/Sermons/2004

Anointed to Proclaim March 7 2004.rtf

Thu, 11 Mar 2004 16:47:40 GMT

Anointed to Proclaim

Luke 4:14-30

Sermon by Heidi Siemens-Rhodes
March 7, 2004
Second Sunday of Lent

Then Jesus, filled with the power of the Spirit, returned to Galilee, and a report about him spread through all the surrounding country. He began to teach in their synagogues and was praised by everyone. When he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, he went to the synagogue on the sabbath day, as was his custom. He stood up to read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written: 'The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor." And he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. Then he began to say to them, "Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing." All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth. They said, "Is not this Joseph's son?" He said to them, "Doubtless you will quote to me this proverb, 'Doctor, cure yourself!' And you will say, 'Do here also in your hometown the things that we have heard you did at Capernaum.'" And he said, "Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in the prophet's hometown. But the truth is, there were many widows in Israel in the time of Elijah, when the heaven was shut up three years and six months, and there was a severe famine over all the land; yet Elijah was sent to none of them except to a widow at Zarephath in Sidon. There were also many lepers in Israel in the time of the prophet Elisha, and none of them was cleansed except Naaman the Syrian." When they heard this, all in the synagogue were filled with rage. They got up, drove him out of the town, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they might hurl him off the cliff. But he passed through the midst of them and went on his way. (NRSV)

In January this year, I witnessed the proclamation of a prophet of God. The Reverend Doctor Donnell Brown, pastor of the Agape Missionary Baptist Church of Elkhart spoke at the seminary's Martin Luther King Day chapel service. I was leading worship, so I was sitting near Pastor Brown, and observed him quietly talking with the seminary president, Nelson Kraybill, and with a member of his church. In fact, his conversation with this church member continued for several minutes after the 10:30 start time, as I and others around me shifted in our seats and I wondered when to break in and get things going. When Reverend Brown finally took the pulpit, we witnessed a transformationthis quiet, gentle African American man I had been observing became a prophet. In his opening prayer he said, ``Lord, come and get Donnell and send the preacher,'' and we could see that transformation happening before us. I thought of playing for you a recording of the first minute or so of his proclamation, but as I listened to it again I realized the power of the speech event, of being there to feel the Spirit in the place and hear the words live. It just wouldn't have been the same to hear that tape here this morning. But let me tell you, had you been there, I think you would have lived an experience in some ways very similar to the way things started in the synagogue in Nazareth we heard about this morning.

Here in the fourth chapter of Luke, we have a recording (not even an audio recording, just words on a page) of the living presence of the Spirit that flooded that place as Jesus chose his words from the prophet Isaiah and began to proclaim. We can't experience that actual event, but some clues from the text set the scene. We are told that after his temptation in the wilderness, Jesus returned to Galilee ``filled with the power of the Holy Spirit.'' He began to teach in various synagogues, the places where Jews of that time met for studying the scriptures, and he ``was praised by everyone.'' Then he really came home, to the town of Nazareth ``where he had been brought up,'' and went to the synagogue, as usual. It wouldn't have been unusual to have him read scripture or comment on itmany of the men in the group would have been given the same chances, and likely Jesus would have done both things here before. But this morning as he sat down to teach, ``all the eyes of the synagogue were fixed on him.'' They watched his every move.

Jesus sat, as the teachers did in his time, and proclaimed that the scripture was fulfilled that very day, that he was anointed by the Spirit to bring good news to the poor, freedom to the captives and the oppressed, and sight to the blind. The year of the Lord's favor had begun that very morning in their presence. And the people all spoke well of him, amazed at the graciousness of his speech. They wondered what had changed in himhe had been gone for some time, and something seemed different. Was this really Joseph's son, the carpenter, the Jesus they knew? They had heard that he had wandered for more than a month in the wilderness, but he seemed healthy enough now, and clearly in his right mind. They had also heard that he was doing amazing things, not just teaching, but doing signs, miracles…was that energy they felt coming out from him the gathering of power to do a great sign, perhaps his greatest sign, here, among his own people? You can almost feel the intense anticipation as they leaned forward to drink in the presence of their native son turned prophet.

But prophets aren't often predictable, and the next words Jesus said threw them for a major loop. He went on to tell them two Bible stories. If you were a Nazarene of those days, you might have expected the story of David and Goliaththe little town of Nazareth had produced a son to make them proud, who might even slay the evil Roman Empire. But no, Jesus, anointed by the Holy Spirit, had other stories to tell, stories of times when God favored those outside the Chosen People of Israel. There was the time when the prophet Elijah was sent by God to a foreign widow. After feeding Elijah from the little she had, God blessed her with a bottomless supply of meal and oil, while the people of Israel suffered the same famine that she did. Through God's power, Elijah even raised this widow's son from the dead, a miracle Jesus will replicate later in the Gospel of Luke. The second story is that of the prophet Elisha, Elijah's successor, who healed Naaman the Syrian, although many God-fearing Jewish lepers continued to suffer the physical and social pain of the disease. Not so fast, Jesus is telling them, don't assume too much. The Good News of God's favor is for you, but it is also for the gentiles, those outside your frame of reference.

It is with this twist of the message that the hometown crowd's warm reception turns to boiling rage, and they rush to stone him. Somehow, Jesus walks though the crowd and continues on his wayhe has just begun to proclaim and do the work of God in this new year of the Lord's favor. What a way to start a movement!

Our theme in this Lenten season is how God fights evil. Last week Dan preached about the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness. There the devil, Satan, the deceiver, came to Jesus in some sort of bodily form, with three specific temptations, which Jesus resisted. Clearly, in that passage, evil was at work. But Satan himself doesn't rear his ugly head in this week's passagewhat does this confrontation at the beginning of Jesus' ministry have to do with how God fights evil?

For one thing, as we have seen, Jesus does confront a very common, garden variety of evil in the expectations of the people he knows best. He proclaims against the evil of inflexible social boundaries, of assuming that God is with ``Us,'' and not ``Them.'' This is one evil we see in the passage, and it is one we meet every day, in our workplaces and homes and churches, if we are very honest, in our own hearts. Sometimes it seems to me that it might be easier to resist, or at least identify evil, if it came to us always in a nasty, scaly, forked-tongue form, Satan attacking with a specific temptation. In my experience, however, my resistance to evil happens in the thousands of little choices I make throughout the day. The issue Jesus chose to begin his ministry prods me to ask these questions: Where have I excluded instead of including? When have I expected God's mission to conform to my vision of reality, rather than letting the scriptures and the Spirit open me to wider visions of God's people?

The broader attack on evil that takes place in this story is at the very beginning of Jesus' message. In the wilderness with Satan, Jesus reacted to the Tempter's words. Here he is the primary actor, using the scriptures of his people to proclaim his mission, to summarize what his ministry is to be about. He doesn't say, ``I will defeat the Devil,'' he doesn't say, ``I will forgive your sins,'' he doesn't even say, ``I will die for you,'' although he will do these things. But the way Jesus frames his ministry is as an anointing to bring good news to the poor, release to the captives, sight to the blind, freedom to the oppressed, and the year of the Lord's favor to all. Jesus, as God's anointed, has set himself up against the evil forces of poverty, lack of vision, and oppression.

If this is Jesus' mission, it must be ours as well. Where do we see the evils of poverty, lack of vision, and oppression in the society around us? In our own lives and practices? This passage calls us to oppose the forces that divide in order to conquer.

In this past week I was reminded of two examples of this sort of proclamation.
First, I received a newsletter from Urban Expression, a group in England committed to bringing Jesus to the poor and ethnically diverse residents of urban London. One thing especially has impressed me about this groupthey value creativity highly, and commit themselves taking risks in order to embody Jesus' message of good news, among people for whom the story is very new and very foreign. In order to free themselves for this creative work, they claim the right to fail without shame, and to try again or try something completely new, and riskier. One of their neighborhood groups is currently doing a Bible study based (loosely, I assume) on the ``The Full Monty,'' a popular 1997 British movie that at first glance doesn't seem to have any spiritual message. I would love to see those Bible study materials!

The other example was a speaker who came to the seminary this past week representing an organization called ``September Eleventh Families for Peaceful Tomorrows.'' They are people who lost loved ones on September 11, 2001, but refused to accept the War on Terrorism as an appropriate. One member describes it in this way on their website: ``As the months [after 9/11] passed, something about the public response to [my brother's] death did not sit well with me. While the humanity of the 9/11 victims - their names, faces and stories - became better and better known, our society seemed to care less and less about the traditions, histories and humanity of other innocent victims.
There were the undocumented workers at the Twin Towers. The Afghan citizens brutalized by the Taliban. The Muslims and Arabs stereotyped as terrorists. Anger and intolerance seemed to mask the pain and fear that we all felt so deeply. And a culture of silence prevented most of us from talking about those feelings.

I came to recognize that these same attitudes, on the part of others, were the very things that had led to my brother's murder. At that point, what I wanted most was the opportunity to somehow prevent those attitudes from leading to the deaths of other people's brothers, sisters, parents or children.''

Now, we don't all have the platform of a large organization or a pulpit to proclaim from, but every word we speak, as Christians, proclaims Christ. Recognizing and proclaiming the truth about evil is the first way God empowers us to fight it. If you think about it carefully, what does Jesus DO to fight evil in this story? Are the people less poor, more free when he is done? We don't see him handing out money or breaking down prison doors or doing any physical healing. If anything, Nazareth is a great deal angrier when he leaves than when he came. But he has acted. With the Holy Spirit's anointing power, he has proclaimed the Good News of God. When he sits down to teach, he says, ``Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.'' This is a present tensein proclaiming the coming of the kingdom of God, Jesus has made it so. He will go from here to actually do the things he has proclaimedthese are no empty words. But even as he speaks them, evil writhes in defeat, knowing that the words are true, and that evil can do nothing to overcome the power of God.

Amen

Changed by Prayer March 21 2004.rtf

Fri, 19 Mar 2004 19:42:46 GMT

Changed by Prayer

Luke 9:28-35
BAMF
March 21, 2004
Fourth Sunday of Lent

Now about eight days after these sayings Jesus took with him Peter and John and James, and went up on the mountain to pray. And while he was praying, the appearance of his face changed, and his clothes became dazzling white. Suddenly they saw two men, Moses and Elijah, talking to him. They appeared in glory and were speaking of his departure, which he was about to accomplish at Jerusalem. Now Peter and his companions were weighed down with sleep; but since they had stayed awake, they saw his glory and the two men who stood with him. Just as they were leaving him, Peter said to Jesus, "Master, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah"--not knowing what he said. While he was saying this, a cloud came and overshadowed them; and they were terrified as they entered the cloud. Then from the cloud came a voice that said, "This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!" (NRSV)

Many years ago, a twenty-four year old man came to me one Sunday morning and asked to be baptized. ``Sure,'' I said, ``I'd be glad to baptize you and welcome you into church membership. But first let's plan a baptism class. You can come to my office every Tuesday evening after you get off work, we'll talk about Christian faith from a Mennonite perspective, and then we can plan to baptize you some Sunday morning in church.''
After we began this baptism class a few weeks later, I quickly realized that this young man, whom I will call Joe, mostly wanted to be baptized because he was scared of hell. For him hell was an evil, terrible place where unbaptized people went after dying to suffer in torment for eternity. Joe wanted to avoid hell. He didn't want to burn in the fires of hell forever. For Joe baptism was like that ``Get out of jail, free'' card in the game of Monopoly. Baptism was the magic card that forever got you out of hell, free.
As the class with Joe continued, I tried to help him understand that baptism was about more than staying out of hell. Baptism is the start of a wonderful friendship with God, I said. As your Christian life develops you and God will become more intimate. As you encounter evil in the worldthe evil of injustice, the evil of violence, the evil of disorder, you will discover that the Holy Spirit is closer to you than the beating of your own heart. Communicating with God in prayer will become more important for you. Prayer will become the spiritual food that feeds your Christian life. Experiencing God through prayer will turn into the diamond you treasure more than anything else. I don't think Joe ever understood what I was trying to say. On the day I baptized him I'm pretty sure he still thought baptism was his free ticket to get out of hell.
What I was trying to tell Joe is that baptism was not enough all by itself. Baptism is the public beginning of our Christian life, a necessary and valuable starting point, but by itself it's inadequate to sustain our spiritual life. For the actual living of faith we need more than just baptism; and one of the most important things we need is prayer.
Look, for example, at Jesus' own life. In Luke's story, Jesus is baptized very early on, in chapter 3, near the beginning of the story. But that baptism is not enough even for Jesus. Jesus also has to pray, and so we read of Jesus praying numerous times. The pattern seems to be that the busier Jesus gets, the more he withdraws to pray. The more famous and popular he becomes, the more he withdraws to pray. And the more he engages in the struggle against evil, the more Jesus goes off to some lonely place to pray. It happens in 5:16 and again in 6:12; but in the first of those two references, Luke makes it clear that withdrawing to a deserted place to pray was something Jesus did frequently. It was a practice, a habit, a normal and customary feature of his spiritual life. Prayer was apparently the main way Jesus and God communicated with each other. It's how they connected, how they stayed in touch, how they came to understand each other.
Here in chapter 9, in the text we heard a few minutes ago, Jesus does it again. Asking Peter, John, and James to come with him, he walks up one of the local mountains to pray. By this point in the story, Jesus has had a long, hard struggle against evil. He's done verbal battle with the devil out in the wilderness, and sent the devil packing (4:1-13). He's announced a frontal attack on poverty, imprisonment, oppression, and racism (4:16-30). He's driven out evil spirits (4:31-37; 8:26-39). He's restored sick people to health (4:38-39; 5:12-26; 8:40-56). He's sketched out to anyone who will listen a radically new way of being human (6:20-49). In the story Anita spoke about last Sunday, he's forgiven sin (7:36-50). And all this is only some of the story. Jesus also calms storms (8:22-25), responds to his critics (5:33-6:5), and accurately predicts that his intense, sustained, multi-faceted fight against evil will soon get him killed (9:21-27).
If it were me, I think I'd head for some mountain to pray too. Never in my life have I wrestled evil with the same level of intensity that Jesus did. I haven't even come close to the kind of struggle he experienced. And that is as it should be, because the struggle against evil is mostly God's struggle, not ours. God, represented here in Luke by Jesus and the Holy Spirit, is equipped to fight evil in ways that you and I cannot. This is one of the main benefits to being a Christian, as far as I'm concerned. The responsibility for fighting evil does not rest on me or on you or even on you and I together. Instead the main responsibility for fighting evil rests on God.
However, I've seen enough evil in my own life and in the lives of people around me that I know from personal experience how necessary it is to withdraw for prayer. Perhaps you will be surprised to hear me say this, but the main form of prayer I practice in my own life is not intercession or petition. In public prayers offered in congregational life, most often you will hear me pray in petitions and intercessions, especially during pastoral prayers in worship. Now in my private prayer I do intercede and petition as well. But most of my personal praying is actually another form of prayer called meditation. First I find a place that's relatively quiet. It might be in my study at home; it might be in the living room some weekday afternoon when Jenny is at work and the boys are in school; it might be while I'm driving out in the country where the traffic is light; sometimes it might even be while I'm walking somewhere. Wherever it happens, I almost never use words, but I pray silently. I simply focus on God, without needing to do anything in particular or say anything in particular or even think anything in particular. Sometimes I might end up doing or saying or thinking something, but that's not usually how I begin. I begin by silently, wordlessly offering myself to God, to see how God might want to communicate with me. Sometimes God doesn't communicate with me at all, at least in any way I can notice. At other times God communicates gently with a word, or a thought, or a feeling. Once in a while, although not very often, God has even communicated in a vision, in a grand, visual appearance that's a little bit like a dream, except I'm very much awake.
Over the course of time, prayer changes us. As nearly as I can tell, that's the real purpose of prayer. Prayer is not primarily about changing other people, or even about fixing the thousands of problems in this world. Prayer might contribute to changes in other people or to changes in the world, but I think that's only a small part of what happens in prayer. Instead most of the changes which happen in prayer happen to the person praying. Prayer is primarily about changing us.
Jesus went up on the mountain to pray, and it changed him. Luke tells us nothing about the form, style, or content of Jesus' prayer while he was up on that mountain. Apparently Jesus went there just to be with God and reconnect with God. But Luke does say that praying changed Jesus. The appearance of his face changed, and his clothes became dazzling (v. 29). If his outside changed so visibly that other people noticed it, then I suppose we can safely guess his inside changed too. In some way we can't quite describe, prayer altered the inner spiritual life of Jesus so profoundly that his outer appearance changed too. So when Jesus goes back down the mountain to re-engage the fight against evil, he goes as a transformed, transfigured person.
Nearly twenty years ago I went on a 4-day retreat to a campground on the east side of Lake Michigan. One afternoon we were invited to spend several hours in silent prayer anywhere in the campground, offering ourselves to God. Just open yourselves to God, our leaders told us, and see what happens. At the end of those several hours of silent prayer, I was walking back to the building from my prayer spot under a local tree. On my way back I saw two of my fellow retreatants meet each other on the path. One of them suddenly stopped, looked intently at the other person, and with a broad smile said, ``What happened to you? You look like you just met God! Your face looks different than it did earlier today! What happened to you?''
What happened, of course, was prayer. Those hours of prayer changed this person so profoundly on the inside that it also changed his outward appearance. Some day, maybe it will also happen to you or I.

Invitation to the Table
Coming to this table is an act of prayer. You don't have to say anything. You don't have to offer any petitions or make any intercessions. Just come and offer yourself, permitting God to do in you whatever God chooses. If you have been baptized, then come to see what God might do in you.
Remember, if you will, that on the night . . .
Let us pray as Jesus has taught us: ``Our father . . .''

Come and See May 23 2004.rtf

Mon, 24 May 2004 16:05:58 GMT

Come and See

John 1:43-46
Sermon by Dan Schrock and Anita Kehr
May 23, 2004

The next day Jesus decided to go to Galilee. He found Philip and said to him, ``Follow me.'' Now Philip was from Bethsaida, the city of Andrew and Peter. Philip found Nathanael and said to him, ``We have found him about whom Moses in the law and also the prophets wrote, Jesus son on Joseph from Nazareth.'' Nathanael said to him, ``Can anything good come out of Nazareth?'' Philip said to him, ``Come and see.'' (NRSV)

[Anita]

You have probably noticed that this congregation has been getting bigger lately. The parking lot is often full or has only a handful of spaces left by the time our worship beginsor by the time everyone gets here, which is not always the same thing. This past September we added forty more chairs here in the sanctuary, most of which are now occupied most Sunday mornings. Some of the nurture hour classes for our young people are larger than the teachers prefer and really should be divided into smaller groups, but we have no rooms left to put more classes in. Last fall we were so desperate for more teaching space that a concerted effort of hard-working folks converted one of our storage closets into a classroom.
Today we want to talk about this growth and what it might mean for the congregation. We wrote this sermon togetherwell, really Dan wrote the sermon and then I helped to revise it until we arrived at something that satisfied both of us. The other odd feature about this joint sermon is that we won't be focusing on a specific scripture passage as much as we usually do. Instead we will speak more from our own lives of faith and from our experience of working together as your pastors for the last two years. We've arranged this sermon into 5 observations.

[Dan]

First, the numerical growth we've been experiencing actually began about twelve or thirteen years ago. This is not a new phenomenon that suddenly appeared out of nowhere. Instead, this growth has been gradual, consistent, and steady for more than a decade. It began before either one of us became your pastors. So many additional people have come in the last decade that by now slightly over one-half of the adults sitting here this morning have come in the last ten years. That means that slightly less than half of us adults have been here longer than ten years.
So how large are we? From last September to last Sunday, our average attendance has been 205 people. That's the average of all Sundays, both high and low. And new people of all ages are coming: singles, couples, whole families, and children. We would never say that our congregation is for everyone. Some people may try us out for a while and decide that a different kind of congregation would be better for them. That's ok. God's kingdom has room for many different kinds of churches, many different kinds of Christians. But still, we believe that this congregation is a good place where some people will thrive.
Yet another way of grasping how large our congregation has become is to count the number of people in our phone directory. Six years ago, in 1998, our phone directory listed 199 people who lived in the area. Our current phone directory now lists 275 people who live in this area, or 76 more people than 6 years ago. This number is significant because it shows the size of our congregational ``family,'' the number of people who call this their primary church home. Even though they are never all here on the same Sunday, these are the people we are all trying to become acquainted with. This is the number of people who call upon us for pastoral care. This is the size of our faith community. In an important sense, 275 is the real size our congregation has already become.

[Anita]

Second, children of all ages are important to us! This fall we will have 24 young people in the Junior Youth Fellowship and 25 more young people in the MYFand that only counts the ones already here. We also have a wonderful group of children who are younger than youth-group age! And they really are wonderful, representing all kinds of gifts and personalities. I am so grateful for the children of our congregation, those who have been here since their birth, those who have come only recently, and all those in between. I am so, so grateful!
It's interesting for me to think about a time a few years ago when the Christian Education Commission looked at our nurture class rosters. We saw large groups of children in the ages of those who are now in middle school and high school. And at that time we saw much smaller classes among the groups of younger children. We were viewing a kind of demographic bulge, and we thought sadly about the time that would come when we would not have fewer children here. But that's not what has happened. Our younger classes continue to grow. What a blessing! And if this fall is like the last few years, other families with young people may arrive, bringing more children to our congregation. One way to look at the importance of children in our congregation is to look at numbers: next year, about one-quarter of the people here on any given Sunday will be in one of our youth groups, and just over 20 percent will be infants through fifth graders. 25 plus 20hmmm. That's a total of 45 percent of our average attendance! What a gift that we must cherish!

[Dan]

Third, some of us are fearful about getting larger. In a larger congregation, how will we know each other? How will we continue to have a feeling of community? How will a larger size affect the way we make decisions and the way we relate to each other? The two of us also think about these questions. Between us we have belonged to total of 12 congregations in our lives. But neither of us has ever belonged to a congregation as large as we are becoming and much less tried to pastor a congregation this large. We have experience pastoring a congregation the size Berkey has been, but we have no experience at all pastoring a congregation larger than this one. Quite frankly, we have much to learn about how to pastor a larger congregation, but we are willing to give it our best effort. Undoubtedly we will make mistakes. We will probably say dumb things and do dumb things. But we believe God has arranged for us to be here in this role for this time. So with your help, we will do our best to shape congregational life in a way that benefits all of us and glorifies God.
We don't mean to say that we know where our congregation is going or how we are going to get there. The previous congregation I [Dan] served was also growing significantly, although it did not quite reach the size this congregation has already become. In that context I tried to manage the growth. I tried to control the growth, direct the growth, channel the growth, even to some extent manipulate the growth. But I have no wish to try and manage the growth here at Berkey Avenue Mennonite. Maybe it's because I'm at a different place spiritually now than I was then, or maybe it's because I am no longer a solo pastor. Whatever the reason, I am content to let God manage it and direct it. If God really is creating the growth, then why would I want to interfere?

