(Psalm 1)

This morning we’re starting a sermon series from the Psalms.  I say from the Psalms rather than on the Psalms because there are 150 of them and we don’t want to spend three years on this; but that very fact that there are 150 makes it a challenge to figure out where to look.  When starting anything, I tend to defer to the King of Hearts in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, who instructed the White Rabbit, “Begin at the beginning, and go on till you come to the end:  then stop.”  But does that really matter here?  Stories have beginnings, and essays—like the ones our middle-school English teachers have to pound their students through—but the book of Psalms?

Thing is, though it doesn’t have the same sort of throughline as a story or an essay, the book of Psalms does have an introduction and a conclusion.  In fact, it has a two-part introduction—that’s why some ancient manuscripts of the Psalter combined the first two psalms into one.  Psalm 1 operates at the level of the individual, and then Psalm 2 speaks of the community of faith among the godless nations.  Both areas of focus are important throughout the book; but you can’t really do both in one sermon, so we’re just doing the first part this morning.Read more→

(Romans 8:28-39)

Oh, the sun runs its course from the east to the west
With the best of our motives illumined,
Then it sinks with a sigh in the dusk of the heart
And our virtue lies worthless as rumor.

You can be what you like if you like what you are—
We reflect but the sum of our creeds;
But we don’t seem to seize on the tenets we hold,
And they slip through the sieve of our deeds.

When we see our mistakes, we ache with regret
And the pain makes a lasting impression,
But we are stoics at heart when the time is at hand
To beat our breasts and make a true confession.

Mark Heard for the win, as usual.  The poet laureate of the Christian struggle knew well that human beings are desperately in need of grace, because left to our own efforts and strength, even our best starts will not end well.  This is the problem that all human religions try to solve with rules and structures and authorities and consequences; but they cannot solve it, only lessen it, because none of those things can touch the heart.  Only God’s scandalous solution can do that.Read more→

(John 20:19-31)

Doubt’s an odd thing.  It’s a grey area between belief and unbelief—between two different kinds of certainty.  It can be paralyzing, leaving us unable to act because we don’t know what to do.  It can be liberating, freeing us to let go a false certainty to seek a true one.  It can be unhealthy, especially if it becomes obsessive; it can also be healthy for us, reminding us we might not know quite as much as we think we do.  It can be dishonest, a pretense to disguise a determination not to believe something—sometimes, to disguise that even from ourselves—but there is also such a thing as honest doubt, and doubt which is truly open to belief and truly seeking understanding can be an important prelude to true faith.

The problem is, true doubt is uncomfortable, like jogging in place on a waterbed.  We want a solid place to stand.  That’s why some churches treat doubt as a sin, as if believing in Jesus and following him are supposed to be easy—which they aren’t.  I think that’s also why, when kids who grow up in the church have their faith challenged hard for the first time, they so often slide into disbelief like Jell-O off a steep metal roof.  Doubt is uncomfortable, so our instinctive reaction is not to engage with it but to protect ourselves against it.Read more→

In Teaching a Stone to Talk, in one of my favorite paragraphs ever written by anybody anywhere, Annie Dillard writes,

On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions.  Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke?  Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it?  The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning.  It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets.  Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews.  For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.

It’s in that spirit, I think, that we should come before this passage, because it’s at this point in the Gospel of John that things really start getting bumpy.  The gospels tell a story of increasing division between Jesus and the religious folk as they move from skeptical curiosity through entrenched opposition to murderous fury—a division that Jesus doesn’t desire but also doesn’t try to prevent.  In John, the major shift happens in chapters 9 through 11.  The healing of the blind man in chapter 9, as Deborah showed us two weeks ago, ups the ante for the Pharisees, making him a much more alarming threat to them than he had been.  The raising of Lazarus in chapter 11, which Tom will talk about in two weeks, brings the chief priests fully on board with the conviction that Jesus must be killed.  And in between?  In our passage this morning, we see Jesus put a wedge in the crack between himself and the Jewish leadership and bring the splitting maul down hard.

It’s important to be clear about something here:  there’s a difference between being a divisive figure and being a divider.  For dividers, turning people against each other is the point—it’s a means to an end, a tactic or strategy in the service of their agenda.  Think Lee Atwater, James Carville, Karl Rove.  Jesus didn’t desire division; he wasn’t dividing people in order to conquer them.  But anyone who stands strongly for truth will be a divisive figure, both loved and hated—and sometimes by the same people at the same time.  Dr. King was a divisive figure, because—like Jesus—he spoke truths that many people didn’t want to hear.  Great unifiers are great compromisers; and sometimes, as with the Constitution, they compromise not only their principles but their integrity for the sake of unity.

Jesus is the light of the world, and—as John makes very clear—light divides the world into those who love the light and those who love the darkness, just by existing.  Read more→

(John 1:1-18)

There’s a story about a young pianist who was working on a piece by Bach.  After the recital, she said to her teacher, “Thank goodness we’ve finished Bach.”  Her teacher looked at her and said firmly, “My dear, one never finishes Bach.”  Christians have the tendency to approach the fundamental truths of our faith in this way, as if there comes a point where we can look at them and say, “I’ve learned this—I can move on to the next thing.”  The truth that we’re saved by God’s grace alone and we live by his grace alone, for instance, is something we need to keep coming back to and re-learning because the sinful part of us keeps pushing it out of our minds.

That’s one reason it’s a good thing we have those headings of the VSF creed up on the wall:  we need the continual reminder that God is bigger.  We do well to take that a bit further and remind ourselves that Jesus is bigger.  The universal temptation is to make God safe, and perhaps especially to make Jesus safe—or maybe it’s just especially easy to do with Jesus.  We think in comparisons, and so when we read the stories of Jesus as a human being, we try to fit him into our normal frame of reference.  Even if we believe he was fully God, we have no model anywhere in view for what that looks like, and so our natural tendency is to imagine Jesus as merely human.  John’s aim in beginning his gospel is to write about Jesus in a way that prevents that tendency from obscuring our view of the greatness and uniqueness of Jesus.

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