Tag Archives: church

What’s It For?

by

God’s people at The First United Presbyterian Church of Crafton Heights spent the summer of 2025 exploring the transformative event that we call “The Last Supper”.  John’s gospel was our guide as we read through John 13-17.  On September 28, we completed this study with an exploration of John 17:20-26, which concludes Jesus “High Priestly Prayer” for the church.  We also listened to Ephesians 4:1-6.

To hear this message as preached in worship, please use the media player below:

To participate in worship via YouTube, use this link:

Professor Butts and the Self-Operating Napkin (1931)

Have you ever heard of a Rube Goldberg machine?  Rube Goldberg was an American cartoonist and engineer of the last century who is best known for his drawings of incredibly complicated gadgets designed to do mundane tasks.  When I was a kid, I was enthralled by the game Mousetrap, which brings the Goldberg concept to life.

I learned recently that there is an annual Rube Goldberg contest, which originated amongst the engineers at Purdue University.  Recent winners include a 72-step machine that will erase a chalkboard and a 120-step process for feeding a pet.

I bring this up because today we are concluding our series of sermons on the Apostle John’s account of the Last Supper.  Jesus and his friends have gathered for dinner.  He washes their feet and teaches them for one last time.  He spends some time in prayer – for himself, for his disciples, and for people like us who are here because of their faithfulness.

The Last Supper, artist unknown

In the Gospel of John, it seems pretty straightforward – a quiet evening with friends, a simple meal, and “love one another as I have loved you.”  That doesn’t seem very complicated.

But here we are, 2000 years later, and we’ve got 45,000 different flavors of Christianity on the planet.  We are led by popes, pastors, bishops, deacons, abbots, metropolitans, and more.  We hold fast to creeds, constitutions, confessions, encyclicals, affirmations, and papal bulls.  We meet in sanctuaries, temples, homes, arenas, schools, or online.

Do you think that Jesus saw this coming when he was praying for “those who will believe”?  It seems like a lot to go from what could be a couple of dozen folks sitting in a room listening to an itinerant rabbi to trying to imagine the full breadth and depth of the institutional church in all of its forms.

Think, for just a moment, of the vastness of the global church – synods, dioceses, hospitals, universities, convents, congregations, and meeting after meeting after meeting…

What’s it for?  And are we doing it right?

As Jesus prays, his focus is on unity.  Two weeks ago, he celebrated his unity with God the Father.  Last week, he prayed that his friends would be kept together and set apart for some holy purpose.  And today, we hear him as he expands his prayer to include us, saying, “that they may be one.” In fact, in verse 23, we see a word we talked about a couple of weeks ago, teleióo, meaning “perfected”, or “finished”, or “complete”.  Jesus asks God that somehow, all of these shapes and flavors of discipleship will be brought together with one goal: in verse 22, “so that the world may believe”; in verse 23, “so that the world will know that you have sent me and loved them”; and in verse 26 “so that the love you have for me may be in them.”

It would seem that the fundamental task of the Rube Goldberg machine that is the church in the 21st century (and every other iteration of the church) is to show the love – the agape – the whole-hearted, selfless, unconditional love of God to the world.  This prayer is the summation of Jesus’ “farewell discourse”.

The High Priestly Prayer, Eugene Burnand (1900)

In this series of messages, we’ve looked at how John devotes five entire chapters of his gospel to narrating the scene at the Last Supper.  There’s the foot washing.  The confrontation with Judas.  The encouragement he offers. The promises he makes.  All of these point to the love, the light, that is in Jesus; all of them prepare Christ’s followers to live the Jesus way in the days to come.

And now, here, in his closing prayer before his arrest and death, Jesus indicates that all that we do, and all that we are, is to be wrapped in that love so that the whole world can see it.  The word that Jesus uses there is cosmos, and it means the entire ordered creation is destined to know God’s intentions for love.

So how are we doing?

Are we living into the prayer of Jesus?  Is it all about love in the world?  How is our part of the Rube Goldberg machine that is the church functioning?

You might point to the monthly food distributions that take place here on the second Friday of every month.  Two weeks ago, more than 200 families were blessed by an abundance of dairy, meat, veggies, fruit, and grain.  There were no restrictions – no matter what your faith (or lack thereof), your income, your race, your marital status… everybody got food with no strings attached.  Yes.  That’s love.

Three mornings a week, we’ve got a posse of 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds upstairs at the Preschool.  From what I can tell, there’s not a whole lot of time spent memorizing Bible verses.  The kids are working on learning their colors and writing their names.  They’re experimenting with tastes and textures.  It’s not preachy, but I think we can all agree that training children to wonder, to celebrate, and to be curious is a fine way of equipping them to discover the presence of God in the world.

Last Sunday night, we played a remarkably stupid game at Youth Group called “Beak Wars”.  Each of us put some tape on our noses, and then we tried to use that tape to steal the tape off the noses of our neighbors.  It was ridiculous!

Can I tell you that the point of that game is not to end up with eight feet of useless masking tape, but rather to create an environment where we are all willing to look silly, to learn to laugh together, and to create a safe space where pain and fear can be shared, and where joy and celebration and friendship can be nurtured?  And do you know that all of those things are rooted in and lead to love?

A couple of days ago I met with a craftsman whose great-grandfather was on the team that installed these stained-glass windows 108 years ago.  Is there anything connecting the idea of Divine love for the world and our maintenance of these bits of colored glass?  Yes – if it’s part of our strategy to create a beautiful and sacred space that is set aside to help form us in our identity as beloved and commissioned by Jesus.

My deep hope and expectation as your pastor is that if you see anything in this congregation that is disconnected from the command of Jesus to “love one another as I have loved you”, that you will call us out on that.  How does doing this, or not doing that, allow us to live faithfully the love of Jesus in the systems of this world?

But it has to be more than just here at church, beloved.  Jesus is lord of all the earth, not just the guy in charge of an hour on Sunday mornings.  The prayer here in John 17 is for the entire cosmos – all of the created order – not just those things that we can label as somehow “religious”.

We cannot seek to create that beloved community in our worship space, our youth group, or our preschool if we are fully comfortable ignoring the children of God whom we see on the sidewalks or on the news.

We cannot hold onto the gift that Jesus gave us back in chapter 14 – “peace I leave with you, my peace I give to you…”, and then go out and vote for war or celebrate the obliteration of a people.

We can say we are for love all day long, but if our actions, our conversations, our social media posts, and the ways that we treat out neighbors are disconnected from that love, what good are we?

How is the love of Jesus being revealed in our pursuit and ordering of a civil society?  In our participation in the cosmos?

Look, I’m not naïve.  Are we always going to agree on strategies about how to do this?  Hardly.  If the twelve folks who spent 24/7/365 with Jesus didn’t always share an agenda of action items, then I’m willing to think that we won’t, either.  I think we can expect that there will be days when you favor that candidate and those programs while I see it differently.

Our unity does not consist of the fact that we all think alike, look alike, sound alike, shop alike, or vote alike.  No, our unity is based in something more fundamental: that we belong to Christ.  And the Jesus whom we follow longs to send us into the world as people who will love as he loved us.

I believe that the call of the Gospel this morning is for each of us to take our lives and to look for ways to live out God’s intentions of love in and for the world in every single facet of them – our work, our play, our rest, our relationships.  We are called to discover ways to show the compassion of Jesus in the world in each sphere of our lives.

As we do that, we’ve got to remember that it’s not an individual effort: the church that bears Jesus’ name is called to be perpetually reflective of the presence of the Holy in the world and in our neighbors.

Beloved, can we acknowledge and even celebrate differences while rejecting division?  Can we disagree on strategy even while remaining committed to the goal?

Take just a moment to have one last look around John 13 – 17.  Remember the Lord who washed the feet of those whom he loved, and who reached out with encouragement even to the one who would betray him.  Hear him as he begs us to stay faithful, to live in hope, to trust the spirit, and above all, to walk all day, every day, in love.  Let us pledge ourselves to doing these things as we move through our neighborhoods, our schools, our workplaces, and our homes.  And may we always remember, and be grateful for, the fact that we are held in this together by the love of Jesus.  Thanks be to God who makes us one  May that unity look more and more like the love of Jesus each day.  Amen.

Who ARE Those Guys?

by

Each week God’s people at The First U.P. Church of Crafton Heights strive to be attentive to where God is active in the world, and to shape ourselves so that we might best participate in that.  On February 23, 2025 we attended to the story of Jesus as found in Luke 9:1-9 and then again in I Peter 3:8-15.  

To hear this message as preached in worship, please use the player below:

To participate in worship via YouTube, please use this link:

I don’t know if they’re still saying this at the Seminary or not, but if I’ve heard it once, I bet I’ve heard it a hundred times: “The congregation’s theology is shaped more by the songs that it sings than by the preaching that it hears.”

There’s a lot of truth in that.  I would add that in many cases, I can learn something about your views of God and the world by looking at a list of your favorite movies. I know that it’s true for me.  Want to talk about original sin?  Check out Sean Connery and Michael Caine in The Man Who Would Be King.  What about our call to care for the environment and realize our connection with both the natural world and one another?  How about Avatar?  And if you know much about me, you know that in my opinion the best film ever made is Cool Hand Luke, in which we can see fascinating parallels between Jesus of Nazareth and Lucas Jackson, a man who dies a martyr’s death for refusing to follow the rules of a corrupt prison system.

This morning, though, I’m thinking of another Paul Newman classic: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.  This 1969 film, which co-stars Robert Redford, is a loose retelling of the legends surrounding real-life outlaws Robert LeRoy Parker (aka Butch Cassidy) and Harry Longabaugh (aka The Sundance Kid).  These two plan a string of train robberies that so incense the owner of the Union Pacific Railroad, Mr. E. H. Harriman, that he hires a posse of elite trackers to hunt them down.  Butch and Sundance have a run of success in America, but eventually get so worn down evading this posse that they decide to relocate to Bolivia.

There, they pull off a couple of heists and become known as Los Bandidos Yanquis.  That fame, unfortunately, spreads to the American west and Butch and Sundance are dismayed to discover that Harriman’s posse has continued to track them in South America.  At several points throughout the film, they wonder at the persistence of their pursuers.

Who are those guys?

At this point in the morning message, you might be thinking twice about the wisdom of having me as your pastor.  Not only are most of my favorite films are from the 1960’s, I’m going to stand here and suggest that there is a connection between the Gospel reading for today and the adventures of Butch and Sundance.

Herod, by James Tissot (c. 1890)

 Here’s the back story on our reading from Luke.  A man named Herod Antipas was the ruler of Judea, and it was an arrangement that raised a lot of eyebrows.  He was nominally Jewish, and he spoke like he was in charge of things. In reality, he was utterly dependent on and ran Judea on behalf of the Roman Emperor Tiberius Caesar.

Around 30 AD, God raised up a prophet in the wilderness of Judea who we know as John the Baptist.  He called people to repent of sin and brokenness in their own lives and to turn toward God.  Although John did most of his work in backwater places, he wasn’t shy about naming names.  Around this time, in a turn of events that could have been ripped from contemporary headlines, Herod divorced his first wife in order to marry his brother’s wife.  Not surprisingly, John took a dim view of this liaison, and said so to the monarch.  Herod had John arrested, and that didn’t even shut him up, so Herod ordered John’s execution.

You’ve got to think that a pragmatic fella like Herod would suppose that that would be the end of the story.

But not quite.

It turns out that the spiritual revival that John had started was only beginning.  John’s cousin, Jesus of Nazareth, had inherited John’s mantle of teaching and prophecy.  Jesus went much further than John did in that he not only called people to repent, but he also worked miracles and brought healing not just in the wilderness, but in the towns and villages.

Jesus Sends the Apostles, Duccio Di Buoninsegna (c.1300)

Not only that, Jesus empowered his followers and sent them out to preach, to teach, and to heal.  Jesus was a real rabble-rouser in that regard.

From his palace, Herod watched all of this unfold, and I’m here to tell you that it got on his last nerve.  Here he thought that all this religious zealotry was finished.  He’d killed John, after all.  And yet it seemed as if the revival was only picking up steam with each passing day.

Can’t you picture Herod in his palace, listening to reports coming from places like Capernaum, Bethsaida, and Nazareth, stroking his beard and wondering, “who are those guys?”

