Engineering My Faith

Based on Matthew 5:20-37. Preached at First Presbyterian Church of Rolla on February 12, 2023.

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The Gospel According to Matthew is structured in such a way to evoke comparisons to Moses. Jesus is portrayed as the new Moses. We are currently in the Sermon on the Mount, which echoes the time Moses went up on Mount Sinai to enter into a covenant with God and receive the Law.

Jesus is the new Moses who delivers a new Law. This section is referred to as the antitheses, meaning a sequence of statements with contrasts. But as Jesus had just said, he came not to abolish the Law, but to fulfill it. His contradictory statements make the Law even more strict. He is saying that the Law that Israel had received was not really complete. The Law of Moses was basically set on a 7 or an 8, and Jesus is turning it up to 11.

When Moses received the Ten Commandments and then all of the other laws captured in Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, God was trying to create a new nation. Israel was just a ragtag assembly of tribes wandering in the desert. If they accepted God’s sovereignty and Law, they would become a holy nation, a priestly people set apart to serve God. Jesus comes along and says, That’s not good enough. Yes, it was fine back then, but now it’s time to create a new kind of community.

This new community needs righteousness exceeding the scribes and the Pharisees. The scribes were experts in the Law, and the Pharisees were known for following the Law scrupulously. But Jesus says, I AM the Law, and I will show you the way to fuller living in My kingdom. To be a part of this kingdom on earth as it is in heaven, here are all the things you need to do. And let me warn you, this is tough stuff.

First off, don’t murder. I think I can handle that one. I personally haven’t murdered anyone today. But Jesus goes further, saying, don’t insult anyone. In fact, don’t even be angry with anyone. For anger disrupts relationships, and holy relationships are the foundation of the kingdom of heaven. If you harm your siblings in any way, you are destroying that foundation.

As I mentioned last time, some Christian sects take the Sermon on the Mount very seriously. Most Christians throughout history have not. We started out as a small group living together with everything in common, as described in the Book of Acts, but later on allied ourselves with Empire. We made a deal with Constantine and his successors, sometimes implicitly but often explicitly, that we would condone their violent ways if they would allow us to continue to serve God.

Indeed, the Christian church often went further and actively perpetrated harm in God’s name. There are too many examples to list. The earliest one I can think of is the Crusades, where Christian armies went murdering and pillaging throughout eastern Europe and the Middle East under a Christian banner. Antisemitism has been rampant since the Middle Ages, resulting in the Inquisition, pogroms, and ultimately the Holocaust. The Doctrine of Discovery was used to justify brutal acts as Christians colonized the Americas. Boarding schools were created to destroy Native American culture, no matter the harm done to the children who were forced to attend them. Many churches openly supported slavery. Incidentally, on this date in 1909, the NAACP was founded in Springfield, Illinois, after race riots there. Denominations have continued to splinter over the past fifty years because of a variety of social issues that ultimately revolve around the question of who is to be included in God’s kingdom and who should have the privilege of leading and teaching God’s people.

We are the unfortunate and unwilling inheritors of this legacy. We can say that we’re not like those other Christians who did all of those horrible things, but we are tainted by the sins committed by our predecessors whether we acknowledge them or not.

Last week, I talked about our calling to be the light of the world. We should not be dentists to the world, but we should allow Christ to examine us and to show us our failings. In order to shine Christ’s love on others, we need to make ourselves worthy of carrying His love. We need to examine ourselves individually, as a congregation, as a denomination, and as a part of the universal Christian church to expose the ways in which we have caused or perpetuated harm.

Often, we commit sins of omission rather than commission. We fail to take responsibility for being a force for good in a broken world. Elie Wiesel famously said:

We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Wherever men and women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must – at that moment – become the center of the universe.

Elie Wiesel

Wiesel is a Holocaust survivor who saw firsthand what happens when good people fail to act. Neutrality helps the oppressor. We who are strong must help those who are weak.

When I think about all the ways Christianity has sinned over the last two millennia, and the legacy of that sinfulness in terms of poverty and oppression, I become overwhelmed. I cannot undo four centuries of white European oppression of people of color in the United States, done either in God’s name or with the church’s consent. I cannot undo the harm that was done by marauding Christians throughout the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. If I spent the entire rest of my life working for peace and reconciliation and restitution of what has been stolen, the most I could hope for is a drop in the bucket, an infinitesimal good among an enormous evil. Even if our congregation or whole denomination decided that was our only objective, we could barely move the needle.

The reality is that the world is broken in ways that I can’t heal, and that we as a group cannot heal. But, we are a people of hope, not hopelessness. We are a people who believe in a God who can overcome sin and even death. We worship a risen Christ who promises eternal life in his kingdom. Reconciliation may be impossible for us, but with God, all things are possible.

Jesus commands us to be reconciled with our siblings in the kingdom. If you’ll notice, he didn’t say, “If someone has wronged you and you are holding a grudge, go and be reconciled to them before offering your gift at the altar.” No. He said, “If you have wronged someone, go and be reconciled to them.” The onus is upon the party who has committed the sin.

Again, you may say that you haven’t broken any relationships that need to be healed. But Jesus sets the bar impossibly high and asks us to broaden our perspective. Think about the people who are not here today and why. At least some of them are people that we know who have been hurt by our actions or inaction. Many more of them are people that we don’t know, but who hold us accountable for the sins of the Church.

Being the light of the world means showing love to those who need it. Jesus says that we should be reconciled to those who have a claim against us. Relationships are healed one-on-one. Relationships are healed when the person who is in the wrong reaches out in humility and asks for forgiveness. Relationships are healed when two people come together and experience God’s presence, the binding power of the Holy Spirit. Relationships are healed when you are willing to own your role in the harm that has been done, or in perpetuating a system that is harmful, or in enabling harm through your silence or inaction.

This is hard. This can be painful. But ultimately, healing comes only when you build something new and beautiful as you work towards a greater good.

Let me tell you about a situation I was in right at the beginning of my tenure as department chair, back in August. There is an endowed professorship that historically was tied to my department. The previous professor who held that position left in summer 2021. The end of the story is that the position is no longer restricted to my department, and there is an active search right now to fill the professorship with a new hire in a different department. This was an extremely painful experience, right after I took over. I was extremely angry at various administrators, which reached its climax with a call to my dean that I regret.

The story has a happy ending of sorts. The dean and I have a pretty good relationship now. He understood where I was coming from, and I eventually understood that there were just miscommunications along the way. Also, the root of the problem wasn’t any evil act on anyone’s part. Rather, the problem came about because of a set of mutually incompatible expectations and a lack of sufficient resources. It resulted not from a personal failure but from a systemic failure.

So often, our interpersonal relationships are damaged by these systemic issues. There isn’t enough time or money or space to satisfy everyone’s needs. Saying yes to one good thing means saying no to another good thing that deserves a yes. What we say is not always the same as what other people hear, and vice versa. Decisions that were made a year or decade or century ago have repercussions that are still felt. The systems are too big for us to change on our own.

But what we can do is to heal relationships one at a time. I cannot resolve the university’s lack of sufficient resources, but I can develop a good relationship with my colleagues so that we can work together towards the greater good of serving our future alumni. I cannot resolve all of the harm done by the Christian church over the centuries, but I can show Christ’s love to those who suffer because of the church’s actions.

Jesus sets the bar impossibly high. He asks us to live in this life just the same as we will live in his eternal kingdom. He asks us to be perfect in an imperfect world. He says all these things knowing that we cannot possibly reach that ideal. But he also promises to fill us with the Holy Spirit who can help us grow in grace and become more Christ-like. He also promises forgiveness when we forgive, new life when we abide in him, and a glorious future that he is preparing for us.

Not every relationship can be salvaged. Not every harm can be remedied. But in baptism, we have each been claimed by Christ and responded by promising to be Christ’s faithful disciple, obeying his Word and showing his love. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God. We embody God’s Word when we bring peace to a violent world, when we heal broken relationships, when we enable the oppressed to go free and flourish. We may fall short—in fact, we will fall short—but Christ will be with us by the Holy Spirit, helping us to do God’s will if we will only try. We are Christ’s body, Christ’s eyes and ears and hands and mouth to everyone we meet as we heal what is broken in this world. Let our yes be yes, as we answer our calling to be vessels of Christ’s reconciling love. Amen.

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Preached at First Presbyterian Church of Rolla on February 5, 2023. Based on Matthew 5:13-20.

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Today, we are continuing the Sermon on the Mount. This is arguably the most important part of the Gospel According to Matthew, and sometimes is treated as the “canon within the canon.” Some Christian sects, such as Anabaptists like Mennonites and the Amish, elevate the Sermon on the Mount above other teachings, basically viewing the Gospel through the lens of this sermon. It contains some of the most famous teachings of Jesus, like the Beatitudes that Susan spoke about a couple of weeks ago.

The passage I just read starts with two of the most popular images to describe the church: salt and light. From a modern perspective, it is sometimes hard to understand the cultural depth of these two images. Let me first speak briefly about salt.

How can salt lose its saltiness? What does it mean to be “salt of the earth”? I’ve read a bunch of different commentaries with different explanations, so I’m not sure which is right. One possibility is that Judean salt was impure and would be kept in a sack. The actual sodium chloride would leach out faster than some of the other constituents, leaving rocks that were of no use but to be trampled under foot. Another possibility that makes more sense to me is that salt was traditionally used as a fertilizer. Too much salt kills plants, but a modest amount helps poor soil, a little bit like adding lime. For me, that squares with being “salt of the earth.” So we are supposed to bring new growth to barren lands, or barren hearts.

What I mostly want to talk about today is light. I would bet that everyone here today is within arm’s reach of a light source. I personally keep one in my pocket. If you look around, you’ll see little lights on the microphones and big lights hanging from the ceiling. Lorie has a light over her head, and I’m looking right into some bright lights. Lights are everywhere.

Indeed, lighting needs have driven technology far more than we appreciate. In ancient times, the primary source of light was lamps filled with animal fat, whether from cows or goats or fish. These lamps would stink. Rich people would use vegetable oils instead, especially olive oil. Eventually, candles were developed, still using animal fat. This was all the state of the art until the nineteenth century. The need for oil to provide light drove people in the north Atlantic to hunt walruses to local extinction. Then it drove the global whale trade.

The first major change was the use of coal, petroleum, and natural gas. In the nineteenth century, coal gas lamps became common in cities. A lamplighter would go along the street each evening and light the gas lamps to brighten the way. Homes were plumbed with gas lines. With the advent of petroleum, many people switched to kerosene lanterns. Think about this: the oil industry was born in 1859 in Titusville, Pennsylvania, but the Ford Model T, which was the first mass-produced automobile, didn’t go on the market until 1908. What were people using the oil for? Primarily, for light.

And what drove Edison’s pursuit of electrical technology? Light. He patented and commercialized the incandescent bulb in 1880 and revolutionized our use of light. Since then, we have developed more sophisticated light sources like fluorescent and LED bulbs.

Light is foundational to society. It allows us to navigate at night and indoors. It enables us to search for what we have lost. It allows us to read and to learn.

In Matthew, Jesus says, “You are the light of the world.” Yet the Gospel According to John opens poetically, saying, “What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overtake it.” John wrote that Christ was the light of all people. How do we square this with Jesus’s words saying that we are the light of the world? Well, Paul described the Church as Christ’s body. Christ is the light, but we are the vessels of that light. We are the lamps filled with the oil of the Holy Spirit, burning brightly with the love of Christ. We shine, not because of who we are ourselves, but because we carry the light of Christ’s love. Jesus came to teach us how to become vessels of his love, lamps burning brightly in a dark world.

