Fire upon the Earth?

Luke 12:49-56

Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost Year C

August 18, 2013

First Presbyterian Church, Clarksville

And

Harmony Presbyterian Church

Dr. Robert Wm Lowry

            It has happened to all of us at one time or another.

            You are sitting around with friends or family and the conversation turns from vacations and stories about the kids to politics or some other equally divisive issue.  The conversation gets more focused, the voices more rigid, the tone more severe.  Eventually the atmosphere gets so tense you could cut it with a knife.  That is when someone asks the question.

            Every tense conversation has “the question.” It might change from group to group or family to family, but it is always there.  When the conversation gets tough, when the tension gets too high, when friendships and relationships are starting to strain, someone asks…”how about this weather we’ve been having?”

            Your question may be different.  In my family, we ask “what about the Cardinals this year?”

            No matter what your question is, that old stand-by to break the tension in polite conversation is always available: the weather.  The most neutral and neutralizing of questions.  Asking about the weather is like tossing baking soda on a grease fire.  It tampers the flames and tempers the situation.

            How about this weather we’ve been having?

            Living in a community visited by Jesus must have been a double edged sword.  On the one hand, this increasingly famous Rabbi was coming to our town- maybe even our street!  We like to think of the crowds being quiet and reverent and standing in rapt prayerful attention, but part of me things that someone as famous as Jesus must have caused at least a bit of a stir.  After all, he was the theological rock star of the early first century.   It might not have been quite as much bedlam as the Beatles landing at JFK on their first American visit or Justin Beiber coming on an arena stage to screaming throngs of teenagers.  But Jesus coming to town was a big deal.

            The other side of the equation, however, is the fact that what Jesus brought was more controversial than a mop haircut or saccharine pop lyrics.  When Jesus came to town, the status quo began to tremble.  What Jesus taught stood as a challenge to the assumptions about how the world works and how God works in and through the world. 

            What, I wonder, happened when one who heard Jesus teaching brought what they heard home?  “I was in the square today and heard this rabbi talking.  He says that the law is fulfilled in him.” How would his devout father who observes and respects the law of Moses reply?  What about the mother who spent the day preparing the kosher supper?

            Jesus’s teachings must have come into homes and families like a ticking bomb waiting to explode and exploit different opinions and perspectives in the same household.  Conversations around dinner tables after a Jesus question was dropped in the middle of the conversation must have taken a turn for the tense.   Let’s face it, there is no way to talk about Jesus’s teachings without things getting at least a little tense.  After all, most of us were taught that you don’t discuss politics, money or religion in polite company.  There must be a reason behind that advice.

            So when Jesus’s words started to make things tense, someone acting as self-appointed peacemaker would ask the question: “how about this weather we’ve been having?”

            Someone would turn the relief valve to let the tension out of the situation and give everyone a chance to get back to normal- to ratchet the passion down a notch- to  keep things from coming to the boiling point when a household is divided against itself- father against son and daughter against mother and…

            But wait.

            That can’t be right.

            I seem to remember Jesus saying something about that whole division of the family thing.

From now on, a household of five will be divided—three against two and two against three.   Father will square off against son and son against father; mother against daughter and daughter against mother; and mother-in-law against daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law.”

            He knew that if we take that word home and live with it and wrestle with it and hold fast to it, the world as we know it is going to be turned on its head.  He goes on to say…

            “Do you think I have come to bring peace to the earth?  No, I have come to bring division.”

            Jesus knew that his word would threaten and upset the status quo and he warns us from the very beginning that if we take it seriously- if we stand with and in his word- we may find ourselves in uncomfortable or even conflicted circumstances. 

            If just to drive the point home, Jesus even warns us about changing the subject back to the weather!  Why, he demands, do you keep talking about the weather?  Your heads are full of clouds and wind directions when what you really need to be talking about- really need to be thinking about is the Word of God revealed to you here and now.  Stop being distracted and start tending to the work of the Word of God.

            Left in the distant past, Jesus’s words stand as a reminder of the importance of not neglecting the message of and priorities of God.  They nudge us toward a greater willingness to draw near and hear God’s Word.

            But Jesus’s words never stay in the distant past.  They are right here.  Right now.

            Jesus’s message is not speaking to us from far away in the distant past.  And as is the case with Jesus’s words, they speak the truth. 

            And I think that is perhaps the most terrifying thing about this text. 

            Just as when he first said them, Jesus’s words often bring division and conflict and even discomfort.

            And just like the people who first heard them, we would rather talk about the weather than live in the midst of the tension of the Word of God.

            Jesus knew that and knows that so before we even have a chance to do it, he warns us away from asking the question; he warns us away from changing the subject.

