Passionate, prayerful and intelligent...

NOTE:  Here are my worship notes for Sunday, October 23, 2011: The 30th Sunday of Ordinary Time.  If you are in town, please know we would be blessed if you joined us at 10:30 am.

The Christian Century magazine – one of the oldest and most insightful journals on the American religious scene – describes itself as a resource that is about “thinking critically and living faithfully” in our times. Now let’s consider that for just a moment, ok? Because it sounds to me a lot like what Jesus tells his opponents after they challenge his commitment to ministry.

Peterson’s lively reworking of the gospel text puts it like this: When the religion scholars and lawyers had been silence by Jesus, they gathered one more time for an assault. (Did you catch that: for an assault?!?) Posing a question they hoped would show him up, one asked: "Teacher, which command in God's Law is the most important?" And Jesus replied, "'Love the Lord your God with all your passion and prayer and intelligence.” (Matthew 22: 34-40)

This is serious business today: We’re talking about an assault on Jesus – not a simple difference of theological opinion or a preferred translation of the Bible or even our denominational inclinations – but an assault. And Jesus teaches those of us who seek to follow him that the way we respond to this assault is with all “our passion, prayer and intelligence.” To paraphrase the motto of the Christian Century, we respond to the assault on Jesus by learning to think critically and live faithfully.

But what does that mean – to think critically and live faithfully – to love the Lord our God with all our passion, prayer and intelligence at this moment in time? Well, St. Paul gives us one clue in Romans 12: I appeal to you, sisters and brothers, by the very mercies of God to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to the Lord, for this is your spiritual worship. Do NOT be conformed to this world, but rather be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern the will of God and do what is good and acceptable and mature.

In The Message Romans 12 sounds like this: Here's what I want you to do: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for the Lord. 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. For 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.

• Did you get that? Critical thinking – using our minds creatively from the perspective of Christ to consider the joys and sorrows of real life – is one of the ways we challenge the assault on Jesus. 

• I am smitten by the way Brian McLaren puts it in his tenderly provocative book, Generous Orthodoxy: to be a Christian in a generously orthodox way is not to claim to have the truth captured, stuffed, and mounted on the wall. It is rather to be in a loving (ethical) community of people who are seeking the truth (doctrine) on the road of mission..." (293).

Now let me give you an example of this plucked from the headlines of the current social, political, ethical, cultural, economic and spiritual morass that we seem to be trapped within. There was an article buzzing around Facebook last week entitled, “10 Things Christians Should Know and Do About the Occupy Wall Street Movement” written by Roger Wolsey. I think he cuts to the case from within the heart of Jesus so I’m going to share an extended quote with you about this burgeoning protest. “I get it,” Wolsey writes, “Corporate greed needs to be challenged and corporations need to be taxed and regulated.”

The gap between the haves and the have-nots in the U.S. needs to be reduced. The Bush tax cuts for the wealthy need to be repealed. Student loans need to be forgiven. Banks that were bailed out by the taxpayers shouldn’t keep on screwing their customers over. And the USSC ruling that decreed that corporations are persons and can thus buy off our politicians and get them to do their bidding needs to be rescinded.

I agree with all of those aims of the “Occupy Wall Street” protesters. But even if all of those sensible demands somehow come to pass (including the many other ones that I didn’t mention), in the big picture it may not be all that meaningful. Much ado about nothing. You see, if all of those reforms were to happen, it would effectively put things back to the way things were 15-20 years ago. Though it would mean resuming our upwardly mobile middle class and reducing the gap between the wealthy and the poor, it would simply allow us to blindly press on with pursuing “the American Dream” where each generation does better than the one before it. And it would allow us to obliviously maintain the unjust global status quo where 5% of the world’s population (the U.S.) consumes nearly 1/3 of the world’s natural resources and disproportionally spews out more trash and pollution than the other nations do.

It would mean returning to a situation where the U.S. gives only a paltry 1/10th of 1% of our GDP to humanitarian aid to other countries. We could cut hunger in Africa in half in 15 years if we were to tax every American 1 penny per day. But we don’t and apparently aren’t about to. No one is protesting or occupying on behalf of the many millions of people in the world who are actually being screwed over the most. To the extent that the Occupy movement is nationalist, myopic, and insular, it’s merely rearranging the deck chairs on an economically segregated and unsustainable Titanic.
(check out the pix @ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/17/occupy-wall-street-faces_n_1015900.html)

To think critically – to love the Lord our God with all our passion, prayer and intelligence – is to engage our faith so that it challenges the assault on Jesus. “Do not be conformed to the ways – and habits and cultural blind spots – of this world,” taught St. Paul, “But rather, by the renewal of your mind, be transformed so that in your everyday, ordinary, walking around lives you embody the alternatives made flesh in Jesus Christ.