Being the light is a prophetic task. I subscribe to a daily email from the Center for Action and Contemplation, a Franciscan center founded and led by Father Richard Rohr. Their theme in 2023 is The Prophetic Path. So far, the focus has been on Jesus as a prophet. Often, we think of prophets as those who tell the future, but in reality, a prophet is someone who speaks the Truth, with a capital T, about the present. The prophet sees what’s going on in the world and points it out. Father Rohr wrote, “What is a prophet? Let me try this as a definition: one who names the situation truthfully and in its largest context. When we can name the situation truthfully and in its largest context, it cannot get pulled into interest groups and political expediency. … We don’t want the big frame. No one wants the big picture. … The prophet or prophetess speaks truthfully and in the largest context.”

Think about the first prophet, Moses. Yes, he told the Israelites about the Promised Land of Canaan, but more importantly, he denounced the evil of Pharaoh and the might of God to overcome that evil. All throughout the Old Testament, we hear about prophets speaking of the evil being done in Israel or Judah. Prophets like Amos denounce the way that the powerful mistreat the poor. He said:

For three transgressions of Israel,

    and for four, I will not revoke the punishment,

because they sell the righteous for silver

    and the needy for a pair of sandals—

they who trample the head of the poor into the dust of the earth

    and push the afflicted out of the way;

Amos 2:6-7a

Amos goes on to proclaim that destruction is coming, but his primary message is that the present order of things is evil and not aligned with God’s will. That is the prophetic task, and that is what it means to be light. Like a spotlight, the prophet focuses the people’s attention on specific ways in which the world is broken, calling them to repent and fix the broken parts of their lives and their communities and their society.

Sometimes, the situation is so dire that a prophet is needed to proclaim Truth to the masses. Martin Luther King, Jr., was just such a prophet, speaking out against the systems and structures that perpetuated evil dating back centuries. But prophets like him are few and far between. Most often, we are dealing with the mundane, the casual, day-to-day shortcomings in our lives. Growing in God’s love is a process that takes time.

In that sense, we can be like the light of a dentist. Now, I only know one person who enjoys going to the dentist, and that’s Jesse. But most of us go to the dentist regularly to make sure we have good, healthy teeth and gums, or to correct problems that have emerged over the years. When we lived in Arkansas, our dentist was not very good. I think he just wasn’t very thorough. When we moved to Illinois, Rhonda and I went to a new dentist who found all of the things he had overlooked. Both of us needed root canals, in addition to several fillings. Our new dentist had better tools that allowed her to see the problems deep in our teeth and correct them before they got even worse. That was an unpleasant experience that played out over several months, but the alternative would have been even more suffering and eventually lost teeth.

In the same way, when the light of Christ’s love shines on the dark parts of our lives, it can be painful. If you really take Jesus’s teachings seriously, you will see all sorts of unpleasant aspects of your life: ways that you have mistreated your neighbor, ways that you have failed to love God with all your heart, ways that you have sinned by getting your priorities out of whack. Some people fear that experience, just as some people fear the dentist, but the reality is that hiding from God just delays the inevitable. If you do not root out problems when they are small, they fester and grow and ultimately can take over your life.

Now, I’m not advising you to be like a dentist, identifying all of the problems in other people. That’s a path that leads to being judged a hypocrite and alienating the people you care about. Christianity has earned a reputation for hypocrisy because churches so often criticize others while condoning sin among their members and leaders. As Jesus said elsewhere, “Why do you look at the splinter in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?” What I’m saying is that each person needs to let Christ illuminate themselves to find those sinful parts of their lives and root them out, so that they can become Christ’s light to others.

Because that was Jesus’s commandment in this passage. Be the light! We have been given an amazing gift, the gift of membership in Christ’s family, blanketed with Christ’s love. Jesus says it’s as if we are a lamp. What is the purpose of a lamp? Let me ask it this way: Do you naturally desire to look at a lamp? Probably not. When I run at dusk or after dark, headlights are a real problem. When a light is shining right in my eyes, it becomes all that I can see. When the car passes, I am momentarily blinded until my eyes adjust. We are not drawn to light like moths. Rather, we use light to illuminate our path.

We are not called to be a dentist’s light, rooting out evil in other people no matter how painful. We are not called to be a flashlight shining in people’s eyes and blinding them to the world around them. We should not expect that our light will draw people to us like moths to the flame. Rather, we are called to be a streetlamp, illuminating the path to goodness. We don’t need to be a bright beacon like Martin Luther King, Jr., or Dorothy Day or William Barber or Desmond Tutu. We just need to be a part of the process of life and shine a little bit of light, a little bit of love, when we find someone in a dark place.

Jesus commands us to shine our light on the world to reveal the good and the bad, and to enable people to see a path to God. We are all people on a journey, one that ultimately leads to the eternal light of God’s presence. In the meantime, some people are walking in darkness, frightened of the world around them, unaware of God’s presence in their lives. We who know Christ know God’s love. We walk in the light of that love and can channel it to shine for others.

Let’s not put our light under a bushel. Instead, let’s shine for the world. That means exhibiting God’s love for the world. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son.” God loves THE WORLD. Not just some people, but the WHOLE WORLD. Unfortunately, many people do not know the loving God that we know. They may have heard of a judgmental God, one who only loves people who act in a certain way or believe a certain thing, or one who condemns people who act in other ways. We know a God who loves everyone, who desires that each person should walk in the light of Her love.

Let us seek to be a church that preaches the true Gospel, the Good News that the kingdom of God is at hand for everyone. Let us be light in the darkness of people’s lives so that they may see the path that leads to God. Let us not be afraid of the dark, but know that the light shines in the darkness and the darkness will never overtake it. Amen.

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Preached at First Presbyterian Church of Rolla on Baptism of the Lord Sunday, January 8, 2023. Based on Matthew 3:13-17.

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We often think of baptism as a quintessentially Christian ritual that sets us apart from Jews. In reality, it was a re-imagining of the mikveh. Throughout the Torah, and especially in Leviticus, there are commandments to “wash with water.” For example, Leviticus 17:14-16:

“For the life of every creature—its blood is its life; therefore I have said to the Israelites, ‘You shall not eat the blood of any creature, for the life of every creature is its blood; whoever eats it shall be cut off.’ All persons, native-born or alien, who eat what dies of itself or what has been torn by wild animals shall wash their clothes and bathe themselves in water and be unclean until the evening; then they shall be clean. But if they do not wash themselves or bathe their body, they shall bear their guilt.”

Leviticus 17:14-16

Uncleanness is different from sin. There are other parts of Leviticus that talk about sins like murder and stealing. Uncleanness is a ritual status that keeps a person out of the community. Think about Paul’s writings about Jews and Greeks eating together. Mainstream Jewish thought in Paul’s time was that Greeks, or Gentiles, were unclean, and therefore not suitable to eat with or associate with. Jews could become unclean for a variety of reasons spelled out in Leviticus, and in fact, ritual uncleanness was a part of daily life. But all uncleanness could be resolved. Depending on the circumstances, maybe there was a sacrifice needed, or maybe there was a waiting time, or maybe there was an inspection. But in practically all cases, the uncleanness was ended by a ritual bath, or mikveh.

The mikveh was also used to prepare a priest for service. Jews in normal daily life would accumulate some uncleanness, but nothing insurmountable. Priests, though, had to be totally clean, so before being anointed, they needed to ritually bathe.

The mikveh was and still is used to prepare anyone who wants to convert to Judaism. Jews generally don’t proselytize any more, but occasionally someone will want to become Jewish. Men need to be circumcised, of course, but both men and women need to ritually bathe. The mikveh washes away their uncleanness, accrued during a life separated from God, and brings them into the Jewish community.

It was this ritual bath that John the Baptist re-imagined as his baptism. He called people to repentance and a renewed relationship with God. He extended the concept of ritual uncleanness to moral uncleanness, sinfulness that needed to be washed away. Even the Pharisees and Sadducees saw the merit in ritual bathing, so they came to him. John embraced the Law of Moses but not the religious establishment. He was in some sense like the Christian reformers of the sixteenth century. Like Luther or Zwingli or Calvin, who accepted Christianity but rejected the Pope and the Roman Catholic hierarchy and its teachings, John the Baptist accepted the Law as taught in scripture and in the synagogues, but rejected the high priest and the Temple power structures. He was a fundamentalist of sorts. He proclaimed that the Jews of his day were inheritors of an ancient covenant but had fallen short of their obligations. They had become unclean not by eating non-kosher foods but by ignoring the poor, the widow, and the orphan, and by appeasing the Roman authorities. Like many back-to-basics reformers, he attracted a number of followers who could sense that there was something wrong in their lives.

Into this mix, Jesus appears. By submitting to John’s baptism, Jesus implicitly endorses John’s world view. By baptizing Jesus, John implicitly endorses Jesus’s ministry. This scene is a transition of power, a demonstration that John and Jesus acknowledge each other’s legitimacy and Jesus’s superiority.

If we think of baptism solely as washing our sins away, we are left to wonder why Jesus had to do it. We believe that he was the Son of God and therefore incapable of sin. So why did he need to be baptized?

Well, think back to the purpose of the mikveh. Ritual bathing isn’t about sins so much as about community. If you do something to become unclean, you cannot worship God and are separated from the holy gathering. After becoming clean, you are welcomed back into full membership in the community and are able to approach God with confidence. Jesus enters John’s community and literally enters his stream of thought as he is baptized in the waters of the Jordan River.

In the past year, we have welcomed two new members of Christ’s body through the sacrament of baptism. If all goes well, we will welcome another this year. I have been working with Cassie over the past month to teach her about Presbyterianism. One important lesson was about sacraments. Roman Catholicism has seven sacraments, but Protestant churches just have the two that Jesus did: baptism and communion. Baptism is a one-and-done sacrament. It’s a grafting onto Christ’s body, which is the Church. Different denominations and Christian movements have different understandings of its function and requirements, and so some only acknowledge baptism done the “right” way. For example, Catholics only acknowledge Catholic baptisms done by a Catholic priest. Missouri Synod Lutheran churches do not acknowledge baptisms done in our denomination or even in ELCA Lutheran churches, I think because we ordain women. Baptist churches and churches in the Christian Restoration movement like Greentree only acknowledge baptism by full immersion, undertaken by someone who is old enough to make a conscious decision.

We Presbyterians are pretty open-minded. We acknowledge any baptism that satisfies two key requirements: water is involved, and the baptism is trinitarian, done in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. We reject baptisms from Mormons and other non-trinitarian sects, but we acknowledge infant baptism, or adult baptism, done by sprinkling or immersion, performed by someone of any gender.

Baptism is a visible sign and seal of God’s invisible grace. Since we cannot control God’s grace, we cannot act as gatekeepers for baptism. The reason I led Bryan through classes, and I’m teaching Cassie now, and the session “inspects” candidates for baptism (or their parents, in the case of infants), is to make sure they know what they’re signing up for. Baptism grafts a person onto Christ’s body. What does that mean? Well, they are supposed to then act as if they were a part of Christ’s body. They are supposed to be Christ’s eyes and ears and hands and mouth in the world. People are baptized into a particular community, so they need to understand the expectations of that community.

Those expectations can sometimes be draining. It can be hard to love people the way God does. It can be hard to trust in God’s providence. That’s why we have the second sacrament, communion. The Lord’s Supper provides sustenance as we grow into the people God intends us to be. It’s like when a farmer grafts a branch onto a tree: it will only grow if the host tree provides nutrients to sustain it. Each month, we partake of Christ’s body to sustain our work in the world and our growth as Christians. To help us to fulfill our baptismal vows.

