In Whose Footsteps?

In Whose Footsteps?

Psalm 23

First Presbyterian Church of Batesville, AR

25 April, 2010

            When I was seminary intern at Central Presbyterian Church in Austin, the pastor and associate pastor were out of town at the same time one week and I got the call that the friend of a member of our church had died quite suddenly.  She was a young woman and her family was in shock and asked that I come over to be with them and begin preparations for the funeral. 

I changed out of my grad school attire in to my good grey preacher suit and armed with my at that point unused Book of Worship set out to make my first pastoral call on the family of a deceased member.  Now in seminary they prepare you to plan an actual funeral service, but they leave out the part about what you should say when you get to the door.  When I reached the family’s home, I rang the doorbell not knowing what I would say when the door opened.  A few seconds later, the door opened and the husband of this young woman stood there in front of me, his eyes swollen and red, looking to me to be his pastor, and I froze.  I did not know what to say.  Then, without thinking I began to recite the 23^rd Psalm faster than it has ever been said before.

When I finished my breathless recitation of those ancient words, I returned to my frozen posture once again at a loss for words.  A few seconds that seemed like an eternity transpired until the silence was broken by the laughter of the husband standing in the door.   He put his hand on my shoulder and said, “I needed that.  Get in here.”

Whether set to the beautiful melodies of countless hymn tunes or recited in the staccato ramblings of a newbie preacher, these words have an almost mystical power to sooth and comfort.   The grip these words have on biblical spirituality and theology is deep and it is real.  It seems almost pretentious to attempt to preach on these words.  It bears witness to itself in its simplicity and scarcely needs any help from me.  Yet, like so much of scripture, there lurks a wealth of truth waiting to be found beneath the surface of the familiar.

Taking nothing from the emotional and spiritual power of the Psalm as hymn of comfort, there is much more to be found if we peer beyond the surface and allow the text to live in our midst.

It is often said that familiarity breeds contempt, but I would wager to say that with a text like this it is more a matter of familiarity breeding numbness.  Like a garden or even a relationship that requires attention and tending, scripture continues to call us back for yet another reading that, in the hand of the Holy Spirit, even the most familiar and comfortable words might stir our souls and draw us ever deeper into communion with God and one another.

When we dwell with the language of the psalm we soon discover that the message of the psalmist is not merely that God relieves our sorrow and fears.  There is more than healing balm in these words. 

There is transformation, empowerment and even a little danger lurking beneath the still waters.

The writer of this psalm is not merely waxing philosophical about a love for God that runs a mile wide and an inch deep.  This is not the stuff of momentary emotional comfort found in a Hallmark card or an especially touching AT&T ad.  No, the comfort the psalmist finds in the Lord is the comfort that comes when one’s whole being is surrounded in the whelming flood of God’s goodness and grace. 

There is a local band here in Batesville named the Wizzbangers.  Its members are all teenagers and their music reflects the kind of all-encompassing emotion that is so familiar at that age.  This is especially true with one particular psychedelic/punk love song.  The song sings about a love that consumes.  When you fall in love as a teenager, well before the experience of life has had a chance to shade or jade, the whole world becomes about that love.   

That is the kind of peace and comfort the psalmist writes about is just that kind of intense feeling.  The Lord is my shepherd is not somehow an expression of benign satisfaction.  It is a proclamation to the world that the Lord, to the exclusion of all other claimants, is the sole guide and guardian in our lives.  The Lord is our everything.  If the Lord is my shepherd, then no one and nothing else can be.   To declare with the psalmist that the Lord is my shepherd is to believe the way we loved as teenagers; wholly, with our entire being, without reservation, and with a confidence that will not waver.

It is precisely God’s companionship that transforms us and every situation in our lives.  It does not mean that there are no more valleys of the shadow of death, no enemies who stand before us.   Those are very real and persistent parts of our world.  The Lord is my shepherd does not eliminate the valley of the shadow of death, but it does declare our deep and abiding faith that we do not walk it alone.

In the German town of Dachau during WW2 there was a Nazi death camp.  It is a museum to the Holocaust now and in that museum is a picture.   It is a photograph of a mother and her daughter being marched to the gas chamber at Auschwitz.  There is nothing the mother can do to stop it, nothing she can do to prevent what will come when they come to the end of their short walk to the building ahead, so she does the only thing she can, the only act of love available to her; she puts her hand over her daughter’s eyes so she cannot see what is coming.[1] 

There is no way to know what that mother said to her daughter in that moment, but I chose to believe that she echoed the beautiful words of comfort we hear today, “he Lord is my shepherd.”  That though they walked through the deepest valley death has ever known, and stood face to face with an enemy so great as to stupefy the imagination, these powerful words of comfort and proclamation spoke through time and, in a mother’s had shielding the eyes of her child, declared to the world, this is not the end. 

