Just another WordPress site

Author: Sara Palmer

A matter of justice

This text was converted from the original print edition for full-text searchability. Formatting may differ from the original. Consult the PDF for citation and presentation details.

Page 47

A Matter of Justice

Samuel L.Adams

Union Presbyterian Seminary, Richmond, Virginia

As churches seek to serve Christ and harvest the resources to sustain their mission , it is important to acknowledge our social, political, and economic climate. In the midst of a harsh recession, the nature of public discourse in America reminds us again and again that we live in a divided country. If you walked into a crowded restaurant and simply shouted “MSNBC” or “Fox News,” it is safe to assume that this would provoke a number of sarcastic responses. Much of the shouting on cable news and in the blogosphere is counterproductive to good public policy and healthy debate over the substantive issues facing our cities, states, nation, and world. While the Internet and proliferation of media outlets have undoubtedly allowed more voices to the table, too often invective and innuendo trump the interchange of ideas. This tendency reflects deep polarization in the society, such that public discussion centers on who is up and who is down, which side has made the most verbal gaffes, and the sordid details of private lives. Sometimes the discourse ventures into the area of religion, especially in the midst of a crisis. It has been interesting to monitor the discussion of the Bible and Christian theology as we have weathered the economic turmoil of the past few years. The subprime mortgage crisis, the loss of jobs, the debate over health care and tax policy: these are not just secular issues. For all people of faith, such events have forced us to consider the complex relationship between our current economic system and what our sacred texts have to say about money. One of the topics that regularly surfaces in discussions of this sort is “social justice .” This concept has received a great deal of attention in the last couple of years, especially in light of the recession and the comments of media personality Glenn Beck last year. There are few names in American public life that provoke a more visceral reaction, whether positive or negative, than Glenn Beck. And of all the things he has said, no remarks have been more volatile or generated more controversy than the ones he uttered in March of 2010: “I beg you, look for the words ‘social justice’ or ‘economic justice’ on your church website. If you find it, run as fast as you can. Social justice and economic justice: they are code words. If you have a priest who is pushing social justice, go and find another parish.” He then argued that “social justice” is a perversion of the Christian message, akin to socialism or communism.1 Many religious leaders were quick to denounce Beck, including those in the Southern Baptist convention, Beck’s fellow Mormons, Catholic leaders, and most vocally Jim Wallis, the editor of the magazine Sojourners. All of them suggested that even a cursory reading of the Old Testament and the Gospels leads to an undeniable conclusion: the biblical writers have an abiding interest in economic issues and the distribution of wealth. In seeking to construct a society in which human beings glorify God and everyone has sufficient resources, the Bible returns repeatedly to the idea of “social justice.” Despite the polemical and uninformed nature of his remarks, Beck actually sparked an important conversation on this issue. Too often mainline Protestants use the words “social justice” in a touchy-feely way, or we do not clarify what we mean

Page 48

by the phrase, including the content of Scripture on this topic.2 Discussions about “social justice” often take a sentimental turn, where we all nod our heads that this is something we ought to be doing, but we are not entirely sure what “this” is. It is the intention of the current discussion to probe a bit deeper and think about the connotation of “social justice” in our contemporary discourse and what the Bible has to say about it. An issue devoted to Pentecost is an appropriate place to consider this topic, since the earliest followers of Jesus gave such close attention to the needs of their entire community of believers. When examining the concept of social justice, the “social” part is straightforward. When used adjectivally, “social” describes how individuals relate to one another. It refers to our various forms of public life. We say someone is “socially adept” or has good “social skills” when they handle the public aspects of their life with decorum. Conversely, an individual who has trouble fitting in with his peers is “antisocial” and a potential problem to the cohesion of a particular group or society. In the Old and New Testaments, tight-knit social communities are core requirements. The Israelites (bene yisrael) live in covenant with God and each other, and the core expectation is that they will stand together in solidarity. The earliest followers of Jesus have a level of commitment that also reflects their close ties and social responsibility to look out for one another (e.g., the focus on £om0wa/”fellowship” in the book of Acts). If “social” is relatively straightforward to define, “justice” is more complex, what we might call a thick term. “Justice” in Scripture means more than punitive measures against those who have done wrong. The Hebrew word translated as “justice” is mishpat, and it can indicate the act of deciding a case or the place of judgment, the court. It can also mean “equity,” “fairness,” and “kindness” to those who are poor. Not taking more than one needs. In the well-known passage from Amos, where the prophet proclaims, “But let justice roll down like water, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream” (Amos 5:24), or in Micah’s famous question, “What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” (Mie 6:8), the context is fairness and equity in the social realm, such that the mercy of God is reflected in the actions of human beings towards one other. Consequently, “justice” can mean not taking more than one needs and looking out for those on the margins. Within the books of the Old Testament, the biblical writers refer repeatedly to the Deity as the God of “justice and righteousness,” especially in the Psalms. One of the more stirring examples is Psalm 99:4: “Mighty King, lover of justice, you have established equity; you have executed justice and righteousness in Jacob.” Notice in this verse from Psalm 99 that justice is present when the Lord has established “equity.” Because God’s primary qualities are justice and righteousness, prophets like Amos and Micah declare that it is necessary to work for justice in the earthly sphere, however short we might fall. Within this framework for justice, mere selfsufficiency does not fulfill the mandate from God. It is not enough to tend to one’s own field and leave others alone, as the prophet Ezekiel explains. The Lord will judge each person according to whether they have avoided such wrongdoing as robbery or charging excessive interest, but also based on their willingness to “give bread to the hungry and clothe the naked with a garment” (Ezek 18:7). J. David Pleins explains that such passages reveal a “theology of obligation” in Scripture.3 Offering support to others, whether of a financial or emotional nature, is not optional, nor is working

Page 49

for a society in which all persons receive fair treatment. In addressing this topic, there is no more comprehensive blueprint for justice in all of Scripture than the book of Deuteronomy. The laws and principles in Deuteronomy, which are the source for many of the ethical conclusions in the New Testament, give numerous and concrete examples about how to work for social justice, or fairness for all persons. As S. Dean McBride, who devoted much of his career to Deuteronomy, points out, the goal in this law is a sphere of genuine autonomy for every individual.4 What this means is that each person should have access to basic resources in the society and be able to function in community without shame. Some modern economists have argued for the same goal in our contemporary landscape. Harvard economist Amartya Sen cites the need for “basic capabilities” among all persons, specifically the ability to appear in public without shame as a basic right for all human beings.5 It is clear that many individuals in America and throughout the world cannot achieve this fundamental goal in 2011. In seeking to cultivate a fair society, Deuteronomy encourages a system predicated on justice: “You must not distort justice (mishpat); you must not show partiality; and you must not accept bribes, for a bribe blinds the eyes of the wise and subverts the cause of those who are in the right. Justice, and only justice, you shall pursue, so that you may live and occupy the land that the Lord your God is giving you” (Deut 16:18-19). The middle of the book (Deuteronomy 12-26) is a constitution, one of the earliest of its type, which strives to offer inalienable rights to each and every person. Deuteronomy attempted to provide a comprehensive polity long before any Presbyterians came on the scene. The covenant people are to worship only God, the power of the king and officials is limited, and the worth of every person is affirmed repeatedly. For example, Deuteronomy 24:17-18, and note again the mention of mishpat or “justice”: “You shall not deprive a resident alien or an orphan of justice; you shall not take a widow’s garment in pledge. Remember that you were a slave in Egypt and the Lord your God redeemed you from there; therefore I command you to do this.” The message of the Bible can be difficult and unclear, as we seek to determine God’s will for our lives today. Yet the concrete advice in Deuteronomy about social justice does not fall into the unclear category. In his speech to Moses, God hammers the point home: “Surely, this commandment that I am commanding you today is not too hard for you, nor is it too far away. It is not in heaven, that you should say, ‘Who will go up to heaven for us, and get it for us so that we may hear it and observe it?’ … No, the word is very near to you; it is in your mouth and in your heart for you to observe” (Deut 30:11-14). There is nothing mysterious about the blueprint for social relations in Deuteronomy: “Justice, and only justice, shall you pursue.” When thinking about our contemporary economic context, the applicability of the message is worth considering. The justice concept in Deuteronomy does not make room for payday lending. Just as Deuteronomy condemns the charging of high interest rates on the backs of subsistence farmers who made up the majority of the population (Deut 23:19-20), unfair loans that test the solvency of poor citizens are unacceptable. My wife Helen just went to a training event for Girl Scout leaders at a struggling school in Richmond, and she came home wondering how kids could learn or even develop self-esteem when they have to venture each day to classrooms in dilapidated buildings that lack the necessary supplies. The justice concept in Deu-

Page 50

teronomy forces us to work for better education and a system in which everyone has access to quality teaching. The justice concept in Deuteronomy means that churches have to continue their outreach ministries, to work tirelessly until each person in our society has a place to go, the ability to appear in public without shame, with a sphere of genuine autonomy about them. The justice concept in Deuteronomy forces us to address the recurrent problem of hunger in America, especially for those families struggling with recent job losses. Now there is an undeniable tension between our capitalist system and the vision for justice in Deuteronomy. For the engines of our modern economy run on the basic premise that each participant acts out of his or her own self-interest. Whoever makes the best product at the lowest price does so in the pursuit of profit. This point was made most famously by Adam Smith in his landmark work, The Wealth of Nations: “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantage.”6 That the baker acts out of self-interest, that each of us participates in the economy out of our own self-interest, is not in and of itself a bad thing, as many economists have pointed out. If it is in the interest of a seller to make the best product available at the lowest price, the savings from this self-interest can and often do carry over to the consumer. Productivity, efficiency, and a competitive market can lead to better prices and a better standard of living for many people. In market theory, a frequent assumption has been that things will hum along as individuals and businesses get more and more efficient, always searching for innovation and an edge over the competition. In previous generations, economists like Milton Friedman claimed that glitches or bumps in a capitalist system like ours will be rare and minor. Modest self-corrections might briefly stall the upward spiral of prosperity, but the system would always self-correct. Now of course the assumption of unending, upward prosperity has been debunked by the events of the last two years. The recession has forced us to reexamine the market economy in which we place so much stock, both literally and figuratively. It has also provided a moment for reconsidering the relationship between our religious tradition, which calls us to be other-interested, and our economic system, which all too frequently encourages us to be self-interested.7 So how do we proceed with this pursuit of justice? This is certainly an ongoing and fundamental question, to be addressed by a variety of voices, and one essay can only scratch the surface. One thing is clear: it is going to take a rebirth of mutual trust in our society, and churches have a vital role to play in this rebuilding. The divisive elections of recent years have shown that we cannot always rely on our political system to build trust and a fair society. The reclaiming of justice will not ultimately be achieved in the halls of Congress or among the President’s team of advisors, but at the local level, in our interactions with each other. As the novelist Margaret Atwood explains in a New York Times editorial, mutual trust is not going to be regained if we just sit patiently and watch the Dow creep back upward: “The wounds go deeper than that. To heal them, we must repair the broken moral balance that let this chaos loose.”8 Justice is not attainable on the cable networks or even the Internet, but in the pursuit of solidarity with one another and perhaps valuing what we own and have attained a bit less. Atwood wonders whether “things unconnected with money will

