Category: FPC Rolla

Preached at First Presbyterian Church of Rolla on December 1, 2024, First Sunday of Advent. Based on Luke 21:25-36.

---

Each year, Advent begins with some variation on today’s lesson. We read the same story in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, Jesus proclaiming that the Temple will be destroyed and then giving an apocalyptic vision of how it will be. So this is our annual reminder that Christianity was born in the stream of thought called apocalyptic messianic eschatology.

Those are some big words, so let’s break it down. Eschatology relates to the eschaton, which is the end of the age or, more broadly, the end times. Just how will history come to an end? There are lots of possible answers, which are all forms of eschatology. “Apocalyptic” means the same as a “revelation.” It refers to a revealing of the hidden plans of God. It reflects a belief that God knows how the age will end and reveals parts of the plan to chosen individuals. “Messianic” is a particular eschatology that believes an anointed son of David will usher in the new age. Jesus of Nazareth was not the only man who claimed to be the Messiah—which in Greek is the Christ. There were many messianic figures in the century before and the century after Jesus lived, and indeed there have been a couple of messianic figures in later Judaism, most recently Menachem Mendel Schneerson who died in 1994. Jesus was not the only man who claimed to be or was called the Messiah, but he was the only one whose movement survived long after his death.

Jesus lived during a particularly active period of apocalyptic literature. Much of the New Testament shows signs of apocalyptic thought. It’s most obvious in the book of Revelation but also pops up in letters like Jude and Thessalonians. The early Christians were immersed in this stream of thought and recognized that Jesus was the Messiah they had been waiting for.

There were three main eras when apocalyptic prophecy emerged. The first era, often called proto-apocalyptic because it wasn’t fully developed, came during the time period around the destruction of Solomon’s Temple and the exile to Babylon. The ancient Israelites believed that God lived in the Temple, so its destruction truly felt like the end of the world, or at least the end of the age. Prophets like Isaiah, Ezekiel, Zechariah, and Daniel reassured the people that yes, the destruction of the Temple is bad, but no worries—it will be rebuilt.

They were right; the exile ended, and a new Temple was built. But Israel never attained its former glory. Judah was a province within the Persian empire, and then was governed by Greeks. They had a short period of independence that came to an end when Rome conquered them. Thus began the second major period of apocalyptic literature, a time when it really flourished and developed. From the second century BC through Jesus’s lifetime, several messianic movements grew and flamed out and many apocalyptic books were written. Rome was the evil empire that stood for everything the Jews were against. They could not reconcile Roman rule with divine sovereignty.

Then the Temple was destroyed in 70 A.D. and the third major era of apocalyptic writing began, much of it ending up in our New Testament. Jews thought they had witnessed the end of the age and were trying to make sense of the new world they were living in. Eventually, some of them, our progenitors, realized that the destruction of the Temple freed God from its confines and that God was now present everywhere, through the body of Christ, which is the Church.

I don’t take any of the apocalyptic writings literally. I’m not a fire and brimstone preacher threatening you all with a lake of fire or anything like that. But I do take it all seriously, and try to understand how it applies to today. Once in a while, I get discouraged and start to wonder if we are in the end times now. I wonder, when historians reflect on the 21^st century, when will they say that World War III began? Will they say it began on October 7, 2023, when Hamas invaded Israel? Will they say it began on February 24, 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine? I don’t know. What I do know for sure is that we are going through a great realignment and a great revolution in the world order.

Recently, I listened to a Freakonomics podcast with Fareed Zakaria, a political commentator who was trying to explain what happened in the presidential election and what has been happening around the world. He argued that we are going through a realignment where the two main schools of thought are “open” versus “closed.” The old notions of political right and left are no longer relevant, and are being replaced with different perspectives on how open each nation should be to trade, immigration, technological and cultural change, etc. One of the early examples was Brexit, when the UK decided that they wanted less openness with the rest of Europe. Another podcaster said that really, the story of global politics in 2024 has been one of turning out the incumbents—a vote for change. Among those who are voting for change, some want to reform institutions and some want to “burn it all down,” replace the failing institutions with something better. I can’t say that either “open” or “closed” is the right answer, and I can’t say what needs to change and what needs to remain the same, but I can say that new coalitions are forming and new understandings of how the world works are developing. I expect that the transition will be very painful for many people, for whom this will indeed feel like the end of an age.

But I think that really, these end time prophecies speak to each person, each institution, each community, and each nation, all the time. Every day, the things we thought would last forever are fading away, dying, changing, transforming into something new. A metaphor used elsewhere for the end of one age and the start of the next is “birth pangs.” Something good comes after the turning of the age, but the process sure is painful. Relationships are broken and re-made. People face poverty, violence, sickness, and death. Institutions and nations go through cycles of growth and decline, sometimes ending in collapse before something else is built on their rubble.

This is the reality that Jesus witnessed, and that so many other prophets have witnessed as well. They all saw that the world was on the wrong path, a path that leads to destruction. Maybe soon, maybe later, but eventually. John the Baptist came proclaiming, “Repent! For the kingdom of God has come near!” Repent! Turn from your ways! Turn towards the plan that God has in mind for you and your community. If you choose not to follow God’s plan, you can expect awful results. But if you choose to follow where Christ leads, you may experience those birth pangs from the creation of a new era, but Christ will be with you the whole time, and the destination is worth the journey.

Because in the end, God wins. That is the persistent message of the whole Bible, and especially the apocalyptic literature. Things may look bad now. The wicked may profit while the righteous suffer. Bad things may happen to good people. Organizations who seek to improve the world may be stymied at every turn. But eventually, righteousness and lovingkindness will win. Eventually, God’s justice will prevail and the righteous will be rewarded with God’s eternal presence. And eventually, God’s mercy will prevail and reconcile all things. God will purge the wicked of their wickedness and the sinners of their sinfulness, and God’s love will conquer hatred and anger. Eventually.

We are on a winning team. I know that sometimes you can’t tell. If you read any studies about the state of mainline Protestant churches, it seems like we’re losing badly. The membership of PC(USA) declined by nearly 62% from 1983 when it was formed as a merger of two denominations to 2021. I would guess that it has declined more since then, especially due to the aftermath of the pandemic. That sure feels like losing. But you know what? Jesus didn’t say to his disciples, “Go therefore and build a bunch of church buildings with organs and pews and worship me on Sunday mornings.” He said, “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you.” Not that what we’re doing here today is wrong, but that it is far from the only way to participate in God’s work in the world.

We are on a winning team. The forces of evil and death are hard at work. They are at work in the Middle East, in Europe, and in places like Myanmar and South Sudan. They are at work everywhere desperate people give in to their worst instincts. They are working through the meth dealers and the fentanyl makers. And yet, God is also hard at work. God is present and empowering the work of the Rolla Mission, GRACE, Russell House, and many other organizations in Rolla. God is at work in a million homes that are filled with love, homes where families were able to reconnect and reconcile this Thanksgiving. Bad news sells more and travels faster than good news, but I know that God is working hard to counteract the forces of evil in the world.

We are on a winning team. We may not have the flashiest worship services, though we do have the best choir director in town. We may not have the newest or fanciest building. We may not have the resources that we once did. But we have something more important and more valuable and more powerful: love. We have God’s love flowing through us and connecting us to each other and the community. We just have to tap into that flow and ride with it to experience God’s transformative work in the world.

We are on a winning team. So act like it! So many churchgoers are functional atheists. They say they believe that God is powerful and can change lives, but then they act like God is irrelevant. They—we—act like we need marketing slogans and advertising and glitz and glamour, when all we need is to let God work through us.

To continue the sports metaphor, you can imagine the church as a football team. Perhaps I’m the quarterback, but I’m not the coach. God is the coach, and God has a game plan that will be successful if we all buy into it. God as the coach speaks to all of us to help us become the best we can be, the best contributors to the plan. God speaks to all of us, if we will only listen and follow.

Today, the first Sunday of Advent, we lit the Hope candle. We have been entrusted with the message of hope that Jesus brought to Judea some 2000 years ago. Jesus said that the Temple would be destroyed, but everything would be OK. He said that people would faint from fear and foreboding, but that we should instead stand tall and raise our heads because our redemption is drawing near. He said that when you see the forces of evil and death seemingly victorious, that’s actually the dark before the dawn of God’s grace.

So keep alert. Don’t worry about tomorrow, but do work for a better tomorrow. Watch for opportunities to share God’s love, ways that you can participate in God’s work, ways that you can be a part of God’s winning team. Listen for God’s coaching as God transforms you into the person God knows you can be. Like the prophets before us, speak truth in a world full of lies, the truth that love will conquer all. And be confident that Christ will walk with you each day, strengthening you, encouraging you, and shining light on the path that you must walk to serve his kingdom. Amen.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Preached on November 10, 2024, at First Presbyterian Church of Rolla. Based on Mark 12:38-44.

---

Tomorrow is Veterans Day. As we saw earlier, there are many people in our congregation who are veterans or their close family members. Thank you all for your service.

In the history of our nation, going back to 1775 when the Revolutionary War began, there have been roughly 1.2 million US military fatalities. Nearly half occurred in the Civil War, 620,000. The next largest was World War II, when we lost 405,399. These were people—mostly men—who gave their lives for something bigger than themselves. Sure, some were there voluntarily and some were drafted, but in the end, nobody dies in battle just because someone told them to go. They give their lives for love: love of country, love of an ideal, love of the people left behind that they’re trying to protect, or maybe love of the soldier fighting next to them.

In the 20^th century, wars became more politicized and more criticized by the civilians back home. There are many legitimate criticisms of the policies, objectives, and practices of the US leadership in Korea, Vietnam, and the Cold War. But that doesn’t negate the honor of all the men and women who served our country. That doesn’t negate the honor of their self-sacrificial love.

We are all soldiers in Christ’s army. I remember when my church growing up had a “Crusade for Christ.” There are several hymns with that theme, and a whole denomination that calls itself the Salvation Army, whose clergy have military titles. Military imagery abounds in some segments of Christianity. But the thing is, the only weapon that Christ allows is love.

In certain corners of Christianity, people do “sword drills,” in which they search through the Bible for verses. This is based on verses like Hebrews 4:12, “For the word of God is alive and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart.” But listen to what it really says: the word of God is like a sword. Not the Bible. We believe that Jesus Christ was the Word made flesh. It is his love that exposes the hatred that lies in every human heart, and his love that we should emulate. Whenever Jesus cited scripture, it was to expose the hypocrisy of the self-righteous, not to chastise so-called “sinners” who were on the margins of society. More often, instead of citing scripture, Jesus spoke with authority about his vision of a society built on love and mutual service.

Then when Jesus was arrested in Gethsemane, one disciple used a sword, but Jesus chastised him. Jesus could have called down 12 legions of angels, but he chose to go willingly with his captors. His so-called triumphant entry, riding a donkey on Palm Sunday, could have actually been triumphant in worldly terms, destroying the Roman garrison and establishing Christ’s kingdom through force. But that’s not what happened. Jesus chose humility. Jesus chose service. Jesus chose love.

The early Christians followed in his footsteps. They gained a reputation for welcoming everyone, regardless of ethnicity or slave status. They gained a reputation for serving everyone, regardless of ethnicity or religion. Little by little, their love for their neighbors, powered by their love of God, grew the church from a minor sect of a minor religion into a major movement.