            You will find my words disagreeable, he says, but don’t even think about bailing out to talk about the weather!

            This lesson from Jesus leaves us in a bit of a quandary.  He tells us that his word will lead to division and even rancor not just in the world but in our own households.  That doesn’t sound too pleasant.

            “Do you think I have come to bring peace to the earth?  No, I have come to bring division.”

            I was unsure how to get past my surface discomfort with this text until yesterday afternoon.  I was watching some news show- I cannot remember which one- and two commentators were blathering on about politics.  One was defending Congress saying that they were absolutely right and the President was absolutely wrong while the other one did the opposite.  Neither was willing to give any ground.  Neither was willing to even listen to the other one.  Neither was willing to see even a shred of truth in what the other had to say.

            It occurs to me that we tend to read this text from Luke through that lens; through the lens of our contemporary political divisions which present themselves as absolute, inflexible and intransigent.  We read this text as if Jesus is saying that households will be divided completely and in every way possible just like our modern politics are.

            On second glance, it becomes pretty clear that Jesus is not saying that at all.  He never says that father will square off against son because one of them is absolutely right and one is absolutely wrong.  That is how the church tends to read this text traditionally, but I am not convinced that Jesus is really saying that.  In fact that reading of the text seems to go against what scripture says about our comprehension of Jesus’s teachings and about God. 

            None of us can be absolutely right in our knowledge of God because none of us can know God absolutely.  Jesus is not warning us that only some will know the whole truth while others will know none of it.  What I hear Jesus saying here is that his word is so big, so vast that no one person can know it fully.  As Paul would later say to the Christians at Corinth, we all see through the glass dimly.

            The conflict Jesus brings is not simply conflict between those who see and those who do not see but between those who see but do not see the same thing.

            One of the persistent conflicts in the church is how to use our resources.  Some think the church should sell all of its property and use every dime to help those in need.  That is certainly a biblical notion- Jesus tells the wealthy young man to give away all that he has to the poor.  Others think we need to preserve our sacred spaces because the church needs a place set aside in the world for the worship of God.  That too is biblical.  When Jesus tears apart the temple it is because it is being misused not because it is unnecessary. 

            If living in the family of the church teaches us anything, it is that people of good faith can and often do disagree.  Two people may read the same words and find vastly different meanings.

            When Jesus tells the crowd that he comes not to bring peace but to bring division, he is acknowledging that at times his teachings will lead to differences of opinion that run deep and may even have the tendency to divide families over the interpretation of his word. 

            He knew that would happen and he makes no attempt to keep it from happening.  Instead, he warns us from doing what we so often do; change the subject.  When the sparks begin to fly and we risk lighting a fire in our midst, when we begin to disagree…

            … “how about this weather we’ve been having?”

            We throw some baking soda on the fire to keep it from getting out of control.  We douse the flames before they can get too big.

            Still, Jesus warns us against doing that; he warns us against avoiding the discomfort and even division that may come from his word and instead calls on us to lean and live into it.  Fundamentally this text is a call to courage amidst the ambiguity of a life of faith.  It is about recognizing that none of us has fully comprehension- full knowledge- full grasp of the Word of God or even the words of Jesus.

            It is telling, I think, that Jesus does not say that the household that is divided three against two is driven apart.  Father may rise up against son but the text says nothing about the father casting the son out of his home.  Beneath the visible division, there is an unspoken unity that exists.  Yes we may be divided over our understanding and interpretation of Jesus’s words, but we are still one family.  We may lack uniformity but, in Christ, we retain our unity.  We are still family.

            The limits of our own spiritual imaginations may drive wedges between us, but somewhere, perhaps deep down in the bottom of our souls, Jesus holds us together.  Since almost the beginning the church has been a house divided- East and West, Protestant and Catholic, Presbyterian and Methodist- you name it.  Yet from the beginning, the people of God though divided by doctrine and discipline are united in the unbreakable bond of Christ.

            This is a text about having courage in that bond- about putting our faith in that bond- about trusting that bond to hold us together even when our house is divided against itself.

            When we can learn to trust our unity in Christ and look beyond the discomfort in our own household of faith;

            when we quit changing the subject;

            when the living gets tough; when we stop putting out the fires of spiritual passion in our midst;

            we become the fire that Jesus came to cast upon the earth. 

            The fire of the Spirit;

                        the fire of the passion of the people of God;

                                     the fire of the word of God proclaimed and lived. 

            May the flames of the Spirit be fanned in our midst and may we, as a family in Christ, have the courage not to change the subject but in our unity in Christ share the light of that flame with the world.

            Amen and amen.