Let’s review what those vows are. Before being baptized, each candidate needs to answer affirmatively to three questions.

One: Trusting in the gracious mercy of God, do you turn from the ways of sin and renounce evil and its power in the world? This should be the easy one, but everyone here knows how hard it really is. I would guess that everyone here commits a sin of some sort every day. I doubt many people here have committed murder, but as Jesus taught, being angry is almost as bad. Early church fathers taught that having two coats is a form of stealing, since the second one should be given to someone who has none. Boy, I’m guilty of that one! Not only do we all sin, but many times, we compromise with the forces of evil in the world. You all can probably guess my political leanings, and I can guess many of yours, but we must all remember that all political parties accommodate some forms of evil. We make compromises so that some good can be achieved, and turn a blind eye to the evils inherent to the systems in which we participate. The world’s political and economic systems are sinful, and that sinfulness infects us all.

Two: Do you turn to Jesus Christ and accept him as your Lord and Savior, trusting in his grace and love? OK, this really is the easy one. Well, it’s simple, at least. In the Baptist tradition, candidates need to be old enough to make this decision for themselves. In our tradition, parents can make this decision on behalf of their children. The main thing is that you need to acknowledge Jesus as your Lord and Savior, and reject all other gods, including gods like money.

Three: Will you be Christ’s faithful disciple, obeying his Word and showing his love? This is the flip side of the first vow. It is not enough to turn away from evil. We vow to actively pursue good. We vow to study Jesus’s teachings and then to put them into action. We vow to show his love to everyone he loves, which means everyone.

John taught that people should “bear fruit worthy of repentance.” I’ve talked before about salvation and my belief that everyone is saved. Others believe that a person needs to accept Jesus Christ as their savior in this life in order to be raised to eternal life. That belief drives evangelism, because believers are driven to “save souls.” If you believe in universal salvation like I do, the goal is not to save souls, but to save lives. Jesus extended John’s teachings and, like a new Moses, provided rules for how we are all to live in this world. He taught us to love God and also to love our neighbors, and taught us who our neighbor is and how we should love them. Being a good disciple means studying Jesus’s teachings and then putting them into practice to bear good fruit.

Baptism is a rite of passage, like graduation. Remember that a graduation ceremony is called “commencement,” which means “beginning.” It’s an end to one phase and the beginning of a new phase of life. After completing high school or college or some training program, there is a public acknowledgement of your achievements, a welcome into the new community of finishers, and an exhortation to go put your learning to work. I want to tell you about this new ring I’ve been wearing for about a month. There is an organization called the Order of the Engineer. In 1922, a professor at the University of Toronto convinced his colleagues that engineers needed to take a vow to uphold the standards of their profession, and asked Rudyard Kipling to write the vow for them. The first ceremony was held in 1925 in Montreal. Then in 1970, some American engineers adapted the Canadian ceremony and instituted the Order of the Engineer in Cleveland. It’s not a membership organization. It is simply a vow that engineers make that is signified by a stainless-steel ring on the last finger of their working hand. The vow is a public pronouncement of obligations to the standards of the engineering profession, and the ring is a visible sign and reminder of that vow. I have here the certificate that I received. If you could see it, you would recognize that it is signed not by some representative of the Order, but by me. It is another reminder of the vow that I made.

I had never heard of the Order of the Engineer until this past fall, but I have often said that to me, engineering is more than just a job or career or profession, but an identity. So it made perfect sense for me to acknowledge that identity publicly.

In the same way, baptism is an affirmation of a person’s identity as a child of God and a part of the body of Christ. You are all already beloved by God, whether you have been baptized or not. Baptism is a visible sign and seal of invisible grace. It is an external indication of something that happens internally. It is a declaration that you accept God’s love, and a welcome into one particular community of believers as representatives of all the saints in every time and place. It is a beginning of a new life of following Jesus.

Once you have been baptized, you are commissioned to be a disciple of Christ. You are a part of that body of believers who received the Great Commission to “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 Jesus commands us. Baptism makes God’s grace visible to the person being baptized, who then makes God’s grace visible to the world. We are instruments of baptism for the whole world. Jesus said that streams of living water would come from the heart of those who believe in him. That living water is the love of Christ channeled through each one of us, flowing out to each person we meet.

God desires that the whole world will be transformed into their holy dwelling. God desires that the whole world will be washed of its uncleanness and brought into holy community. We who have been baptized are part of that community. We have pledged to be Christ’s faithful disciples, obeying his Word and showing his love as conduits of his living water. Let us always remember that pledge and strive to be visible signs of an invisible grace at work in each person we meet, binding us together and birthing a new heavenly earth. Amen.

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Preached at First Presbyterian Church of Rolla on January 1, 2023. Based on Matthew 2. This combines the First Sunday After Christmas Day with Epiphany Sunday.

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The lectionary is a structured way of marching through the Bible each Sunday. Some preachers, like Bob Morrison, don’t like using the lectionary, in part because it leaves stuff out. I figure once I have preached on every text in the lectionary, I might start venturing elsewhere in the Bible. But for now, I’m sticking with it.

The lectionary is a three-year cycle. The Gospel of John is sprinkled through all three years, but each year is primarily organized around one of the three synoptic Gospels: Matthew for year A, Mark for year B, and Luke for year C. The year starts with Advent, so we are just a month into year A. I thought I’d take this opportunity to give you a thumbnail sketch of Matthew since we’ll be in it all year.

The reason we have four Gospels is that they each have a different theme, a different main perspective. The theme of Matthew is that Jesus is like Moses and is leading his people to freedom. The Torah, or Pentateuch, is the first five books of what we call the Old Testament: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy. There is a story arc to the Torah that starts with one man, Adam, whose descendants include Jacob, renamed Israel. Jacob and his twelve sons move to Egypt during a famine and are the fathers of twelve tribes. Their relationship with Pharaoh degenerates into slavery, so then Moses is raised up to lead the Israelites to freedom and the Promised Land of Canaan. Along the way, God enters into a covenant relationship with Israel, encapsulated in the Ten Commandments, and also gives them the Law to help them fulfill their end of the covenant. They struggle to follow God’s commands, particularly the prohibition against idolatry, so they are forced to wander in the desert for 40 years. Even Moses is not allowed to enter Canaan, but then the next generation is blessed and told to enter the Promised Land.

Matthew is structured to evoke this same story arc. The parallels are not exact, but are enough to remind the first readers of their origin story. The Gospel is oriented around five discourses, mirroring the five books of the Torah. It starts with a genealogy that situates Jesus in Israel’s history. The discourses include Law-like teachings, particularly the Sermon on the Mount. When Jesus institutes the Lord’s Supper, which we will be celebrating today, he calls it a new covenant. Then the very end of the Gospel is the Great Commission: Go into all the world.

So here we are near the beginning, and Matthew is trying to establish those parallels. I’m not saying that he fabricated anything, just that he selected story elements that highlight Jesus’s role as the new Moses. The first aspect he tries to evoke is the sense that he is under threat and always on the move. The book of Genesis is a travelogue of sorts. It tells the story of Abraham’s travels, then his son Isaac’s travels, then his son Jacob’s travels, then the grand story of his son Joseph going to Egypt and asking all of his brothers to join him there. In the same way, we see the Holy Family, Joseph, Mary, and Jesus, under threat and on the move. They’re in Bethlehem in Judea, but they have to leave and sojourn in Egypt. When the threat is removed, they return to what was Israel but they can’t quite go home. There is still some danger, so they go to Nazareth instead of Bethlehem.

When Jesus shows up, everything changes, and everyone’s lives are up-ended. Poor Mary was not yet married but became pregnant. Poor Joseph is betrothed to a woman who becomes pregnant but apparently with another man’s child. An angel tells him to go through with the marriage anyway, which probably leaves a cloud hanging over their family throughout their lives. Not only does Joseph need to marry this pregnant woman, but he also needs to flee to Egypt, and then move to a different town. Nothing in his life will ever be the same.

In the same way, Jesus commands that we follow him, knowing that our lives will never be the same, and that we will live under threat from the world around us. In that time and place, the major threat against Jesus and his ministry that became Christianity was from the Roman Empire and their client kings and princes, Herod and his sons, in addition to the religious power structures. When Jesus was born, he was destined to die, just like all people. But he was particularly destined to die young because he posed a threat to the people who benefited from the structure of society as it was: rulers who liked to rule, religious authorities who liked their place of authority, and so forth. Anyone who threatens the structure of society can expect to run into problems in their lives.

The Church, with a capital C, is Christ’s body in the world, and is still under threat today. In some parts of the world, there are physical threats. I just listened to an audiobook by David Platt set in the Himalayas. The local Hindus and Buddhists see Christianity as teaching foreign gods that will anger their local gods, in a way that is reminiscent of many stories in the Bible. He tells a story about local leaders burning down the house and worship structure that belonged to a couple of Christian missionaries. He tells another story of tribal leaders literally stoning a Christian couple to death.

Here in America, though, the major threat against the Church is more mundane: irrelevance. I don’t need to tell you a bunch of statistics for you to realize that church attendance and membership are in decline. They have been since the Sixties. Some individual churches are doing just fine, but the broad trend in all denominations in America and western Europe is downward. Why? Lots of reasons, but I think the pandemic revealed the utter irrelevance of the Church to the majority of people. When things shut down in 2020, a lot of church leaders protested and insisted on continuing to meet. Why? Well, they said it was because that was essential to their worship of God, but I think really they were afraid that people would realize that they don’t need to attend worship. People who had already been just going through the motions would realize that they can find spiritual connections and human community without their churches. Even among those gathered here today, I’m guessing that most find community in other organizations as much as in the church—clubs and sororities, service and professional organizations, political parties and activist groups, and so forth.

Churches are also assailed for their hypocrisy. I want to be clear that I’m not speaking of First Presbyterian Church of Rolla specifically, but churches generally. Outsiders see Christian churches as places where we congratulate ourselves for being such good people, without actually having an impact on the community. During the cold snap right before Christmas, I saw a post on Facebook lamenting the fact that churches weren’t opening their doors to the homeless and those who were in places with inadequate heat. My first reaction was that we support the Mission, which provides that service. My second reaction was that we have our own struggles, and we don’t have the people and systems to manage a ministry like that, even for just a single night. But really, that criticism is fair and just one symptom of a broader disengagement from the problems of the world. We talk about them and give money to support organizations that help people, and many of us are part of those organizations, but is that really enough? It’s not enough for the unchurched people in Rolla to see us as reflections of the Light of the world.

As I said, the Gospel according to Matthew is full of Jesus’s teachings of a new Law. We’re in chapter 2; next week will be chapter 3 when Jesus is baptized; then in chapter 5, we have the Sermon on the Mount, which is the first of five discourses. It’s the most explicit set of teachings where he tells his followers to be salt and light for the world. He expands on Moses’s teachings and moves the locus of the Law from external to internal—not only should people not murder, but also they should not be angry. He says that they should love their neighbor and also that they should love their enemies. He says many other things, then says, “Everyone, then, who hears these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise man who built his house on rock.” We are to be not just hearers, but also doers.

The fifth and last discourse ends in Matthew 25. In it, he says that he will sit on the throne of his glory and judge the nations. He will separate the nations between those who cared for the hungry, the stranger, the naked, the sick, and the prisoner, and those nations who did not. Throughout the Gospel, Jesus teaches that we are supposed to care for one another, not just individually but as a community and society and world. He commands us to transform the world. He is concerned not with personal salvation, but with the salvation of all people.