Our reading in Luke ends with the statement “Herod was eager to meet Jesus.”  I bet he was.  It comes to be an undercurrent in the Gospels.  Herod would love a little face time with the preacher from Nazareth, but Jesus does not appear to be interested in having an audience with the monarch.  A few years later, when Jesus is arrested by the Roman Governor named Pilate, Luke tells us that “For a long time Herod had wanted to see Jesus and was very happy because he finally had this chance. He had heard many things about Jesus…” (Luke 23:8)

Why do you think that Jesus was not interested in meeting Herod?  I suppose that one answer might be that Jesus knew what Herod did to preachers who told the truth.  In a deeper sense, though, I would suggest that Jesus was not interested in making Rome a little nicer, or in blessing the structure of oppression and manipulation with some kind of appearance at or endorsement of Herod’s regime.

When Jesus showed up, his first message was always “The Kingdom of God is at hand”.  He was not interested in reforming the Roman Empire: he was focused on building and establishing the Church.

And when I say he was building the church, I don’t mean to imply that he put his carpentry skills to work and set about constructing edifices like this one.  I mean that Jesus focused all of his best energy and intentions on gathering to himself a group of followers who were united in their own understanding that the world, and everything and everyone in it, belongs to God.

Theologians like Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer call this specifically “the confessing church”, and point out that this group exists to call people to conversion as a part of inviting them to participate in this new body of people, a countercultural social structure called church.  Pastor and author Will Willimon puts it this way:

The confessing church seeks to be the visible church, a place, clearly visible to the world, in which people are faithful to their promises, love their enemies, tell the truth, honor the poor, suffer for righteousness, and thereby testify to the amazing community-creating power of God… the confessing church can participate in secular movements against war, against hunger, and against other forms of inhumanity, but it sees this as a part of its necessary proclamatory action.  This church knows that its most credible form of witness (and the most “effective” thing it can do for the world) is the actual creation of a living, breathing, visible community of faith.[1]

You see, this body of Jesus-followers, the church, is God’s strategy to show God’s intentions of love and justice in the world.  Jesus wasn’t interested in meeting with Herod because he knew that Herod wasn’t interested in what the Kingdom was really about, and so Jesus spent his time and energy with the folks who came to him to learn more about this Kingdom of God.

One of the people who Jesus sent out into the Galilean countryside that day was a fisherman whose name had been Simon, but Jesus nicknamed Peter, or “the Rock”.  He’d met Jesus some time earlier, and he was on board from the start.  In the course of their three years together, Peter fell hook, line, and sinker for the vision of the Kingdom of God as Jesus proclaimed it.  After Jesus’s death, resurrection, and ascension, Peter became a leader in the Jesus movement.  In his letter to Christ-followers that you heard a few moments ago, Peter talks about the task of being the church in the places that we are.  It’s important to realize that as he does so, Peter is using the second person plural.  By this I mean that he is not talking to YOU, he’s talking to YINZ GUYS.

While Peter would affirm the need for individual conversion and personal discipleship, here he is not speaking about the inner habits of disconnected individuals. Rather, he is pointing to the collective behavior of a group of people who have been transformed into the universal Body of Christ.  Again, to quote Willimon,

The most interesting, creative, political solutions we Christians have to offer our troubled society are not new laws, advice to Congress, or increased funding for social programs – although we may find ourselves supporting such … efforts. The most creative social strategy we have to offer is the church.  Here we show the world a manner of life the world can never achieve through social coercion or governmental action.  We serve the world by showing it something it is not, namely, a place where God is forming a family out of strangers.

The Christian faith recognizes that we are violent, fearful, frightened creatures who cannot reason or will our way out of our mortality.  So the gospel begins, not with the assertion that we are violent, fearful, frightened creatures, but with the pledge that, if we offer ourselves to a truthful story and the community formed by listening to and enacting that story in the church, we will be transformed into people more significant than we could ever have been on our own.[2]

Beloved, the call of Jesus then and now is to be a community that shows the world what God’s intentions look like.  Like Herod, the people in Washington, or in Harrisburg, or on Grant Street[3] all think that they have some power.  And it may be that every now and then we need to speak with them as did John, and point them toward justice, honesty, and integrity.  That’s great.  But we dare not think that the church – or this congregation – is here for the sole purpose of informing, reforming, or transforming the government.

Our calling is to do what we can to form and nurture a community that is capable of sustaining Christian love and virtue in our neighborhood and our world.  Therefore, we teach and practice sacrificial love, honest worship, humility, and integrity because the church – this church – helps us to be the love of Christ shared in the world today.

My hope is that when you are feeding the hungry, housing the homeless, befriending the stranger, visiting the sick, and walking with the marginalized and excluded, that the folks in Washington or Harrisburg or Grant Street might look askance and say, “Who are these guys?”

Who are we? We are the Body of Christ on earth.  Let us live deliberately with that purpose and intention.

Thanks be to God, who has not stopped including, equipping, and sending people like us to a world in need of peace, hope, and love.  Amen.

[1] Hauerwas, Stanley, and Willimon, William, Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony (Abingdon Press, 1989, pp. 46-47

[2]  Resident Aliens, pp. 82-83

[3] Location of Pittsburgh’s City Hall

What Are We Doing Here?

by

The people at The First U.P. Church of Crafton Heights are spending much of our time in 2023-2024 looking at the story of God’s people as recorded in the New Testament book of Acts.  We engage in this series of messages convinced of the fact that God’s power changes apparently small and nondescript groups of people into a force that will change the world in ways that are reflective of the love and justice of Jesus.  On the penultimate Sunday in this series, we watched Paul’s reaction to getting shipwrecked and finally reaching Rome. You can read about it in Acts 28:1-15 and Ephesians 2:19-22

To hear this sermon preached in worship, please use this player:

To participate in worship via YouTube, please use the link below:

One August afternoon more than 25 years ago, my family and I were passengers in a pickup truck driving near the town of Balaka in the African nation of Malawi.  We had just come through the local market, which meant that either side of the two-lane roadway was lined with thousands of people doing their shopping.  In addition, there were several hundred school children heading for home.  We were terrified to see, coming right at us, a large fuel tanker truck that was careening out of control.  The brakes on the trailer had failed, and the big rig was jackknifing down the road, filling both lanes.  My friend Ralph, who was driving our vehicle, twisted the wheel and took us into a cornfield as we watched the tanker blow by us with inches to spare and head toward the crowd at the market.

When the dust settled, I was shaking like a leaf, and I went to congratulate Ralph on his skill, but he had already left the car.  He’d leapt out to see how he could help whoever was behind us.

I felt like I could barely breathe, and was counting my fingers and toes, rejoicing at the presence of my wife and my daughter and thankful that we were all in one piece.  Ralph was caring for the traumatized.  As it turns out, not a soul was physically injured that day.  The pedestrians were able to flee and the driver stopped his truck eventually.  It was a miracle.

I thought of this episode when I read today’s story about Paul.  When we saw him last, he was dragging himself ashore on an unknown island, having just survived a storm that destroyed his ship and all its cargo.

Instead of leaning back and breathing a sigh of relief, or maybe plotting his escape from the prison guard, Paul springs into action as he serves and encourages those on the island.  There are three reactions today that really catch my attention.

Life of St. Paul: The Viper, from the Basilica of St. Paul in Rome, c. 1857

Look at the reaction of the locals on the island.  They watch, perhaps amused, as the prisoner starts to help stoke the fire – and then they recoil when he gets bitten by a snake.  The first question for many that day was one shaped by bad theology: it was a version of “what did that guy do to deserve this?”  When they saw the viper latch onto Paul’s arm, they assumed that the gods had tried to kill Paul in the storm.  When he survived the tempest, they sent a poisonous snake to finish the job.

While we don’t have much in common with these poor islanders from 2000 years ago, we know what it means to think that “bad things happen to bad people”.

Things take a drastic turn when Paul doesn’t, as everyone expects, swell up and drop dead.  “Wait!” the crowd exclaims.  “We were wrong! He’s not a murderer! He must be a god!”  They said this, of course, because good things (like surviving snake bites and shipwrecks) happen to good people.

Beloved, this is incredibly dangerous thinking.  If we suppose that good things happen to good people, and bad things happen to bad people, then the logical conclusion is that if our kids are healthy, our jobs are secure, and our streets are safe – in other words, if we are doing OK, thank you very much – then we must be #blessed by God.  If material wealth is a sign of God’s blessing, then those of us in the USA must be doing something right, right?

And if the notion that wealth implies blessing is accepted, then we must also accept the opposite proposition: that those who struggle are somehow cursed by God.  They are poor, hungry, and victimized because they somehow deserve to be.  When you see someone who is reliant on food stamps to feed her children, this kind of thinking leads you to wonder, “What’s wrong with her? Why can’t she just pull herself together?”

Can I tell you that it breaks my heart to hear folk dismissing whole categories of people – or in some cases, entire nations – immigrants, neighbors who are black and brown, people who have struggled in poverty for generations, or countries who have been chewed up and spit out by their colonizers or enslavers – because of some twisted notion that somehow those people have either missed out on or deliberately walked away from God’s blessings that are so abundant in our lives.  And when we’ve convinced ourselves that these people somehow deserve the suffering that they’re experiencing, then it’s distressingly easy to ignore it or even contribute toward it.

I’ve said it before, and I’m telling you now: bad theology will get people killed!

Listen: if the story of God’s people in the Gospels and in the Book of Acts tells us anything, its that it is surely foolhardy for us to cry out for what we think we deserve.  Instead, we are shown the wisdom of seeking to be treated mercifully and then extending that mercy to those whom we meet.  Pay attention to that crowd on Malta, and be wary of them.

And look at the reaction of Paul in this passage.  As we’ve mentioned, he’s had a rather rough couple of years.  And yet as he pulls himself up and rubs the sand out of his ears, he realizes that he was preserved, not merely from the shipwreck and the snake bite, but from countless assassination attempts and beatings and imprisonments, in order to keep on serving in the name of Jesus.

Because he believes that he is compelled by the Holy Spirit, of course Paul crawls off the beach and starts looking for firewood.  Of course Paul prays with Publius and his dad, and with anyone else who asks for prayer.

Paul Cures the Father of Publius, by Nicola Consoni c. 1860

There is no indication that Paul somehow “vetted” these people in an effort to separate the deserving from the undeserving.  He just offered what he had in the name of Jesus.

That kind of behavior reminds me of the food distribution that takes place downstairs on the second Friday of each month.  If you need food, you get food.  Nobody is checking your tax returns, your marital status, your gender identity, or your race.  Are you hungry? Come on in.  We believe that the gifts of God are for the people of God!

And after you consider the reactions of the locals and of Paul, take a look at the reaction of the community of disciples in Italy!  We read that after spending a few months on that island, the prisoners traveled to Syracuse, a port on the island of Sicily; from there they made for Rhegium, a town on the “toe” of the “boot” that is Italy, and that they finally arrived in Puteoli, near Naples.

Now some years earlier, Paul had written a letter to a small group of believers in Rome.  He’d never been there, but he wanted to encourage them as they followed Jesus.  These people get wind that Paul is coming and they travel more than forty miles to meet him.  Luke goes out of his way to make sure that we know what road and landmark they chose, so that we can measure the strength of commitment that these Roman Christians display here.

Paul And the Romans in the Forum of Appius, by Carlo Gavardini c. 1858

So far in the Book of Acts, we’ve seen incredible stories of people who have been given great power, or who have experienced great deliverance, or who have seen great wonders.  Now, as the story nears its end, we have a chance to glimpse the greatest strength available to the disciples: the power that comes from the presence of their siblings within the Body of Christ.

What did the Roman followers of Jesus do that was so remarkable?  They went out of their way to show up!

I’d like to invite you to think of a time in your life where the blessings, powers, or presence of God was somehow more real in your life because somebody showed up for you.  Was it after your parent or your child died?  When your divorce came through? When you were alone in a new city or starting a new school? When you were afraid that you were losing it, and you didn’t know where to turn?

Look – this is the church’s superpower: we can show up!  A French historian in the 19th century named Alfred Loisy once observed that “Jesus proclaimed the Kingdom of God, and what came was the church.”

Nowadays, it is not uncommon for scholars to read that quote as ironic, implying that the congregations that we can see are somehow nothing but a profound disappointment to both God and humans.  But I think that Loisy told the truth: the message of Jesus does not consist of a bunch of ideas, but rather consists of the formation of a new community.  Jesus didn’t give his disciples a manifesto; he invited people to follow him and eventually he sent those people out to be his Body, acting like him down on the corner, or at school, or on the job, or in the home.

Pastor Will Willimon gets it right when he declares that the question in Acts is not merely an intellectual discussion along the lines of “Can you agree with all of this?”, but rather a social and maybe even a political one: “Are you coming?  Will you show up?”