Page 51

be valued more – friends, family, a walk in the woods. Τ will be spoken less, ‘we’ will return, as people recognize that there is such a thing as a common good.” Of course our model in this and all other pursuits is the life and witness of Jesus Christ. A focus on social justice pervades the entire New Testament, and it is an emphasis born from the experience of observant Jews familiar with the principle of mishpat (“justice”) in the book of Deuteronomy. Jesus encourages the giving of alms and sharing of resources: “Sell your possessions, and give alms. Make purses for yourselves that do not wear out, an unfailing treasure in heaven, where no thief comes near and no moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Luke 12:33-34). He frequently casts the issue in eschatological terms: the person who tends to the less fortunate will inherit the kingdom (e.g., Matt 25:34-40, and the separation of the sheep and the goats based on their pursuit of justice). The parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37) is probably the best-known story in the New Testament, and the core message relates to risk-taking in the service of a stranger. Clearly, the “theology of obligation” persists in the New Testament. The letters of Paul reflect a similar tendency. In 2 Corinthians, Paul encourages all believers to give according to their means and to do so following the servant-leader model of Christ. The Apostle declares, “I do not mean that there should be relief for others and pressure on you, but it is a question of a fair balance between your present abundance and their need” (2 Cor 8:13). Paul’s statement calls the early church to act with a generous spirit, to seek a fair balance between individual needs and justice in the larger society. In the tradition of Deuteronomy, Paul seeks a world in which there is a sphere of genuine autonomy around all of the early believers in Jesus, and every person has the ability to appear in public without shame. His statement in 2 Cor 8:15 encapsulates this goal: “The one who had much did not have too much, and the one who had little did not have too little.” This question of a “fair balance” is a very difficult and contentious issue. In an age of conspicuous consumption, we regularly hear the refrain, “How much is enough?” People of faith can disagree on the best policy prescriptions for achieving a fair so ciety, and neither the left nor the right has a monopoly on the truth. There is need for honest debate on all complex issues relating to our economy. And it is unlikely that anyone is going to sell his or her possessions after hearing this passage from 2 Corinthians or Jesus’ words as recounted in Luke. This would make a person vulner able to destitution, unable to support and be present for family members and friends. In addition, many on the right have pointed to the need for personal responsibility in how we make decisions. The Bible certainly endorses personal responsibility in both Testaments in taking care of one’s family, exercising common sense (as in Proverbs), and not engaging in destructive behavioral patterns. Yet as we address the current economic landscape, Paul’s message about earthly treasures is very relevant to the contemporary pursuit of justice and the tension between our own self-interest and “a fair balance.” This passage and others like it call us to question aspects of our consumer culture, to make sure that we provide for everyone in our midst and value the type of person we are in community with others more than our status. One of the best things about Deuteronomy and some of the other passages in Scripture is that they focus on small, everyday acts of kindness. Very few of us have the resources to be philanthropists on the level of Bill Gates, but we can do little

Page 52

things that add up to justice. Being present with friends and loved ones who are out of work and trying to ease one another’s burdens during stressful times: such efforts help to build a just society. Persistent acts in the pursuit of justice make all the difference, and this is a regular occurrence in the book of Acts. A focus on the practical is apparent among the first disciples. After the Holy Spirit has descended upon these believers, after Peter eloquently explains the significance of the resurrection to anyone who will listen, the author of Luke and Acts includes a fascinating description of the financial habits of the first disciples. No one hoarded more than he or she needed, and they all looked out for one another. The resurrection forced these early followers to take stock of themselves and their finances and to submit their entire lives to the fellowship of believers (Acts 4:32-35). It was not enough to shout the good news, “He is risen!” The best and most effective way to live out the Easter miracle was to live in solidarity. There could be no greater witness than their commitment to pledging their lives to each other, relying on their fellow disciples for spiritual and economic strength. The “fellowship” (koinonia) of these first followers of Jesus is based on social justice for all persons. During this season of Pentecost, as we face a difficult economy and uncertain future, several important conclusions can be drawn from our engagement with the Scriptures: “social justice” is at the heart of our shared faith, the model for fellowship or koinonia espoused by the earliest followers of Jesus still has relevance today, and despite frequent messages to the contrary, our greatest earthly treasure in life is each other.

Notes 1 Glenn Beck, “The Glenn Beck Program,” March 2,2010. 2 The same confusion is not as present within many Catholic traditions, where “social justice” has both encyclical support and there is a broad tradition of Catholic social teaching. 3 J. David Pleins, The Social Visions of the Hebrew Bible: A Theological Introduction (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2001). 4 S. Dean McBride, “Polity of the Covenant People: the Book of Deuteronomy,” Interpretation 41 (1987): 229-244. 5 Amartya Sen, “Capability and Well Being,” in The Quality of Life, ed. Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 30-53. 6 Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Clarendon Press, 1976) [London: Strahan and Cadell, 1776], I.ii. 7 Rebecca M. Blank, “Viewing the Market Economy through the Lens of Faith,” in Is the Market Moral?: A Dialogue on Religion, Economics, and Justice, ed. Rebecca M. Blank and William McGurn (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2004), 23. 8 Margaret Atwood, “A Matter of Life and Debt,” The New York Times, October 21,2008. 9 Ibid.

December 31, 2011
Hope-holders: notes and reflections on preaching hope in Advent

This text was converted from the original print edition for full-text searchability. Formatting may differ from the original. Consult the PDF for citation and presentation details.

Page 16

Hope-Holders: Notes and Reflections

on Preaching Hope in Advent

Leighton Ford

Leighton Ford Ministries, Charlotte, North Carolina

“Sometimes all you can do is hold hope for someone until they can take it and hold it for themselves.” A young colleague made this remark as we spoke over lunch about hope. The phrase “hope-holders” struck home to me. Isn’t that what followers of Christ are supposed to be? I think of Peter’s admonition: “Always be ready to make your defense to anyone who demands from you an accounting for the hope that is in you” (1 Peter 3:15). I picture Paul, sailing to Rome when the ship is caught in a violent storm and near foundering. After every possible measure is taken and the storm still rages, Luke records “all hope of our being saved was at last abandoned.” Then Paul stands up and tells them not a life would be lost, for an angel had come telling him not to fear, that he would indeed live to stand before the emperor. “So keep up your courage,” he says, “for I have faith in God that it will be exactly as I have been told. But we will have to run aground on some island” (Acts 27:20-26). Paul was no preacher of positive thinking or a prosperity gospel. Danger and death would still come. But with his trust in the word of God, he was a true hope-holder. And what more could we hope to be as preachers of hope this Advent?

What have I learned about hope? Across the decades of my life, what have I learned about Advent and hope that could be fresh, substantial, hopeful? Christmas I remember well. Customers crowded my parents’ jewelry store in Chatham, Ontario. But Advent did not make an impression on me at First Presbyterian Church. Our minister, Scott Fulton, was tall, genial, with a warm smile, but if he expounded Advent I do not recall. Our worship in the rather austere Scots Presbyterian style did not pay much attention to the liturgical year. And hope? What if anything (beyond presents under the tree) did I hope for? I hoped in those war years that we would beat Hitler, although that war was a wide ocean away. I hoped the Toronto Maple Leafs would win hockey’s Stanley Cup. And they did, fairly often. I hoped my parents would stop fighting and arguing, at least over Christmas. They didn’t. I hoped, when I led our fledgling Youth for Christ rallies , that most of the kids in my high school would come to Jesus. Some did. Most didn’t care. What happened to those hopes? Hitler died, but there’s hardly been a year since without war in some part of the world. The Maple Leafs have been pretty much a lost hope for the past forty years. My parents separated when I went off to college. And, although I later preached evangelistically across my native land, fewer Canadians go to church now than then. My birth city, Toronto the Good (and the gray), is now one of the most secular cities in the world.

Page 17

Two Advents and a Year of Loss Ironically, the two most recent Advent seasons sandwiched a year of loss for me. Advent always comes at a bittersweet time for Jeanie and me, as we remember our twenty-one year old son Sandy who died thirty years ago during heart surgery the day after Thanksgiving. For some reason, in November of 2009, that dark abyss seemed to crack open, as if a world were crumbling under me again. The sense of loss soon had other faces. Over the next year three men very close to me died with cancer – a longtime colleague, my spiritual director, and one of the first young leaders I mentored. Our doctor son-in-law had a serious accident. A case of shingles occurred. I had to forego attending a major world conference that I had looked forward to. A younger family member was struggling with depression and addiction. All that happened from Advent of one year through the next. Those losses seem to have been foreshadowed when I got lost hiking in the North Carolina mountains in the summer of 2009.1 had missed a sign for a fork in the road, had no map, darkness was closing in, and no one knew where I was. I wondered if I would be spending the night in the company of bears! Just before my cell phone powered down, I managed to call the manager of a local lodge who told me I was headed 180 degrees in the wrong direction. “Start walking the other way,” he said. “It’s a long walk, but I’ll send someone to get you.” An hour later I heard a welcome shout from a security guy in his pickup. A voice had come with promise and a new direction. Early and late, I have been learning that hope and loss, tragically, are bound together, that like Abraham I am always “hoping against hope,” and that for hoping, I need a voice beyond my own.

The Character of Hope “What can I hope for?” The philosopher Immanuel Kant posed that as one of the three main questions we humans must ask. The answer to Kant’s question seems as slippery, as elusive, as Emily Dickinson’s depiction of hope as a “thing with feathers that perches in the soul.” So I turn to theologians and writers who have tried to describe hope.

Hope as Wishful Thinking? In Frederick Buechner ‘s book of theological ABCs, I find this : “Hope (See Wishful Thinking).” Turning to Wishful Thinking, I am startled to read that “Christianity is mainly wishful thinking.” Does Buechner really think that hope is the fanciful belief that somewhere, somehow – “over the rainbow” – our dreams will all come true? But with a typical wry play on words, Buechner continues, “Dreams are wishful thinking. Children playing at being grown-ups is wishful thinking. Interplanetary thinking is wishful thinking. Sometimes wishing is the wings the truth comes on. Sometimes the truth is what sets us wishing for it.”1 Perhaps this is more than clever. Perhaps it is profoundly wise. From where does hope arise if not from the deepest wishes and longings of our lives? But then Henri Nouwen, reflecting on “waiting” in Luke’s advent account, observes that Zechariah, Elizabeth, and Mary were filled not with wishes but with hope. Hope, he says, is open-ended, fulfilled according to the promises and not just according to our wishes. “I have found it very important in my own life to let go of my wishes and start hoping. It is only when I was willing to let go of wishes that something re-

Page 18

ally new, something beyond my own expectations, could happen to me.”2Hope may connect with our deepest wishes, but must it not connect with something more?