The task before us in this new year is to be doers of the word, not just hearers. I want to return to that story I read about some missionaries in the Himalayas. This couple moved to a little village and built a house and a separate structure for their ministry. They helped the villagers while also teaching about Jesus. One night, a group of militants knocked on their door, with guns and torches. Pointing a gun at the couple, the leader told them that they needed to leave the village and never return. Once the couple was out, the militants burned both structures to the ground. The couple moved on, but stayed in touch with the villagers who had converted to Christianity.

Sometime later, there was a natural disaster that destroyed many homes in that village. When the missionary couple heard, they gathered up all the people they could and returned to the village to help rebuild. Even though their lives had been threatened and their possessions destroyed, they returned. They continued to love their enemies. Afterwards, the leader of the militants, who had been the conduit for so much hate directed at them, felt the love of Christ through the missionaries and converted to Christianity. He donated land for them to rebuild a worship & ministry center. He himself became an outcast and subject to hatred from his former fellow militants, but God’s love was stronger than their hate.

That’s what it means to follow Jesus’s teachings. That’s what it means to love your enemies. If you believe that Jesus loves you, shouldn’t you share that love with others? We are not saved by our works, but are saved for works. Jesus loves us and redeems us into God’s family so that we can serve others and bring them into God’s family.

The Church is now and has always been counter-cultural. In first-century Judea, that meant conflict with the Roman Empire, King Herod, and Herod’s sons. That meant conflict with the religious authorities who benefited from collusion with those secular rulers. That meant death on a cross for Jesus, death by stoning for Stephen, persecution and jail and floggings and executions for many other followers of The Way. Today, being counter-cultural means taking care of each other in an every-man-for-himself world. It means teaching love instead of judgment. It means seeking out the people who others consider problems to be ignored or eliminated and trying to bring them into community. It means working for a world in which all people are valued and know the love of God in their lives. In so doing, we will enter the Promised Land, a transformed world where God lives and reigns forever. Amen.

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Preached at First Presbyterian Church of Rolla on the Second Sunday of Advent. Based on Matthew 3:1-12.

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Let me start this morning by setting the scene. You may recall that John the Baptist is the son of Zechariah and Elizabeth. Elizabeth was an old woman and childless, so her pregnancy was a miracle. Zechariah was a priest, so John could have been a priest as well. All priests in the Temple were of the lineage of Aaron, so since his father was in that lineage, John was as well and could have joined the Temple power structure. But he chose a different path.

John is described as wearing clothing of camel’s hair. You may have heard of a “hair shirt.” It’s a coarse garment made of hair that is intentionally irritating to the skin. The point of the hair shirt, or John’s camel’s hair clothing, is mortification of the flesh to help you repent. John’s leather belt would have ensured that his rough clothing was pressed against his skin. The outfit was a way for him to explicitly reject his inheritance, particularly his inherited sins. He verbalizes this rejection by saying, “Do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our ancestor’; for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham.” He is rejecting the notion that membership in God’s kingdom comes by birth, and is asserting instead that it comes from God’s will.

The Temple was a massive institution. Observant Jews, as well as Gentiles who acknowledged the supremacy of Yahweh, would come from all over the known world. They would bring animals for sacrifice, or if they were coming from too far away, they would bring money. It was a huge operation that enriched the high priests. Over the centuries, they developed a cozy relationship with whoever was in power. At the time of John’s preaching, the high priests were deeply enmeshed in Roman politics so that they could continue to worship God as they had been taught by their forefathers.

John rejected this institution and went to the wilderness. He called all people to join him in that rejection. He proclaimed that the time was at hand to overturn the existing power structures and enter God’s kingdom instead. His message resonated with the poor and marginalized inhabitants of Judea, who were suffering under Roman rule. His message wasn’t really intended for the Pharisees and Sadducees, though. The Sadducees were aristocrats and the quintessential insiders in the Temple hierarchy. They were beneficiaries of the Temple operations and had everything to lose if the Temple were destroyed. The Pharisees were men of the people, but were busy setting up an alternative institution in the synagogues. Perhaps they weren’t wealthy like the Sadducees, but they still supported a rule-based religious structure.

John the Baptist preached that it was time to shed all of those rules and instead turn towards God. The word “repent” is usually taken to mean “confess your sins and stop doing them.” It’s an English translation of the Greek word metanoia, which more literally means to change one’s mind. It’s a spiritual conversion, a transformative change of heart. John was encouraging people to change the way they thought about the world.

The metaphor he used was separating the wheat from the chaff. Now, many times, this is interpreted to mean that some people are wheat and some people are chaff. Conveniently, those who interpret John’s metaphor in this way see themselves as the wheat and other people as chaff. But anyone who heard John would know that wheat and chaff come from the same plant, the same grain on that plant. Wheat is a form of grass whose seeds are edible. While it grows, the seed, or kernel, is surrounded by thin membranes that are like little leaves. These leaves dry out and are inedible. After being harvested, the wheat must be threshed and winnowed to remove this chaff. Threshing basically involves beating the grains to loosen the chaff from the kernels. Now you have a mixture of kernels that you want and chaff that you don’t. Winnowing is where you toss the mixture in the air and let wind blow the chaff away. If there’s no wind, you need to make wind with a big fan. All of this would be well-known to John’s audience. They would know that the chaff was an essential part of the plant while it was growing, but couldn’t be eaten and so it was something to be discarded.

I am reminded of the Solzhenitsyn quote which I have shared many times with you. In his book The Gulag Archipelago, which is a history of the vast system of prisons and labor camps in the Soviet Union, he wrote, “If only it were so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” Solzhenitsyn knew that there are no “good” people and no “evil” people, but that indeed we are all good and all evil. Rather than the easy work of separating the evil people out and disposing of them, we must do the hard work of separating the evil out of ourselves.

John’s message is first a call to personal repentance. What is the chaff in your own life? When wheat is growing, the chaff serves an important role. It protects the kernel so that it can grow and develop into something useful. The chaff is what you see when you look at a field of wheat. It hides the kernel from animals who might otherwise steal the food that farmers are trying to provide to society. What is the chaff in your life, and what is the wheat kernel?

I would say that the kernel is that part of you that is made in the image of God. It is the part that is all-loving, that seeks the good of all Creation. It is the part that is building God’s kingdom and transforming society. And yet, every one of us is surrounded by chaff, too. I just listened to an audiobook by Brian McLaren titled, Do I Stay Christian? He has an extended discussion of thirteen biases we have that prevent us from perceiving reality, and a prayer for God’s help to overcome them: confirmation bias, complexity bias, community, contact, and complementarity biases, competence, consciousness, comfort, and political biases, confidence, catastrophe, cash, and conspiracy biases. We are who we are, and we cannot really escape seeing reality through the lenses of these biases. Nor can anyone else, and so we present ourselves to the world in ways that will be acceptable to those who have these biases. We just had a holiday when extended families gather. Often, when families gather together, some people wear a shell that hides their true self and shows their family just what is expected of them. Maybe they hide their political opinions, or their understandings of God, or their financial or job status, or their relationship status, or even their true identities. Hiding our true selves is often necessary to get along in this broken world, but it prevents us from truly participating in God’s kingdom. It prevents us from truly experiencing God’s reconciling love, a love that is stronger than any human hatred, a love that transcends our limited understandings.

So John the Baptist said, Come get baptized. Come shed those things that are preventing you from experiencing God’s kingdom. Shine forth your true self, which is an image of God. Join in holy community that is united by the Holy Spirit that flows like a river through us all. Transform yourself, and in the process, transform the systems and institutions that surround you and have formed you.

Because John was not simply calling individuals to repentance. He was also calling for institutional repentance. He was calling for the Temple hierarchy to be up-ended. He was calling for Judaism to shed the chaff that prevented them from truly experiencing God’s loving community.

Well, a few decades later, the Temple was destroyed and two religions sprouted from its rubble: rabbinic Judaism and Christianity. Then both set about building up some chaff, and here we are 2000 years later with a lot of extra stuff hanging around. In a recent podcast about the Eastern Orthodox churches, a scholar pointed out that the Church preceded the Bible. Israel had been worshipping for centuries before anyone wrote down the scriptures that we know as the Old Testament, and the choice of books to include in the canon wasn’t settled until sometime after Jesus’s birth. The earliest books in the New Testament were written decades after Christ’s resurrection. So the Bible itself is a window into God’s reality, but only one window among many, and one that came a little bit late. Over the centuries since the Bible was written, our denomination and its predecessors piled up creeds and confessions on top of it. I would now like to read to you some selections from our Book of Confessions, which since 2016 has included 12 different confessional statements.

From the Nicene Creed: “We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one Being with the Father; through him all things were made.” Beautiful poetry, right? But what does it mean? We probably couldn’t all agree on what it means that Jesus Christ was begotten, not made, of one Being with the Father.

Now from the Scots Confession: “We abandon the teaching of the Roman Church and withdraw from its sacraments; firstly because their ministers are not true ministers of Christ Jesus (indeed they even allow women, whom the Holy Ghost will not permit to preach in the congregation to baptize) and, secondly, because they have so adulterated both the sacraments with their own additions that no part of Christ’s original act remains in its original simplicity.” So here we have both misogynist and anti-Catholic bias in one sentence. The Book of Confessions does have a footnote and discussion that at least partially rejects this section, but it remains in the book.

I’ll spare you the Second Helvetic Confession, but there is a long section where it first elevates Lactantius, Epiphanius, and Jerome, then rejects the Epicureans, Manichaeans, Marcionites, Pelagians, and other heresies. If anyone can explain to me what the Pelagian heresy was, let’s chat after worship!

For a while, the only official creed Presbyterians affirmed was the Westminster Confession. In fact, there are other Presbyterian denominations that still hold to that tradition. However, our Book of Confessions actually has two parallel versions, because two of our parent denominations had diverged in places.

Some would say that the Westminster Confession is what makes us Presbyterian. But what does that really mean? OK, I know the definition of Presbyterian and its Greek root word that means “elder.” But if you asked a random person on the street what a Presbyterian was, they wouldn’t really be able to explain it. It’s just a word. I was at an interfaith dialogue when someone said, “P-Presbyterian, is that like P-Pentecostal?” I explained that no, Presbyterians and Pentecostals are about as different as any two Christian sects could be. Even for us insiders, how would you explain the difference between Presbyterians, Lutherans, Episcopalians, Methodists, UCC, and so forth? We are in full communion with the Moravians and the Reformed Church in America, but I don’t really know what either of them are, let alone how they differ from Presbyterians.

This is all chaff. We are supposed to be the body of Christ. We are supposed to be image-bearers who exemplify the unity of God’s eternal kingdom. And yet, we keep finding ways to divide ourselves, to decide who is “in” and who is “out,” to decide which particular interpretations of scripture are correct, and so forth.

Indeed, we even divide ourselves over externalities that have nothing to do with God. I would say that the primary difference between the Episcopal church and PC(USA) is the form of worship. Along with the rest of the World Anglican Communion, they use the Book of Common Prayer, with all the historical liturgical trappings of high church. I would say that we’re not exactly “low church,” but certainly not as liturgical as the Episcopalians. If we look around the sanctuary today, we see a Christmas tree, an Advent wreath, and other indications that Christmas is coming. I would bet that you wouldn’t see any of that in a Baptist church or in a nondenominational church in the Christian Restoration movement, like Greentree or Ridgeview.