I wonder if I would have the courage of that mother.  I wonder if, faced with the kind of darkness that loomed that day, I would have the presence of mind to make even the smallest gesture of faith to cover the eyes of a child.  I say I wonder if I would because like so many in our culture, I find myself being pulled in different directions by different shepherds.

We live in a time when there is a pervading sense that meaning has lost its meaning, that truth has become more difficult to hold on to than a soapy three year old who refuses to stay in the tub.  We live lives suspended between the restlessness of our hearts that long for the God of our ancestors and the anxieties of a world that declares such things to be foolish remnants of a time gone by.  We become seduced by the complexity of our contemporary world and the layers of geo-political, military, economic and other intricacies of our ever changing human community, what Walker Percy called being “lost in the cosmos.”  

We construct such great walls to separate us from God when all we need to do is stop and lay in the grass.  Pause beside the still water.  We do not have to look far to find the one who calls us by name because the shepherd stands not at a distance but in the midst of the flock. 

It is in God the good shepherd that we find our rest, our nourishment, our comfort and our care in the greenest fields and the darkest valleys.  The shepherd feeds and tends and, when necessary, fights off the wolves.  The shepherd loves the flock and we love the shepherd.

The Lord is my shepherd and it is in the shepherd’s footsteps that I seek to walk…

…all the days of my life.

In the name of God, the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.  AMEN.

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[1] This observation, in slightly different form, was made by Tom Long in a sermon preached at the Festival of Homiletics in Washington D.C. May 2004.

The Last Word

The Last Word

Revelation 22:12-21 

First Presbyterian Church of Batesville, AR

The Reverend Dr. Robert Wm Lowry

15 May, 2010  11AM 

At the moment, it did not seem quite so silly.

I had been in bed for a little more than a week with pneumonia.  The doctor told me not to get out in the damp winter air.  I really did not believe that there was anything to be worried about.  Nonetheless, with about 5 minutes to go, I roused myself from my sick bed; put on jeans and a sweater; put the dog on her leash and walked the five or so paces down the landing to Pete and Laurie’s apartment. 

Earlier that day when she brought me some soup, Laurie had invited me over.  I thanked her but said I doubted that I would get out.

As the clocked ticked, I began to rethink that decision.  Pneumonia or not, I decided better safe than sorry.   After all it was Y2K and if the apocalypse really was upon us and I was going to be left behind, I didn’t want to be left behind alone.  And I was pretty sure that if I was getting left, Pete would be around to keep me company.

Like I said; silly.

In retrospect I am embarrassed to admit that even that little bit of the millennium bug bit me just before December 31, 1999 rolled into January 1, 2000.  But I take comfort in knowing that I am in good company.  As one of my professors said a few weeks later, “the apocalypse makes people do funny things.”

And it does.  From the tinfoil hat wearing fringe to the mainstream of protestant theology, the apocalypse amazes, interests, confuses and, yes, frightens us. 

Of the many things I learned living in Scotland, one is that we Americans have a unique fascination with the Revelation of John of Patmos.  It is somehow written in our spiritual DNA.  While most of the Scots pastors I know are comfortable with Calvin’s conclusion that Revelation is an unnecessary muddling of the already clear history of salvation in Christ, we Americans can’t seem to get away from this tale of dragons and beasts; trumpets and seals.

Since Puritan merchant Edward Johnson declared the American colonies “a city on a hill” and the New England settlers “forerunners of Christ’s army,” there has been an ongoing love/hate relationship between our national self-image and John’s radical picture of the world yet to come.

For my part, I am torn.  Part of me says, “run.  Run as fast and as far as you can. Nothing good can possibly come from preaching this book.”  Another part still wanders over to Pete and Laurie’s just in case.

To be sure, John’s revelation is a fascinating read.  Part morality tale part science fiction, it is as if John Milton wrote the screenplay for the new Star Wars film.  Revelation is a page turner and, in many ways a puzzle.

For centuries theologians have tried to make sense of the sevens and the 666’s and the factors of 12 that punctuate the book.

By the time of the revolution, American protestant clergy had made a cottage industry of unraveling the puzzles of John’s writing.   A prominent Presbyterian pastor in New Jersey went so far as to predict that the millennium of Christ foretold in John’s writing would dawn in Elizabethtown, New Jersey on May 15, 1796.  On May 16, 1796, the elders of the church convened to fire him.

In “the Age of Reason,” Thomas Paine noted that when a clergyman attempts to “unriddle” John’s Apocalypse, he does so agreeably to his own views.

            Whether read as a roadmap for the consummation of history or an allegorical retelling of our shared reality, the book of Revelation has a singular ability to capture our imaginations.  Try as we may, the voice of John speaks even today.