         

          

True Sabbath Keeping

Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost Year C

August 25, 2013

First Presbyterian Church, Clarksville

And

Harmony Presbyterian Church

Dr. Robert Wm Lowry

                In the 2000 presidential campaign, there was a short and now forgotten controversy surrounding the candidacy of Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut.  Al Gore chose Leiberman to be his running mate and the press began to write about him, his career and his life.

            What intrigued many writers the most was Leiberman’s religion.  He is an Orthodox Jew.  You would think he was the man from Mars the way some reporters wrote about the Sabbath practices of the Orthodox community. 

            As you may know, Orthodox Jews take a very strict approach to the Sabbath.  In addition to the religious requirements of prayer and ritual, many forego modern conveniences such as automobiles or computers while others, including Lieberman, take the command to rest from labor to the extent that they do not answer the telephone or open doors on the Sabbath.

            The controversy arose when reporters began to wonder what would happen if Liberman was to ascend to the presidency and, on the Sabbath, he was required to call the Kremlin in a crisis or enter his nuclear launch code in a computer or some other action that is strict Judaism forbade on the Sabbath day.

            Could an Orthodox Jew be President and remain faithful?

            Interestingly, that question was never asked about Baptist Al Gore, or their two Methodist opponents George Bush and Dick Cheney.  No one questioned whether or not a Christian would have trouble going to war on a Sunday- the Christian Sabbath.

            It took a while, but in the wake of the conversations about Leiberman, theologians began to ask, “have we lost a sense of Sabbath in the Christian world?”  Has Sunday become just another day?

            The short answer to the question is “yes.”

            In many ways Sunday has become just another day.

            I remember growing up and asking my mother why the beer, pantyhose and other random items were covered up and the grocery store on Sunday.  She explained “blue laws.”  Remember blue laws?

            With the exception of buying retail alcohol, there are few blue laws left in Arkansas. 

            Some other places still have them on the books, however; these laws designed to protect and defend the Sabbath; to keep it different, holy, set apart.

            You cannot buy a new car in Connecticut or a sofa in Bergen County New Jersey.

            You cannot sing vain or rowdy songs anywhere in New Jersey and in Pennsylvania you may not hunt unless you are hunting coyotes or crows.

            And good luck finding a single beer in most of the South.

            As time marches on, however, these laws are becoming more and more a thing of the past as Sunday takes its place as just another day.

            In truth, Sunday has been losing its cultural place for quite a while.  I remember as a child thinking that my great-grandmother was crazy for all of her old school Presbyterian Sabbatarian ideas about not going to the movies or mowing the grass on Sunday.  It has been a long time since Sunday was truly set aside in any significant way in our culture and certainly not during my ministry. 

            As long as I can remember in ministry, Sunday has been a challenge.

            So I have to confess some measure of sympathy for the priests in this story from Luke we have today.  When Jesus comes into the synagogue and labors, in flagrant violation of tradition, and heals the woman who has been ill for more than 18 years, he treats the Sabbath like it is any other day.  The Sabbath was supposed to be a day of rest- a day set apart from what you could do any other day of the week.  Jesus ignored that tradition.  He could have healed her on Friday or the next Monday or any of almost a week’s worth of days, but he came to the synagogue on the Sabbath and he worked.  Sure, he was working in his capacity as the one who brings miracles and healing rather than as a carpenter, but still he worked and to the priests that was a slippery slope.

            Once we start treating the Sabbath like any other day, it is going to lose all its meaning.

            One day Jesus is healing a sick woman and the next thing you know they will be selling socks and beer at Wal-Mart after church.

            It is a slippery slope when we start playing fast and loose with the Sabbath.  And the priests told Jesus that in no uncertain terms. 

            By the end of this short scene, Jesus has done what Jesus so often does.  He humiliates the priests and turns their world upside down and he does all of that by one simple action; he holds up a mirror to their lives and lets them see how foolish they have been.

            We don’t really know anything about the motives of the priests in this story.  It is easy to set them up as straw men and make them out to be the embodiment of true evil trying to stand in the way of Jesus’s ministry, but there is no evidence of that in this text.  In fact, they come across as pretty sincere.  All they want to do is protect the Sabbath from becoming just another day.

            Jesus, holding up the mirror to their lives, shows them the folly of what they are saying.  They may be trying to protect the Sabbath from becoming just another day, but in the meantime they have lost the meaning of it!  