Then Constantine converted, the Christian church made a deal with the Roman Empire, and things have been all downhill since then. Throughout history, whenever Christians have chosen the love of power over the power of love, they ended up serving neither God nor neighbor and ended up far from the kingdom of God.

We see that still today. About a year ago, I wrote a column for the Phelps County Focus that went somewhat viral, by Rolla standards, called, “The World’s Most Dangerous Person.” In it, I wrote, “There is no one more dangerous than someone who believes they have exclusive knowledge of the Truth and the duty to impose it on others. If you hold your beliefs with absolute certainty, there is no limit to the evil you can commit in service to them. Each action can be justified by an appeal to the higher good of serving God, no matter how it may hurt other people.”

Too many Christians fall into this trap. They start out with good intentions, but their self-righteousness convinces them that their only choice is to force their beliefs on others. But the only person in all of history who actually did know the Truth, who actually did have the authority to demand obedience, chose instead to lay down his life as a model of the way to God’s kingdom.

As part of my effort to revitalize the church, I received a report from MissionInsite. Altogether, it’s about 60 pages and includes demographic information, both current and projected, and opinion survey data. One section asked people who do not attend church why they don’t. The top reason is that they think it’s boring, old-fashioned, uninteresting, or irrelevant. Then the next several reasons are interrelated. People are disillusioned with religion. People don’t trust organized religion—perhaps related to a general distrust of all institutions. They don’t trust religious leaders. They think religion is too focused on money, and that religious people have strict and inflexible beliefs and are too judgmental in applying them.

These are all attributes that we see Jesus apply to the priests and scribes and Pharisees and Sadducees throughout the Gospels. In today’s passage, Jesus is specifically criticizing the scribes for desiring places of honor and for stealing money from the vulnerable.

I know you’re thinking something like what I think: I’m trustworthy. I’m flexible. I’m not judgmental. But I’m here to tell you: that doesn’t matter. Jim Drewniak used to tell me that it takes ten attaboys to overcome one “oh shoot.” That is, gaining trust is ten times harder, maybe a hundred times harder, than losing it. The reality is that we are a Christian church, and so we inherit all of the positive and negative attitudes that people have towards Christians. PC(USA) hasn’t had a major scandal around child abuse, but there have been a few cases, and regardless, we’re tarred with the same brush as those institutions that have done truly evil things to cover up abuse.

Another thing we’ve seen over the past few decades is an increasing willingness of pastors to stray into the political arena. Now, I know you can all guess how I voted, but I won’t tell you how to vote because as Martin Luther King said, the church is not the master or the servant of the state, but rather the conscience of the state. Many of my colleagues in churches across the country don’t feel that way. As a result, people outside the church just assume that all pastors are like the ones they see on TV. Or like the ones I’ve seen at city council meetings. The problem is that when you go down that road, the messiness of politics will inevitably force you to choose between your faith and your party. And every time the church chooses power, we always compromise the Gospel.

So even though I trust me, and you trust me, and I trust you, and we all trust one another, what have we done, as an institution, to earn the trust of those outside the church? Why would the average Rolla resident think we are any different from any other church?

And it’s not sufficient to just tell them. I frequently remind the students in my class that I am kind and generous and brilliant and inspiring. Oh, humble, too. I say it all tongue-in-cheek, because I know I’m no more brilliant and inspiring than any other instructor, and although I like to think that I’m kind, they may not see it that way. Anyway, just telling them that I care about their personal and academic success doesn’t matter. I can tell them all sorts of things about myself, but until I show them that I care, none of it matters.

And you know, I sometimes find myself acting like the scribes in this story. I have titles: professor and department chair. Those titles come with a certain level of respect, especially from people raised in certain cultures. If I spend too much time around students from India, I can start thinking that I really do deserve special treatment. But in the end, I have to remind myself that they aren’t respecting me, Jonathan Kimball, but the title, professor and chair. It’s just surface stuff, and in the end, I am no better than anyone else. I am better at a few things than other people are, but worse at many things. In the end, I am just a beloved child of God, like you are, like they are. The only honor that I should seek is the reflection of Christ’s glory.

Speaking of honor, one of the Ten Commandments is to honor your parents. In a patriarchal society, this rule was foundational to maintaining basic order and property rights. Being a parent is a simple act of biology. But parenting a child is hard. Parenting takes many forms. For example, my secretary is a foster parent who has adopted some of the kids that have been placed with her while others just pass through as their biological families get their act together. I overhear her dealing with a lot of really unpleasant things. That’s parenting, even if she is only the temporary mom. More broadly, many of us have people in our lives we might consider to have guided us like a parent would, and many of us have people in our lives that we consider to be our bonus children.

I’d like you to think of this as analogous to our place in God’s kingdom. Being a Christian is easy. All you have to do is say that you believe in Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior. Done. But being Christian, that is, behaving the way Christ commanded, following Christ’s guidance, and emulating Christ’s example, is supremely difficult. Not always enjoyable, either, but rewarding.

Last weekend, I was at a workshop in Wichita, so I missed the presbytery meeting in Iola. I decided to stop and worship at First Presbyterian Church of Iola on my way back—it was a good way to break up the trip and foster a little bit of connection with my larger Presbyterian family. A visitor from the Presbyterian Mission Agency, Rev. Lemuel Garcia-Arroyo, preached on the story in Mark 10 about the rich man who asked, “Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus reminded him of the Ten Commandments, which he claimed to have kept since his youth. So Jesus loved him and said, “One thing you lack. Go, sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.” He went away sad, because he had great wealth.

This is Jesus’s recurring command: give up everything you have for the sake of His kingdom. If you want to enter God’s kingdom in the here and now, you must be willing to forego all of the riches and honors of the present age. If you wish to be first, you must instead be last and servant of all.

Which brings us to the widow. While the scribes liked the honors that came with their social status, the widow truly gave her whole self. Widows at that time were on the very margins of society. Usually, they had no means of supporting themselves, no social status, nothing. Throughout the Hebrew scriptures there are instructions to care for the widows and orphans, as stand-ins for all those who are in need. So here’s a person who has almost nothing and yet chooses to give the little she has for the glory of God. Now, the fact that she gave it to a corrupt Temple that would be destroyed a few decades later by the Romans does not negate the value of her gift of self. Giving to the church is a spiritual practice, a way to more nearly approach God’s kingdom by loosening your grip on the possessions that get in your way.

In the same way, we are called to give our whole selves for God’s glory. No matter who you are, you have a gift to offer for the glory of God’s kingdom. You are a beloved child of God, a perfect vessel for God’s love. You may not be able to change the world, but you can change one person’s world.

We have been given a task: to proclaim the good news of God’s coming kingdom of love. We are not called to glorify ourselves or to enjoy riches and honor that lead to pride. We are called to reflect God’s glory, to empty ourselves and give our whole selves as servants of all. Let us go now and be Christian, be Christ-like, in our community, demonstrating the power of love to heal, to reconcile, and to transform. Amen.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Preached at First Presbyterian Church of Rolla on October 20, 2024. Based on Hebrews 5:1-10.

---

We call Hebrews an epistle, but it’s more of a theological treatise, or perhaps a sermon transcription. You know, one of these Sundays, maybe I should just read a full epistle as my sermon. That’s what they used to do. Anyway, like any good preacher, the author of Hebrews tried to get his point across with illustrations that the readers or hearers could identify with. Eventually today, we’ll get to his core illustration: Christ as high priest. But before that, I want to go back to Genesis.

Abram was called by God to leave Ur of the Chaldeans, in Mesopotamia, and migrate to Canaan. So he moved there with all his family and possessions. Eventually, his nephew Lot separated from him and settled in Sodom. Around that time, there was a battle between five kings on one side, including the kings of Sodom and Gomorrah, and four kings on the other side, including King Chedorlaomer of Elam. The group that Chedorlaomer led defeated the five kings and carried off many of their people and possessions, including Lot and his household.

When Abram heard what had happened to his nephew, he set out in pursuit of Chedorlaomer and eventually defeated them, rescuing Lot and retrieving many goods that had been taken. When he returned, the king of Sodom came out to thank him

And here’s where things get strange. Up until now, it’s a typical story of battle and conquest, a story like we read throughout the Bible and other ancient literature. Then an enigmatic figure appears: Melchizedek, king of Salem, also comes out to meet Abram. He gives Abram bread and wine and blesses him, in his role as priest of El Elyon, God Most High. In return, Abram gives him a tithe. Then Melchizedek disappears from the narrative, Abram returns everything that had been taken from Sodom and the other kings, and the narrative arc resumes.

Hmm. Who is this Melchizedek, king of Salem? His name means “king of righteousness” or “righteous king.” Other places in the Bible equate Salem to Jerusalem, but a more literal reading equates it to shalom, or peace. So perhaps he wasn’t just some random king from some random city, but a righteous king of peace. He wasn’t involved in the battle. His only role was to bless Abram by El Elyon, and to proclaim that El Elyon delivered Abram’s victory.

At this point in Israel’s history, they were still figuring a few things out. They would eventually realize that the God they knew as Yahweh was the same as the God that others worshipped as El Elyon, God Most High, or as El Shaddai, God Almighty. Or as many other titles that described God’s different characteristics, the different ways that God appeared to people throughout the Near East. But when Abram was blessed by Melchizedek in the name of El Elyon, he intuitively knew that this was a holy thing, that this was something worthy of his respect.

Melchizedek was both king and priest. He was apparently the king of a city, while also serving as a priest of God Most High. This was nearly universal in the ancient Near East. In Israel’s later history, a priestly class would emerge, the Levites and specifically Aaron and his descendants. But in other cultures, and in the time before Aaron was called to serve, the king was responsible for making sure that there was a place to worship and animals to sacrifice. The king was responsible for ensuring that his people stayed in the good graces of their patron god. This remained true outside of Israel until well after Christ’s life, death, and resurrection. So the original readers of Hebrews would be quite familiar with the role that the political leader played in religion.

In the Second Temple period, there was a clear distinction between priestly tasks and political rule. This was necessary in part because the Jews were no longer a distinct nation, but instead were ruled by foreigners who worshipped different gods. Still, there was an expectation that the political leaders would ensure that there was a place to worship and sacrificial animals with which to worship.

Then Christ came along and changed everything. First, he said that instead of worshipping on a particular holy mountain, we would all worship in Spirit and truth. Then, he made the ultimate sacrifice, once for all. In that way, he satisfied the obligations of a priest-king according to the order of Melchizedek. He provided a place to worship—everywhere we have an awareness of God’s presence—and a sacrifice with which to worship—himself.

And so we have a high priest, Jesus Christ, who was chosen by God. He wasn’t a descendant of Aaron so he couldn’t be a regular Jewish high priest, but instead he transcends those rules. Before the priesthood had to be confined to a smaller group that served the nation of Israel, God chose priests from among the people according to God’s own vision of their qualifications. God saw his own son in Jesus and anointed him high priest.

After his death and resurrection, Christ took on an expanded role. Instead of serving a small group of disciples, he took his place in the heavenly realm to serve all of humanity. Instead of ruling a city or a nation or an empire, Christ rules God’s kingdom, an eternal and all-encompassing existence in God’s presence. Christ is a priest-king who ensures that God is worshipped eternally, as so beautifully recounted in the Book of Revelation. He is a righteous king, that is, a ruler who dispenses justice and mercy to all people, who achieves reconciliation of each of us to each other and to God. He is the king of shalom, of peace, of wholeness, of completion, of universal flourishing. His realm is eternal and perfect.

