Deuteronomy 32, as you should if you’re going to toss this verse around, you find that the speaker here is God and the context is a threat of punishment against the Hebrew people for turning away from God. This line means vengeance belongs to God, and not to any one of us.

Let’s get back to my original coffee-mug quote: “I can do all things through a verse taken out of context.” Now obviously, this little bit of sarcasm is a play on one line from St. Paul’s letter to the Philippians, chapter 4, verse 13 – “I can do all things through him who strengthens me” – and it is a classic example of scripture being taken out of context. Quoted in its entirety this is a perfectly legitimate statement explaining that when Christ strengthens us for a particular task, we can do that task.

But all too often it is quoted in a shortened version and used to suggest that simply because we “know” Christ we are therefore equipped to do anything – and I don’t believe that’s what it means at all. I “know” Christ, yet I am not a pastor who could go out and start a new church from scratch. I can’t leap tall buildings in a single bound. I believe if I should ever be called to do such a thing, that then I would be equipped to do it but I don’t believe I am especially enabled to do anything that pops into my head, just because “God is on my side.” And yet, this particular scripture is misquoted all the time to justify questionable results.

Does all this mean we can’t read scripture for ourselves without a theological education? No. Few of us have that to lean on. What we all do have, however, is common sense. If we are well-grounded in the teachings and examples of Jesus, then we are going to know when something is authentically from God and when it is not. If you can’t imagine it coming out of Jesus’ mouth, then it is probably not a general teaching on living a life in God. It is more likely an historical record pertaining to a particular event in history when the people did not know any better.

We know better. Christ’s own Spirit lives in us. It’s part of us. It helps us understand and reason our way through questions that arise. Don’t be afraid to question scripture. God isn’t going to get mad because we ask questions. Find someone you trust and ask your questions. Line up your pros and cons. And trust the Spirit within you.

As Disciples of Christ we are expected to question and work out our own understanding of what scripture seeks to tell us. Listen, then, and trust the Spirit’s leading. Trust God to help us understand and to hear what we are meant to hear.

Amen.

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A CONTRACT WITH THE SPIRIT

10/17/2021

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I’ll start right off today with a quote:

"You and I have a contract with the Spirit. We have a working relationship. Our purpose in creation is not just to sit and look pretty, but to stand and go to work. Life is unfinished. Hope is not yet realized. There is much to be done, and much of it can only be done by you and I.....Each day the exchange is made: the Spirit offers me another day, and in return asks only that I make the most of it. The gift of life, of being with those I love, of seeing the sky and feeling the wind, of thinking and creating and being—all of this is freely exchanged for the promise within my soul, the possibility of great thoughts and caring actions, the ability to love, and the capability of change, if only I make the effort to meet the Spirit halfway.*

This quote is from Bishop Steven Charleston, a retired bishop of the American Episcopal Church. Those of you who attend Church of the Open Door in person should be well familiar with Bishop Steven, since I have read and quoted him to you for years now. He is a Native American of the Choctaw people, former Dean of the Episcopal Divinity School, and a prolific and profound writer.

I love his base idea here that we -- all of us -- are in a working relationship with the Holy Spirit. We are not here just as another piece of creation. As he phrases it, we are not here just to “sit and look pretty.” We are here as partners in the process of creation, because life is an un-finished act. Creation was never meant to be just a one-and-done event. Hope is, as yet, un-realized. There is work to be done still and we are – hopefully -- here to do it.

It’s all in our contract -- the implied contract we have with the Holy Spirit that comes with our life. We are, indeed, given this gift of life freely and with no strings attached. We are given the gift of waking up each morning to a new day, given another day to be part of God’s creation, being with those we love, seeing the sky and feeling the wind, thinking and creating and being. We get all of this but in exchange the Holy Spirit asks us to be here, ready and willing to participate in the process of working on this unfinished life – to act to bring hope to the point of being fully realized everywhere.

Well, that all sounds lovely, but what does it mean in concrete terms? What is it the Spirit actually wants from us in fulfillment of our end of the contract? Luckily for us, this is an easy one this week – this is a question which has answers scattered all throughout scripture. The problem will be to pick which ones.

We can start out with our old favorite, Micah 6:6-8 – always a good place to start:

With what shall I come before the Lord and bow down before the exalted God?
Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old?
Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, with ten thousand rivers of olive oil?
Shall I offer my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?
He has shown you, O mortal, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you, but to act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.

This scripture has the benefit of not only telling us what God wants us to do -- act with justice, love mercy and kindness, and be humble before God – but it also tells us the kind of performative worship that God does not want.