Now it is not coincidental that our tradition asks us to think critically before living faithfully, right? If we’re going to be passionate and prayerful about challenging the assault on Jesus, then we have do so in an intelligent, wise and humble manner. That’s the second insight from St. Paul for today. In advising the young Christians of Thessalonica, Paul could have said, “Look, baby, I’ve been through it all – not only have I been struck down and blinded by Jesus – but I’ve been picked up and healed by the Master, too. So, put a sock in it and listen up.”\

• And there are Christian leaders all over the world who teach that most of us need to shut up and follow – and literally just pay our dues, too – without having a voice or say in the ministry.

• One of my dear friends back in Tucson – a pioneer in HIV/AIDS ministry from the days when it was called “gay cancer” – said to me: As an out lesbian back in the late 70s my church told me that I was welcome to worship, sing in the choir, minister to the most wounded on the streets and make a financial contribution to keep the church solvent but… never, ever to even dream of having my voice or vote counted in the leadership.

And sadly, this is but one of countless examples of how the church turns the love and passion of Jesus on its head in arrogance. So Paul is explicit with all of us who have been given the privilege and responsibility of leadership when he says: We never threw our weight around or tried to come across as important, with you or anyone else. We weren't aloof with you. We took you just as you were. We were never patronizing, never condescending, but we cared for you the way a mother cares for her children. We loved you dearly. Not content to just pass on the Message, we wanted to give you our hearts. And we did.

To live faithfully in this – or any other – era demands that we think critically before making our words flesh, yes? Last week, during church council, we talked about this as we discussed the up-coming vote on the proposed and affirmed ONA statement. And we wondered together about next steps…

• Now I tend to be a leader who wants to tease out the nuances of the Spirit before charting a course. I try to listen and wait before leaping into action. So I suggested that if the congregation should be led by the Holy Spirit to officially accept this new commitment, perhaps we should wait for a while before creating an imple-mentation plan.

• Well, that opened up a serious and rich conversation within the council. Because they didn’t like the idea of waiting – they sensed the Holy Spirit was calling us to do something bold right out of the gate – but at first it wasn’t clear what that might look like.

So we talked and challenged one another, we questioned and listened carefully… and then a plan began to take shape and form: If we are led to move forward – and I pray that we are – we will start inviting guests from around the region to join with us in worship. We want this commitment to be at the core of our identity so Sunday morning is crucial. So we will ask our guests to bring us a message to us of how we might best live into our Open and Affirming commitment based upon their experience.


• How, for example, might we with join others in breaking down the barriers of race hatred in the Berkshires?

• What are the unmet needs of LGBT families in our area?

• How can we – and other faith communities – do more than offer band aids to our most vulnerable neighbors in need?

Do you hear what I’m saying? This approach has to do with humbly taking seriously the call to think critically before living faithfully, and then charting a course of action that doesn’t compound the assault on Jesus. It is both/and – thought as well as action – passion, prayer and intelligence.

That is how I understand we are called by God to challenge the assault on Jesus. Not shooting off our mouths in anger or ignorance – not arrogantly demanding that somebody hurry up and DO something – and not rushing to judgment because of our opinions or ideologies. We are to be a passionate, prayerful and intelligent part of Christ’s body.

And that, beloved, means that our lives must bear the fruit of faith – they must come to resemble more and more the heart, soul and mind of Jesus – rather than the status quo. The status quo drags us down to the lowest common denominator – it is not about the standards of God’s kingdom – but the dumbing down of all that is good, true and beautiful.

• So “do not be conformed…” admonishes the old saint. Rather, let the Holy Spirit go to work within you so that in God’s own time you start to bear the fruit of faith. 

• And do you recall how Paul came to describe that fruit? Not longevity of membership; not privilege of race, class or gender; and it has nothing to do with educational or economic status. No, in Galatians 5:22 Paul wrote that the fruit of God’s Holy Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.

So here’s a test – and a challenge – and an opportunity: have you let the love of Jesus change you from the inside out? Is there any evidence in your history that your life looks more like Christ’s today than when you first started to worship? Has your faith given birth to the fruit of the Spirit?

One of the reasons why so many people think the contemporary church is bankrupt – and turn away in disgust and anger – is because they see a bunch of people who are just as cranky, selfish and mean-spirited as the culture all around them, right? They see us and wonder where is the love of Jesus – where is the evidence of the Spirit – why does this matter?

Now to be fair, when people outside the church say that to me – when they tell me that the church is full of hypocrites – I reply, “No, no, no, you are so wrong – we’re not FULL of hypocrites - there’s always room for more so come and join us!” But I also recognize that they have a point: like St. Theresa of Avila once said, “Sometimes we are the only hands of Christ that some people will see.”

So take a look at your hands right now:

• Are they open to welcome and embrace?
• Are they balled up into a fist to wound?
• Are they indifferent and irrelevant and bored?
• Or are they folded across your chest in fear or judgment? 

Ask yourself – test yourself – and look at yourself – because in the assault on Christ yours may be the only hands some will ever see…