The Christ-followers in first-century Rome, even though they’d never met Jesus in the flesh, got this.  They understood in their bones the truth that Paul wrote to their siblings in Ephesus: that they existed as a household of faith, or a dwelling-place for the Holy.

More than that, they grasped the truth that on their own, none of them could effectively live the Jesus way in a culture that couldn’t recognize who Jesus was. Individually, they were helpless to follow Jesus – and they knew this to be true even of the great Apostle Paul – and so they showed up for him.

Will we, as a household of faith and a dwelling place for the Holy, be those who intentionally show up with and for one another and for those whom God loves in this neighborhood?

Writing in a commentary that was published in 1988 – less than 40 years ago, Will Willimon said,

The North American church may not adequately appreciate the precariousness of its existence within American culture.  The world has stopped giving us favors.  People will not become Christian by living within this country, drinking the water, watching television.  We are – like those brothers and sisters who ran out to Three Taverns to greet Paul – aliens, exiles, colonists more than we know.  The power of the church to support us and to create a new counter-culture for us is bound to take on an increasing significance in the future.[1]

Do we, the church in post-pandemic America, understand this yet?  Can you see why 27 of your children crowded into that hot room upstairs for Youth Group last week?  We really need one another, beloved. And this neighborhood needs this church!

We had a meeting earlier today, and will have another on Wednesday of this week, wherein we will look at some real financial challenges facing CHUP at this moment.  I have to say, it is really tempting to want to say, “OMG! We are in danger! How will the church survive?”

Yet the reality is this, dear ones: the church of Jesus Christ is always on the edge.  For 2000 years, people have looked at themselves and their neighbors and asked, “Will you come?  Are you going to show up?  Will you be the hands and feet of Jesus in this time and place, loving and serving ‘the least of these’?”

That is the question that those who would follow Jesus have always heard, and we hear it today.  “Will you come?  Will you give your heart and mind to loving the things and the people that Jesus loves?”

If the answer to that question, beloved, is “yes”, then we will be fine.  My experience is that people usually bring their calendars and their wallets with them when they come to follow Jesus.

As we close this part of the story, Paul is still a prisoner.  He must have some idea of what is waiting for him in Rome.  And yet, Luke tells us that Paul was encouraged.  Why? Because he was not alone.  He had sensed God’s presence along the journey.  Now he was surrounded by all of these sisters and brothers in Jesus, who had run all this way just to be with him.

Thanks be to God for people who show up, and for those who teach us how to show up in the places and lives that are precious to Jesus.  Amen.

[1] Interpretation Bible Commentary on Acts (Atlanta: John Knox, 1988), p. 187.

Teamwork Makes the Dream Work: A Sermon for Pentecost

by

The people at The First U.P. Church of Crafton Heights are spending much of the 2023-2024 academic year looking at the story of God’s people as recorded in the New Testament book of Acts.  We engage in this series of messages convinced of the fact that God’s power changes apparently small and nondescript groups of people into a force that will change the world in ways that are reflective of the love and justice of Jesus.  On Pentecost Sunday (May 19) we wondered at and rejoiced in the power of the Holy Spirit through named people in particular places.  You can read it for yourself in Acts 18.

To hear this message as preached in worship, please use the media player below:

To participate in worship via YouTube, please use this link:

Let me tell you something that just warmed my heart.  Erin is a woman who was a member of the youth group in the church I served in New York more than 30 years ago.  Recently, I saw Erin – who hadn’t aged a day since I left that congregation in 1993 – offering food and water to folks who were suffering horribly in Gaza.  Oh, church, can I tell you that I was filled with a mixture of pride and horror as I saw her serving God in those conditions?

Today, I’m remembering vividly a conversation that I was having with my grandmothers.  Clara Carver lived most of her life in Nebraska, while Helen Shutt was born and died in New York.  Both of these women passed away in the mid-1990’s.  Yet this morning I am able to recall an afternoon chat between the three of us that was interrupted when my 6 and 10 year-old granddaughters came in and sat in my lap.  Church, can I tell you how excited I was to introduce Lucia and Violet to their great-great grandmothers?

Another thing that I’m thinking about this morning – with great fondness – is the night that I discovered that I could fly!  I was on the top of my home, working on the roof, and I slipped and fell.  Instead of panicking, I arched my back, threw out my arms, and found that I caught an updraft there on Cumberland St.  Rather than splatting into the tomato patch, I soared above the Heights in the early-morning sky.  Oh, it was glorious!

I hope that you have been able to infer that each of these incidents describes a vision I’ve had while sleeping in recent weeks. Yes, I was dreaming! What about you?  Do you dream, too?

Of course you do!  Every human being dreams while sleeping.  Most of us do so for about two hours each night.  Nobody is entirely sure why humans (and many animals) do this – dreaming serves to consolidate our memories, helps us to process our emotions, and more.  Dreaming is a normal, healthy part of life.  It is in our nature to dream.  Our dreams help to make us who we are.

Dreaming is wonderful!  In mine, I’m often the hero; I’m always funny, and I’m never bored.  I like dreams because in those nighttime visions, the “normal rules” of our existence don’t need to apply. The Erin that I remember from New York is not a teen – she’s nearly 50 years old and has children who are older now than she was when we met.  Both of my grandmothers died decades before either of my granddaughters were born.  And when I am awake, I am subject to the laws of gravity.

But isn’t it fun – in the best of dreams, anyway – to contemplate life in a reality where things are not the way that they always are?  Isn’t it rich to inhabit, at least occasionally, a universe where cultures can embrace one another, generations can gather together, and old guys can soar with grace and joy?

Do you think that God dreams? If you’re going to take me literally, I know what you’re going to say.  Psalm 121 indicates that “the God who watches Israel neither slumbers nor sleeps.”  Proverbs 15:3 points out that “the eyes of the Lord are in every place keeping watch on the evil and the good…”  I get that.  But let’s think past the literal question of whether or not the Almighty ever sleeps and ask again whether or not God might dream.

If, as I’ve said from this spot at least a thousand times before, if we are made in the image of God, then of course there are parts of us that are like God.  And if that’s true, then surely it must follow that there are parts of God that are like us.  If it is in our nature to dream, then is it possible that God does something similar?

Let me go further: what if the Book of Acts is, in some way, God’s dream?  I mean, seriously – think about what we’ve read since September.  What have we seen in this slim volume?

  • Do you remember those times when simple, uneducated, so-called “commoners” are filled with wisdom, discernment, and boldness?
  • How about all of the “outsiders” – like a member of a sexual minority from Ethiopia or a soldier from Rome – who are brought into the center of God’s people?
  • A couple of weeks ago we saw an enslaved woman from Philippi discover freedom such as she’d never known.
  • What about all of those living with disabilities, like the beggar in Jerusalem, who find themselves leaping for joy?
  • Have you noticed how the Jesus movement seems to spark such generosity that people who may be by nature inclined to hoard their possessions wind up sharing their food, their homes, and their money?
  • Murderers, like Saul of Tarsus, learn amazing lessons about grace and forgiveness. In the process, they find great opportunities to point to healing and hope.
  • Dead people, like Dorcas in Joppa, are raised to life.
  • And how many prisons have we seen – theological, ethnic, religious, cultural, and even brick and mortar buildings – where the doors have not only been unlocked and thrown open, but sometimes the prisons themselves have been destroyed?
  • Even a quick reading of Acts will help us to understand that geographic boundaries don’t seem to count for as much as we might have thought they would.

All this, and we’re only 2/3 of the way through the Book of Acts!  Have you seen the kinds of impossible things that happen here?  Don’t you remember the ways that the normal laws that we expect to govern the ways that people and the world behave don’t always apply in Acts?

But Acts can’t be a dream, at least, not like my having tea with my grandmothers or flying off my roof.  Acts is a written document.  It’s history.  It’s an account of something that happened, right?

No, the Book of Acts is not God’s dream.

But – hear me on this – what if the church is God’s dream?  The Book of Acts tells the story of the church – a group of people that is called, commissioned, empowered, and sent by God into the creation.

Dura-Europos Church, Syria (c. 240 AD)

And let’s be clear what I mean when I say “church”.  The church can’t be a building.  All these pages and verses we’ve read since September in the book of Acts talk a lot about the church, but there’s not a building for Christian worship to be found.  The earliest structure built for the purpose of Christian worship that folks have been able to find is called the Dura-Europa Church.  It’s a home in Syria that was converted into a worship space in approximately AD240.  For the first 200 years of the Jesus movement, specially-constructed and dedicated buildings such as this simply did not exist.  This building is not God’s dream.  No building is.  But the building is not the church.

The church is the people of God, right?

I’m going to quiz you right now… I want to see whether you were paying attention when Brian and Jacob were reading these passages.  There were, as you may have noticed, a lot of names.  I’ll say a name, and you tell me whether you heard that name as the scripture was being read this morning.

Paul.  Apollos.  John.  Jim.  Becky.  Aquila.  Priscilla.  Tim.  Megan.

There are a lot of names, aren’t there?

Take a look at this slide that has all of the names highlighted.  There are so many people!

 

I mentioned at one point a few months ago that some people have suggested that the Apostle Paul “invented” Christianity – that there would be no church, no people of God, without Paul.  I cannot accept that as true.  We have, in fact, seen all kinds of places so far in the Book of Acts wherein God used Paul mightily.  Yet at the same time, we’ve got to remember that here and elsewhere, Paul is not the entire show – Paul is a member of the cast.  Paul is not the story.  The church is the story.

Pentecost: True Spiritual Unity and Fellowship in The Holy Spirit, by Rebecca Brogan (used by permission, more at http://jtbarts.com)

According to the church calendar, today is the Day of Pentecost.  As I mentioned with the children, some call this the “birthday of the church”.  Around the world today, billions of people in millions of gatherings are reading from Acts chapter 2, which describes the day that the Holy Spirit came upon the disciples in fresh and powerful ways.  I hope you remember that.  We’re not reading it today, because we read it back in September, and if I start backtracking in this sermon series, we’ll never make our way out of Acts!  Besides, the passage you heard this morning is crystal-clear in its assertion that the Holy Spirit is continually being poured out on the people of God – on all kinds of people.

One of my mentors, the late Eugene Peterson, put it this way:

Church is the core element in the strategy of the Holy Spirit for providing human witness and physical presence to the Jesus-inaugurated kingdom of God in this world.  It is not that kingdom complete, but it is a witness to that kingdom…

It takes both sustained effort and a determined imagination to understand and embrace church in its entirety.  Casual and superficial experience with church often leaves us with an impression of bloody fights, acrimonious arguments, and warring factions.  These are more than regrettable; they are scandalous.  But they don’t define the church…

Church is an appointed gathering of named people in particular places who practice a life of resurrection in a world in which death gets the biggest headlines… The practice of resurrection is an intentional, deliberate decision to believe and participate in resurrection life, life out of death, life that trumps death, life that is the last word, Jesus life…[1]

So today, on this Pentecost Sunday, it’s important to remember all of those named folks who helped to make us who we are.  We remember the folks who we’ve learned about in the Book of Acts.  But we can’t stop there. Take a moment and remember someone who isn’t here anymore, but who taught you a great deal about what it means to practice resurrection – someone who showed you that it is possible to live beyond the constraints of the world as we too-often know it.  I named my grandmothers – Helen and Clara.  Who lived Jesus in front of you to help get you to this point?

And, beloved, I don’t want to stop there, either.  I want to give thanks and praise to the God who invited us to be together here in this morning’s expression of Church.  We are here, and we are called, and we have names.  We are, this day, the church, practicing resurrection life in this time and in this place.  Let us praise God as we continue in this practice of living and proclaiming resurrection together here at the corner of Stratmore and Clairhaven Streets.  Thanks be to God for the gift of the church!  Amen.

[1] Eugene Peterson, Practice Resurrection: A Conversation on Growing Up in Christ (Eerdmans, 2010) p. 12

Who’s In Charge Here?

by

The people at The First U.P. Church of Crafton Heights are spending much of the 2023-2024 academic yearlooking at the story of God’s people as recorded in the New Testament book of Acts.  We engage in this series of messages convinced of the fact that God’s power changes apparently small and nondescript groups of people into a force that will change the world in ways that are reflective of the love and justice of Jesus.  On February 11, 2024 we witnessed an epic power struggle between Herod Agrippa and the young community of Jesus-followers.  You can check it out in Acts 12

To hear this message as preached in worship, please use the media player below:

To participate in worship via YouTube, please use this link:

Well, what are your thoughts on the goings-on in Washington DC?  How do you feel about the upcoming Presidential election season?  And what about those folks in the Congress?  Or Harrisburg? Or downtown Pittsburgh?  There is a LOT going on right now, isn’t there?  Should we talk about that?