Now, I’m not arguing that we throw out the Book of Confessions or the Christmas tree. I’m as committed to the institution of the church as anyone. What I’m saying is that these are tools, and like any tools, they can be used as weapons. They can be used to bring us closer to God, to remind us that we are made in God’s image, to reveal to us the kernel of God’s divine spark within each of us, to create an institution that reveals God’s love for all humanity. OR, they can be used as weapons to divide us from one another, to hide our light from the world, to keep out those who we deem unworthy because they don’t believe or behave or look or act like we do.

That was John’s core message, and Jesus’s core message. Jesus said, “Behold, I am making all things new.” He proclaimed that all of the trappings of religiosity would fall away, leaving only the Holy Spirit to guide us into his eternal kingdom. John said that Jesus would separate the wheat from the chaff and burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire. As long as we are living in this world, we need the chaff to protect us as we grow into the people God intends. But as much as possible, we should shed those things that are only serving to separate us from one another.

This Advent, we are hopeful that God will do a new thing among us. Last Sunday, we heard an inspiring message from Pastor Greg Emery who has been helping us through this transition period. He gave us encouragement to keep on going and keep on hoping. We pray each Sunday that the Pastor Nominating Committee will find a new spiritual leader who will bring about our rebirth. But God is already at work among us. God is already calling us to shed those things that feel comfortable but no longer serve God’s kingdom. God is already raising up children of Abraham. God is ready for us to let our light shine forth as we bear God’s image to our community and our world. Be ready: Even now, the ax is lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. Those things we cling to that no longer bear fruit for God’s kingdom are passing away. Let go, and let God lead you, and lead us, into a glorious future where we bear fruit worthy of God’s love for the world. Amen.

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Preached at First Presbyterian Church of Rolla. Based on Luke 21:5-19.

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Right now, as we speak, sixteen nations are considered to be at war. The two that we hear about in the news are Russia and Ukraine, of course. Looking at the list I found, those are the only nations that fall into the pattern of “nation verses nation.” Yet other nations, from Afghanistan to Yemen, are experiencing civil wars and terrorist insurgencies. For example, northeastern Africa has widespread violence: a civil war in Somalia, a civil war in Ethiopia that has involvement from Eritrea, terrorist insurgency in Sudan, and ethnic violence in South Sudan, which only earned its independence a decade ago.

I looked at a list of “significant” earthquakes from USGS for the last year. I started copying the list but gave up after the second page. Just in the US, there have been significant earthquakes in Hawaii, Alaska, California, Oregon, South Carolina, and Georgia. Wikipedia indicates that there have been 1427 fatalities in 2022 due to earthquakes, with 1163 caused by a single earthquake in Afghanistan in June.

Then I looked at a list of the world’s hungriest countries. Many nations in Africa are struggling, some because of a history of war and ethnic conflict, others due to climatic changes. Closer to home, Haiti is experiencing substantial hunger after a series of earthquakes and hurricanes, which ravaged a nation that has a history of poor agricultural management and poor government.

Meanwhile, the world is still struggling with COVID-19. To date, this disease has claimed 6.6 million lives worldwide, close to one person of every thousand. Here in Rolla, we don’t talk about the pandemic very much, but it has certainly impacted our community and our institutions, including this church.

These are indeed the end times! Wars and insurrections, earthquakes, famines, plagues. About ten minutes of news will make you think the world is coming apart at its seams. Even America, long a bastion of democracy and the world’s leading power, seems to be struggling. A poll that I saw on election day indicated that 69% of Americans are worried about the future of our democracy. I recently listened to an audiobook called The Four Threats. It argued that there are four conditions that threaten democracy: political polarization, debates over the boundaries of inclusion in the political process, economic inequality, and excessive executive power. Of course, the book argued that the four threats have coincided today like never before.

But the book also described past episodes when democracy was in peril. They mentioned the 1950s and ‘60s as a time of relative health, but remember that the 1960s saw the assassinations of a president, an attorney general, and two civil rights leaders, all capped off in 1970 by the Kent State Massacre. Maybe there were other signs of health, but there were signs of trouble as well.

Stepping back a couple of decades, we often think of FDR as a great president who piloted the nation through difficult times, and there is truth to that. However, his presidency also saw the biggest increase in executive power, flirting with autocracy, as he instituted quasi-socialist programs, all in defense against fascism and communism.

The worst episode for our democracy was in the 1860s, but in 1800, it was uncertain we would even have a democracy. The 1790s were a time when the Federalist party was in control. In 1800, the Electoral College was split, so the presidential choice was thrown to the House of Representatives. They took THREE MONTHS to agree to transfer power to Thomas Jefferson and his Republicans (the party that is now called the Democrats).

It is tempting to think that we are unique in our struggles, but actually, wars, earthquakes, famines, and plagues have been the norm throughout human history. Another audiobook I listened to recently was set in England in the 1300s. That century started off with the Great Famine in 1315, which also had a couple of recurrences. The Hundred Years’ War between England and France started in 1337. The Black Death hit in 1348. Altogether, the famine and plague killed about half of England’s population, yet the Hundred Years’ War continued until 1453. Bleak times indeed.

Jesus’s ministry occurred during another bleak time, which only got worse. Judea had been an independent nation just a century earlier, but was then ruled by the Roman Empire. Insurrection was in the air—the Zealots, such as the Apostle Simon the Zealot, advocated a violent solution. Other parties like the Sadducees advocated appeasement and cooperation. Everything came to a head in the late 60s, and then Jerusalem was destroyed in 70 CE. This indeed seemed like the end of the world for Judaism.

But it wasn’t. There wouldn’t be another independent Jewish state until 1948, but Judaism wasn’t destroyed—just changed. Two major religions came out of the crucible of this destruction. The Pharisees led a change to what we know as rabbinic Judaism. They started to assemble the Talmud, a collection of rabbinic teachings about the Torah. The Hebrew Bible that we know today began to crystallize. Meanwhile, Christianity began to coalesce into a distinct, recognizable religion. Followers of the Way realized that they had better write down what Jesus had taught, resulting in the four canonical Gospels and the diversity of epistles that eventually were chosen for inclusion in the New Testament, as well as many other non-canonical writings.

In fact, one could argue that Christianity as we know it today would not exist if Jerusalem had not been destroyed. Up until that time, Judaism comprised several sects: Sadducees, Pharisees, Essenes, Zealots, Christians, and probably others whose names I don’t know. Everything in Jewish life revolved around the Temple, just as other religions had temples for their gods. They didn’t worship an idol as in those other temples, but they still believed in the need for transactional sacrifices, certain animals that needed to be sacrificed in certain ways for certain conditions, and only in the Temple where God was specially present. Throughout Paul’s letters, we see tension between Jewish Christians who still thought that such sacrifices were necessary, as well as other prescribed observances like circumcision, and who still were attached to the life of the Temple and synagogue, versus the Gentile Christians who saw no need for continuing a system that seemed to be a relic of the time before their Messiah came to usher in a new age. After the destruction of the Temple, everyone had to re-think the system. Most of the Jewish sects collapsed, leaving only the Pharisees. Meanwhile, Gentile Christians had no particular attachment to Jewish traditions, much less to Jerusalem, so they were freed to follow the Way that Jesus Christ had taught them through his apostles.

At any rate, in April of 70 CE, just before Passover, the Roman army surrounded Jerusalem and laid siege. Jewish factions within Jerusalem fought amongst themselves, weakening their defense. On August 30, the Romans finally overwhelmed the defenders and set fire to the Temple. Over the following month, fighting continued and ultimately, all of Jerusalem was burned to the ground.

We are conditioned to believe that fire is bad. In fact, around my department on campus, I strongly discourage people from using the “F” word after we had an actual fire in 2016. That fire in our building was hugely expensive, and not just financially. Everything was saturated with smoke; all of the carpet and ceiling tiles had to be replaced, as well as much of the HVAC equipment and some of the classroom equipment. But fire can also be restorative. Consider wildfires. If you are living in the urban fringe and a wildfire threatens your home, sure, it’s very bad. But in many ecosystems, fire is actually a necessary part of the life cycle. Fire clears away the dead wood and debris. Where I hunt in Colorado, there is a mountainside that suffered a wildfire a decade or so ago. Now, you can see the damage, but you can also see that aspens have completely filled the space that was left. Prairies require periodic fires to cause certain seeds to germinate.

Most animals fear fire, but humans long ago learned to control and use fire. Early agrarian societies saw the way prairies and woodlands responded to fire and used it to create farmland and to renew their fields after harvest. We use fire every day to cook our food and heat our homes and workplaces and power our cars. Industry is built on fire, from primitive forges and glass blowing furnaces to modern coal-fired power plants. Fire is a tool. Like any tool, it can be dangerous when used incorrectly, but it is also an essential component of modern society.

Malachi said, “See, the day is coming, burning like an oven, when all the arrogant and all evildoers will be stubble; the day that comes shall burn them up, says the Lord of hosts, so that it will leave them neither root nor branch.” Many people read these kinds of eschatological writings and identify with the evildoers. They fear the day of the Lord at the end of the age, worried that they won’t make the cut. Like I said last week, they’re afraid that they haven’t earned enough on God’s ACT and will be burned up. But really, apocalyptic writings are supposed to bring us comfort. They are supposed to remind us that no matter what happens, no matter how much evildoers seem to succeed in this world, in the end, God wins. In the end, God will remove evil from all Creation and form Christ’s peaceable kingdom. God’s fire is the restorative work of the Spirit, burning away all of the evil within us and purifying each one of us.

Jesus’s friends said, Look how awesome the Temple is! Jesus said, Everything is temporary. The Temple is nice, sure, but one day, it will be destroyed. One day, there will be wars, and earthquakes, and famines, and plagues. But you know what? That doesn’t matter. Whatever happens, I will be there with you. My words will never pass away, but will live within you.

This is one of those days. Today, there are wars, and earthquakes, and famines, and plagues. Today, there are believers being put out of their churches and separated from God’s kingdom. Today, there are Christians around the world being persecuted. Today, there are churches that are struggling to survive. We are indeed living in the end times.

Everyone, everywhere, throughout history, for the two thousand years since Jesus’s death and for two thousand or ten thousand more years to come, has lived through or will live through their own end times. And yet, Christ’s kingdom survives. It is here among us, wherever and whenever we come together in Christ’s name. The Day of the Lord comes and the fire of God’s wrath burns away the evil within us each. As Solzhenitsyn said, “The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.” Jesus will kindle his fire and burn away whatever doesn’t serve his kingdom, like a refiner’s fire. He will purify each one of us and put his words in our hearts.

Jesus said, the tribulations that will come upon each of us will be an opportunity to testify. If we trust our own intellect and our own wisdom to guide us through the time of trial, maybe we’ll do well, maybe we won’t. But if we trust in Jesus Christ to lead us, to show us the right path, to give us words and wisdom, then nobody and nothing can stand against us.

These are the end times. But what comes after the end is not death and destruction, but new life in Jesus. Let us seek to trust that God will carry us through the end and into a new beginning, freed from the constraints of everything that doesn’t serve the coming kingdom, freed from hate and anger and resentment and jealousy, filled instead with the deep love that is God’s wisdom. Amen.

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Preached at First Presbyterian Church of Rolla on All Saints’ Sunday. Based on Luke 20:27-38.

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To modern ears, this whole notion of a widow marrying her dead husband’s brother is just weird, or perhaps repulsive. Let’s spend a little bit of time trying to understand what’s going on. In that time and place, women were most certainly second-class citizens. There were some who had wealth, but by and large, women didn’t own property. They were essentially dependent on the men in their lives: first their fathers, then their husbands, then their sons. I can’t say that marriage had nothing to do with love, but certainly, marriage was centered on practical necessities. Men would get together and make appropriate arrangements for women.

