Defense Against Miracle

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(Acts 2:14, 22-32)

Imagine, for a moment, yourself in Peter’s sandals.  You’ve seen Jesus convicted by a Jewish kangaroo court and brutally executed by Roman soldiers at the order of a politically-vulnerable Roman governor.  You’ve seen him alive again, and even eaten with him, proving him neither ghost nor golem.  You’ve stood looking up into the sky and watched him vanish from sight.  You’ve followed his instructions, waiting with the rest of his disciples in Jerusalem for . . . well, for something to happen, even if you weren’t exactly sure just what.  And now, this morning, with all of you together at the Temple to celebrate the Feast of Weeks, that something happened, and you are experiencing the world made strange.

And what’s more, it’s not just you—everyone around you in the Temple is experiencing it, too, as your fellow disciples are all speaking at the same time in all the various languages of the Roman world.  You’re surrounded by a crowd now, a crowd of people watching in stunned bewilderment.  Some are trying desperately to understand; others have raised shields of self-defensive mockery, accusing you all of being drunk out of your skulls.  Suddenly, you feel the Spirit of God pulling you up to speak.  What do you do?  What do you say?Read more→

Call and Response

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(John 9)

Note:  the video begins with a dramatic reading of John 9 and concludes with the Lord’s Supper, with the words of institution; the sermon begins around 5:56.

The lectionary this morning brings us to John 9, in a season when we are looking at God’s word through the lens of calling and mission.  Left to my own devices I would probably never have put these two things together; but I was not left to my own devices.  It’s a great gift to have good colleagues, and this year I’ve been pondering the words of one of the wise pastors I know.  Those words were in the back of my mind as I began preparing this message, and they quickly became my guide to see John 9 from a new angle.  Let me show you:

[play sermon snippet, Emily Cash, VSF, 1/29/23]

When we talk about the ways God calls us to be and do what he wills, we have to face the fact that his calling is rarely obvious or explicitly spelled out.  Given that reality, there are two profoundly important truths in Emily’s words.Read more→

Tempted to Lead

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(Matthew 4:1-11)

Roughly seventeen years and two churches ago, I started off with a five-week series on this passage.  Since it was the beginning of the year, one of those services included the ordination and installation of a new elder.  That got me thinking about Jesus as a human leader of a group of oddly-assorted people on a trying journey through challenging circumstances.  It’s not a new idea, to be sure, but it wasn’t an angle I had spent a lot of time considering; and the more I thought about it in the light of Matthew 4, the more I came to think that if we want to learn about leadership from Jesus, our passage this morning is where we must begin.

When I say that, you might be looking back down at the text and wondering where I’m getting that, and the answer is:  not in the text.  It’s in the context.  Look what comes next in this chapter.  First, John the Baptist gets thrown in prison, prompting Jesus to move to the cities around the Sea of Galilee, start his preaching career, and recruit his first disciples.  Then we see the early success—at least as those disciples probably saw it—of Jesus’ preaching career, as he starts drawing large, adoring crowds.  That is followed in turn by the first great act of leadership of Jesus’ career, the Sermon on the Mount, which is designed in part to force those adoring crowds to make a choice:  either follow Jesus as committed disciples, or abandon him.  People following him for the sake of the stuff he’s doing doesn’t serve his purpose at all.Read more→

Welcoming the Unacceptable

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The calling to preach the word of God is a series of opportunities to get yourself into trouble.  On the one hand, there is the recurring invitation from the Spirit of God to, as the late Representative John Lewis put it, “get into good trouble”; on the other, there are myriad chances to put your foot in your mouth and start chewing on your ankle.  This is one reason why the wise preacher goes forth only with much prayer, in a spirit of dependence.  Let’s pray.

 

As many of you know, we came to Indiana from Colorado, where I pastored a church in a small mountain resort community.  The church was pretty thin on the ground in the county, but I had a few colleagues whom I really appreciated.  One was Doug Stevenson, a New Zealander who had come to the US a few years before to pastor an independent congregation out in Kremmling, in the western part of the county.  One day, somewhat pensively, Doug told our pastors’ group his daughter was coming to visit from New Zealand.  He and his wife Ethel were eager to see her, but there was a complicating factor:  she was bringing her girlfriend along.  Unsure how to respond to the situation, he had reached out to a friend for guidance.  His friend listened, then told Doug to put a double bed in his daughter’s room, set everything up as nicely as he could, and leave chocolates on the pillows.  “Make your daughter welcome,” was the message, which meant making her girlfriend welcome too.

I learned at Regent to take hospitality seriously, both from the way the Regent community valued it and from my introduction to the work of Dr. Kenneth Bailey, who taught me the great importance of hospitality in the world in which Jesus lived; but I still saw it primarily in practical terms, as one of the small graces in which and by which we’re called to live.  That conversation with Doug widened my perspective, because his friend wasn’t talking about hospitality as a practical response to human need but as a theological response to the human condition.

Read more→

Neurodiversity and the church: exploratory thoughts

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As I noted briefly a few weeks ago, the church has a neurodiversity problem which it needs to address.  Those of us who are neurodivergent in one way or another face challenges both in corporate worship and in the discipleship programs of the church, but the typical congregation is unaware or dismissive of these challenges.   If you or your children have ADD, or are on the autism spectrum, or deal with dyslexia, or have other neurological/neurochemical processing issues that make you different from neurotypical folks, you’re most likely on your own.  What works for “everyone else” ought to work for you, and it’s up to you to make it work.

