Month: May 2022

Preached at First Presbyterian Church of Rolla. Based on Acts 11:1-18 and John 13:31-35.

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The Old Testament book of Leviticus lays out a number of laws about cleanness and uncleanness. Certain foods are proscribed, like pork and shellfish. There are rules about how you butcher animals. There are rules about leprosy, which was kind of a catch-all term for skin diseases. There are rules about women. There are rules about foreigners. Rules, rules, rules.

All those rules are kind of hard to keep track of precisely, so over the centuries, rabbis constructed a fence around the Law. For example, there is a verse saying that it’s wrong to boil meat in the animal’s mother’s milk. Why, I don’t know. The problem is, all the milk from the herd gets mixed together. So to be careful, rabbis said, Just don’t boil any meat in any milk. And just to be certain, don’t allow any dairy products to touch any pots or pans that you use to cook meat.

They extended this fence to exclude people. Table fellowship is an essential part of being in a community. Hospitality is kind of important in American culture, but really critical in Middle Eastern culture, and was even more so in the first century. Who you shared the table with indicated who you valued as part of your community. I have heard it said that the entirety of Paul’s corpus of letters wrestles with one essential question: Should Jews and Greeks eat together?

One argument went that keeping separate from each other enabled Jews to maintain their unique identity. Perhaps that’s why Jews don’t eat pork—to establish that they are different from the other people who live in that region. Eating separately also ensured that no unclean food was consumed and no unclean people came into contact with Jews who were trying to maintain their ritual purity.

In the early days of Christianity, the predominant attitude was that the followers of Christ’s Way were fundamentally Jews first. Simon Peter held that position. He was part of the “circumcision party,” that is, the faction within the movement that believed in maintaining all of the Jewish laws and customs. Circumcision was the physical sign that a man was Jewish. Like most of the early Christians, Peter believed that all followers of Jesus needed to first become Jews by being circumcised, then be baptized, then keep all of the Law.

One day, he had a vision. It’s perhaps a bit difficult for us to imagine a vision of ritually unclean animals, but maybe we can think about foods that are acceptable in other cultures but that we don’t eat. That’s kind of what the ritual purity code was about—only eating the things that Jews eat. Peter has a vision of foods that were repulsive to him, but God tells him that all things are blessed by God, and what God has blessed, Peter should accept. He wakes from the vision of unclean foods and is led to unclean people. Cornelius and his Gentile household would have been considered unclean people that a good Law-observing Jew like Peter should not associate with, let alone visit in their own house. Yet God leads Peter to realize that all things are blessed by God. The gift of God’s love is not meant just for certain people who follow certain rules, but for everyone.

Now, I have not personally had any visions like Peter’s. Some people claim that they have, and others claim to have at least sensed God’s message in some way. We need to be careful in those situations. On the one hand, yes, I believe that God is still speaking to us. The United Church of Christ, one of our sibling denominations, uses a big comma as one of their key symbols to remind them and all of us that God has not stopped revealing herself to us. On the other hand, some people claim to have heard God saying something that is conveniently aligned with their own views. Kind of like the huckster preachers who claim that God is calling you to send them money. As Paul wrote to the Thessalonians, “Do not despise prophecies, but test everything; hold fast what is good.”

How are we to know what is good? How can we know whether a prophecy or other spiritual leading is from God or Satan? How can we know whether we are being led towards or away from the divine? Well, we can test it. The test is this: Jesus was the clearest revelation of God’s innate character. Is the prophecy aligned with Jesus’s main message?

In today’s Gospel reading, we hear the opening paragraph of Jesus’s farewell address to his disciples. At this point, he has washed their feet and shared a meal with them. Judas had just left, on his way to betray Jesus and set in motion the process that led to his crucifixion, death, and resurrection. His time with his disciples is waning, so this is Jesus’s last chance to make sure they know what to do when he’s gone.

Jesus had taught his disciples a bunch of things over a period of three years. He taught that the Temple should not be a marketplace. He taught that they must be born again. He taught that he was living water and the bread of life. He taught that one day, Samaritans and Jews would both worship in spirit and truth. And he taught them to wash each other’s feet. Now was the time to summarize all of his teachings. What would he highlight?