Meanwhile, inheritance laws favored sons as well. When a man died, his sons would inherit his property and would continue the family line. If a man died without a son, and certainly if he died without any children, then who would inherit?

To address the issues of care for women and continuation of the family, levirate marriage was introduced. That’s what the Sadducees were talking about. If a man died without a son, then his widow would marry his brother. Any son who issued from that marriage would be considered the son of the deceased man. He would be expected to take care of his mother and to inherit the deceased man’s property.

This is kind of strange, right? I mean, not only is it strange to modern ears, but also, it’s a tortuous way to deal with the fact that women were powerless. Wouldn’t it be better if women could just fend for themselves? That way, they wouldn’t need a man to take care of their needs. If they were widowed, they could inherit their husband’s property and go on living.

That’s how Jesus describes the resurrection. He says, essentially, Look, you people are going to all these lengths to deal with a problem that has a fairly simple solution. Instead of levirate marriage, or indeed any marriage, being needed to care for disempowered women, all people will be supported by God.

The four Gospels have recurring discussions of the kingdom of God or the kingdom of heaven. Let’s assume for today that those are synonyms and look specifically at what the author of today’s text had to say about God’s kingdom. First and foremost, the kingdom of God is good news! In particular, it is good news for the poor, who shall inherit the kingdom. Entering the kingdom of God requires single-minded perseverance and is costly, but at the same time, it’s the outgrowth of something small like a mustard seed. It requires childlike faith, and wealth can be a barrier to entering it. It is here now, in our midst, but is also yet to come. It’s an already-but-not-yet transformation of Creation.

Complicated, right? Taken together, these disparate perspectives are teaching us that the kingdom of God is just different from what we know. It’s a different form of existence that can only be explained in paradox. Let me read to you from Luke 13, verses 29-30. “Then people will come from east and west, from north and south, and take their places at the banquet in the kingdom of God. Indeed, some are last who will be first, and some are first who will be last.” Jesus taught that people will come from all over the world to God’s banquet table, while social hierarchies would be overturned.

There is a recurring theme in the Old Testament that the Israelites were special. They were specially chosen by God to be a priestly people. They failed in their task and were exiled, but then God relented and re-established them. So there was a presumption that they would be first in God’s kingdom. Yet Jesus taught that the “last shall be first and the first shall be last.” He was trying to get them to understand that God’s ways are not like our ways. You cannot earn your way into heaven by following some rules, like the Jewish power structure at the time was teaching. Instead, God chooses who will eat at his table, and chooses people from north and south and east and west.

Let me give you an analogy. You’re all familiar with the ACT and SAT, right? The ACT is scored on a 36-point scale. The higher your score, the more likely you are to get into a good college, though there are other factors involved as well. Supposing you get into college, you need to work hard and learn, so that you can be successful after college, and continue to learn and work all through your life.

Well, suppose instead that your ACT score determined your whole life. Not just in some metaphorical sense, but literally. Suppose that if you earn a 30 or above, you are given a mansion and a credit card that you never need to pay off, but if you score below a 30, you are thrown out into the streets, penniless and naked. There is no second chance, no change to your circumstances after the test is over.

Doesn’t that sound ridiculous? Now, some among us would be OK with that plan because we would be “in.” But I personally couldn’t live with the thought that 93% of the population would be irredeemably doomed to a life of squalor. I don’t think anyone who proposed such a plan would ever be elected to the school board or city council, let alone emperor of the world.

And yet, that’s something like what a lot of churches preach. They say, be careful what you do in this world, or else you’ll be doomed to eternal torture in the fires of hell. Or maybe, they say you have to pray a certain prayer, which would be more like getting one specific question on the ACT correct. Can you imagine a world in which one question, asked and answered while you’re a teenager, determines your whole life trajectory, with no hope of change?

Now imagine that instead of living to be 60 or 80 or even 100 years old, we all live to be 1000 years old. How much more ridiculous does this become? Make one mistake as a teenager and suffer for 1000 years?

Well, if you believe in forever, then this life is just a blink of an eye. I cannot believe in a God who would decide eternal glory or eternal damnation on the basis of what we do in a few short years. I think people who preach that just can’t imagine eternity. If we are raised to eternal life, then even 1000 years is as a day.

So, why are we here? If the purpose of this life isn’t to decide whether we go to heaven or hell, then why bother with it at all? Well, I compare it to school. We have a few short years to learn as much as we can. We learn how to treat each other and how we want to be treated. We learn to appreciate the pleasures and pains of these clay jars that contain our eternal treasure. We have great loves and great heartbreaks. We carry all of those lessons into our next life.

As an aside, you may wonder why I go elk hunting every year. No, it’s not about the meat. The camaraderie is part of it, but just a small part. To really enjoy elk hunting, you have to have a real passion for suffering and misery. You spend a week or more being cold, wet, and tired, and push yourself to your absolute limits. Then, you know where those limits are.

It’s like a competitor I saw on American Ninja Warrior once, Jessie Graff. She got to the last obstacle, which was the Elevator Climb, where she had to climb up 35 feet using only her arms with two ropes that worked like an invisible ladder. She failed, but she was smiling the whole time. Afterwards, she said that she was pushing herself to her absolute limit and loved that feeling of using everything she had.

That’s why we’re here. We learn from those great loves and great heartbreaks, those pleasures and pains in our lives, and use them to transform the world to match God’s vision. Like schoolchildren, we cannot really achieve God’s vision, but we can push ourselves to the limit and see what is possible in this world.

Do you remember the song, “Rock and Roll Heaven,” by the Righteous Brothers? “If you believe in forever, then life is just a one-night stand. If there’s a rock and roll heaven, well, you know they have a hell of a band.” They sang about all of the great musicians who have entered God’s kingdom ahead of us. How amazing it will be! Someday, the Beatles will be reunited. Someday, we’ll hear all of the amazing things Jimi Hendrix has learned to do with a guitar. And not only that, someday, we’ll hear Mozart and Beethoven and Rachmaninoff performing their works. We’ll know how the psalms were meant to be sung. And that’s just scratching the surface.

Now, do I think all of those people prayed the sinner’s prayer and passed the test? No. Well, I don’t really know, but I certainly doubt Mozart and Beethoven did, since that wasn’t the prevailing theology at the time. Would it be heaven without them? Would it be heaven without my Uncle Dick, and Grandma Lois, and Grampa Pete—who I didn’t even meet, but I’ve heard so much about? I don’t think so. Heaven is a place of eternal joy; how can it be joyful without the people we love?

That’s why I believe we are all saints bound for heaven. Some people may take a little longer to get there. Some people may need to keep on learning after they die. But hey, eternity is a long time, right?

But let’s try not to be people who need to spend 1000 years in remedial education. Let’s focus on learning all that we can about living with each other, about sharing God’s love, about loving God with all our heart and mind and strength, about loving our neighbor as ourselves, in this life. Then one day, we’ll know how we did, and where we still fall short, but our savior, Jesus Christ, will keep teaching us, keep showing us his way of love, while we dine at table in his eternal kingdom. Amen.

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Preached at First Presbyterian Church of Rolla on October 16, 2022. Based on Jeremiah 31:27-34.

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“Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart.” This is the Shema, the centerpiece of Jewish morning and evening prayer services, something taught to Jewish children as their bedtime prayers, and the traditional last words of a Jew. It encapsulates the monotheistic beliefs of Judaism and reminds observant Jews of the true focus of their religion. We find it in Deuteronomy chapter 6, which reports Moses’s farewell discourse.

Deuteronomy is the closing book of the Torah or Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible. Collectively, the Torah describes a covenant relationship between Yahweh and Israel. We see an evolution in understanding from first Yahweh being the God of Abraham—special to him, but not necessarily the only god—to eventually El Elyon, God Most High, the one true God. This is a part of God’s progressive revelation to humanity as humans grow in their ability to understand who God is.

In particular, the Torah is concerned with establishing the Sinai covenant. Recall that the Israelites were a group of tribes who were living as slaves in Egypt. God freed them from slavery and they escaped into the wilderness, but then what? They were still just a ragtag group of nomads. The covenant at Sinai turned them into a nation.

The technical terms under this covenant were suzerain and vassal. In antiquity, we see a number of covenants of this sort between a powerful nation, like Assyria, and a lesser nation, like Moab. The powerful nation is the suzerain and agrees to protect the lesser nation, called their vassal. In return, the vassal is supposed to “love” their suzerain. Here, “love” is not an emotion, but an action. The vassal is supposed to support their suzerain, give them money or supplies or people in times of need or war. A covenant is like a treaty, but more relational. In the modern world, perhaps the relationship between Russia and Belarus is like suzerain and vassal.

In the Sinai covenant, God is the suzerain and Israel is the vassal. In this way, God turns Israel into a nation, because only a nation can be in this sort of relationship. What we call the Ten Commandments are actually the headline terms of the covenant. Think about the first commandment: “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me.” God is saying, I’m your suzerain because I rescued you when you were in trouble, so you will be my vassal and acknowledge only my authority over you. God goes on to list other conditions, which are basically ways to support God or to take care of your neighbor—ways to love God and love neighbor. Deuteronomy expands upon these themes and spells out just what it is to love God and neighbor, how that plays out in real life, and what the consequences will be if Israel, as a nation, fails to uphold their end of the bargain.

Jeremiah speaks out against Judah in the days shortly before their conquest. The Old Testament basically narrates the history of Judah and Israel through their rise, fall, and rebirth. They start as one man—Abraham—who has a grandson, Jacob, who gets nicknamed Israel. Jacob’s twelve sons go on to found twelve tribes, one of which is Judah. After God rescues them from Egypt, they become a nation comprising these twelve tribes. Eventually they settle in Canaan and establish a monarchy under Saul, David, and Solomon. That’s the peak, after which they begin their slow decline. Ten of the tribes split off, so that there are two kingdoms, Israel and Judah. The northern kingdom is conquered, and then the southern kingdom is conquered and taken into exile. Seventy years later, Judah is freed from their exile and they return to rebuild. So there is this grand story arc from greatness to sin to exile to partial restoration.

In a sense, this is a “type” of all Creation. In Biblical studies, a “type” is a real person or nation or event that can be interpreted as representing something else, something greater. Israel’s story arc can be interpreted in two ways, going down or up in scale. Going down in scale, we can maybe see ourselves, our own lives, in this story. We grow up and are formed into adults by our parents or other adults. We’re on our own, and usually, we screw up. Maybe in big ways, maybe in small ways, but regardless, most of us go through some heartbreaks that we cause ourselves. Then, like the prodigal son, we come to ourselves, return to God’s guiding ways, and become better people.

Going up in scale, Israel’s story is in a sense a story about all of Creation. We began as simple people, completely dependent on God. Then gradually, societies grew and changed. Every society suffers from systemic abuse or neglect of the poor and marginalized. Every human institution falls short of God’s glory. Here and there, we can see bright spots in human history, times when societies did the right thing and were oriented towards improving people’s lives. In America, I can point to the Progressive Era, from the 1890s to the 1920s. This was a time when “robber barons” had their power reigned in. When protections were put in place for workers and consumers. When women were given the right to vote. When educational access radically expanded. When most modern service organizations were founded, from the Optimists to the Lions Club to the Boy Scouts and beyond. Now, these efforts had their problems, but at least there was a general ethos of helping build a better society.

But just as Israel’s restoration after the exile was only partial, these bright spots in history are only partial and have not completely transformed the world. The trend is in the right direction, though. As Martin Luther King, Jr., said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” The world poverty rate, based on the percentage living on less than $5.50 per day, was 42.9% in 2018, which sounds bad, but is better than the peak of 68.1% in 1993. By nearly every metric, the world is better today than it was 500 years ago.