So what are we to make of this book?  Is a portent of dramatic and tragic events to come or is there perhaps something more there for us?

We join John’s vision in its final chapters when he describes the vision he has been given of what is to come.

He sees a vision of a new heaven and a new earth.  They are entirely new creations, not the present world with a fresh coat of paint.  He sees in short, the victory of God over sin and death. 

It is important to remember the context of the people to whom John’s vision is related.  They were a church under persecution.  Now this persecution was different from the persecution many Christians today are fond of saying the church is subjected to.  While the church today is ridiculed on sitcoms and by comedians, while individual Christians may get some strange glances if they pull out their bibles in Starbucks, we as a church and as individual believers are not subjected to the kind of persecution the first century Christians were. 

We get odd looks, they got fed to the lions.  We get made fun of, they got crucified.

It was with this church, with this persecuted community that John shared his vision of the ultimate victory of God over sin and death.

That vision is not foreign to us.  Each year throughout the season of Easter we celebrate that in the life death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, there was the end of the beginning.  The fulfillment of the promise in the prophets that God would become human and dwell among us harkened a new age.  It harkened the age of the promise that is in Jesus Christ, Emmanuel, God with us.

We celebrate that it is in Jesus Christ that God has the final word for creation, and that word is YES!   In the midst of the turmoil of their age, and of our own, John proclaims God’s saving grace and his confidence that in Jesus Christ, God has indeed had the final word over creation.

We must be careful though.  We must remember that though God smiles on creation, there is much work to be done.  Because the victory over death has been won, does not mean that the battle with sin and death in this world is over.  Because we have the promise of a new creation, does not mean that this creation, the creation we inhabit as God’s people, is without need.

There is deep need in the world and as Jesus himself says, “the Kingdom of God is at hand.”

The promised kingdom is at hand.

It is that kingdom promise that provides the backdrop for the Church’s work.  The mission and work of the church is carried out with the promise that although there are great struggles ahead, the ultimate victory is won.  The task of the church is to bear witness to this dwelling place of the Lord, this new heaven and new earth that are promised.  If we but have the confidence of the people of God, all good things will fall into place.

It would be nice if it was that easy wouldn’t it?

However, we all know that there is much more to it than that.  We know that there are no easy fixes in the world.  We know that though Christ has won the ultimate victory over sin, our lives are still plagued by it.

When we come to this place one of the first things we do is confess our sins.  We confess that the blame for the troubles of this world sit on our shoulders as well as those of our neighbors.  We too are resistant to God’s vision.  We too contribute to the forces that resist the coming kingdom.  We too are scared of the change that is required if we are to embrace this new kingdom.  In fact, it is in few places in the world that our resistance is more determined that here in God’s own house.

We are scared that the church we have come to know will change if we

sing new hymns or

use different words or

hire a new pastor or

refer to God as a woman or

ordain gays and lesbians or

talk about controversial issues or

take stands against the prevailing public view.

Things are going to change and we don’t know what that will mean.  What will happen to the “good old days” if we dare to change?

Change begins to take on the shape of apocalypse.  We begin to see the promise of the future as the fearful coming of some cataclysmic shift in our reality.  The people of John’s time certainly saw that.  They saw the world around them shifting and changing and they did not know what to make of it.

Where was God?  What did and does God have in store?

“Behold,” God says, “I make all things new.”

The future belongs to God and God has made it clear that we are partners in this new creation.  God has also made it clear that in the end there will be no more death, no more tears, no more mourning or wailing or pain because all of this old will have passed away and a new life will begin.  What we fear as apocalypse is in fact promise.

I know that is why you are here today.  You are here for the same reason I am.  You believe that despite everything, there is something to this promise. 

The surest test of our Christian faith isn’t what we are willing to say or what we are willing to confess, or what we are willing to endure, it is about what we are willing to believe.  Will we dare to believe that the future, in whatever form it may take, belongs to God?  Will we believe that we go into that future not in peril but in promise?

In the coming weeks, we will be looking to the past as we discern this congregation’s future.  We will discuss, discern and even disagree.  We will negotiate change and work to preserve cherished traditions.  We will all have a say, but in the end God will have the last word.  In fact, God has already had the last word and that word is yes. 

At times it may begin to feel like there is too much happening too fast.  It may begin to feel like all the things happening in our own church are like a mini-apocalypse on the horizon.

The apocalypse makes people do funny things.  Perhaps, just perhaps, it may also give us the wisdom and courage to do marvelous things.  When, in the coming weeks, you find yourself feeling anxious about our future together, remember this; the future belongs to God and God has already had the final word to say.  And that word is, “yes.”