When he ascended, Christ left behind this temporary and imperfect copy of his heavenly realm. He commissioned his followers to rule as he would rule, not to “lord it over” God’s beloved family, but to serve them and to seek their good. Our rule over God’s creation and God’s people is not one of domination, but one of caretaking, of tending and stewarding and protecting. We are to govern as Jesus would if he had continued his ministry, in which he healed the sick, fed the hungry, forgave the sinner, and brought everyone into a right relationship with God and each other.

This world is passing away, and yet God cares deeply for it. God created the universe and declared it good, then created humanity and declared us very good. God did not create a disposable earth or a useless people, but a place and a people who are destined for greatness, for completeness at the end of the age. That’s why we pray, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” We pray that this world will become heaven.

And so our task is Abram’s task: to carry God’s blessing to the world. Abram was selected by God for reasons that only God knows. He was told to take his household on a journey, and that in return, the world would be blessed through him. God created Israel as a priestly nation, that is, a whole nation that would serve as a bridge between God and all humanity. At the end of the story of Abraham’s encounters with God, God declares that by Abraham’s offspring “shall all the nations of the earth gain blessing for themselves, because you have obeyed my voice.” Abraham’s descendants will be a great nation who bless all humanity through their fidelity to God and by mediating between God and all the nations.

Unfortunately, things did not go according to plan. The one nation of Israel split into two, both of which forsook God and worshipped other gods. Then came the exile, which was a terrible, traumatic event in the life of God’s people. It did have one positive, though: now Jews were dispersed throughout all of the nations and could spread God’s word. In the New Testament, we read about God-fearers, which were Gentiles who nevertheless worshipped as if they were Jews. Still, a barrier remained due to a lack of understanding God’s plan of reconciliation.

So Christ came to convert us all into a priestly nation, one that could indeed take God’s message to all people. We are all priests, each one of us, and all of us together. We are Christ’s body, and so we together fulfill the role of priest. Together, we mediate between humanity and God. Individually, we may be bold to approach God with our own confessions and petitions and with intercessions for others. Together and individually, we are tasked with communicating God’s blessings to all people. That’s why the first Great End of the Church is “The Proclamation of the Gospel for the Salvation of Humankind.” We are to carry God’s message to all of humanity. And in turn, we are to carry all the cares of the world and lay them on the heavenly altar.

And just how do we do that? Prayer. Through Christ, we know that God hears our prayers. We know that Christ sits at the right hand of God to judge humanity, but we also know that the judgment is good news for all. It is wholeness and reconciliation and flourishing. So we don’t need to fear that when we lay the world’s cares before God that the response will be punishment for our great sins. Instead, we can be sure that Christ, who knows what it is to be human, will look on us with mercy and work through us to transform the world into his kingdom.

Eventually, everything will be made right. Eventually, Christ’s work in the world will transform us into holy people who are in right relationships with God and each other. This may take a while, though. In the meantime, the world looks pretty bleak and is in desperate need of God’s grace.

I’ve been listening to the book that Susan mentioned a few weeks ago, Praying Like Monks, Living Like Fools. Very good book that I highly recommend. One of the core ideas is that prayer is powerful. Prayer can change the world. The author’s first serious experience with prayer came as a youth, leading a Bible study in his middle school. He would walk in prayer around the school and would pray each day for his classmates. His Bible study flourished despite his lack of knowledge or experience. Through prayer, God changes the person who is praying, that’s certain, and also opens up opportunities to change others.

One of the lessons in our Bible study a few weeks ago was “C is for Cornelius.” In that story, Cornelius is a centurion who has a vision and sends for Peter. Meanwhile, Peter has a vision of unclean animals descending from heaven, and eventually realizes that God is teaching him to welcome Gentiles like Cornelius into Christian fellowship. Peter teaches Cornelius and his household is baptized. Now, Christ could have just directly told Cornelius everything about himself. Instead, Christ chose to work through Peter. Christ got the ball rolling and opened both Cornelius and Peter to learning from each other, and then empowered their relationship.

That, to me, is how prayer works. God nudges us and makes some paths easier than others and arranges “coincidences” that aren’t actually random. As a result, we grow into relationships that have the potential to change lives, and through changed lives, to change organizations and communities and nations.

Prayer is powerful. Throughout the New Testament, we are told to pray in Jesus’s name. Christ is our true high priest, who is waiting in the heavenly temple to act on our every prayer of confession, petition, and intercession. Christ is waiting for the opportunity to change us, to empower us to change others, and through us, to carry his blessing to the world.

Sometimes, we look at all of the challenges we face and don’t know where to start. Well, the very first step is prayer. Let us pray that God will open our hearts and our church to those in our community who need God’s blessing in their lives. Let us pray that God will empower us to reach new people, to meet them where they are and to bring them into God’s family. And let us pray all of this in the name of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior, our righteous king whose realm is eternal peace, wholeness, and flourishing. Amen.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Preached at First Presbyterian Church of Rolla on October 13, 2024. Based on Hebrews 4:12-16.

---

This summer, I listened to an audiobook called, This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared, by Rabbi Alan Lew. In it, he describes the Days of Awe, a season of the Jewish year that centers on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. The Jewish calendar is a little bit strange in that the first day of the first month is in the spring, but the “head of the year” or Rosh Hashanah occurs in the fall, on the first day of the seventh month. This year, it fell on the evening of October 2. This is the first Day of Awe, one of the high holy days. They sound the shofar, or ram’s horn, and there are special services all day long.

Rosh Hashanah also begins the Days of Repentance. The time is always right to do what is right, which is to repent of your sins against God and neighbor. The Days of Repentance, or teshuvah, are the first ten days of the month of Tishrei and are a particularly auspicious time for repentance. In a sense, this ten-day period is like Lent in our tradition or Ramadan in the Muslim tradition. It’s a time when you specifically focus on making yourself right with God in preparation for Yom Kippur.

The tenth of Tishrei is the Day of Atonement, or Yom Kippur, the highest of holy days in both ancient and modern Judaism. In ancient Israel, from the days of the Tabernacle to the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 A.D., this was the day when the high priest would enter the Holy of Holies. He would make special sacrifices on behalf of the people, and another on behalf of himself. This was also the day when they did the scapegoat ritual. The high priest would present two goats and cast lots. One goat would be sacrificed to the Lord as a purification offering, while the other goat was set aside. Then the high priest would take incense into the Holy of Holies, make more sacrifices, and ultimately make atonement for all the people. He would present the live goat and lay all of the people’s sins on it, then set it free in the wilderness. In this way, the people would be made pure and clean in God’s eyes.

After the destruction of the Second Temple, Jews needed to reimagine Yom Kippur along with the rest of the Temple sacrificial system. In modern Jewish thought, the gates of heaven open on Rosh Hashanah. They stay open while the people repent and seek renewal. There is a special closeness between God and humanity, but then on Yom Kippur, the gates of heaven close again until the next year. So that has become a special day of fasting and worship to set oneself apart for God.

I should point out that this shouldn’t be taken too literally. It’s a bit like saying that the Holy Spirit comes on Pentecost—the Holy Spirit is always present, but we have a special awareness of that presence on Pentecost. Similarly, the gates of heaven are always opening and always closing, and God is always close to us, but Jews celebrate a special awareness of that closeness during the Days of Awe.

It’s really a beautiful vision of God’s relationship with humanity, and I highly recommend the book. But in the nearly two millennia that Jews have been developing that theology and tradition, we have developed a different understanding of atonement centered on Christ.

The author of Hebrews was steeped in both Jewish thought and Platonic philosophy. In Platonism, the things we see on earth are temporary, imperfect versions of what exists in heaven as permanent and perfect. Take this circle for example:

You would say that it is a “perfect” circle, but you would be wrong. If you zoomed way in, you would see that the outline is jagged. The outline of a true circle has zero width, but this one has a width of a couple millimeters. Still, if you look at this circle, you can imagine what a true circle, a perfect circle, would be like.

In the same way, the Jews built first the Tabernacle, then Solomon’s Temple, then the Second Temple as temporary, imperfect replicas of the heavenly temple. If that weren’t their goal, the Torah wouldn’t have page after page of mind-numbing details on how to construct the Tabernacle. These holy structures were imperfect, but they taught the ancient Israelites what the true heavenly temple is like.

Unfortunately, even the imperfect temple was destroyed, so we don’t have it as a reference. But we do know some broad outlines. There is an outer gathering area, and then an inner place where God dwells. And just as the ancient Jewish temples had high priests, we too have a high priest: Christ, who can enter the Holy of Holies in God’s presence any time he likes. Like the tabernacle and temples, the old high priests were temporary and imperfect—they were sinners just like us, and so they could not enter God’s presence without first purifying themselves. But Christ is perfect, and so he need not make any more sacrifices to purify himself. He can enter God’s presence at any time to purify God’s people—us.

The kingdom of heaven has come near! Through Christ, God’s eternal kingdom is always close at hand. So, we need to be continuously working to purify ourselves and prepare ourselves for entering God’s presence. We need to always be working on our repentance.

Again, let me turn to the Jewish practice of the Days of Repentance between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. The rabbinic tradition has a lot of variation in it—the joke is that if you ask ten rabbis their opinions, you’ll get eleven answers. But basically, they see repentance as having five main elements: recognition of one’s sins, remorse, desisting from sin, restitution where possible, and confession.

Recognizing your sins is the first and most important step. Like Alcoholics Anonymous, admitting you have a problem is the first step towards resolving it. Recognition is an intellectual realization that leads to remorse, which is a deep emotion that mirrors the hurt that your actions or inaction have caused. Desisting from sin is an action: it is not sufficient to know that you have sinned, you have to stop doing it.

Restitution is an essential part of healing, and is therefore step 8 of AA’s 12 steps. This is where the rubber meets the road. Through Christ, our sins are forgiven—our sins against God. But God cannot forgive on behalf of the person we have wronged.

Imagine that my kids, Sam and Jesse, are fighting and hurt each other, and in the process, they break my TV. As their father, I can forgive them for breaking the TV. As their father, I can forgive Sam for hurting Jesse and Jesse for hurting Sam. What I can’t do is forgive Sam on behalf of Jesse or forgive Jesse on behalf of Sam. They need to do that themselves. They need to apologize to each other and heal their relationship. In the same way, our heavenly Father can forgive any sin we commit against him, and forgive us for hurting one another, but cannot directly heal our relationship and forgive on behalf of the person we have hurt. We have to work towards that reconciliation. Only after we have tried our best to resolve whatever hurt we caused can we truly feel worthy of God’s forgiveness.

A couple of weeks ago, in Sacred Paths, we talked about confession of sins. Sacred Paths is the campus ministry co-sponsored by this church, Christ Episcopal, and CrossRoads. It’s quite an ecumenical group, but strangely, many of the students are or were Catholic. The Roman Catholic Church recognizes seven sacraments, including the sacrament of reconciliation, commonly called confession. In preparation for confession, you are supposed to reflect on what has happened since your last confession, typically using the Ten Commandments as your guide. Then you go in and tell the priest your sins and discuss how you plan to resist temptation and desist from sinning. It is essential that you have a truly contrite heart and truly intend to turn away from sin, and that you make a thorough confession, holding nothing back. Then the priest offers you forgiveness and perhaps penance. The priest cannot himself forgive sins, but is God’s voice. As in that famous poem Melba read at the opening of the service last week, Christ now has no mouth but ours.