            In the Old Testament, the command to keep the Sabbath is present in both Deuteronomy 5 and Exodus 20 accounts of the Ten Commandments.  Yet in each account, the reason for Sabbath keeping- the reason we set aside this time- is slightly different.  In Exodus, Sabbath is rooted in creation “because the LORD made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and everything that is in them in six days, but rested on the seventh day.”  Deuteronomy, on the other hand, roots Sabbath keeping in redemption. “Remember that you were a slave in Egypt, but the LORD your God brought you out of there with a strong hand and an outstretched arm.”

            Sabbath is about taking delight in both creation and redemption; in God’s bringing order to chaos and God’s redeeming that which is broken or lost.

            When Jesus goes to the synagogue and heals the woman, his act is an act of true Sabbath-keeping.  He both creates wholeness where there had been brokenness and pain and he redeems and restores the woman to health.  In this one act, Jesus embodies the truest meaning of Sabbath.

            But the priests cannot see it.

            They have become so wedded to the words- the letter of the law- that they have been blinded to the true meaning of Sabbath.  They work so hard to preserve it in name that they have lost track of why it is here in the first place.

            They were like modern day politicians who get worked up into a lather about whether a local celebration is called a Christmas Parade or a Holiday Parade.  Some get so worked up into a name calling frenzy about the word Christmas, they often lose the meaning of the whole season.  It is kind of hard to celebrate the birth of the Prince of Peace while calling your political opponent a worthless, godless, hedonistic, atheistic, Communist!

            The same was true for the priests in the synagogue that day. 

            They had lost the meaning of Sabbath. 

            And when they admonish Jesus, he responds saying, “Hypocrites! Don’t each of you on the Sabbath untie your ox or donkey from its stall and lead it out to get a drink?”  In other words, “are you really going to stand there and tell me that this woman’ suffering is less important on the Sabbath than your donkey’s thirst?!”

            It is difficult to take delight in creation and redemption while actively ignoring the needs of a child of God.

            In recent years, the church has taken more and more notice of how Sunday has culturally become just another day.  There is a movement within the church to resist those things that conflict with Sunday and especially with Sunday morning and the community’s time of worship.

            In some quarters of the church, there is active resistance to what is perceived as the war on Sunday which is an extension of the perceived war on Christmas.  There are fingers pointed and accusations hurled at soccer practice, homework, television and just about every other boogey-man around.  Every potential culprit is named.

            Except one.

            Not many of those fingers point back at the church.

            If we are really going to get a handle of why Sunday has become just another day, our time would be much better spent not looking for how the world is at fault, but by holding up a mirror to ourselves and our own habits of Sabbath keeping. 

            Put another way, we need to ask the question, why do we want people here on Sunday morning rather than reading the paper or playing golf or fishing or whatever else they might be doing?

            If the reason is that we would prefer to see more seats filled, or because we remember when there were lots more people here or because we want to be sure the church is still around in another generation or because more people means a better chance of making the budget, we’d better be prepared for that mirror that Jesus holds up because the picture looking back isn’t going to be pretty.

            If our whole reason for Sabbath keeping and Sabbath advocacy is the building up and preserving of what we have or value, we miss the point of Sabbath.

            If Sunday is important only because it is not Monday through Saturday, we miss the point of Sabbath.

            If we set this day aside out of a sense of obligation or even duty, we miss the point of Sabbath.

            Sabbath is not about fulfilling a requirement or preserving a church, Sabbath is about delighting and sharing delight in creation and redemption in God.  And when our Sabbath is about that- when our Sabbath is about delighting in God rather than rooted in anxiety about how many people come to church, Sunday takes on a whole different meaning.  Our preservation of this time set apart stops being about holding on to something we cherish and instead becomes a celebration of being held onto by the God who cherishes us!

            In the Jewish community, the traditional Sabbath greeting is “Shabbat shalom.”

            Literally translated, it means “peaceful Sabbath.”  However like so much of Hebrew idiom, there is much deeper meaning beneath the words.  Sabbath-shabbat- is not just a day it is an orientation of life toward delight in creation and redemption.  It is the orienting of our lives toward God.

            Shalom, though it does indeed mean peace, means peace that is found only in wholeness-completeness in God.

            Shabbat shalom translates as “peaceful Sabbath” but it means far more; “may you know wholeness in your delight in God.”

            “May you know wholeness in your delight in God.”

            The woman in the synagogue that day with Jesus certainly knew wholeness and the text tells us that the first thing she did when she straightened up was praise God- delight in God.

            She knew Shabbat shalom and all through Jesus’s touch.

            What made that day truly a Sabbath day was not the blind observance of rules by the priests and congregation, but Jesus reaching out to another and sharing the wholeness of God.