[Anita]

Dan has a lot more experience in being a pastor than I do, and boy! am I glad that he's here! Still, I would not be truthful if I did not admit that I sometimes become anxious when I think about the future and caring well for the growth of our congregation. Those of you who have come in recent years know that there are lots of cracks in the way we organize ourselves. Small groups and nurture hour classes: these are the two areas that you have noted over and over again as being confusing, daunting, andsometimesjust plain unwelcoming. So, we're going to need to figure out what to do and how to do things in different, more integrated, ways. And I'm not sure what all those ``ways'' are going to look like. We're going to have to work at it together. In a minute, we'll talk about the way that the size of a congregation affects these things. No matter what, though, my hope for the future is that we will find these better ways of organizing ourselves while, at the same time, maintaining our fundamental congregational calling to be Christ's loving, healing, caring presence.
That hope is sustained when I am reminded that it appears as if God has already been working behind the scenes to plan for this growth. For many years we hoped to be able to purchase more land in this area, but we were never successful. Then a little over a year ago, one of our neighbors came to us with a surprising offer: to sell us 3½ acres right next door. Last month we purchased that land, which more than doubled the amount of land we had before. This feels like the initiative of God, and I believe that we can name it so.

[Dan]

Fourth, we believe that this numerical growth is in some sense the work of God. None of us has tried to become larger. We haven't gone to church growth seminars. We haven't gone knocking on neighborhood doors, printed up newspaper ads, or produced TV commercials. We haven't even prayed for numerical growth. But it's happening anyway, and the most likely agent we can think of is God. Yes, of course, all of us work hard together at being the church, at teaching and mentoring and caring and making music. But it's the Holy Spirit at work in us doing these things. So for whatever reason, for whatever purpose, we think the growth is God at work.
Of course, we can't sit back in our recliners and expect God to do everything for us. No, we have much careful work ahead of us to decide how to use the extra space we now have and how to care for each other well in new ways. We will listen to each other and to the Holy Spirit. We will speak of our foundational desires. We will think and pray and meet. But God may also have more surprises for us that we cannot foresee.

[Anita]

Fifth, people who study church growth say that when a congregation goes over 200 in average attendance, some significant changes start to happen in the way the congregation organizes itself. Congregations over 200 seem to operate a bit differently than congregations under 200. Of course congregations of radically different sizes operate in different ways. A congregation of 35 people obviously functions differently than a congregation of 350, and 350 functions differently than 3,500. One size is not necessarily better than another size, but they are different. However, there does seem to be a significant shift in congregational dynamics between congregations over 200 and those under 200. And that's where we are. Also, the sheer fact of having more people eventually creates change. So as we all continue working together at being church, we may discover that we will want to tweak a few things in order to respond to our different size. One area of possible change is how we make the fellowship time between worship and nurture better for all of us. Many of you have already been talking about the fellowship time in small groups and in the large nurture class we had two weeks ago here in the meetingroom.
Another example is that we may want to alter some of the ways we've structured our commissions. Or we might choose to expand our network of people in the congregation who offer certain kinds of caregiving. But whatever changes we agree to try, they will probably happen gradually, not quickly. We will keep working at church life together.

[Dan]

Is change something to be afraid of? No, because God walks with us through change. According to the first chapter of John, when Philip and Nathanael and the other disciples first met Jesus, they had no idea how their lives were about to changeand change for the better. In Jesus they were about to discover a new, deeper life than anything they had known before. Certainly the invitation to discipleship stretched Philip and Nathaniel in remarkable ways, but the stretching led to greater spiritual maturity. When Philip first told Nathanael about Jesus, Nathanael skeptically wondered whether anything good could possibly come from Nazareth. In response Philip suggested that Nathanael come and see for himself.
So in the spirit of Philip's reply, we also invite you to come, to see together what God will yet do among us and through us.

Confession August 8 2004.rtf

Sun, 15 Aug 2004 16:15:11 GMT

Confession: Telling the Truth about Ourselves
Anita Yoder Kehr, August 8, 2004

         I wonder: How many of you looked in the mirror this morning? For those of you who did, what were you looking for? Were you checking to see that your hair wasn't messed up? That your shirt was tucked in or that your slip wasn't showing? Were you making sure that there wasn't any lingering toothpaste around your mouth or shaving cream at the edges of your ears?
         Perhaps some of you looked a little closer than that. Perhaps you peered at the mirror and looked at the lines around your eyes and mouth that seem to have appeared overnight. Perhaps you looked to see whether your late night showed up in how you were looking this morning. If you are an adolescent boy you might have looked for the emergence of hair on your upper lip or on your chin, or, if you're a little older than that you might have assessed the proportion of gray hair among the rest… or how much ``rest'' was left.
         Please don't raise your hands for this!, but I wonder how many of you looked in the mirror before you had clothes on. For some of us that becomes a dicey proposition. The reflection staring back at us becomes way too clear, way too intimate, way too truthful. Clothes do a good job of hiding what needs hiding, for the sake of modesty… but also so we don't have to face what's there. Nakedness hides nothing. Clothing can deceive. Depending upon what I'm wearing, and the angle I stand, and how close I am to the mirrorfarther away works betterand if I squint just right I can distort my self perception enough with clothes on to imagine that I can see myself 50 pounds ago and 20-some years younger. I can create an untruthful illusion for myself… whichin truthis not helpful. I am not 50 pounds lighter nor 20-some years younger than I am now, and those truths have implications for my health and my quality of life. I have a choice: I can continue to distort reality for myself or I can face the truth and adjust some things in my life.
         Think about the story in Genesis 3 of when sin entered the world. Isn't it interesting that the very first thing Adam and Eve did after they ate the forbidden fruit was to cover up? They covered-up their bodies with clothes, and then they covered-up their tracks by hiding, and then they covered-up their disobedience by blaming someone else, anyone else, even though there weren't very many ``someone elses'' to blame! Every act of cover-up that Adam and Eve took changed their formerly-intimate relationship with God. Each time they hid themselves from God, they put up a new barrier between themselves and the One who loved them completely. Whenever they neglected to take responsibility for what they had done, they fractured the communion with their Creator that had once been as whole as heartbeat and breath. That's what sin does: it separates us from God. It distorts in us the image of God in which we were created. Sin is behavior and attitudes which are not what God intends for us (1); perhaps sin is lying to ourselves about what we were created for. Sin erects barriers between God and us.
         Confession is one way of inviting God to dismantle all those barriers that we've erected. Confession is telling the truth about ourselves in the presence of God. Confession is getting naked before God and then facing up unflinchingly to the clear and undistorted image that God reflects back to us. Confession is recognizing and naming the truth of sin in our lives.
         Confession can be deeply painful, especially if we have spent lots of energy and time in hiding and covering up. So why in the world would anyone want to go through it?? Psalm 32 which Shawna read for us this morning gives two of the clearest reasons.
         First, ignoring our sin, keeping silence about it, leads to spiritual anguish and illness. ``While I kept silence, my body wasted away through my groaning all day long, for day and night you hand was heavy upon me…'' Jesus in Matthew 23 is much more direct: ``Woe to you…! For you clean the outside of the cup and plate, but inside [you] are full of greed and self-indulgence…. First clean the inside of the cup, so that the outside also may become clean…. [You] are like whitewashed tombs, which on the outside look beautiful, but inside… are full of the bones of the dead…. So you also on the outside look righteous to others, but inside you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness….'' (Matthew 23:25-28 adapted) When we lie to ourselves about the presence of sin in our lives, we get stuck. We can't really flourish and grow because we're straitjacketed by the cover-up we've wrapped around ourselves. We're living behind all those barriers that we've erected. We're separated from God. We're spiritually sick, and we need healing.
         Therefore, the second reason to do the hard work of examining ourselves truthfully and confessing our sin is to be reconciled to God, to invite the grace of God to take down those barriers we've erected and to restore us to intimacy and healing and communion and relationship. Psalm 32 says it this way, ``I said, `I will confess my transgressions to the Lord,' and you forgave the guilt of my sin. Therefore, let all who are faithful offer prayer to you…. You are a hiding place for me; you preserve me from trouble; you surround me with glad cries of deliverance.'' Isn't it interesting that instead of feeling as if we need to hide from God because of our sin, in forgiving grace God becomes our hiding place??
Confession is the act of voluntarily coming to God and admitting that we need forgiveness and restoration. God never forces relationship upon us, but instead waits and longs for us to come voluntarily. In Matthew 23 again, Jesus cries out to Jerusalem, ``How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under wings, and you were not willing!'' (v. 37) The source of God's desire for our confession is not wrath nor retribution but instead God desires to restore us to full and intimate relationship. God invites us to confess the truth out of the deepest of love for us because to remain silent is to let the illness of sin grow and metastasize.
         If you have your Bibles with you, turn with me to Psalm 51. Both of the psalms we're looking at this morning, Psalm 32 and 51, have been used throughout faith history as psalms of penitence; they remind us of our need for God's mercy, steadfast love, and compassion. Psalm 51 is perhaps the most famous of all of the penitential psalms. We're singing two different versions of it this morning, and there are many more we could have sung. This psalm is so well known, I think, because it gives us beautiful words that speak what we feel and need at the deepest level. The psalm begins with a focus on the character of God and then moves to the character of humanity to forgiveness to transformation, the same journey that we make in confession.
         Now, let me say that this psalm is true poetry: for each of those four movementsthe characters of God and humanity, forgiveness, transformationthe poet uses at least three different sets of words to give slightly different nuancesdifferent perspectivesto what is happening. The poet is using every means possible to show the depth and richness of what happens in the relationship between human beings and God.
         The psalm begins with an appeal to the merciful, steadfastly loving, abundantly compassionate God. Each of these wordsmercy, steadfast love, and abundant compassionprovide different descriptions of God's grace. (Not all of the English translations will show the different words.) It is because of God's gracious character, born out of God's love for us, that we can tell God the truth about ourselves. We trust that God will love us anyway.
         Telling the truth about ourselves involves confessing our transgressions, our iniquity, our sin, and our evil. That's the next set of four, and those words encompass the whole range of sin: from outright rebellion against God to culpability in choosing a path that is different from what God intends (a crooked path!) to missing the mark, not quite making the goal that we're being called to reach, to experiencing the depth of sin's consequences is evil. (2) Every kind of sin, the psalmist says, whether or not the sin has also been against other people, is a sin against God, an offense to God.
         Because these are offenses against God and because of the claim of the truth of divine love, it is to God that the psalmist pleads in these first verses: ``Blot out my transgressions, wash me, cleanse me.'' These three sets are all descriptors of the act of God's forgiveness. When God forgives, the sin and the memory of that sin is swept away, erased, obliterated. That's what it means to ``blot out.'' When God forgives, we are sent through the laundry, washed clean of sin and the stain of sin. That's what it means to be washed. And when God forgives, we undergo a purifying process; we get separated from our sin in the same way that impurities are separated from ore in the refining of metal. That's what it means to be cleansed. (3) God's forgiveness is expansive and comprehensive, and we are meant to be changed in the process.
         Skip on down to verse 10 and see the psalmist's petition for transformation: ``Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me. Do not cast me away from your presence, and do not take your holy spirit from me. Restore to me the joy of your salvation and sustain in me a willing spirit.'' The three-way petition for transformation here has to do with the dance of God's own spirit with our spirit. Only God, the only Creator, can fashion a new heart for us, make of us a new creation as Paul writes in his second letter to the Corinthians. (2 Corinthians 5:17) The steadfast love of God creates a steadfast and loyal spirit within us. The holy and pure spirit of God purifies our spirit. And we respond to the generous and loving and saving spirit of God with a joy birthed in thanksgiving and with a desire to serve willingly and voluntarily. By forgiving us of the sin that had erected those barriers of separation, God restores us to intimate and reconciled relationship. What a gift of grace!
         Confession begins, remember, by telling the truth about ourselves in the presence of God. Confession is getting naked before God and then facing up unflinchingly to the clear and undistorted image that God reflects back to us. Confession is recognizing and naming the truth of sin in our lives. Confession requires both humility and honesty.
         Psalm 51:17: ``The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.'' I don't believe that what God desires here is humiliation , which is a kind of brokenness that tarnishes the image of God in us just as surely as pride does. No. Instead what God desires is humility, a readiness to see and hear and confess the truth of who I am in the truth of the presence of God. Humility is putting aside our pride and our instincts for self deception and self preservation, and making ourselves vulnerable to God and in the community of faith.
Confession also requires honesty. Most of us would rather…reshape the truth than face it. We are tempted to make excuses: I lashed out that way because he pushed me farther than I needed to go! I held that grudge for so long because she really hurt me. I spread that rumorwell, I didn't really spread a rumor; I was sharing a prayer concern. I ate too much today because I was under a lot of stress. I participate in systems that oppress others because I don't know how to do differently. I never intended for our relationship to get this serious; I just found this soulmate who wasn't my husband. I cheated because I just couldn't fail. I had a legitimate reason to do what I did… whatever it was. And on, and on, and on. Honesty in confession means putting aside all those excuses and all that self deceit. It means taking truthful responsibility for those choices and acts we've made that have brought illness and sinfulness and brokenness to our lives. Honesty in confession also means not taking on responsibility that is not ours, and that's a temptation for some of us. Not all our woundedness and brokenness come from our sin. It's important to sort through those things in the gracious presence of God. Honesty also means being able to affirm what is good and healthy and whole in our lives and to see the ways that God has already been at work in us.
With humility and honesty, we can finally tell the truth about ourselves, we can make a truthful confession. By the mercy and steadfast love and abundant compassion of the God of grace, then, we can begin to experience healing and reconciliation.
Because that's the point, isn't it? The point of confession is to be restored to an intimate relationship with God, to allow the creative spirit of God to transform us, to lead us to become who we're meant to be, to reflect the image of God brightly and clearly, to act in ways that are consistent with the intentions of God for all of creation. The end of this restoration and reconciliation leads us to witness to the truth about God, to confess our faith. The poets of both Psalm 32 and 51 respond to the forgiving love of God with a promise to testify about that love. And that's the kind of confession that we'll be talking about next week: telling the truth about God.
But there's another truth here that we can't ignore. And it's a hard one. The truth is that we will sin again. The good news is that that's not the last truth. Remember that ``The Lord, [our Lord is] a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love…'' (Exodus 34:6b) God is ready to forgive and restore and reconcile whenever we confess our sin in humility and honesty.
The book of Romans written by the Apostle Paul is a letter packed full of the theology of God's grace. And in Romans, Paul refers to both of our psalms for today; they provide part of the foundation upon which Paul can teach about the God's new initiative of salvation in Jesus Christ, the savior who embodies grace. In a moment you will have the opportunity to tell the truth about yourself in the presence of God, to confess in honesty and humility. But first, hear the words of Paul from Romans 12 as we enter into this time: ``I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of Godwhat is good and acceptable and perfect. For by the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think of yourself more highly than you ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned.''
         As you tell the truth about yourselves, may you know in full the mercy, steadfast love, and abundant compassion of God who forgives and reconciles and transforms. Amen.

Endnotes:
(1)      Definition courtesy of Dale Shenk.
(2)      Tate, Marvin E. Word Biblical Commentary: Volume 20 . Dallas: Word, Incorporated, 1983 and McCann, J. Clinton, Jr. The New Interpreter's Bible: Volume 4 . Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996, p. 885.
(3)      Tate, Marvin E. Word Biblical Commentary: Volume 20 . Dallas: Word, Incorporated, 1983.

Counting Our Blessings before They Hatch February 15 2004.rtf

Thu, 19 Feb 2004 16:46:15 GMT

Counting Our Blessings Before They Hatch

Luke 6:17-26

Sermon by Heidi Siemens-Rhodes
February 15, 2004

17He came down with them and stood on a level place, with a great crowd of his disciples and a great multitude of people from all Judea, Jerusalem, and the coast of Tyre and Sidon. 18They had come to hear him and to be healed of their diseases; and those who were troubled with unclean spirits were cured. 19And all in the crowd were trying to touch him, for power came out from him and healed all of them. 20Then he looked up at his disciples and said:

"Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.
21"Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled.
"Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh.
22"Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man. 23Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven; for that is what their ancestors did to the prophets.

24"But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation.
25"Woe to you who are full now, for you will be hungry.
"Woe to you who are laughing now, for you will mourn and weep.
26"Woe to you when all speak well of you, for that is what their ancestors did to the false prophets. (NRSV)

This past month as I thought about preaching today, two phrases kept knocking around in my head, neither of them biblically based, both common sayings. The hybrid of these two is my sermon title this morning. The first phrase that got my attention and kept coming back was: Count your blessings. Although we face various challenges, we in this congregation are a people much blessed, to be sure. We live in the richest country in the world, and although some people in this land do, we don't go to bed hungry. We enjoy vacations from time to time, we have the freedom to gather and worship God together without fear. We have it pretty good. Our blessings are piled around us so high that it is easy to forget to see them, and even easier not to look beyond them to see those who are in need. I say that it is easy to neglect compassion, although I know that we don't always remain safely in our comfort zones. I'll get back to that at the end of the sermon. But the fact remains that it is easier to be lax and lazy and self-contained than to pursue compassion.

The other phrase that wouldn't let me go as I thought about speaking to you today was: Don't count your chickens before they hatch. That isuntil the money is in the bank, in your account, don't add it to the balance in your checkbook. Nothing's real until you can touch it, hold it, perhaps clench it in your fist. Eggs do not equal chickens until the first crack in the shell widens, the beak pokes out, the whole wet scrawny little chick emerges, and really not even then�wait until the chick has lost that baby fuzz, grown up, and is producing eggs of its own. Only then is the egg a good investment, a sure thing.

Count your blessings, but don't count your chickens before they hatch. Can these two phrases interact in any meaningful way? Counting our blessings, naming the ways that our lives have been and continue to be good, has the risk of becoming a kind of tally sheet or list of what is ours, counting on these blessings to remain ours and even continue to develop, to hatch, to grow, to reproduce themselves until we ease into blissful retirement. Counting our blessings can make us complacent. On the other hand, if we worry about the future of each good thing, we lose the joy of it in the present. What are blessings if they are squeezed too tightly? Might they, like chicks, prove fragile and give up the ghost between our strong sweaty hands?

We live in a culture that holds its blessings tightly, and asks for more. Since the brutal shock of the 9-11 attacks, the phrase ``God bless America'' seems to be dangerously one-sided: What do we mean when we ask God to bless us without specifically including the rest of God's children in the blessing? I had similar difficulty with Bruce Wilkinson's recent bestseller, The Prayer of Jabez: Breaking Through to the Blessed Life . In this book Wilkinson promises amazing results for those who regularly and sincerely pray a short prayer for success which is found in a list of Israel's ancestors, in 1 Chronicles 4:10. This is the prayer:

``Oh, that you would bless me indeed,
and enlarge my territory,
that Your hand would be with me,
and that You would keep me from evil,
that I may not cause pain.'' ¹

What does it mean to pray for God to expand our territory, without explicitly asking God to help us see the whole landscape through God's eyes as well? I feel the necessity to contrast the prayer of Jabez with the one Jesus taught us Our father, give us our daily bread. If any of you have read Wilkinson's book and found it helpful, I would be glad to hear more from you on that. My point is that in both of these examples, ``God bless America,'' and ``God, expand my territory,'' the blessing being sought is not the broadest and fullest blessing that God would have us seek.

What is the blessing which God offers to us? This is a question too large and too deep and too wonderful to explore in any great detail in one sermon, but there are a few things I think must be part of that conversation:

First, in the first chapter of the Bible, the very first blessing God speaks into being is the blessing of humankind. Genesis 1:26-28: ``Then God said, `Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.' So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. God blessed them, and God said to them, `Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.'"

The first blessing is given to us, to human beings, male and female, and it establishes our involvement with all other living creatures. We are blessed by our nature as God's good creation.

The second piece of our blessedness that we had better not miss is the blessing God bestows on the chosen people of Israel. In the first blessing God speaks to Abram, God specifies that ``all the families of the earth'' would be blessed through this blessing of Abram's descendants. The blessing starts local, with one family, and through Jesus becomes global, embracing all the nations as God's people, beloved and blessed. So, we are blessed by being created good, and are created to be connected to others, other living things and other human beings.

Now, how does the list of blessings and woes that we heard read this morning fit into this picture? The scripture for today is taken from the Gospel of Luke, which more than any of the other three gospels has a clear emphasis on the economic leveling that Jesus calls for. This list of blessings and woes is from the Sermon on the Plain, which parallels the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew. But you may notice that the woes and blessings here are less abstractwhere Matthew records Jesus blessing the poor in spirit, Luke's Jesus blesses the poor. These blessings and woes have been called ``a series of bombshells.'' Barclay, William. The Gospel of Luke . Philadelphia, PA: The Westminster Press, 1975. Page 75. So far in our discussion of God's blessing, we have assumed it to be a good, pleasant thing for which we are glad and rejoice! God has blessed us! But hear again the list of people Jesus calls blessed: the poor, the hungry, those who weep, and those who are the object of jeers and jokes. Not quite the blessings we desire for ourselves! In fact, the other side of the list seems much more in line with what we, understandably, have in mind when we ask for a blessing: at least a small measure of the world's riches, at least a full stomach, a bit of laughterand a few friends�too much to ask? What are we to make of these blessing bombshells?

I would caution us, first of all, not to assume that this is a glorification or idealization of poverty, sadness, hard times. The poor, the hungry, the deeply sad, the persecuted, live uncomfortable, unfair lives. But God sides with them. They are close to the heart of God, and they will be comforted. Does this mean that those of us who are now doing ok for ourselvesand I don't assume that we would all put ourselves in that categoryshould feel guilty? I can hear Jesus saying: Those who have ears, let them hear! You who feel wrapped in the good blessings of God, these words are not meant to make you sad and dejected and dis-empowered. Feeling guilty does nothing to reconnect you with your sisters and brothers who mourn, who go to sleep hungry, who are falsely accused. And God's blessing is about that connection.

Might Jesus be saying: don't hold what you consider to be your blessings too close to your chestwhat you have now will not last, and what you lack now will be given to you. Have you wept yourself to sleep because of losses too deep to share with your seemingly happy friends? God longs to comfort you. Do you eat well, well, perhaps too well? God longs for you to find balance, and to connect your use of resources with the lack of resources experienced by your brothers and sisters who weep as their children go hungry.

This morning's text states that Jesus speaks these words of blessing and woe to his disciples, whom he had just called earlier in the chapter. They are a newly formed group, just beginning the path that would lead to Jesus' death and resurrection, and to their being clothed with power from on high. They do not know those parts of the story yet. As they hear this list of blessings and woes they are an awkward assortment of people just learning what it means to follow Jesus of Nazareth. There is a tax collector among them, and a zealot, two of the most unlikely companions in that first century Palestinian society, one benefiting financially from the Roman occupation, the other fiercely, militantly committed to the downfall of Rome's power. Yet in the crowd of Jesus' disciples they both have a place.

And so do we, no matter how many digits line up neatly in our checkbook, no matter how down or up our mood this morning. God has blessed us, and this blessing begins with God's gift of life, continues through our relationships to our environment and the other blessed people around us, and offers us finally, the ultimate blessing of life with God now and forever.

So where does this leave us in tallying our chickens and eggs? Shall we smugly count our blessings or nervously wait for them to hatch? Can we fully enjoy our lives while others suffer? When we suffer, do the good times of others rub salt in our wounds? The blessings and woes certainly remind us that joy and sorrow coexist simultaneously among God's people. Sensitivity and sharing are called for.