Jesus gave his disciples a new commandment: that they love one another. He said, Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. Let’s think about what he says elsewhere in the Gospels, though. Elsewhere, he said that the Great Commandment is to love God and love our neighbor, which is really just plucking a couple verses out of Deuteronomy and Leviticus. So it seems like the new commandment is just the old commandment, with a little spin. Well, the reason for a new commandment is for a new covenant. When we talk about the Ten Commandments, we’re actually talking about the original covenant between God and the new nation of Israel. A covenant is like a contract, in the sense that it has terms and conditions. The conditions of the original covenant were listed out as ten individual rules. Jesus later on distilled them down and said, OK, I know you can’t keep track of all those rules, but if you love God and love your neighbor, you will fulfill your side of the covenant. But then he forms a new covenant, sealed in his blood. What are the terms and conditions of this new agreement? Love one another as I have loved you.

Under the old covenant, love of neighbor was kind of a negative law. To love your neighbor, don’t murder them, don’t steal from them, don’t covet their possessions. Under the new covenant, love of neighbor is a positive law. Serve them as Jesus served his disciples. It’s possible, at least theoretically, to avoid murdering and stealing and so forth if you still draw distinctions between Us and Them. It’s much more difficult to actively serve someone you think of as an outsider.

In the wake of 9/11, there was a surge in the number of hate crimes. There was an Islamophobic attitude in the nation, running so hot it overcame logic and reason. In India, Hindu is the dominant religion with Islam a close second, but there’s also the Sikh religion. Sikhs are monotheistic, though it is unclear whether their God is our God. They know God by a different name, Waheguru. Sikh men stand out in a crowd because they wear a turban as a religious headdress. Those turbans, and their brown skin, made Sikhs convenient targets for irrational hatred, even though their religion is totally unrelated to Islam.

Valarie Kaur, a third-generation American and a Sikh, was a student at Stanford at the time and made a documentary about the surge of hate crimes called Divided We Fall. The first victim was Balbir Singh Sodhi, on September 15 in Mesa, Arizona. Immediately, a Sikh in the community rallied a response. They blitzed the media with information about the Sikh religion and history. Ironically, Sikhs had immigrated to escape religious persecution from Hindus and Muslims in their native country. Balbir himself was a recent immigrant but well-known in his community. The media blitz turned him from an anonymous, brown-skinned, turban-wearing man—the Other—into a human being with a kind heart, who loved his family and community, who was in America seeking a better life. In response, thousands of people showed up for his memorial. His widow, who was still living in India and visited for the memorial, left feeling loved, not hated, by America.

That’s the key. That’s what Jesus asks us to do: to see each other’s fundamental humanity and respond in love. When someone is grieving, like Balbir’s widow, we grieve with them. Through that shared experience of grief, we can see God and experience God’s love. Similarly, when someone is hungry and we feed them, or lonely and we bring them into our fellowship, or oppressed and we free them, we can see and experience God.

Henri Nouwen was a Catholic priest and mystic. He once said, “Telling someone ‘I love you’ means, ‘You are a window through which I can see the infinite love that is God.’” Each person has that divine spark within them, a connection to the infinite love of God. If we can see past the masks that we all wear, we can see our shared humanity in each other, and through that window, we can see the love of God.

I just finished listening to an audiobook by Valarie Kaur in which she talks about making her movie, as well as a wide range of other experiences she had and learned from. She worked as an activist. She toured the country screening her movie and moderating discussions. While in law school, she worked in a clinic and represented a Latinx community that was struggling against the local police. Through it all, she learned that in every encounter, she had a choice. She could respond to provocation in kind, letting her attacker’s anger make her angry in response. Sometimes, that was the only choice—the attacker’s words and actions were so painful and dehumanizing that they stimulated her fight-flight-or-freeze response. In those cases, she had to find a way to release the rage that was provoked, under controlled circumstances to avoid danger to herself or others. Or instead, she could react with a sense of wonder. She could listen—truly listen—to the story beyond the words and actions. She could see a guard at Guantanamo Bay as an agent of an unjust system that systematically dehumanized detainees, or she could see him as a victim of a military structure that gave him no choice and stole his humanity as well.