            The labor from which we rest on the Sabbath is our labor for a wage in the world.  On the Sabbath, we rest from that labor so we might focus on our work in the kingdom of God and there is no more pure way to live into the promise of the day of delight than by reaching out and sharing the wholeness and delight of God with another.  That is the purest way of honoring the Sabbath and the truest way of honoring God in this day.  When we gather on Sunday to worship God together we do not gather just to perpetuate an institution or to live up to an obligation.  We gather because we seek to share in the wholeness of delight that comes in Shabbat Shalom.

            John Winthrop’s sermon “A Model for Christian Charity” is famous mostly for his use of the image from Matthew’s gospel of a city upon a hill.  Far from describing the power of a nation as it has come to mean, Winthrop’s image of a society that shines like a city upon a hill is built on an ideal of sharing the promise of wholeness in God and delighting in God through our love for our neighbors.  Speaking to the community, he said:

We must delight in each other; make others' conditions our own; rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, as members of the same body.

The Lord will be our God, and delight to dwell among us, as his own people.

For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us.

What Winthrop described as the model for Christian Charity, might also be called the model for Sabbath living because when we delight in each other; when we make others’ conditions our own; when we live as members of the same body, we cannot help but delight in the LORD and our very living becomes true Sabbath keeping.

            Shabbat Shalom Chevarim!

            May you know wholeness in your delight in God, my friends!  Amen.

There IS a Balm in Gilead

Jeremiah 8:18-9:1

Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost Year C

September 22, 2013

First Presbyterian Church, Clarksville

And

Harmony Presbyterian Church

Dr. Robert Wm Lowry

            Jeremiah is called the Weeping Prophet.

            More than any other of the Old Testament prophets, Jeremiah voices lament over the state of affairs of the people and the nation.

            The Isarelites, once defined by their love for the God who called and blessed them, have drifted into new troubling patterns of life in worship, politics and the values that unite them as a people.

            In a way, Jeremiah’s are timeless words.   Our context may not be the same as the ancient Israelites, but when we look out over the landscape of the world we share, lament seems to be in order.

            Just think about some of our shared realities.

            3.5 million children die worldwide each year from malnutrition.  To put that in some context, 3.5 million per year is seven per minute.   It took me roughly four minutes to read the scripture this morning. 

            30 million men, women and children in Africa, or roughly 3% of the total population, are HIV+ and have no access to medical care.

            In southern China, a woman was recently beaten to death in police custody for handing out Bibles and in Pakistan young women are frequently beaten by their families for perceived violations of honor. 

            One month ago yesterday, 1500 people were killed by their own government in a chemical weapon attack in Syria.

            We look around the world and we see injustice and prejudice and the inhumanity of humankind and we need a prophet to lead us in our weeping.

            Of course, we don’t really have to look too far to see the wages of injustice. 

            Right here at home, in our own backyards, there is evidence of how far from God’s vision for the world we have wandered.

            One in four children right here in Arkansas will go to bed hungry tonight.

            Here in the wealthiest nation the world has ever known, the gap between the top earning worker and the lowest earning worker is greater than anywhere in the world or in human history.

            The moral compass of our nation is more and more defined by the holy writ of party politics than the unwavering command of Jesus to love God and care for our neighbors.

            If Jeremiah was here with us today, no doubt he would weep.  He would lament. 

            Ours is a sorry state of affairs and worthy of lament; the modern day equivalent of the times of Jeremiah. 

            We need a prophet to give voice to our lament and frustration. 

            We need a modern day Jeremiah to cry out with loud voice,

            “Is there no balm in Gilead?  Is there no physician there?”

            The image of the balm of Gilead is an interesting choice.  Known throughout the ancient near east for its medicinal qualities, the balm of Gilead was prized for its restorative powers and the ability of its perfume to cover foul and offensive odors. 

            “Is there no balm in Gilead?  Is there no physician there?”

            In other words, is there nothing and no one that can cure this disease and cover the stench of injustice and unrighteousness?  Is there no physician who can cure these people?

            It is important to note here who is doing the speaking.  It is clear from both the context of the writing and the language of the prophet that this lament is not Jeremiah’s.  It is God’s.  These are God’s words while looking out over the scorched moral landscape of the people of Israel.

            Apart of me finds great comfort in knowing that this is God’s voice.  It is comforting to hear God speak these words of frustration and lament and sorrow because knowing that God feels it too means something.  It matters.  It reminds me that ours is a God not standing far and disconnected from the world but one who stands so close that even the stench of our sinfulness reaches God.     

            “Is there no balm in Gilead?  Is there no physician here?”

            A part of me finds it very comforting that God speaks those words.  Another part of me, however, looks at the world’s suffering and wants to shake a fist at God and say, “if you don’t like what you see, fix it!  Quit asking if there is no physician here.  You are the physician!  So, physician, heal thyself!”