And you say, “To be honest, Dave, I’d prefer that you didn’t.  Can’t you just give it a rest with all that political stuff?  That’s not why we’re here.  We came to worship.  We came to study Acts.  Talk to us about faith, not politics.”

OK, I’ll do that, but only with a warning: Acts chapter 12 is full of political drama.  Luke is writing to describe how the people of God explored questions of power and authority.  Specifically this morning, we’ll be looking at the power of the Herods vs. the power of the church.

Herod the Great

As we consider the power of the Herods, we ought to be clear with whom it is we’re dealing here, because “Herod” is not only a name, it’s also used as a title.  The person historians call Herod the Great was the ruler of Judea and Palestine at the time of Jesus’ birth.  He’s the one who rebuilt the great temple in Jerusalem, and he’s also the force behind the order to slaughter all of the male babies born in Bethlehem around the time of Jesus’ birth.  As it happened, he needn’t have worried about Jesus, because Herod the Great died not long after Jesus was born.

When he died, they split up his territory.  His son, Herod Antipas, was the one who ruled over Galilee during Jesus’ ministry.  It was Herod Antipas who ordered the execution of John the Baptist, and who also collaborated with Pontius Pilate on the trial of Jesus.  A few years after that, his nephew, Herod Agrippa I accused Herod Antipas of treason against Rome, and he was sent into exile.

Herod, by James Tissot (c. 1890)

Herod Agrippa I, the grandson of Herod the Great, is the Herod referred to in this morning’s reading.

Spoiler alert: we’ll meet his son, Herod Agrippa II, in Acts 24.

Herod Agrippa I, it appears, had become a crowd favorite in Jerusalem.  He noticed that there was a developing controversy between the traditional Jews and those Jews who had begun to follow Jesus of Nazareth.  A skillful politician, he sees this schism as a chance to pad his popularity, and to pit the groups against each other.  He murders James, the brother of John and the son of Zebedee, in cold blood, and that got the traditionalists all fired up.  Herod’s poll numbers rise immediately, and so he goes out and arrests Peter, the first of Jesus’ disciples and the unabashed leader of the community of Christ’s followers.

Herod flexes by imprisoning Peter during the Passover holiday.  He bows to tradition by not doing much business during the Holy Days, but he sure primes the pump by letting folks know that he’s got it in for Peter.  As you heard, however, Peter escapes, and so Herod demonstrates how tough he is by executing the guards who had been charged with watching Peter.

Not long after that, Herod shows up in front of a starving crowd in the neighborhoods of Tyre and Sidon, and those poor folks lay it on thick in the hopes that he’ll come through with a grant or food or something. They tell Herod that he’s the best speaker anyone has ever heard – even better than God!  These folk are so desperate that they’ll bow to anyone in the hopes of finding some relief for themselves.  That kind of praise appealed to the old tyrant, and he started to believe it… and then, we’re told, God struck him dead.  That’s the power of Herod.

And what of the power of the church?  While Herod is out there imprisoning and murdering and subjugating, the church is not idle, is it?  I mean, the church is doing something, right?  While Herod is shining up his armor and sharpening his spears, collecting taxes for the Empire and building monuments, the church isbusy, right?

Yes, of course they are!  Here in Acts 12, the church is very busy!  The first thing that they do is grieve the death of their friend James.  Then, they launch into a prayer meeting.

Wait – what? Don’t you mean that they took to the streets with a bunch of placards reading “Free Peter” or “Justice Now”?  Didn’t they send in a SWAT team to off Herod or to release Peter?  Nope, that’s not what happens.  That may be Dave’s way, but it is not apparently God’s way.

Peter Returns, by Johann Christoph Weigel (1695)

So let’s talk about what the church did:  They prayed for Peter on Passover.  You’ll remember that is a night celebrating the fact that the angel of death visited the homes of the oppressors in Egypt, but spared those who sought to be God’s people.

That same night, an angel of the Lord appears to Peter, and leads him out of prison right to the place where the prayer meeting is going on.  He knocks at the door, but they won’t let him in, because they can’t believe it’s really him.

As an aside, I need to say that I really, really hope that Mary Magdalene was at that meeting watching this unfold.  Do you remember how many times she’d gone to Peter and said, “Jesus has risen!”, and Peter looked at Mary and said “Nah…Impossible!”  This evening, it’s Peter standing at the gates trying to convince an incredulous crowd that it is, in fact, him, and that he is, in fact, free!

So the next day, these followers of Jesus send Peter out of town on the first bus.  They could have arranged a public parade and offered criticism of Herod’s administration.  They chose, however, to go in a different direction, and they sent Peter down to Caesarea for his own good.  The church continued to meet and pray in Jerusalem and elsewhere.

It’s worth noting that Peter’s prominence in the book of Acts will diminish quickly from this point.  The movement is growing like crazy, and this shows that Peter is not in it for Peter’s sake. These folks are God’s people, not Peter’s.  In fact, we’ll see in the weeks after Easter that for the rest of the book of Acts, the primary spokesperson for God is Saul, also known as Paul, and not Peter.  It would appear as though Peter has no intention of building some sort of power base within the church.

The Herods of the world will focus on, and strive for, and even kill over positions of power and privilege. They want to be in charge so badly that they can taste it – and they don’t care who they run over in their hurry to get there.  You can take a look at a lot of those folks in Washington DC as an example of this – folks who are more than happy to let someone else suffer or even die if it’s to their political advantage.

The Death of Herod, German woodcutting from the 17th c.

But the followers of Jesus, we’re told, run things a little differently.  They turn to God in prayer, and refuse to take up violence.  And the result? Well, by the time that Luke gets around to writing up this story in about 70 AD, Herod Agrippa I has been dead for more than 25 years.  He’s a distant memory – literally, consumed by worms.  But according to verse 24 of today’s reading, “the word of God continued to advance and gain adherents.”

You see? This is a story about power and about politics.  It’s a story that asks the question, “Who gets to tell me who I am? To whom or to what do I owe ultimate loyalty?”  Is it the government?  Or is it God?

In the world in which our Christian faith was born, religion was clearly the servant of the state.  The emperor was said to be divine, and most historians seem to think that this worship was essential if the Empire was going to survive.  Leading Roman thinkers like Marcus Aurelius, Lucian, and Celsus belittled Christianity mainly because they thought that this new faith would be divisive in the Roman Empire. They sought to eliminate Christianity because they saw it as a threat to the status quo.

And today?  Pastor Will Willimon writes to point out that we live in a time where the state is given almost religious reverence:

We look to the almighty state for our security, our well-being, our protection, and care of all the vulnerable and needy within our society.  The state gives us our identity, our ultimate loyalties as we step into line behind the flag, the fatherland, and the national self-determination.  The state has become our most commonly accepted means of … insuring ourselves against the vicissitudes of life.  Like a god… the state holds for us the powers of life and death.  Who can fight city hall?  Can we understand that little band of Christians who huddled behind closed doors, fearful of the evil hand of Herod and his soldiers, incredulous that any power, even the power of God, could prevail against such a hand? [William Willimon, Interpretation Commentary on the Book of Acts (Westminster/John Knox, 1988) pp. 118-119]

I don’t think that we can understand how they felt.  We’re so used to being the “good guys”, and we’ve pretty well convinced ourselves that old Herod isn’t so bad, so long as he’s elected more or less democratically and has a sound fiscal policy.  We like to pretend that Jesus and Herod can get along just fine… but that’s not what we see in Scripture.

And I know it’s hard – trust me.  Over the years, I’ve gotten a few letters and phone calls from the White House, and I’m here to tell you that it feels pretty good!  That kind of attention and proximity to power is seductive.  It’s somehow validating to be in that space…

And yet God, in Christ, by the power of the Holy Spirit, longs to be the one who tells me who I am.  And how does God do that most often? By the power of community and the voice of the church.

We’ve seen the power of conversion in our study of Acts so far.  People from every walk of life – Jews, Greeks, Centurions, slaves, those who are well-known and those who are marginalized – are all being transformed by the power of the Gospel.  And this transformation is not merely a series of individual lives that are touched.  Rather, as each life was changed, a new community was formed.  In a very real sense, the church of Jesus Christ became a new community for those who were converted.  One historian compared the church to other societies in the Roman world, and said

Christian groups were exclusive and totalistic in a way that no club or even any pagan cultic association was…to be ‘baptized into Christ Jesus’…signaled…an extraordinary thorough-going resocialization, in which the sect was intended to become virtually the primary group for its members, supplanting all other loyalties. [Wayne Meeks, The First Urban Christians: The Social World of the Apostle Paul (Yale Press, 1983) p. 78]

Isn’t that what we’ve seen throughout the book of Acts?  A person is “saved” or “converted” and that change so deeply affects that person’s life that they must re-shape their fundamental life-orientation.  They become a part of the church – the Body of Christ – and they realize that it is the Lord, not Caesar, who gets to tell them who they are.  It is God, not the government, who gets my ultimate loyalty.

I think that’s a huge part of what is happening here in Acts.  So what am I asking you to do with all this?  I mean, this happened a long, long, time ago.  What, if any, are its implications for our lives?

Let me invite you to explore your identity, and to nurture it.  If I am asked to prove my identity, I usually assume that the folks are asking to see some sort of government-issued document that proves who I am, where I was born, and what citizenship I claim.  And those items can be helpful, sometimes.

Yet the church in Acts knew that their prime identity was to be found, not in their relationship to Rome or to Herod, and not even in terms of their ethnic or social understanding of who they were.  The core of who they were lay elsewhere.

You have, I suspect, got somewhere in your pocket or on your nightstand a piece of plastic asserting that you are a resident of Pennsylvania and a citizen of the United States.  That’s fine.

But before you got those things, many of you heard Psalm 139 on the day that you were born.  Every day since then, the church has been reminding you that you are fearfully and wonderfully made, and that you belonged to God long before you moved into this neighborhood.  You are a child of God.  That is your birthright.  That is who you are.

We are coming into the season of Lent, and this is an amazing time for us to explore what it means to belong to God, and to live for Jesus. Let me ask you to take some deliberate time in the next couple of months to consider who, and whose you are… and to contemplate the difference that might make in the way you live your life, spend your money, and offer your obedience.

You might choose to invest yourself more deeply in the relationships we have.  Come to the pot-luck dinners on Wednesdays and take time to be with one another around a common table.  Maybe you’ll plug into a small group, such as the Adult Sunday School time each week.  I hope that you’ll make worship a priority – beginning with this coming Ash Wednesday evening service.  Perhaps you’ll do some reading and study on your own.

When Herod was trying to imprison or kill us, it was, perhaps, a little easier to focus on the fact that he’s not the one in charge.  But now Herod has shifted his tactics, and seems determined to prove that he’s coming to save us.  But he’s still not in charge.  In the weeks and months to come, beloved, let me urge you to look for ways to remind yourself and each other that God, not people, rules the world.  And then let us seek to engage in practices that will help us to align ourselves with God’s priorities in this place and at this time.  Thanks be to God, who promises to form us into his very body here and now.  Amen. 

Choosing Who We Will Become

by

The leadership of The First U.P. Church of Crafton Heights has voted to identify as a “Matthew 25 Congregation” in the Presbyterian Church (USA).  You can click here to learn more about this initiative across the denomination.  For a few weeks this winter, then, we are spending time in this chapter, seeking to understand our place in it.  On January 16, our scriptures included Matthew 25:1-13 as well as Amos 5:18-24.

To hear this message as preached in worship, please use this media player:

To participate in the entire worship service via our YouTube recording, please use the link below:

Last month, the Session at Crafton Heights voted to join 933 other Presbyterian Church (USA) congregations in identifying as a “Matthew 25” church.   The Matthew 25 initiative invites churches to focus on three key emphases in the Gospel: a vitality in our life together, a commitment to combatting structural racism, and the attempt to dismantle systemic poverty. The Matthew 25 program has been around for a few years, and our Session did not jump on that bandwagon immediately.  This isn’t because we felt like those were poor goals, but rather because they seemed pretty self-evident.  We wondered, “are there churches that don’t care to be vital? Are there congregations that support racism, or are disinterested in social justice?