Yet as far as we have come, we have a long way to go. Let me turn back to Jeremiah. This section of his prophecies came near the end of Judah’s existence as an independent nation, but before they were actually conquered. I’ve said before that the apostle Paul had a hard life—well, so did Jeremiah. A few chapters later, he is imprisoned in a cistern and almost dies before being rescued. His life was so hard because he was an outspoken critic of Judah’s society. In fact, his recorded pronouncements were such extreme criticism that they gave rise to a term, jeremiad, which is “a long literary work … in which the author bitterly laments the state of society and its morals in a serious tone of sustained invective, and always contains a prophecy of society’s imminent downfall.” Basically, he spent his whole life telling Judah’s leaders how terrible they were. They mistreated the poor and ignored their commitments to God.

Here in the middle of his ranting and raving, though, he takes a few chapters to give Judah hope. Back in chapter 29 we get the famous verse, “For surely I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope.” He encouraged those who were captured by the Babylonians to live as well as they could in that captivity because one day, they would be free to return to Judah and rebuild Jerusalem.

Jeremiah spoke of a time when the material world of Israel and Judah would be reconciled. He said, “The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah.” He basically said that they were being punished, but the punishment would not last forever. He was speaking specifically about the restoration of Judah as a nation in what once was Canaan.

Yet Jeremiah’s words also point forward to the new covenant that Jesus Christ instituted. The original covenant was a suzerain/vassal relationship. Israel would be a nation that was a vassal to their God. But that was only temporary, as all things in this world are. That was just a way to teach them to follow God’s will and God’s ways. Moses said, “Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart.” He told the Israelites to remember God’s Laws, to write them on their door posts, to bind them on their hands and on their heads. He knew that people are forgetful and need constant reminders.

But God had a better plan. God said, “I will write it on their hearts.” We had been given book knowledge in the form of a set of laws, but now we will be given heart knowledge. God knows love must come from our hearts, not our heads. It must be both the absence of causing pain to our neighbors, and the action of helping them. It must be incarnational.

We have been made in the image of God. That image goes beyond our physical features and includes our thoughts, our emotions, and our actions. We must become image-bearers by having God’s heart. Since Jesus’s death, resurrection, and ascension, we have become the body of Christ. We need to see our neighbors as God sees them and love our neighbors as God loves them.

Now, that’s impossible to do on our own, but with God, all things are possible. By that I mean, if we trust our normal human instincts, we are almost certain to do the wrong thing. I preach inclusion, but truthfully, when I encounter someone who looks and acts different from me, I still have those normal human biases against them. My conscious mind embraces diversity, but my subconscious mind reacts just like someone in a primitive tribe protecting himself from outsiders. But with God’s help, I get a little better all the time, and maybe someday my subconscious mind will get reprogrammed. In the same way, God is transforming each person to be a little more Christ-like. And collectively, our world is becoming a little closer to God’s original divine plan.

The days are surely coming when all shall know God, for he will forgive their iniquity and remember their sin no more. That day has already come, and yet is still in our future. We live in an already-but-not-yet state. We have already been forgiven, through Jesus’s life of sacrifice. Yet we still sin against God and neighbor, and so we still need to be forgiven. We get glimpses of the kingdom of God, those times when God reveals her love to us and we can feel her presence in and among us. But we know we are not yet living in that kingdom, because we still see people suffering and dying, due to drugs or violence or poverty.

But the days are surely coming, and we can live into God’s kingdom now if we allow God to write their laws upon our hearts. Jesus did not abolish the law, but instead showed how it could lead to a better life. He showed that if we make God our top priority, and our neighbor’s welfare as important as our own, we can be part of the kingdom of God now. In the Gospel lesson we heard that it takes only a little bit of faith to be a part of that kingdom. If we trust in God’s plan, we can turn our focus from protecting ourselves from harm to helping others thrive. Just as Jeremiah told the ancient Judahites who were in exile, if we work for the good of others, God’s grace will flow over and through us, partially restoring us in preparation for our future full restoration and reconciliation.

One thing you will notice if you read the Old Testament prophets is that by and large, they were failures. Jeremiah preached that Judah needed to turn their hearts to God and follow God’s laws, and they basically ignored him or imprisoned him. The king even made a great show of burning the scroll that Jeremiah dictated to his scribe. I think Judah had to hit rock bottom before they would get the message. You sometimes see the same thing with people who find Jesus while they’re in prison—they have to hit rock bottom to realize that they need to rely on God instead of themselves. I think the same applies to churches, and the Church more broadly: we have to realize that relying on our own ideas and our own efforts is never going to be enough. If instead we rely on God, place all our faith in God, and put God’s love into action, we can be a part of remaking Creation according to the original divine plan and start to live in the kingdom of God now. Amen.

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Preached at First Presbyterian Church of Rolla on October 2, 2022, World Communion Sunday. Based on 2 Timothy 1:1-18.

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Before I jump into the lesson for the day, I’d like to give a little background on Second Timothy. A good fraction of the New Testament was allegedly written by Paul. Some letters are uncontested—Romans, First and Second Corinthians, Galatians, First Thessalonians, Philippians, and Philemon. There are a few others that may be authentic and at least reflect Pauline theology. Then there are the Pastoral Epistles: First and Second Timothy and Titus. They are called “pastoral” because their contents refer to church organization and administration, and also because they are written to particular individuals who are known to be pastors. Many scholars reject all three, and I would probably never preach from First Timothy or Titus. However, Second Timothy is the most likely of the three to be authentic, and when I read today’s passage, it spoke to me. It reflects a time in Paul’s life that I think has a lesson for our church today. Also, incidentally, like Timothy, my own grandmother’s name was Lois.

Paul is nearing the end of his life. Let’s think about what he has done. He started out a Pharisee, a deeply committed practitioner of Judaism, and to borrow a term from modern discourse, perhaps he was a fundamentalist. He was conservative, at least, in his beliefs and practices, and so he persecuted those who sought to change the focus from Temple worship to following Jesus Christ. After a miraculous encounter on the road to Damascus, followed by days of blindness and then a healing by one of Jesus’s followers, Paul instead became the leading proponent of a new way of following God. As he wrote in today’s passage, he was still committed to following the God of his ancestors; he just had a new understanding of what that meant.

His ministry included several trips around the Mediterranean. He tried to convince Jews to follow Jesus, but eventually determined that his particular calling was to Gentiles. Paul never stopped being a Jew and never stopped believing that his fellow Jews should follow Jesus, but he focused his energy on spreading the Good News of God’s kingdom to those who had previously been locked out of it, but were now welcomed because of Jesus’s saving life, death, and resurrection.

New ideas always give rise to opposition, and Paul’s ministry put him into direct conflict with both Jewish and Gentile leaders. He had a hard life. He was shipwrecked a few times, jailed several times, and flogged. He made good use of his time in prison—many of his letters were written while he was imprisoned, including this farewell message to Timothy. But you can tell from the tone of his writing that he was feeling dejected. He had labored for years to bring Gentiles into God’s kingdom, to spread a message of radical inclusion. Would it all be for naught? We read at the end of today’s passage that “all who are in Asia have turned away” from him. Now, that’s a bit of hyperbole, but Paul was feeling like everyone was abandoning the message that he had taught. He considered himself “a herald and an apostle and a teacher,” and yet his pronouncement and teachings were being forgotten and ignored. He knew his life was coming to an end. He surely believed that he would soon be with his Lord, and yet he cared deeply for the people still living lives separated from God. Would his work die with him?

Well, he could hold on to one hope: that Timothy would carry on the faith. As far as we know, Paul was never married and had no biological children, but he did have spiritual children. He considered Timothy to be like a son to him. The way Paul talks about him is intimate and physical, not just spiritual. It is incarnational.

We modern Christians owe a lot of our belief system to Greek philosophy, including a dualistic belief that the spiritual and material worlds are totally separate, and that the spiritual world is fundamentally superior. Paul didn’t believe that and didn’t teach that. The Jewish belief system that Paul’s Christian theology grew out of is fundamentally incarnational. He didn’t believe that the material world was something terrible to be escaped, but instead was something broken that needed to be healed. One day, this world will be fully transformed into God’s kingdom. In the meantime, Paul taught us to work towards its transformation on a small scale. We cannot change everything for everyone, but we can change the world in a small way for one person at a time.

Paul effected that transformation through deeply personal relationships. He relied on God of course, and particularly on his Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, but he also needed people like Timothy and Onesiphorus to sustain him.

In the same way, we all need to live incarnational lives. Too often, we separate the spiritual from the material worlds. We pray for mercy on Sunday and work for retributive justice on Monday. We pray for peace but pursue war. We pray for an end to hunger but perpetuate systems that keep people around the world in abject poverty.

We need instead to live an embodied faith. I’ve listened to a few podcasts that interviewed “embodiment coaches.” I found a good explanation of what that means from Michelle Neumann on embodiedpresencenc.com:

An Embodiment Coach is someone who supports you in creating ways of living more consciously and consistently in your body, embracing the present moment, setting intentions and goals from this embodied space, and listening to and following the wisdom your body has to share with you!

Michelle Neumann

This is basically a new term for an old concept. Monastic orders have long taught that we need to live in the present, not dwelling on past heartbreaks or worrying about the future, but simply being in the present moment, seeing God in all things, living in our bodies that are a part of Christ’s body. And what do we do with those bodies? We embody the faith that we have been taught, by Abraham and Moses and Amos and Jesus and Paul. Susan shared a quote a few weeks ago that really resonated with me, because it was also on the wall of my grandma’s house. Etienne de Grellet, a Quaker missionary, once wrote:

I shall pass this way but once; any good that I can do or any kindness I can show to any human being; let me do it now. Let me not defer nor neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again.

Etienne de Grellet

Live in the present moment. See where God is calling you to act, and do it. Each moment comes but once, and if we miss it, it’s gone forever. Take advantage of every opportunity to embody the faith of our ancestors.

What is holding us back? What is holding YOU back? Well, maybe this isn’t true for you, but one thing that commonly holds Christians back is shame. Society has rules and uses shame to enforce them. One rule is to never discuss religion or politics in polite company. Generations of that rule have left us unable to discuss them politely. People assume that if you bring up politics, it’s either to reinforce your bond over shared beliefs or to argue, strenuously, to get them to change their minds. It’s really difficult to have a calm, rational discussion about world events that have a political dimension. Too often, we lapse into sound bites that we have heard from our favorite political commentators, and wind up talking past each other.

In a similar way, people assume that if you are talking about religion, your goal is to browbeat them into changing their minds. Evangelism has become a dirty word, tarnished by decades of aggressive proselytizers. Christians with a particular worldview have gone forth with their Four Spiritual Laws to convert sinners into saints. Do you all know about the four laws? The first one is, “God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life.” I can get on board with that. Where it goes off the rails is the second law, “Humanity is tainted by sin and is therefore separated from God. As a result, we cannot know God’s wonderful plan for our lives.” Basically, the Four Laws teaching is that we are all sinful, terrible creatures that need to REPENT! We are worthless but can be saved if we say the sinner’s prayer. Well, for more than fifty years, this has been the most vocal evangelistic message. So if you bring up Christianity, people are on guard. They put up walls and end the discussion.

Most of us respond by just never bringing it up. We don’t want to be rejected because of our beliefs, so we hide our beliefs. We cede the public conversation to those who preach hate in the name of a loving God, and then we’re surprised that nobody wants to come to church. We hide ourselves from the world, and then we’re surprised that nobody knows where to find us when they need the God we worship and adore.

