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WHAT ARE WE LOOKING FOR?

10/27/2024

“If you are looking for verses with which to support slavery, you will find them. If you are looking for verses with which to abolish slavery, you will find them. If you are looking for verses with which to oppress women, you will find them. If you are looking for verses with which to liberate or honor women, you will find them.

If you are looking for reasons to wage war, you will find them. If you are looking for reasons to promote peace, you will find them. If you are looking for an out-dated, irrelevant ancient text, you will find it. If you are looking for truth, believe me, you will find it.

This is why there are times when the most instructive question to bring to the biblical text is not "what does it say?", but "what am I looking for?" I suspect Jesus knew this when he said, "ask and it will be given to you, seek and you will find, knock and the door will be opened." If you want to do violence in this world, you will always find the weapons. If you want to heal, you will always find the balm.”

― Rachel Held Evans, A Year of Biblical Womanhood

This reading doesn’t come from the bible. It was taken from a book titled, A Year of Biblical Womanhood, by Rachel Held Evans, a young blogger and writer who died much too soon in 2019 at the age of 37. Two of her several books were New York Times best-sellers, including the one I just quoted.

I have to admit, when I first heard this book’s title, I cringed. Back in the late 70’s and early 80’s the Christian publishing world was swimming with earnest books instructing women how to be good, subservient Christian women, recognizing the husband’s role as ‘head of the family’ and keeping our silence in church matters. I hated those patronizing, dismissive, treacle-y books, and this title sounded like something written in that same line.

It isn’t.

For the past few months here – and actually a lot longer since it is a recurrent theme – we’ve been going through different readings from scripture and trying to discern which might truly be God’s words to us and which are just another human’s opinion.

I did not intend that this message should center on Rachel herself, but sometimes it can help us in our own journey to understanding when we find someone articulate who has faced the same issues.

Rachel Held Evans was born into an evangelical biblical-literalist family where every word was presented as straight from God’s mouth. She believed her family’s teachings completely until her young adult years when she began to realize that she knew real flesh and blood people who were good and kind and loved Jesus and yet were condemned by the very teachings she claimed as her own. She spent the rest of her too-brief life working to determine what she actually did believe and why. What she could claim and what she could not of all she had been raised to believe.

Is there anyone among us who has not struggled with parts of the bible that don’t at all agree with what we believe or what we can believe is the voice of God speaking?

The title of this message is “What Are We Looking For?” What is it we are expecting or hoping to find within the covers of this book? The answer there depends largely on who we believe wrote it. If you believe that every word came straight from God’s lips you are going to approach it differently than if you start out believing it is a series of stories about people’s experiences of something they believe to be God in their lives and their struggle to articulate that experience.

There are differences of opinion as to when the oldest parts of the bible were written but they were written at least 1500 years before the birth of Jesus. That’s a lot of time and a lot of opinions. Add in another 100 years to include that New Testament and understand the number of people who wrote parts of all this and we are faced with a whole lot of people, from many different backgrounds and beliefs writing over a very long time span.

It isn’t simple and it’s when we try to make it simple that we can get ourselves all tangled up in theories and confusions of all sorts. It isn’t simple at all. As Rachel says in our opening quote: If you are looking for an out-dated, irrelevant ancient text, you will find it. If you are looking for truth, believe me, you will find it.

So – how do we look at scripture when we set out to learn from it? Are we looking for reasons to put others down or an excuse to hate? Or are we looking and expecting to find a God speaking to us of love and caring? Are we looking for validation for our current actions or are we hoping to find clear directions for how we can best be part of following Jesus’ way? Can we look at a story from 2500 years ago and see that, while we might not agree with them today, they were, perhaps, trying their best in circumstances we have never had to face? Can we see how we can learn from their experience?

One more quote from Rachel -- one I have great fondness for reads like this: “I have come to regard with some suspicion those who claim that the Bible never troubles them. I can only assume this means they haven’t actually read it.” I've known some of these people.

Those of us who do read it know that we will always find stumbling places but if we come to the readings with love and humility and a true desire to learn to live as our God wants us to live – a way that benefits us all – a way that lifts up this beautiful creation God has given us – we will find the answers here – here in scripture and in our hearts where the Holy Spirit lives with and in us.

We read, we discuss, we share – and we find God with us – always -- in the words.

Amen.

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A QUESTION ABOUT NEIGHBORS

10/20/2024

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Luke 10:25-37

An expert in the law stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” he said, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” He said to him, “What is written in the law? What do you read there?” He answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind and your neighbor as yourself.” And he said to him, “You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live.”