In the name of God the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.  AMEN

Of Mites and Millions: A Stewardship Sermon

Of Mites and Millions

Mark 12:38-44

First Presbyterian Church of Batesville

November 14, 2010

Dr. Robert Wm Lowry

Mark’s gospel is meant to be read theologically rather than historically or biographically.  He seeks to provide a theological account of Christ the worker of great miracles rather than the great teacher of Matthew and Luke or the philosopher of John.  For Mark, Jesus’ ministry is in many ways itself a theological interpretation of the covenant between God and humanity.   In this short story, Mark seeks to show a Christological interpretation of the enduring theological concept of the righteous.

Now that word, righteous, gets a bad rap in our contemporary minds.   When we hear it we think “self-righteous” or “arrogant” or even “intolerant.”  In biblical terms, however, the term means something altogether different.  To be righteous means to be anything but those things.  It means to be self-giving, to be humble before God and to be welcoming, especially to those who are among the least powerful in the community.  In the case of the biblical world, that meant widows and orphans and immigrants from other places.  To be righteous is to look out for their well-being and to put your trust in God and God’s work.

For those of us reading biblical commentaries and the notes in the margins of our study bibles, all that seems well and clear.  In Mark’s time, however, it was anything but.  Writing only a few years after the resurrection, Mark is sharing the story of Jesus in a world still reeling from the titanic shift that he brought to church and society.

            Imagining what it must have been like in those earliest years of the church, I do not have too much trouble imagining the kind of anxiety it must have produced to experience such a radical shift in thinking and theology within the community.  They knew what the law said but Jesus kept saying that he came to fulfill the law and that there was this new law about loving God and your neighbor.  So what were they supposed to do now?  What was the measuring stick?  “What does it mean to be righteous now?” they must have been asking.

            According to this parable, the short answer is simply this: if you are like the widow who gives all she has, you are righteous.  If you are like the scribes and Pharisees, well, you better watch out.

            That reading is certainly easy, but it is also misses the point.  You see this story is not actually about money.  Well, let me restate that, it is not entirely about money.  It is about trust.

            Unfortunately for much of the church’s history, this text has been reduced to a morality tale about money and used as a tool to pick many people’s pockets.  This text is half of the formula for the phenomenon of Prosperity Gospel preaching.  You know that kind. Those are the preachers who assure you that if you will give your last two copper coins to the church, God will reward you with riches in this life.  It is the gospel of quid pro quo.  God will prosper you if you will only follow the example of the widow and bankrupt yourself by giving all you have to the church first.  Under this formula, righteousness is defined as sacrificing all you have to the church in the hope that you will be rewarded with even more later on.

            Jesus, in this account from Mark, does in fact lift up the importance of giving sacrificially but it is not part of a formula for later riches.  There is nothing in the story to say that the widow gave so that later God would make her rich.  Her righteousness does not come from the size of her gift but by what the gift means.  

             Now make no mistake, the money matters.  It matters that the widow and we support the church with our financial resources.  It is those gifts that make the ministries of the church possible.  Those gifts keep the lights on, they pay the staff, they buy the curriculum and fund the mission.  The money in the plate, whether the widows copper coins or the millionaire’s whelming gift, are vital to the ministry of the church and we would not be able to do much of our work without the generous support of our members.

            What this story in Mark points us toward, however, is something beyond the gifts themselves.  Those coins represent more than money.  They represent faith and belief.  They represent hope and trust.  Jesus illustrates in this parable the reality that these things must be lived out in our lives in concrete acts and not solely in religious rituals.  By contrasting the widow’s faith with the hollow faith of the scribes and the Pharisees, Jesus recalls that powerless rituals do not call forth deep acts of faith from our witness in the world.[i]  Instead, these heartless rituals have become pro forma ceremonies marking questionable status and fallow craven piety.

            If we are not careful, a stewardship campaign can become one of those fallow craven pious rituals.  When our stewardship is a once a year hurdle to clear so the budget can get made, we miss the point of the widow’s gift.  When she put those two coins in the offering, what the English translation refers to as “all she has to live on,” what she really puts in is a faith-filled offering of herself to the service of God in the world.  Perhaps rather than “all she has to live on,” a better translation would be “all that she has.”  Because when she puts her worldly wealth in the offering, she is also putting her trust and faith that it will be used for the glory of God.

            The act of giving in this story is not so much about the doing of stewardship, the giving of the gifts like we give today, but about being good stewards.  It is about being people whose faith is in the work of God’s church and the work of God in the world. 

            In his compelling charge to Communion, Augustine calls on us to take the grace and hope we find in the wine and bread and make it live in our lives in ways that not only sustain us, but model for others the enormous power of that offering for the world.  That act of witness is not something we can do at arm’s length.  And neither is this.