There is a real psychological and sociological value in hearing someone say to you, “I hear what you did, and God forgives you.” This is a powerful moment that unfortunately the Reformation purged from our tradition. We instead approach God directly and confess our sins, and trust in what we have been taught about forgiveness and reconciliation through Christ.

We don’t have the same kind of personal, private confession as Catholics, but we do have corporate, public confession. Every week, a critical part of our worship service is centered on confession. First, we hear the call: a reminder that we may be bold to approach the throne of grace and lay down all our sins. Next, we pray together, acknowledging our sins. Finally, we are reminded that through Christ, we are forgiven.

But what sins do we acknowledge? Jeff assembles our liturgy each week and draws a prayer of confession from one of his various resources. There is a chance that he will include something that you personally did, something that you need to confess. It is more likely, however, that most of what you confess in that prayer are sins that you don’t recognize in your own life. So why confess them at all?

Let’s return to the scapegoat ritual. The high priest lays all the sins of all the people on the scapegoat and sets it free in the wilderness. In that way, the people as a whole are reconciled to God and made clean. There is a strong sense in the ritual that we are all bound together. Each of us is tainted by the sinfulness of the community and indeed by the sinfulness of all humanity.

Here’s a part of what we prayed last week: “We confess that we have defaced your creation and poisoned our environment through our consumerist behavior and for personal gain.” OK, one of the great sins of modern commerce is the prevalence of single-use plastics. We are rapidly consuming our reserves of petroleum, and using it for such ridiculous things as putting peeled oranges in small, plastic containers. So, as a spiritual practice, perhaps you take reusable shopping bags to Kroger or Walmart. In fact, in some states, and at Aldi, you are required to take your own bags. But I defy you to enter a grocery store, even Aldi, buy food for the week, and leave without single-use plastics. I don’t think it can be done. Whether you are buying meat, produce, cereal, or dairy products, single-use plastics are unavoidable.

So even though I don’t personally make plastic and I don’t have any choice about using it, I am part of a society that is turning petroleum into disposable junk. This is just one of a thousand ways that we all participate in sinful systems.

And sometimes, the sinful systems persist long after the original sins were committed. For example, there are hardly any women in electrical and computer engineering. Right now, I think 10% of the faculty in my department are female, and about that same percentage of students. Why? Well, there was a time, decades ago, that women were simply not allowed to study electrical or computer engineering. There are no formal restrictions anymore—indeed, there are programs to encourage female participation—but the inequity persists for reasons that have become embedded in our culture. Similar factors result in racial and ethnic inequities.

So each Sunday, we pray for forgiveness for our participation in these sinful systems. We may not personally commit any of the sins in the prayer of confession, but we are part of a society that is built upon a sinful foundation.

We pray and confess our sins to God boldly, knowing that God forgives them. But what about restitution? What about the people who have been harmed by our actions, our inaction, or our participation in a sinful society? Many of the Old Testament prophets tell us what to do. They teach us that God doesn’t care about our sacrifices or our confessions unless we have changed hearts that change our society. As Amos famously said, “Let justice roll down like water and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.”

We were made in God’s image. At heart, we are pure and good. Yet we are a part of a broken world, a world shaped by the sinful desires and actions of generations past and present. Our calling, then, is to seek reconciliation and healing, to fix what we can. That is the work of a lifetime, of a thousand or a billion lifetimes. It is a task that we can never complete. But that doesn’t absolve us from our responsibility to get started. I cannot eliminate all of the prejudice and bias in the world, but I can help a few people and maybe change a few hearts and minds.

I know that all of you look around the world and see the problems. Inequities in society due to race, gender, class, age, and wealth. Violence in our community, nation, and around the world. Natural devastation amplified by poverty. Environmental calamities caused by human greed and our desire for convenience. On and on it goes. We can’t fix it all. But we can do something.

So my challenge to you all is this: Identify some sin in our society that you can do something about, and get to work. Maybe you’re already doing all that you can, through GRACE or the Russell House or the Mission or Phelps Connections for Seniors or whatever. But maybe there’s something more that God is calling you to do. And maybe there’s something that others in this church are also called to do, working alongside of you. Let’s help each other as we strive to channel the righteousness that flows from heaven and cleanses our world, washing away our individual sins and those of our broken systems. Amen.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Preached at First Presbyterian Church of Rolla on October 6, 2024, World Communion Sunday. Based on Hebrews 1:1-4, 2:5-12.

---

Many musicals and large orchestral works begin with an overture. This is more than just an opening piece. Instead, it is composed to familiarize the audience with all of the musical themes that they will encounter throughout the larger work.

Several books of the Bible have what is essentially an overture as well. Perhaps the Gospel of John. Perhaps the Gospel of Luke, with Mary singing the Magnificat and Zechariah singing the Benedictus. In these cases, the overture introduces not musical themes but theological themes that will recur throughout the book.

Today’s reading includes the opening of the Letter to the Hebrews. Now, that title is a total misnomer. It is certainly not a letter in the same way as Paul’s epistles, but more of a sermon transcript or a theological treatise. It was perhaps a circular letter that was passed around to many churches. And it was not addressed to the Hebrews in any real sense. Rather, it was addressed to Greek-speaking Christians, both Jews and Gentiles, who were familiar with both Greek and Jewish philosophical traditions. The readers were struggling to stay strong in their faith.

So to set the stage, the author wrote one long Greek sentence as an overture. In our English Bibles, the one long sentence becomes several sentences in the first four verses of the book. This opening statement lays out the key concepts that we will encounter throughout the book. First, that the story of Christ has been told to the Jews throughout history, but in bits and pieces that the author will try to assemble. Second, that Jesus came to give it to us straight, to proclaim the Truth. Next, that Jesus Christ was the perfect image of God, through whom all things came into being.

Let’s sit with that for a little while. In Genesis, God created humanity to bear God’s image here in the created world. In Psalm 8, we read that we were made just a little lower than the heavenly beings. So we are all made to reflect God’s image and glory. But we are an imperfect reflection. We all try to live up to our calling as God’s representatives here on earth, but we fall short of the glory of this calling. Only Jesus of Nazareth was the exact imprint of God’s very being. In a sense, this is why we say that Jesus was truly human and truly divine. Like all humans, he carried God’s image, but because he carried it perfectly, he was God, and because he was God, he was able to be fully human. This paradox is at the center of the Nicene Creed and is partially explored in Hebrews.

Returning to the opening, we see the next key characteristic of Jesus Christ. When he had ascended in glory, he sat down at the right hand of God to exercise dominion over all things. That sounds familiar, too, from the Nicene and Apostles Creeds. Christ came to show us who God truly is and to explain the Truth directly, to clarify the piecemeal revelation that was made throughout Israel’s history, and then he ascended to rule God’s kingdom.

Why was Jesus born? That’s a deep question that a lot of people have tried to answer. The author of Hebrews lays out part of his argument in the second half of our reading today. Jesus came so that through him, God could truly experience suffering and death. There are things you can learn by watching someone else do them, but then there are things that you can only learn through firsthand experience. God Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth, knew all things from the beginning of time. All things came into being through Christ. And yet, there was one thing that God could not know directly: death. As an infinite being, as being-ness itself, God could not know what it meant to come to an end. And so, Christ was incarnated as Jesus of Nazareth, who like us was a little lower than a heavenly being for a little while, and who suffered and died. Now God knows firsthand what it means to be truly human, to live and to love, to suffer and to die.

That internal knowledge was part of Christ’s plan to reconcile all things to God. He was the pioneer of our salvation—the firstborn from the dead, who paved the way for the rest of us to suffer, die, and be raised to glory with him. As the firstborn through whom all things were created, all things were placed under his reign. Christ reigns not just over the ancient Judeans nor their descendants. Christ reigns not just over Presbyterians or Americans. In fact, Christ does not just reign over humanity. But Christ reigns over all things. All people, all the birds of the sky and the beasts of the field and the fish in the sea. The sun and the moon and the stars at night. Everything. Everything is a part of Christ’s dominion, the kingdom of God.

Yet Jesus of Nazareth lived only a short time, did not achieve a whole lot of worldly power, and then died and ascended to heaven. Now what? Well, Christ continues to reign in the world through us. We are tasked to rule in his place. Jesus initiated the reconciliation of the world to God. We are tasked with continuing that work.

There are two terms I’d like you to consider that describe who we are. First, we are Christ’s ambassadors to the world. To those who do not know Christ, we are expected to represent Christ faithfully and seek a relationship that will connect them to Christ’s kingdom through us. But second, we are Christ’s regents. A regent is someone who rules in place of the king because of the king’s absence. Christ is not truly absent, but is not visible to those who aren’t looking for him. And so, we are tasked with carrying out his reconciling work and ruling as he would rule—not to “lord it over” our siblings that God also loves, but to serve them and to love them.

So what would Jesus do? Well, what did Jesus do? Jesus demonstrated what God’s reign is like. It is a total self-emptying. It is putting one’s whole self at God’s service. As Jesus prayed in the garden of Gethsemane, “Let this cup pass from me, yet not my will but your will be done.” We may pray that things go according to our desires, but in the end, we are called to give our whole selves to God no matter what God asks of us.

I have talked on other occasions about spiritual practices. Things like prayer, reading scripture, fasting, and acts of service and hospitality. Spiritual practices enable us to regularly turn towards God and towards becoming who God wants us to be, both as individuals and as a part of the body of Christ. Practices need to be performed regularly in order to form us. And like learning an instrument or a sport, you need to start small but be persistent in order to allow God to form you through the practices.

Jesus demonstrated the ultimate form that we should strive for: giving our whole selves to God. All that we have and all that we are. Well, Jesus didn’t start his ministry on the cross, even though he was willing to go there. He started with smaller acts of kenosis or self-emptying and worked up to the ultimate gift of his death on the cross.

So, how can we start small and work up to giving our whole selves? By committing ourselves to the promises that many of us made at our baptism or our confirmation or when we joined this church: to support the church with our prayers, our presence, our gifts, and our service. Or sometimes stated as our time, talent, and treasure. There are some people who literally give their whole lives to God—priests, monks, nuns, and friars who have no possessions, no life partners, no jobs outside the church. The rest of us instead give some portion of our lives to God.

Before we moved to Rolla, I occasionally worshipped at a church in Mahomet, but not seriously. After we moved here, we committed to making worship a part of our lives. That was the first step. Then we started giving. I remember not knowing what “per capita” meant and trying to decide whether and how much to give towards it. Then Rhonda became a trustee and I joined the choir. Little by little, we gave more of ourselves to serve God’s kingdom.

A few years ago, I’m not sure when exactly, our giving reached the level of a tithe, a tenth. Now, what does that mean? Well, different people compute it differently. I base it on my giving to the church divided by my after-tax income. Some people divide by their pre-tax income. Others who are in a wealth-distribution phase of life, rather than earning a salary, need to think more about what it means to “lay up treasure” in God’s house. For the numerator, some people include what they give to other benevolent organizations, like the Mission or Russell House or whatever.

The exact math doesn’t matter so much as the basic principle: God is the ruler of all things, everything you have belongs to God, and so you should hold on to it loosely. As a spiritual practice, you should give of your time and money to God’s reconciling work in the world. Generosity is a way of training yourself to value relationships and God’s kingdom more than your own comfort.