But wanting to vindicate himself, the lawyer asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?” Jesus replied, “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho and fell into the hands of robbers, who stripped him, beat him, and took off, leaving him half dead. Now by chance a priest was going down that road, and when he saw him he passed by on the other side. So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan while traveling came upon him, and when he saw him he was moved with compassion. He went to him and bandaged his wounds, treating them with oil and wine. Then he put him on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him. The next day he took out two denarii, gave them to the innkeeper, and said, ‘Take care of him, and when I come back I will repay you whatever more you spend.’

Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?” He said, “The one who showed him mercy.” Jesus said to him, “Go and do likewise.”

After all our discussions of how and why John’s gospel account seems to differ from the other three gospel accounts and how carefully we need to work to understand just what the writers are trying to convey with their particular style, I thought it would be interesting to check out just how complex any gospel can be – and not just John’s.

The one we’re looking at here today is from Luke and it is chock full of language and history that the writer probably assumed later readers would understand. Maybe we do, and maybe we don’t.

A lawyer one day asked Jesus what he must do to inherit eternal life. The answer wasn’t especially tricky, since it appears multiple times in scripture – In Deuteronomy, in Matthew, in Mark, and here, in Luke:
“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind and your neighbor as yourself.”

Luke is the one who gives us this long story to explain just how that works. But first, a little history. After hearing the story of Jesus and the Canaanite woman last week it surely won’t surprise us to see how often the Israelites could insert their hatreds into their religious beliefs. (Listen to any news story today – it’s still there.)

This time, Jesus' target audience, the Jews, hated the Samaritans (who followed the Law of Moses) to such a degree that they had destroyed the Samaritans' holy site on Mount Gerizim about 100+ years before Jesus’ birth, because they believed they followed pagan beliefs. The Samaritans, in turn, hated the Jews and had more recently desecrated the Jewish Temple at Passover with human bones – human bones being “unclean.”

This belief, likewise, plays its role in our story today. The story comes around in response to the Lawyer’s question: “Who is my neighbor? – The one I’m supposed to love as I love myself?” There are five active characters in the story as Jesus tells it -- a traveler who is robbed, beaten, and left half dead alongside the road, a Jewish priest, a Levite, a Samaritan, and an inn keeper.

Because the nationality or ethnicity of the victim/traveler is never specified it is assumed he is Jewish. The priest and the Levite both serve in the Temple, the priest as intermediary between the people and God -- offering sacrifices and prayers, and acting as judges.

Levites were a lesser level of priests. They prepared the sacrifices and prepared the temple for public gatherings – serving as something like a sacristan or sexton. Both groups were bound by purity laws.

In Jewish culture, contact with a dead body was understood to be defiling. It is possible that both the priest and Levite assumed the man was dead and therefore passed him by -- avoiding him to keep themselves ritually clean.

It’s sort of a gray area because they didn’t know he was dead, they just assumed that as the easier choice, whereas the better choice would have been to check to see if he were indeed dead (which of course, he wasn’t). They both cared more for their own “purity” and sanctity than the chance he might be alive and in need of care.

Enter the Samaritan – the despised outsider – the true “neighbor” -- who apparently without hesitation tended to the injured man with his own hands and his own oil and wine – and provided for his further care – while knowing that he himself would most likely be ignored and rejected had the script been flipped.

While the Samaritan is indeed the hero of the story, my second favorite actor here is the inn keeper who took in the injured man and arranged his further care for partial payment and a promise from a stranger – a Samaritan at that – to pay the rest the next time he came through. That may be the part of the story I find the most astonishing.

But we know who Jesus means when he speaks of the one who is the “true neighbor.” It is interesting that in this question and answer between the lawyer and Jesus it is not Jesus who gives us the answer, although he certainly sets it up. It’s the lawyer who possibly hoped to “catch” Jesus who ends up answering his own question “Who is my neighbor?” ….. “The one who showed him mercy.”

May we all go and do likewise.

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"Reframing Those Old, Old Stories"

10/13/2024

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Matthew 15:22-28
Jesus went away to the district of Tyre and Sidon. Just then a Canaanite woman from that region came out and started shouting, “Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is tormented by a demon.” But he did not answer her at all.

And his disciples came and urged him, saying, “Send her away, for she keeps shouting after us.” He answered, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” But she came and knelt before him, saying, “Lord, help me.” He answered, “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” She said, “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.” Then Jesus answered her, “Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.” And her daughter was healed from that moment.