Also, if we are hungry, we will be filled by God's very hand, but won't that make us some of the full who will without a doubt experience hunger? The cyclical, either-or nature of these sayings opens them up to this interpretationCount your blessings! Be grateful! But don't count on themwho knows which egg will crack open to reveal that disappointing ugly duckling�and even then, what happened to the ugly duckling? The same woe can transform into a blessingthe ungainly duckling into a serene swan.

Carrying the egg theme a little bit further, even, I know some of you remember Horton, Dr. Suess' faithful elephant, who sat on an bird's egg for 51 long and dangerous weeks, out of respect for a promise he had given the egg's motherand do you recall the shape of what hatched out? The world's first, and likely only, elephant-bird, with wings attached to its, thankfully, very small elephant-like body. Horton is a wonderful parable of the persecution of the goodhe is ridiculed by his friends (An elephant in a tree?) and hunted, and captured, and put on show in a circus. But he is faithful, ``100%'', keeps his promise and protects the vulnerable egg. Likewise, careful tending of our blessings can transform us and also those blessings themselves, in unpredictable ways.

Today we will gather for a meal after Nurture Hour, and after we have all eaten our fill, we will convene a congregational business meeting. As the pastoral intern here at Berkey these past five months I have been able to observe the inner clockwork of this church in a new way, and today I would like to count with you a few of the blessings I have observed. These are not bombshells, not brand new observations, but let's look at them again.

�� We at Berkey love to worship together, a great blessing.
�� We have an on-going many-layered mission in the community and world though various local and international organizations and connections. That is, we have a heart for the poor and needy, a blessing.
�� We have experienced growth, and the ushers often need to bring in extra chairs after our service has started, a blessing.
�� We are led by a pastoral team, Anita and Dan, who share power and empower us all to minister, a blessing.
�� I have also observed great positive energy in elders and commission meetings, another blessing.
�� My last point on this particular list is that we will soon be the owners of a new parcel of land to dream and grow into, a blessing that deserves much careful tending and creative contemplation.

These are some of the blessings I have counted here among us. We carry woes as well, corporate and private, but it is my experience here that we as a community tend to be quick to embrace the hurting and right the wrong, with the Spirit's guidance. Let us continue to count and honor our blessings as they develop in secret, before they hatch and bring certain surprises, knowing that as we experience blessing and woe, woe and blessing, God is with us.

Note

1. Bruce Wilkinson , The Prayer of Jabez: Breaking Through to the Blessed Life . ( Sisters, OR: Multn omah Publishers, 2000), p. 93.

Discipleship October 24 2004.rtf

Sun, 24 Oct 2004 15:38:48 GMT

Discipleship

Mark 8:31-38
Sermon by Dan Schrock
October 24, 2004

Then he [Jesus] began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again. He said all this quite openly. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. But turning and looking at his disciples, he rebuked Peter and said, "Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things."
He called the crowd with his disciples, and said to them, "If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life? Indeed, what can they give in return for their life? Those who are ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels." (NRSV)

This past summer several of us from the congregation attended the annual sessions of the Indiana-Michigan Mennonite Conference, held this time in Indianapolis. Since this was the 150 ^th anniversary of the conference, we were treated to several historical vignettes about the history of the conference. The one I found most intriguing was a panel discussion by three long-time conference leaders, all of them now retired: Vernon Bontrager, Russell Krabill, and Galen Johns. From about the 1940s to the 1980s, these three men were among our best-known pastors and administrators. At one point during their discussion, Vernon Bontrager pointed out that for a long time in the 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s, conference was mostly about rules: making rules, instituting rules, interpreting rules, enforcing rules, and disciplining those who broke the rules. In those days we had rules for all sorts of things: how long your hair could be, what style and cut of clothes you could wear, what you should and should not do on the Sabbath, what sort of leisure activities you could or could not indulge in, and so on. Now of course we Mennonites also believed in the importance of the devotional life. But at least in the memory of some people who knew those years best, the work of conference was mostly about rules.

The reason for all these rules was discipleship. We Mennonites wanted to be faithful disciples of Jesus Christ, and in those days we thought one of the best ways to be faithful disciples was to make rules and then encourage everyone to obey the rules. Now rules do have some value. Assuming the rules are well-made, they can help us learn the difference between right and wrong, between what lies within God's purposes and what lies outside God's purposes. To some extent, rules can be a useful guide in our lives of discipleship.

But if all we have are rules, we will never become the kind of disciples Jesus wants us to be. A young man once called me up on the phone and asked if we could meet at a local coffee shop to talk. When we sat down across the table from each other, I noticed he had a rather sheepish and embarrassed look on his face. Slowly, in bits and pieces, and in a very round-about way, his story came out. A few evenings earlier he had been out on the town. Late that evening he slid up to a woman whom he thought was a prostitute and began soliciting her. They bantered back and forth for a bit, and then suddenly the woman pulled out handcuffs, clamped them on his wrists, and arrested him. She turned out to be an undercover cop. She hauled him off to jail where he sat most of the night until a friend came and bailed him out.

What this young man wanted was spiritual renewal. He had grown up in a very conservative congregation dominated by rules. At his home church there were rules to cover nearly every area of life: rules for family life, rules for the workplace, rules for church, rules for this and rules for that. ``Because I grew up in that environment,'' he told me, ``I thought Christianity was all about rules. I was taught that if I just followed all the rules my pastor and parents and teachers set for me, I'd be a good and faithful Christian. Having all those rules meant I never had to think for myself. I only had to obey. I was, and I am, like a robot. Getting arrested the other night showed me that I have never had any kind of real inner spiritual life. I was baptized when I was a teenager and I'm a member of the church. I've heard the Bible preached all my life and studied the Bible for years in Sunday school. But I don't really know God. I'm not very familiar with the workings of the Holy Spirit. What I want more than anything elsewhat I need more than anything elseis a vital, living relationship with Jesus Christ. I need to go beyond simply obeying rules; I need to develop a relationship. Can you help me with that?''

One of the great gifts our Anabaptist ancestors have bequeathed to us is the emphasis on Christian discipleship. For them, discipleship was not about robotically obeying a long list of rules. No. Discipleship was about having a relationship with Jesus Christ. Discipleship was about imitating the deep patterns of Jesus' life. Discipleship was about following Jesus through thick and thin. One of the Anabaptist leaders, a man named Hans Denck, insisted that the only way to really get to know Christ is to follow him in discipleship.

So that's what those Anabaptists tried to do to the best of their ability. Their discipleship wasn't always perfect. As you know, many of the early Anabaptists were arrested for their commitments to believers' baptism, for their refusal to swear oaths of loyalty to local governments, for their passion about peace at a time when the armies of Europe were fighting a series of desperate battles against the Turks. After getting arrested for these discipleship commitments, they were stretched on racks or had screws turned into their thumbs to make them recant. They were tried before judges and political rulers. When found guilty they were banished or drowned or burned. Under such tremendous threats of pain and punishment, some of them wavered in their commitments.

Still, they have given us quite a legacy. People often say that for Martin Luther, the first of many great Protestant reformers in the 16 ^th century, the main question was: ``How can we human beings find forgiveness?'' That was the great passion that motivated much of Luther's life and has continued to influence Lutherans even to this daythe passion to find forgiveness from sin. For John Calvin, another great Protestant reformer, the main question was: ``How can we glorify God?'' Among denominations in the Reformed tradition that descend from John Calvin, such as the Presbyterians and others, this emphasis on glorifying God continues to the present. But the Anabaptists had a different concern than the other reformers of the time. For them the main question was this: ``How can we follow Christ in daily life?'' As you know, this is still one of our great questions to this day. How do we follow Christ in our time, in our context?

This is why throughout our history we Anabaptist-Mennonites keep returning again and again to Jesus. If we're going to follow him, we have to know something about him. We have to know what he taught, what he did, how he acted. Therefore we read the stories about him in the gospels. We discover how he defined peace and justice, blessedness and healing, and how he lived those things. We reflect on the meaning of his words and actions. We learn to distinguish him from all the other people in the world who try to woo us away from him so that we follow them instead. We learn the difference between Jesus and what is antithetical to Jesus. Then in our own imperfect but well-intentioned way, we try to follow him as best we can.

The text from Mark 8 that we heard this morning is one of those central stories in the gospels. In direct, blunt speech that no one can misunderstand, Jesus tells us where he's going, where his life is headed. His life is headed for the cross. Now over the last 2,000 years of church history, the cross has come to mean a lot of different things; but on that day when Jesus spoke those words to the people standing around him, the cross really had only one meaning. In the first century, the cross was about politics. In Jesus' day the only people who ended up on crosses were people whom the Roman government found threatening or offensive. People who were cozy with the government did not end up on a cross. So if Jesus told you he was headed for a cross, it meant that somewhere along the line he and the government were in conflict with each other. A cross meant that you and the government were not bosom buddies. You did not see eye to eye about things. It meant you and government had some fundamental differences with each other about what is just, what is moral, what is right, and about how you're going to achieve those things.

It is not a light thing to follow someone who's walking toward a cross. If you walk behind such a person, you too could get nailed to a cross. This is why at its best our Anabaptist-Mennonite tradition of faith has always insisted on the importance of a living, growing relationship with God, and the Holy Spirit, and Christ himself. This is why that young man in the coffee shop desperately wanted to develop a relationship beyond the rules. This is why we don't baptize babies, and why we insist you have to decide for yourself whether or not you are going to take the risk of following this Jesus. Christian discipleship could get you squashed like a bug on a sidewalk. The only thing that sustains this kind of radical commitment to God's way is a deep, intimate, loving, trusting relationship with Christso that even if the powers that be squash your body, they will never be able to squash your spirit.

I used to think that discipleship was all about large, grand, daring actions like that of Annie Funk, the Mennonite missionary who in 1912 gave someone else her seat on the lifeboat and then drowned with the Titanic in the chilly waters of the northern Atlantic Ocean. Or a grand action like the father who offers himself to an enemy soldier so that his son can go free. Those grand acts do happen, but not real often. I now think our discipleship is mostly about the small, ordinary, day-to-day stuff that is less noticeable but terribly important. Stuff like fixing a meal, holding out a hand, listening with total attention. That's mostly what Jesus did, you know. Small stuff here and there. He healed a person here; he spoke a few words there; he proposed a few comparisons and contrasts for people to think about. After a while the small stuff started to add up, and people began to sit up and take notice. That's mostly how he got into trouble with the government, I think. The small stuff just added up. He didn't set out to deliberately offend or attack, but the cumulative effect of all that he did and said ended up with a situation where the powers that be no longer wanted to tolerate him. So they eradicated him. Done and gone; dead and buried; out of sight, out of mind, out of the way; no longer able to trouble or provoke or challenge anyone.

Ha! The powers that be forgot to reckon with God. God is a wily, crafty person, the likes of which no one else can match, much less outfox. God arranged it so that Jesus just came right back. In a matter of a few days. Very much alive, so alive in fact, so imbued with power and might and glory, that no one will ever again be able to kill him.

And so it is that in the end Jesus overcomes, and we who follow him in discipleship will also follow him in life eternal.

Easter 2004.rtf

Tue, 13 Apr 2004 19:04:07 GMT

Easter 2004

Luke 24:1-12; Revelation 19:6-10
Sermon by Anita Kehr
April 11, 2004

Hallelujah! For the Lord our God, the Almighty, reigns!

         This is our Easter claimthat Jesus has defeated the power of evil, the power of sin, and the power of death and reigns in triumph both now and forever over all that is above, below, and on the earth. Hallelujah!

         A week ago or so, Maya and I were eating together and talking. At some point during our conversation, she asked me who would be preaching today, on Easter. I sort of muttered that I was the preacher for today. ``Why do you say it like that, Mom? What's up?''

         ``Well,'' I said, ``Easter is the highest, most holy celebration for Christiansit's the high point of the year!and I admit to being a little anxious about doing a good job.''

         ``I'll help you,'' she said. ``Let's see. We've been talking about Jesus' fight against evil, during Lent, right? Hmmm.'' All at once her face lit up the way it does when her peculiar kind of creativitywhich always includes a hefty dose of humor in itgets to working. ``Here's what you do, Mom,'' she said. ``You put on the music from `Rocky,' and then you make your entrance to the pulpit running in like a boxer. And then you do a play-by-play: `Jesus and Evil are in the ring. They're really going at it, really slugging it out. It looks like they're pretty even, taking turns making solid contact. Boom! Evil lands a solid right jab to the jaw and Jesus drops to the mat. What's this!? The lights go out? For three days? What are we going to do? Wait! Look! The lights are back on and it looks like Jesus isthe winner! How did this happen? Jesus must have dealt a deadly blow to Evil during that black-out because he clearly emerges from this bout as the victor… What a fight!!''' Maybe we should have added, ``Hallelujah!?'' Anyway, by the time she was halfway through her spiel, we were both laughing and shaking our heads. What a scenario!

         Imagine my surprise this week when I listened to a report on the ``Today'' show about the buffing up of the image of Jesus. A reporter described how some Christians are finding new ways to depict Jesus, focusing especially on his strength and courage. The language they're using centers on Jesus as a warrior or fighter, and they avoid any mention of Jesus the meek or humble of heart. The two pictures that NBC kept flashing during the report showed Jesus as a very buff boxerhmm, steroids, I thoughtleaning back against the ropes of the boxing ring, looking ready to take on all comers. One part of the commentary suggested that in times of uncertainty and war, we Christians look for a Savior who can take on all comers; we look for a warrior. I was chagrined; I thought that Maya and I had been joking.

         The truth about Jesus is that he is strong. The truth about Jesus is that he did emerge as the victor from his bout with evil. The truth about Jesus is that he is the one who brings salvation, taking all comers. And yet the truth is that he did and does it all without becoming a warrior king. He emptied himself over and over again of any claims to human power.

         The saving work of Jesus began at his birth, by One who is eternal taking on all the limitations of flesh and becoming human. In the squalling of that particular baby born to poor parents, God's new initiative of salvation began. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us. Which is a poetic way of saying that Jesus lived and walked and breathed and struggled and talked and loved and shared all of human experience. God came near.

         The saving work of Jesus continued as he grew and was baptized and began to preach the way of God. He opened the Scriptures and all at once they meant new things; he challenged the way the ``it had always been done.'' Jesus lived according to the spirit of the law rather than according to the meaning that had accrued to it over time. Jesus spoke the truthalwayseven when it was hard. He paid attention to everyone: the rich, the poor, the healthy, the sick, the living, and the dead. Jesus sat at all kinds of tables and ate with all kinds of people, too. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us. Which is a poetic way of saying that Jesus shows us the way that God intends for human beings to live. Jesus interprets what it means to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly in the way of God. The way Jesus lived is the way we're meant to live.

         The saving work of Jesus continued as he entered Jerusalem for the last time, when the crowds greeted him with an ecstasy he knew would not last. His truth-telling and his healing and his mercy and his challenge of the status quo had made him a popular man. And so, he had become a threat to those who held religious and political power. Even as Jesus saw all the signs of an ultimate confrontation lining up against him, he chose to continue in the way of obedience. He did not flee and he did not fight. Instead, he endured with dignity what came to him. He continued to speak truth and he didn't try to make it more palatable to his judges. He just said what he needed to say. And he, completely innocent and without sin, was sentenced to die the death of a criminal, beaten and tortured and hung between two others. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us. Which is a poetic way of saying that the Eternal One let himself die; he shared in all the suffering of humankind.

         The saving work of Jesus culminated at that tomb where Mary Magdalene, and Joanna, and Mary the mother of James, and several other women who had been followers of Jesus went at the break of day. They went to care for the broken body of Jesus, to anoint it with spices and prepare it properly for burial. There hadn't been time after the crucifixion. What they found at first was… nothingempty grave cloths and no body. What they heard and saw next was astonishingThe living does not dwell among the dead. Remember what he told you? And the women did remember. They not only remembered, they believed that he had really returned to them, that God had raised Jesus from the dead. They claimed the truth of the resurrection. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory... full of grace and truth. Which is a poetic way of saying that after sharing the frailty of our humanity with us, Jesus now shares with us his triumph over death and over evil. What has come into being in him was life, and the life is the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it , not because of physical strength or military strategy but because of obedience and humility and the life-restoring love of God. (From John 1)

         Jesus appeared to a number of his disciples in the days that followed the one where God raised him from death. At least three times he appeared, or was recognized, at mealtimes: when he broke bread with the men who had walked with him to Emmaus in the story written by Luke; when he showed up while the eleven were eating and then lectured them for not believing eyewitness testimony of his resurrection as described by Mark; and at a seaside breakfast in the Gospel of John. But the story of Jesus' life doesn't end with these appearances now with his return to heaven. His story continues in the new life born in all of his disciplesbeginning with the women and men who witnessed to the truth of all they had seen and heard. They were the ones who received the Spirit at Pentecost, who preached the gospel, who gathered new believers to worship in their homes, who partnered with God in spreading the news of Jesus everywhere, even until it reached here, to Goshen, Indiana, at Berkey Avenue, in this particular fellowship of people who confess with our lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in our hearts that God raised him from the dead, calling upon the name of Jesus, knowing that we shall indeed be saved. (From Romans 10:9-13) Those messengers who brought the good news to the women said, ``Why do you look for the living among the dead?'' The same question is true for us: Where do we look for the living, truth-telling, merciful Jesus? Perhaps we should be looking at each other, finding the risen Christ present and active among us right here and right now.

         Jesus won the struggle against evil, not by might nor by power but by obedience to God. We share in that triumph when we choose the way of Jesus. But sometimes… sometimes it feels as if evil hasn't been vanquished at all, as if it has the ascendancy in our world. And sometimes it feels as if sin has us all tangled up, and there's no getting loose. In our world, there are wars and rumors of wars; nationalism and ethnocentrism and racism; individualism and egoism; a letting go of moral commitments and responsibility; a temptation to justify ourselves by any means possible…; and then, there's all the stuff in the most inner parts of our livesanger, jealousy, pride, whatever. Sometimes the picture seems so bleak!

         But, even then, our Easter claim remains trueJesus has defeated the power of evil, the power of sin, and the power of death and reigns in triumph both now and forever over all that is above, below, and on the earth. Hallelujah!

         The truth is also that we live in the time between the times, the now and not yet. Jesus did begin something new with his life and death and resurrection; that new thing is a way of being in a healed relationship with God that is direct and intimate and transforming. It is our salvation. That relationship has implications for how we live, for the big and little choices we make day by day. But, God's reign is not yet here in its fullness; we're still only seeing glimpses via a dim mirror. Our world continues to thrash in its web of evil, and we continue to tangle ourselves up in webs of sin. So again and again we return to Jesus, relying on his grace and forgiveness, but also on his ability to untangle us from our sin and free us for his way. For we know that sometime we will be completely free.

         And that's the picture that John depicts for us in our text from Revelation: It's the time at the end of time when Jesus, the Lamb, will reign unimpeded. John hears the loud shouts of all of creation acknowledging the Lamb's glory and praising him. He sees that the saints who have accepted the invitation to the marriage supper finally get to be clothed in fine linen, pure and bright, the linen of righteous deeds that are no longer sullied by sin. And of course, there's fooda bounteous banquet! It's a marriage celebration, the result of the victory of the Lamb who was slain in order to liberate us all for intimate and loving relationship with him. ``Blessed are those who are invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb,'' John hears. ``These are the true words of God.''

         The preparations for that banquet at the end of timethat eschatological banquetbegan in earnest the moment that the garden tomb emptied, when Evil discovered that it could not keep Jesus dead, when it learned about defeat. The preparations for that banquet are on-going, even as we discover and accept Jesus' invitation to new life. What we have here today is a fanciful imagining of that banquet, but this is also a celebration of the way that we have already known and experienced the saving, liberating, triumphant, and birthing work of Jesus. Each of you is invited to come and eat and celebrate, both now and at the end of time. I hope that you accept both invitations.

         Hallelujah!

Falling in Love September 26 2004.rtf

Thu, 30 Sep 2004 20:41:53 GMT

Falling in Love

Psalms 113:5-6; 18:1, 31
Sermon by Dan Schrock
September 26, 2004

Who is like the Lord our God,
who is seated on high,
who looks far down on the heavens and the earth?

I love you, O Lord, my strength.
For who is God except the Lord?
And who is a rock besides our God? (NRSV)

Have you fallen in love with God? And how did it happen?

A long time ago in the country of Spain, a handsome, rich young man named Gonzalo was working as a silk merchant. His family's silk business took him to many different Spanish towns where he bought silk cloth from weavers and sold silk cloth to wealthy customers.

During one of his business trips he stopped in the small town of Fontiveros to visit a certain firm that wove silk threads into cloth. While he was there he met a beautiful, poor young woman named Catalina who worked at one of the looms. Gonzalo and Catalina talked. They laughed. They flirted. And they fell in love with each other.

But there was a problem. He was wealthy, a member of the upper middle class; while she was poor, a member of the lower class. As we would say today, she came from the wrong side of the tracks. Now in our society, this would be a minor problem at most; but in Spain a long time ago it was a huge problem. Back then people from different social classes simply did not marry each other. The upper class married the upper class; the middle class married the middle class; and the lower class married the lower class.

But here were Gonzalo and Catalina, members of the upper middle class and the lower class, respectively, who wanted to get married. Their extended families fought their wish to get married, especially his family. The issue was not about Christian faith or Christian commitment, for both young people were members of the church. The issue was about money and social class. Don't commit yourself to that lower class woman, the members of his family advised him. She may be beautiful, she may be smart, but she has no money. Her family is not respectable. They have no honor. If you insist on marrying her, we'll disown you. Kick you out of the family business and refuse to have anything to do with you anymore. You'll lose your wealth, your status, your power, your connections, your family. Don't do it.

Gonzalo listened, then made his choice. True, Catalina was in his eyes a beautiful young woman. But it was more than that. She had a sterling character, a kind disposition. She and he had stolen each other's hearts. So the two of them agreed to marry, knowing full well that they might pay a stiff social and economic price for their decision.

After the wedding, Gonzalo's family disinherited and abandoned him. Losing his access to their wealth and their business opportunities, he had little choice but to learn the trade of a silk weaver, his wife's occupation. So over the following months she taught him how to set up a loom, how to weave and finish off cloth. They rarely had enough money to get by, but together they made a life; and for as long as the two of them lived, love drew them together and gave them the commitment to persevere in hard times. Out of love, he entered into her poverty. For her sake, he willingly relinquished material comfort. To achieve union, he and she put each other first and made all else second or third or fourth.¹
Have you fallen in love with God? How did it happen? And what price have you paid for loving God?

Historically we Mennonites have talked a lot about discipleship, about following Christ in daily life no matter what the cost. This is one of our theological and ethical strengths as a people, one that Christians from other denominations admire a great deal. Quite a few people from other backgrounds have joined the Mennonite church expressly because they wanted to radically follow Jesus and found this kind of emphasis in no other church.

But sometimes our discipleship can get rather sour-faced, especially when discipleship pushes us to do something we really, really don't want to do. In those circumstances we may very well go ahead and do the task because we think Jesus would want us to, because we think it's our duty and obligation. You know, just obey. But we obey with a rebellious spirit and a grim, determined look on our faces, having no fun with it whatsoever.

In contrast to this grim-faced, obedient discipleship, we Mennonites have rarely talked about falling in love with God. True, falling in love with God could have a price, just as grim-faced discipleship could have a price. But there's a huge difference between paying a price when you're in love with someone and paying a price when you're doing it out of duty. When you're in love you do things joyfully, eagerly, willingly. When you're operating out of duty and obligation, then you do things grudgingly, reluctantly, maybe even cynically. It's no fun at all.