            Part of me is comforted by God’s capacity to lament, but part of me is also frustrated by God’s seeming refusal to use God’s capacity to fix what is so lamentable!

            “Is there no balm in Gilead?  Is there no physician there?”

            Yes there is a balm and it is you.  Yes there is a physician and it is you!  So, God so get to work!

            Of course, that is not how it worked then and it is not how it works now.  Ours is not a God who waves a magic want and makes it all better. 

            In fact, it would go against the very nature of God to do that; to wave a magic wand and make the whole world ok; to wipe away any trace of injustice or oppression in the world. 

            What Jeremiah gave voice to in lament; what God cries out over in our text today; what we see when we look across the decaying moral landscape of the world, what we see is not a design flaw in creation in need of a fix by the creator.  No, what we see is the tangible, visible, enduring wages of human sinfulness in the midst of creation. 

            The reason God does not simply fix the world is simply that God did not break it in the first place.

            God said, let there be light.  We are the ones who keep choosing darkness.

            God said, let there be abundance of life.  We are the ones who choose consumption and greed.

            If we take the Bible at its word, God’s fundamental desire for humanity is that we flourish and thrive in the midst of God’s creation.  And to achieve that flourishing and thriving, God created the world as a paradise and made it a gift to humanity.

            That we have taken paradise and made it into a living hell for so many of God’s children is at the root of God’s lament.  

            It is clear in the book of Jeremiah and if we are honest with ourselves, it is clear today, that the root causes of injustice and inequality in the world are not inherent in creation but the wages of our individual and corporate sin. 

            Each year enough food is grown worldwide to feed every person on the planet, if we only had the moral courage to get the food where it needs to go.

            There is enough wealth in this nation to ensure that no person goes hungry or without shelter, if we only had the moral courage to get the resources where they need to go.

            There is enough biblical imperative to lead us to treat each and every person with the dignity of a child of God, if we only had the moral courage to stand up to racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia and every other human effort to divide God’s children.

            The world that God created as a paradise is as we have allowed it to become.

            And God laments that state of affairs. 

            God weeps over that state of affairs.

            God cries out in anguish, is there no balm in Gilead?  Is there no physician there?

            Still, as much as our shattering and abuse of the perfect shalom of God’s creation grieves God, God cannot and will not go along with unjust and inhumane practices by waving a magic wand and making everything better.

            God cannot and will not wipe away the tangible wages of our sins in this world because to do so would make God an accessory after the fact to our wanton disregard of the shalom and promise of creation. 

            In truth, I think some of the grieving we hear in God’s voice in this lament over the world is rooted not only in the suffering of God’s people but in the pain God bears in knowing that it doesn’t have to be this way. 

            It doesn’t have to be this way.

            Beneath the words of anguish and despair; behind the voice of the weeping prophet, there is in here a message of hope.

            Yes, our hearts are anguished because God’s heart is anguished.

            Yet, we who read these words of lament on this side of the empty tomb read them through the lens of “Alleluia, he is risen he is risen indeed!”

            We can read these words and participate in God’s anguish and even beg the same questions asked by God,

            “Is there no balm in Gilead?  Is there no physician there?”

            But when we ask them, we have the benefit of knowing God’s promised answer in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

            In Christ, the creator of paradise defined by perfect shalom comes into the world bearing that shalom once again. 

            If the root of the lamentable state of affairs in the world is our sin, then what balm do we need but the grace of Jesus Christ?  What physician can heal us beyond the wholeness we find in Christ?

            In Jesus Christ, God snaps the neck of the cycle of destruction and despair that trapped generations.  God, being God, refuses to let lament have the last word and sends Christ into the world to be the healing balm not only for Gilead but the whole of creation. 

            In Jesus Christ is healing balm and in Jesus Christ is the healer’s hand.   Christ is God’s promise to the world that songs of lament will be supplanted by hymns of praise. 

            Even in the midst of a world of sin and beyond the prophet’s songs of lament, God’s one final word for all creation rings out; hope.

            Is there no balm in Gilead?  Is there no physician there?

            Yes and yes.  On nothing less is our hope built.

            Amen and amen. 

Big Shoulders

Jeremiah 32:1-17

19^th Sunday after Pentecost Year C

September 29, 2013

First Presbyterian Church, Clarksville

And

Harmony Presbyterian Church

Dr. Robert Wm Lowry

            French philosopher and sociologist Jean Baudrillard said, “We live in a world where there is more and more information and less and less meaning.”  Put another way, there is some degree to which we are living, culturally, in an extended episode of Seinfeld; the television show that proudly declared itself a show about nothing.   