Part of the issue is that neurotypical people do not understand what it is to be neurodiverse—and usually don’t see any need to.  Neurodivergent conditions are defined from the outside by neurotypical people, and they are defined symptomatically.  Put another way, these conditions (and thus, by extension, those who have them) are defined as collections of behaviors which neurotypical people see as problems that need to be fixed.  In some cases, they are defined morally and condemned as willful misbehavior by people who refuse to believe the condition actually exists.Read more→

Read your own mail

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The perception of Christians in Western culture these days is growing increasingly negative, in large part because we are seen as focused on telling other people what to do and what not to do.  Regrettably, that view has some truth to it.  Regrettably, but not surprisingly; after all, we don’t cease to be sinners just because we start going to church.  Even the most Christlike people I have ever known were simul iustus et peccator, in Luther’s phrase, simultaneously saint and sinner.  The redeeming work of Jesus in our lives by the power of his Holy Spirit is the deepest reality of our hearts, but the reality of the sin in our hearts is very deep as well.

One of the effects of our sin is a proclivity to read our Bibles the wrong way ’round.Read more→

Do justice, love forgiveness

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Does it seem to you that Western culture is growing increasingly merciless and unforgiving?  Maybe it doesn’t.  Maybe you think the opposite is true, given the rate at which behaviors traditionally understood as wrong are being normalized—but that has nothing to do with mercy or forgiveness.  Actually, that trend underscores my point; given the increasingly pharisaical tenor of Western society, true toleration of behavior is disappearing into polarization, leaving only approval and anathematization as options.

I wrote that five and a half years ago; if anything, I think it’s truer now than when I wrote it.  Contemporary Western culture has rejected Christianity as legalistic in the service of a harsher legalism.  It has condemned the historic Christian faith for believing in sin, and in the process has lost the understanding of grace.  As it has rushed to caricature and demonize the Puritans, it has become puritanical in the worst sense of the word (a sense which, ironically, would not actually apply to the historical Puritans).

If you don’t believe me, just ask Anne Applebaum, who is no conservative Christian.Read more→

“She was just here . . .”

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Lin-Manuel Miranda is a blessing for the USA for which I am truly grateful.  I suspect that my reasons for saying that are somewhat different from those which his high-profile fans, supporters, and friends would offer, but I’m no less serious for all that.  Of all my reasons, the most important—if we could learn to listen—might be this:  he offers our death-denying culture a model for lament.

The novelist and publisher Carolyn Givens wrote beautifully about this in an essay posted on The Rabbit Room a couple months ago called “Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hopeful Grief.”  Givens reflects on “Alabanza” from In the Heights and “It’s Quiet Uptown” from Hamilton, which she calls “two of the most beautiful and hopeful expressions of grief I’ve ever heard.”Read more→

What is this building?

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This is an embassy.  Specifically, this building is an embassy of the Kingdom of Heaven to the nations of this world, and the people of God are Heaven’s foreign service.  We are God’s ambassadors to the communities in which he has placed us to carry out his policy in this world.

That policy, the policy of the kingdom of God in this world, is reconciliation.  We have been given the job of announcing a peace treaty between the Kingdom of God and the warring kingdoms of this world.  That peace treaty was signed by God himself in the city of Jerusalem on a dark Friday in the spring of the year 29 AD, and it is open to anyone willing to sign on.  Our job is not to make peace, nor is it to negotiate anything.  Our job is simply to declare the peace God has already made with us through Jesus Christ, to proclaim the good news of reconciliation to all those who need to hear it, and to invite them to sign the treaty and join us.

 

Photo ©2021 Richard Haddeman.  Public domain.

On being a man

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I noted recently my appreciation for Elizabeth Moon’s novel Against the Odds, citing her character Kevil Mahoney’s discussion of the distribution of human talent.  Another favorite passage of mine is a bit of impromptu marriage counseling given by an older man, Professor Gustaf Aidersson, to one of her young protagonists, Lieutenant Barin Serrano.  (By way of background, Aidersson has been married for decades to a sculptor named Kata, while Serrano is recently married to one of Moon’s longer-running protagonists, Esmay Suiza, now Lieutenant Commander Esmay Suiza-Serrano.)

“A man who is just a scientist, or just a soldier, or just a woodcutter isn’t a whole man.  I’ll tell you what I think a man is—and by man I don’t mean a featherless biped or something who just happens to have human DNA and a Y chromosome.  A man is a person who has learned—is learning, is willing to learn—to know himself.  Who can face the truth about himself and go on living, who makes the right kind of difference in the world.”

“Truth’s not always easy,” Barin muttered into his potatoes.

“Truth is never easy,” the professor said.  “Truth about yourself is the hardest.  But men love, men protect those they love, men walk with honor.  So can women—Kata would smack me with one of her carving tools if she thought I didn’t know that—but right now, because we’re both men, we’re talking about men.”

“What if you . . . make bad mistakes?” Barin asked.

“You fix them, as best you can,” the professor said.  “Admit them, make amends, try again.  I’ve certainly made them.  Lots.  It’s how you learn.”

I love Moon’s emphasis here:  being a real man—or a real woman—is about facing yourself honestly, asking yourself the hard questions, accepting the truth without defense, and moving forward with honor.