The writers of the psalms fell in love with God. In the verses that we heard a bit ago, the psalmist loves God because he or she realizes that no one can compare with God. Who else sits high above heaven and earth? Who else is so able to deliver or save or heal or bless? Who else loves us the way God does? So given a God like this, I ask you: who else could possibly steal our hearts?

I've been a Christian for 33 years, but most of that time I was not in love with God. I tried to obey God, yes; I tried to follow Jesus, yes; but I was not in love with God. I loved my stamp collection. I loved reading books and going to school. I loved music by Bach and Beethoven, Stravinsky and Shostakovich. I loved my closest friends, my congregation, my wife and my children. But not God. God was someone I learned about, someone I studied, and above all someone I obeyed; but not someone I fell in love with.

I am not quite sure when I fell in love with God or how it happened. I am quite sure my love for God has a lot of growing to do. But I can tell you that it's only in the last few years that I finally realized that somewhere along the way I have indeed fallen in love with God. God has captured my heart, stolen my affections, captivated my imagination, overwhelmed my feelings. There is nothing else quite like it, for God is incomparable. In all of heaven and earth, no one and no thing even comes close to God.

I suppose the closest analogy to falling in love with God is falling in love with someone of the opposite gender. Falling in love with someone is not something we can decide to do when we get out of bed in the morning. We cannot stand in the bathroom, look ourselves in the mirror, and declare, ``Today I am going to fall in love with a woman (or a man).'' No, falling in love is not something you force yourself to do. Instead it happens in the context of a gradually-evolving relationship. You are entranced by a certain way he carries his body, enchanted by a certain dimple that shows up when she smiles, enthralled by the timbre of his voice, wowed by his beliefs about social justice. People in love will usually be able to tell you some of the specific things that appeal to them about the other person; but they'll also tell you, if they're honest, that there is something mysterious about their love that they can't quite explain, that their love is bigger and deeper than they can put into words.

So it is with God. The main difference about falling in love with God, as far as I can tell, is that we can't see God face-to-face. We don't hear God's voice the way you are now hearing my voice. As Jesus says in John 4:24, God is spirit. God does not have a body the way we have a body. So how do you fall in love with Spirit, with One who is everywhere all at once, with One you can't see like you see the shape of a nose, can't smell like you smell cologne, can't talk with in the way you talk with someone at the Electric Brew?

I can't answer these questions for you because there are a thousand different ways of falling in love. One of the reasons I fell in love with Jenny 20 years ago was because of her writing style, with the way she put words together on a page. It's still one of the best things I like about her. But I know very well that most couples do not fall in love with each other because of the way they write. That's an oddity, a quirk, that's true for me but not most people.

So I can't say for sure how you fell, or might fall, in love with God. Maybe the best I can do, the only thing I can do, is give you a few reasons why I am still falling in love with God. I love God because of what I've learned about God through study, because of God's passion for both mercy and justice, because of the connection I sometimes feel when I sing or hear certain pieces of music, because of the way sunsets look in profligate shades of purple, because of the way extra virgin olive oil tastes when Greek olives have been soaking in it for several months. Oddly enough, I have also more intensely fallen in love with God when God seems to withdraw the divine presence from my life and feels absent. Even though I know very well that God is always around and objectively never leaves me or the world, sometimes it feels as if God has leftand that feeling of absence, that sense of distance, makes my heart grow fonder. I yearn for God more passionately precisely because God seems further away.

There is, of course, a price we pay for falling in love with God. The price is that we no longer love other things the way we used to. Since one great love has filled us and swept us off our feet, we are no longer so interested in lesser loves like a lavish standard of living, a new care, a stamp collection, a score of other things we spent so much of our time and energy pursuing. When love for God fills your life, a lot of other things just aren't so interesting any more. We come to appreciate the truth of Paul's willingness in Philippians 3:8 to lose a lot of other things because of the surpassing value of knowing and loving Jesus Christ our Lord. I think you will find that the price is worth paying, because nothing compares to falling in love with God.

Note
1. Adapted from Daniel Chowning, ``Free to Love: Negation in the Doctrine of John of the Cross,'' in Carmelite Studies IV: John of the Cross , edited by Stephen Payne.

Foundation and Flame Anab Spir 4 October 31 2004.rtf

Tue, 2 Nov 2004 05:00:00 GMT

``Foundation and Flame''
John 1:1-5
Anabaptist Spirituality Series, part 4: Scripture
Anita Yoder Kehr
October 31, 2004

         The Word of God Scripture the Holy Bible.

In the beginning was the Word, the Word of God, the Word that is God, spoken and creating: Let there be� and there was.

         The Word came to humankind:
                  --and covenanted with Abram
                  --and worked through Moses
                  --and spoke to Samuel
                  --convicted and forgave David
                  --obeyed and flouted by judges and kings
                  --spoken by the prophets to call back a people
                  --receiving songs of praise in the psalms

         The Word came into being, and in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it. The Word came to humankind:
--embodied, disclosed, and revealed by Jesus
--leading to salvation
--sustaining us in our living.
                  --falling on us like seed in different soils
                  --full of truth
                  --instructing
                  --obeyed and preached and witnessed to by disciples and believers�by us
                  --discerned and taught in the Body of Christ
                  --bringing light and giving life
                  --unchainable
                  --prophetic and witnessing
                  --linked with love
                  --enduring

         The Word became flesh and dwelt among us and by that Word we see the glory and grace and salvation of God. The Word of Godcontained in the Scriptures, in the essential book of our faith, the Biblebut not contained by it.

         Think back to the first Sunday of this series on Anabaptist spirituality when Dan Schrock and Alicia Schwartzentruber had a conversation about the beginnings of the Reformation and then of the Anabaptist movement. Do you remember some of the things that they talked about as being keys to the beginning of these reform movements? One of the catalysts for the beginning of the Reformation was the translation of the Bible into the language spoken by the people. Another catalyst was the invention of the printing press so that books and pamphlets could be reproduced and distributed much more easily than had ever happened before. Common peoplepeople who were not necessarily in the learned or wealthy classescould get their hands on a Bible and, if they were literate, could read it for themselves and understand it. You could also read the plethora of pamphlets that were being written and distributed, pamphlets that approached faith in a new way, that described Scripture as being the only foundation for faith and doctrine, about justification by faith through grace, about the corruption of the church and its need for reform, about things that spoke to your spiritual thirst.

And even if you couldn't read, you could listen to the talk about these new ideas, and with everyone else you might begin to get excited. You could memorize the Scripture that someone else might read to youperhaps in sewing circles like the one described this morning. You might hide what you hear in your heart like Mary, and it would begin to work in you. Either way, by reading or by listening, you might discover Jesus: the way of Jesus, the call of Jesus, the delight of knowing a living, dynamic relationship with God through Jesus. You'd experience the enlivening and enlightening work of the Spirit in your life. And you'd discover that the word of God is indeed ``living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow�able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart'' as the book of Hebrews proclaims.

Now, nearly all of the groups and movements that began during that amazing period in Christian history known as the Reformation and then the continuing reformations would claim sola Scriptura, Scripture alone. What that phrase meant to each of the groups, however, was less clear. The transcripts of disputations and the records of court proceedings are filled with arguments from all sides buttressed by Bible quotations being batted back and forth. Some of the arguments and disputes might sound foreign to us, especially the ones that questioned which books of the Bible really belonged there; Martin Luther suggested that Hebrews, James, Jude, and Revelation were ``less than canonical,'' not having the same authority as the other books of the Bible. But even though the questions might have been different, many of the arguments then have the same question at their base as our arguments have now. That basic question is, ``how does one rightly interpret the Word of God?'' This morning I want to suggest to you that there might be some things we can learn from the early Anabaptist believers, from their passion and knowledge of the Bible, that would help us in our own approach to the Word. But first, two disclaimers:

This question of how the Anabaptists interpreted Scripture is not settled. It is a live debate among scholars and people who know much more than I do. And, there certainly was not one systematic way of interpretation that was consistent from one Anabaptist group to another to the next. However, I believe that there are some common threads that run through a majority of the groups, and I hope that we can draw some helpful conclusions from those common threads.

         And the second disclaimer is this: I will be offering you an idealized version of Anabaptist interpretation. I want to be clear here; there were certainly excesses and errors in some Anabaptist groups' interpretation of Scripture. It seems to me, though, that we can learn as much from the excesses and errors as we can from the solid successes, and I hope this morning to be drawing some sound conclusions based on both. So, here we go.

         Observation 1: All of the Anabaptist groups held to some kind of a balance between the inner word and the outer word, between the letter written on paper and the Holy Spirit writing on the heart. Now, some of the groups got into trouble when they focused on one at the expense of the otherthere's legalism on one side and spiritualizing or rootlessness on the otherbut all of them believed that the Holy Spirit was necessary in order to interpret Scripture correctly, to discern the plain sense of the text accurately. The Spirit is the flame that enlivens and quickens the foundation of the written word. It is by the inner word (the Spirit) that the outer word (the written Scriptures) begin to work in us, begin to transform us and move us into obedience. The Spirit opens up new layers of Scripture to us as we need it.

Many of you have had the experience of going to an old, familiar Bible passage that you've read so many times before, but this time you discover something newa new meaning, a new challenge, a new word of comfort, a new call. That experience is the inner word of the Spirit interacting with the written word to give you what you need for faith and faithfulness. Attending to the Word of the Spirit while testing it against the plumbline and order of Scripture (Michael Sattler (1)) provides the kind of balance John Roth talked about two Sundays ago, the balance of rooted freedom, of faith in the Risen Christ that encompasses heart and mind, body and soul.

A second observation about Anabaptist interpretation begins with this: The Word became flesh and dwelt among us. For Anabaptists, Jesus Christ became the key to interpreting all of Scripture because Jesus embodied or incarnated God's intention for humankind. With this approach, the Gospels, the stories of Jesus, become the heart of the Bible, and Jesus' Sermon on the Mount becomes the foremost practical instruction guide for how to be a Christian. The Old Testament isn't viewed in the same way that the New Testament is; the New Testament has higher authority because it reveals Christ. Pilgram Marpeck, an early Anabaptist leader, wrote that the Old Testament is a promise for what the New Testament fulfills, and Menno Simons wrote that the testaments do not have one-to-one correspondence. The Old Testament pre-figures the New with the same sort of relationship that an image has with the reality it reflects. (2) Think about that one for awhile!

Now, I am not advocating that we ignore the Old Testament. On the contrary, that testament tells the same story that is continued in the newer one; it shows the way that God reached out again and again to establish a relationship with us as humans. We should also not simply bury the hard parts of the Old Testament, the ones that are confusing and difficult and violent. We need to grapple with those stories and their meanings, too, using the tools of Bible study that we have gained over the last 500 years. However, if we believe the words from Paul's letter to the Philippians, if we believe that Jesus really was ``in the form of God�but emptied himself, taking on the form of a slave, being born in human likeness'' and is now exalted so that ``every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father,'' then interpreting Scripture through a Christ-centered lens makes a great deal of sense. The way of Jesus gives us a unique perspective into the mind and heart of God.

         A third observation: Anabaptists believed that obedience to the Scripture was necessary for right interpretation. The more a believer obeys the Scripture, the more accurately she can interpret it. And the more that a believer works with and interprets the Scripture, the closer he will be able to follow in the way that Jesus calls him to. This sounds familiar, doesn't it? It's the same concept that came up last week when Dan talked about discipleship.

Remember Hans Denck? He's the one who insisted that the only way to really get to know Christ is to follow him in discipleship. The Anabaptists understood interpretation of scripture to work in the same way. Here's how their reasoning went: 1) Being a Christian is much more than believing the right set of doctrines and principles. 2) Being a Christian involves a living, growing relationship with Jesus. 3) Therefore, it makes sense that as the relationship grows, knowledge of the other grows, and as knowledge of the other grows, then the relationship also grows. The wisdom needed for discerning and interpreting the Scripture comes by way of obeying what you read in the Bible in the context of that growing relationship with Christ. This whole process is called the hermeneutics (the interpretive principle) of obedience, and the expected outcome is fruitful Christian yieldedness and discipleship or, in other terms that we've used in the past few weeks, fruitful Christian Gelassenheit and Nachfolge. Head knowledge and heart experience and behavioral change all go together; they cannot be separated.

And the fourth observation: Interpretation of Scripture happens best in the gathered body of believers. Now there are several underpinnings to this particular Anabaptist approach to digging into the Bible. One of those underlying assumptions is that Scripture is accessible to everyone. There is a ``plain meaning'' to Scripture that everyone can understand, educated or not. Another assumption is that the Rule of Paul from 1 Corinthians 14:29 really is a good way to order meetings: ``Let two or three prophets speak, and let the others weigh what is said.'' In fact, one of the earliest documents that was circulated to those earliest Anabaptist congregations to help them order themselves says that ``the brothers and sisters should meet at least three or four times a week, to exercise themselves in the teaching of Christ and his apostles and heartily to exhort one another to remain faithful to the Lord�'' (3)

Another underpinning of this principle of interpretation in community is that though there are people chosen as leaders, those leaders must show the fruit of living in obedience to Christ. The gathered body can confer leadership, and it can remove it. If the ``hermeneutics of obedience'' weren't evident in a leader's life, then his or her scriptural teaching would also be unsound.

The result of all these underpinnings or assumptions is a sense that the people of a congregation need each other to form true spiritual community and to interpret the Scripture for the common good. In the 1530s, some Anabaptists wrote a tract that explained why they weren't showing up in the state churches. Listen to what they say about those state church services: ``When someone comes to church and constantly hears only one person speaking and all the listeners are silent, neither speaking nor prophesying, who can or will regard or confess the same to be a spiritual congregation, or confess according to 1 Corinthians 14 that God is dwelling and operating in them through his Holy Spirit with his gifts?'' (4) Hmmph. Here I am, one person speaking and the rest of you silent and listening. Perhaps it's time that I end and let you interpret and divide the Scripture for the common good of our own Body!

Unfortunately, I do have one more thing to say�well, maybe two more things. First, another disclaimer: When we interpret Scripture in the community of believers, let us know that we will probably not all come to full agreement every time. What the commitment to interpret Scripture together does mean, however, is coming to the process with humility and with a desire to learn from others and from their relationship with Christ. If we come to Scripture thinking that we know the one way to it's meant to be received, then we are perhaps closing the door to what the Spirit might want to teach us. However, there are also going to be times when we will simply disagree.

Now, here's my last word: It seems to me that these Anabaptist principles of interaction with the Bible are worthy of our consideration and embrace. Let me remind you of them: 1) balancing the letter and the Spirit, 2) interpreting Scripture by way of Christ, 3) applying the principle of the hermeneutics of obedience, and 4) understanding our need for one another as we seek to interpret Scripture and its implications for our lives. I propose that when we apply these principles and inform our use of them with what we've learned about the Bible in the past 500 years, perhaps we'll have a remedy for two of the major temptations of Christians in our own age: either to reduce Scripture to irrelevance for our daily life and practice or to elevate it to untouchable perfection. Both of these lead us astray. We are meant to be instructed by Scripture, and we are meant to approach Scripture. Both! To dive in, to handle, to divide, to learn, to obey, to be transformed by it.

In the beginning was the Word.

(1) Yoder, John Howard. The Legacy of Michael Sattler. Scottdale: Herald Press, 1973, p. 153.
(2) Poettcker, Henry, ``Menno's Encounter with the Bible,'' Essays on Biblical Interpretation. Elkhart: Institute of Mennonite Studies, 1984, page 69.
(3) Yoder, John Howard. The Legacy of Michael Sattler. Scottdale: Herald Press, 1973, p. 44.
(4) Klassen, Walter, editor. Anabaptism in Outline: Selected Primary Sources. Waterloo: Herald Press, 1981.

Freedom and Obedience June 27 2004.rtf

Tue, 13 Jul 2004 19:24:48 GMT

Freedom and Obedience

I Kings 19 and Galatians 5:1, 13-14
Sermon by Anita Kehr
June 27, 2004

Thomas Merton was born in 1915 to free-spirited artist parents. By the time he was 16, he had lived in France, the United States, England, and Scotland. He had traveled throughout Europe. Andhe was an orphan, having lost both of those free-spirited parents to cancer. After his father died, the 16-year-old mourned, but later, as he reflected about that period of his life, Merton wrote, ``I imagined that I was free. And it would take me five or six years to discover what a frightful captivity I had got myself into…. The sense of… independence… grew upon me until I was convinced that I was my own lord, and despised every form, not only of control, but even of advice.'' ¹ Merton, who was a true intellectual, studied at boarding schools and universities and explored all kinds of lifestyles and causes even while he felt himself being drawn more and more toward God. When he was 23, he gave himself to the Gospel of Jesus Christ and was confirmed as a Roman Catholic. When he was 27, he entered the monastery at Gethsemani in Kentucky; his desire for solitude and contemplation and prayer was deep and profound. He wrote later about his experience of entering the monastery: ``So Brother Matthew locked the gate behind me, and I was enclosed in the four walls of my freedom.'' ²

Over the next 27 years, Merton wrote books that many of us read now as spiritual classics, books that detail his spiritual journey and the depth of his experience with God. And, in that monastery at Gethsemani, Merton's life of prayer and solitude and contemplation birthed in him a passion for the humanity whom God had created. He became a contemplative activist, one who wrote against injustice, racism, and nuclear madness and on behalf of peace and equality. He corresponded with all kinds of people around the world, hearing their stories and allowing them to touch his life and understanding. He struggled to prevent his solitude from descending into spiritual narcissismwe might call it ``navel-gazing''but rather to allow his contemplation and prayer to yield obedience and transformation according to the will and in the image of God.

Thomas Merton once wrote, ``There is in the depths of man's heart a voice which says, `You must be born again.'''³ Basil Pennington, a spiritual leader in his own right and one of Merton's biographers, continues the thought, ``We must be reborn of the Spirit who is free, and who reaches to the very depths of everything. He wants to reach to the inmost depths of our heart and take our heart to himself by … creating for us a new identity, by being himself our identity…. When we are completely freed from our old self by a true death to self in Christ, then we will be able to live totally in the spontaneity of the Spirit.''⁴ These are paradoxes, aren't they: freedom through death to self and obedience to the Spirit, and solitude and silence resulting in activism?

Surely there is paradox, but it is paradox found also in the Scriptures we have heard Ruth and Kelly read today.

You heard Elijah's story, and you know it; it's a familiar one. But let me remind you of some things and add a few others. First of all, remember that Elijah's ongoing struggle in his prophetic ministry is to call the people of Israel away from the worship of Baal and back to the worship of Yahweh God. Our story today takes place right after Elijah, with the help of God, had very successfully and spectacularly faced off against the prophets of Baal. The report that Ahab took back to Jezebel at the beginning of our text was about the way that the fire of God had consumed altars drenched and running with waterafter heartfelt pleas to Baal by his prophets had resulted in…nothing. So, it's curious that after this great triumph, after this display of God's power, Elijah falls into such deep despair when Jezebel issues her threat. Perhaps he's just tired: tired after the confrontation and victory that now ends in threat, tired of the struggle, tired of feeling alone, tired of being the target. Whatever it is, Elijah becomes afraid and he runs.

And think about where Elijah is running to. He leaves Israel and goes to the southernmost tip of Judah, in Beersheba. There he leaves behind his servant. And he goes one day further into the wilderness. Elijah is leaving the land of Yahweh, the land of the covenant. He believes that his ministry is over and all he wants to do is diewhich he says quite clearly after he settles himself under a broom tree. But it's not time for dying. God the Provider sends two messengers to Elijah, both of whom feed him while the second one sends him on the long journey to Mount Horebthe very same place where Moses had met God face to face.

When Elijah gets to Mount Horeb, the word of the Lord comes to him, this time in question form: ``What are you doing here, Elijah?'' And Elijah answers with a strongly-worded, hot-headed complaint: ``I've worked my tail off for you, the Israelites have ignored me and you, I'm the only one left who's faithful, and they all want to kill me.'' Now, often in scripture, God responds to this kind of complaint with a word of salvation or comfort. Not in this case, though. Elijah hears that he's going to have to wait some more and then the Lord his God will be passing by.

Big things begin to happen around Elijah, then. Really dramatic things. Things that God had used before as ways to make appearances to humankind: a wind so strong that it could split mountains, an earthquake that made the ground tremble, and a fire that blazed in heat and brilliance. But God was not in those really big and dramatic things.

Have you ever wondered why the wind, earthquake, and fire are in this story? I have. Most obviously, perhaps, Elijah may have been getting a reminder that God is in much more than the big and dramatic. I wonder, though, if he wasn't also being prepared to listen well. Perhaps Elijah was straining his heart, mind, and body to see God pass by in those big things, and when God wasn't there, perhaps he was finally trained and ready to hear God in utter silence.

Because that's how the word of the Lord cameafter ``the sound of sheer silence,'' the hush that comes pregnant with anticipation. When Elijah heard that silence, he knew that God had arrived. He covered his head, went to the mouth of the cave, and prepared to listen. And God asked the same question that Elijah had answered before: ``What are you doing here, Elijah?'' And Elijah gives exactly the same complaint, not trying to make it nicer this time: ``I've worked my tail off for you, the Israelites have ignored me and you, I'm the only one left who's faithful, and they all want to kill me.'' And God isn't any more comforting this time; God simply gives Elijah directions on what he's supposed to do next. And God reminds Elijah that there are 7,000 other people in Israel who have never bowed to BaalElijah has never been alone, never separated from God nor from others who have shared his dedication to Yahweh. He's cut himself off. The word of God for Elijah is for freedom from fear so that he can go back to doing what he's supposed to be doing. And apparently Elijah got the message. We see at the end of the chapter that he obediently got up, found Elisha plowing in a field, and called him to become his companion and eventual replacement as prophet to Israel.

On that holy mountain, Elijah met God, and God freed him from fear and returned him to his calling. This being freed from fear has something to do, I think, with the freedom that Paul is preaching about to the Galatians in the text that Kelly read: ``For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery… only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence but through love become slaves to one another.'' (Another one of those paradoxesfreedom for slavery!)

During the baptism exploration class, I often ask the students two questions when we get to talking about salvation. I ask: Just what is that we're saved from? And just what is it that we're saved for? (You might want to think about how you'd answer those questions!) But for today, I wonder about modifying the questions for thinking about this freedom of Paul's: Freedom from what? And freedom for what? (pause)

What are we freed from ? Paul is certainly preaching freedom from a rigid adherence to the Law and from the belief that salvation hangs on that rigid adherence. He's preaching freedom from the worship of false gods, which wrongly regarded Law can become. He's preaching freedom from slavery to sin and to selfishness.

And what are we freed for ? We're freed for love, for becoming ``slaves'' to one another, for loving each other as we love ourselves. Paul gives half of the summary of the law and the prophets here in Galatians, but it's Jesus who supplies the other half in the Gospels. So we're freed for loving God completely, with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength. And, later in Galatians 5, we see that we're also freed for life lived in the Spirit and to bear fruit grown by that Spirit.