Each person we encounter has a story. We can choose to flatten people into stereotypes, or we can choose to listen to those stories and find a way to see God in them. That’s what I have tried to do over the past few years. I have lived a pretty sheltered life with a lot of unearned privilege. As a teacher, historically, I just considered my students to be brains on a stick. But they’re more than that, and so are the patrons at the Mission, and so are all the people in the community that I interact with. By learning their stories, I have been able to see the world through their eyes, and I have been able to see God through them. If we only talk with people like us, we only get one perspective on God. By getting to know—really know—people who have different life experiences, we can see God in different ways and broaden and deepen our relationship with them.

Jesus gave us a commandment: to love each other as he loved us. That means that we don’t just have warm feelings towards them, but that we really know them and serve them. As we learn to see God in each other, we are able to serve God by serving them.

A couple weeks ago, I asked the question, Whom do we serve? Well, the basic answer is, the people we love. So today I must ask: Whom do we love? Do we just love people who are like us, people we already know? Or do we go outside our comfort zone to meet new people, to know their stories, to love them, and to see God through them? Again, the world is a big place, and it’s not possible for us to know everyone well enough to love them and serve them. So my challenge to you all, and to myself, is to think about who we are called to reach out to, to learn from, to love, and to serve.

I’d like to close with the Prayer of St. Francis. It’s a reminder to go into the dark places of the world and shine Christ’s light. To go where God needs us to share in his work. I want you to remember throughout the prayer that it is asking God to turn us into people of action, who sow love and who seek to love. Would you pray with me?

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace:
where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury, pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
where there is sadness, joy.

O divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek
to be consoled as to console,
to be understood as to understand,
to be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive,
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.

Amen.

Prayer of St. Francis of Assisi

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Preached at First Presbyterian Church of Rolla on May 1, 2022. Based on Acts 9:1-20 and John 21:1-19.

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I’d like to start back in the Old Testament, in the early days of Israel as a nation. They had been slaves in Egypt whom God freed. After Moses died, Joshua led them in their conquest of the Promised Land. As Joshua approached death, he gathered the people together to exhort them. He said, in chapter 24 verses 14-15:

“Now therefore revere the LORD, and serve him in sincerity and in faithfulness; put away the gods that your ancestors served beyond the River and in Egypt, and serve the LORD. Now if you are unwilling to serve the LORD, choose this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your ancestors served in the region beyond the River or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you are living; but as for me and my household, we will serve the LORD.”

The people all said, Of course we will serve the LORD! Joshua warns them that it’s hard, and that if they turn their back on God, they will suffer. They say again, We will serve the LORD!

At that time, they understood religion in terms of the legal code—the Ten Commandments plus the extensive rules in Leviticus—plus the sacrificial system. They could serve the LORD by bringing burnt offerings and fellowship offerings and sin offerings and guilt offerings to the priests who ministered before the LORD, particularly where the Ark of the Covenant was kept. There were clear rules.

I listen to audiobooks a lot when I run, and one I listened to recently was by Brené Brown. One guideline she gives leaders is this: Clear is kind. Unclear is unkind. Well, the Law of Moses and the Temple sacrificial system was clear. If you want to serve the LORD, do this thing. The problem was that it was inflexible.

The Gospel of John was written late in the first century, maybe in the year 90 CE. In March of 70 CE, the Roman army destroyed the Temple in response to a Jewish revolt. Suddenly, these clear rules were no help. It was impossible for the Jewish people to continue serving the LORD as they had for five centuries. They were lost and trying to find their path. Out of this turmoil, two religions emerged: rabbinic Judaism, which was the heritage of the Pharisees, and Christianity. Both religions had to answer the question: what does it mean to serve the LORD?

So that brings us to this morning’s scene by the lakeshore. Remember that Peter was kind of the chief disciple. Jesus never set one disciple over another, but he did say that Simon would be known as the rock upon which his church would be built. In Aramaic, he was given the name of Kepha or Cephas; in Greek, Petros, which we translate as Peter. I prefer to think of him as Rocky. Anyway, Peter, or Rocky, was usually the one we hear asking stupid questions or saying ridiculous things, but he was also the one who answered Jesus correctly when he asked, “Who do you say I am?” Peter said, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.”