            Just as we have to experience the table ourselves if we are to model in the world the hope that indwells the body and blood of Christ, so too must we participate in generous giving to the work of Christ if we hope to model that generosity to the world.  Our stewardship is not merely about writing checks to the church it is about writing the church into our lives.  It is about grafting the trust and hope of offering into who we are, not once a year when we make a pledge, but on a daily basis.  In this story Jesus calls the disciples and the church to himself and points out this poor widow and her manner of giving with such trust and hope.  It is that very trust and hope that followed her copper coins and today follows our pledges of support.

            It is one thing to say from the pulpit that these are offerings of trust and hope that we should give and quite another one to actually give them.

            In recent time, this community has experienced a sense of broken trust.  For some in our community, the church has not been worthy of the gifts of the givers, particularly the gifts of those who felt alienated or disillusioned.  It is difficult to give over our trust and hope when that trust and hope has been shaken. 

Last week Max told us that the officers of the church had all made a commitment for the coming year.  Those gifts were pledges of money, but more importantly, they were pledges of trust in the future of this congregation.  Today, you are invited to follow suit.  You are invited to make your pledge of money, yes, but more importantly of faith and trust in the future of this place.  And whatever may rest in our past, our vision in this place is of the future.  It is a vision of the possibilities found only in Christ’s covenant community and the power of the people of God to bring healing and wholeness to a broken world.  Even to a broken church.  Our gifts of faith and hope and trust align us, not with the troubles of the past, but with the promise of the future.

            That widow so long ago gave all that she had in trust and we are invited to do the same.  Whether that trust is measured in mites or millions, it is another step in the direction of righteousness; the righteousness that comes from putting our whole lives, from the coins in our pockets to the hope of our hearts and the trust of our souls, in the hands of Christ.

             In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.  AMEN.

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[i] FOTW B.4.286

While We Were Yet Sinners

While We Were Yet Sinners[1]

Psalm 9:9-20

Romans 4:23-5:21

First Presbyterian Church Clarksville

Harmony Presbyterian Church

June 24, 2012

Ordinary 12

The Reverend Dr. Robert Wm Lowry

                I never cared for group projects in school.  It was not so much that I did not like working with other students because I did- I always got a checkmark next to works and plays well with others.  And it was not because I am inherently an introvert or shy or anything else for that matter.  I just never cared for the group projects.

            On a level, group projects make more sense.  Many hands make light work, etc.  The same can be said for many minds.  Still I did not like doing them.  As beneficial as they can be in so many ways, they just offend my own sense of justice.

            I cannot recall a single group project where everyone did an equal portion of the work.  Someone always got the benefit of the grade without putting in the sweat equity to get us there.  These may have been my friends and colleagues, but they were freeloading on my hard work and that offended my sense of justice.

            That sense of what is just and unjust is, I think, what makes grace such a bittersweet pill to swallow.  On the one hand, we boldly sing Amazing Grace with feeling and conviction and proclaim that it is indeed grace, freely given, undeserved, abundant grace that saves a wretch like me. We lift up our voices in praise and thanksgiving for God’s freely given gift of grace…to us. 

            Because, let’s face it. We deserve a little grace.  When everyone around us split for another church or no church, we are still here.  When the world turned its back on the Gospel, we stood fast.  We show up on Sunday mornings, we volunteer to usher and greet, we give to the offering plate, we come to Midweek Manna and volunteer in the Thrift Shop. We seek in our lives over and over again to deserve and earn the freely given gift of God’s grace.

            So it is no wonder that it offends our sense of fair play- our sense of cosmic justice- that God’s free gift of grace is just that- free.  It is not earned, it is not deserved, it is simply freely given by God in Christ Jesus and even the slacker who doesn’t help with the project drinks from the streaming waters of grace. 

            Why would God set it up that way?  Why would God create a world in which the rain falls on the just and the unjust alike and so does the grace of God? 

            Well, as you can probably guess after a month with our friend Paul, he is raising a question that is not reserved for his time.  It is an inherently human question and one that persists from Paul’s Rome to our Johnson County.  This idea of the freely given grace of God is yet another reason Paul is convinced that the gospel is so foolish, so ridiculous if we just stop and think about it.

            After his discourse on Abraham, we heard part of that last week; Paul turns his eye even further back in history to Adam.  Adam, whose Hebrew name means human, is the common ancestor to all of us.  Paul takes the name A’dam quite literally when interpreting Adam and Adam’s sin as descriptive of all humanity.  We are all A’dam and, consequently, we all bear the sin of Adam.  We are all tangled in its nets and even when we think we have worked ourselves free, we are still ensnared. 