Now if we go back and look at Elijah's meeting with God and think about this question of freedom, I think we might add something else: Elijah was freed from his fear of Jezebel from his fear of death!and from his deep loneliness, and Elijah was freed for courageous obedience. He was able to go back to the struggle, to call his own replacement, to know that he was doing exactly what he was supposed to be doing. In that freedom that comes of love, perhaps we, too, may be freed from fear and freed for obedience. And perhaps freedom from fear is one of the most fundamental releases that we humans require. At least it is for me. I don't have a Jezebel chasing me, but I certainly know fearfear of failure, fear of appearing ridiculous, fear of conflictoh, I have a whole set of them. And when I meet God, I relinquish them over and over again. It's a longer process for me than it apparently was for Elijah! But when my fears have the upper hand, they shackle me. I am hobbled from obeying God in the way I'm called to obey God.

So paradox appears again: We're freed so that we can be obedient. Obedience now, in our culture and in our time, has all kinds of connotations, and many of them are unpleasant. We talk about blind obedience that leads down wrong paths; enforced obedience that results in resentment and despair; and dumb obedience that disengages reason and intellect. But what about obedience to the call of God who desires only what is goodwhat is best for us? What about obedience that leads us to become who we were truly created to be? And what about obedience that enables us to help others become who they were created to be? What about obedience that yields joy? (pause) What about obedience rooted in freedom?

The birth of freedom comes in meeting God, in experiencing the reality of the risen Christ. And perhaps we meet God in big and dramatic events, in things like wind and earthquake and fire and cataclysmic personal traumas. And maybe we sometimes even expect that's the way we're supposed to meet God, in those major dramatic and inescapable events. God does, indeed, sometimes confront us then. But perhaps God meets us most often when we dampen the fires and calm the winds and steady the earthquakes with which we fill our lives so that we can hear the sound of utter silence, and thenjust beyondthe word of God to us, calling, challenging, directing, loving, leading us to engage the world in obedient freedom.

That is what happens when we meet God face to face. God frees ussaves us from fear, from slavery to sin and false gods, from a rigid adherence to doing all the right things and being just the right kind of person in the mistaken belief that that is somehow the way that we find our salvation. And then, God frees ussaves us for wholehearted love of God, for love of one another, and for a life lived in the Spirit that births love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self control. We meet God in silence and prayer and contemplation and there we receive freedom to humble ourselves in obedience. These are paradoxes shared in the lives of Elijah and Jesus and Paul and countless other believers including Thomas Merton, who wrote this, ``Without contemplation, without the intimate, secret pursuit of truth through love, our action loses itself in the world and becomes dangerous…. We should lose ourselves to win the world; we should humble ourselves to find Christ everywhere and to love him in all beings.'' ⁵ Necessary paradoxes indeed.

Notes
1.       Quoted by William H. Shannon, The Silent Lamp, New York: Crossroad Publishing Company, 1992, p. 53-54.
2.       Thomas Merton. The Seven Storey Mountain , New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Co., 1948, p. 372.
3.       Quoted by M. Basil Pennington, Thomas Merton, Brother Monk: the Quest for True Freedom , New York: Harper and Row, 1987, p. 150.
4.       Ibid , p. 151.
5.       Quoted by Shannon, p. 189.

Gelassenheit--The Practice of Consent October 10 2004.rtf

Sun, 10 Oct 2004 16:01:56 GMT

Gelassenheit:
The Practice of Consent

Matthew 26:36-39
Sermon by Dan Schrock
October 10, 2004

Then Jesus went with them to a place called Gethsemane; and he said to his disciples, "Sit here while I go over there and pray." He took with him Peter and the two sons of Zebedee, and began to be grieved and agitated. Then he said to them, "I am deeply grieved, even to death; remain here, and stay awake with me." And going a little farther, he threw himself on the ground and prayed, "My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me; yet not what I want but what you want." (NRSV)

Today is the first of a series of six special worship services on our Anabaptist-Mennonite heritage of faith. About a year ago I went to John Roth and asked whether in his memory our congregation has ever done a series on Anabaptist-Mennonite history. He said we had not in the twelve or thirteen years he has been here. Once we heard that, Anita and I thought it was high time we did something on our heritage of faith, because if we know nothing about our heritage, we will probably feel spiritually rootless.

Now this is not a history class. We will not focus on memorizing facts, dates, and names of important people; and there will not be a test at the end. Instead we want to focus on the spiritual life of Anabaptism. What did our spiritual ancestors say was most important for developing a healthy Christian life? How did they express their spiritual convictions? What sustained them through persecution, hardship, and personal attacks? What made their faith so vibrant and appealing to other people that those other people also wanted to join this movement, even though for many of them it led to serious harassment? We believe that the spiritual practices which sustained our Anabaptist ancestors and made their faith so attractive can also sustain us todayand will make our faith attractive as well.

I'm delighted to say that we'll have two special speakers in this series, two Johns, in fact. Next Sunday John Roth will speak about the two main sources of spiritual renewal in Anabaptist-Mennonite history. And five weeks from today, John Rempel will come and speak about the Lord's Supper in Anabaptism. John Rempel was for many years a pastor in New York City and now teaches at the Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary in Elkhart. Since his academic specialty is the Lord's Supper, we're fortunate that he's willing to share some of his thoughts about the importance of the Lord's Supper with us.

So let us begin. Maybe one of the biggest challenges about learning from the Anabaptists is that they lived so long ago, nearly 500 years ago. Anabaptism began in the 1500s in Europe, and that world was very different than the world we live in. So to get a sense of what religious life was like for people back then, I've asked ____ [female] to join me for a minute and we're going to try to imagine what church was like in 1500.

Now ___, in the year 1500, everybody in Europe was Catholic. There was no other kind of Christian. I want you to try to imagine what it was like to be a Catholic Christian back in 1500. For a few minutes forget everything you know about the Mennonite church, because there was no such thing yet. First, as a member of the Catholic church, you were baptized when you were a baby. You never attended a membership class, and you remember nothing about your baptism. From as early as you can remember, you simply belonged to the Catholic church.

Now let's imagine what it was like to go to church. When you go to church you read the Bible, right? Ok, here's a Bible. Would you please read it. [Hand her a Latin Bible.] Impossible, right? This Bible is in Latin. In 1500 all Bibles were in Latin. But most people, like you, couldn't read Latin. The only way you could learn Latin was if you went to school, but school was expensive. Generally speaking, most of the people who went to school were rich boys. Children from poor families rarely got to go, and girls almost never went. So you when you went to church, you heard the priest read the Bible; but it was in a language you didn't know. Pretty exciting, huh?!

Well, what about the rest of the worship service? Maybe you could connect with the rest of the service. Or maybe not. Here's what the worship service sounded like. Listen:

Credo in unum Deum.
Patrem omnipotentem, factorem caeli et terrae,
visibilium omnium et invisibilium.
Et in unum Dominum Jesum Christum,
filium Dei unigenitum.

Latin. The whole service was in Latin. You don't speak Latin. You don't understand Latin. You have almost no idea what's going on in the worship service. What I just read, by the way, was the beginning of the Nicene Creed, which was recited in every Catholic mass.

Another thing. In 1500 there's no Sunday school. Sunday school would not be invented for another 300 years. There's just the worship service, with no coffee time afterward. So when you go to church, you hear the Bible in a language you know nothing about, and the service conducted in this same mysterious language. Now the question I want to ask you is this: knowing what you know about church in 1500, how excited do you think you might be about being a Christian? [Her answer; paraphrase it.] This gives us a flavor of what it was like for people to be Christian in 1500. Most had no idea what the Bible said, and many did not know what was going on in the worship service. As a consequence, God seemed distant, far away, remote, and mysterious. Thank you; you can sit down again.

All this meant that throughout Europe there was a tremendous hunger for God. People were ready for new ways to connect with God. And very quickly, some new ways became available. First of all, some scholars began to translate the Latin Bible into languages that ordinary people spoke every daylanguages like German, French, Dutch, Spanish, and English. Second, a man named Johann Gutenberg invented a printing press with changeable type, which meant that people could now print thousands and thousands of Bibles at relatively little cost. So for the first time, ordinary people had access to copies of the Bible printed in a language they could actually understand.

Can you imagine how exciting this was? To finally hear for yourself or read for yourself what the Bible really said? A whole new world opened up for people. For the first time, they found out what Jesus said to his disciples in the sermon on the mount. They found out what Paul wrote to the Corinthians. They heard the stories of Ruth, David, and Elijah. Imagine hearing these words for the first time: ``There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus'' (Romans 8:1). This was awesome stuff!

Added to this were new worship practices. When the first Anabaptists began meeting in 1525, they did not worship in Latin, but in the same language they spoke at home. In their own language, they read the Bible. In their own language, they prayed to God. In their own language, they sang songs. In their own language, they celebrated the Lord's Supper. And for the first time, people could make their own decision, as informed adults, to follow Christ. Not infant baptism, but adult baptism. We have stories of people standing up in the middle of worship services, asking to be baptized right then and there. One example. In the village of Zollikon, near Zurich, Switzerland, an Anabaptist congregation was having a worship service. Suddenly a man named Hans Bruggbach stood up crying and shouting that he was a great sinner and that they should pray [to] God for him. Then Georg Blaurock, an early Anabaptist leader famous for the blue coat he wore, asked this man if wanted to receive the grace of God. Yes, said Hans Bruggbach. Then another leader named Felix Manz stood up and asked if there was any reason not to baptize this man immediately. Since no one could think of a reason not to, Felix Manz took a dipper of water and baptized him right there in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. ¹
So the early Anabaptists possessed this intense religious fervor. Suddenly God seemed very close to them, as if they were almost touching God. The Holy Spirit swept through their lives, giving them a fire, sense of passion and conviction they had never experienced before. For many people, God became the most important part of their lives. Spiritually speaking, they were exuberant, excited, enthusiastic, energetic. God was real. God was alive. They sensed it in their bones, felt it in their hearts, perceived it in their minds. They were on fire with the Holy Spirit.

And so we come to the word Gelassenheit , a German word that many of the Anabaptists themselves used to describe one of the most important characteristics of their spiritual life. Gelassenheit, they said, is the practice of yielding to God's purposes, the willingness to abandon ourselves to God's care, the habit of saying yes to whatever God may ask of us. For the Anabaptists, Gelassenheit lead to this incredible sense of peace and calmness of mind. Gelassenheit describes the kind of relationship they had with God. They trusted God deeply, and were willing to do almost anything that they genuinely believed God was inviting them to do. This radical trust in God, this profound commitment to God's purposes in the world, is what led them to such extreme acts of discipleship, which I will talk more about in two weeks.

If you have a chance to read Anabaptist history, you'll see the marks of Gelassenheit all over the place. You see it in their passionate prayers, in their heart-felt hymns, in their practice of memorizing long passages of scripture, in their frequent celebration of the Lord's Supper which in some places happened every week, and in their courageous decisions to defy the political and religious authorities who in truth were frequently scared of the Anabaptists.

Gelassenheit is one of the primary qualities that the Anabaptists saw in Jesus. When they read the gospels, especially the passion narratives in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, they realized that Jesus illustrates Gelassenheit in his own relationship with God. ``Not what I want,'' prays Jesus at Gethsemane just before his arrest, ``but what you want, God.'' In this act of submission, of surrender to the greater purposes of God in the world, Jesus releases himself into the hands of God. Of course as the Anabaptists read the rest of the Bible, they saw Gelassenheit in other people like Abraham and Sarah, Ruth, Jeremiah, Mary, and Paul. But for them, Gelassenheit was best expressed in the life of Jesus, and they wanted to imitate his example.

I believe that Gelassenheit is one of the best things we can learn from our Anabaptist ancestors. One of the wonderful gifts of being a pastor is that you get to watch people grow and develop spiritually over time. You get to watch them decide to be baptized, decide to go into voluntary service, decide to act ethically in the workplace, and so on. One of the things I've noticed about people is that some of the most important and profound moments of spiritual growth happen when they practice Gelassenheit. Usually it doesn't happen in big and grand ways, but in small steps. At various points along the way they will sense a little nudge from the Holy Spirit, asking them to do something. Or they'll feel a little tug from Christ, beckoning them to make a small change somewhere in their life. When these people say yes, ok, I'll try this invitation out and see what happens, that yes to God almost always leads to significant spiritual growth. One mid-life person I know began to sense an invitation to consider a term of service in Asia under Mennonite Central Committee. At first the idea seemed crazy. But after a while, she said ok, I'll do it, even though it was unconventional. And in the years since, it's obvious that crucial Christian growth has taken place because of that decision.

Another person began to sense a call to quit watching violence on TV. At first he brushed it off, but when it became more insistent he decided to try it and see what happened. He quit watching violent shows. Then later he started feeling a call to quit watching TV entirely. After some foot dragging he finally did it. And I noticed that afterward that person's walk with Christ became more serious, more committed, more engaged.

Gelassenheitthe practice of consent, of willingly saying yes to God's invitations along the waythis is one of the most important qualities of the Christian life. It was important for the Anabaptists, and it's important for us as well.

Note
1. Story quoted by Timothy George, ``The Spirituality of the Radical Reformation,'' in Christian Spirituality: High Middle Ages and Reformation , ed. Jill Raitt (New York: Crossroad, 1987), p. 338.

God and God Alone September 19 2004.rtf

Thu, 23 Sep 2004 00:01:42 GMT

God, and God Alone

Mark 12:28-34
Sermon by Dan Schrock
September 19, 2004

One of the scribes came near and heard them disputing with one another, and seeing that he answered them well, he asked him, "Which commandment is the first of all?" Jesus answered, "The first is, 'Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.' The second is this, 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.' There is no other commandment greater than these." Then the scribe said to him, "You are right, Teacher; you have truly said that 'he is one, and besides him there is no other'; and 'to love him with all the heart, and with all the understanding, and with all the strength,' and 'to love one's neighbor as oneself,'--this is much more important than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices." When Jesus saw that he answered wisely, he said to him, "You are not far from the kingdom of God." After that no one dared to ask him any question. (NRSV)

Some years ago when we were living in Columbus, Ohio, and I was still in the habit of watching TV, I flipped to the channel that aired Rod Parsley. Rod Parsley is the founder and pastor of World Harvest Church, a mega-church on the southeast side of metro Columbus that began in the backyard of a house and now has 12,000 members. Thanks to the elephant size of his congregation and his weekly TV broadcast, he's easily the best known pastor in all of Columbus. I turned the TV on that day to see what odd theology and questionable statements Mr. Parsley was going make next.

What came from Mr. Parsley's lips that day astonished me more than anything else I ever heard him say. During the dozen times a year or so that I listened to him, he would typically dance around on the stage at the front of his 5,000 seat sanctuary, his dark wool double-breasted suit coat buttoned up, his forehead perspiring, his face animated with a score of excited expressions, an open Bible in one hand and a white cotton handkerchief in the other. But today he was actually standing still behind the pulpit instead of running around on the stage. And his face, although perspiring under the hot spotlights, was sober.

What astonished me the most were his words. For once he was not shouting. He was not telling us how we could get healed of whatever sickness we had if we only had enough faith. For once he not was hinting at how wealthy God would make us if we were just spiritual enough. For once he was not urging us to pray for a Holy Spirit revival to sweep across evil America. No, none of that. Instead, he was talking about spaghetti suppers and bake sales. Let me paraphrase for you what Rod Parsley said that day to his 12,000 church members and to maybe hundreds of thousands of TV listeners.

``Why do we do all stuff at the church?'' he was asking. ``This church is full of rushed, blurred activity. On Monday night we have spaghetti suppers. On Tuesday night we have group meetings. On Wednesday night we have Bible study and worship. On Thursday we have strategy sessions. On Friday night we have sports teams. On Saturday we have bake sales and an evening worship service. Every day of the week we have committee meetings. On Sunday we have three worship services, and then on Monday we start all over again. We have classes for children. We have classes for youth. We have classes for adults. We have baseball teams, softball teams, basketball teams, soccer teams. We have fund-raisers for mission trips, fund-raisers for youth groups, fund-raisers for our building project. We have concerts, performances, and presentations. We have choir practices, worship band practices, play practices, audio-visual practices. We have inspirational lectures, discussions, and how-to trainings. We have exercise groups, weight-loss groups, grief support groups, motivational groups, men's groups, women's groups, singles groups, mission groups, newly-divorced groups, Bible study groups, prayer groups. We have day camps, petition drives, revival meetings, healing services, city-wide crusades, canvas mailings, phone solicitations, a clothes closet, a food bank. We have a prayer ministry, a broadcast ministry, a tape ministry, a book ministry, a families ministry, a couples ministry, a ministry to this and a ministry to that. What is it all for? Why are we doing all this stuff?''

I watched Rod Parsley on my TV set, utterly fascinated by what I was hearing. To my eyes it looked like he was tired, unutterably exhausted at all the work it took to operate this huge church. He seemed subdued and full of doubt. Never before have I witnessed such honest questioning from a TV preacher, displayed in public for thousands to watch.

I listened all the way to the end of his sermon, waiting for him to answer his own excellent questions. But he never did. He left us hanging; and ever since then I've wondered what the answer might be. Why, indeed, do we do all this stuff at churchthe committees, the groups, the classes, the projects, the meals, the worship services? Do we exist to maintain this building, to sweep its carpets and paint its walls? No, of course not. Are we here to be a social club? I hope not. Do we work at being the church in order to earn a get-out-of-hell-free card? No.

Then what are we here for? What is the purpose of the church? What's the ultimate goal we're trying to achieve?

I propose a simple answer: the purpose of congregational life is to help us love God more. The purpose is to make our love for God more intense. To let our love for God expand into more and more areas of our life. Everything we do at church should somehow help this love grow.

Out on the street one day, a scribe asked Jesus what the first commandment was. ``First'' means the most important commandment, the most central one, the one most foundational for the spiritual life. Of the hundreds of commandments God has given, which one is the heart and soul of the spiritual life, the hub around which everything else turns? Quoting Deuteronomy 6:5, Jesus replies, ``You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.''

The main problem you and I have is that instead of loving God with all ourselves, we love all sorts of other things. Some of the things we love are just plain evil. Some years ago I was in Nashville helping at a five-day spiritual retreat for youth workers from many different denominations. On the last day of the retreat we had a healing service. Any of the youth workers could come to one of the stations, ask for anointing, and then receive a personal prayer. It was all confidential. A female Presbyterian pastor and I were at one of these stations, and a forty-something man came to us, weeping. ``I'm addicted to pornography,'' he whispered. ``Please pray for me. I want to be free of this.'' What had happened you see, is that he had come to love pornography in a twisted sort of way. So my colleague and I anointed him on the forehead with oil and prayed for him. Acting as representatives of the church, we forgave him so he could be free to love God with more of his life.

But not everything you and l fall in love with is evil in and of itself the way pornography is. Some of the things we fall in love with are good, in and of themselves, or at least morally neutral. For twenty years I drank coffee. Now there's nothing wrong with coffee per se. Coffee doesn't shorten your life like tobacco or damage your brain like cocaine. In fact it has the positive value of keeping sleepy people awake and alert. Now we would agree it's important that coffee farmers get a just and fair wage for growing coffee beans, and that coffee agriculture is practiced in such a way that preserves the soil without depleting it. But other than that, coffee itself is morally neutral as far as I can tell.

For the first few years I drank one mug every week or so. Then I began drinking a mug every day. Then two mugs a day. But in the last year or so, I was drinking a quart every morning at breakfast and another large mug in the early afternoon, about a quart and a half a day. It seemed I was spending a lot of my day boiling water, measuring beans, grinding beans, brewing beans, drinking cup after cup, washing all the equipment when I was done, and then going to the restroom for the next three hours.

During Holy Week this past April, the thought came to me, a thought so quiet and small and unobtrusive that I almost missed it: give up coffee. The idea did have some appeal. I realized that if I quit, I could be free of the addiction, free of the tedium of making coffee and cleaning up coffee messes, free of the shame at spending so much money on expensive coffee, free of all those trips to the restroom.

But I immediately rejected the idea. ``That's ridiculous!'' I said to myself. ``I'm not giving up coffee! I like coffee! Coffee is such an integral part of my life that I can't imagine living without it!'' A day later the invitation came back again, just a wee bit more persistent: give up coffee. Again I brushed off the invitation as brusquely as before. As the days went by this invitation and I kept playing ping-pong, it asking and I refusing. The following week I casually mentioned this to my spiritual director, and he jumped on it immediately. ``Dan,'' he said, ``I think that invitation might be from the Holy Spirit. One of the marks of the Holy Spirit is the sense of freedom we feel whenever we are asked to do something. You immediately felt some freedom when the invitation first came, so it's probably the Holy Spirit. It sounds like coffee is an addiction for you. Maybe you will want to think more seriously about quitting.

So on the Sunday after Easter I drank my last cups coffee. In retrospect I think coffee had become another god. My bond to coffee turned out not to be very physical, because symptoms of withdrawal like headaches or intense sleepiness were surprisingly inconsequential. So it was not caffeine that was the source of the problem. I now realize that my deepest bond to coffee was spiritual. Yes, I still gave Yahweh, the God of heaven and earth, my highest love and devotion, even when I was drinking a quart and a half a day. But coffee had become a little god, stealing away some of the affection that should have been going only to Yahweh. Coffee turned out to be a siphon, a drain, a leak, in my commitment to God. So God invited me to stop loving it, in order that I might love God more.

The church is a primary place where God loves us and where we learn to love God back with more of our heart, soul, mind, and strength. Of course if there are any deficiencies in this relationship, they're all on our side, not God's. God's love for us is perfect and complete; while our love for God is incomplete and sometimes very messed up. This is why I've come to value the Holy Spirit so highly, because the Holy Spirit in each of us and in the church helps us to love God better over the course of our lifetimes. This is why we are here; this is what we are about: to love God, and God alone.