Hope as Human Resiliience? This year we have witnessed some heart-warming examples of human resilience amid great loss. One thinks of the citizens of Joplin and Tuscaloosa rebuilding after the tornadoes or of Lou Zamperini, whose story is told in the best-selling Unbroken. Zamperini survived forty-seven days on a raft after his B-24 crashed in the Pacific during World War II, followed by years in brutal Japanese POW camps. He had no strong faith until much later (after hearing Billy Graham preach), but something inside kept him enduring the unimaginable. Is hope then a characteristic that humans have? A “hope” gene, perhaps, stronger in some than others? On NPR’s Speaking of Faith, British physicist/ theologian John Polkinghorne expressed his conviction that there is a “very deep human intuition of hope, the strangeness and bitterness of the world notwithstanding.” Asked if his conviction of a destiny beyond death was not an article of faith, he replied that it was, but one guaranteed in history by the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Perhaps this “deep intuition of hope” provides an entrée for our preaching of Advent hope. The resilience we see in Joplin, Tuscaloosa, or Lou Zamperini, the “hopes” that keep us going, may not fully express biblical hope, but they do point to the God of hope.

A Theology of Hope and Promise For a long time Kant’s third question – What may I hope for? – was largely absent from philosophical and theological agendas. Then it surfaced after the crucible of World War II. A philosophy of hope was espoused by an eighty-one year old East German Jewish-Marxist atheist, Ernst Bloch. German theologians Moltmann and Pannenberg championed a “theology of hope.”3 In 1968 The Christian Century carried a series on this “theology of hope.” One contributor, the Anabaptist scholar Vern Eller, was deeply concerned about the direction he saw this heading. “Stop the train!” he wrote, fearing theology could be switched “to a dead-end siding.” It was not the theology of hope as such that Eller was challenging . He simply thought it was the wrong name. It should, he said, be called the “theology of promise.” He was concerned lest the “hope” line take us to a dead-end with theology as an analysis of human capability instead of God’s faithfulness. “It is because God has promised … that man has even the possibility of hoping. It is the case that promise creates hope, not that man’s need for hope creates the idea of a promising God.”4 Strong and salutary words. They make me pause and think about what I have already written. Should I take back what I recounted about my own teen-age hopes? Or my year of loss? The resilience humans show? I think not. Those are attention-getters that God may use. But they do make a red warning light go off. I can speak too glibly about hope or tell stories to imply that God is our Leading Optimist. Eller makes me reckon again with Paul’s description of what it means to be strangers to the covenant, “having no hope and without God in the world” (Ephesians 2:12) – grim words, yet in the context of God’s abounding riches and eternal purpose in Christ. This biblical hope does not promise easy answers to hard questions. As the light of the risen Christ blinded Paul on the road to Damascus, the daybreak of hope

Page 19

is also a light which for a while blinds us. We still wonder, hurt, and grieve, but not as those who have no hope. We still trust the God of promises who leads us on to the future. Thus faith is the “assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (Hebrews 1:1). Where then is the voice I need to hear? The promise I need to trust?

The Character Of Hope – In Person It surprised me to learn that the word we translate as “hope” (elpis) seldom appears in the gospels-the noun not at all, and the verb only five times, with one significant use in the past tense, “We had hoped” (Luke 24:21).5 Many of the Psalms overflow with “hope,” and so do some of the prophets. The epistles seem to be crammed with “hope.” Why so rare in the gospels? That seemed strange until I realized: of course! Why would the writers need the word for “hope”? Hope was present – in person. They had seen hope – walking, talking, eating, speaking, healing among them. “The blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, the poor have good news brought to them” (Luke 7:22). God was keeping his promise of a coming kingdom—in person ! Of all the gospels, Luke may offer the text of choice for Advent preaching on hope. And not only because of his traditional Nativity account, but because of his focus on a waiting people, waiting with a sense of promise and surprised by the hope that comes to them. “Nobody has to teach the theology of hope to Luke,” writes Vern Eller. “He was preaching it long before our modern theologians got around to inventing it.”6 Luke begins his “orderly account of the events that have been fulfilled among us” (Note that word “fulfilled.”) with the narrative of three annunciations (to Zechariah the priest, Mary the mother of Jesus, and the shepherds), two conceptions and two births (John and Jesus), three hymns (Mary’s song, and Zechariah’s, and Simeon’s), a revelation (to the aged Simeon) , and a witness (by Anna the prophet) about the child “to all who were looking for the redemption of Jerusalem” (Luke 2:38). His first three chapters are packed with themes we could lift up as a series in our Advent preaching on hope. The Angels of Advent. Hope comes as a word from God through angels to Zechariah, Mary, and the shepherds. We might say they were the first “evangelists” – ev-angel-ists These stories are “thick with angels” (Eller), and if we are preaching on them we better have our “angelology” straight. It might even be wise to ask some Majority World believers to tutor our rational Western minds. They seem to know more about angels than we do. The Emotions of Advent. Hope comes so surprisingly that it creates strong emotions , fear, terror in fact, and perplexity (1:12, 1:29,30, 1:65, 2:9), but emotions quickly transformed into joy (1:14,1:46,2:10) and peace (1:79,2:14,2:29). Imagine how tangled confusion and hope must have been for Mary and Joseph over the nine months of her pregnancy. The Spirit of Advent. Hope announced by angels is also the gift of the Holy Spirit. John will be filled with the Spirit before his birth (1:15). The Spirit who hovered over the waters at creation overshadows Mary as the new creation begins with her child the holy Son of God (1:35). Elizabeth, filled with the Spirit, cries out with joy as the

Page 20

baby leaps in her womb (1:41-2). Before he died, Simeon was guided by the Spirit to see the Lord’s Messiah (2:26-7). Why not freshly acquaint our hearers with the “Spirit of hope” during Advent? The Hope of Advent. Jesus Saves ! So said the angels. Saving hope comes in stages. It comes personally to Zechariah in the birth of John, to Mary in her son Jesus, to the shepherds in the baby in the manger. But hope also comes for all creation — the promise of the Kingdom of God. John the Baptist will be a forerunner of Jesus and of the rule of God (1:17). Mary’s child will reign over a kingdom with no end (1:33). The good news to the shepherds is for all, with peace among those God favors (2:10, 14). How wide and deep is the hope of salvation. Not only is it hope for our heavenly destiny. My own personal experience of salvation is a promissory note, a foretaste of God’s promise to make all things new. The Comings of Advent. Jesus was hope present in person. He is also our hope in his coming again. “Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again,” we say in our liturgy. Do Presbyterians believe this: that Jesus is coming again? Why leave his second coming to the crazies or the date-setters? As N. T. Wright puts it, “People who believe that Jesus is already Lord and that he will appear again as judge of the world are called and equipped (to put it mildly) to think and act quite differently in the world from those who don’t.”7 Whatever text we may choose (or that chooses us), we desire Advent to become more than a solemn season before Christmas, but indeed the theme of our lives. In Eller’s words, “The world has not seen the last of Jesus Christ…. The proper stance toward Christmas is not to look back toward Bethlehem, but (to) look through the stable into the Kingdom of God.” (op cit.) We are still, and always, a waiting people, who confess Christ has come. Christ is coming. Christ will come again!

The Character Hope Produces Luke begins his gospel with a waiting people. He ends with a disappointed people – two disciples on the way to Emmaus who tell the stranger who questions them, “We had hoped he was the one to redeem Israel” (Luke 24:21). But they had hope wrong. They thought when Messiah came, God would raise up a remnant force to defeat their pagan foes. But the stranger opens the Scriptures and shows them how the Messiah had “first to suffer, then enter his glory.” The thread of God’s saving purposes ran through the suffering and vindication of his people – and finally his Servant-Son. Jesus’ death was not the end. Death did not destroy his messianic mission. It confirmed it. This is how the exile was to end and the kingdom to come—hope leading through suffering, into glory. As the scriptures are opened, so are the eyes of two men walking to Emmaus. All are “surprised by hope” as Jesus appears once more and tells them to wait until he sends “what the Father has promised” – power from on high (Luke 24:36ff). When the Holy Spirit comes, they become a transformed and hope-filled people, a missionary people, living, telling resurrection hope until he would appear again. Luke passes his chronicle of hope on to the apostles and disciples, and especially to Paul the apostle of hope, in his testimony before King Agrippa, arguing that he stands

Page 21

trial “on account of my hope in the promises of God made to our ancestors” (Acts 26:6); in his words of hope on that storm-lashed ship; in his writings; and especially in his letter to the Romans. (Paul uses “hope” more than any other New Testament writer, 17 times in Romans alone.) We miss the point of Romans unless we read it as a great missionary manifesto. Paul writes that we receive grace “to bring about the obedience of faith among all the Gentiles for the sake of his name” (Romans 1:4-5). Paul’s theology is missiology – a call to God’s people to live, suffer, and proclaim the risen Jesus as Lord to the nations. Hope is about much more than my personal wishes; it is about belonging to a community of hope-holders. (
material for Advent preaching. All the themes from Luke (except angels) appear again – waiting, expectation, promise, suffering, joy, salvation, the Spirit of hope. Here we see the character of faith – Abraham “hoping against hope,” convinced that God was able to do what he promised (Romans 5:18, 21), knowing that we will be saved by Christ’s death and his life (Romans 5:10). Here we see character shaped by suffering – which produces endurance, and character, and hope – all from God’s love poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit (Romans 5:3-5). Here we see the character of waiting expectantly, all creation, groaning now, but “saved in hope,” knowing that nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord (Romans 8:18-25, 38-39). And here we see the character of a missionary people, encouraged in hope by the Scriptures, the promises, the power of the Holy Spirit, praising the Lord among the nations so they too shall hope (Romans 15:4-13). So we take on the character of the angels – evangelists, hope-holders to the world!