After our Annual Fall Women’s Retreat last month I came home full of new ideas and new ways to see the work we do in our churches. Since we were still in the middle of our Summer Sermon Series on John’s Gospel, I didn’t really have time to share much about the retreat and the teachings we shared there.

Well, we’ve finished with John now, so we have time to go back and check out the retreat theme, “New Hope -- Where do we go from here?” a question that challenges us to live out the Gospel, empowered by the Holy Spirit in this present, postmodern world. Our Keynote speaker, Dr. Sharon Jacob, visiting professor of New Testament, from Claremont, had plenty to share with us.

But before we get into that I want to – briefly – remind us that we are a story-telling people. We humans have always told stories about ourselves and all that share this world with us – ‘how did we get here?’ stories, ‘what’s it all mean?’ stories, ‘why did this happen to me?’ stories – stories that shape us and stories that explain us.

The Bible is a book of such stories. Some we accept as not literally true but still making a good point, such as: ‘Noah’s Ark’. Some we accept in part while rejecting other parts such as the birth of the baby Jesus as a human child – most of us believe that part – but we ignore the part of that story that says the sky that night was lit up by angels singing praises to God (which absolutely no one seemed to remember at any time in the following 30 years.)

I titled this message “Reframing those Old, Old Stories.” Reframing is a psychological technique that involves changing the way a person understands a situation, experience, or emotion, by changing the information that surrounds it – basically, putting it within a new framework. – viewing it from another point of view that may change our interpretation of what we’ve read.

The reading we opened with today comes from an example Dr. Jacob shared with us, involving the story of the Syro-Phoenician woman and her demon-possessed child. This one is available from both Matthew and Mark.

Now, as we’ve always accepted, Mark’s gospel is the first one written down and read by many. We know that much of Matthew, put together later, was taken directly from Mark and there is one note in these two versions of the story that you and I have no way of knowing about unless we know a lot of Near Eastern history, yet this primary point makes all the difference in how we would hear this story if we heard it 2000 years ago – or today.

In both versions a non-Jewish woman comes to Jesus asking him to heal her possessed child. In both versions Jesus at first rejects her and her plea, comparing her to a dog (!) -- and in both versions, eventually changes his mind and heals the child.

In Mark’s telling, the woman is simply described as a Syro-Phoenician – a geographical descriptor telling where this story takes place and that the woman is non-Jewish and therefore not as important to him as the Hebrew people he usually walks among. In Matthew’s version, she is described as a Canaanite woman -- and this matters.

When the Hebrew people ended their forty years in the desert after escaping from slavery in Egypt, the area we generally lump together as the Near East, was inhabited by several different peoples of different ethnicities. There were few solid boundaries between them and the whole area, in general, was referred to as Canaan and the people as Canaanites. It was this loosely defined area that God “gave” to the Hebrews as their long-promised new homeland.

The Hebrews marched in and waged bloody war, killed off many of the inhabitants and settled in their promised land. The Canaanites resisted and became generational enemies.

But this was long ago – even in Jesus’ time -- and for Matthew to refer to the people who now lived in the northern realms as Canaanites was simply inaccurate – deliberately so. That term was no longer used – they were simply Syro-Phoenicians – as Mark described the woman -- not the Canaanites they had invaded and battled centuries ago.

This was a case of Matthew pushing his readers into an Old Testament mindset to manufacture a justification for Jesus and his disciples to be so contemptuous of the mother who was pleading for her child’s healing. We are being forced to few this woman and her child as outsiders – people not included in God’s special covenant with God’s chosen people.

Such a little thing, so easy to overlook with a casual reading – especially if we today don’t know the ancient history. We aren’t going to understand that “Syro-Phoenician” is OK but “Canaanite” is not. A small thing and yet it makes such a big difference in the story we read and our understanding of this Jesus person -- who we believe, from all other evidence, to be loving and kind – and yet somehow – uncharacteristically – comes across here as an arrogant jerk.

Mark tells us the same story, but without the layers of contempt that this woman would dare to ask Jesus for help. Jesus is still rude (by our standards) but to a much lesser degree. In many ways he is simply acting like a Jewish man of his time.

Such instances occur all through the bible – and they color how we hear and interpret what the scriptures are saying to us. In many cases, they can sway how we believe what the stories tell us. We need to be ready to hear them and recognize them when we are seeking God’s intention. As Jesus himself discovered as his ministry progressed, God’s promises are not only for the children of Israel but for all God’s beloved children.