Paul told Timothy, “I am not ashamed, for I know the one in whom I have put my trust, and I am sure that he is able to guard the deposit I have entrusted to him.” As I said, Paul had a hard life. He could have just put all of his time and energy into tent-making and had a much easier time. But in a culture where shame could mean death, he was unashamed to preach the Good News of God’s inclusive kingdom. He was unashamed to make enemies of both the conservative Jewish synagogue leaders and the Gentile political leaders. He had no fear of making enemies across all social strata. He knew that God’s kingdom was greater than the limited vision the Jewish rabbis taught about, and greater than the powerful Roman empire.

Paul went on to praise Onesiphorus because “he often refreshed [Paul] and was not ashamed of [his] chain.” Paul brought shame upon himself and got himself flogged and imprisoned. Yet he formed relationships through the power of the Holy Spirit that transcended these merely mortal concerns. He was able to find people who understood his mission, who understood that God’s kingdom would transform and transcend this broken world. Paul counseled Timothy, too, to rekindle the gift of God that was within him, a spirit not of cowardice but of power and love and self-discipline. He said, “Do not be ashamed, then, of the testimony about our Lord or of me his prisoner, but join with me in suffering for the gospel.”

Paul’s challenge to Timothy is also a challenge to us today. Do not be ashamed to testify about our Lord. But how shall we testify? I suppose I could find a street corner and harangue passersby like some traveling preachers do, but I’m pretty sure that would hurt more than help. That’s what has given evangelism such a bad name. What is the fundamental message of the Gospel? The arrival of God’s kingdom, which is the transformation of this world into a place where everyone knows and loves God, and loves their neighbors as themselves. So the best way to share the Gospel is to share love.

Who should we love? Let me turn that around. Who shouldn’t we love? Who should we reject, revile, and hate in God’s name? Well, I would be hard pressed to identify anyone that Jesus said should be kept out of his kingdom. If I had to name someone, it would be hypocrites and those who ignored the needs of the sick, the poor, and the prisoner. Jesus only ever chastised those who made other people’s lives worse instead of better. So let’s strive to make this world a better place, one person and one relationship at a time. Let’s strive to invite everyone, EVERYONE, into God’s kingdom.

That was Paul’s message. He traveled the Near East preaching a message of radical inclusion. He became like a Jew to the Jews and like a Gentile to the Gentiles. He taught that being circumcised or uncircumcised made no difference. He taught that nothing could ever come between us and God. And yet despite this message of inclusion, or more likely because of his message of inclusion, he was rejected. As he approached the end of his life, he feared that his work would end with him.

Impact. He looked back on his life and wondered, did it matter? Did his work really change anyone’s hearts or minds? Two thousand years later, we can confidently say yes: Paul’s life mattered. He gave his whole self to God, pursuing his calling as a herald, apostle, and teacher. He risked everything for the sake of that calling, likely dying in prison. He had faith that the calling was worth the risk. He relied on the grace of God, promised from before the ages began, to sustain him in this life and the next. He knew that if he gave his whole self to God, his self-sacrifice would matter. His challenge to Timothy is his challenge to us today. Give your whole self to God. Let go of fear and shame, and go forth as a herald, proclaiming God’s all-inclusive, all-loving kingdom. If we do that, if we turn away from a spirit of cowardice, we can be sure that we will be sustained by God’s spirit of power and of love and that we will be a part of God’s kingdom right here, right now, and in the world to come. Amen.

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Preached on September 18, 2022, at First Presbyterian Church of Rolla. Based on Amos 8:4-7, Luke 16:1-13.

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There is a new term sweeping the internet and Twitter and such: quiet quitting. According to techtarget.com, “Quiet quitting doesn’t mean an employee has left their job, but rather has limited their tasks to those strictly within their job description to avoid working longer hours. They want to do the bare minimum to get the job done and set clear boundaries to improve work-life balance. These employees are still fulfilling their job duties but not subscribing to ‘work is life’ culture to guide their career and stand out to their superiors. They stick to what is in their job description and when they go home, they leave work behind them and focus on non-work duties and activities.” The term and the phenomenon are subjects of some controversy. On the one hand, employers want their employees to be engaged and committed to the success of the company. On the other hand, if they want employees to do more, they should pay them more, right? I mean, doing the work you get paid to do should not be considered a form of “quitting.” The Onion, a satire news site, had an article with a bunch of alleged quotes about quiet quitting, including, “Not me. I take pride in being the most exploitable laborer in my office.”

In other situations, this phenomenon has been used as a labor action, termed “working to rule.” Instead of going on strike, a union might decide to do things exactly the way the contract is written, with no flexibility. The flip side of quiet quitting is “quiet firing,” where an employee is given unglamorous work or management otherwise makes their job increasingly unpleasant and unrewarding so that the employee quits.

Maybe these terms are new, but the actions are not. For years—probably millennia—people have sometimes insisted on doing no more than what they are paid to do, and employers have responded by rewarding those who are willing to be exploited. There was a time, not too long ago, when employment was considered a lifelong relationship. For example, my father spent his entire engineering career working for Westinghouse. In the steel mills of western Pennsylvania, generations would spend their whole careers working in the same plant. That’s not the world we live in now. People change jobs regularly, either for different opportunities or because their employer makes a change. I mean, Westinghouse doesn’t really exist anymore, and most of those steel mills shut down decades ago. So instead of being a relationship, it is a contractual arrangement: employer pays $x for employee to do Y.

This is often called the “market economy.” In the market economy, every good or service has a value, usually a dollar value. People exchange money for goods and services, and get essentially what they pay for: no more, no less. Sure, we all like to get more than we pay for, or get paid more than something is worth, but in the long run, those marginal differences wash out.

The problem is, the only relationships people have in a market economy are those that can be monetized. I don’t have a real relationship with the people who work at, say, Walmart or Amazon. I have a financial relationship with Amazon because I subscribe to Prime, but if I discover that I’m not receiving sufficient value for my money, I’ll cancel it. No big deal.

But we are relational beings. When God created us in their image, they created us to love one another, to see God in each other. That requires us to have actual relationships, not just exchange money. The next level up is what’s sometimes called the “gift economy.” In a gift economy, I give you something with no expectation of financial compensation, but we end up with a tiny bit of a relationship because of a sense of obligation. Multiply that by a hundred or a thousand small gifts that we give each other, and we create a network of mutual obligation. There is no way to actually account for what anyone is “owed” by anyone else. There is just a sense that we have all contributed to the community and are all obligated to help each other.

This, I think, is the difference between a contract and a covenant. In a contractual arrangement, the two parties agree to exchange certain things of agreed-upon value, with clauses to account for uncertainties in the future. For example, when I worked for Motorola, we had a contract with Baldor to provide a custom component in exchange for some money and some other concessions. Then Motorola’s business changed, and they decided not to provide that custom component. No problem; the contract had a clause that governed what would happen in that situation. Unfortunately, Baldor did not find the terms to be sufficient. Baldor thought they were entering a relationship, a covenant, where both parties would gain and would be obligated to supporting each other. Motorola simply entered a business contract and honored its terms.

We do not have a contract with God. The nation of Israel did not have a contract with God. They had a covenant. The terms of the covenant were like the terms of a marriage. A covenant is not a 50/50 agreement, but 100/100. Both sides give their full selves to the relationship, which then creates something new that is bigger because of that mutual obligation. The essential narrative of the Old Testament is that first Israel and later Judah failed to live up to the expectations of the covenant. It wasn’t that they violated some contract term. It was that God expected to be in a relationship with Israel, and the Israelites kept turning away. God gave them chance after chance to turn back, to acknowledge that the relationship was important, to make an effort to live up to God’s expectations, but they failed again and again. As Amos said, they turned their backs to the poor and prioritized the market economy over their relationship with God. Finally, God sent Israel, and then Judah, into exile. The gifts of God to his people were not enough to bind them to him, so the relationship was broken.

That might have been the end, but God didn’t give up altogether. God kept trying. Throughout the centuries after the exile, the Israelites tried to rebuild their relationship with God, but in the end, it’s impossible for humans to ever heal what has been broken. But with God, all things are possible.

We live in a market economy because we are modern Americans. We live in a gift economy because we are members of a community, whether that community is Rolla or Missouri S&T or the Lions Club or whatever. We give ourselves to our chosen community and form a network of mutual obligations with them. But Jesus came to teach us about something better: the grace economy.

How do we earn God’s grace? Trick question. We cannot earn God’s grace. It is freely given to us by God through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior. It is a gift of infinite value that God chose to give us, each one of us individually and all of us collectively. God’s grace cannot be bought and sold. It is both precious beyond words and abundant beyond our imagining.

The grace economy is like the gift economy, except that the source is from God. God has showered grace upon us, an overflowing love, and all he asks is that we share that grace with others who need it, which is everyone, and who God believes is worthy of it, which again is everyone. The grace showered upon us is not ours to keep but to give. We ask God to forgive our debts, as we forgive our debtors. We treat people who make mistakes the way we would want God to deal with us when we make mistakes. We are forgiven and in return we forgive others. We are loved and in return we love others.

What makes the grace economy so different is that grace is not a finite resource. In the market economy, if I give you a dollar in exchange for, say, a book that you give me, I will have less money, you will have more money, I will have one more book, you will have one fewer book. It’s a zero-sum situation. In the gift economy, our network of mutual obligations is limited by the time, energy, and other resources within the community. We see that sometimes in small organizations where there’s only so much the organization can accomplish because the people who give of themselves only have so much to give.

But in the grace economy, when we share God’s love with others, we receive more love in return. God’s love is an infinite resource, and God’s realm is an open-sum situation. There will always be more love to give, more forgiveness to give, more hope to give, because our source is God.

In the Gospel of John, in Jesus’s farewell discourse after instituting communion, Jesus said, “I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinegrower. … Abide in me as I abide in you. Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me. I am the vine; you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing.” What is this fruit that the branches bear? It is the grace of God, the faith, hope, and love of God that we share with others. If we rely only on our own resources and our own selves, we are living in the market economy or the gift economy and are governed by scarcity. If instead we rely on God, if we abide in Christ as He abides in us, we can live in the grace economy and can be governed by the abundance of God’s eternal realm.

Now, I am an engineer, and therefore, I’m a pragmatist. I recognize that we all have limited time, energy, and resources. I know that we all live in a market economy and rely on it for our food, shelter, transportation, and so much more. The shrewd, dishonest manager also lived in a market economy. He was about to be thrown out of his job, and decided to make use of someone else’s resources to provide for himself. He used his master’s wealth to build relationships with the master’s creditors. But how long do you think those relationships would last? Take the man whose debt was a hundred jugs of olive oil, but the manager made it fifty. Well, how much is fifty jugs of olive oil worth? I’m guessing the debtor would know exactly how much debt was forgiven, and would give the manager exactly that much support. And then what? Well, if he didn’t have a ready source of income, he would still end up a beggar.

We too need to have a source of income to live in this world, but we have an infinite supply of grace that will sustain us in the world to come. But the promise of the Gospel is that we can live in God’s realm now, not later. This world is being transformed through Christ. It’s an already-but-not-yet fulfilled promise. God’s realm hasn’t come into full fruition, but is already available to us. We have available to us an infinite source of grace, of love, of faith, and of hope. We can tap into that wellspring of love if we are willing to be conduits for it, sharing it with all of God’s people to bring them into God’s eternal realm now, growing the grace economy until it transforms this broken world, one person, one relationship, and one community at a time. Amen.

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