            Part of being a believer in the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob-the God of history; the God who would come in the person of Jesus Christ- is to see the something in the midst of the nothing. 

            Just consider our story today.  Jeremiah, in jail at the order of Zedekiah the king of Judah, has been prophesying about the pending fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonians.  There is no grey area in Jeremiah’s words.  Jerusalem will fall.  The nation will be overrun and all that belongs to the Judeans will belong to the Babylonians.

While Jeremiah is in prison, two things happen.  The first is a vision from God that his cousin would come to visit him and demand that Jeremiah purchase a piece of property out of familial obligation.  He was next in line to buy and his cousin wanted to sell.  Although he is a prisoner, Jeremiah trusts God, purchases the property and in front of witnesses gives it to Baruch with instructions to have a deed drawn up and sealed in a clay jar to preserve it.

            The second thing that happens is even odder than a prisoner with no likely chance for freedom who knows that the land is about to be overrun buying a piece of land.  Jeremiah sees in this less than ideal land deal the hand of God at work. 

            After purchasing the land and instructing Baruch in its use, Jeremiah says, “LORD God, you created heaven and earth by your great power and outstretched arm; nothing is too hard for you!”

            Now, I have to admit.  When I bought my first house and signed the loan papers and realized I owed more money than I ever had in my life, my first thought was not to say a word about God’s awesome power as the creator of heaven and earth!  And unlike Jeremiah, I wasn’t in prison at the time either!

            As someone whose life’s work is rooted in the church, I am tempted to shake my head and scowl with some combination of sadness and contempt at the cultural tendencies that Baudrillard criticizes and Seinfeld embodied.  For those of us who find our home in the church, this historical community built on stories and truths whose age is measured not in decades or centuries but in millennia.   The text for my sermon this morning is from a story more than 2500 years old and is built on theology that extends centuries earlier.  Being part of the church is by definition to be part of something and not nothing.  Still, there is something striking about the difference between Jeremiah’s response to a banal moment and ours. 

            What about this moment was so different?  What about this moment when Jeremiah did something as innocuous as buy land from his cousin was so special- so different- that his response was to give praise and express awe for God? 

            Perhaps a better question is, what is so different about us? 

            14 years ago Jedediah Purdy gave an answer to a version of that question in his wonderful book, For Common Things.  In the book, Purdy argues that modern culture has been seduced by irony and its accompanying avoidance of naïve devotion, belief or hope.  The ironic individual, he says, practices a kind of self-protection against disappointment by simply not believing in much of anything in the first place. 

            The net result is a loss of imagination.  Generally speaking, we have, as a people, lost our sense of imagination for things that are beyond our expectations and experiences.  We have lost the vocabulary of awe that transcends our daily lives. 

            If there is a single spiritual illness underlying the state of our culture, I think that is it. 

            If there is a single spiritual illness underlying the state of the church, I think that is it.

                        A loss of imagination;

                                    a loss of our ability to see something beyond the nothing.

                                                we have been seduced by the ease and perceived comfort of living ironic lives insulated from disappointment by our persistent refusal to dream too big. 

            That is, to varying degrees, the diagnosis for our age, but I have trouble indicting myself or our collective self in the church too much for making this a self-inflicted illness.  Like the person who gets a cold after being out in the rain, there are plenty of reasons why we suffer from this collective malady.

            Our political culture has become trifling, wearisome and parochial; the great human rights movements that sparked the passion of previous generations have become excuses for fundraising more than motivators for social change; appliances and relationships that used to be worth repairing have become disposable and easily replaced. 

            We have spent the last quarter century standing in a chilly cultural rain and it is no wonder we have caught a spiritual cold. 

            The net result of so much of this cultural sickness is the loss our imaginations; we’ve lost our ability or our willingness to risk seeing beyond our own lives and perspectives.

            Bill O’Reilly, the Fox News commentator, has written a book on the life and death of Jesus.  The book has been roundly criticized by reviewers for many reasons, some deserved some not.  It is not terribly accurate and relies on lots of assumptions and not much scholarship, but O’Reilly does not make a claim to be a biblical theologian so it may not be fair to judge his book against the likes of Luke Timothy Johnson or Reza Aslan.

             One critique of O’Reilly’s book is well deserved but not very new.  If you read O’Reilly’s account of the life of Jesus, you find that the Son of God seems, in his theological and political outlook, a lot like, well, Bill O’Reilly.  For the writer of a pseudo-biography of Jesus to write himself into the profile of Christ is not a new thing.  Since the whole notion of writing a biographical account of the historical Jesus became popular in the early 19^th century, the picture of Christ that comes from the words on the page more often than not looks a lot like the one who put the words on the page in the first place.  Over the years Jesus has resembled variously a German academic, Anglican bishop, protestant clergyman and, now, conservative television commentator. 