            You see for Paul, just as Adam was the way ticket into the tangled web of sin, Christ is the only way out.  Not faith in Christ.  Not belief in Christ.  Not even surrender to Christ.  But Christ; the life, death and resurrection of Christ; the freely given grace of Christ is the only way out of the prison of sin we each find ourselves tangled within. 

            Still, we do have a tendency to think of our own emergence from this tangled web of sin as the product of at least some measure of our own spiritual hard work.  I mean, Christ might give it the final umph, but I loosened the lid!

            However, Paul emphasizes, as he so often does, that our individual needs and deeds, both good and bad, are not the only things at work here.  God does see and know and love us as individuals distinct and unique in God’s eyes, but our individuality does not mean that we are wholly disconnected from our neighbors.  It does not mean that we have to somehow go it alone in the world.  Thinking that we do and our constant trying to do so is nothing more than a wage for our sin. 

            Still we have difficulty seeing ourselves as part of this human whole- this body of humanity bound in sin by Adam and freed from sin by Christ.   Rather than heed the words of Dr. King that we exist in a web of mutuality one with the other, we prefer that great American philosopher Lilly Tomlin who said, “We are all in this thing together, by ourselves.”

            We are constantly tugged from the promise of our unity into the divisions created of our own minds. 

            Paul recognized this in the Romans of his day and he tries mightily to persuade them that if we are joined to Adam in sin, then we are also joined to Christ in his obedience to God, and we all receive God’s act of grace through Jesus’ merit and faithfulness.   Paul does not suggest that we are somehow to understand our own sin as inconsequential because it is not.  Sin does still bear its wage of death, whether in body or in spirit.  But Christ also still bears his promise of life, in resurrection and renewal. 

            The healthy spiritual life keeps both our sinfulness and God’s saving grace in balance recognizing that just as sin cannot drag us to a place too distant for God’s grace to reach us, so God’s grace does not take us so far that the consequences of our sinfulness are forgotten.  Though sin may no longer reign supreme, it is still very real and its consequences as well. 

            For Paul, grace is more about saving us for rather than saving us from.  It is what empowers and compels us forward in history rather than leaving us to retreat ever further into our own sinfulness.   It is not a get out of hell free card giving us carte blanche to live, as Calvin said, the life of a libertine.   Instead it is something to be held in awe and wonder.

            Martin Luther, when he went to say his first mass as a priest, was so struck by his own paralyzing fear of his unworthiness that he wrote of the moment:

            “I was utterly stupefied and terror-stricken.  I thought to myself, ‘With what tongue shall I address such majesty, seeing that all [people] ought to tremble in the presence of even an earthly prince?  Who am I, that I should lift up mine eyes or raise my hands to the divine Majesty?  The angels surround him.  At his nod the earth trembles.  And shall I…say ‘I want this, I ask for that?’  For I am dust and ashes and full of sin and I am speaking to the living, eternal and true God.”[2]

            What Luther would come to realize in his life is that Paul’s words are not hollow and it is indeed true that “God proves his love for us in that even while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.”  He realized that, yes, left to our own devices we are unworthy to even raise our eyes or hands to the heavens so stained are we all by sin.  But we are not left to our own devices.  We are not left alone in the world to forever divert our eyes from the holy.  We have in Christ our true companion and savior and it is by his grace; his faithfulness; his love that we are freed to turn our fearful and sinful hearts to God.  

            It is that freedom from the bondage of sin that frees us for the works of mercy so needed in the world;

            that frees us for a life lived in thanksgiving to God;

            that frees us for a life not focused on earning our own salvation but embodying the promise of Christ’s salvation to a broken world.

            And make no mistake about it, friends, the work of the church is the work of salvation.  Not merely salvation from hell, but salvation from hell on earth.  That freedom for that comes so freely from the whelming grace of God in Christ Jesus is a message the world needs to hear and we are called to proclaim it in thought, in word and in deed. 

            And, yes we will falter and we will fail.  Yes, we will often lapse back into our old sense of justice and have difficulty seeing beyond our own ideas of deserving to Christ’s idea of generosity.  We will find ourselves resenting those who do not pull their weight on the group project that is the work of God in the world.  Because we grace freely given in Christ does not mean that we will never again taste sin inherited from Adam.  We will.  Over and over and over again, we will know what it is to sin, yet as often as we find ourselves standing in a posture of sin, we need only remember that as many times as we sin and fall short of the glory of God, that many times plus one is the number of times God forgives. 

            One of the most enduring stories of a life lived in confidence in this sort of grace is the life of English clergyman John Newton.  Most famous as the author of the hymn Amazing Grace, Newton was someone who knew the miracle of grace and set about the rest of his life determined not to forget it.  A former slave trader, Newton knew that his sins were too great for him ever to merit salvation.  Yet, in Christ Jesus he was saved not only from the wage of his sin but for the work of grace in the world.  Through his witness as writer, preacher, hymn writer and mentor to young Abolitionists, Newton found the grace of Jesus Christ compelling his life as well as saving his soul. 