What then is hope? And what difference does hope make in how we live? Hope is a strong and confident trust, given by the Holy Spirit and nurtured in life experience, that God, who has promised good to us and all creation, makes good on his promises through Jesus’ coming and coming again. Hope deepens our longings – turning our wishes into a desire for what is truly good, beautiful, and eternal. Hope trusts our longings into God’s merciful hands, knowing that he is wiser than we, and able to do above what we can ask or even think. Hope expands our horizons setting our desires into a wider and longer picture. Like stone masons fitting stones for a cathedral, we see only the small section assigned to us, yet know ours is part of a great purpose. Hope reframes our losses. “Reframe,” a psychological term, describes the power of hope to give a new perspective and open new possibilities. As we “hold hope” for others we pray they may also be given grace to see how God can bring gain out of terrible loss. Hope binds our own future to that of Jesus Christ. Whatever storms come we can know with comforting certainty “that I, body and soul, both in life and death, am not my own, but long belong unto my faithful Saviour Jesus Christ” {Heidelberg Catechism).

Page 22

Hope Holder Sidepieces A Piece of the Berlin Wall A 17-year old North Korean woman who spoke at the CapeTown 2010 congress on world evangelization told how her father has been missing for four years, presumably imprisoned for his faith. Her one ambition: some day to speak for Christ in her country. A Salvation Army officer present from the old East Germany met her with a gift, explaining, “I brought with me a piece of the Berlin Wall, and I want to give it to her as a sign of what God can do in seemingly impossible places.”

Lazarus in Haiti On a visit to Haiti, Rich Stearns, president of World Vision, visited a crude church made of UN tarps and scrap lumber. There he saw Demosi, a mother who lost two limbs in the earthquake, leading the choir, standing on her prosthesis and lifting her one hand high in praise. Rich asked what he could tell people back home. “Tell them you have seen Lazarus, and she is back from the dead.” Demosi believes she was saved to raise her girls and serve God a few more years. “God has given me a second chance.”

The Surfer Who Reframed Her Loss The hit movie Soul Surfer is the story of Bethany Hamilton, a teen-age surfing champion who lost an arm in a shark attack in Hawaii. “What do I do now?” she plaintively asks her father, who tells her, “Wait. Listen. Follow your instinct.” On a mission to tsunami victims to Thailand, she finds children withdrawn and terrorized by the ocean. But she finds, by letting them watch her surf with her one arm, she can bring new hope to them.

Hoping for Hope in Japan Michael, youthful president of a seminary, says young Japanese “hope for hope, not only from the disasters, but so many are victims of the sex trade.” And how is hope held for them? “In our city, at the Heart and Soul Café, we offer a safe place, coffee and tea, music, counseling and tutoring, and hope in Christ.”

Not Rude to the Holy Spirit Hester is an 87-year old widow and retired missionary in England. “Hope,” she says, “is very practical for me. I am alone so much of the time. I wish I could actually see Jesus, have him sit with me. Then I remember that he said if he did not go, the Holy Spirit, the Counselor, would not come. So I do not want to be rude to the Holy Spirit!”

Kingdom Hope among Students in Nigeria Femi, a leader in ministry to university students says, “What our country is most hoping for is leadership with new direction, and new integrity. I see hope in young Christians, with a passion for Jesus and an irrepressible desire to witness for him, with kingdom values that can transform our country.”

I do not have a long wish list for this Advent Season. I hope it may not be as

Page 23

traumatic as some past ones. But I do have this Advent wish: to be so grasped by the promises of God, that my preaching, by the power of the Holy Spirit, will lead those who hear to say: “There is our future. Christ is our future. He is our hope.”

Notes 1 Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking. A Theological ABC (New York.JSÍY: Harper and Row,1973). 2 Henri Nouwen, “A Spirituality of Waiting.” (Weavings (January/February 1987). 3 Carl Braaten, Toward a Theology of Hope. Theology Today, 1967.24:208. His evaluation of theology of hope and its implications is still relevant and well worth reading. Braaten saw this “new” theological vision as filling a vacuum, taking up the question of “what it means for man to hope at all, whether to be human is to have hope.” The biblical message is like a powerful electrical generator needing a place to “plug in” with modern people, and that plug in is the longing for hope. Without the eschatology of the Bible, “there is nothing that remains that deserves to be called the biblical message.” Hope is born from contradiction; the resurrection contradicts the cross. Hope contradicts our present experience. The mission of hope is to face the contradictions of our world – between righteousness and sin, joy and suffering, peace and war – while looking to what we may expect “if the God of hope is faithful to his promises.” 4 For Vern Eller ‘s article, go to the website_www.hccentral.com. The Vernard Eller Collection. He includes a football analogy: every call a good quarterback makes is eschatological, made with an eye to the final score. Yet the quarterback remembers each previous play, is planning the next play, and can somehow do all this as tacklers go for him! By Advent football is in full swing – so this may offer a helpful analogy.. 5 For an excellent short summary of “hope” in the Old and New Testaments see Hope in Colin Brown ed, The New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology. Volume 2. (Grand Rapids, Mi: Zondervan: 1976). 6 Vern Eller. “Christmas and Luke’s Theology of Hope,” in The Christian Century December 18,1968. Eller ‘s exposition from Luke’s early chapters provides excellent material for preaching. To access go to www.hccentral.com House Church Central. The Vernard Eller Collection. 7 N. T. Wright, Surprised by Hope. (New York, NY: HarperCollins , 2008, 144). If I were preaching an Advent message on the “second coming” I would delve into Wright’s discussion of eschatology. He takes on both the secular humanist apostles of progress, and the extreme preachers of doom. A video series with Wright available from Zondervan could be helpful for an Advent study group.

December 31, 2011
‘There’s no getting around this one!’

This text was converted from the original print edition for full-text searchability. Formatting may differ from the original. Consult the PDF for citation and presentation details.

Page 61

Protagonist Corner

“There’s No Getting Around This One!”

Joseph L. Roberts, Jr.

Columbia Theological Seminary, Decatur, Georgia

In our personal lives, is it not true that most of us try to evade embarrassing situations? We endeavor to avoid taking any responsibility for what we truly know we have done. Isn’t this what “spin doctors” are for? Aren’t they paid to fabricate creditable alibis for us? Don’t they assure us that we have nothing to worry about? Don’t they want us to believe there are no issues we cannot evade? In other words, they suggest there is nothing we can’t get around. Scripture challenges this assumption. It confirms, over and over again, that life has inescapable consequences. We begin by relating a true experience in the life of Robert Louis Stevenson, nineteenth-century Scottish author, remembered most for his famous novel Robinson Crusoe. What we probably don’t know is that a few years before writing this novel, he traveled with his entire family to a desolate south sea island, so he could feel the mood and climate of island life. Stevenson was also a devout Christian. He began each day with family devotions, the reading of scripture, and concluded with his whole family on bended knees, praying The Lord’s Prayer in unison. One morning, in the middle of this prayer, Stevenson arose and left the room abruptly. His wife, fearing for his health, followed him and asked, “Is there anything wrong, Robert?” He had a sad, solemn look on his face and affirmed that something was wrong. He announced, “I cannot pray this prayer this morning!” His family was stunned when they heard his answer. This was indeed a jarring confession. Now it was not the entire prayer that disturbed him. It was only one petition that he found almost impossible to be honest about. You see, he wanted to escape this petition, or at least get around it that day. But he didn’t know how. He left the room in sadness, because he knew his communication with God had been ruptured. There was just no getting around this one! What was this troublesome petition that shook him to his core? It was this: “And forgive us our debts, as we have forgiven our debtors. Ana do not bring us to the time of trial (testing,) but rescue us from the evil one” (Matt. 6:12 -13). I wonder whether we understand Stevenson’s insight, or has it escaped us again? We all ask God to forgive our debts (our obligations to Him and our brothers and sisters. That’s the easy part of the petition. It is self-serving and self-gratifying! The most difficult phrase is, “As we have also forgiven our debtors” (my paraphrase). As we have also forgiven those who owe us an apology. Here is the rub! Forgive us, in direct proportion to our willingness to forgive those who work against us. Isn’t this asking too much? This petition is intrusive; it judges us all. It’s on the street where we all live. Let’s put it another way. We are always ready to ask God to forgive our shortchanging others. But we can’t be forgiven unless we have also forgiven those who have short-changed us. In other words, God has the right to expect something in return for something He alone can give us—forgiveness.

Page 62

Robert Stevenson was on point that morning. “Lord, I am not fit to utter this petition this day. My heart is not right; my mind is not made up. I am a Christian bedeviled with a split personality, unblessed, and powerless against the forces of evil in my personal world and the larger world around me! And it’s my own fault; I admit this. For I have chosen death over life. I know the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life. But please, do not bring me to the time of trial, but rescue me from the evil one!” (Matt. 6:13) In our personal lives, we can’t get around this one! Picture the people you have not forgiven and find it hard to forgive. Let their individual images pass through your memory, one at a time. Does it still hurt, is the pain still there? Two examples make clear the point: Can we forgive co-workers we never liked in the first place? Don’t we try to avoid them as much as possible without being obvious? Can we forgive certain insensitive relatives during some crises occasioned by sickness or death? They are about to get on our last nerve. Why don’t we forgive more readily? Do you realize that sometimes we can’t remember what offended us in the first place? It happened so long ago. Was the offense really as important as we thought it was when it first occurred? Or could it be that some of us love holding grudges. Don’t we really just want to exercise power over others, even if it is negative power, arising from conflicts we never tried to resolve? Forgiveness is, at best, a chancy, risky proposition. Someone has written, “Forgiving is love’s toughest work and love’s biggest risk.” Jesus knew forgiveness was risky, yet he declared, “You shall love the Lord with all your heart, soul, and mind, and love your neighbor as yourself.” We are pretty good at loving ourselves. It’s the love of neighbor that we find difficult to swallow. Furthermore, we love ourselves and rigorously defend most our actions. We are all self-serving creatures. We find it possible to justify our actions, right or wrong. We stand in front of the mirror and admire ourselves more than anybody else on earth. “Forgive us our debts.” Some of us don’t even believe we have debts, at least not financial ones. Dr. Cornell West has written a book, Race Matters, in which he speaks more universally about moral matters. Moral matters include us all, don’t they? Yet some of us declare, “I haven’t crossed the line yet. Besides, things have changed. Many people are doing what I am doing, and they are getting away with it, so it couldn’t be that bad. You’re out of touch. Come on, get with it.” Our national mood in 2010 is: America for Americans. Yet for some Americans, the moral star is constantly receding, especially if you are a poor Latino, African American, or Caucasian. Adam Smith, that great economist of the eighteenth century , declared that we have no moral obligation to the disadvantaged. He said that “the invisible hand” of the free market would cause all the people in the nation to be strengthened and arise. This has not happened recently. If he were alive, he might declare that we will all rise, with no government intervention needed to help get out of our economic poverty. If we give tax breaks to the very rich, how will this reduce our national debt? (Remember, the top one percent of our population collected 80 percent of the salary increases last year.) What about 99 percent of our population struggling merely to exist on the 20 percent that falls from the master’s table? After we divide the 20 percent gain among 99 percent of our nation’s population, won’t it still be inadequate to meet their basic needs for food, clothing, and shelter? Jesus prayed, ” Forgive us our debts, only as we forgive those indebted to us.