The first chapter of the prophet Isaiah has a verse very similar to this one with a few additional must do’s:

Learn to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow.

Now I’ve always taken the Old Testament language of widows and orphans pretty literally – children without parents and married women left without husbands, but in my studying for this message I came on information that gave me a whole new way to look at what scripture says about widows and orphans.

Story International** a non-profit organization, began, as they put it, in the orphanage business – trying to help the most vulnerable of Guatemala’s poor. Over the years they have grown into something much larger – a multilevel organization trying to work with multiple generations to get to the heart of the devastating poverty in Guatemala rather than simply putting a band-aid on the most obvious wounds.

I’m not trying to push this organization because I know nothing of them but what I just read on their own site – which is very interesting, by the way -- but what they did give provide for me is a much broader understanding of just who is included in “widows and orphans” – and what that means to our understanding of scriptural uses of this phrase.

In most parts of the world, according to them, around 80% or more of the children living in orphanages have at least one living parent. They are situational orphans. Most of them didn’t become “orphaned” until they ended up in an orphanage where the parent or parents placed them themselves because they could no longer care for them sufficiently. A very high percentage of these “orphans” are the victims of poverty, war, disaster, abuse, neglect, illness, or death. It’s not as simple as parents dying and leaving a child alone.

Similarly, a “widow” is generally imagined as the woman left to fend for herself after the tragic death of her husband. In biblical times this was bad enough, but if we expand our understanding as we did with “orphans” we can see so many other causes for “widowhood” – women become “widows” in this biblical sense not just with the death of a spouse also because they left their spouse to escape abuse, or because their spouse is incarcerated, suffers from a chronic and debilitating illness, is engaged in war or conflict, is unemployed, addicted, or any number of others factors that leave a single parent to meet the needs of their children. This may be more modern language but, because people are people and always have been, there is no reason to believe that these very same situations did not exist in biblical times.

With these expanded definitions, we can see that the prophets of old as well as the teachers of today are talking about something much more widespread and deeply ingrained when we are called to action for "widows and orphans" by our part of the Spirit’s contract.

As I said earlier, I could go on all day with various scriptures describing what God’s Spirit desires from us while we are here enjoying this life, but we do not have all day, and these, I think, give us plenty to ponder on.

I’m going to finish here with the words of Jesus himself that state quite clearly what is required from us – from Matthew, chapter 25. A very familiar reading:

‘Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.’
Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink? And when was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you, or naked and gave you clothing? And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you?’ And the king will answer them, ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.’

We are blessed with life and goodness. We are asked to share that blessing and care for each other – all of the least of these. There is nothing new here except for a new way of looking at the whole question. I like Bishop Steven’s way of seeing our exchange with the Spirit and our place in this beautiful creation as a contract.

Unfortunately we are living in a time right now when hate seems to grow every day. Hope is going unrealized because too many are wallowing in hatred and distain for others. A time when ordinary people routinely perform acts of unbelievable cruelty and callousness. It is now even more imperative than usual that those of us who care for our brothers and sisters and for this creation all around us do so actively and openly.

I recently reposted a meme on our facebook page. It reads, simply: “When hate is loud, Love must be louder.” Loud doesn’t necessarily require decibels but it does require presence -- active presence. Our contract only calls for us to be loud and present in our loving. May we continue to be so.

* Ladder to the Light: An Indigenous Elder's Meditations on Hope and Courage' Steven Charleston, (c) 2021, Broadleaf Books
** Story International, https://www.storyintl.org/

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BOXES, BIG AND SMALL

10/10/2021

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[Sorry this is posting late. We've had some connection issues today...]

I just received my copy of writer John Pavlovitz’ newest book. Pavlovitz is one of my favorite writers on spirituality and the state of the church these days. He’s blunt and honest and I like his work.

This book is so new I haven’t had a chance to read it yet, but what I have done is to leaf through it and read a few tidbits here and there. Just to give an idea of how good I think it’s going to be, just on that first brief look through I found two statements that I found so interesting and provocative that I’d like to share them here today to see what you think about them.

The first one comes right at the beginning in Chapter One. Pavlovitz is here discussing his personal faith journey over the years --

“If I’m honest, the further I’ve walked into my adult life and the more open I’ve been to being surprised and to changing my mind and to considering better stories about spiritual things, the more organized religion has been an exercise in diminishing returns: God getting progressively bigger, while the space I’d once created to contain that God grows more and more restrictive, more and more suffocating.”

Now to be honest, I have to say that I have felt this same way for a long time – that the boxes we call ‘church’ or ‘faith’ always turn out to be too small to hold the fullness of the One I call God.