In the upper room on the night when Jesus was arrested, Peter promised to follow Jesus even unto death. Jesus knew Peter better than he knew himself, though, and correctly predicted what would happen just a few hours later. Peter accompanied Jesus to the garden and witnessed his arrest. He continued to follow Jesus, as he promised, but he denied being a follower. Three times, he was given the chance to say, Yes, I am one of Jesus’s disciples, I have promised to follow him unto death. Three times, he said, No, I don’t know him! When he realized what he had done, poor Peter was ashamed.

Fortunately, the story doesn’t end there. In his shame, and in his grief, he returns to his former occupation. Peter says to his closest friends, I’m going fishing. They didn’t catch anything, but you know, when you’re dealing with grief, fishing isn’t about catching fish. It’s about being on the water, experiencing God’s creation, and staying busy. They fished all night unsuccessfully, and then some random guy says, Try the other side.

Suddenly, everything changes. They catch a ton of fish, and “the disciple who Jesus loved,” which presumably is John, the author of the Gospel, recognizes their friend, their leader, their risen Lord. John sees Jesus and knows his identity, but it is Peter who acts on it. It’s Peter who is so overjoyed that he can’t even wait for the boat to get to shore. Like Forrest Gump, he jumps in the water and swims to shore to see his old friend.

Peter doesn’t recognize Jesus at first, but as soon as he does, he is overjoyed to see him. Yes, he abandoned Jesus once, but now he knows that death and sin have been vanquished. He knows that Jesus truly is the Messiah, the Son of the living God, and he is strengthened and empowered to follow Jesus even unto death. Years later, Peter will be martyred, as Jesus warns, but on this day, all that matters is fellowship with his friend, his brother, his Lord.

Now, Peter could and probably should have been ashamed. He had abandoned his friend when the going got tough. It doesn’t matter, though. His love for Jesus was stronger than that shame. Jesus responds in kind. He doesn’t punish Peter. He isn’t some vengeful, tyrannical leader who responds to betrayal with ostracism or harsh words. He offers Peter the opportunity to prove his love and devotion, simply by saying, Yes, Lord, I adore you. The word that Peter uses means a personal kind of love, the love you might have for your closest friend, someone you think of as a sibling because they mean so much to you.

Peter was tested, and failed. He was challenged, and responded by denying that he was one of Jesus’s followers. Still, Jesus knew that the test itself—even the failed test—had changed Peter. No longer was he just the bumbling idiot we sometimes read about in the Gospels. He was indeed the rock upon which Jesus would build his church. He knew the shame of denying Jesus, and recommitted himself to following Christ. So Jesus commissioned him.

Clear is kind. Jesus gives Peter explicit instructions: If you love me, feed my sheep. In the same way, Saul is tested and commissioned. Today’s reading from Acts describes Saul’s encounter on the road to Damascus. He was blinded by his encounter with Jesus. He could have responded by thinking that he was right about Jesus being an agent of Satan. I mean, surely an agent of God wouldn’t do something so terrible to him. But instead, Saul realized that this wasn’t a punishment, but a test. He recognizes that the path he had been on led not just to Damascus, but to a spiritual death. He was getting further and further from God by persecuting the people that God loved.

Saul, also called Paul, needed something dramatic to wake him up. A simple meal of bread and fish wouldn’t be enough for him. He hadn’t been one of the disciples and never knew Jesus before his crucifixion, so he couldn’t just be reminded of the things he had been taught like Peter. He needed to witness the inbreaking of God’s reign in order to learn that Jesus is indeed God.

Let’s imagine being poor Saul. He was some distance from Damascus and blinded. Fortunately, he had traveling companions who helped him get to safety. Still, he was blind for three days. He may have thought that this was just his life now. No wonder he didn’t eat—he was mourning the loss of his sight. At the same time, he was processing the words he had heard and realized that he had been very, very wrong. He had thought that followers of the Way were from Satan and were leading the Jewish people astray. Now he knew that Christ’s Way is indeed the path that leads to eternal life. So perhaps he was also in mourning because of shame and regret over all the evil he had done, erroneously thinking he was serving God.

But that wasn’t the end. Saul was healed, and commissioned for service. Jesus told Peter to “feed my lambs.” Jesus tells Saul instead to spread his message of love and reconciliation “to Gentiles and kings and … the people of Israel.”