Good Uses of Wealth January 25 2004.rtf

Tue, 27 Jan 2004 17:43:25 GMT

Good Uses of Wealth
Acts 4:32-35
Sermon by Dan Schrock
January 25, 2004

Now the whole group of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was held in common. With great power the apostles gave their testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and great grace was upon them all. There was not a needy person among them, for as many as owned lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold. They laid it at the apostles' feet, and it was distributed to each as any had need. (NRSV)

In high school I thought all wealthy people were sinful. In high school I read passages like this one from Acts 4, and concluded that all rich people were greedy and deserved God's punishment simply because they had money. I thought the only Christian way to handle wealth was to give it all away to the poor and then join an intentional Christian community with a common treasury. For a while I thought of joining an intentional community such as Reba Place in Evanston, Illinois, or one of the Hutterian bruderhofs in various places around the U.S.
As you can tell, I changed my mind. Jenny and I have not given all our money away to the poor, and we have not joined an intentional Christian community with a common purse. Thanks to your generosity which pays me a salary in line with the recommendations from our denomination, we have an income that meets all of our immediate needs and then some. So what happened in the last 25 years that changed my mind about wealth?
Two things happened. First, I read the New Testament more carefully and second, I learned a little about economics. My purpose this morning is to offer some reflections on the proper uses of wealth, and to invite you to participate in this conversation as well.
If this passage from Acts 4 were the Bible's only text on wealth, we in this congregation have to conclude that the only appropriate way for us to handle our wealth would be to sell everything we own and give the proceeds to the Stewardship and Finance Commission. John, Ruth, Steve, and Curt would then have the daunting task of helping us decide what to do with all those millions of dollars!
But Acts 4 is not the only text in the New Testament that talks about wealth, and it's not even the only text in Luke and Acts. Throughout his two books, Luke talks a lot about money and wealth, and in those passages has at least 3 different models for how we might use our wealth in Christian ways. One model is the community of goods here in Acts 4. The second model is completely renouncing possessions in order to follow Jesus. We find this in the story of the rich young ruler.
The third model, found in a number of different passages in Luke and Acts, is to give alms to the church and to the poor. Giving alms, of course, presumes that you will keep some of your wealth for your own ongoing needs. This third option is the one most of us have chosen for ourselves. Since Luke writes about all 3 of these models, we can conclude that he allows for different but equally legitimate ways of using our wealth in the service of Christ. In other words, it's just as ok for us to give a portion of our wealth via the Sunday morning offering plate as it is to participate in a common treasury. This more careful reading of scripture is why I no longer feel compelled to run off and join a Christian commune.
I also no longer wish to condemn Christians who have lots of assets simply because of those assets. Permit me to be blunt. One of the unfortunate things that happened in the Mennonite Church in previous decades was that we came down pretty hard on our wealthy members, especially on business people. After reading books such as Amos and Luke, with all their condemnations of wealth and high living, we turned to the business people sitting beside us on the pew or in the Sunday school class and told them they had too much wealth. We made them feel guilty, as though they could not be in business and still be a true Christian. I am blunt about this because once upon a time I too played this game of criticizing rich business people.
The core problem is that we were sloppy in the way we read the Bible and sloppy in the way we understood economics. To say it another way, we have forgotten about the importance of productive capital investments for a healthy economy; and we have failed to notice that the Biblical writers knew nothing about productive capital investments.
As you know, productive capital investments are technology or resources that allow you to produce more goods and services in the future. You spend a lot of money on something today that will allow you to be more productive in the future. Take a ditch digger as an example. If the digger uses his hands to dig, the ditch at the end of the day will be quite small. However, if he takes some of his money and invests in a shovel, he can get a much larger ditch dug in a day. And if he spends even more money to invest in a back hoe, he can dig a huge ditch in one day. The shovel and the back hoe represent capital investments which cost money in the present but which will allow him in the future to produce more than if he used only his hands.
We take the importance of productive capital investments for granted. Authors buy computers in order to write faster than they could with a pen. A warehouse manager buys a forklift to move far more material than she could by carrying things in her arms. A restaurant cook buys a food processor to chop more vegetables in half an hour than he ever could with a knife. You and I know that with the right kind of capital investments, we can expand the economic pie so that more goods and services will be available for more people.
But this idea that productive capital investments can increase the size of the pie never occurred to people in the ancient world. For them the economic pie was static. They thought an acre of land could only produce only so much barley or so many olives. True, some years they might get more and some years less because of the weather, but over a long period of time that acre's average yield would remain constant. A major implication of this ancient assumption of the fixed pie was that if you got rich, someone else necessarily got poor. If there are only 8 pieces of pie available for 8 people, and someone takes 2 pieces, then at least 1 of the other 7 people has no choice but to take less than 1 piece of pie.
This belief that the economic pie stays the same size is one reason why the Biblical writers rail again and again against the rich. Biblical authors such as Amos assumed that if somebody built a house of cedar and slept on a bed of ivory, they had somehow stolen those resources from the poor. Biblical writers saw the rich accumulating wealth for their own luxurious living. In other words, if you had wealth, they thought you were a thief. They believed that if everyone shared equally, no one would be poor. Another way of describing the difference between modern and ancient economic worldviews is that we focus on production questions while they focused on distribution questions. For the ancients who assumed a no growth economy, the only way to fight poverty was for the wealthy to give to the poor. So far as anyone can tell, the ancients never quite realized the role of productive capital investments. They never caught on to the fact that accumulations of capital can be spent to increase future production or to create more jobsin other words, to increase the size of the economic pie.
Not until the Middle Ages, around the year 1000, did a few people begin to realize that capital inventions and innovative processes could increase production over a long period of time. Only with the invention of 4-wheeled wagons, with the substitution of horses for oxen, with the use of crop rotations, and with the movement from common property to private property did folks begin to see that with the right applications of technology and the right arrangements of resources you actually could expand the economy to feed a growing population and to provide work for more people.
I am not saying the Bible's passages about wealth are irrelevant for us today. The Bible is very relevant for us. As I tried to show in last Sunday's sermon, whenever we hoard resources for our own luxurious living, the Bible's criticisms apply to us. Whenever we get wealth by dishonest or immoral means, the Bible's admonitions apply to us. Whenever we turn our wealth into an idol and substitute it for God, the Bible's warnings apply to us. However, since Biblical writers apparently knew nothing about the benefits of productive capital investments, we need to be more careful in evaluating the morality of wealth. Accumulating excess wealth can be a very good thingif you can satisfactorily answer 4 questions. We might think of these as 4 criteria. If you can answer yes to all 4 questions, then wealth is a good thing.
1. Do you get your wealth by honest and just means? As Christians we obviously do not want to acquire our wealth by stealing or by mistreating others. We want to earn wealth by honest work and by treating others decently.
2. Do you use your excess wealth to invest in future production? Let me explain what I mean by excess wealth. We might understand that wealth falls into 3 possible categories: The first category of wealth is what we spend to meet the basic needs of a modest lifestyle. This includes needs such as food, clothing, shelter, travel to visit family and friends, and retirement. The second category of wealth is what we give to the work of the church. Excess wealth falls into a third category: it's what we have left after we've taken care of our basic needs and given to the church. If we use this third category of excess wealth for luxurious living, then, as we've already seen, the Bible would frown upon that. But there's another possible use for excess wealth, a good use, and that's for investing in future production.
An example. Let's say that after you've taken care of the first two categories of expensesyour basic needs and your generous giving to the churchyou still have $5,000 left for the year. It could be $500 or $50,000, but let's take $5,000. What will you do with that money? Maybe you decide you want to make a special contribution to this church, or to a Mennonite college, or to Habitat for Humanity. Making a special contribution to a worthy cause would certainly be a good use of that extra money.
Or you could spend that $5,000 on luxurious living, let's say on a trip to the casinos in Las Vegas, or on custom-made leather seats for your car, or on a diamond necklace. Those would not be good uses of that money because they represent the kind of luxurious living the Bible condemns.
Or you could invest that $5,000 in something to increase future production. If you're a business person, you might invest the money in new computer equipment that will do a better job of tracking your inventory and figuring your payroll. If you're a farmer, you might invest that excess money in a used skid-steer loader to help you to move snow, dirt piles, and manure. And if you can find a way to invest that money in something that creates new jobs, it can do tremendous good because jobs fight poverty.
There are other ways to make good investments into the future. You can invest money in a person's education. As any business person knows, a well-educated employees are necessary in modern economies. So you might send some of your employees off to a special week-long conference that will give them new skills. Parents regularly invest money to send their children to college so those children will be more productive in the future.
Money is not the only form of excess wealth we might have to invest in future production. Another form of excess wealth is time. The many people who invest some of their excess time by volunteering for Ten Thousand Villages are a good illustration of this. Those volunteers invest their time in helping to expand future production of goods by poor people in other countries. Taking excess time to raise children is also a form of investing in the future. The excess time of retired persons is another form of wealth that can be invested wisely.
My point here is simply that accumulated wealth, whether it's money or time or some other resource, can be an excellent thing when it's invested in ways that will expand goods and services in the future, or when it invests in the future of people.
3. Do you use your wealth to produce something that is socially beneficial? Let's suppose you have $10,000 to invest. We would all agree that society is better off if we invest in a tree farm than in a tobacco farm, if we invest in more efficient technology for manufacturing computers than for manufacturing vodka, and better to invest in a year of college for your child than to invest in a bomb factory.
4. Do you successfully resist turning your wealth into a substitute for God? I think this is what Jesus had in mind when he commented that it's harder for a rich person to enter the kingdom that it is for a camel to squeeze through a needle. Jesus was simply saying it's very hard for us to put God first and our wealth further down the list. Wealth has a way of pushing aside all other concerns; it has a way of consuming our hearts and minds so that no room is left for God. We Christians need each other's help to counteract this power of wealth. We need each other's help to keep God first.
In Acts 4, Luke says early Christians testified to the resurrection by the way they used their wealth. I've suggested that Luke believes the model of giving generously and the model of having everything in common are equally legitimate expressions of following Jesus. I've proposed that after we use our wealth for the needs of a modest lifestyle, after we give generously to the work of the church, then we can make wise investments into the future productivity of goods, services, and people. When we get our wealth honestly and decently, when we invest it in ways that expand the economic pie in socially beneficial ways, and when we keep God first, then we are making good use of our wealth to the glory of God.
May it be said of us as Luke said of the first Christians in Acts 4:33: ``With great power the apostles gave their testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and great grace was upon all the church.''

Note
I am indebted to Jim Halteman's Market Capitalism and Christianity (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1988) for many ideas in this sermon.

Greed January 18 2004.rtf

Tue, 20 Jan 2004 21:47:48 GMT

Greed

Luke 12:15-21
Sermon by Dan Schrock
January 18, 2004

And he said to them, "Take care! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; for one's life does not consist in the abundance of possessions." Then he told them a parable: "The land of a rich man produced abundantly. And he thought to himself, 'What should I do, for I have no place to store my crops?' Then he said, 'I will do this: I will pull down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I will say to my soul, 'Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.' But God said to him, 'You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you. And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?' So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich toward God." (NRSV)

Today inaugurates a series of four sermons on biblical views of wealth. Today I want to talk a bit about greed, next Sunday I'll speak about good uses of wealth, on the third Sunday I'll look at Zacchaeus' conversion to generosity, and on the fourth Sunday I'll explore an interesting suggestion in Deuteronomy for what we might do with our tithes. The Bible certainly has more to say about wealth than we can possibly talk about in four Sundays! But I hope we can at least get a few insights into this important topic.
Here in Luke 12, Jesus tells a parable about one of the greediest persons in all of scripture. According to Jesus, the farmer in this parable is already rich. Perhaps the farmer belongs to the elite class of major landowners who dominated first century agriculture. In any case, when the farmer harvests his wheat and barley, grapes and olives, figs and dates at the end of the growing season, he realizes he has a huge bumper crop, so huge that his present set of barns, sheds, and storage pits will not hold all the produce.
So far so good. Up to this point in the parable the farmer has done nothing immoral. He's simply done what any conscientious farmer does: in the spring he planted his crops and in the fall he harvested them. It just so happens that factors beyond the farmer's control were ideal that year. Sunlight and rainfall came in the right proportions throughout the growing season, and no insects or plant disease attacked his crops. So now he has more crops than he's ever had before.
At this point circumstances force the farmer to make a crucial decision: what is he going to do with all his grain and fruit and oil? Clearly he has room in his present buildings to store part of his crop. But with the excess crop that won't fit into his buildings he probably has three choices. First, he could give the excess away to feed the many poor people who then lived in Palestine. This would be a tremendously virtuous course of action, because the evidence we have clearly shows that the first century Palestinian economy was in terrible shape and had created a rather large class of poor people who were barely able to survive. For some, malnutrition was a significant problem. So this lucky, wealthy farmer could have given his excess away to his hungry neighbors. But it's not the course of action he chooses.
His second option is to sell his excess produce on the open market. The moral benefit of this option is that it would increase the supply of food available to the population as a whole and would ultimately have the effect of helping to lower prices so that more people could afford to buy the food they needed. With the money he earned from selling, the farmer could then give to charity. But the farmer does not choose this option either.
His third option, the one he chooses, is to build bigger storage facilities so he can keep everything for himself. His purpose in keeping it all is not so he can do good with it, but so he can ``relax, eat, drink, [and] be merry'' (verse 19). This man's greed is evident in the way he talks. Just listen to all the ``I'' language he uses: I have no place to store my crops. I will do this. I will pull down my barns and build bigger ones. I will store all my grain. I will say to my soul, ``Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years.'' Or again, listen to all the ``my'' language he uses: my crops, my barns, my grain, my goods, my soul.
Another way to measure this man's selfishness is to notice whom he talks with: himself, and only himself. There is only one person in this parable, and that's the wealthy farmer. So when he talks, he talks to himself because there is no one else important enough for him to speak with. Notice too that he only thinks about himself. People who lived in the first century were surrounded by other people almost all the time. So far as archaeologists have been able to tell from the design of houses, the layout of towns, and the high population densities, first century people rarely had any privacy. Even in the wealthiest of homes there was little or no privacy, because those homes typically had many slaves, some of whom slept in the same bedroom as their owners. Yet this wealthy farmer can only think about himself. To him other people are simply irrelevant, even the ones five or ten or fifteen feet away from him whom he encounters every day.
The point of the parable is not about farmers. Jesus is not singling out farmers as a class of peculiarly immoral people. The man in the parable could have had any number of other occupations we could think of. It's possible for nearly anyone to be greedya stay-at-home parent, a dentist, a teacher, a pastor. Once in another state I knew of a fellow Mennonite pastor who worked at a church in the neighboring town. By all the accounts I ever heard, he loved the congregation and the congregation loved him. They paid him according the guidelines set by the denomination. By anyone's yardstick, he and his wife were members of the middle-class, with more than enough income to cover their needs. They had a comfortable home with late-model cars. Yet they thought they weren't making enough money. So one day he submitted a letter of resignation to the congregation, and reportedly the reason he gave in the letter was that he wanted to enter another occupation where he could make more money. The congregation was stunned that greed had gotten their pastor. Within a few months this former pastor and his wife joined a large non-denominational church that preached a gospel of wealth and success.
In Jesus' parable, God bluntly calls the greedy farmer a fool. God informs the farmer that he will not be building any bigger barns and he will not be enjoying any of his economic excess. Why? Because that very night the man will die. His life will be required of him. He will be parted from his wealth, unable to carry out his greedy inclinations. That night, the man will enter one of the most fearsome fates anyone could experience, to die poor toward God. In many ways, the farmer in the parable was a good man. It is not recorded that he was a thief, that he committed graft, or that he mistreated his employees. Presumably he paid his taxes and went to worship every Sabbath. What did him in was greed.
For better or for worse, Jesus does not give us a mathematical formula in this parable to calculate what is greed and what is not greed. Instead he confronts you and me with vivid images and eloquent language. Be on guard against greed, says Jesus, and watch out for it continually. This is what greed looks like. Observe this man, take notice, and choose another option.
And so Jesus leaves you and me to discern the shape of our own lives, to shuck off our smug justifications as much as we are able, and to figure out whether what we own has now come to own us. A quarter of a century ago when my family still farmed out west in St. Joseph County, one of our neighbors down the road was a fellow whom I will call Jim. Jim was what we called a big operator. He owned and farmed 1200 acres scattered over a 15 mile area. For a period of several years, he bought up more land as fast as it was sold. At nearly every farm auction you'd see Jim bidding away on the land, hoping to add more acres to his already substantial holdings. Because Jim was also a loan officer at one of the local banks, he had easy access to loans for himself. So when he bid on a farm, he usually got it. We used to see Jim tearing by on Beech Road, traveling as fast as his huge John Deere tractors would take him, hurrying to the next field, racing against his own inner compulsions to grow more crops so he could buy more land so he could grow more crops. One day around 1976 or so, we heard that the bank had fired him, reportedly because he had abused the process of extending loans. A few months afterward, Jim went bankrupt. I never did hear what became of him after that, but the consensus among farmers in the area was that Jim had succumbed to greed.
Another instance of greed surfaced in the late 1980s when Ferdinand Marcos, then the dictator of the Philippines, was deposed after a non-violent coup. Even before the coup took place, it was well-known that the dictator's wife, Imelda Marcos, loved to shop. But what was not well-known until after the coup was just how greedy her shopping trips had become. After the Marcoses had fled the country, people went into the palace in Manila and discovered that Imelda had amassed a collection of about 2,000 shoes.
You don't have to look far in the world to see plenty of evidence that greed is alive and well in our time. But there is also plenty of counterevidence, if you keep your eyes and ears open. Counterevidence suggesting that here and there, the followers of Jesus guard against greed with profound acts of generosity.
Consider this. Back in the early 1990s, the Christ Lutheran Church in Pickrell, Nebraska was coming up on its 100 ^th anniversary. At one time Christ Lutheran had been a large, financially able congregation with over 450 members. But more recently, it had declined to under 250 members, many of whom were children because Lutherans baptize infants and count them as members too. In 1992, the total giving in that congregation amounted to just $97,000. However, three years before the centennial of the congregation, several lay leaders had an idea. Why not celebrate their 100 ^th anniversary by collecting $1,000 for every year since the congregation had been founded, and then giving that money to mission? True, $1,000 per year for 100 years would mean raising $100,000, more than their total budget for just one year. It was audacious, outrageous idea. But why not try? So try they did. In August 1993, at the height of their centenary celebrations, Christ Lutheran Church, Pickrell, Nebraska, handed out checks to six different Lutheran mission efforts. The checks added up to $100,000. ¹
Or consider this counterevidence. Some years ago the Witmer Greenhouse in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, disastrously lost $100,000 worth of poinsettias that they had grown for the Christmas market. The disaster was something of a fluke having to do with a fungicide that killed all the plants. At any rate, all plants were lost and their insurance did not cover it. The Witmer family, some of whom are Mennonite, was staring at the possibility of financial ruin.
But word of the disaster got around. The Esbenshade Greenhouse, a neighboring competitor, sent over 1,600 poinsettias with a note that read, ``Pay us back in the spring if you get straightened aroundif not, then consider these plants a gift.'' Other businesses contributed in other ways.
Local Mennonites got in the act too. A few of them put their heads together and decided to fax around a notice inviting members of the Association of Mennonite Aid Societies to respond in whatever way they wished. Soon $7,000 had come in to help the Witmers. Mennonite Economic Development Associates became involved, and from various and sundry places $52,000 was raised by February 19, enough to keep the Witmer business operating. ²
You see, the way to counteract greed is with generosity.

Notes
1. Martin E. Marty, ``Counterevidence,'' Christian Century , October 27, 1993, p. 1071.
2. Edgar Stoesz, ``Mutual aid . . . by fax,'' The Marketplace, March/April 1993.

How to Fight Pharaoh May 9 2004.rtf

Sun, 9 May 2004 16:03:02 GMT

How to Fight Pharaoh

Exodus 1:1-21
Sermon by Dan Schrock
May 9, 2004

These are the names of the sons of Israel who came to Egypt with Jacob, each with his household: Reuben, Simeon, Levi, and Judah, Issachar, Zebulun, and Benjamin, Dan and Naphtali, Gad and Asher. The total number of people born to Jacob was seventy. Joseph was already in Egypt. Then Joseph died, and all his brothers, and that whole generation. But the Israelites were fruitful and prolific; they multiplied and grew exceedingly strong, so that the land was filled with them.
Now a new king arose over Egypt, who did not know Joseph. He said to his people, "Look, the Israelite people are more numerous and more powerful than we. Come, let us deal shrewdly with them, or they will increase and, in the event of war, join our enemies and fight against us and escape from the land." Therefore they set taskmasters over them to oppress them with forced labor. They built supply cities, Pithom and Rameses, for Pharaoh. But the more they were oppressed, the more they multiplied and spread, so that the Egyptians came to dread the Israelites. The Egyptians became ruthless in imposing tasks on the Israelites, and made their lives bitter with hard service in mortar and brick and in every kind of field labor. They were ruthless in all the tasks that they imposed on them.
The king of Egypt said to the Hebrew midwives, one of whom was named Shiphrah and the other Puah, "When you act as midwives to the Hebrew women, and see them on the birthstool, if it is a boy, kill him; but if it is a girl, she shall live." But the midwives feared God; they did not do as the king of Egypt commanded them, but they let the boys live. So the king of Egypt summoned the midwives and said to them, "Why have you done this, and allowed the boys to live?" The midwives said to Pharaoh, "Because the Hebrew women are not like the Egyptian women; for they are vigorous and give birth before the midwife comes to them." So God dealt well with the midwives; and the people multiplied and became very strong. And because the midwives feared God, he gave them families. Then Pharaoh commanded all his people, "Every boy that is born to the Hebrews you shall throw into the Nile, but you shall let every girl live." (NRSV)

The year was 1943, and the place was Berlin, Germany, the capital city of Adolf Hitler's Third Reich. Hitler had just decided that it was time to kill all the Jews in Europe. He called this plan the ``Final Solution''; once all the Jews were exterminated like so many roaches, Hitler and his pure race of Aryan warriors would finally rule Europe.

So the Gestapo rolled into action. All over Berlin canvas-covered army trucks roared up to the gates of factories with Jewish employees and rumbled to the front of Jewish homes. Storm troopers got out of the trucks and rounded up thousands of Jewish men, packing them into the back of their trucks and hauling them off to a prison in the city, before shipping them out the next day to concentration camps where they could be killed. As Hitler expected, most Germans quietly acquiesced to this death plan by lowering their eyes and wordlessly going about their activities. The final solution had begun.

But Hitler failed to reckon with the Jewish women. Early the following morning, the Jewish women of Berlin found out which prison their husbands were being held in. 6,000 women appeared at the gate of that prison, called out for their husbands, and demanded the Gestapo to release them. The police tried to disperse the women; but all day the women held their ground, calling out the names of their husbands above the noise of street traffic.

It so happened that the headquarters of the Gestapo were just a few blocks from this demonstration. A few well-aimed machine guns could have wiped the women off the square. But creative resistance like this had ever happened before in the Third Reich, and the Gestapo was scared, so scared that they did not fire their machine guns. Eventually the officers agreed to negotiate with these women. They spoke to the women soothingly, giving them assurances, and finally releasing their husbands. ¹
It seems that these Jewish women knew their scripture. Buried somewhere in their memory was the story of another ruler, thousands of years before, who also tried to deal in death.

The story in Exodus opens on a chilling note: a new king has just come to power, one who did not know Joseph. Joseph, you remember, was a buddy of the old king. Joseph had correctly interpreted some dreams for the old king, and in gratitude the old king had made Joseph second in command over the whole country, and had handsomely provided for all of Joseph's extended family. But this cozy relationship between Joseph's people and the ruler of Egypt did not and could not last. Time passes on: the old king died; Joseph and his siblings died; and the new king had no interest in preserving his predecessor's policies. The new king had never known Joseph and did not care about Joseph. All the new king knew was that these despicable Hebrew shepherds were occupying some of most fertile land in all of Egypt, and were having so many babies that they were threatening national security. These immigrants were getting too numerous. These refugees were getting out of hand. From the new king's point of view, these foreigners were potential terrorists, a potential hotbed of trouble for the Egyptian superpower.

Something had to be done. What if another country attacked Egypt and these Hebrews decided to aid the enemy? We'd have an uncontrollable situation on our hands, a national crisis! That would surely be the end of the Egyptian way of life! That simply cannot happen! So why don't we oppress these potential terrorists? Why not force these worthless Hebrews to build new army bases for us at Pithom and Ramses? Make them strengthen our national security. Then we'll be safe!

The king of Egypt was not the last person in history to think of oppressing others for the sake of national security. Pharaoh keeps reappearing in other guises, again and again throughout history. Hitler, the German Pharaoh, gassed Jews in order to exalt the so-called Ayran race. After World War II, the Russian Pharaoh subjugated Eastern Europeans in order to erect a buffer against the possibility of an invasion from Western Europeans. The white Afrikaaner Pharaoh and the white American Pharaoh enslaved black Africans for the sake of power and privilege. Even as we speak, certain contemporary Pharaohs are trying to bully their way around the world, using the age-old justification of national security.