Journal for Preachers

Page 63

And do not bring us to the time of trial; but rescue us from the evil one. How will you make it when it rains on your party? You just can’t get around this one! Here sin is considered a debt to God. And our debts can never be discharged or transferred to anyone else. These are individual obligations and responsibilities we all share together. They have our names and dates of birth on them. We can run, but we can’t hide. Most important: these debts have the date we became a part of the Body of Christ, the Church, stamped on them. Forgiveness is costly. It calls for humility and repentance for selfishness and self-centeredness. Forgiveness calls us to place personal relationships far above our material possessions. I don’t know where I ran across these closing thoughts. They are not original; they are relevant:

It’s not your neighborhood; but your neighbor, who really counts. It’s not your club; it’s your companions, who really count. It’s not your money; it’s your mercy that really counts. It’s not your china; it’s your concern for children that really counts. It’s not your fine linen; it’s your enduring love for others that really counts. It’s not your food; it’s your faith that really counts. It’s not our health; it’s your healing that really counts. It’s not where you’ve been; it’s where you’re going that really counts. It’s not the words you’ve spoken; it’s the bread you’ve broken that really counts. It’s not your degrees; it’s your deeds that really count. It’s not your honors; it’s your humility that really counts. It’s’ not your preaching; it’s your practice that really counts. It’s not things; it’s your thoughts that really count. It’s not price tags; it’s people who really count. It’s not who you know; it’s whose you are that really counts.

How is this debt cancelled? How can Robert Louis Stephenson and all of us pray this prayer again? The answer is that our debt is cancelled, not by repentance or good works, but only by the grace of God in Christ Jesus, our Lord. You see, salvation is God’s deliverance—costly deliverance. So we go back to our paraphrased texts—Matt. 6:12-13. “For if you forgive others their debts, their shortcomings, your heavenly Faher will also forgive you, but if you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive you… .And do not bring us to the time of trial, but rescue us from the evil one.” Jesus, from Calvary, deals with our gross shortcomings that bring us to tears, both of repentance and gratitude: “Father, forgive them, for they knew not what they do.” There’s no getting around this one!

December 31, 2011
Measuring our worth

This text was converted from the original print edition for full-text searchability. Formatting may differ from the original. Consult the PDF for citation and presentation details.

Page 50

Measuring Our Worth

Jerrod H. Hugenot

First Baptist Church, Bennington, Vermont

You may have seen the commercial on television during primetime or while surfing the ‘net. It depicts a man in a baseball cap and jacket running around the front entrance of a skyscraper in New York. He stretches police tape across the grounds, as if securing a crime scene. Guards from inside the building look nervously at the camera crew following this man around, trying to politely remove the man from the premises. The man holds up a bullhorn to his mouth and announces he is “here to make a citizen’s arrest of the directors of American International Group, Inc. (AIG).” At home, some viewers watch the commercial and chuckle. Others get the remote and turn the channel with disdain. Like it or not, audiences at home or in front of the screen are getting the word. Another film is coming from the controversial documentary director Michael Moore, whose films are geared to critique the political and social issues of the day. His new film is entitled “Capitalism: A Love Story.” Hailed by some, scorned by others, the film represents Michael Moore’s perspective on the ways that the U.S. and global economy have been handled, the federal bailout efforts, and the political finger pointing that goes along with it. Stepping aside from the headlines and the cinema box office, do you know where the word “economy” comes from? The word “economy” comes from the Greek: oikos (house) and nomos (rule). Quite literally, an economy deals with how a household is structured or organized. And just as we struggle with twenty-first century ideological differences regarding the structure and stability of an economy, rest assured, talking about the economy was just as volatile and ideological in Jesus’ day. The first century economy of Palestine differs remarkably from our present-day U.S. context. Nonetheless, talk about money long enough, and there will be strong disagreements arising. Talk about money and religion, and well…. The person who approaches Jesus is referred to as “the rich young ruler” in popular recollections of the gospel narratives. The difficulty, however, is when we gather together the three similar stories told by Matthew, Mark, and Luke and compare them. We will look at the differences and similarities during Adult Forum after services today, but for now, note a key difference of Mark’s gospel. Mark notes little about the man, saying only that he has many possessions. Instead of thinking of this fellow as a rich young ruler, we will call him “the man of means.” The man asks Jesus a question that sounds primarily theological (“What must I do to inherit eternal life?”); however, the question is aimed at sniffing out Jesus’ thoughts on the economy. Just as the Pharisees and the Sadducees have come forward, asking questions to test Jesus’ teachings on religious orthodoxy, just as the Herodians will step forward to help entrap Jesus in a question of politics, the man of means appears on the scene as a representative of another sector of society unnerved by any upstart religious teachers, the financial elite of the day. The gospels are told from the perspective of a limited good society. Very few people owned land. Very few people controlled the commerce of the day. And in

* This sermon was preached on October 11,2009.

Page 51

turn, many people lived under the rule (and whim) of the very few, certain families inheriting great ancestral power and privilege, members of the ruling establishment, especially those in collaboration with the Roman Empire’s resident government. The man of means who presents himself to Jesus wears the robes of the upper echelon, a far cry from most of the other characters who interact with Jesus. Most everyone, Jesus and the twelve included, are part of the peasantry. No “middle class” exists in the New Testament. A select few enjoy the high life. Everyone else scrapes by at the subsistence level, working day and night and having very little to show for it. Some New Testament scholars would label the man of means kneeling before Jesus as part of the “elite,” one who keeps a style of life largely denied to anyone who is not already part of the power and financial base. When one lives in a limited good society, a person with significant finance is a person not to be trusted. There is a deep suspicion of the elite, as they have not evidenced anything less than self interest and self preservation at the expense of the multitudes. The economic background is helpful, as we hear the exchange between Jesus and this man with a bit more barb to it. The edge to this gospel story is economic and theological: what is the measure of a person’s worth? Who has the last word on economics? Will the “house rules” be determined by the elite, the “powers that be” that work with Rome and the Temple, aka “the established powers that be,” or the Lord God whose kingdom Jesus is proclaiming? Initially, the man of means would claim “God” is the determiner of all things. After all, he claims, the man of means is an observant man. The commandments Jesus cites are all agreeable to the man of means, yet he does not realize Jesus has cited only part of the Ten Commandments, those focusing on those commandments dealing with one’s behavior toward others. Like many opponents before him, the man of means has stepped into the snare. As New Testament scholar Bill Herzog notes, the man of means is “moral, but selectively moral.”1 The man of means has been so vested in maintaining his own economic privilege that he has claimed to be observant of a religious faith steeped in traditions of protecting the poor from exploitation and decrying covetous behavior and been part of the effort to create a different economic reality that left most of the populace in systematic impoverishment. There is a common myth that the New Testament has no use whatsoever for persons who are wealthy, and this story of “the rich young ruler” (as we tend to hodgepodge the three stories together) is cited as the final word. In truth, the New Testament depicts the earliest Christians as socio-economically diverse, including persons who are well to do. Nonetheless, the Christian teachings would side with those who are vulnerable and condemn those whose wealth has been attained by exploitative practice. Thus, the man of means who kneels piously before Jesus represents a class of people who have not lost a wink of sleep over their exploitation of others. Bill Herzog cites Jesus’ refraining of the commandment about covetous behavior. Jesus slips it in the midst of the commandments, a sly word in Greek (apostereö) we would render in English as “do not defraud.” The man of means has visions of the good life continuing in the life to come. He is not bothered in the least that he has spent this life taking advantage of others. He wants the free pass he has enjoyed since being born into the right family or being at the right time at the right place with the sweetheart deal that sets him up for life. He claims faith, yet he does not know the economy (house rules) of God, the One whose law provisions for all persons as part

Lent 2011

Page 52

of the most sacred covenants of God with the people Israel. This man’s wealth is at the cost of covenant obedience. His faith extends only so far. As for the disciples, their response to Jesus makes sense. We usually stop with the incredible image of the camel squeezing itself through the eye of the needle and chuckle a bit. The disciples wonder how anyone can get into heaven. Hear Jesus’ response again: “Truly I tell you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields, for my sake and for the sake of the good news, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this age—houses, brothers and sisters, mothers and children, and fields with persecutions—and in the age to come eternal life. But many who are first will be last, and the last will be first.” The economy, house rules, that matter most to Jesus are the ones ensuring the covenant is kept: no one is left out in the cold while others kick back and reap the benefits of kicking others. The little people of the rural villages are not the lower rung functionaries of the elite’s monopoly or Rome’s all consuming empire. Indeed, the economics of Jesus are astonishingly defiant of the way things usually work out with humanity. We can craft our economic theories down the generations, yet we still have the all too human tendency to create chasms between the “haves” and the “have nots.” The early Christians practiced a way of life that we still struggle to be at peace with and follow, for we are too much a product of the economics we devise, craft, and inhabit. The house rules set up by the gospel look out for those who are told to stand at the back of the line. In fact, Jesus turns the order of things around, just as the covenant and the Ten Commandments described before. Persons who are of means have their place in the kingdom of God, yet there are no “gold card level memberships” to be found in Jesus’ vision. Persons of all means, great and small, are welcomed into the kingdom, or as I like to say it, there are no second class citizens in the Kingdom of God. The system that keeps elite elitist and the peasant majority invisible shall not stand. The early Church became a subversive alternative, providing a place where all folks from all levels of socio-economic status learned to live together as a countertestimony to the ways of Empire. And indeed, those accustomed to being told they are the last will have the last word. In the meantime, the followers of Jesus have to ask pressing questions of the economics of the day. What should be the house rules of a country that consumes more than its share of the world’s resources? What should be the house rules of a nation that can write a blank check for warfare yet balks at the provision of healthcare? What should be the house rules for Christians who live in the “first world” while most others (even fellow Christians) live in the hell of the two-thirds world? My friends, the Church has much to ponder in the first century or the twenty-first. What are our house rules? Where does the economy we live under diverge from the economy of the gospel? How do you get a camel to fit through the eye of the needle? You cannot.

Note 1 William R. Herzog, II. Prophet and Teacher, (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 2005), 138.

December 31, 2011
A word from the gospel of Mark to cancer survivors

This text was converted from the original print edition for full-text searchability. Formatting may differ from the original. Consult the PDF for citation and presentation details.