Jesus calls everyone to serve him. In Matthew 25, he tells the crowd that whatever they do to “the least of these,” they do to him. In Acts 9, he tells Saul that whatever he has done to followers of the Way, he has done to Jesus. Jesus is in all of us, everyone, the people you love, the people you hate, the people you don’t even know. He is in the powerful; he is in the poor. He is in the strong; he is in the weak. How we treat people is how we treat Jesus.

All of the disciples were given a commandment to love one another. All of the disciples were given a commission to go to all the nations and baptize in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. But there on the beach, over a simple meal of bread and fish, Peter was specifically commissioned to feed Jesus’s lambs and tend his sheep. There in Damascus, Saul was specifically commissioned to take Jesus’s message to the Gentiles.

So the question to us, each of us individually and all of us as a congregation, is, Whom do we serve? I was talking with my friend Sharon recently about that question, and she said, “It’s God, right? Always remember that.” Well, sure. We all are called to serve God, and like Joshua, we should promise that we will. But what does that mean?

I suppose we could try to find the lost Ark of the Covenant, build a temple, and recruit a kohen to resume the sacrificial system. I don’t think that will happen, and anyway, as Paul wrote, all of those sacrifices and the whole sacrificial system were only temporary. Then Jesus gave himself in sacrifice once for all, so sacrifices are no longer necessary. What can we do instead?

Well, who are Jesus’s lambs and sheep? Everyone. There is no one that you will meet who God does not love. We are called to see Jesus in the faces of each person we meet. Sometimes that’s easy, sometimes it’s hard. Jesus never said it would be easy; in fact, he warned both Peter and Saul that they would suffer on account of him. He was pretty explicit that Peter would be martyred, but then said, “Follow me.” Being a Christian isn’t supposed to be easy, but it is rewarding. Peter and Saul and the rest of the early church leaders wouldn’t have carried on if they hadn’t been strengthened by the Holy Spirit. In serving God’s people, we draw closer to God and encounter God and are empowered by God.

So the question again is, Whom do we serve? In theory, we should heal all of the brokenness of this world. We should comfort everyone who is grieving. We should feed everyone who is hungry, free every prisoner, help everyone suffering from addiction, heal every human relationship. We should build a new society where each person is valued because they reflect the glory of God. We should tear down systems of oppression, in our community, across the nation, and around the world. We should put an end to violence and war. Wow. That’s a big ask. I can’t be everywhere, and I have certainly been confronted by problems that I cannot solve. Well, as the saying goes, there is a Messiah, and it’s not me.

Only God can ultimately heal all of creation. But for whatever reason, God chose to dwell among us in the person of Jesus, and after his death and resurrection, commissioned us all to carry on the work. God chose to work in the world through us. No longer does manna fall like frost or dew—if there are hungry people, we are expected to feed them. No longer is Jesus here to cast out demons or to heal blindness—that’s our job. Even in those early years, Jesus was working through his followers. After Saul was blinded, it was up to his friends to get him to Damascus and Ananias to heal his blindness.

We are finite. We cannot be all things to all people. Consider our worship style versus, say, Greentree. People who like one won’t like the other. Consider our sanctuary. The things that we all find comforting and holy are instead intimidating and disquieting to some people in the community. All we can do is follow Jesus and be who we are, only a little bit better than we were yesterday, a little more Christlike. A little more transformed by our love of God, which flows through us to love others. That means serving someone, finding out where God is at work and is leading you to help.

I know who I serve, as an individual. I know who we have been serving as a congregation. The question before us is, who will we serve? Where have we been fishing and coming up empty, and where is the “other side of the boat” where Jesus is calling us to fish? The kingdom of heaven is abundant. Jesus fed thousands of people with just a few loaves of bread and a few fish. He changed 150 gallons of water into wine. He casually told his friends where to throw their net and they caught 153 fish. Abundance, not scarcity. The world is filled with God’s people, people who are suffering, who need to feel God’s love, who need to be connected to Christ’s body. Let us all pray for guidance, that we can see where God is at work and is asking us to join in. Let us all pray that we will see Jesus in each person we meet. And let us all pray that we will know, individually and as a congregation, who we will serve. Amen.

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