And yet, the more we revisited this notion, the more it seemed that maybe this was a good time for us to say, emphatically, YES – this is who we are striving to be as we continue to try to understand what it means to live as followers of Jesus here and now.

And maybe you’re thinking, “Look, I don’t have anything against vitality, or the struggle to overcome racism and poverty, but why are you calling it the ‘Matthew 25 Initiative’?”  Why choose that particular chapter out of the nearly 1200 chapters in the Bible?

Let’s talk a little bit about Matthew.  If you have access to a “red-letter” Bible, you will notice that when Matthew gets around to writing his version of Jesus’ life, he is a careful and intentional editor. There are five great discourses of Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew – five collections of Jesus’ teaching that are spaced throughout the book.

Chapters 5-7 contain the material we know as “the Sermon on the Mount”, while chapter 10 is sometimes called “the missionary discourse” because Jesus is sending out his disciples.  Chapter 13 contains a number of parables relating to the Kingdom of Heaven, and Matthew 18 is filled with instruction on life in the community of faith.

Matthew 25 provides the end of what we call “the Olivet discourse”, as Matthew sets these teachings in a conversation that Jesus was having with his disciples on the Mount of Olives during Holy Week.

It’s no surprise that Matthew, the Gospel with the greatest emphasis on Jesus’ connection to Jewish faith and tradition, would choose to group Jesus’ teaching into five sections.  Everyone in Matthew’s community knew the five books of Moses, the Torah of the Old Testament, and just as the teachings of Moses formed the basis for the community that became known as Judaism, so now the teachings of Jesus form the basis for life in the present age.

Another thought that may be interesting to those who are currently in our confirmation class: there are those who theorize that Matthew wrote his gospel in this way so that it would be more easily memorized by those who were hoping to be received as Christians in the first century.  We’re doing a lot in our confirmation experience, but you don’t have to memorize the entire Gospel of Matthew!

Like any good teacher, Jesus is working toward a conclusion – a point he wants to emphasize.  Some scholars suggest that the material in this last discourse, which focuses on the new order that is to come and the judgment of the nations, is the high point of Jesus’ teaching to his followers.

Matthew 25 consists of three parables: the so-called wise and foolish maidens, the servants and their talents, and the sheep and the goats.  We’ll be spending the next month reflecting on these stories in the hopes that we can learn more about our call to be a Matthew 25 congregation and live faithfully with our neighbors.

Ten Virgins, Mariette van Velden (contemporary)

Today we hear the parable of the ten bridesmaids.  I don’t know about you, but this parable used to scare the heck out of me.  I mean, it appears to end with five hapless women having been locked out of a party.  They bang on the door, and an apparently angry Jesus thunders at them to get lost – he’s not interested in them.  I mean, when I first heard this, I thought, “What can I do to not be like those people!” I sure don’t want to be left behind…

So let’s look at this story.  We’ve got ten young women who, for all intents and purposes, are identical.  What I mean to say is that they are all insiders.  They’re all included!  There’s going to be a wedding, and they not only wrangled an invitation, but they’re a part of the wedding party!  So they’re preparing for this big event, and because they’re sharp and know that it may last a while, they bring their lamps – full of oil – along with them.

We aren’t entirely sure what a traditional wedding might have looked like during Jesus’ day, but there are some pretty good guesses.  The bride and her friends would gather at the bride’s home as the feast was being prepared.  When everything was ready, the groom would leave his home and journey to the house where his bride was waiting.  He would ceremonially enter the house, where he would greet the bride and escort her back to a feast at his family’s home, where the couple would then live.

The bridesmaids had a particular role in that they would take their lamps, which were essentially long sticks that held a bowl filled with oil and rags, and use those lanterns to illuminate the path to the bridegroom’s house.  In addition, the fact that such lamps would burn through an extravagant amount of oil was thought to be a reminder of the worship in the Temple and God’s presence at the wedding event.

So in the story we’ve been given by Jesus, ten young women went to wait with their friend on one of the most exciting days of her life.  Each of these ten women carried a lamp that was, presumably, full.  Five of them, however, were cautious enough to drag along an “emergency back-up jug” filled with oil.  There’s nothing to indicate that this would be necessary – folks knew where the houses were, they knew the route, and they could expect how the schedule might reasonably unfold.  I’d suggest that the women who brought the extra oil might be compared with people who not only carry umbrellas, but wear raincoats; they are the folks who have not one, but three locks on their doors.  Do you see what I mean?  They are “above and beyond” types.

The Parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins (detail), Friedrich Wilhelm Schadow 1838–1842

So these girls, some of whom may have seemed a little overprepared, but, whatever – they did all the things that a roomful of adolescent girls do while waiting: they visited and snacked and gossiped and laughed and finally, they fell asleep.

Why did they fall asleep? Well, it is the bridegroom’s fault.  All Jesus tells us is that the groom was “delayed”.

Now, we’re going to talk about this more in the weeks to come, but I want to make sure that you notice right now that the whole crisis is occasioned because the bridegroom is late to his own party.

Have you ever been in a situation where you threw your hands in the air and looked toward the heavens and shouted a prayer that sounded like, “OK, God, where are you NOW?”  You had been taught to know that God loved you; you expected and needed and longed for God’s presence and then – at the time when you most needed to know that God was there… crickets.

Have you experienced a time when you thought that Jesus was MIA?

I think that’s a fair question because in this parable and in the two that follow, we find descriptions of people who are operating in the perceived absence of the Lord.  We will want to pay attention to that fact this month.

At any rate, here is our room full of bridesmaids, all of whom have succumbed to slumber, and all of a sudden they get word – the groom is on the way, finally!  So the girls wake up and get things sorted out and for whatever reason, five of them discover that their supply of oil is short.

The Parable of the Ten Virgins, Jan van ‘t Hoff (contemporary)

Now at this point, every girl in the room, with the possible exception of the bride, is operating under a horrifying misconception.  It would appear as though each of those women seems to equate her worth with her ability to have an oil-filled lamp.  Each person is behaving as though the quantity of oil is the main point, and not the procession or the wedding.

The five “foolish” bridesmaids see that they are short and think, “Oh, no! How can I show my face in this procession if I don’t have an abundance of oil?”  And so they beg their sisters to share with them.  The five “wise” women appear to reply, “What are you, crazy?  If we give you some of ours, then we won’t have enough!”  Every girl in the room seems to think that if they aren’t in possession of an abundance of oil, they are useless.  Unlovable.  Worthless.

Every person in that room (except, as mentioned, perhaps the bride) has somehow learned to equate their worth as a person to something outside of themselves that they have or offer.  That is a tragedy.

I was struck by an expression of this in the recent Disney film Encanto.  One of the characters, Louisa, has been given the gift of great strength, and she apparently relishes the opportunities she has to serve her family and neighbors by moving pianos, donkeys, and even churches.  However, as she sings Surface Pressure, she reveals that all of that service comes out of a deep fear:

Pressure like a grip, grip, grip, and it won’t let go…
Pressure like a tick, tick, tick ’til it’s ready to blow…
Give it to your sister, your sister’s stronger
See if she can hang on a little longer
Who am I if I can’t carry it all?…

Give it to your sister and never wonder
If the same pressure would’ve pulled you under.
Who am I if I don’t have what it takes?
No cracks! No breaks!
No mistakes!
No pressure…

Louisa is afraid that she is lovable only for what she can do to help other people.  If she somehow lost her ability to be useful to her family or community, she wonders: would she even exist?

Have you ever felt that? As though you are loved, not for who you are, but because you have something to “bring to the table” – you are loved because you’re the funny one, or because you’re so pretty, or because you pay the bills… A love “because” or a love “if” is not genuine, and I can’t believe that Jesus would lift up that kind of transactional relationship here in the Gospel.

The Clever Bridesmaids, He Qi (Contemporary)

And so it hit me on Thursday afternoon of this week: being obsessive enough to pack an extra quart of olive oil is not what qualifies those five young women as being “wise”.  What made them “wise” is that they chose to stay where the party would find them.  They didn’t leave.

Their peers are foolish, not because they ran out of oil, but because they chose to value the oil than the event that the oil was intended to celebrate.  They were so intent on looking good, and looking prepared, that they left their friend on the eve of her wedding and missed the party altogether.

Everything we know about first-century weddings tells us that five lamps would have been enough for the celebration to continue.  And yet half of the bridesmaids can’t quite bring themselves to believe that they belong at the wedding, oil or no, and so they trust in their ability to run fast, to be quick at the market, and so on.  They cannot trust the grace and welcome of the groom – and their preference to trust themselves more than they trust their host is what makes them, in Jesus’ eyes, foolish.

So what is there for us to take away from this first parable in Matthew 25?  I’d suggest that one word for the church in the 21st century is that we can put aside any temptation to get sidetracked by the notion that we can somehow impress God with how holy we are.  Let us refuse to act in ways that suggest that, sure, Jesus doeslove you, but he’d like you a lot better if you cleaned up your language, or slept around a little less, or volunteered at the food bank more often.

Jesus did not come as a potentate waiting to be wowed by the splendor of the tribute that is brought forward.  Jesus comes as a child, a sibling, a groom, and a friend.  He’s not looking to give you a score – he’s come in the hopes of a relationship.  The last thing that the groom says in the parable is the saddest thing of all: “I do not know you.”

The groom does not say, “You should have been here hours ago.”  Nor does he say, “You should have been more prepared.”  He doesn’t say, “You should have been smarter.”  He says simply, “I don’t know you.”

Let us resolve, beloved, as we begin this adventure that is 2022, that as individuals and as a congregation we will be those who know Christ and make him known.  Let us choose to put ourselves in places where the healing and grace of Jesus are likely to come to us.  In doing so, we can choose to be the kind of people through whom the healing and grace of Jesus are likely to flow.  Let us celebrate the fact that we are welcome at the party, and live in such a way so that others sense that welcome and invitation as well.

I’ll close with the observation of theologian and priest Robert Farrar Capon, who says about this parable:

When all is said and done—when we have scared ourselves silly with the now-or-never urgency of faith, and the once-and-always finality of judgment—we need to take a deep breath and let it out with a laugh. Because what we are watching for is a party. And that party is not just down the street making up its mind when to come to us. It is already hiding in our basement, banging on our steam pipes, and laughing its way up our cellar stairs.  The unknown day and hour of its finally bursting into the kitchen and roistering its way through the whole house is not dreadful; it is all part of the divine lark of grace. God is not our mother-in-law, coming to see whether her wedding-present china has been chipped. He is a funny Old Uncle, with a salami under one arm and a bottle of wine under the other. We do indeed need to watch for him; but only because it would be such a pity to miss all the fun.[1]

Thanks be to God for an invitation to love ourselves and each other as God already loves us in Christ Jesus.  Amen.

[1] Robert Farrar Capon, The Parables of Judgment (Eerdmans, 1989) p. 166

Glad and Generous Hearts

by

Of what use are the the ancient (and not-so-ancient) creeds of the church in the twenty-first century?  In late 2019 and early 2020 the folks at The First U.P. Church of Crafton Heights are looking at how some of these historic documents, many of which have their origin in some historic church fights, can be helpful in our attempts to walk with Jesus.  On November 24, we considered The Heidelberg Catechism and sought to be attentive to the scripture as contained in Psalm 19:7-14 and Acts 2:42-47.

To hear this sermon as preached in worship, please use the media player below:

So, here’s how we began our 2019-2020 Confirmation Class last Sunday evening.  In addition to the young people who were there beginning their journey towards church membership, we once again had an older teen who is volunteering as assistant teacher.  When we were going around the circle introducing ourselves, Maddy said, “Well, when I did this five years ago, Carly was here to help Dave, and that was important to me.  I think that sometimes it’s helpful to have someone, you know, younger, who can explain things differently than Dave.”

Ouch!  But it’s a fair statement.  The circle is always better when it’s more inclusive.

And we are not the first church where this has happened.  As we continue in our discussion of the creeds that have shaped our faith, I’d like to take you back to 1559.  Frederick III has just become an Elector – a sort of regional governor – of Germany.  No sooner had he taken office, though, when he had a ringside seat to a full-blown church fight.  Here’s the story.

In this corner, we have Tileman Heshusius.  He’s a professor of preaching at Heidelberg University and is also the preacher at the local church.  Heshusius is a staunch Lutheran – one of the most important aspects of theology, in his mind, is what one believes happens during the Lord’s Supper.  He believed, taught, and preached that the actual body and blood of Jesus was present in the sacrament.  Anything else, thought Heshusius, was nonsense.