Page 24

A Word from the Gospel of Mark

to Cancer Survivors

Gary W. Charles

Central Presbyterian Church, Atlanta, Georgia

When Mac and Anne Turnage arrived at Central Presbyterian Church in Atlanta in 2007, Anne asked me: “Does Central have a cancer ministry?” “No, we don’t.” “Why not?”

I wish I could claim the cancer ministry was my brainstorm, a pastoral response to the relentless presence of cancer in the four congregations I have served. Fortunately , God’s grace is not reliant upon my pastoral instincts or lack thereof. Thanks to Anne’s persistence, the vision of a compassionate company of deacons, and the wise guidance of my colleague, the Rev. Caroline Kelly, soon after my initial conversation with Anne, a cancer ministry was born at Central. So, what is a cancer ministry? Each month, a group of cancer survivors and family and friends of cancer survivors gather for worship, for mutual support, and to explore different dimensions of living with cancer. They covenant to pray with and for each other, and they willingly serve as an information, spiritual, and educational community for those who are first hearing the life-changing words: “You have cancer.” I am not a cancer survivor, nor are some regular participants in this ministry, but given the devastating preponderance of this disease, each one of us is touched by cancer. In January 2011,1 was asked to bring “a word from the Gospel of Mark to cancer survivors.” I love the Gospel of Mark. I have spent countless hours studying the first Gospel, writing about this Gospel, and teaching and preaching from this Gospel. In 2003, Westminster John Knox Press published a book that Brian Blount and I wrote, Preaching Mark in Two Voices. Even so, when Anne Turnage asked me to bring a word of hope to cancer survivors based on the Gospel of Mark, I swallowed hard. I had never engaged the Gospel of Mark based on such a provocative, fascinating, and pastorally important question. When I met with the cancer ministry on January 8, 2011,1 began with a brief overview of Mark’s Gospel and how it tells the story of Jesus.1 The presentation below is one way to wrestle with this question. By God’s grace, may the words below bring a word of hope from the Gospel of Mark for cancer survivors.

Presentation – January S, 2077: What does the Gospel of Mark have to say to cancer survivors? Not a single thing. The concept of “cancer” was unknown to Mark, and if we approach the question simply in a literal, wooden way, this will be the shortest meeting yet of Central’s Cancer Ministry. So, I suggest that we reframe the question in such a way that it will be hard to keep Mark quiet. If we understand cancer as something demonic, a destructive and relentless assault on the human body that God created and called good, then Mark

Page 25

not only has something to say, but he has many things we need to hear. Throughout Mark’s Gospel, Jesus encounters the demonic. It starts in the first chapter of this Gospel and does not end until the crucifixion in Chapter 15. There are many battles in the Gospel of Mark, but none more persistent than Jesus battling the demonic. Whether in the synagogue as in Chapter 1 in which Mark establishes the definitive authority of Jesus over against the perceived authority of the synagogue leaders or whether it is a body of demons threatening the life of Jesus and his disciples in a boat by stirring up a chaotic sea at the end of Chapter 4 or whether it is a legion of demons occupying a Gerasene that Jesus relocates to a herd of pigs in Chapter 5 or whether it is at the end of Chapter 7 when Jesus tells a theologically astute SyroPhoenician woman, “The demon has left your daughter,” Mark pits the in-breaking healing power of the reign of God present in Jesus against the life-destroying power of the demonic rampant in the world. In Mark’s Gospel, God’s reign is eyyus – at hand, all around us, working within and beyond us to accomplish God’s redemptive purpose as incarnated in Jesus. At the same time, the demonic is all around us, trying to tear down God’s good work, personal, social, and political. Toward the close of Chapter 15 when Jesus cries out, “Eloi, Eloi, lama, sabachthani,” it appears that once more the demonic has proven its supreme reign in the world, but when the women come to the empty tomb on Easter morning, they are pointed back to Galilee and ahead to the risen Christ who will lead all who follow beyond the demonic and into the risen life. In our post-Enlightenment age, it is tempting to dismiss Mark as a non-sensible remnant of ancient thought, a period piece that has little to say to our particular period in history. Mark knows nothing of technology, of i-phones and i-pads, of C.A.T. and M.R.I. and P.E.T. scans, of medical research done at such amazing centers of research as Johns Hopkins and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Is there anything that a gospel fascinated with demons – often talking demons, no less – can possibly say to us today, much less to survivors of cancer? If you spend much time with Mark, you will find yourself out of breath. He is in a hurry to say what he has to say, and he waits to see how readers will finish the story of Jesus. Will we believe, truly believe, that God’s redemptive, healing, loving purpose will defeat even the most intransigent demonic force? Reading Mark through this lens, we might find ourselves asking: —Is demonic cancer a disease that strips us not only of our health, but our identity and integrity, a disease to which we can only submit? Or in cancer, as in every arena of life, is the reign of God at hand, battling the demonic in the world and in us, intent on the day when the demonic sees its last conquest? —Is the question for us not really one of surviving cancer, but living fully and faithfully with and beyond cancer, knowing that we are claimed by the One who stared down the demonic, was tortured by the demonic forces of Pilate, and who by God’s resurrecting power shut up the demonic? There is something about the word “cancer” that makes me want to shout. It makes me cower in fear. It makes me dread its unwanted and unplanned grip on me. It makes me want to bow down to the gods of science to rid me of this dreaded interloper. Throughout Mark’s Gospel, Jesus asks the crowd, his disciples, and the diseased “to believe” that the will of God is for healing and restoration despite the persistent “cancer” of the demonic.

Pentecost 2011

Page 26

There is a danger in reading Mark too literally at this point, as if to suggest that those whose cancer does not move into remission and who do not survive are of inferior faith. But there is an even greater danger in dismissing Mark’s theological conviction that in Jesus, God’s redemptive, healing, barrier-busting love is loose in the world. I doubt that if writing his Gospel today Mark would eschew chemotherapy or surgery or radiation for the treatment of cancer, but I suspect Mark would see each of them as instruments of God’s healing, redemptive, in-breaking purpose. As the Gospel closes in 16:8, the women who visit the tomb and are visited by a young man there leave silent and terrified by what they have heard. How many of you and how many people you know have left a doctor’s office silent and terrified by what you have heard, by adding cancer to your list of uninvited intruders in your life? The women at the tomb in Mark, though, had not heard demonic words, but lifesaving words, and yet these words were so overwhelming that they were left stunned and speechless. As readers reach 16:8 in Mark’s Gospel, they look around for those who will announce the risen life of Christ to a world encased in the demonic? Gone are the male disciples, and the faithful women in this Gospel are now terrified and silent. So, who will proclaim that even terror, torture, death, and the demonic cannot confine the life-restoring intent of God? My prayer for all cancer survivors is for faith-filled trust that the reign of God is at hand, for the will to follow the risen One who leads us to confront the demonic in and around us, and for the confidence that the last word in life and death will be the promise of risen life through Christ Jesus our Lord.

Notes A brief introduction to reading Mark: 1. Mark was written in an apocalyptic time that centered around the imminent destruction of the temple in 70 CE or just after its destruction; 2. Mark is an extended sermon, attuned to the ear, designed to enlist disciples to follow Jesus, using rhetorical and literary devices and conventions common in Greco-Roman rhetoric and literature; 3. Mark establishes a privileged position with the reader, revealing the true identity of Jesus to the reader in the opening verse of the Gospel: “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God”; 4. Mark does not divide the world into sacred and secular realms, but believes God is sovereign over all of life; 5. Mark uses rhetorical devices to establish a theological sense of urgency in chapters 1-10 that slows to a dreadful pace with Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem in 11:1 ; 6. Mark’s end to the Gospel in 16:8 is not a piece of the original ending, but is the intended ending, asking readers to follow the risen Jesus to Galilee, to be disciples who “finish the story.”

December 31, 2011
The faces of greed

This text was converted from the original print edition for full-text searchability. Formatting may differ from the original. Consult the PDF for citation and presentation details.

Page 33

The Faces of Greed

Matthew 26:1-16

Martin B. Copenhaver

Wellesley Congregational Church, Wellesley, Massachusetts

Who comes to mind when you hear the word “Greed?” Whose face do you see? Whose name do you hear? Do you think of Bernie Madoff, who “made off” with other people’s money through the largest Ponzi scheme in history? He became rich by defrauding his clients of an estimated $65 billion, destroying numerous Jewish charities and institutions in the process. Or do you think of Jeffrey Skilling, once the President and then the CEO of Enron, who one year made $132 million, and who currently is serving a 24 year sentence for fraud? When Enron filed for bankruptcy in 2001,20,000 lost their jobs, and investors lost billions. Do you think of Gordon Gecko, the slick and sleazy trader in the 1987 movie Wall Street, who seemed to capture the ethos ofthat decade with his declaration, “Greed is good?” Or how about Judas, who turned Jesus over to the authorities to be arrested for thirty pieces of silver—which was a lot of money, equivalent to perhaps two hundred thousand dollars today, proving that when greed creeps into a human soul, that someone will do almost anything for money. Or do you think of Ebenezer Scrooge in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol! After all, Dickens’ description of Scrooge is the very picture of greed: “Oh! But he was a tightfisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! A squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner ! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster.” What a withering portrait of greed! We need to be careful here. If we associate greed too closely with the glaring examples from the news or the portrayals found in literature or film, we will likely miss the more everyday and commonplace expressions of greed that are found closer to home and can even take up residence in our own lives. Philosopher Rebecca De Young, writes: “The greedy person’s attachment to wealth can wear many faces—an overflowing shopping cart or a single purchase, a stock portfolio that is aggressive or conservative, a wallet full of credit cards or a safety deposit box with a few carefully guarded treasures, a garage full of expensive cars or a closet jammed full of ‘great deals.’” Of course, the faces of greed are easier to identify in the lives of others than they are in our own. Methodist Bishop and author, William Willimon, muses, “When does our need for that ever expanding ‘more’ of life become too much? When does the desire for the abundant life become the life that is jerked around by grubby Greed? I expect that you know better when / cross that line than when you trip over it.” He’s right, isn’t he? One of my best friends loves cars—he’s quite obsessed with them, actually. He is from Detroit, so he comes by it naturally. He has owned quite a few sports cars, each one more exotic and expensive than the last. I would never spend that much money on a car, and I’ve probably been a bit smug about that, on occasion. So I’m really glad that he doesn’t see how often the UPS truck stops at myhousewithapackagefromAmazon.com. How often? Put it this way: I’m on a first-name basis with the UPS truck driver. Sometimes I think I could claim him as

Page 34

a dependent on my income taxes. Greed, perhaps more than the other deadly sins, has an ability to sneak up on you. British journalist and essayist, Henry Fairlie, writes:

No one accuses us of being selfish when we walk into Neiman Marcus and buy a suit or a dress that we do not need, yet a callousness begins to grow in us when our appetites are not challenged. Why should one not dress beautifully? And indeed why should one not? But then something else begins to happen: One gets tired of giving a quarter to a beggar. Or one forgets or simply does not notice. Much worse than that, one gets tired of supporting, with one’s own energy and skills, the programs that might make the beggar not a beggar.