But Pharaoh doesn't have to be nationalhe can just as easily be personal. Pharaoh appears in the local crack dealer who hooks young people with free samples so they get addicted and turn into regular customers. Pharaoh arises in the boss who grants advancement only in return for sexual favors. Pharaoh shows his face in the abuse of children. Pharaoh is whomever sacrifices others for selfish interest. Pharaoh oppresses. Pharaoh deals in death.

But let us return to the story. The pharaoh of Egypt assumes that hard brickmaking will put these Hebrews in their place, diminish their influence somehow, maybe even cleanse the land of their foreign blood. But the pharaoh of Egypt is wrong. Although he may not know it, Pharaoh has a divine opponent called Yahweh who deals in life. The most amazing thing begins to happen, the very opposite of what Pharaoh intends: Yahweh multiplies the Hebrews and spread them over the land; and the more ruthless Pharaoh becomes, the more numerous Yahweh makes the Hebrews.

So Pharaoh turns to plan B. He calls the Hebrew midwives, Shiphrah and Puah, into his palace and orders them to kill all Hebrew boys as soon as they are born.

Pharaoh turns out to be who Pharaoh always is: a dealer in death. Oh yes, on the surface it might look like Pharaoh deals in something else: drugs, maybe; or maybe separate but supposedly equal racial development; or maybe national security. But if you look hard enough underneath the pretense, you'll usually see that the real commodity Pharaoh deals in is some form of death: physical death, emotional death, or spiritual death.
But like Hitler, the Pharaoh of Egypt fails to reckon with Hebrew women. Shiphrah and Puah are perceptive women; they realize right away what devilment Pharaoh is up to. But because of their higher loyalty to Yahweh, these two women will not go along with Pharaoh. They will not deal in death. They will use their heads to outfox Pharaoh. Exodus puts it simply but eloquently: Shiphrah and Puah fear God. They know God deals in life. They know God is blessing their people with more and more children. And they know God is far more powerful than Pharaoh.

Fearing God is the first step in fighting the various manifestations of Pharaoh. How can we even think of resisting oppression unless we connect ourselves with a power far greater than oppression? How can we possibly fight death unless we are on the side of life? God is the only person worthy of our fear. After all, God made the universe, not Pharaoh. God sustains us with love, not Pharaoh. God offers resurrection, not Pharaoh. So fearing God allows Shiphrah and Puah to act courageously.

The second step in wrestling Pharaoh is to realize we are God's junior partners. The responsibility for grappling with death is mostly God's. But once in a while, God depends on us to help out. In this particular situation, Shiphrah and Puah correctly discern that God does want them to sit back and twiddle their thumbs, bellyaching about how bad things are. They realize they are uniquely positioned to act for life. They have the power to refuse Pharaoh. No way could Pharaoh personally be present at all the births of Hebrew babies. He wanted them to kill; but they have the power to promote life. So the midwives deliberately disobey Pharaoh and let all Hebrew boys live.

Pharaoh eventually finds out, and once again he summons Shiphrah and Puah to the palace, demanding an explanation. Note well how the midwifes answer Pharaoh. Their audacity, their nerve, their boldness, is astonishing: ``Well, sir,'' they say, ``it's like this. The Hebrew women aren't like the Egyptian women. The Egyptian women have a lot of difficulties in childbirththey always need midwives to help them out. But the Hebrew women? They're in such good shape: healthy, vigorous, able, full of life! By the time we get to the house they've already had the kid. It's not our fault all these Hebrew boys are alive. We can't do anything about it.''

You surely realize that the midwives partly tell the truth and partly lie. Everything they say out loud to Pharaoh is in fact true: the Hebrew women are in fact vigorous, fecund, and healthy. Everything in the story points to the irrepressible life in the Hebrew people. But they don't tell Pharaoh everything. The part they leave out is that they have been blatantly refusing to obey him. They could kill Hebrew boys. But aren't doing it. And they won't.

The midwives employ creative nonviolent resistance in order to thwart the king. This is the third step in fighting Pharaoh. And it works. For the time being, at least, the king is so speechless that he takes no action against the midwives. True, Pharaoh will eventually resort to state terrorism by ordering his subjects to drown all Hebrew boys in the Nile River. But thanks to the creative nonviolent resistance of three other womenan older sister, a mother, and a grown daughter of Pharaoh himselfone Hebrew boy named Moses will slip through this national policy of murder and grow to adulthood. True, Pharaoh will deport the adult Moses out the country. But in the due course of time God will bring Moses back to Egypt, and Pharaoh will again be confronted with creative nonviolent resistance until finally Pharaoh gives up in sheer exhaustion and lets all the Hebrew people leave the nation of Egypt. You see, each time Pharaoh devises a new death-dealing plan, God and God's people creatively think of a new strategy to resist it. And in the end, Pharaoh's policies come to utter defeat.

The story of Shiphrah and Puah is the first recorded instance of creative nonviolent resistance anywhere in world history, dated at about 1350 BC. But many other stories of creative nonviolent resistance followed, some of them in the Bible. In 1 Kings, God, with a little help from Elijah, withholds rain from King Ahab. In Daniel 3, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego stand up to Nebuchadnezzar's image while everyone else bows down. In chapter 6 Daniel prays to God even when such prayer is illegal. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus gives his disciples three suggestions for responding creatively to oppression: turn the left cheek to your striker, voluntarily give up your underwear when someone sues you for your shirt and pants, and insist on carrying a soldier's backpack for two miles when the law only permits you to carry it for one. Then at his arrest Jesus illustrates creative love for the death-dealers by healing a bloody ear. On the cross Jesus pleads with God to forgive his murderers. In each of these cases, God somehow honors the resistance against death and creates new life from a situation that at first seemed hopeless.

The twentieth century saw many successful efforts at creative resistance against oppression and death. It is often said that the only way to stop Hitler to defeat him in war. But careful students of World War II have noticed that whenever people used nonviolent resistance against the Germans, it always worked. In Bulgaria, nonviolent collaboration between Christians and Jews saved all of that country's Jews from the German death camps. In Finland all but 6 Jews were saved by non-military means. Of 7,000 Jews in Denmark, 6,500 escaped to Sweden with the help of virtually the whole citizenry, and almost all the other 500 were safely hidden for the duration of the war. This nonviolent resistance was so effective that Adolf Eichmann (the man in charge of executing Hitler's plan to exterminate Jews) had to admit that ``the action against the Jews of Denmark has been a failure.'' After World War II ended, one leading military writer, B.H. Liddell-Hart, interviewed Nazi generals about the course of the war. He discovered that while the generals had little trouble responding to violent, conventional war, they were completely baffled about what to do whenever they encountered nonviolent resistance. The form of resistance they found the most frustrating was when the resisters were friendly and cheerful, but thoroughly non-compliant.

Nonviolent resistance continues in our own time. Take the five years from 1986 to 1990. Nonviolent resistance against evil was successful in country after country. A few examples. It brought down President Marcos in the Philippines. It brought whites and blacks to the bargaining table in South Africa. Freedom from Soviet control came to Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and East Germany, all through nonviolence. The Rumanian dictator Ceausescu was overthrown after a pastor, of all people, dared to speak the truth about what was happening in the country. King Birendra of Nepal agreed to end three decades of absolute rule after a series of nonviolent protests. To be sure, not all nonviolent movements during those five years bore fruit. But contrast the record of nonviolence against the record of violent insurrection: during that same five-year period not one instance of violent resistance succeeded. ²

The Bible says it started when two ordinary Hebrew midwives feared God, understood themselves to be God's assistants, and creatively used nonviolent resistance to fight Pharaoh's policies of death. And according to verse 20 in the story, ``God dealt well with the midwives; and the people multiplied and became very strong.''

Notes
1. Adapted from Gene Sharp, The Politics of Nonviolent Action , pp. 89-90.
2. Walter Wink, Engaging the Powers , pp. 254-255.

In Days to Come November 28 2004.rtf

Sun, 28 Nov 2004 15:43:07 GMT

In Days to Come

Isaiah 2:1-4
Sermon by Dan Schrock
November 28, 2004
First Sunday of Advent

The word that Isaiah son of Amoz saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem. In days to come the mountain of the LORD's house shall be established as the highest of the mountains, and shall be raised above the hills; all the nations shall stream to it. Many peoples shall come and say, ``Come, let us go up to the mountain of the LORD, to the house of the God of Jacob; that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths.'' For out of Zion shall go forth instruction, and the word of the LORD from Jerusalem. He shall judge between the nations, and shall arbitrate for many peoples; they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. O house of Jacob, come, let us walk in the light of the LORD! (NRSV)

It may be that the darkest part of our world is the long, deep shadow of war. Consider the present war which the leaders of this country, both Republican and Democrat, have been continuously waging against ordinary people in Iraq for almost 14 years. This war of retaliation began in early 1991 when the president sent troops to begin what we have come to call the Persian Gulf War. Most Americans think that war ended only a few months after it began. But ordinary people in Iraq know differently. They know that for the next 12 years American military jets continued to fly every day over certain sections of their country, and that on some days those American jets dropped bombs on their country. In fact, since the end of Operation Desert Storm in 1991, the U.S. flew more than 100,000 sorties over Iraq at a cost of $1 billion per year, according to the Congressional Research Service. In addition to this air war, there were also sanctions. The United Nations said that during those years an Iraqi child died every ten minutes because of U.S. and U.N. sanctions against Iraq.

Shortly before the current president decided to expand the war against Iraq in 2003, the executive director of our denomination, Jim Schrag, sent a letter to the White House warning that expanding the war in Iraq would ``cause enormous human suffering'' and would ``further destabilize the region by fueling more radical elements.'' ¹ Jim's warnings more than two years ago about what would happen have in fact come true. After 14 years of war, Iraq is a wrecked country. As a direct consequence of this war, the economy is a shambles. Infrastructure is devastated. Various sub-groups within the country are fighting us and each other. Social and political order do not exist. The shadow of chaos hangs over the land. Ordinary Iraqis find it close to impossible to grow food, find meaningful work that pays a living wage, and live the way we all want to live, in peace. As a prominent member of this president's own political party puts it, ``In 2003, the United States invaded a country that did not threaten us, did not attack us and did not want war with us, to disarm it of weapons . . . it did not have.'' ² Now chaos grips Iraq, and no one knows how to restore order so that hope may prevail.

The people of God have been living with the brutality and stupidity of war for a long time. 2,700 years ago, during the days of Isaiah, the people of God suffered from the wars of their day. And there were many. In 744 B.C., a new king came to power in the nation of Assyria, then one of the world's great superpowers. The new king's name was Tiglath-pileser III, and he immediately assembled an army to attack smaller nations that were not harming Assyria but were just minding their own business. These nations included Judah, the tiny nation Isaiah lived in, and Israel, the tiny nation just north of Judah. Throughout most of Isaiah's lifetime, wars continued between Assyria and smaller nations. Thousands died in battle; thousands were maimed for the rest of their lives; and thousands, including children, died from starvation and disease.

Now whenever we weep over the brutality and chaos of war, God graciously offers us a vision of days to come, when violence shall no longer ravage this tired earth. God, who created us and is well acquainted with our sinful state, knows that before we can walk in the light we need an alternate vision of what might be and what shall be in days to come. God knows that if we are to have any hope for the future, then we need to be able to imagine a new world. God knows that if nations are to change the way they resolve conflict, then they need to be able to see new possibilities for the way things could be. Therefore the ability to imagine alternatives, to imagine newness, is one of God's greatest gifts.

So God gave Isaiah a vision for a new alternative to war. We do not need to ask how God gave this vision to Isaiah. We only need to know that it was an act of daring imagination, intended to nourish hope in the lives of God's people and alternative possibilities in the minds of the world's nations. The vision says neither how nor when this new world will happen, nor even who will make it happen; it simply insists this new world certainly shall happen. The vision of future newness that God gave Isaiah has six parts.

Part one: In days to come, the mountain of the Lord shall be the highest mountain (v. 2a). People in the ancient world believed that gods of all religions preferred to live on the tops of mountains. Mountains were holy places, places of majesty and mystery and power. The higher the mountain, the more majestic and mysterious and powerful was the god who lived on that mountain. So when the vision says the Lord shall be on the highest mountain, that means that Lord Yahweh of Hosts will in fact be the most powerful, most awesome, most righteous God of any in the world.

Part two: In days to come, all nations of the world shall stream to this mountain (v. 2b). In Isaiah's day, all nations included superpower nations like Assyria and Egypt. It included far-away nations like Greece, Lydia, Phrygia, and Libya; and it included small near-by nations like Ammon, Moab, Edom, and even Isaiah's own nation of Judah. In our day, all nations includes the current superpower, these United States of America, plus Iraq and Afghanistan, Russia and Ireland and Mexico and all the rest. The rulers of these nations shall leave their countries to seek God like a mighty stream seeks the ocean. They will take whatever conveyance gets them to Goda jet, a boat, or a limousine; a prayer, a thought, or a desire so deep that nothing but God can satisfy it. They will passionately hunger for God.

Part three: In days to come, God will instruct these nations (v. 3). In fact, this is why the nations will hunger for God: to get God's instructions, to learn God's ways, to live by God's will. If you will, envision some grand, divine university, where God is both administration and faculty. God plans the courses, teaches the classes, and sets up the requirements. God teaches courses on national and international law, on the theory and practice of justice, on the ideals and skills of living peacefully with others, on the wise and fair distribution of resources. The nations are so determined to learn these new ways of God that they refuse to graduate and go home until they pass all their final exams with ``A''s.

Part four: In days to come, God shall adjudicate disputes between nations and peoples (v. 4a). Implication? In the world to come, there will still be conflicts. People will still squabble. But there will be a difference: in this future world, people will go to God for help in finding a resolution to their differences. Sometimes God may act as a judge, finding for one side and imposing penalties on the other. At other times God may act as an arbitrator to whom the disputants submit their differences and expect impartial judgment. At still other times, God may act as a mediator who helps the disputants find their own resolution. But in none of these scenarios will nations settle their conflicts with violence. Instead they will settle using the wisdom and will of God.

Part five: In days to come, the economy will change its focus from war to peace (v. 4b). Although swords and spears are relatively cheap to make today, in the ancient world their production required a nation to divert enormous economic resources. Metal ore was hard to find and difficult to smelt. Once smelted, it then had to be alloyed with other metals in just the right amounts, and finally shaped into weapons by highly skilled craftsmen. This process strained the outer limits of technology and cost national treasuries huge amounts of money. In rough terms, making swords and spears in Isaiah's day was equivalent to what nations have to undertake today in order to make nuclear bombs.

Yet there was an odd irony about this. Even though it took highly skilled people to make swords and spears, any ordinary village blacksmith could make those weapons of war into tools of peace. Lowly, ordinary blacksmiths could heat those swords and spears in a fire, and with a hammer shape them on an anvil into plowshares and pruning hooks. This is precisely what will happen in God's new world. Since all wars will be over, nations will sell their weapons on the open market for a fraction of the cost they paid for them. Ordinary people will buy up those weapons, take them to their neighborhood welder or machine shop, and have them refashioned into tools for growing food.

Did you know that things like this have already happened, here in our own country? After World War II, the U.S. Army had vast amounts of war materiel it no longer needed$34 billion worth of leftover stuff. This leftover stuff included ships, airplanes, and guns; shoes and jackets; in fact, 4 million different types of stockpiled items, most of which the Army no longer needed. For instance, it had 7 million tubes of toothpaste. So the Army dumped those things on the open market and sold them for pennies of the original cost. B-29 Superfortress bombers, each of which cost $509,465 to build in 1945, were selling a few years later for $350. Eventually the Army quit trying to sell all this stuff and just gave it away for all sorts of peacetime uses. In Iowa, tanks were soon pulling out tree stumps. In Kentucky, B-29 bombers became cafes. In Michigan, Quonset huts became dairy barns. In New Jersey, amphibious trucks ferried school children across the Delaware River. ² Look for this kind of thing to happen again, completely and irrevocably, in God's new future.

Part six: In days to come, nations shall neither fight nor learn how to fight wars (v. 4c). Air Force and Naval academies will go out of business. War colleges will fold because they can't get any students. Military-style high schools will disappear from the face of the earth. Military think tanks will have nothing left to think about. In God's new world, the skills of war will be so useless and obsolete that they will soon be forgotten entirely. We shall study war no more.

This is the vision of the future that God gave to Isaiah. This is the alternate reality toward which history moves. This is where our earth is headed. Envision the light, you people of God: in days to come, all these things shall happenfor the mouth of the Lord has spoken it.

Notes
1.       James F. Schrag, letter to President George W. Bush, August 27, 2002.

2.       Patrick Buchanan, Where the Right Went Wrong: How Neoconservatives Subverted the Reagan Revolution and Hijacked the Bush Presidency, quoted in Christian Century, October 5, 2004, p. 7.

3.       James R. Chiles, ``How the great war on war surplus got wonor lost,'' Smithsonian, December 1995, pp. 52-63. This article is available on the web at: http://www.smithsonianmag.si.edu/smithsonian/issues95/dec95/warsurplus.html.

Meeting God in the Extraordinary June 13 2004.rtf

Sun, 13 Jun 2004 15:40:54 GMT

Meeting God in the Extraordinary
Acts 9:1-5
Sermon by Dan Schrock
June 13, 2004

Meanwhile Saul, still breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord, went to the high priest and asked him for letters to the synagogues at Damascus, so that if he found any who belonged to the Way, men or women, he might bring them bound to Jerusalem. Now as he was going along and approaching Damascus, suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him. He fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to him, "Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?" He asked, "Who are you, Lord?" The reply came, "I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting.''

Maybe you have heard this story dozens of times in your life: how Saul travels from Jerusalem to Damascus in order to seize Christians. On the road he sees a light, and out of that light, he hears a voice that shakes up his life. Saul, arch-enemy of Christians, now becomes Paul, a passionate defender of Christians.

We are familiar with the story, but most of us are not familiar with the experience this story describes. Most of us have not seen lights brighter than the noonday sun. We have not heard voices more persistent than anything on earth. We have not been stopped dead in our tracks by a God who radically alters the road path that we, in our limited understanding, have chosen to take.

But watch out. Someday it mightmight possiblyhappen to you. Maybe one day you'll be doing what you usually do during the day, when without warning the Divine breaks through and irrevocably changes you. Maybe.

Some years ago Jenny and I attended a seminar on Greek Orthodox thought and practice at the Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church in Columbus, Ohio. The seminar was taught by Fr. Kevin, the assistant priest at the church. Near the end of the morning, someone in the class asked him about a small cross, maybe 8-9 inches tall, that was sitting in a glass case at the front of the sanctuary. What was that cross for? And why was it in a glass case?

``Well,'' said Fr. Kevin, ``that's a long story. That cross once rested on our altar, and was the cross we used to bless the congregation after worship. We'd take it off the altar, hold it high above the congregation, and bless them with it. This past December, after one of our main Sunday morning worship services, our senior priest noticed that the cross was wet. We thought nothing of it. The heat had just been turned on in the building for the winter and we thought it was condensation from moisture in the air. We wiped it dry and put it back on the altar.

``The following Sunday it happened again. The cross was wet with an oily substance, and it smelled like roses. Still thinking it was condensation, we wiped it off and wrapped it in plastic. But when we looked again, the cross was not only wet, but had blistered the plastic as if the oil were hot and partially melted it.

``We began to get suspicious. This was not obviously condensation. Someone was surely playing a prank on us. So again we wiped it dry and put it back on the altar. This time we decided to re-program the alarm system in the sanctuary to stop the prankster. The only people that knew the new combination to the alarm system were the two of us, me and the senior priest.

``When we came to work the next day, we smelled roses out in the parking lot. The fragrance was stronger in the building. When we entered the sanctuary and looked at the cross, it was glistening with oil.

This time we removed the oil from the cross and placed it in a small vial. We sent the vial of oil to a laboratory and asked them to run various tests on it to see what it was. Several days later they called back to say that they hadn't been very successful; whenever they took some oil out of the vial and placed it on their lab equipment, it just evaporated. All they could say was that it appeared to be an oil and smelled like roses.

``We decided it was time to call the bishop in Pittsburgh. He asked us to bring the cross to the diocesan headquarters so he could see it. I drove it up, and when I arrived it was wet again, still smelling of roses. Eventually the bishop suggested that maybe this was a miracle, that God had specially consecrated this cross in order to increase our faith, and that we shouldn't use it anymore but put it in a special place. So we brought it back and put it in that glass case. Since then we haven't noticed any more oil on it.''

So there you have it: the miracle of the oily cross that smelled like roses. Now you're probably very skeptical when you hear this. ``Come on,'' you are saying to yourself, ``that's a ridiculous story. Surely there must be some other explanation.''

Well, maybe. We Mennonites tend to be down-to-earth, practical people, not prone to look for this kind of miraculous event or to believe it when others tell us about it. Fair enough. Ignore the details of the story, if you will. But I invite you to look beyond the details to the story's central affirmation: that God sometimes intervenes in our lives and knocks the socks off our feet.

Another story, which happened when I was 19. Our church was on a weekend retreat. On Saturday evening Virgil Brenneman, one of the members, shared with us the story of his marriage to Helen. When they married each other in the 1950s, their future looked bright. They had several fine children. But then Helen came down with polio. The disease worsened until she could do very little except lie in bed. Virgil was devastated. The two of them could no longer walk together, go camping together, or fulfill their dream of becoming missionaries together. After it became clear how bad Helen's condition was, and after Helen went to a nursing facility, friends privately went to Virgil and suggested that maybe it would be best if he just divorced her. Get on with your life, they said; you're still young and you can do a lot if you get rid of her.

With tears rolling down his cheeks, Virgil told us that he refused their advice. On their wedding day he had promised to love and cherish her, in sickness and in health, until death did them part. He was still committed to her even though they could not live together in the same house. He would not divorce her. He still loved her.

I was profoundly affected by this story. What awesome commitment between a husband and a wife! What faithfulness!

At that point our worship service changed into a dance and a prayer. We formed a circle around the retreat lodge and began to dance several Israeli folk dances, one of them to the song ``Teach me kingdom ways so that I may walk with Thee.'' When the dance was over we had communion together. And then, just before we came forward to receive the bread and the cup, God unexpectedly broke into my life. I saw the risen Christ. It was like seeing the still point of the turning world, like a spinning bicycle wheel, with a hub at the center connected to the outside rim, like glimpsing Christ at the center of the church, with each member an integral part of the rim, yet fastened to the hub that holds us together.

These kind of experiences are interesting, even exhilarating. But we miss the point if we say, ``oh that's nice,'' and then we move on with our lives. No, throughout the Bible, God uses these experiences to get people off their duffs, to change the course of somebody's life, to move people in a new direction. They are, in other words, conversion experiences, not necessarily the conversion experience where you first commit your life to Christ, but conversions nonetheless. God uses these conversion experiences to get us moving in mission.

Example: while engaged in the ordinary, humdrum work of tending sheep, Moses stumbles upon a burning bush that does not burn upand soon thereafter he finds himself on the way to Egypt with a mission.