And in the other corner, we have Wilhelm Klebitz (I tried, but could not find a picture of this fellow).  He’s a student at the university, and a Deacon in the congregation.  He advocated, very forcefully, that while every believer has access to the real and substantial presence of the risen Christ while taking the sacrament, there is no literal body or blood.

If I were to say that this was a heated debate, you wouldn’t get the full impact of what happened.  While Heshusius was out of town, the other professors awarded Klebitz his degree. When Heshusius returned, he was furious, and in a sermon he called that act a “hellish, devlish, cursed, cruel, and terrible thing” and said that Klebitz was a devil from the pit of hell.  The next week, when these two men were together at the communion table leading worship, Heshusius literally wrestled the cup of wine out of Klebitz’ hands.  The congregation watched, dumbfounded, as the two pastors fought in the chancel.   Finally, Frederick had had enough and he kicked them both out of Heidelberg.  But then he had another problem: he needed someone to preach at his church and he needed a professor for the university.  More than that, he was concerned that the church argument between the previous folks had turned off the young people.  He wrote that his problems were many:

Therefore, we also have ascertained, that, by no means the least defect of our system, is found in the fact that our blooming youth is disposed to be careless in respect to Christian doctrine… The consequence has ensued that they have, in too many instances, grown up without the fear of God and the knowledge of his Word, having enjoyed no profitable instruction, or otherwise have been perplexed with irrelevant and needless questions, and at times have been burdened by unsound doctrines.[1]

But what to do?  How to get the kids to pay attention to religion, and learn the faith?  Frederick had just the ticket: he went out and hired Zacharias Ursinus, age 28, to be the professor of preaching at the university, and a 26 year old named Caspar Olivianus to be the preacher at the local church.  I’m not sure whether these young whippersnappers had goatees, or played the guitar, or know all the right slang words, but I do know that Frederick asked them to come up with a means by which young people might be instructed in the path of Christian discipleship.  Moreover, Frederick asked them to do it in such a way as to bring people together, rather than driving them further apart.

In January of 1563, then, these men published the Heidelberg Catechism, a series of 129 questions and answers covering the depths of human sinfulness, the profundity of God’s redemptive love, and the importance of our gratitude for that redemption.  It is a remarkable document in many ways.

It is, first of all, deeply personal.  This is not a sweeping series of broad theological statements requiring intellectual assent, but rather a string of heartfelt questions addressed to the individual.  For instance, this is how the catechism begins:

  1. What is your only comfort in life and in death?
    A. That I am not my own, but belong— body and soul, in life and in death—to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ. He has fully paid for all my sins with his precious blood,and has set me free from the tyranny of the devil. He also watches over me in such a way that not a hair can fall from my head without the will of my Father in heaven;in fact, all things must work together for my salvation.

Do you hear how different that is from our previous statements like the Nicene or Apostles’ Creeds or the Scots Confession?  It’s just lovely!

In addition, it is conciliatory in tone.  The authors deliberately sought to find areas of agreement in Jesus Christ.  There is little trace of the controversy that birthed the catechism within it.

And it is remarkable in its emphasis on the positive aspects that flow from a life of discipleship in Jesus.  If you read it, you’ll discover an echo of the 19th Psalm focusing on the beauty of God’s law, one that stresses the goodness that can come from walking in the path of obedience.

Too often, the Christian faith is presented as a caricature.  God is depicted as a grumpy old man who is really mad at you because you’re such a miserable sinner.  Maybe you grew up in a church that defined faithful living as all the stuff we’re not supposed to do: no swearing, no lying, no cheating, no dancing, no card playing…  In some churches, the message seems to be this: If you want to make God happy, then straighten up and fly right, Buster.  Stop doing all that stuff that ticks God off, and then maybe God will have mercy on your pathetic little soul…

But the Heidelberg Catechism is beautiful in the way that it treats the laws of God.  In fact, the discussion of the commandments is located in the section of the Catechism dealing with gratitude because Christian living is not primarily about avoiding the negative and unpleasant realities of sin, but rather embracing the positive and joyful aspects of daily life.  I’d like to look at two sections of the Catechism by way of illustration.

Questions 110 and 111 deal with the eighth commandment: “Thou shalt not steal”.  If the only possible interpretation of “stealing” was breaking into my home or robbing me on the subway, well then it’s easy to have a simple prohibition.  But the Catechism suggests that the commandment addresses a more pervasive human condition, that of greed.  The answer to question 110 indicates that the eighth commandment “forbids not only the theft and robbery which civil authorities punish, but.. also… all wicked tricks and schemes by which we seek to get for ourselves our neighbor’s goods…”

It’s fair to include in this definition, then, deliberate attempts to underpay workers or to cheat the poor.  This is particularly relevant during the Christmas season, when we are so pressured to buy more and more stuff for loved ones, colleagues, and, of course, ourselves.  The Catechism reminds us that the Law of God is concerned with who is getting the money for these products.  Are those shoes that look so great being crafted in subhuman conditions by 13 year-olds?  Is that furniture that looks so amazing in my den the result of deforestation in a country that desperately needs a rain forest?

You see, our economics can never simply be about saying “I paid for this, and so it’s mine.”  Who did you pay, and who got paid?  Who else made that bargain possible?  In your purchase, did you somehow support, enrich, or encourage someone who truly needs that income?  That is the law of love applied to the eighth commandment.

Similarly, question 112 deals with the ninth commandment which forbids false witness.  We are cautioned, of course, to avoid outright deception and deceit that come straight from the pit of Hell.  And we are also reminded that human speech is a glorious gift.  How dare we abuse that gift by contorting it into falsehood?  In addition to refraining from lying, I am forbidden to take your words and meaning and twist them into something else entirely, implying that you are saying something altogether different than that which you meant.  The Catechism warns us against slander and gossip.

Wow, is that relevant in the age of social media and electronic communication, or what?  Between Twitter and Instagram and Facebook and Email and Texting, it is so easy to yield to the first impulse and to launch an attack, spread a falsehood, perpetuate a rumor, or join in a group smear campaign against someone else. The Catechism says, “In judicial and all other matters I am to love the truth, and to speak and confess it honestly.”

Nicholas Wolterstorff, a contemporary theologian and philosopher, puts it this way: “Thou must not take cheap shots.  Thou must earn thy right to disagree… the point being it is much more difficult (I don’t say impossible) to dishonor someone to his face.”[2]

The Catechism goes on to instruct us that the ninth commandment calls us to defend and promote our neighbor’s good name.

I want to pause there and remind you that we’re talking about a document that was written as a result of a church fight.  Frederick III asked for a way through a conflicted time, and the resultant catechism affirms that we are called to build up our neighbor in what we say about her or him even when, or perhaps especially when, we are angry.

That might be timely for you this morning.  Maybe you’re irritated with a fellow member of this congregation; perhaps you’re preparing yourself for another holiday meal with your “idiot” brother-in-law whose politics you cannot stand; or maybe you’re enraged by the current state of affairs in Washington DC.  The question is the same: in what you say about or to people, are you, to the best of your ability, promoting their good name? Are you loving your neighbor in your speech? Is the world a better place because of what you say and how you say it?  That is keeping the commandment!

Acts chapter two describes the first Christian community.  I know we are the “First U.P. Church of Crafton Heights,” but this passage is about First Church of Anywhere, anytime, anyplace.  It describes their gatherings… day by day – that is to say, they are normal, and unremarkable.  They met – how? With “glad and generous hearts”.  When they looked at each other, and spoke to and about each other – they did so with generosity of spirit.  The result was that they enjoyed the good will of all the people.

Beloved in the Lord, the scripture is plain: God’s law is a gift.  It is designed to lead us to embrace what is best.

May we be known as people who are quick to encourage and affirm; as those who are reluctant to profit from another’s misery or misfortune; as people whose hearts, minds, and spirits are indeed glad and generous.  Thanks be to God!  Amen.

We concluded the message by affirming our faith using

questions 1, 2, 110, 111, and 112 of the Heidelberg Catechism.

  1. Q. What is your only comfort in life and death?

    That I am not my own, but belong with body and soul, both in life and in death, to my faithful Savior Jesus Christ. He has fully paid for all my sins with His precious blood, and has set me free from all the power of the devil. He also preserves me in such a way that without the will of my heavenly Father not a hair can fall from my head; indeed, all things must work together for my salvation. Therefore, by His Holy Spirit He also assures me of eternal life and makes me heartily willing and ready from now on to live for Him.

  2. Q. What do you need to know in order to live and die in the joy of this comfort?

    First, how great my sins and misery are; second, how I am delivered from all my sins and misery; third, how I am to be thankful to God for such deliverance.

    110. Q. What does God forbid in the eighth commandment (concerning theft)?

    God forbids not only outright theft and robbery but also such wicked schemes and devices as false weights and measures, deceptive merchandising, counterfeit money, and usury; we must not defraud our neighbor in any way, whether by force or by show of right. In addition God forbids all greed and all abuse or squandering of His gifts.

    111. Q. What does God require of you in this commandment?

    I must promote my neighbor’s good wherever I can and may, deal with him as I would like others to deal with me, and work faithfully so that I may be able to give to those in need.

    112. Q. What is required in the ninth commandment (concerning false witness)?

    I must not give false testimony against anyone, twist no one’s words, not gossip or slander, nor condemn or join in condemning anyone rashly and unheard. Rather, I must avoid all lying and deceit as the devil’s own works, under penalty of God’s heavy wrath. In court and everywhere else, I must love the truth, speak and confess it honestly, and do what I can to defend and promote my neighbor’s honor and reputation.

[1] From the original preface to the Catechism in 1563.  Available in its entirety here: http://heidelberg-catechism.s3.amazonaws.com/Original%20Preface%20of%20Heidelberg%20Catechism%20(1563).pdf

[2] Quoted in Christian Contours: How a Biblical Worldview Shapes the Heart and Mind, edited by Douglas Huffman (Kregel Academic and Professional Press, 2012), pp 88-89.

Wearing the Uniform

by

In the Autumn of 2019 the folks at The First U.P. Church of Crafton Heights are talking about “church clothes”.  What do we wear as we seek to be a congregation in this place and time?  Paul wrote his friends in Colossae to “clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience.”  On October 13 we talked about the virtue and practice of Humility.  Scriptures included Matthew 23:1-12 and Philippians 2:1-11.

To hear this sermon as preached in worship, please use the media player below:

I’d like to start this morning by sharing one of my all-time favorite memories of Christmas.  In the mid-1980’s, before we were parents, Sharon and I spent a day buying clothes for a student at a prestigious private school where Sharon was doing some research. This young lady was a “scholarship” kid who lived in what thirty years ago we called “the projects”.  Most days, she did well at school, but the last Friday of every month was sheer torment for her, because it was “dress down day”.  That meant students were free to shed their uniforms and wear whatever they wanted to.  I think that Maddy could tell us something about how nice it feels to be able to choose your own clothes for a day every now and then.

The problem was that this student didn’t really have any other clothes that were nice enough to wear to that school – so she just wore her uniform on those Fridays.  And, because kids are kids, she got ripped apart on those days, and was teased mercilessly. Because my wife is one of the kindest, most generous people I know, she decided that we’d go school shopping for a high school girl.  We bought a couple of bags of clothes, and got a youth group member named Tom Taylor to dress up in my Santa suit and deliver the goods.  It was wonderful to hear Sharon narrate the scene she witnessed on the next “dress down day” at that school.

Now, the Gospels don’t record that Jesus ever had to deal with a posse of “mean girls”, but there was a group who consistently targeted and criticized him for being “not like us”.  They looked at Jesus and they scolded and mocked him, saying, “What’s up with those losers you surround yourself with?  And how can you justify spending your time in that way? And that stuff that you eat? And the people you eat it with? For crying out loud, Jesus, you are embarrassing us.  You are so out of it.  How dare you think of yourself as one of us, Jesus.”

But Jesus looked at that crowd – we know them as The Pharisees – and shot right back.  “Those guys?  Please.  Oh, they may think that they’re all that.  And they’ve got the right uniforms on – their prayer shawls and beads and scripture boxes – but there is no substance there.  They don’t have a clue.  They were born on third base but they walk around like they just hit a triple.”

The Pharisees Question Jesus, James Tissot (between 1886-1894)

And then he looked at those who were following him and issued a call to humility. “Don’t be like that,” he said.  “You are to take the lowest place. You are to see yourselves as students, not teachers.  You are to serve each other.”