Greed is sneaky in this way, also: it is always trying to blur the line between want and need, between desire and necessity. William Willimon writes: “We really do need clothing that protects us from the cold, but we also appear really to need clothing that adorns the body and is attractive.” One could worship God in a Quonset hut, but “something about us needs a beautiful space in which to praise so beautiful a God. The line between need and desire gets thin.” The line between want and need also gets blurred because a consumer culture relies on stimulating our desire. In Vermont they tell the story about a general store owner in a remote corner of the state. He’s just gotten a shipment of fresh pineapples. It is the first time he has ever carried them, the first time anyone can remember having them available in that little town. One of his customers comes in and the store keeper says, “Try the fresh pineapple. It’s delicious.” The customer replies, “No, thank you. I don’t want to develop any new hankerings.” But, you see, our consumer culture is predicated on our developing “new hankerings” all of the time, and we, in turn, are often happy to do our part. Did you know that the average American shops eighteen hours a week? That’s a lot of time to develop new hankerings. And have you noticed that there are more and more stores that do not have anything you really need? Henry Farilie put it well:

The most important fact about our shopping malls, as distinct from the ordinary shopping centers where we go for our groceries, is that we do not need most of what they sell, not even for our pleasure or entertainment…. Little in them is essential to our survival, our work, or our play….Our appetites are stimulated so that the product will be consumed, and thus we are incited to possess for the sake of possessing. We “must have that,” when we see it, even though we do not need it.

In New York there is a well known clothing store that has the motto, “An educated consumer is our best customer.” But consumers are not so much educated as they are nurtured and formed. Again I turn to William Willimon:

Once, during the middle of a sermon just before the annual orgy of buying that we once called Christmas, I said, “If you bring a young child, say a child of five or six, into this church, the child will be disoriented, will need

Journal for Preachers

Page 35

Instruction, will not know what to do next. If you take that same child into Toys ‘R’ Us, no instruction will be required.” Then I caught myself in mid-sentence and said, “No, that’s not fair to the folk at Toys ‘R’ Us, who have spent millions and utilized the best minds that we can produce to instruct this child, through a barrage of ads, that the whole purpose of life is consumption, that life consists in the abundance of their possessions.”

Willimon concludes: “None of the Seven Deadly Sins receives such extensive indoctrination in our culture as Greed. Advertising is not simply information; it is also formation.” I have concluded that greed is a fearful response to life. In fact, I think greed is largely fueled by fear—fear of scarcity, fear that there is not enough to go around, fear of missing out, fear of having something taken from us. And greed may be an expression of other, larger fears as well. In Tennessee Williams’ classic play, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, there is the memorable character of Big Daddy. He has made a lot of money, and now he is dying of cancer. At one point he says, “The human animal is a beast that must die. If he’s got money, he buys and buys and buys everything he can, in the crazy hope one of those things will be life-everlasting, which it never can be.” Big Daddy, as he nears the end of his days, sees a number of things more clearly, including the way greed can cause a person to misspend his life. After all, a shroud has no pockets. When greed creeps into someone’s heart, that person can become almost completely self involved. It is telling that the symbol of greed is a tight fist—holding on to things, of course, but also curling in on itself, reminding me of William Sloane Coffin’s observation that there is no package so small as a person wrapped up in himself. And it is telling, as well, that greed does not have a happy face. So the adjectival form of the word miser is miserable. A miser is, quite literally, miserable. The greedy person is never satisfied with what he has; he always wants more. The greedy person is afraid of losing what she already has, even though worry keeps her from taking delight in her possessions. In fact, the question that hovers over a greedy person’s life is this: Do you possess your possessions, or are you possessed by them? I appreciate what my friend Tony Robinson has said: “The only sure way to silence the voices inside your head that say, ‘Never enough, never enough’ is to give something away.” I think he’s right. But I would go even further. As surely as being a miser makes one miserable, being a giver brings joy. The Apostle Paul famously said, “God loves a cheerful giver.” But let me ask you, is there any other kind of giver? Givers are cheerful. I have never known any truly giving person who has not been a person of cheer. I am not referring to the kind of reluctant, count-the-cost kind of giver. Rather, I am thinking of the open-handed, open-hearted givers. They not only spread cheer and share joy, but they obviously know cheer and experience joy. We might wonder which comes first: do these people know cheer and joy because they are givers, or are they givers because they are people of cheer and joy? The question seems strangely moot, for in the lives of such people, the two are inextricably intertwined, joy and giving flow from one another in a sure and blessed way. So the opposite of greed is a gracious mixture of gratitude, generosity, and joy. Gratitude, generosity, and joy—don’t let anyone try to sell you anything else.

December 31, 2011
Paul’s weak preaching

This text was converted from the original print edition for full-text searchability. Formatting may differ from the original. Consult the PDF for citation and presentation details.

Page 65

Protagonist Corner

Paul’s Weak Preaching

Ryan Ahlgrim

First Mennonite Church, Indianapolis, Indiana

A reasonable case can be made that the apostle Paul was a weak preacher. Some of his cultured contemporaries within the church gave his speaking skills low marks. They conceded that he wrote weighty and strong letters, but claimed that “his bodily presence is weak, and his speech contemptible” (2 Corinthians 10:10). Paul did not disagree with this assessment and admitted that he was “untrained in speech” (2 Corinthians 11:6). In a predominantly oral culture that insisted upon a strong presence and oratory excellence for speakers who wished to be taken seriously, Paul was apparently at a disadvantage. We do not know what his physical or verbal defects may have been. Perhaps he was unattractive or had a physical deformity or disability. Perhaps he spoke with a lisp and his voice cracked. Perhaps he lacked quotations from the classical poets and mangled rhetorical rules. Perhaps, as in his letters, he had a tendency to speak in convoluted sentences and make contradictory statements. Even a source sympathetic to Paul allowed that he sometimes didn’t know when to stop talking. On one occasion his preaching put a young man to sleep—who subsequently fell out a third story window (Acts 20:7-9). Whatever Paul’s particular preaching limitations were, they appear to have been an obstacle in his ministry. Paul turned the tables on his critics by refraining his own preaching limitations as an advantage: “[Christ sent me] to proclaim the gospel, and not with eloquent wisdom, so that the cross of Christ might not be emptied of its power” (1 Corinthians 1:17). Ironically, if he were to speak with eloquent wisdom, he would be undermining the power of the good news. Paul claims that eloquent wisdom is antithetical to the message God has given him. To use eloquent wisdom would be to use a medium that conflicts with the message because the message itself is contrary to human wisdom and skill. What is that message? That the Messiah, God’s savior of humanity, was stripped and crucified by humanity—but it is through this weakness that God’s power saves us. This scandalous and absurd message cannot be conveyed through conventional wisdom, nor can this good news of God working through weakness be proclaimed with tools of strength. Instead, Paul’s own weak presence and contemptible speech embodies the very news he is preaching. Whatever his critics found offensive or laughable about his speaking abilities is what made Paul uniquely suited for his message : an absurd message from an absurd speaker; a message of apparent weakness delivered by a weak man. He is the proper medium for this message. As a pastor who takes a keen interest in skillful preaching, I find Paul’s dissing of eloquent wisdom distressing. I cringe when he rails against the wise, the scribes, and the debaters of his age, claiming that God has made them into fools (1 Corinthians 1:20), since I am among that educated elite. But I also find his perspective clarifying , because we who preach Christ may be in danger of losing our way as we pursue effective preaching.

Page 66

For instance, have we, for the sake of our own egos, dressed ourselves in symbols of power and education before mounting the pulpit? Have we, for the sake of popular entertainment, relied on skits, movie snippets, and creative PowerPoint presentations? Have we, for the sake of comfort and success, made the Christian message reasonable and respectable? If so, we have emptied the cross of its power. The news that God overcomes the powers and principalities of the world through an ultimate act of humiliation and sacrifice runs counter to our slick sermons. Today’s eloquent wisdom of being cute, funny, conventional, and sentimental turns the ugly cross of Christ into a pretty necklace. We do not need to be handsome, well-dressed, or smart. We need to embody in our lives and in our message the audaciousness that God’s power is made perfect in weakness. I wonder what Paul would think of the homiletics courses taught in our seminaries today. Students are often graded by the quality of their exegesis, illustrations, voice projection, and eye contact (and whether they came to class on time and helped out the professor). Awards are sometimes given to the students who exhibit the most verbal panache. I think Paul would say we missed the point. He would demand just two things from preaching students: be in Christ, and preach Christ crucified. Whether one has training in rhetoric is irrelevant if the preacher isn’t living in the Spirit and conforming to our self-emptying Lord. Indeed, skillful rhetoric and cutting-edge technology undermine the authentic good news if we are confusing ear-tickling and eye-candy with God’s upside-down way of overcoming human rebellion. Cannot eloquence and skillful rhetoric serve the message of God’s powerful weakness and wise foolishness revealed in the cross of Jesus Christ? Yes. When Paul rejects eloquent wisdom, he is exaggerating a bit for (paradoxically) rhetorical effect. Paul may claim he is “untrained in speech,” but the evidence of his letters proves that he was capable of putting words together in ways that will ring throughout history . How many preachers can equal the rhetorical power of Philippians 4, Romans 8, or 1 Corinthians 13? No one has ever claimed that the soaring eloquence of these passages emptied the cross of its power. Paul is not against being eloquent; he is against prideful presentations of human skill and wisdom that run counter to God’s foolishness revealed in the cross. The crucified Christ is served by oral eloquence if it articulates the spiritual eloquence of God’s humility and subversive ways. So the preacher cannot use Paul as an excuse for being ill-prepared, sloppy, or lazy. We must choose our words, images, and rhetorical structures carefully. We want to maximize the listener’s involvement in Christ’s good news, not our world’s vision of power and success. Even so, the preacher’s honesty counts more than eloquence, and humility counts more than knowledge. Our very imperfections may be the cracks through which the good news is made most real. Barnabas, Paul’s missionary partner, was once mistaken for Zeus. Almost certainly he was more powerful and distinguished looking than Paul, yet Paul did all of the talking (Acts 14:12). This may have been because Paul’s testimony of how he went from being a church-destroyer to a church-builder was more dramatic. Or it may have been because Paul could speak with the authority of having received astonishing visions. Or it may have been simply because Paul liked preaching more than Barnabas did. Whatever the reason Paul did most of the talking, it is probably fortunate that he did, because through his weak presence and contemptible speech, something profound about the good news was conveyed. God chose what is weak

Journal for Preachers

Page 67

and lowly to shame the strong and proud. If, in our own preaching of the crucified Christ, we are accused of being weak preachers, we may have received our most valuable encouragement.