The best time to make a change in how you give of your prayers, your presence, your gifts, and your service is when something changes. For example, my life revolves around the academic year. So, each fall, I put together a regular schedule for my week that incorporates my class schedule, regular meetings, and time to serve God, directly and indirectly. I reconsider my giving and see what I can afford. My life is changing a little bit more right now because both of my kids are out of college and “off the payroll,” plus my new position as your CRE. All of that factors in to my decision-making.

Another good time to consider how to change your approach to church is during a particular part of the church year. Perhaps Christmas when we celebrate the Incarnation, perhaps Lent, perhaps Easter or Pentecost. Or perhaps today.

Today is World Communion Sunday. This is not a liturgical holiday like the others I listed, but it is an important day in the church year. The first celebration of World Communion Sunday was in 1933 at Shadyside Presbyterian Church in Pittsburgh. Since then, it has spread to other denominations around the world. It’s a day when we remember that there is one body of Christ, which is the Church with a capital C. We may identify ourselves as Presbyterians, or Methodists, or Lutherans, or Baptists, or Episcopalians, or Moravians, or whatever. All these labels identify our differences. But what matters to God is our similarities: we are all children of God, united together into Christ’s body. We squabble over different understandings of God, but ultimately, none of us can be certain until we meet our Lord at the end of the age. I have many identities: son, husband, father, engineer, professor, church leader, and so on. But the one identity that matters most is beloved child of God.

Today, as we receive the gift of Christ’s body and blood in these simple gifts of bread and juice, we remember all those who celebrate in their own way in churches across our community and around the world. We remember all those who have gone before us and all those who will come after us. And we remember that Christ asks for our whole selves in service to God’s eternal kingdom, made manifest through Christ’s body, the Church, that strives to transform the world today and every day. Amen.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Preached at First Presbyterian Church of Rolla on September 22, 2024. Loosely based on Mark 9:30-37. This message was particularly intended for FPC Rolla at this stage of its life. I am providing it here both for our own members’ reference and as potential inspiration for other churches who seek renewal.

---

In today’s Gospel lesson, we get a little insight into the kind of society Jesus wanted his disciples to create. First, he reminds them that he will be going away sometime soon. Remember, Jews were anticipating a Messiah who would return Israel to its former glory. They were expecting a priest-king who would re-establish the independence of their nation, who would kick out the Romans and purify the Temple. Jesus’s disciples thought that he was this Messiah who was getting ready to march triumphantly into Jerusalem to establish his reign.

So of course, they wondered who would reign with him. Who would help Jesus govern the nation? Who would have power and authority? Who would receive the honors and accolades that come with being close to the King?

Well, Jesus wasn’t that kind of Messiah. Jesus told the disciples that he was headed not towards a worldly victory, but towards an ignominious death. He was headed towards glory, but of a sort that the disciples didn’t understand. Boy, they were thick-headed, weren’t they? Let’s give them the benefit of the doubt. They simply reflected their cultural understanding, and we have the benefit of hindsight, knowing how the story will end.

But at this point in the story, the disciples didn’t get it. They didn’t understand what it meant for Jesus to be the Messiah, and they didn’t understand what kind of kingdom he would institute. He tried to tell them, again and again, but they didn’t get it. Here he says that rather than seeking power and authority, they should strive to welcome children. They should welcome anyone into God’s kingdom.

After Jesus ascended, he left his disciples to carry on his vision. He set out a bold vision of what human society could be, and the disciples sought to bring it to reality. While God’s goal is a total transformation of the world, our task is just to transform our little corner of it. Eventually, God’s vision of total transformation will be realized, but in the meantime, we are called to do what we can to make Rolla, or at least our church, a hazy, imperfect image of things to come.

Imagine if you will First Presbyterian Church of Rolla at some point in the distant future. I’m going to describe this future church that perhaps none of us will see, just like the Israelites who fled Egypt did not see the Promised Land. But let’s imagine that at some point in the future, we truly meet the Great Ends of the Church. As a reminder, about a century ago, the Presbyterian Church developed these Great Ends:

• the proclamation of the gospel for the salvation of humankind;
• the shelter, nurture, and spiritual fellowship of the children of God;
• the maintenance of divine worship; 
• the preservation of the truth;
• the promotion of social righteousness;
• and the exhibition of the Kingdom of Heaven to the world.

The kingdom of heaven is a place where all people, all people, have what they need to flourish and thrive. That means they all have their physical, emotional, and spiritual needs fulfilled. So let’s start by thinking about who “all” might be.

The demographics of the kingdom of heaven ought to mirror the demographics of the broader community. The median age of Phelps County residents is 36 years old. This is skewed a bit from the statewide median, 39 years old, because of the university’s huge population of 18-to-24-year-olds. At any rate, this church as we are imagining it is filled with people of all ages, from newborn to ninety. There are children, college students, young families, empty-nesters, and people in their twilight years.

Church members are predominantly white, but with a significant Asian contingent and a smaller number of people of other races and ethnicities. One in twenty would live in a household that has a primary language other than English—some speak Spanish, many speak Mandarin and other Asian languages. A significant fraction, perhaps 10%, would have moved to Rolla in the past year, including those who have come here to attend or teach at Missouri S&T. Maybe as many as 10% are veterans.

No matter who they are, everyone is bound by a desire to connect to God and one another. We are a truly intergenerational organization, one where any given group that is working or studying together has a mix of people of all ages. These groups benefit from the wisdom of differing perspectives and experiences. Most members worship on most Sundays, although some participate online instead of in person.

The highlight of the church week is Sunday. We have two services, traditional and contemporary. The traditional service is smaller and skews older, perhaps 150 people with a median age in the 50s. Some younger people too, though, who enjoy the liturgy. A choir that has at least four basses and four tenors, plus a larger number of altos and sopranos, to give us good, full, four-part harmony, occasionally splitting out to eight-part. We continue to include both piano and organ in the service, with occasionally other instruments like brass, woodwinds, or strings. We have a bell choir that participates in worship quarterly.

Between the two services, we have a time of fellowship and Christian education. We have six classes: up to kindergarten, first through fourth grade, fifth and sixth grades, seventh and eighth grades, ninth through twelfth grades, and adult. There’s also a group that gathers in the chapel between services for contemplative prayer.

During the fellowship time, various small groups meet up to make their plans for the week. The associate pastor, who works full-time as a chaplain and part-time for us, connects with the deacons to plan visits to shut-ins. Presby Politics decides what their topic of the week is. This is a mixed group of Democrats and Republicans who meet not to argue or convince, but to seek nuance and understanding. A Bible Newbie group makes sure everyone knows the topic for the week, too. These are folks who did not grow up studying the Bible and need to learn the basics, like the core story of the Exodus and the relationship between the Gospels and Epistles. Another group plans an outing to meditate at Lane Springs, and another talks about a project they are doing for the Mission, and other people are talking about opportunities to serve at GRACE and Russell House and so forth, or just coordinating lunch plans.

After fellowship and Sunday School comes the contemporary service. This is the bigger and younger group, perhaps 250 people with a median age in the early 30s. There’s a band that leads the music, but it’s not a performance—the sanctuary is filled with the full-throated singing of the congregation. Whether they attend the traditional or contemporary service, everyone leaves worship energized and renewed for the week.

Monday through Friday, the preschool is in full swing. As hard as it may be to imagine, they’re doing an even better job than today. Spots are in high demand because of the quality of their programs, which run year-round. The preschool regularly receives national awards for the impact they have on children and the community.

Monday evening, we host a grief support group. Tuesday evening, we host a cancer support group.

Wednesday is for music. The bell choir practices first, and then the chancel choir, and finally the band.

Thursday is for campus ministry. We have a youth leader slash campus minister who was a stay-at-home mom until her kids went off to college. She coordinates a group of about 30 college students who are growing into an adult faith.

One Friday a month, we have a Parents Night Out, where we provide childcare to enable parents to enjoy some adult time together. On other Fridays, we encourage small groups to gather, whether at restaurants or each other’s homes.

Saturday night is for youth group. Our youth leader leads a group of about 20 high school students, most of whom have completed confirmation and seek continued growth in their faith.

All of this is coordinated by our senior pastor, a dynamic preacher dedicated to Reformed theology and the faith formation of the members. The senior pastor is an effective administrator who supervises the youth leader and the associate pastor, as well as three office staff and the music director. This team collectively has all of the skills and knowledge needed to lead this vibrant faith community. They all recognize where their strengths and weaknesses are, and defer to others as appropriate.

The senior pastor also moderates the session, a group of earnest, faithful elders who consistently evaluate our ministries. They consider which ones need more investment—in time, people, space, or funding—and which ones have outlived their purpose. They keep an eye out for conflict, which will naturally occur in a group of 400 or so imperfect humans that might have 10% or more turnover annually due to people moving into and out of the area. The session considers proposals for new ministries, and each elder is typically involved in one or two of our major ministries. One leads the Bible Newbies class, for example, and another leads the outdoor contemplative prayer group.

How does this sound? Does this sound like the kingdom of God? Does this sound like a place where you could thrive? Does this sound like a place that has a significant impact on the community?

I believe that this could describe our church, not next year, maybe not even next decade, but someday. In fact, when I’ve heard descriptions of this church from several decades ago, they sound something like what I described. There is no fundamental reason we cannot achieve this vision. With God, all things are possible.

However, this vision cannot be wished into existence. We must pray for God’s help, but we also need to do our part. A spiritual advisor once told me that we do perhaps 2% of the work and God does 98%, but we absolutely must do our 2% to unlock God’s providence. The kingdom of God is not for spectators. It calls for our total commitment, the dedication of our whole selves.

Right now, today, our church has neither the people nor the resources to make this vision a reality anytime soon. But if we hold out this vision, or something like it, as a possible future, we can find a path to it. Perhaps we start with a cancer support group or a grief support group. Or perhaps we put together a Parents Night Out. Nora has already discussed that with the preschool committee and is working on a version of my vague idea that better fits their families’ needs. Or perhaps we start a contemplative prayer group, whether in the chapel or out in nature.

We can do this. Together. What in this vision resonates for you? What do you feel called to do?

Something I have learned about myself over the past few years is that I am good at providing logistical and emotional and spiritual support to whatever initiative someone else wants to lead. Maybe there’s some part of this you’re willing to lead, but you don’t know how to advertise it or organize it, and I can help. I also recognize that we have diverse skills and talents across the congregation, and I’m starting to learn what they all are. Individually, it’s hard to do anything, but drawn together and empowered by the Holy Spirit, we can accomplish much for the kingdom of God. Let’s get started!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Preached on September 8, 2024, at First Presbyterian Church of Rolla. Based on Mark 7:24-37.

---

Let’s start by asking, Why was Jesus in Tyre? Last week, Susan preached on the first part of Mark 7. Jesus had done some amazing things reported in Mark 6. He fed 5000 men, walked on water, and after landing at Gennesaret, he healed many people. Of course, the scribes and Pharisees couldn’t stand for that sort of thing. So they challenged him. The first half of this chapter describes Jesus sparring with his fellow Jews about what is proper behavior in God’s eyes. They argued about ritual purity and interpretations of Mosaic Law.

One of the students who attends Sacred Paths, our campus ministry, commented that she gets the most criticism from other Christians. Just the fact that she attends our meetings while also attending other ministries must mean that she has ideas that are “wrong” in the eyes of those other ministries. And of course, in many Christian traditions, certainty and having the right answers and right beliefs are essential to salvation. They are right and we are wrong, of course. If you argue about certain doctrines, they will either appeal to the authority of the Pope or some other human leader, or cite some scripture that they believe settles things.