            There is something about thinking about the divine that so often keeps us from looking beyond the limits of our imaginations; that persuades us that all there is to be in this world is within sight of our own lives so whatever God or Christ or the Spirit may be or do is bound on each side by what our imaginations declare to be the boundaries of the possible.  We imagine a God who is big, but not too big; a Christ who is forgiving, but not too forgiving; a Spirit that inspires, but not too much. 

            We just seem to have lost our appetite and our imagination for a God who is greater than our greatest and wildest dreams.   

            Jeremiah bought a share in the Promised Land that was about to be claimed by Nebuchadnezzar.  Knowing that the land was about to be overrun and that deeds of transfer would likely not carry much weight with ole Nebuchadnezzar, what does Jeremiah do?  Doe he lament in being forced into a deal with his cousin?  Does he shake his fist at the sky and ask God why?  He turns to God and says, “LORD God, you created the heaven and the earth by your great power and outstretched arm; nothing is too hard for you!”

Imagine buying land in a nation that you know is about to be overrun and occupied.   It isn’t as if the Babylonians were going to honor land ownership!  What did he imagine that he had to be thankful about?!  Jeremiah buys a share of something that is about to be taken over by outsiders. 

            In a way, I suppose we do that every time we gather in this place.  When we give our time and our energy and our resources to the church, we buy shares of God’s promise even while the barbarians are at the city gates.   To say that the church is about to be overrun by the Babylonians might be a bit of a stretch, but we do live in uncertain times.  There is a whole cottage industry in publishing books and holding conferences on the inevitable sea change that is happening in the church.  We are in the midst of what has variously been called a new Reformation, a fourth Great Awakening and the emergence of a whole new Christian era.  Whatever it is called, it is certain that we are living in uncertain times in the household of God much like Jeremiah lived in uncertain times in the Promised Land of God. 

            So why did Jeremiah, facing invasion and occupation, respond with words of praise and we, faced with an uncertain future in the church, so often respond with anxiety or, look around at those empty pews, we just walking away?

            What are we missing?  What did Jeremiah see in his moment of uncertainty that we do not see in our own?

            Perhaps a better question is asking, what did Jeremiah see BEYOND that moment? 

            If we read this text clearly, it is really what he sees beyond the moment that inspires Jeremiah rather than what happens in that innocuous moment itself.  He does not praise God because his cousin forced him into this land deal or because Nebuchadnezzar is at the city gates and about to sack Jerusalem, he praises God because he knows that this land in which he now owns a share is God’s and what is truly God’s can never belong to Nebuchadnezzar.  What is truly God’s can never be taken away.  God promised the land to the children of Abraham and God’s promise, ultimately, cannot and will not be broken.

            Jeremiah buys a share in the Promised Land not because he sees promise in the moment but because he sees beyond the nothing of the right now to the something of God’s promised tomorrow.

            This prophet of God lets his imagination take him, like Willy Wonka’s Great Glass Elevator, beyond the boundaries of experience and reason and rationality and excuses to a place of pure imagination; a place in his spirit where the only words he can find are words of praise for God.

            Jeremiah did that sitting in Zedekiah’s jail. 

            He dared to imagine that God was bigger and greater than the present moment.  He dared to dream in what one preacher called the God of the big shoulders- big enough to hold us all. 

            Imagine what we could do right here and right now if we dare to put our imaginations to work.

            What kind of church would we build if we were willing to unleash our imaginations and let them take us beyond the reality of the moment to the limitless possibilities of God’s promise?!

            What kind of world would we build if we were willing to open our hearts and our minds and our lives to a God who can still surprise us with hope, a Christ who can still astonish us with grace and a Spirit that can still overwhelm us with promise?

            It would, I am certain, be like nothing we have ever seen before.

            It would, I am certain, be beyond our wildest imaginations.

            It would, I am ab-so-lute-ly certain, be a bigger, brighter, greater, more wondrous future than any of us dare hope and because we trust our imaginations to God there will be no need for us to wear the armor of our ironic age, because the God of promise never disappoints.

            Like the hymn says,

If you but trust in God to guide you

And place your confidence in Him,

You'll find God always there beside you,

To give you hope and strength within.

For those who trust God's changeless love

Build on the rock that will not move.

            LORD God, you created the heaven and the earth by your great power and outstretched arm; nothing is too hard for you!  Or for us, with you.

            Amen and amen.