December 31, 2011
Protagonist corner [35 no 1 Advent 2011]

This text was converted from the original print edition for full-text searchability. Formatting may differ from the original. Consult the PDF for citation and presentation details.

Page 44

Protagonist Corner

Wain Wesberry

First Presbyterian Church, Clinton, South Carolina

No matter the liturgical season in the year, no matter where we are in our phase of life, no matter our vocation, our baptism matters, preachers are called to call people’s attention to this truth. When we in the Presbyterian Church (USA) baptize someone, each congregation speaks on behalf of the church as a whole when it affirms its commitment to that person, promising to follow Christ and to “guide and nurture by word and deed, with love and prayer, encouraging him/her to know and be a faithful member of his church.” It is a touching moment in the service, one that has seen every Christian parent through many a tough time. It might take a village, but it definitely takes a church; the responsibility of being the sole Christian model for a person is destined for failure for anyone but our own Christ Jesus. It takes a church – all of us working together – for any of us to have any real chance of maturity and growth in our faith and in our relationships. Living out the baptismally promised support is easy (or at least easier) while the person remains in our midst. We might teach him in Sunday school or be her covenant partner in the confirmation process. We might encourage his gifts in the choir or buy her a hammer for a mission trip. But what happens when our young people leave our fold upon high school graduation? Presumably, they leave for college or for the next step in their adult lives, but in reality, many of them leave for good. “85-90% of young adults leave the PC (USA). Most leave when they are 16-24 years old. Of those who leave, 20% come back. Another 15% go to other churches. 65% go nowhere.”1 That is sobering. It means not only that we are failing in our promises to them, but also that we are less than we could be ourselves. The loss of any affects all. I am the pastor of a 156 year-old congregation whose story of faith and service in the town of Clinton is tightly tied to the Thornwell Home for Children and to Presbyterian College, two vibrant institutions located only a few blocks away that were started by our church in the late 1800s. Because of our proximity to the college, we feel quite keenly the responsibility to catch these young adults that have left their home congregations. We see them arrive in the heat of a South Carolina August. Some are ready to tear off the ties that bind and see what else they can tie themselves to, and some are scared to death. Some seek the church their first Sunday or two; some never darken the doors; some come faithfully. We share our facilities with the Presbyterian student group on campus, so we have more college students and young adults than many other churches. When classes are in session, we have groups of students who participate in worship services, weekly fellowship suppers, and Bible studies. They share their gifts in ministries such as our chancel choir, children’s programs, and service projects. By the time the season of Advent arrives, many of our church members know the names of the college students. Some have invited students to their houses to enjoy game nights and homemade meatloaf and macaroni and cheese shared around a family table. Others have made space on their family’s pew for college students, added them to their personal prayer lists, and sent them thoughtful cards in the campus mail on occasions such as Halloween

Page 45

and Thanksgiving and the dreaded exam weeks. We are far from perfect in our attempt to catch these birds who have flown from their nests. Our community sees and sometimes bemoans the less pleasant side of the maturation process: they drive too fast; they are attached to their phones; they are unreliable; they are too loud; they party too much; they live with a sense of entitlement . All of these are true , but not just for college students. We are all unworthy, we all fall short in gratitude, we have all annoyed someone else on the road ways. What we as Christians have a duty to remember about these irresponsible, fast-drivin’, quick-textin’ young people is this: God loves them. God loves them and has claimed them as God’s own. Regardless of their low grades or their high blood alcohol levels (or perhaps because of those things), we are called to love them, too. What does that look like? How do we catch people who might not want to be caught? The season of Advent brings both a nostalgia for the holidays and exams, two great reasons for these young adults to visit a local congregation. It might be a good chance for us to figure out how to love them and how to show them that. It is no accident that the early days of Advent bring us to an encounter with John the Baptizer, causing us to remember and live into our own baptisms and to help others do the same. How do we do that? We might bear visual witness to God’s gracious claims by standing at the baptismal font, dipping our hands in the water, raising them above our heads as the water drips down in front of us, and announcing God’s unmerited favor and love for us. Times such as the “Assurance of Pardon” or the “Invitation to Discipleship” are wonderful moments during our Lord’s Day worship when we might consider such theologically and liturgically symbolic gestures. Although young adults might be particularly aware of the need to prepare the way for life after higher education, they might have forgotten that their own way has been laid for them -just for them – by the Creator of the universe before they were even knit in their mother’s wombs, much less before they struck out for college. A less traditional way to show God’s grace might be a little bit uncomfortable for some of us: when you introduce yourself, get the student’s name and cellphone number. Then use that cell phone number to send them a text saying that you enjoyed meeting them and will pray for them during exams or holiday travel. They might even text you back with a quick thanks. If so, do you know what that means? It means two things: 1. They have your cell phone number. 2. You have the beginning of a relationship. It’s my observation that this is how young adults live – by text and by the spur of the moment. One night in January, you might realize that you have more than enough for dinner. You can shoot that student a text message and invite him/her over to help you with the extras. They don’t care if it’s last minute. That’s how they roll. It’s not quite as striking an image as the water dripping off your hands, but it might go just as far, if not farther. We might rather evangelize on a street corner than send someone a text message, but in today’s society, the text may well fall on more attentive ears. If the Holy Spirit could come like a dove over Jordan’s waters at the baptism of Jesus, who is to say that the Spirit cannot come through an iPhone? It is a new world, and it’s getting newer all the time. The one whose birth we eagerly anticipate once more teaches us that names matter, and he was called “Emmanuel ” (God with us). Christ was born to be with us, to meet people of all kinds, and to teach God’s ways of love. Such teaching calls us to meet people where they

Advent 2011

Page 46

are. Perhaps those who are waiting to be caught in God’s love no longer linger outside the city gate with the lepers and the beggars; perhaps they linger just outside the landline, waiting for a message they can understand to let them know that they matter. They do matter. Each of us holds a particular responsibility to act as a part of a cloud of witnesses to these young adults who are claimed by God and are trying to figure out how that fits into the world. Preparing the way might look different, but it is still our calling. Our calling is to call out to each other. Who better to model this radical behavior than the preacher? It is impossible to remind another person of his or her baptism without first recalling our own. When established church members reach out to young people who are in a new place or who haven’t yet found a place, the kingdom grows. One more step of the way is prepared. All sides benefit. Each child of God is necessary, and God calls us to welcome all, to seek out the ones who are MIA, and to throw a huge party for them when they come back. God calls each of us to call to each other, “It’s here. God’s love for you is right here, and it’s been here all along, right under our noses.” With the waters of baptism and the grand promises of other feeble Christians like ourselves, we remember our past. With the anticipation of Advent, we anticipate our future. Like a voice in the wilderness, we are called to call… or text.

Notes 1. Being Is What Is, DVD, Produced by PC (USA) Office of Youth & Young Adult Ministries, 100 Witherspoon Street, Louisville, KY (2005).

December 31, 2011
Two cheers for the lectionary…and one for sermon series

This text was converted from the original print edition for full-text searchability. Formatting may differ from the original. Consult the PDF for citation and presentation details.

Page 32

Two Cheers for the Lectionary…

and One for Sermon Series

Martin B. Copenhaver Wellesley Congregational Church (UCC), Wellesley, Massachusetts

In recent years I have become a “two cheers for the lectionary” kind of preacher. After preaching regularly from the lectionary for some time, I now depart from it rather liberally. The biggest reason is that I have been preaching in my current congregation for over sixteen years, which translates into the sixth go-round with the lectionary texts. Certain texts may give rise to a fresh take every three years. But after reading some of the lectionary texts, I found myself saying, “I kind of like what I said about this text three [or six, or nine, or twelve, or fifteen] years ago.” Other preachers may have something important and engaging to say about the Gerasene demoniac every time he comes around in the cycle (Mark 5:1-20, Proper 7C), but they are probably more imaginative preachers than I am. As for me, I am relieved to see him ride the lectionary carousel and, for once, not get off. These days I preach more sermon series. The two sermons which follow, “The Faces of Greed,” and “Reveling in Romance” are both from a series of sermons I preached during Lent 2010 on the Seven Deadly Sins. The series provided me and my congregation with a helpful (and, dare I say, fun?) way to talk about sin during that season of penance. There are dangers in preaching too many sermon series, of course. One danger is that such an approach can take us out of earshot of the biblical text. But that is not necessarily the case. One year, when our church building was undergoing a complete reconstruction, we could not use our sanctuary and had to worship in the diaspora of our church building. During that time, I preached a nine-month-long series on the Sermon on the Mount. I figured that, while we were building on the very foundations of the church building, it made sense to focus on such a foundational text. Besides, in that time, when so much else was in upheaval, I thought it might increase the congregation’s sense of dislocation if they were summarily plunked down in Lamentations one week and then introduced to 2 Timothy the next. The Sermon on the Mount seemed to serve as a kind of plumb line for us during that time of construction. As challenging as that sermon is, returning to it each week kept us properly oriented and aligned.

Journal for Preachers

December 31, 2011
Against your absence

This text was converted from the original print edition for full-text searchability. Formatting may differ from the original. Consult the PDF for citation and presentation details.

Page 25

Against Your Absence

Walter Brueggemann

Cincinnati, Ohio

All power, honor, glory be to you!

You…sometimes hidden, silent, absent, unresponsive.

We are so privileged that we seldom sense you

hidden, silent, absent, unresponsive.

But we know people who do,

we think of places where you do not appear.

We imagine you defeated,

weak,

held captive.

And we wait a day,

two days,

until the third day.

And then, most often then,

quite reliably then,

you appear then in your full glory. This day we pray against your absence, silence, and hiddenness. Come with full power into deathly places, and we will praise you deep and full. Amen.

On reading I Samuel 5/February 2001

Used by permission: Prayers for a Privileged People, Walter Brueggemann, Abingdon Press, 2008.

Beyond Survival: Easter Preaching when the Church Is in Survival Mode

Mark Neleson Georgetown Christian Reformed Church, Hudsonville, Michigan

As I write this, my family is halfway through a six-month trial (in both senses) of a cable television subscription. The offer of free hookup and the “half-price for half-a-year” was too good to pass up; particularly given that I am told that all my kids’ friends have some kind of specialized TV that comes by cable, dish, or fiber optics. One of my discoveries along the way is to observe that much of the programming one finds these days is devoted to themes about survival. Recently, I lamented this in the presence of my 12 year old. While he did not understand what I meant by apocalyptic television, he could relate when I reframed my observation to terminol-

Easter2011

December 31, 2011