This kind of argument is tiring. We are all children of God, all trying to do our best to understand God’s will for our lives. Some beliefs may be more or less life-giving, but it’s hard to say who is right and who is wrong. The stressful nature of discussing matters that are so close to the heart is probably why there is a taboo about discussing religion in polite company. The self-righteous nature of those who think they have exclusive access to the Truth shuts down a healthy exploration of faith that allows for different perspectives and different ways of following God.

Jesus was embroiled in these arguments, had enough, and decided to escape to Tyre for a little break. He probably figured that the scribes and Pharisees wouldn’t chase him that far. Tyre is a good distance from Gennesaret, about 35 miles, probably two or even three days’ journey, and Gennesaret is already a good distance from Jerusalem, about 80 miles. So Jesus could perhaps count on some downtime where he didn’t have to spar with other Jews about the interpretation of written and oral Law.

Tyre was an old and prosperous city. It was the main source of Tyrian purple, an extremely valuable dye that they started producing about 1200 BC. Tyrian purple is extracted from the mucus produced by the Murex family of sea snails. Its production is difficult and time-consuming, and so the dye was literally worth its weight in gold. It was a leading commodity of the Phoenicians that was exported around the Mediterranean and because of its expense, it became associated with royalty.

In the Roman era, Tyre began producing another valuable commodity called garum, which was a sauce created by fermenting fish innards. One source I read compared garum to caviar, because it was so highly prized. The fact that Tyre produced these two commodities by processing fish and sea snails probably made the whole city smell bad, but also made it an extremely wealthy city. On top of these industries, Tyre was also a major port that connected the Mediterranean to the Silk Road and East Asia. Tyrian shekels were almost pure silver so they were the currency used to pay the Temple tax.

So when you hear that Jesus went away to Tyre, maybe it was like going away to Silicon Valley today. Sure, there are poor people in Silicon Valley like everywhere else, but you might expect the random person you meet to be relatively well-off.

The story of Jesus’s encounter with a Syrophoenician woman doesn’t look good at first. A woman comes to Jesus asking for what he has already done so many times before, to heal her daughter. Does he do it? No. He compares her to a dog and seems ready to send her away. I’ve read several perspectives on this story, but the one that makes the most sense to me is that he was implicitly criticizing the wealth of Tyre. As a wealthy commercial center, its residents would have naturally felt superior to a Galilean country bumpkin. So Jesus is essentially saying, You have all that wealth that has been extracted from people like me. Let my people at least have these gifts from God to themselves. Use your wealth to take care of your daughter, and I will share God’s grace with those who have nothing.

In response, the woman asks for the crumbs from God’s table. We have already seen, a chapter earlier, that when Jesus feeds the multitude, the crumbs fill a dozen baskets. Shortly after this story, Jesus feeds another multitude, and the crumbs fill seven baskets. God’s providence is so abundant that no matter how much is showered upon the lost sheep of Israel, there will always be more left for the Gentiles.

So here we have the contrast between the people to whom Jesus was sent and the people who were outside the covenant that God had made with Abraham. The covenant established an eternal relationship between God and Israel in which God would shower blessings upon Israel in return for their love of both God and neighbor. The story of Abraham actually has two covenants within it, first one of unconditional love and grace from God to humanity, and then one that is conditional. My interpretation is that God’s unconditional love and grace are always available to us, but that the conditions of the Law guide us as we strive to build a society that lives as God’s kingdom now.

The scribes and Pharisees in Jesus’s time, as well as many Christians today, put the emphasis on the conditions. You must earn your place in God’s kingdom by following these nitpicky rules as interpreted by someone in authority. Only those who embrace the church’s rules are worthy of a place in the earthly expression of God’s kingdom. But they forget that the rules are built on top of the unconditional love and grace of the original covenant. They forget that no human can limit God.

The Syrophoenician woman, though, focused on what actually matters. She loved her daughter. No amount of wealth or social privilege could heal her daughter. She may have thought that this country bumpkin from Galilee was beneath her station and not worthy of her attention, just as Jews thought that Gentiles were outside the covenant and not worthy of approaching God in the Temple. But one thing was more powerful than any hierarchy of wealth, culture, or ethnicity: love. Her love of her daughter drove her to seek any solution, no matter the cost to her dignity.

I am reminded of the time Rhonda was fighting her facial pain. We have very good health insurance. I wouldn’t say that I’m wealthy exactly, but I certainly have more financial resources and job flexibility than many people. We visited numerous doctors, in St. Louis and at Mayo Clinic and at Cleveland Clinic. But at the end of the day, none of it mattered. Money can’t buy a cure. The only way we were able to get her pain under control was by working with one doctor over a period of nearly two years to find the solution together. My love for her kept me searching for a solution, and our relationship with her neurologist enabled us to find the solution together.

In the same way, the woman’s wealth did not enable her to cure her daughter. Her wealth did not make her worthy to enter Jesus’s presence. Yet her ethnicity did not make her unworthy, either. The disciples may have thought that she had no place asking Jesus for help, but she was bold to ask anyway.

Have you ever been made to feel unworthy of God? Maybe you were too young or too old, or of the wrong social status, or had said or done something outside the norm or contrary to doctrine, or you weren’t dressed properly. People have a way of making outsiders feel uncomfortable and unworthy, and church members are sinful people. We try our best, but sometimes we can’t help but allow our cultural attitudes overwhelm our calling as Christians. Perhaps this woman felt the same way. She went to a house full of Galilean Jews, probably mostly men, and felt excluded because of her gender and ethnicity.

Yet she persisted. She knew that none of it mattered. It didn’t matter that she was a Gentile. It didn’t matter what her wealth or social status were. It didn’t matter if she was ritually unclean. All that mattered was that she loved her daughter, and Jesus could heal her. She needed God’s grace in her life, and nothing would prevent her from seeking it.

Jesus first reminded her of her status, perhaps as a social critique. Perhaps he knew how his disciples would react if he left their fellowship to care for the child of a wealthy foreigner. She could have responded by demanding that Jesus do her bidding, as she had probably done before to many other men she considered beneath her. She could have responded by promising him wealth or power, just as Satan tempted Jesus after his baptism. Yet she knew that Jesus was no ordinary man, able to be bribed or cajoled.

The sacrifice that God desires is a contrite heart. The woman knew that she needed God’s grace and that nothing she could do would make her worthy of Jesus’s service. But Jesus’s response reminds us that nothing she could do would make her unworthy, either. She was in need, and God’s abundant grace overflowed onto her.

In the same way, no matter how worthy or unworthy you feel, you may be bold to approach God with your needs. God cannot be cajoled or bribed. God cannot be argued into doing your will. But if you approach God with a contrite heart as the Syrophoenician woman did, God’s grace will flow over and through you. Even the crumbs of God’s blessings are abundant and life-giving.

You too may be wealthy or poor, an insider or an outsider, a person of high standing in the community or one of the lowly and forgotten. None of that matters. All of us stand in need of prayer. All of us need God’s grace in our lives—unearned and unearnable, a free gift through Christ. All of us need healing in our bodies, minds, and souls. All of us need to be connected to the infinite love of God that transcends the pains and struggles of the world. And all of us may be bold to approach God through Christ who came to demonstrate that God’s love is for everyone. Amen.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Preached at First Presbyterian Church of Rolla on August 25, 2024. Based on John 6:56-69.

---

Who here is familiar with the book Good to Great by Jim Collins? It’s a famous book about companies that somehow emerged from mediocrity to become great. One that they talk about that has a nexus with S&T is Nucor. Nucor was a mediocre company that provided services and equipment for the nuclear industry, but somehow emerged as the leading steel producer in America.

I’d like to share with you one of the principles discussed in the book: the Stockdale Paradox. Admiral Jim Stockdale was a prisoner of war in the Hanoi Hilton, the highest-ranking US military officer there. Collins had the opportunity to interview Stockdale and ask him how he survived and who didn’t survive. He said, “I never lost faith in the end of the story. I never doubted not only that I would get out, but also that I would prevail in the end and turn the experience into the defining event of my life, which, in retrospect, I would not trade.” Stockdale was convinced that he would eventually be victorious.

But who didn’t survive? The optimists. As Stockdale related, “They were the ones who said, ‘We’re going to be out by Christmas.’ And Christmas would come, and Christmas would go. Then they’d say, ‘We’re going to be out by Easter.’ And Easter would come, and Easter would go. And then Thanksgiving, and then it would be Christmas again. And they died of a broken heart.” The Stockdale Paradox is summed up in his statement: You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—a faith that you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality.

When Rhonda was going through her face pain, I was one of those optimists. I would think, The next doctor will fix this. Or the next drug, or whatever. While Rhonda was having a surgery that was ultimately unsuccessful, I talked with my friend Sharon for some moral support, and she reminded me how many times I had thought that we were about to solve the problem. That helped to prepare me for the eventual let-down when Rhonda’s pain returned.

On the flip side, we Americans are notorious for seeking instant gratification and easy answers. When those aren’t available, we just give up and stay in our comfort zone. We think, Oh well, that didn’t work out, so why bother trying? Things are fine the way they are. We stay in the comfort zone. Well, the comfort zone is one of the most dangerous places to be.

Think about it: comfort foods are some of the worst foods for your health. Things like, pasta served in a bread bowl. Or grilled cheese. When I go elk hunting, while I’m at base camp, I eat a lot of grilled cheese because I’m so mentally and emotionally and physically drained from hunting. That’s fine for a week, but if I ate grilled cheese for dinner every day, I definitely wouldn’t be as thin as I am!

Couches are comfortable, too. I try to run every morning, although I’ve been struggling lately due to travel and injury. The reason I run is because if I don’t, my lifestyle is basically sedentary, and that’s terrible for your health. I know some of you are not able to be as active as you once were, but it’s best for your health if you stay as active as you are physically able. Otherwise, what you don’t use, you lose.

So those are two of the ways you can fail. On the one hand, you can live with false hope that everything will be fixed tomorrow. We just have to do this one thing and our problem will be solved. Or on the other hand, you can give up, accept your current reality as the best it can be, and slowly decay instead of reaching your potential.

I’ve read a couple of books by Phil Stutz and Barry Michels. In The Tools, they describe a visualization tool for escaping the comfort zone. It’s a little bit like the image I walked through two weeks ago, where we are drawn to God through the cross. The tool that Stutz and Michels describe goes like this:

1. Imagine the pain that you are avoiding as a black cloud in front of you. Silently scream at it, “Bring it on!”
2. Imagine yourself entering that black cloud and feeling that pain. Silently scream, “I love pain!”
3. Imagine yourself being propelled out the other side. Silently scream, “Pain sets me free!”

There’s a lot more to the book, which I highly recommend. But the basic idea is that you succeed by being willing to confront the pain head-on and blow through it. It’s like a running back breaking a tackle. I had a wonderful clip, but the NFL blocked it from playing. So just imagine it: an amazing running back who runs straight into a defender, keeps pushing, keeps pushing, and finally breaks through for a touchdown. He is courageous—maybe not fearless, but willing to confront his fear and blow through it. Now, the reason these kinds of plays are on YouTube is that nine times out of ten, this kind of play results in a tackle for a loss. But once in a while, the running back succeeds. Do that often enough, and you win games, you win championships, and you end up in the Hall of Fame.