It’s hard to talk about humility in the church – or anywhere, really.  I mean, if you talk about yourself as someone who is humble, you probably aren’t.  I’m reminded of the time that the congregation surprised their pastor at the end of one Sunday worship service.  They announced that he had been voted the “Most Humble Pastor in America”, and then they presented him with a medal having that inscription.  The next Sunday they took it away from him because he wore it.

As we continue this series of messages on “The Dress Code for Christians,” what does it mean for us to be people who wear humility in our relationship with each other?

Let’s look at a case study: the situation in the First Church of Philippi.  Things were rough there.  We don’t know exactly what was going on, but it’s clear that the place was simmering with conflict. Plenty of people were really irritated with each other.  Paul names two adversaries in chapter 4 of this letter, and so it may be that folks in church were taking sides in this dispute.  Maybe some of the folks were running around saying, “Well, I’m on Syntyche’s side” and others were saying, “Why is that person being so mean to Euodia?”  It could be that what had started as a personal argument was polarizing people in the congregation.

Or maybe there was some conflict around the idea of what made someone a “real” Christian.  Some folks insisted that you couldn’t follow Jesus unless you bought into all of the Jewish Law first, and others insisted that there was no impediment to following Jesus – nothing at all.

And it could have been that some people there were irritated at Paul – they saw him as playing favorites, or as being too close to some people while being distant from others.  Whatever the cause, the content of the letter makes it plain that there was some genuine conflict in the church.  I know, I know, it sounds difficult to believe, but it’s right there in the Bible so I guess we’re going to have to accept that it’s possible for people to argue with and even be petty with each other at church.  Go figure.

So Paul addresses this conflict by constructing a theological argument.  He begins chapter 2 with a sentence that strings together a number of clauses that all begin with the word “if”.  In the Greek, it is ei.  You heard it a moment ago: “if you have any encouragement… if any comfort… if any common sharing in the Spirit, if any tenderness and compassion…”

Now, in English, when we use the word “if”, it’s often in a conditional clause: “If it rains on Saturday…” It might be gonna happen, it might not be gonna happen.  We won’t know until Saturday.  But the Greek language allows for an understanding of “if” as a statement of fact.  Something like, “Look, Andre, if I’m your friend – and we both know that I am – then…”[1]

My point is that Paul is not wondering whether there is encouragement, comfort, commonality of purpose, or compassion to be found in Jesus – he is affirming FOUR TIMES that we all agree that those things are rooted in the person and work of Jesus Christ.  So he starts this case study by reminding them of what they all know.

In the second verse, Paul goes on to tell the Philippians what ought to happen.  And once again, he re-states the goal four times: be like-minded (this does not necessarily mean that he expects them to agree on everything or vote unanimously, but rather that they are to work toward having the same attitude, or to be looking in the same direction); have the same love for one another; be of one spirit (the literal Greek there says “share the same soul” or “share the same breath”); and be of one mind.

You may think that he’s stretching to make it come out to four by repeating the word “mind” twice in this list, but I’d like to suggest that in repeating the word phroneó, he is actually getting that word into their heads so he can use it again in verse 5.  He calls his congregation to have the same mindset, the same view, to have a commitment to seeing things… how? To seeing things the way that Jesus saw them.  “Be like Jesus,” Paul says.

And then the old Apostle does something that you’ve done a hundred times.  Do you know how sometimes you have something to say, or you want to tell me something that is true, and you’re not quite sure how to put it into words, and then you think of a song that says it exactly right?  You want to remind your spouse of the way that you love her, and so you play “your song” on the car radio.  You are grief-stricken at the cemetery and all you can do is just stand there while “Taps” is played.  You are searching for something true to say at church and the best you can do is say, “Well, Amazing Grace, right?”

That’s what Paul does in Philippians 2.  He either reminds them of a song that they’ve sung before or he writes a new hymn on the spot.  The purpose of this hymn is to point to the humility of Jesus.

So what did humility look like when Jesus wore it? It begins, Paul says in verse 5, with a mindset.  He repeats the word phroneó as a means of affirming that Jesus, in the mystery of his pre-existence within the Trinity, decided something.  Jesus chose to submit himself to the overall purpose and intentions of God.

Now that choice, that mindset, led Jesus to a specific course of action.  When Jesus decided to align himself with God’s purposes, that meant that he was setting down the pathway of obedience.  In this case, obedience means that he yielded his rights, privileges, or place in line so that he might be better able to see, hear, and simply be with people like us.  Obedience for Jesus meant the setting aside of one possible reality in order to fully embrace something else.

Of course, every action has a consequence.  According to the hymn that Paul sang, the result of the action that Jesus took was his death.  He suffered pain that he did not deserve because he had chosen to act in obedience.

However, that action also produced fruit.  Yes, Jesus died, but that was not the end of the story. The end result of Jesus’ decision and action was that the entire creation would come to the realization that Jesus, not Caesar, not me, not you, is Lord.

So what?  What are the implications for the people in Philippi? Or for the people in Crafton Heights?

Paul is calling us, as the people of God, to recognize that humility is a part of the uniform that we wear as Christians.  Like any other garment, we must choose to put this thing on.

Paul begged his friends in Philippi to see that humility is a willingness to accept that God, in Jesus, is at work in each life.  In my life.  In your life.  And in affirming that God is at work in my life, I must of necessity acknowledge that the work is not yet complete.  I am a work in progress.  And since I am not yet finished, I cannot (as the Pharisees did) present myself to you or anyone else as a final product.  I am still being molded, shaped, and used as I seek to stay on the path of obedience.

And if God is at work in each life, then God is moving not only in my life, but in yours.  I must acknowledge that you are being molded and shaped by the power of the Spirit that flows through Jesus.

And if THAT is true (and it is), then it is preposterous for me to think that somehow you are in your finished form.  I am not free to treat you as someone who is too high and lofty for me to reach – someone who is out of my league.  And neither can I regard you as one so lost that I shouldn’t even bother reaching out to you.

Like Paul, I’m not above quoting a song lyric that says something meaningful and important.  The late Rich Mullins wrote these lyrics:

My friends ain’t the way I wish they were
They are just the way they are
And I will be my brother’s keeper
Not the one who judges him
I won’t despise him for his weakness
I won’t regard him for his strength
I won’t take away his freedom
I will help him learn to stand
And I will, I will be my brother’s keeper[2]

When Paul tells his friends in Philippi, or when he speaks to us through the letter to his friends in Colossae, that we are to wear the uniform of humility when we come to church, he’s saying that we are to look to Jesus in obedience and to each other mercy and kindness.  That’s what Mullins is saying when he says he is his brother’s “keeper”, not “judge”.

John Ruskin was a leading thinker in 18th century Britain. He got to the heart of the matter at hand when he wrote,

“The first test of a truly great person is their humility. I do not mean, by humility, doubt of one’s own power…[but really] great people… have a curious… feeling that… greatness is not in them, but through them… and they see something Divine… in every other person, and are endlessly, foolishly, incredibly merciful.”[3]

Humility, therefore, is not thinking less of yourself, but simply thinking of yourself less as you act in kindness and mercy toward others.

Beloved, this is the truth that comes to us from scripture this morning, the truth that echoes through the streets not only of Philippi but Crafton Heights: if your baptism means anything, it means that we are called to care with and for each other in demonstrable, observable ways; that we are charged to invest more in the means of building each other and the whole Body of Christ up than in tearing it down; that anyone who would wear the name “Christian” is by implication someone who is learning every day to adopt the mind of Jesus.

Thanks be to God for the call, the example, and the presence of Jesus on this path of obedience.  Amen. 

[1] Fred Craddock, Interpretation Bible Commentary on Philippians (Atlanta: John Knox, 1985) p. 35.

[2] “Brother’s Keeper”, David (Beaker) Strasser | Rich Mullins, © 1995 Kid Brothers Of St. Frank Publishing (Admin. by Brentwood-Benson Music Publishing, Inc.) Universal Music – Brentwood Benson Publishing (Admin. by Brentwood-Benson Music Publishing, Inc.)

[3] https://ldschurchquotes.com/john-ruskin-on-humility/, edited for inclusivity.

An Appreciation for A Faithful Guide

by

One of the highest privileges I’ve received is that of serving as Pastor for the community of The First U.P. Church of Crafton Heights for the past 26 years.  In 2010, this group granted me a four-month Sabbatical from my ministry for a time of recharging and renewal.  In 2019, they extended that offer again – so I’ve got three months to wander, wonder, and join in life in a  different way.  This time has been divided roughly into thirds. For three weeks, my wife and I ventured through 8 states and many, many National Parks on a great RV adventure (chronicled in the June 2019 entries).  I spent virtually all of July in Africa, learning about and experiencing partnership in mission (the July 2019 entries).  In August the game plan changed once more – mostly time alone, and (mostly) 21 nights in the same bed – as I entered into a sanctuary known as Seneca Lake State Park in Eastern Ohio.  While here, my focus will be mainly on the interior life: reading, thinking, praying, and so on…

I took a rather circuitous route to the Pastoral Vocation.  As mentioned in the previous post, I spent many years specializing in “youth” ministry – it took me more than eight years to complete my Master’s Degree and satisfy my denomination’s requirements for ordination – a place I wasn’t sure that I wanted to go.

And yet in September, 1990, it happened.  Not only had I jumped through all the hoops, dotted the i’s and crossed the t’s – lo and behold, there was a congregation that wanted me to serve as (Associate) Pastor!  One of the first things I did as a pastor was to dip into my book allowance and buy a slim volume entitled Working the Angles: The Shape of Pastoral Integrity  by Eugene Peterson.  I’m sure that it was the best ten bucks the church ever spent on me.  I recall sitting in my study, reading portions of it out loud to anyone who happened to have had the poor timing to be walking past or telephoning me at the moment.  My takeaway from that book was that while the church really did want me (or someone like me) to take care of the business of being the religious institution that counted for respectability in the neighborhood, nobody in the congregation would really ever give a rat’s patootie about the three things that constitute the core of the Pastoral Vocation: prayer, studying scripture, and offering spiritual direction.

Peterson proved prophetic in many ways: I’ve often received memos for failing to account for some particular budget anomaly, and I’ve been reamed out more than once for choosing the wrong music, and I’ve been challenged on many occastions for being too political (or not political enough) from the pulpit.  Sessions and Presbyteries and Assemblies care about results, about data, and about growth.  Eugene pointed out to me early on that nobody was going to bug me about the most important stuff – the stuff that kept me alive, and that really mattered to people when they were calling from the ER or wondering what had happened to their marriage or how they might survive the loss of yet another child.

I grew to see Eugene Peterson as a guide in ministry, and I devoured his writing. And then about a dozen years ago: a great gift.  I was facing a challenge in ministry for which, to my knowledge, neither he nor anyone else I trusted had written a book.  And so I wrote a letter (on paper, through the snail mail!) to Eugene, then living in (semi) retirement in Montana. I asked if he might mentor me through this particular challenge, and after a few weeks I received an invitation from Eugene to call him at his home (on his land line!).  We met several times in person and more frequently via telephone for the next eight months or so, and I was greatly blessed to be the recipient of his wisdom, his energy, his insight, and, most especially, his care.  That time made me a better pastor and a better person.

In my previous post, I wrote about the joys of learning from someone younger than me. When I’d finished Rachel Held Evans’ Inspired, I went in the other direction and picked up the last book that Eugene published prior to his death. As Kingfishers Catch Fire: A Conversation on the Ways of God Formed by the Words of God  is a collection of 49 sermons (yes, there are seven units that contain seven messages each) that Eugene originally preached to the congregation of Christ Our King parish Bel Air, Maryland.  What a joy it has been to hear these words in his deep and gravelly voice – words that bring me into consideration of The Word; words that ask important questions and point to great beauty and poke holes in easy answers.