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BREAD OF LIFE -- (Last of the John's Gospel series for 2024)

10/6/2024

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John 6:35-40
Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty. But I said to you that you have seen me and yet do not believe. Everything that the Father gives me will come to me, and anyone who comes to me I will never drive away, for I have come down from heaven not to do my own will but the will of him who sent me. And this is the will of him who sent me, that I should lose nothing of all that he has given me but raise it up on the last day. This is indeed the will of my Father, that all who see the Son and believe in him may have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day.”

This will be (I think) the last in this current series of discussions looking into John’s Gospel and what makes it so often different from the Synoptic gospels. This has not been the usual bible study format, going verse by verse in the order written. Instead, we’ve somewhat randomly taken specific points of interest and delved a little more deeply than usual into those particular points.

I’ve left today’s subject to last because I think it may well be the most important for us. We are a people of Bread and Cup and our Table Theology lies at the heart of most everything we do. Our gathering at table and the words of institution are central to our worship – and yet these words did not appear anywhere in John’s gospel. They do appear in each of the synoptics:

Mark 14:22-24 While they were eating, he took a loaf of bread, and after blessing it he broke it, gave it to them, and said, “Take; this is my body.” Then he took a cup, and after giving thanks he gave it to them, and all of them drank from it. He said to them, “This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many.

Matthew 26:26-29 While they were eating, Jesus took a loaf of bread, and after blessing it he broke it, gave it to the disciples, and said, “Take, eat; this is my body.” Then he took a cup, and after giving thanks he gave it to them, saying, “Drink from it, all of you, for this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins.

Luke 22:14-20 When the hour came, he took his place at the table, and the apostles with him. He said to them, “I have eagerly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer, for I tell you, I will not eat it until it is fulfilled in the kingdom of God … Then he took a loaf of bread, and when he had given thanks he broke it and gave it to them, saying, “This is my body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” And he did the same with the cup after supper, saying, “This cup that is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood.

But, again, none of this is included in John’s gospel account. In all four accounts Jesus and his disciples are in Jerusalem for the Passover celebration. In Matthew, Mark, and Luke, this is the only Passover mentioned and Jesus’ only appearance in Jerusalem. Again, John is different. Three separate Passover celebrations are mentioned here and this is apparently, Jesus’ third visit.

After the triumphal entry into Jerusalem -- which begins the final week of Jesus’ human life -- there was a meal -- it is mentioned, barely – John’s scripture simply says there was a meal. And for the writer of John, apparently, the most important thing that happened at this meal was Jesus washing the feet of his disciples. The rest of the evening is taken up with Jesus’ long discourse as he tries to squeeze in all that he still needs to say to his followers before his inevitable betrayal and arrest.

So – what – if anything, does all this have to tell us about our table theology? We have four gospels – three of them place a strong emphasis on the institution of Holy Communion – one does not. Does that in any way invalidate our gathering at the table? I don’t think so – different places, different times.

We’ve recognized before that time and distance strongly affect what scripture has to offer us today. There is some lack of agreement as to which of the four gospels was the last written. For a long time most mainline scholars believed John was the last gospel written, but in more recent years there has been a strong argument put forth the John was next to last and Luke was the latest gospel.

Mark was written first, possibly as early as 30 years after Jesus’ with death, with Matthew following another decade or two later and John and Luke another two or three decades more. The point being that there was a lot of time between Jesus’ death and any of them being written down. It is totally unreasonable to expect that they could all four have chosen exactly the same moments to record. Even the synoptics, similar as they can be, differ widely in a great many ways.

Add to this that John’s community lived at some geographical remove from Jerusalem, which was the physical center of the growing Christian faith. His stories grew out of a community that had different sources for their shared Jesus stories, a community that faced different challenges and likely shared different ethnicities.

We today read scripture with an additional 2000 years of interpretation adding to (or perhaps confusing) our understanding. We read trusting in the Holy Spirit to guide us and trusting, as well, our own gut reactions to what we read, our own understanding of this Jesus person – and we trust God to speak to us fairly and honestly, showing us all we need to see and hear to live our lives as God would have us lead them.

We read Mark and Matthew. We read Luke and John, and we hear – through each of them -- that we are loved – and that is the most important message of all.
One Bread, one Body, one trusting, sharing people.

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WHAT ARE WE LOOKING FOR?

A QUESTION ABOUT NEIGHBORS

"Reframing Those Old, Old Stories"

BREAD OF LIFE -- (Last of the John's Gospel series for 2024)

Rev. Cherie Marckx

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