h the book of Ephesians under the inspiration of Eugene Peterson's, Practice Resurrection. If you are in the area, please drop in at 10:30 am on Sunday. It would be a blessing. (Please forgive my repeat from part of yesterday's posting...)This has been a fascinating week: amidst the beautiful and abundant – maybe even relentless – snow of the Berkshires and the tumult and hope that is spreading like wildfire across Egypt – to say nothing of the fun and joy of playing Patrick’s Pub again with the Jazz Ambassadors – I have been surprised by how many of you have been in touch with me concerning your thoughts and feelings about St. Paul. Seriously!
• More than any other sermon series I’ve shared with you since my arrival in Pittsfield three and a half years ago, this one about growing up in the faith has generated the most push back and commentary.
• Not that anyone has been upset or offended by the challenge to leave adolescent or infantile Christianity behind: no, what has been problematic is grounding the call in the teaching of St. Paul.
I suspect that if I had framed this series usin
g the words and character of Jesus – taking today’s call from Matthew’s gospel to live into the counter-cultural wisdom of being salt and light for the world - you would have probably responded more enthusiastically, don’t you think? I mean we LIKE Jesus, we appreciate when he challenges the status quo of every generation and we affirm that he is at the heart of our spirituality.• When he talks about being salt to the world – living in such a way that we not only strengthen the flavor but also preserve the value of creation like salt did to food in ancient times – we know that Jesus is pointing towards God’s deepest integrity and joy.
• And when scholars remind us that salt “was rubbed on newborn children, used to seal covenants, sprinkled on sacrifices and understood to be a metaphor for wisdom… (Well) it is no wonder, that salt became "associated with God's gracious activity.” Believe me, most of us don’t have any trouble being salty.
But put that same challenge into the mouth of Paul – whom many of us associate with a strict, overbearing and harsh morality – and the call to mature in the faith suddenly sounds punitive, judgmental, narrow and even wrong. So let me ask you: does that ring true? That when Jesus challenges us to reflect on “whether our individual and church lives are actually a model of God’s heart in the world or simply a mirror of old values and behaviors” (Kate Huey) we smile, but when Paul says the same thing we frown and fold our arms in front of us in resistance?
• It made me think of the old tune, “Jesus Is Just Alright with Me” by the Doobie Brothers: what a GREAT song – rockin’ sound, excellent harmonies and a hook that grabs you where you live.
• I’ve been in bars where tough, mean-livin’ bikers stand up and cheer when this song is played – I mean they GET IT – and are often moved to tears because they know that no matter what Jesus IS alright and filled with God’s grace.
My hunch is, however, that the same thing doesn’t hold true in popular culture for old Paul – and I can’t think of ANY rock songs played by a bar band that celebrates the insights of this weary saint. Because, you see, St. Paul has been used to beat wounded people
up with his words. He has been made into a homophobic misogynist with racist, sexist commitments who seems to excuse wife beating, slavery, any and all prohibitions on women’s ordination and a religion that hates pleasure and the body because his veins are filled with fear, guilt, hellfire and ice water.Now if this were the totality of St. Paul, I’d be with you: let’s kick his theological behind out of the canon and move on to a church firmly grounded in Christ’s call to be like salt and light in the world. But hold on: there is more to old Paul than what his worst interpreters have told us. Just this week, Fr. Richard Rohr of the Center for Contemplation and Action in Albuquerque, New Mexico noted that our old buddy Paul has a lot more going for him than most of us realize.
For those in the Christian tradition, Paul is the symbol of radical change. He moves from darkness to light (Acts 9:1-4), from a hateful religious zealot and murderer to a mystic. He is thrown to the ground and blinded for three days. Then scales fall from his eyes and he goes off to Arabia for several months of prayer and reflection (Galatians 1:17-18). This is his personal vision quest and initiation, as it were. And when he meets the Christian community following this experience, they are astounded that it could be the same man. He really is a different person with an utterly new identity, goal, and motivation, who breaks with his own commonly understood tradition, just like Jesus did before him. What’s more both of them based this change on their personal experience of God!
Isn’t that remarkable? Like Jesus, Paul’s encounter with God impelled him into a new way of living and thinking that broke with his tradition and fears so that a new life of compassion and hope blossomed wher
ever he went. And just so that you don’t think I’m blowing smoke at you – trying to sell you a bill of good about a really mean-spirited religious bigot – I made a list of my top five sayings from St. Paul that are just as rockin’ as the song, “Jesus Is Just Alright with Me.”• Number Five – from Ephesians 4 – says: Here's what I want you to do: walk—better yet, run!—on the road God called you to travel… with humility and discipline pour yourselves out for each other in acts of love, alert at noticing differences and quick at mending fences... Please, No prolonged infancies among us, God wants us to grow up, to know the whole truth and tell it in love—like Christ in everything.
• Number Four – from Romans 5 – reminds us: That because we have been embraced by God’s grace we are at peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, that is why we can glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; and perseverance builds character; and character leads to hope. And hope comes from God’s love being poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit.
• Number Three is hot – from Galatians 3: Look in Christ's family there can be no division or separation into Jews and Gentiles, slave and free, male and female (and in Paul’s spirit I have to add gay or straight, young or old, rich or poor, Republican or Democrat) because in Christ Jesus we are all equals.