            Near the end of his life, Newton summed up his own understanding of grace in words that should be written on each of our hearts and lives.  “My memory is nearly gone, but I remember two things; that I am a great sinner and that Christ is a great savior.”

              John Newton, the self-described libertine and slave trader, would live long enough to watch the wages of sin be washed away by the tide of grace as parliament voted to ban the slave trade. 

            So may it be for each of us.  May we who live in the knowledge of the love and grace of God, live lives that bear witness to the promise of Christ and, should it please God, may we have a glimpse in our own time of the work of salvation over and against the wage of sin in our world.

            In the name of God the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.  Amen.

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[1] I am indebted to Dr. Brian Wyatt for insights provided by his sermon on this text presented to our study group in March 2012.  He also drew in the reference to Luther and the vivid memory of group projects in seminary!

[2] R.H. Bainton, Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther (New York: Abingdon-Cokesbury, 1950) 30.

"Out of the Sandbox" June 24, 2012 Romans 3:32-4:5

Out of the Sandbox[1]

Romans 3:31-4:5

First Presbyterian Church Clarksville

Harmony Presbyterian Church

June 24, 2012

Ordinary 12

 

The Reverend Dr. Robert Wm Lowry

Jesus said that where two or more are gathered he is there.

The presence of the Son of God is not the only thing present when human beings gather together.

In all sorts of places;

the sandbox on the playground,

the corridors of political power,

the midst of social conflict or upheaval,

IT is there.

The IT in question is our never ending effort to establish order in the world.  And not just any order, but a new order that favors our own perspectives and demands and bends them to our own will.

            A colleague related a story about the sort of conflict that can arise when those visions conflict.  It happened on the middle school yard.  The two guys had been cruising to a fight for a while because both had staked their claim to the same girl.  So, in that eternal show of middle school tough guy bravado, they stormed over to one another, threw their books to the ground and commenced battle.  Some blood was drawn, a few bruises were shared.  In the end, there really wasn’t a winner.  That of course was somewhat preordained since these two guys were fighting over a girl but neither had even shared their interest with her.  She had no desire to let these two guys decide anything about who she would or would not hang out with.  In fact, she was hanging out with a guy from another school. 

            Fists clenched and wills determined, those two guys duked it out to set straight just how the world was going to be ordered but in the end all they did was accomplish some bruises, scrapes and a three day suspension.   Try as they might, they did not have the power to bend the world to their own will and in hindsight driving home with mom and dad school suspension in hand, it probably seemed a little silly.  But in the moment, nothing else seems so important.

            Throughout the history of civilization, that school yard fight has been played out on a greater and more troubling scale.  And with each one, the victor thought that a new and permanent world order had been established.

            When Babylon crushed the Israelites, Israel worried that a new and permanent world order had been established and the Babylonians celebrated in their final victory.  But then, a few generations later, there the Israelites were rebuilding the temple and Jerusalem.

            In 732 at the Battle of Poitiers, the balance of power between Catholic France and Moorish Spain seemed to have been struck and set in stone forever.   750 years later Spain would not only be Christian again, but the Tribunal of the Holy Office of the Inquisition would ensure that no other voices would be heard.

            In 1960’s and 70’s, the fragile balance between the United States and the USSR appeared to be the context of world affairs for the foreseeable future.  Until a group of East German residents, dissatisfied with the order of the world, took to the streets with sledgehammers and began to tear down the wall.

            The world order as we see it often seems eternal and unchangeable, but history teaches us that it rarely is.  Each of these eras in history is fleeting, yet each is also impactful on the fullness of history.  Without Babylon, the Jews of ancient Israel would likely not have such devotion and passion for the land of return.  Without the invasion of Spain by the armies of Tariq Ibn Ziyad, the west may never have made advances in math and astronomy owed largely to Islamic scholars.  Without the Cold War, we may never have known the horror of the arms race.

            For better or worse, each new era in human civilization changes whom we are and how we live.

            Such was the Rome of Paul’s time.  It was the biggest kid on the playground.  It set the rules and dictated the ordering of the world.  And like powerful nations before and after, Rome established that order by delineating between whole swaths of peoples.   Who is in and who is out.

            Paul, in this portion of his letter, betrays himself as a very well educated and astute observer of humanity.  He understood the realities of power and he understood these underlying patterns of history.  In writing to the Christians at Rome, Paul calls them, and consequently us, to a new perspective on history.  It is as though Paul walks us to a high vantage point and, letting history unfold before us, says “what you see is not really how it is.  Oh it may seem real enough in the moment, but in the fullness of history; in the fullness of God’s unfolding history, this is not the whole reality.” 