I’ve been on my own spiritual journey for most of my adult life. I’m not going to bore you with the story of my journey, because that’s my journey and not what I’m here to talk about today. I will say that my journey has taken me to a lot of places – not geographically but intellectually and spiritually. I would try some new way to grow and expand my faith journey but after a while that ‘new’ way would start to become boxed in by ever more strict rules that kept it from being anything but just another box.

I understand Pavlovitz’ frustration – especially as he puts it here. For him, organized religion has been an exercise in “diminishing returns with God getting progressively bigger, while the space he’d once created to contain that God grew more and more restrictive”. That’s why I myself am a hybrid mix of Christian Church: Disciples of Christ, and United Church of Christ. Both these denominations not only allow me to find my own answers, they encourage it.

So where do you stand here? Is your faith comfortable in a box with strict rules laid out as to what is and what is not, what can be, and what cannot? Where exactly does God exist? What were you taught when you were a child about where God lives and does the God you know today still live there?

In the ancient years it was generally believed that the gods lived in specific places in nature – mountain tops, deep caves, holy springs and there they were worshiped. Even as the Hebrew religion was forming into the faith Jesus was born into, there was often an overlay of nature religion still within the new faith. But with the coming of the Ark of the Covenant and the Temple built by David and Solomon, God moved indoors, to take up residence in a literal box -- the Holy of Holies, deep in the heart of the massive Temple -- a god in a box -- no longer free in the world but enclosed inside and only to be approached at rare moments by the High Priest.

My usual practice with these messages recently has been to start with an interesting quote and then move to scripture for verses and stories that amplify the message of the quote. I’m not doing that today, simply because there is an endless list of verses about where and how God exists and all of them are different. We today have a such a multitude of places where various people believe God “lives,” and we could find a bible verse or two or three to support any idea out there so I’m going to pass on the verses today. Except for one.

Many will confidently tell us that God lives in ‘heaven” while not being able to explain just where or what Heaven is. If we insist on a Bible verse, I myself prefer the one found in John 15:4: Dwell in Me, and I will dwell in you.

Aside from where God is, many of our current manifestations of Christianity still want to keep god in their own little boxes – the ones that let them feel they have control of their own faith journey – the ones where they know all the rules. The problem with that, in my eyes, and apparently in Pavlovitz’ as well, is that the smaller the box, the smaller the God.

We would do well to remember what Aslan said in C. S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe – “I am not a Tame Lion!” And God is not a tame God to live in some small box hedged round by man-made rules – liking all the people we like, comfortable wherever we are comfortable.

When I started here I said I had two quotes from Pavlovitz’ book so I don’t want to forget the second quote, because it is a real thought-provoker itself. This one comes in Chapter Four, I believe:

“Faith isn’t about surety but about suspicions; it’s an aspirational orientation. A movement toward something just slightly out of reach, something that propels you to ask and seek and knock — because you don’t know it all yet. There is nothing organized or neat or easy about this.”

Again, what do you think or believe about this statement? Are you content to let your journey be a little messy and unorganized or do you need it to be tied up in a neat package with “facts” and figures?

For me, a tightly organized faith is usually one that is packed neatly into its box. When I was younger I thought I knew all about God and church and faith. I knew the right boxes. It turns out that the older I grow, the less I’m willing to claim I actually “know.”

The orthodoxy, the canonicity of a faith statement interests me less and less as my journey progresses and as my theologian husband can attest, I am bored witless by systematic theology.

I want to know and believe in a God who is bigger than me. One that my human limitations will not allow me to fully grasp or understand. I am comfortable within that mystery.

I want to know what my journey with God means here and now, in the work I do in this world, in this time. What difference, if any, do my choices make in the world right now?

If you’d like to ponder these questions a little deeper I’ll be posting the text for this message on our Facebook page and our website, so you can find the two quotes there. I hope this leaves you with some questions and that you might be nudged to think about them some more and seek some answers for yourself. Maybe even get to know your God better.

Oh, yes, and the title of the new book is If God is Love, Don’t Be a Jerk, with the sub-title, Finding a Faith that Makes Us Better Humans. The author is John Pavlovitz and it’s published by Westminster John Knox Press. I recommend it. There’s a lot to think about in there.

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PLEASE NOTE

10/2/2021

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There is no post for this week (10/3/21). Our church will be out of town worshiping with our sister church in Geyserville. Back on our regular schedule next week. Blessings!

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GRASP YOUR ONE NECESSITY

READING SCRIPTURE IN CONTEXT

A CONTRACT WITH THE SPIRIT

BOXES, BIG AND SMALL

PLEASE NOTE

Rev. Cherie Marckx

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