For instance, in a sermon on Psalm 23 he writes, “Our lives are lived in the company of both the Shepherd and the shadow…Life in the desert for both Shepherd and sheep is no soft, sun-drenched idyll on a south sea island.  It is menaced by the dark shadows of the beast-infested valley. The threats to life are all around, but the presence of the Shepherd guides and leads, dispersing the threats.” (pp. 101-102)

In his introduction to the sermons on prophecy, he writes, “Everyone more or less believes in God or gods.  But most of us do our best to keep God on the margins of our lives, or, failing that, we refashion God to suit our convenience.  Prophets insist that God is the sovereign center, not off in the wings awaiting our beck and call.  And prophets insist that we deal with God as God reveals himself, not as we imagine him to be… The unrelenting reality is that prophets don’t fit into our way of life. For a people who are accustomed to fitting God into our lives or, as we like to say, ‘making room for God,’ the prophets are hard to take and easy to dismiss.  The God of whom the prophets speak is far too large to fit into our lives. If we want anything to do with God, wehave to fit into God.” (pp. 115-116)

In reflecting on his growth in wisdom, he said, “Not everything I did or said took place behind the pulpit or in the sanctuary.  Not everything I was learning about grace and holiness was coming out of the Bible.  I was also being tutored by a woman recovering from a heart attack, by a family struggling in poverty, by young people finding words to express their newfound faith honestly and unpretentiously, or, in the words of our text, by hearing wisdom crying aloud in the street (Proverbs 1:20).” (p. 185)

In this, his final volume, I hear Eugene reminding me of truth I first encountered three decades ago: that the Christian life is all about congruence – it’s not about some extraordinary event or immersion or experience that we get once in a while, but then it’s business as usual; rather, faithful Christian living is done Monday – Sunday in workplaces and schools and hospitals and homes.  Our calling as believers is to look for ways to participate in what God is doing in each of those places; my calling as a Pastor is to point to how that might happen and invite your consideration of that as it does its quiet work in your own heart.

It’s only a hummingbird, and not a kingfisher – but she was a welcome companion all morning!

I’ve been reading his work and drafting this appreciation seated at a picnic table overlooking a lake in Eastern Ohio.  As I’ve been doing so, a number of hummingbirds have been flitting in and out, buzzing me, chasing each other, and sipping on the nectar in the feeder. This is not a gift I deserve nor one for which I could have planned, but at this season in my life and ministry, I am grateful for such reminders of grace and beauty and perseverance and delicacy and energy.  My prayer for you today is that you have the presence of faithful mentors and guides who help you to see what really matters in the world and in your own life. Thanks be to God!

I realized that I’d omitted a photo of my bride from previous posts at the lake. She is here on the weekends and source of great comfort and joy!

Eating the Poor

by

he people at the First U.P. Church of Crafton Heights have spent many Sundays since late 2017 immersed in an exploration of the Gospel of Mark. On March 3, 2019, we considered the scripture that terrifies me as few others do: Jesus’ critique of the religious leaders and worship practices of his day.  Our Gospel reading was Mark 12:35-44.  The Old Testament reading was another frightening passage – God’s judgment on the religious leaders as found in Ezekiel 34:1-10.

To hear this sermon as preached in worship, please use the media player below.

I suspect that I am not the only person in the room who is guilty of having watched a television program called “Mystery Science Theater 3000”.  This show ran on Comedy Central from 1988-1999 and was revived on Netflix last year. What you need to know about that program this morning is that it featured a human and several robotic companions watching B-grade movies in an empty theater; the movie would be shown in its entirety and the characters, visible in silhouette on the bottom of the screen, would provide humorous or sarcastic commentary while the film played. Some days, it was pretty funny.

I think about Mystery Science Theater 3000 as I read today’s gospel.  Jesus and his friends have gone to the Temple to offer worship to the Lord.  Like everyone else there, they’ve participated in the prayers, sung along, and made some sort of an offering.

And then something happens – there’s a slight shift.  In my mind, it’s like we are watching a drama unfold over Jesus’ shoulder.  We are hearing his commentary on the story of worship that day – the religious figures who are leading worship as well as the poor people who take part in other ways. And just as the writers of Mystery Science Theater 3000 hoped, this program of Jesus’ commentary on worship was a smash hit.  We read in verse 37 that “the large crowd listened to him with delight.”  Everybody was having a good time.

Can I tell you something? Jesus’ teaching here in Mark 12 is the absolute scariest passage of the entire Bible to me.  And when I read the text from Ezekiel?  I get a pit in my stomach.  In fact, sometimes I think that I’m asking the Lay Readers to share the scripture because I want them to have a meaningful part in the morning worship.  Today, it’s because I’d rather have Rayna and Jon reading that than me.  I mean, did you hear what was going on there?

Here’s Jesus, delighting the crowd with his observations about pompous, self-righteous religious authorities who walk around in long robes (…maybe like this alb I’ve got on this morning?).  The Greek word that is used there is stola– as in “stole” (…maybe like this stole I’m wearing now?).  And these people of whom Jesus is so critical demand respect.  Maybe you know that most of the time when I introduce myself, I’m “Dave”, or maybe “Pastor Dave”.  But on days when I’m cranky, or when I want the people at the hospital or the prison to take me seriously, I introduce myself as “The ReverendDavid B. Carver…”  Jesus talks about those pretentious leaders as people who long to have the best seats in the front of the worship space (…maybe you’ve noticed that there are only 3 upholstered arm chairs in the room, and you-know-who is seated in one of them every week…).  Incidentally, you might not know that Rayna’s dad is the craftsman who upholstered these chairs a few years ago…

But do you see why this passage frightens me?  Jesus is talking about people like me!  What if he’s even talking about me?!?  To the cheers of the crowd he is taking these self-righteous, arrogant, religious hypocrites down a peg or two.

What makes me any different?

I’ve seen it – far too often.  I’m sure you have too.  One of the scenes that sticks in my mind happened some years ago in a place far away. I was a guest in the home of a pastor, and the pastor’s wife warned me about another pastor in the area.  “Stay away from that one,” she warned.  “He eats the money that people bring to the Lord.”

Her husband attempted to quiet her, but she waved her hand and continued. “Listen, a long time ago in another place that man was the treasurer for his Presbytery.  Somehow, he stole a receipt book then, and he carries it with him now.  When elders from the churches bring in their offerings, he writes them receipts from his own book, rather than the official book, and he takes the money from the poor home and he eats it.  It is a terrible thing for a person to call himself a ‘man of God’ and then do something like that.”

You’ve seen it, and I hope you’ve been troubled by it – those who would hold themselves up as authorities or somehow important or especially blessed by God who wind up deceiving themselves or their audience.

But that’s the problem, isn’t it?  We as humans find it so easy to get puffed up, we find ourselves so desperate to impress either ourselves or each other that we become blind to the purpose, glory, and hope of the Kingdom that is proclaimed throughout Mark’s Gospel.

The Good News of the Gospel, my friends, is that we are not presented with a problem and then left hanging.  Just after Jesus states the lamentable nature of the human condition to preen and strut and fill ourselves with pride, he offers a set of practices that will help us to deal with that problem.

While some of these very important and impressive men are parading up to the front of the temple and putting on a show as they drop in the money for a new roof on the temple, or maybe a scholarship in grandpa’s name or a sizable donation to the organ fund, Jesus isn’t even looking. After all, whatever they give is inconsequential – it’s their extra money, and they know where to get more if they need it.

Instead of focusing on the doctors of the Law and their flowing robes, Jesus invites us to notice a small, impoverished woman making her way up the side aisle.  She’s coming while all the attention is on the goings-on in another part of the building, and she’s putting some coins in the offering plate.

When she thinks that no one is looking, she drops everything she has into the basket.  Her offering consists of two coins that are called leptons– which means literally “a thin one”.  It was the smallest coin known to that culture, and it would buy about one slice of bread.[1]  Clearly, Jesus is not impressed with the size of her gift – but he makes special note of the substance and the manner of that gift.  He says that “she put in everything that she had”.  Jesus points out that this woman is modeling a set of behaviors that are demonstrably different from those that he’s critiqued in the previous verses.  Rather than trusting in herself, her own giftedness, her own respectability, she is trusting God with her very self as she gives all that she is to God.

So why does Mark write this down?  More than that, why does Mark choose to use this as the last of the public teachings of Jesus?  Let’s remember that the original audience for Mark was a small community of Christians in Rome who lived under constant threat of persecution from both the civil and religious authorities.  People were literally dying because they professed to be followers of Jesus; the self-important leaders in flowing robes and fancy stoles and rich togas were enjoying the good life, and those people who carried the name of Jesus were being put to death.  And Mark, writing to encourage this community, keeps this important teaching here because he wants to remind people that it’s better to be nameless, poor, vulnerable and trusting in Godthan it is to be renowned, revered, and favored in the world’s eyes.

Mark’s first audience needed to hear this because each of them wasthe widow; they werethe ones who were reduced to nothing but poverty, trust, and hope.  They needed to hear the blessing of the Christ.

But why has it survived?  Why read this today, on Preschool Sunday of all days?

Because I am not the only one who longs for respect and affirmation.  I may be the only person wearing a white dress and a stole this morning, but each and every one of us in the room this morning knows something about how it feels to simply lovewalking around claiming that there is something external that defines us, that makes us important, that gives us status or prestige or respectability.

Maybe it’s our nationality. “Hey,” we say.  “I’m from _______.  That makes me special.”  Or we point to our race, or we crow about how we pay taxes and those other losers do not; maybe we’re proud to be homeowners and not renters, or we’ve impressed ourselves that our sexuality is somehow more pure than those other people.  I remember this feeling of superiority very vividly as a teenager.  A number of the people with whom I was connected had gotten themselves arrested for one thing or another, and one of the mothers looked at me and said, “Well, David – why are you looking so smug?  Do you think you are better than these boys that you’re sitting with?” And – I said it.  I’m not proud of it, but I shot back, right before she slapped me, “Well, actually, if we’re looking at things from a purely legal standpoint…”

If you’re going to be honest with yourself and with me, you’ve got to know how that feels – to look at someone else and say, “Look, I know that I may not be perfect, but I’m surely better than that slob over there…”

The Widow’s Offering, Jesus MAFA Project

Mark’s first audience and the people gathered today are called to the same practices – to engage in disciplines that will lead us to lives that are characterized by humility, generosity, faith, and gratitude.

What do thoselives look like?  In her stunning volume entitled, Help, Thanks, Wow: The Essential Prayers, Anne Lamott tells the story of Father Gregory Boyle, the founder of a group called Homeboy Industries, a ministry that helps former gang members re-enter society.  He reminds us that

…gratitude is not about waving your arms in praise on Christian TV shows. That’s what we think God would want because we would love to have a few hundred people applauding us, waving their arms like palm fronds. Instead, God’s idea of a good time is to see us picking up litter. God must love to see us serving food at the soup kitchen at [a local] Church, or hear us calling our meth-head cousin just to check in because no one else in the family speaks to him. He can be long-winded and a handful, but we used to put each other’s peas in the glasses of root beer at holiday dinners, so we have history together. With two other cousins, we took naps together in one big bed, so we pick up the two-hundred-pound phone and dial his number, and say, ‘How are you?’

I really believe God’s idea of a good time is also to see us sharing what we have worked so hard to have, or to see us [chatting up] the old guy in line at the health food store, telling him our grandfather had a hat just like his, even though it is a lie.

When you have been able to cry out “Thank You” upon finding your lost child at the mall or getting off booze it can naturally make you willing to want to take time with the homeless…[2]

Closer to home, you can see this in lots of places here in Crafton Heights.  Did you see someone bringing a child to worship or after school?  How about the person who called the church to make sure that we knew about her sick neighbor? You can walk into a room and hear people with quiet voices who speak last.  You know someone who has spent time sitting with an old, sick man who doesn’t speak our language, and the two of them were laughing at jokes that only one of them could fully understand. There are those in our midst who have dedicated themselves to making room in this congregation and their lives for those who feel excluded or unsafe everywhere else in their world…

We are here and in all of those places, dear friends, not because the seats are all comfortable and the hymns are our favorites and the babies are all cute – we are here and in each of these places because this is where God is, and this is the world to which Christ is sending us.  These are the places where we learn humility, generosity, faith, and gratitude.  Is it hard? Sometimes.  But it’s good.

Samuel Shoemaker was a religious leader in a difficult place in New York City. He was asked why he continued to pour his love out on those who were past the edges of society, even when it was taking a toll on his own health and well-being.  He replied, “I would love to run away from it all, but a strange man on the cross won’t let me.”[3]

Beloved, I started this message inviting you to recall a television program wherein we are sitting in the back of an auditorium, belittling a story that plays out on the screen.  In our world, however, we are like the poor widow who lives for an audience of One. We seek to be humble, generous, faithful, and thankful because that is who God has made us to be.  We are called to live and share and model this behavior in front of God and therefore, with and for each other.  Thanks be to God for the ability to share in this life together. Amen.

[1] http://disc.yourwebapps.com/discussion.cgi?disc=148202;article=233607;title=OCRT%20Forum

[2]Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers, Anne Lamott. (Riverhead, New York, 2012) pp 58-59.

[3]Interpretation Bible Commentary on Hebrews,Thomas G. Long