            For Paul, the order of history-the order of the world, our lives, and our communities- is about nothing less than Jesus Christ.  And Christ’s order is different than any other that the world has ever seen.

            In Jesus’ world, citizenship is determined by two things; the need of grace and the justification of Grace.  And what does Paul have to say about that.  Well to the first point, he says that we are all sinners and fall short of the glory of God.  Kind of hard to put national or cultural or political boundaries around that!  We are ALL sinners and we ALL fall short of the glory of God.  And we sinners are “justified by God’s grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forth as a sacrifice of atonement by his blood…” (3:24, 25)

            Of all the tipping points in human history, of all the eras in which the whole course of history seems to change, none compares in Paul’s eyes to the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

            While earthly powers gather on the school yard to duke it out or argue over whose toys will stay in the sandbox, Jesus does something different.  Dissatisfied with the world as it is and with the limited perspectives the powers that be can offer, Jesus does not seek to reorder the world.  In his life, death and resurrection Jesus ushers in a whole new world.  A world not bound by the limits of our horizons or even the walls of the sandbox!

            In a world of dog eat dog,

                        a world of me first, me second, me third,

                        a world where the one with the most toys wins,

                        Jesus proclaims a new day.   A day when the order of the world does not rise or fall on the powers that be;  that expands beyond our human created boundaries, divergent philosophies and limited perspectives; where the goal of life is neither strength nor power, neither advancement or domination. 

            This new world as Paul describes it is defined by…relationship.  And this is not just any relationship but real, abiding, unbreakable relationship with God our creator.  Paul strives in his letter to the Romans to get them to understand that this new order Jesus ushers into the world is defined by one truth; the truth of the grace and love of God.  All that is, in heaven and on earth, bows to God and it is by God’s universal act of grace that we are united.

            Amen?

            No, really, can I get an amen to that?

            If there was ever a good word of good news in a world that needs to hear it, this is it!  Can you think of any better word for us to hear? 

            If ever there was a time for even Presbyterians to give an amen, this is it!

            This new world that Paul describes is a place for US.  For all of us; Jews, Gentiles, men, women, old, young, free people and slaves, you name the human condition or human category, and Jesus has knocked down the walls and gathered us all in together in the embrace of the love of God.

            God, Paul tells us is our universal true north.  Was it the law that brought blessing to Abraham?  No.  Was it his good works and good deeds?  No.  It was the faithfulness of God and Abraham’s faith in God’s faithfulness that brought such blessing to him. 

            I did a completely informal survey last night.  I skimmed three dozen front page stories on news websites; the NY Times, Washington Post, Le Monde, you get the idea.  I kept a running count of the stories that described some sort of conflict or division in the world.   With the notable exceptions of an article on the children’s book Good Night Moon and a very interesting article about the rising standards for admission to nursing programs, every article I read described some sort of conflict between warring political, economic, social or national worldviews.  Each one determined to bend the world to their own will and way. 

            Later this week in Pittsburgh, a few thousand Presbyterians will descend on Pittsburgh for the 220^th General Assembly of the PC(USA).  Some of the business will sail through without a single dissenting voice.  Things like salaries for missionaries and partnerships with hospitals and orphanages around the world.  Other things, though, will be met with less fulsome support.  As in so many years past, a great deal of time will be spent arguing over which side will have its way.  Each one unwilling to establish enough space for the other, groups on opposing sides of contentions issues will stake out their claim. 

It seems as though we do spend an inordinate amount of time arguing over who and what gets to play in our sandbox.  We argue and debate about which ideas and which people and which groups may or may not be a part of our sandbox. 

There is only one problem I can see.  Well, two actually.

The first is that it is not our sandbox!  We spin our wheels when we try to determine who will and who will not exist in the shadow of the love and grace of God. 

The second is that the sandbox we share today is boundless.  There is room for us all.  Jesus made sure of it.  In fact, he died to make it so.

There are no boundaries to this new world order ushered in by Christ.  And in Jesus Christ, we live in a new world, a new time, a new order defined by new love, new relationships and new possibilities for all of God’s children. 

Make no mistake about it. 

Jesus Christ died…for all.

God’s grace is offered…to all.

This new world order born of an empty tomb has room…for all.

That did not sound like good news to the powerful.

That did not sound like good news to the fearful.

That did not sound like good news to those who like things just the way they were.

What about us?  Does that sound like good news to us?

For our sake, I sure hope so.

Sola Deo Gloria.  To God alone be the glory!  Amen.

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[1] I am indebted to the Rev. Dr. David Bender whose sermon of the same title was presented to our study group in March 2012. This sermon is informed both by his theological insights and homiletical ideas. His generous permission is gratefully acknowledged.