• Number Two – part of my life calling as written in Romans 12 – says: So here's what I want you to do with God’s help. Take your everyday, ordin
ary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Don't become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You'll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you. (Romans 12)And the Number One, best, most important and insightful insight from the former bad boy known as Saul of Tarsus comes from I Corinthians 13: If I speak with human eloquence and angelic ecstasy but don't love, I'm nothing but the creaking of a rusty gate. 2If I speak God's Word with power, revealing all his mysteries and making everything plain as day, and if I have faith that says to a mountain, "Jump," and it jumps, but I don't love, I'm nothing. 3-7If I give everything I own to the poor and even go to the stake to be burned as a martyr, but I don't love, I've gotten nowhere. So, no matter what I say, what I believe, and what I do, I'm bankrupt without love. Love never gives up. Love cares more for others than for self. Love doesn't want what it doesn't have. Love doesn't strut, Doesn't have a swelled head, Doesn't force itself on others, Isn't always "me first," Doesn't fly off the handle, Doesn't keep score of the sins of others, Doesn't revel when others grovel, Takes pleasure in the flowering of truth, Puts up with anything, Trusts God always, Always looks for the best, Never looks back, But keeps going to the end for love never dies.
And it is THIS Paul – not the apologist for fear and harshness – that I look to in Ephesians, ok? And this Paul tells us two important truths about what it means to grow up into the truth of Jesus in our generation.
• First he speaks to us abo
ut prayer as a way of living – being salt and light in the world – rather than just a collection of words or rituals. Mature people of faith LIVE as a prayer in the world, while baby Christians merely repeat what they have heard.• And second, grown up Christians understand that our feelings and attitudes about ourselves and others is NOT how God looks at us. We are “saints” in God’s eyes - people of grace and blessing by our baptism – who are bigger and deeper than our emotions, addictions, bad habits and all the rest.
Now let’s unpack both of these insights for just a moment, ok? Do you grasp what Paul is getting at when he tells us that prayer is about living fully in the presence of God? That real prayer is beyond the liturgy – the forms and rituals – so that everything we do can be a meeting of God’s grace in our ordinary experience? Eugene Peterson has a great quote:
We pray when we sit quiet and meditatively before God with Psalm 118 open before us; and we pray while we are taking out the garbage (do you recycle?); we pray when we are losing our grip and ask God for help; we pray when we are weeding the garden (and find ourselves fully present in the moment); we pray when we ask God to help a friend who is at the end of her rope; we pray when we write a letter; we pray when we are in a conversation with our cynical and bullying boss; we pray with our friends in church; we pray walking down North Street in the company of strangers because… while not everything we do is prayer everything we do and say and think could be prayer.
In other words, everything we do, think and say could be a search for the Lord in our ordinary existence and an expression of Christ’s salt and light, too. Making love – listening to music – choosing to spend time talking with someone rather than vegging out in front of the TV, coming to help out at church with a river clean up: all of which asks you to become a real non-conformist about prayer. Using the words of others is ok to start with, right? That’s how children learn to speak – they imitate and practice – but we’re not after being children in the faith all our lives.
We want to grow up: so how do you think you might practice being CREATIVE with your prayers this week? Anything strike you as I’ve been talking this morning?
I once did an experiment collecting jokes as part of my prayer discipline – I’m serious – but not just any kind of joke: they had to be funny and saturated in self-deprecating humor. Jokes or stories that helped me laugh at me, not those told at the expense of another, ok? Here’s one:
Once upon a time the pastor of a congregational church and the moderator of church council were lamenting the sorry state of their community’s spiritual life. “Why I bet you,” said the minister, “that you don’t even know the Lord’s Prayer.” To which the moderator said, “Shame on you; of course I do.” But the pastor was insistent: “No you don’t – nobody knows how to pray any more – and to prove it to you I bet you $100 that you can’t pray the Lord’s Prayer at our next council meeting.” So they shook hands and the bet was on. Well, the council meeting came and the moderator said, “Alright now, let’s begin this meeting with the Lord’s Prayer.” And when everyone had bowed their heads she said, “Let us pray… now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep.” At which point the pastor looked up and said, “Oh my God… she DOES know it after all!”
Paul is a genius sometimes – especially when he urges us to become creative and experimental with our whole lives as a prayer – in this he is in harmony with the prophet Isaiah who tells us that God’s fast is NOT going through the motions. God aches for authenticity and creativity and compassion: Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house; When you see the naked, to cover them, and not to hide yourself from your own kin? Then your light shall break forth like the dawn, and your healing shall spring up quickly.
Paul finishes his insight for today with this: everyone in this place is a saint. You – m
e – your neighbor – the newest guest here as well as the oldest sinner: we are all saints. And he doesn’t say this out of naivety or foolishness, ok? Paul is practicing resurrection – intentionally cultivating Christ’s salt and light – so that we start seeing ourselves as a truly counter-cultural alternative to the status quo. Again, Peterson is helpful when he notes:Paul is retraining our imaginations to understand not in terms of how we feel about ourselves and not in terms of how others treat us, but as God feels about us and treats us. Not as our parents or teachers or our physicians or employers or our children define us, but God… I want to give you a new word for yourself, a word that gets beneath all appearances, behind all roles and functions, a word that reminds you of what God is doing in your life so that you can grow up in Christ. You are a saint – holy – bigger than the society that evaluates you by role, behavior or potential.
Do you sense how radically upside-down this is? How Christ-like? How counter-cultural? And you won’t discover this insight any place else – only in the church – and that’s a stone cold fact, Jack. The church is where we grow up in Christ if we’re willing to become creative and bold and let go of our fears and habits just like St. Paul.
And that strikes me as very good news for today so I invite those who have ears to hear, to hear.
credits:
1) Lumsden photo
2) Gaughin @ http://blogs.tcpalm.com/marilyn_bauer/2010/08/
3) Photo @ http://www.clarkmillerpub.com/
4) Photo @ http://www.flickr.com/
5) Beloved @ http://www.designsbysbk.com/
6) Prayer @ http://www.carla247.typepad.com/
7) Prayermobile @ ibid
I was very surprised to find that the Byrds first recorded Jesus is Just All Right With Me (composed by McGuinn?).
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