The key is to be willing to endure temporary pain for the promise of eventual success. Now, I’m not talking about being a masochist. Not all pain is redemptive, and I certainly didn’t see anything positive in the misery that Rhonda went through fighting her facial pain. Sometimes, life just sucks. But sometimes, the pain, or discomfort, or embarrassment, or fear, or whatever else is holding you back is just temporary, and if you power through that, you’ll come out the other side stronger, better, and victorious.

Coming back to our Gospel lesson, we hear John again and again talking about consuming Jesus, which we are supposed to take metaphorically. Maybe it’s the Eucharist, or maybe it’s a reference to integrating Jesus’s teachings in our lives. Either way, we are called to abide in Christ so that he may abide in us. We are called to dedicate our whole selves to Christ—not just our Sunday mornings, but every waking hour, all that we have and all that we are. And in return, Christ will strengthen us and bring us abundant life. Not a life of abundance—this isn’t the Prosperity Gospel. Abundant life—love, and joy, and hope, and life-giving relationships. Jesus is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. He is the Way—following him is the only way to enter God’s kingdom. He is the Truth—the hard truth, the challenging truth, but the divine truth that reveals our true potential as beings made in the image of God and a church that is Christ’s body. And He is the Life—the source of abundant blessings that we enjoy when we are connected to each other and to God through Christ, and the source of strength when we are weak, of courage when we are fearful, of wisdom when we are filled with doubt.

But if we really want to know Jesus as the Way, Truth, and Life, we must be willing to confront the facts before us. We can’t ignore the problems that plague us, individually and as a church, and hope that they will just go away. We can’t be afraid that knowing the Truth will mean more work, or sacrificing something good for the sake of something better. We need to turn away from pleasant lies and accept the uncomfortable truths.

At my commissioning service two weeks ago, the congregation affirmed the Great Ends of the Church:

• the proclamation of the gospel for the salvation of humankind;
• the shelter, nurture, and spiritual fellowship of the children of God;
• the maintenance of divine worship; 
• the preservation of the truth;
• the promotion of social righteousness;
• and the exhibition of the Kingdom of Heaven to the world.

These are in our Book of Order, and I think we can all agree that they are all important for truly fulfilling our calling as the body of Christ. I’d like to ask the ushers now to distribute the papers. On the paper, I want you to rate First Presbyterian Church of Rolla on how well we are fulfilling these Great Ends. On the right end, I want you to imagine the nearly perfect church—perfect for you. The church as you think it should be, as closely following God’s will as imperfect humans possibly can. On the left end, I want you to imagine that this church is gone, shut down, the people all dispersed to the community or across the country. On that scale, how are we doing? Are we proclaiming the Gospel? Are we promoting social righteousness? At the end of the service, please place the papers in the basket provided for the purpose. NOT the offering plate! The basket.

We need to know. We need to take a hard look at ourselves and evaluate just who we are, or else we will never know how to become who we could be. Then once we know where we are, we can plot a course towards a better future. And when I say “we,” I mean everyone who is worshipping here today. Whether this is your first time or you’ve been coming for months or years or decades, you matter to God, so you matter to me. I want to know what you think of our church.

There are many paths that we can take, but let’s focus on just two options. One is the easy path: stay in the comfort zone, don’t push ourselves too hard, keep doing what we’re doing and hope for the best. That is the wide path that leads to destruction. The other is the hard path: follow Christ. Follow wherever he leads, even if it means following him to his crucifixion, because we know that the Way of the Cross leads to eternal life.

Jesus’s teachings in this chapter of John are hard. They turned a lot of people away. It’s like he was trying to weed them out: every paragraph gets a little more graphic, a little more demanding. Eventually, he is left with just the Twelve, and Peter says those fateful words: “Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.”

Do you believe? Do you believe that Christ is the Holy One of God? As they entered the Promised Land, Joshua challenged the people. He said that the future was uncertain, the path was hard, but if they stayed on it, they would be victorious. Then he said, “As for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.” Jesus Christ has the words of eternal life. Will you serve the Lord? Let us choose each day to take the hard path, the narrow path, knowing that Christ will sustain us and strengthen us, and knowing that the challenges are temporary, but the glory is eternal. Amen.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Preached at First Presbyterian Church of Rolla on August 11, 2024. Based on John 6:35, 41-51.

---

Let’s back up a couple of weeks and paragraphs. At the beginning of chapter 6 in the Gospel According to John, we hear of one of the few miracles that are reported in all four Gospels. Jesus is in a deserted place, preaching and teaching a huge crowd. Five thousand men! Assuming there were some women and children among them, we’re talking about roughly the number of students who attend S&T. Jesus is moved by their need and feeds them. He feeds them with bread and fish. All ate and were satisfied, and the leftovers filled twelve baskets.

This establishes Jesus’s bona fides. Water into wine is nice, healing a leper or blind man is nice, but how does that help me? What has Jesus done for me? Well, here’s what he did for you: he fed you. In a deserted place, like the Sinai desert, he fed a vast multitude who he was leading to the Promised Land of God’s kingdom.

In case the Exodus symbolism is too subtle, he followed up with crossing the sea. He didn’t split it like God did for Moses, but he did walk over it. So clearly, Jesus is no ordinary man.

The problem with feeding people that day is that the next day, they would still be hungry. In fact, the people he fed track him down in Capernaum so that he can feed them again. But you know the old aphorism, If you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day; if you teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime. Right now, they have Jesus with them, but they won’t always. He can feed them now, and so he did. But he needs to teach them how to survive after he’s gone.

Thus begins Jesus’s teachings on the bread of life. We only read a snippet today, but most of chapter 6 of John’s Gospel, starting from verse 25 that Susan read last week, is about the bread of life that doesn’t spoil, but instead lasts to eternal life. We will discuss how the story ends in a couple of weeks, but for now, let’s stay focused on this basic teaching: Jesus IS the bread of life.

What can that possibly mean? Right after this passage comes what I call the cannibalism verse: Jesus said, “Very truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.” We read this from our comfortable seats in 21^st-century America with two millennia of associating Jesus’s body and blood with the Eucharist. But if you put yourself back in first-century Judea or Galilee and imagine hearing this statement, you couldn’t help but be repulsed. This is outrageous! How could a man offer his literal body and blood as food and drink for a whole crowd?

Obviously, he can’t. Obviously, Jesus was speaking metaphorically. Perhaps this is a reference to the Eucharist. Even if it isn’t, though, we need to understand his statement as a metaphor that somehow extends the life-giving sustenance that he offered to those five thousand men into all of eternity.

Each week, after the scripture lessons, the preacher says, “Heaven and earth will pass away, but the word of the Lord is forever.” Variations of this statement appear in the three synoptic Gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke. John’s Gospel is less explicit and more metaphorical.

The first chapter of John says that in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. Then the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. Jesus was the incarnation of the Logos, the divine Word, the organizing principle of the universe, the absolute Truth. The Word became flesh, and Jesus told his disciples that they had to “eat” the flesh. That is, they needed to, and now we need to, consume the Word, the true Word that transcends the words about God that we read in the Bible, the divine Truth that stands within and behind the Gospels and other teachings that have been passed down to us. We are not supposed to just hear the words read, but also internalize their message. We are supposed to make Jesus’s teachings a core part of our lives, of our very being.

This is a challenge. First of all, we don’t have Jesus here with us to teach us. What we have instead are some stories and teachings that his followers shared and someone eventually wrote down, in Greek, which were eventually translated into English. Jesus taught people in first-century Judea and Galilee, so there is a cultural barrier that we need to transcend in addition to the language barrier. But if we try hard enough, we can receive the message that stands behind the words in our Bible.

Jesus taught us to pray, “Give us this day our daily bread.” If Christ is the bread of life, then maybe we ought to turn to Christ every day. Think about it: Can you eat a big meal on Sunday afternoon and then fast for the rest of the week? No. So why would we think that we can study the Word of God on Sunday and ignore it the rest of the week? Every day, we need to turn to Christ and receive his nourishing words of life.

Now, that doesn’t necessarily mean that we need to study scripture every day. We are also nourished when we pray. Through prayer, we are connected to our Triune God, if we take the time to listen for God’s message to us.

There are other spiritual disciplines that I’ve talked about before. The point is, every day, we need to do something to re-center our lives in Christ. And then, we need to connect our hearts and minds to our feet and hands and mouths. We need to put Christ’s teachings into practice to further God’s kingdom.

Throughout the Old Testament, God appears to Israelites in various forms—in dreams and visions, as a pillar of fire or smoke, as a burning bush, and so forth. At some point, God realized that wasn’t getting the job done. In order to truly transform the world, God had to enter it as a human being. Only a human can teach other humans how to meet their true potential as God’s image-bearers. And so we have the Incarnation, God Made Flesh, Jesus Christ, who came to really show us how to live.

By truly living into Jesus’s teachings, we too incarnate the Word. Incarnate—that’s kind of a strange word. It means to make something into flesh and blood. It’s not just words and thoughts and ideas and such, but actually living people. We are the incarnation, when we do God’s will. When we connect with Jesus’s teachings, when we allow Christ to dwell in us, when we work for a better world that more nearly approaches God’s vision for a perfect humanity.

Later in John 6, we hear that lots of Jesus’s followers fell away because of this teaching. The truth is that following Christ is hard. It’s painful. Sometimes, it means turning from things that bring instant gratification towards things that you know will be good in the long run, but are unpleasant now. Sometimes, it means giving up the good for something better. Always, it means leaving the comfort zone. But growth never happens in the comfort zone, only when we strive to go beyond it.

Let me give you an example from my career. In 2018, I was promoted to full professor. In truth, there are few positions at a university that are objectively better than being a tenured full professor. I could have just stayed the course, taught a couple classes per year, kept my research program cranking along, and so forth. That would have been staying in the comfort zone. But I knew that I had the potential to have more impact on the university if I chose a leadership path. First I was a research center director and then became department chair. Now, being department chair is a little bit more pay for a whole lot more work and a whole lot more stress, with the added benefit of the opportunity to make lots of enemies. But I was willing to make that sacrifice because I knew that I could make my department better. A similar motivation drove me to become your commissioned ruling elder, effective this afternoon. I know that I’ll do things that make some people angry at me, but I also know that something needs to be done and someone needs to do it, so I’ll be that someone. Lord willing, something better awaits us all.

Jesus said, “No one can come to me unless drawn by the Father who sent me.” The word translated as “drawn” is maybe a bit more like “dragged.” When I read this, an image came to mind. Look at this cross on the Table. It’s a variation on a Celtic cross, with a ring around the crossing point. I want you to imagine that ring is a halo, which is a feature that appears in the sky when there are ice crystals dispersed in the atmosphere. Under the right conditions, a circular halo appears around the sun. Sometimes the halo is just white, but other times you can see the colors of a rainbow. Anyway, even if you just see the halo, you know the sun is there in the center, too.

So I want you to imagine that this ring is a halo, meaning that the sun must be back behind the cross creating the halo. But you can’t see it, because the cross is in the way. The sun is the light of God’s heavenly kingdom. You feel an irresistible pull towards the sun, like gravity, a gentle force but one that you can’t ignore or escape. God is dragging you towards God’s eternal kingdom, but to get there, you have to go through the cross. There is no way to get there except through Christ, and Christ’s way is the way of the cross. You know that the cross is a place of extreme pain, torture, agony. But you also know that it’s temporary. Everything is temporary, everything except the kingdom of God. And so you let yourself be pulled towards the cross. You get to the cross, and the pain is almost unbearable, but Jesus is right there with you. He too is suffering, but he helps you to bear the pain. And then, you’re through. You emerge on the other side of the cross in the blazing light of God’s glory. All of the pain is gone, and you know that it was worth it.

That’s the Way of the Cross. Jesus was willing to give his life for us all, because he knew that the pain and suffering were temporary, but the glory is eternal. In the same way, we can be confident that any suffering or loss we incur as we help to build God’s kingdom here in Rolla will be temporary, it will be bearable because Christ is with us, and in the end, it will be worth it for the glory on the other side.

This too is a daily need. Elsewhere, Jesus said, “If any wish to come after me, let them deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will save it.” We must each take up our cross daily. This is hard. Some days, I just don’t want to. I want to take the easy path, just once. But the easy path slowly becomes a path away from God. So I do my best to choose the hard path, the painful path. I am empowered to take the hard path because I am nourished and strengthened by Christ’s flesh, his words of life, his love that continually flows over me. May God grant you the courage to also choose the hard path as you are drawn through the cross into God’s eternal glory, knowing that you are nourished and strengthened for the journey by Jesus Christ, the Bread of Life. Amen.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Preached at First Presbyterian Church of Rolla on July 21, 2024. Based on Ephesians 2:11-22.

---

In this passage of Ephesians, Paul talks about a dividing wall of hostility that separated Gentiles and Jews. Why? What caused this division? Well, it all went back to the Law of Moses as it was understood and practiced. I’m going to assume that you are all aware of kosher laws in some general way but not in the particulars. There are obvious and easy rules like no pork or shellfish. But truly keeping kosher requires a whole lot more effort than that.

For example, there is a verse in Exodus, “You shall not boil a kid in its mother’s milk.” I don’t think anyone knows where that rule really comes from. Maybe it was some pagan ritual that God outlawed through Moses. Whatever the origin, this is an important part of the kosher laws. It’s hard to know what cow provided the milk you drink, or that you used to make a particular block of cheese. So, to be safe, Jews never boil any meat in any milk, or otherwise allow dairy products to contact their meat. OK, fair enough, no cheeseburgers. Well, how clean do you get your pots and plates and silverware? Is it possible that a little bit of meat residue remains, or a little bit of dairy residue remains? Well, we don’t want to take a chance. So, a fully observant orthodox Jew will have completely separate kitchen items, maybe even a completely separate kitchen. They’ll have pots and pans and plates and silverware that they use for meat dishes, and a completely other set that they use for anything that has dairy.

This is just one of the many rules that cover both the letter of the Law as reported in Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, and the “fence around the Law” that rabbis developed over the centuries. So let’s imagine you’re an observant Jew in Paul’s time who is striving to follow all of the rules in every circumstance. Suppose a Gentile invites you over for dinner in a show of hospitality. You get there, and first you see that there is meat and cheese on the table. Whoa, hold on. We can’t be eating those together. Then you ask your host how the animal was killed. The kosher laws include lots of details on how animals should be butchered. Your host says, Oh, I don’t know, they took care of it down at the Temple of Artemis. Now hold on. You can’t be eating meat that was sacrificed to some other god. It just keeps going from bad to worse.

So what do you do? You don’t eat anything you’re served. You can’t be sure it was prepared properly, so instead of taking a chance, you refuse the hospitality that is offered to you. You think to yourself, These God-forsaken pagans can never know my Lord if they won’t try to learn God’s rules. Now, not every Jew had this reaction, and there were and are a diversity of ways that Jews observe the Torah, but at least some Jews would have reacted this way.

Now imagine you are that Gentile host. You went to a lot of trouble and expense to offer the best you have to a potential new friend. And what do you get in return? They turn up their nose, say that your food isn’t good enough for them, refuse your hospitality. Well fine. Let them keep to themselves and we’ll keep to ourselves.

This scene played out enough times to establish that Jews and Gentiles just aren’t compatible. In addition to not eating together, which of course is kind of a big deal for hospitality, Jews and Gentiles would not mingle in the same social circles. They maintained completely separate cultures. The separation between Jews and other religions persists to today.

But Paul said, “In his flesh [Jesus Christ] has made both into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us.” How can the dividing wall be broken down? Only by breaking down the Law of Moses. As long as the Law remains, there will always be a reason for Jews and Gentiles to stay separate. There will always be conflict and resentment. So Paul said that through Christ, the Law has been made ineffective, allowing Jews to freely mingle with Gentiles as one people, members of God’s household.

Before Christ, there was an “inside” and an “outside”—Jews were insiders and Gentiles were outsiders. Now that Christ has broken down the dividing wall of hostility, there is only “inside.” Jews and Gentiles alike are part of God’s family with equal access through the Holy Spirit. Easy to say, hard to do. After centuries of living separate lives and developing separate cultures, simply saying, “The distinctions don’t matter anymore,” isn’t sufficient to bring people together. Our natural inclination is to develop factions. We tend to congregate with people who think alike, who look alike, who act alike.

What divides people today? In Paul’s context, the important division was between Jew and Gentile—a religious and cultural difference. Those divisions exist still today. There is hostility between Christians and atheists. There is hostility between different kinds of Christians, whether Presbyterian or Catholic or Baptist or whatever. There is hostility between American Christians and Christians in Africa and the Global South.

But looking beyond the church, there are lots of other ways we divide ourselves. It seems like politics is the strong undercurrent that drives so many disagreements, especially in a presidential election year. Things have gotten particularly heated and even violent last week with the assassination attempt. Violence is never acceptable, but is the natural result of the apocalyptic rhetoric and our culture of glorifying violence. We don’t really know what drove the shooter, but perhaps a desire for fame or notoriety. Regardless, I’m not looking forward to the next six months of campaigns and election aftermath. Whoever wins, it’s going to be ugly, potentially violent, and relationships will certainly be damaged or broken.

What else? What other ways do we find to divide ourselves? Ethnicity. Language. Gender. Age. Class. Wealth. The list goes on and on. In some cases, the formal divisions have ended, but the damage persists because, like the Jews and Gentiles, simply saying “there is no reason for conflict” doesn’t eliminate it. For example, it was IN MY LIFETIME that women were given the right to get loans in their own names. The Equal Credit Opportunity Act was passed in 1974 and prohibited discrimination against a loan or credit applicant for reasons related to sex, marital status or familial status (as well as race, religion, and other reasons). I suspect that there are people here today whose lives would have been different if the rules had changed earlier. I also know that a decade later, probably two or three decades later, probably even today a half-century later, women still had and have trouble getting salesmen to respect them as individuals capable of making independent financial decisions. This is just one of the many ways that artificial divisions exist in our society and persist even after laws change.

We may be Presbyterians, but we are also Americans. We spend an hour or two each week focused on our church family, but the other 160+ hours living in American culture. We cannot help but inject our American attitudes into our church life. We cannot help but develop a church culture that looks an awful lot like American culture, but hopefully with more love of God and love of neighbor than most people.

So the question I would put to you is this: What aspects of our American culture and congregational culture have we imported into God’s kingdom, that inadvertently create barriers that keep people out? I believe that God’s realm is a state of universal human flourishing—universal, not just for a few people, but for everyone. God’s love is on offer to everyone who seeks it. What do we do that creates barriers? Do we actually have “open doors”?

When I look out at this congregation, I mostly see middle-class, educated Baby Boomers. That’s not a value assessment—that’s just a factual statement of who we are. Problems arise when we take our perspectives as the norm and expect others to conform to us. For example, in 2016, we had our Christmas Eve service at 5:00 pm. I didn’t think much about it, because I have never had to work past noon on Christmas Eve. Schools are closed, so teachers and other staff are off. Of course, if you’re retired, then you’re not tied to a work schedule. But there are plenty of jobs for which Christmas DAY is a holiday, but Christmas EVE is not. This was a decision that was made without any malice or exclusionary impulse, but that did in fact exclude certain people from attending worship.

In what other ways do we take our own lifestyles, attitudes, and family situations as normative? On the one hand, we should adapt to the people who show up, but on the other hand, we should meet people where they are. We all have a particular vision of what it means to worship God, and what a sanctuary should look like, and how the liturgy and music should flow, and so forth. For most of us, that vision has been shaped by many years or decades of worshipping in this church, or perhaps in other similar churches. But none of what we do is the One True Way to Worship God. In talking with my family members and friends who attend other churches, there is a ton of diversity, a wide range of ways that people can authentically worship the same God that we do.

Now, you might say that having a worship service that looks like the broader culture is giving in and abandoning our principles. But again I’ll say, none of what we do is the One True Way to Worship God, and we are called to meet people where they are and invite them into God’s family, not to force them to become like us first.

Once we meet people where they are, our goal should be to enable them to connect to our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, and to live in shalom, just like the banner says. Paul repeatedly uses the word “peace” in this passage: For Christ is our peace, who proclaimed peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near. The Hebrew word for peace is shalom, but it means far more than the absence of violence. In the book Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin, Christian author Cornelius Plantinga described the biblical concept of shalom:

The webbing together of God, humans, and all creation in justice, fulfillment, and delight is what the Hebrew prophets call shalom. We call it peace but it means far more than mere peace of mind or a cease-fire between enemies. In the Bible, shalom means universal flourishing, wholeness and delight – a rich state of affairs in which natural needs are satisfied and natural gifts fruitfully employed, a state of affairs that inspires joyful wonder as its Creator and Savior opens doors and welcomes the creatures in whom he delights. Shalom, in other words, is the way things ought to be.

Think about that: shalom is the way things ought to be. Life in Christ is universal flourishing, wholeness, the way God intended for life to be. Isn’t that amazing? Isn’t that something you want everyone to experience? The promise of the Gospel is that shalom is available to everyone if they choose to participate. But how can they choose to participate if nobody offers them that choice? If a person thinks that they are unworthy of God, or thinks that all churches are full of hypocrites who can’t possibly point them to God, or wants to participate but doesn’t know how or where to start, then it is incumbent on us to reach out to them, meet them where they are, identify whatever barriers they are encountering, and break them down.

In a recent discussion about spirituality that I attended, we talked about challenges on the spiritual journey. The biggest one that came up was fear. Too many people who were raised in a church were raised to fear God’s wrath, rather than welcoming God’s love. They were raised to fear that if they do something wrong, they’ll burn in Hell in eternal conscious torment. This fear is reinforced by cultural messages that seem to say that all Christian churches preach “fire and brimstone.” But I saw this Justin Buzzard quote circulating on the internet: “Christianity should feel like ‘My chains fell off’ not ‘I better not screw up.’” There is reconciliation through Christ, forgiveness and love and healing and wholeness. We should radiate that love to all who enter our doors.

Another challenge that came up is one that I struggled with for many years. I thought that I was self-sufficient and that I didn’t need God. This whole Christianity thing didn’t make much sense anyway, so why bother? I know there are lots of young people out there, by which I mean people younger than me, who feel the same way. But someday, they may have a life event that shows them that no, they really aren’t self-sufficient and they need something else in their lives. How can we be that something, a hospital for the spiritually sick, a place where people can turn when they have nowhere else to go?

The core of the Gospel is this: The kingdom of God is at hand! Shalom, peace, healing, wholeness, and flourishing are all available to everyone. Let us seek God’s guidance and wisdom to see the barriers that people encounter and then do our part to remove those barriers, to enable them to welcome Christ’s reign in their lives. Amen.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download