Example: while in Jerusalem worrying about international politics, Isaiah observes the Lord on a throne, high and lofty, with God's robe filling the temple and six-winged seraphs crying ``Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of Hosts; the whole earth is full of God's glory!'' and Isaiah soon finds himself enroute to his fellow Israelites, with hard words to speak.

Example: while going about her daily household tasks, the teenager Mary is stopped by an angel, who informs her she is to be the mother of the Messiah. In the twinkling of an eye that miracle begins to grow in her womb, and she is given the mission of being a good mother.

Example: while traveling the 140 miles from Jerusalem to Damascus, Saul is bathed in light and lulled by a voiceand soon finds himself ministering to the very people he wanted to kill.

So, these dramatic things do happen. Maybe once happened to you. Maybe some day will happen to you. Or maybe never will happen, I don't know. If it never happens to you, don't worry: you are not an inferior Christian, and people who have had these extraordinary experiences are not in any way superior to you. For reasons known only to God, they happen to some people and not to others. But if it does happen to you, be forewarned: afterward you could find yourself going in a direction you never anticipated, even a direction that is at first uncomfortable.

One final story. This story appeared in The Christian Century on February 17, 1988, and was written by Brian Wren, the British evangelical hymn-writer who has 15 very fine hymn texts in our hymnal. His story is entitled ``Meeting the Awesome She.'' Brian writes:

``Twice I have experienced the immediate presence of God: at the age of 19, when I met Jesus on the cross, and last October 27, at about three in the afternoon. At that moment, I'm ashamed to admit, I was feeling an upsurge of lust in the presence of a young woman.

``As I was wrestling with myself, trying to stop the flow of fantasy, I was interrupted by a gripping awareness of divine presence, arresting and unmistakable. For the first time in my life I met the living God as Holy Femaleness, Awesome She. She impinged on me not as Mother, Sister or Lover (though no doubt she can be so known), but as the archetypal power and spirit from which such personal images derive. She told me, in words I can't now frame, that the woman in my thoughts was precious to her, under her protection and someone I had better treat with respect. Faced with that towering presence, my fantasies evaporated, leaving me chastened and changed.

``I saw, and met, a divine presence that was toweringly female yet beyond sexuality; She was arresting and awe-inspiring. There was the impression of hair, sweeping upwards and outwards on either side, becoming great wings, as of an eagle facing me, poised to soar upwards, or beat downwards in bone-breaking fury. The hair becoming wings was not joined to the mask, but above and close to it. Between the wings was neither shape nor form, but dark purple fire.

``Below the mask over a face-not-a-face was the impression of an iridescent robedark blue, purple, russet and blackflecked with gold, covering a torso whose breasts were indistinct yet immense, able to comfort someone embraced or snuff out the life of one hugged in anger.

``On each side of the robe was the impression of great arms in movement, indistinct, yet with fur and forepaws clearly visible. The paws, I thought, can bless and embrace, but also seemed those of a she-bear robbed of her cubsreaching out ready to hug or crush and rip apart in wrath: a warning from fierce love. The robe swept down for a great distance, becoming indistinct far below, lost in clouds of thick darkness, with lightening flickering within and without. Beneath the clouds were tiny figuresthe women whom she loves and protects with her power.

``She is the Holy One of Sarah and Abraham, Miriam and Deborah, Mary of Magdala, Martha and John. She is Moving and Flowing Spirit, Birth-giver Unborn, Word and Wisdom, present in Jesus, El Shaddai, Awesome She, Protector of Women.

``Though I have always believed that each woman I meet is made in the image and likeness of the living God, henceforth, when I speak to a woman, I shall know, deep within my being, that I am meeting an icon of God herself. Though we constantly speak of God as Father, King and He, the particular beauty of the male icon will be known to us only when we have shed the proud pretense that [maleness] is the only true representation of God.

``The Holy One who met me . . . had something of the fierce love for each human being that was enfleshed in Jesus of Nazareth, and which prompted that male Jew to treat the disvalued and subordinated women of his time with revaluing love and respect.''

May the living God, the God of many names, guide us, direct us, and meet us.

Amen.

Obstreperous Idiots May 30 2004.rtf

Sun, 30 May 2004 15:56:10 GMT

Obstreperous Idiots

(Acts 2:1-4) Acts 4:13-21

Sermon by Dan Schrock

May 30, 2004

One afternoon in the city of Jerusalem, not too long after the day of Pentecost, Peter and John walked over to the Temple for their daily prayers. It was about 3:00 PM (3:1). On this particular day Peter and John chose to enter the Temple grounds through the so-called Beautiful Gate. Little did they know it, but Peter and John were going to get themselves in gargantuan trouble that afternoon.

It so happened that the Beautiful Gate was also the favorite begging spot for one of the city's most well-known panhandlers. He was well-known because everybody who walked through the Beautiful Gate to pray in the Temple had to pass him. He was there every day, a forty year-old man who had never walked a day in his life. He had been born with malformed feet and ankles, and no matter how hard his parents tried to get him to walk as a child, no matter how much encouragement he received from his brothers and sisters, he had never been able to walk. His feet and ankles simply were not made right. A person who cannot walk cannot farm, cannot work in a trade, is not employable. What else can he do except beg for a living? So every day his friends carried him to the Beautiful Gate, where he sat on his behind and called out to passersby: ``Alms for the poor, alms for the poor! Will you give alms for the poor?'' He rarely looked up at you as you walked by him, but he mostly just stared at the pavement, singing that mantra of his, hoping people would drop a few coins into the clay pot he kept beside him, hoping the coins at the end of the day would be enough to buy bread and cheese and olives. As Peter and John walked up to the gate a little before 3:00 that afternoon, the man sang his mantra: ``Alms for the poor, alms for the poor! Will you give alms for the poor?''

Now ever since the day of Pentecost, Peter and John felt themselves to be changed people. Since Pentecost they had been feeling a holy power inside of them that they never felt before. They felt more love, experienced deeper peace, sensed wider joy. When Peter and John saw the man's condition, the Spirit prompted them to an act of compassion. Halting in front of the man, Peter said, ``Look us in the eye.'' The man on his behind tilted his head back eagerly, hoping that these tall men were going to be particularly generous and give him some gold coins, instead of the cheap copper stuff most people gave.

``We don't have any gold or silver to give you,'' Peter said with an intense expression in his eyes, ``but we're going to give you what we have to give. In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, stand up and walk!'' At that Peter reached down, grabbed the man's right hand, and yanked hard. Instantly the man's feet straightened and strengthened. He stood!

That's when the trouble started, although it wasn't really the man's fault. What else do you expect someone to do who's never walked a day in his forty year-old life? He just had to try out those feet and ankles, to test how good they really were, to measure the farthest limits of their performance. He didn't just walk: he jumped and leaped and danced on those two feet of his, to see what they could really do. Ten minutes wasn't enough. After forty years of penned up yearning, wishing he could walk, wishing he could be like other people, wishing he could have a regular job, his desire now gushed through the gate and he jumped and leaped and danced without end, so that his bodily movement became prayer to God Almighty.

So you can understand why the man reveled in this new way to pray. But it stirred up a peck of trouble for Peter and John. Eyewitnesses quickly gathered around Peter and John as if they were divine miracle workers. Others who recognized the dancing man as the former panhandler came running too, to find out what on earth had happened. How did this beggar get so happy and light on his feet? The crowd gathering around Peter and John quickly got very large. Not one to pass up an opportunity, Peter seizes the moment and launches into a conversation with the crowd about Jesus. We didn't do this miracle, he says. It was Jesus, the man you all helped to crucify a few months ago. But God raised him up from the tomb, and this risen Jesus now lives among us in Spirit. You can be his followers too, like we are, if you repent.

At this point the priests, the Sadducees, and the police captain saunter over to where Peter and John are holding forth to the crowd. The priests, Sadducees, and police captain are annoyed. They do not like large crowds. Large crowds have a way of getting out of hand. Things could escalate to a point of no return. People could riot. People could throw rocks. And if that happened, they, the priests, Sadducees, and police captain would start to look like incompetent rulers. Better to nip things like that in the bud before they got too big. Rough up the instigators and tell the others to disperse and go home quietly. So the priests and Sadducees nod to the police captain, who barks out an order to his men. Within minutes, the police handcuff Peter and John, lead them away, and lock them up in jail overnight.

The next morning Annas, the high priest, along with Caiaphas, John, Alexander, and other members of the high-priestly families, convene a hearing. When the police bring Peter and John into the conference room, Annas has only one question: ``By what power, or by what name, did you make that panhandler run around on his feet?'' This question shows that underneath it all, the high priest is afraid of anything that challenges his own power. Peter and John obviously have access to some kind of spiritual power that the high priest knows nothing about. Peter and John can turn sitters into dancers, and panhandlers into productive citizens. But the high priest can do none of those things. Consequently, the high priest feels threatened, vulnerable, suspicious, and very, very scared.

Then Petera plain fisherman, an ordinary blue collar worker, a man with no education to speak ofPeter makes a short but eloquent speech as if he had practiced it thoroughly except he really hadn't because it rolled off the end of his tongue on the spur of the moment thanks to the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. Peter said:

``Rulers of the people and elders, if John and I are questioned today because of a good deed done to someone who was sick, and are asked how this man has been healed, let it be known to all of you, and to all the people of Israel, that this man is standing before you in good health by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom you crucified, but whom God raised from the dead.''

With the Spirit in him and on him and around him, Peter speaks boldly. Peter speaks passionately. Peter speaks as if he were no uneducated man, but a man of learning and intellectual fortitude. Listen now to what happens next. Listen to how the establishment responds. Listen to Acts 4:13-21:

Now when they saw the boldness of Peter and John and realized that they were uneducated and ordinary men, they were amazed and recognized them as companions of Jesus. When they saw the man who had been cured standing beside them, they had nothing to say in opposition. So they ordered them to leave the council while they discussed the matter with one another. They said, "What will we do with them? For it is obvious to all who live in Jerusalem that a notable sign has been done through them; we cannot deny it. But to keep it from spreading further among the people, let us warn them to speak no more to anyone in this name." So they called them and ordered them not to speak or teach at all in the name of Jesus. But Peter and John answered them, "Whether it is right in God's sight to listen to you rather than to God, you must judge; for we cannot keep from speaking about what we have seen and heard." After threatening them again, they let them go, finding no way to punish them because of the people, for all of them praised God for what had happened.

The religious establishment calls Peter and John ``uneducated and ordinary men.'' In Greek, that word ``ordinary'' is idiotai , [spell] from which we get the word ``idiot.'' It is as if the powerful, privileged, and well-educated religious authorities derisively regard Peter and John as stupid idiotsbut idiots with sass. This sass, this verbal boldness, is what makes Peter and John so unusual. In the book of Acts, it is, in fact, the chief distinguishing feature of the followers of Jesus. Look at verse 13: ``when they saw the boldness of Peter and John . . . they . . recognized them as companions of Jesus.'' At the end of chapter 4, the entire church in Jerusalem, several thousand strong, pray to Godnot for deliverance, not for safety, not for protectionbut for boldness. Please continue to make us bold. Please continue to fill us with your Spirit, so that we stand up to the powers that be and witness to you (4:23-31).

How does this boldness play out for Peter and John? Once the powerful, privileged, and well-educated religious authorities find out that Peter and John are followers of Jesus Christ, they realize that there is very little they can do to stop them. Now they order Peter and John not to talk any more in public about Jesus, but Peter and John flatly refuse this ridiculous order. ``No,'' they say, ``we are not going to stop talking about Jesus. Yes, we will continue speaking about what we have seen and heard and know to be true about Jesus. Sorry, you cannot silence us.''

When they hear this response, the powerful, privileged, and well-educated religious authorities know they are defeated. After all, the power inside Peter and John is now beyond their reach. The authorities have already collaborated with the Romans to kill Jesus. Now these stupid idiots claim that Jesus is raised from the dead again. Whether that is true or not, these obstreperous people now have an internal fire, a psychological certainty, that goes beyond anything the authorities can control or manage or even influence. Never before have the authorities met such extraordinary power in such ordinary people, unless it was the extraordinary power in that irrepressible Jesus of Nazareth who keeps popping up again and again no matter what people do to him.

Unlike anybody else, the followers of Jesus are bold people. The followers of Jesus will not be quiet. They will not go away. They will not lie down and shut up. They will not stop when entrenched power structures tell them to stop. Instead, the followers of Jesus will persist in faithfulness to their Lord. They will acknowledge Jesus. They will heed the Holy Spirit. They will stick together in twos and threes and whole congregations. They will pray for continuing boldness. They will cross rivers, hike mountains, navigate oceans. They won't worry too much when they end up in jail for a while, because they know God can turn jail into yet another chance to testify to what they have seen and heard and know to be true in Jesus of Nazareth. They won't even fret a whole lot when death stares them in the face, because they know death is but a trifle for God, an inconsequential event that God reverses as easily as flipping a switch.

God's bold, thrilling, electric power, given to common, ordinary people like you and me, to make us obstreperous Christians.

Possibilities--December 12 2004.rtf

Tue, 14 Dec 2004 16:59:16 GMT

`` Possibilities''
Isaiah 35:1-10; Psalm 146:5-10; Luke 1:47-55; James 5:7-10
Advent 3December 12, 2004
Anita Yoder Kehr

         Projected images: ``Annunciation'' by El Greco, ca. 1595; ``The Long Loneliness'' by Fritz Eichenberg, 1952.
         Poem by Denise Levertov, ``Annunciation,'' from A Door in the Hive, New Directions, 1989.
         Mary had the courage to say ``yes'' to God. She had the courage to imagine the possibility of partnering in the task of bringing the reign of God to a parched people. She could have said ``no,'' but she didn't. And when she said yes, she opened herself to carrying the uncontainable God in the shape of her baby, Jesus. When Mary said yes to the possibilities the angel described to her, she gave us the possibility of knowing her Son.
         We have heard some of Mary's song this morning``My soul magnifies the Lord and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior…. Surely from now on all generations will call me blessed; for the Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is his name…. He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. He has brought down the powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly; He has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty….'' Mary's song is filled with pictures of the possibilities of the reign of God, a reign in which justice blossoms in all its beauty. God's reign is here, begun in the moment of conception and in the days and years of the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, but sometimes it seems more possibility than reality. God's reign is here… but not all the way here all of the time.
         This morning we have also heard pictures of possibilities described in Isaiah 35: As the prophet tells about the day of the Lord's judgment and vindication, we hear word pictures of a desert blooming, of waters breaking forth from rock and sand, of the thirst of a land being quenched, of the rain of God bringing forth indescribable beauty; we hear about the reign of God bringing forth justice and healing. Wonderful possibilities…
         Have you ever heard about blooming deserts? In those places of most extreme climate, seeds of flowers and plants lie dormant in the dryness. The possibility of life and growth waits beneath arid sand and in the crevices of hard rock and waits and waits and waits for rain. And when the rain does fall, all those waiting possibilities burst out into foliage and they bloom. Overnight, rain transforms the desert from bleak to bounteous; rain transforms possibility into actuality. A friend of mine who has seen it happens says that is almost unbelievable. All of the possibilities for a blooming desert are already here…but not all the way here all of the time.
         The reign/rain of God has already come and it comes again, falling fresh on us with all its possibilities of washing and refreshing and healing and restoring. The reign/rain of God calls us to the possibility of following the Holy Way, the highway described in Isaiah 35 on which we can returnredeemed and released from slavery and exilewith everlasting joy and gladness. There it is, the road to life, and every day we have choices to make about the possibilities that open up to us: stay on the road? Turn aside? We're on our way… but not all the way there yet.
         We heard a portion of a Scripture passage from James this morning; we heard about a farmer patiently waiting for the crop to grow after sowing precious seeds. The farmer waits for God's good rain to come, for new shoots to emerge and then to mature and bear fruit. Be patient, James says. We all heard it! Look for God's possibilities, look and expect to see the Mighty One at work and reigning.
         There's more to that text, though, more than being patient and looking hard and being strengthened in the strength of God. The last instruction James giveswhich you did not hear this morning but now willthat instruction is not to grumble during all the waiting, not to grumble so that we won't be judged. This judgment, it appears, comes upon grumblers because their patience wavers in the tension of the reign that is here…but not all the way here all of the time.
         On many mornings in the fall, winter, and spring (you'll note that there is one season missing), I come into the office and I grumble to Eleanor and to Dan and to Bob Pfledererwho is often here doing all that he does at our church with his client Travisand I really don't grumble about anything important. I grumble about the weather: It's too gray; it's too gloomy; it's too rainy; the sun has been gone for too many days.
         Truly I think there's some legitimacy in my complaint. After living in Texas where sun was the norm, and rain came as infrequent respites from its shining brightness, I got used to light and I loved it. Andadmit ithere in this part of Indiana, sunny days really are precious and rare, especially in some seasons of the year. But what I fail to see very oftenwhat I fail to look for or rememberis the possibilities that all these clouds create: fertile soil, big apples that spray juice when you bite into them, tomatoes that burst with flavor, corn growing taller than the tallest human, lilacs and peonies, trees that stretch high and spread wide. We experienced these only faintly or not at all in Texas. Furthermore, the truth is that the sun really does always shine right here in Indiana behind all those clouds. I just don't see it. Therefore, I have a choice about how I am going to look at the possibilities that are set before me in this place. Every day I can decide whether to focus on what's not easily seen and grumble about its apparent absence, or I can decide to look for what's there but harder to see and be glad. It's my choice.
         Every day each of us has a series of choices to make, choices about what we're going to look for, whether we're going to be patient or grumbling, and how we'll respond to the possibilities to partner with God that get placed before us. This morning we heard word pictures from Psalm 146, entwined with those we heard Mary sing. Those word pictures describe the promises of God's healing and wholeness. We heard about justice for the oppressed, food for the hungry, freedom for prisoners, sight for the blind, the raising up those who are bowed down, love for the righteous, and care for strangers, orphans, and widows. These are not meaningless word pictures. No. Instead, they depict what is important to God, and what it means to be a partner in the reign of God!
         Throughout the Bible, God asks us to act on the possibilities set before us in the not-all-the-way-here-yet reign of God. Take a stroll through the minor prophets and read Matthew 25 to see what I mean. God is the Creator, the inviter, the first actor. We, as humans then, have choices to make about how we respond to God's activity. We can act with God; we can act in opposition to God; we can react to whatever we let ourselves see; we can do our best neither to see nor to hear what God is inviting us to. The invitation, however, is to enter into partnership with God, to live according to the ways of the reign of God, the reign of God that already is here now by sharing the Good News, by doing justice and loving mercy, by seeking shalomwhich is wholeness, health, and peacefor our world. That invitation is to say ``yes!'' to God's announcement to us of our call to follow and to walk in the Holy Way; the invitation is to say ``yes!'' to our own annunciation.
         Every day we have some form of Mary's choice set before us, and sometimes the choices are not easy ones. The second print that was projected earlier onthe woodcutwas entitled, ``The Long Loneliness.'' When Mary said ``yes'' to the angel messenger's announcement, she began a walk that only she could take, all by herself, alone: she was the mother of the Savior. She watched Jesus grow and then begin to teach and challenge and heal. She saw her boy spar with the leaders of her world. She worried about the storm that gathered and then broke over the head of her baby on a hilltop with three crosses. Mary mourned Jesus' death. And she celebrated his raising, buteven soknew that he would soon be going to a place where she could no longer mother him, touch him, embrace him. Mary probably did not know all she was saying ``yes'' to at that moment the angel waited for her, but she knew that it would be beyond anything she could imagine. Even so, she said, ``Here I am, the servant of the Lord. Let it be with me according to your word.''
Now, we will likely not always be as exemplary as Mary was in that moment. She was probably not always as exemplary as she was in that moment. However, one day at a time, look for the Mighty One at work around you and for the possibilities that come with the reign of God, the possibilities of partnering that are set before youpartnering in the reign that is here and yet not all the way here. And as you choose to respond, may your intention more and more often echo Mary's: ``Here I am, the servant of the Lord. Let it be with me according to your word.'' May you be courageous and patient. And may your consent illumine you.

Praying Like an Anabaptist November 7 2004.rtf

Sun, 7 Nov 2004 05:00:00 GMT

Praying Like an Anabaptist

Matthew 6:7-13
Sermon by Dan Schrock

November 7, 2004

``When you are praying, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do; for they think that they will be heard because of their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.
"Pray then in this way: Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come. Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And do not bring us to the time of trial, but rescue us from the evil one. (NRSV)

We Mennonites officially began at a prayer meeting. An evening prayer meeting. On January 21, 1525, a group of young adults got together for prayer in a small house near the Catholic cathedral in Zurich, Switzerland. We're not sure exactly how many people gathered in this small house, but the group was not very large. We do know names of three of them: Georg Blaurock, Conrad Grebel, and Felix Manz. In recent months this group of young adults had been arguing with other people in town about baptism. Leaders in the town of Zurich insisted that you had to baptize all babies, while this group of young adults believed, based on their study of the Bible, that you should only baptize believers who were old enough to make a conscious, informed decision for Christ.

The conflict over baptism was now at a crisis point. So these young adults got together to pray, to reconnect with God and see what God might say to them. And here's what happened during the prayer meeting as they called upon God to have mercy on them: suddenly in the middle of prayer, Georg Blaurock stood up and asked Conrad Grebel to baptize him for God's sake. Conrad agreed to do it, and in the next moments occurred the first recorded instance of believers' baptism in the 1500s. When Conrad was done baptizing Georg, Georg turned around and baptized all the others. ¹
The Anabaptist movement actually began in several different places in Europe at about the same time. This little prayer meeting in Zurich, Switzerland, was only one of many different events that started the Anabaptist movement. Yet wherever Anabaptism beganin Switzerland, in south Germany, or in the Netherlands, most Anabaptists valued prayer as a necessary ingredient of their spiritual life.

Now the main spiritual practice in the Anabaptist movement was becoming thoroughly immersed in scripture, a topic Anita addressed last week in her sermon. These people read scripture, memorized scripture, quoted scripture, and tried to live by scripture. ²

But prayer was important too. So how, when, where, how, and what did they pray? What did the prayer life of an Anabaptist look like?

First, the how. As far as we can tell, many Anabaptists got down on their knees when they prayed, although some of them occasionally fell flat on their faces to pray, and still others looked up to the heavens with their eyes open. Whatever posture they used, observers of the time who watched Anabaptists praying report that these prayers were often quite emotional, sometimes even including sighing and weeping. ³ Menno Simons, an important early leader after whom Mennonites are named, once wrote about his own experience of prayer. He said, ``My heart trembled in my body. I prayed God with sighs and tears that he would give me, a troubled sinner, the gift of his grace and create a clean heart in me, that through the merits of the crimson blood of Christ he would graciously forgive my unclean walk and ease-seeking life, and bestow upon me wisdom, candor, and courage. . . .'' ⁴

When did Anabaptists pray? Often. Really often. The story is told of two prisoners who were locked up in the same dungeon. One of the prisoners was a convicted murderer while the other one was an Anabaptist named Hans Schmidt. After he being forced for a while to live in the same cell as Hans Schmidt, the convicted murderer complained that nothing was wrong with this Anabaptist ``except that he prays day and night.'' Another man named Sebastian Franck thought that some Anabaptists prayed too much, so much their mouths got tired. Anabaptists ``do almost nothing but pray,'' he wrote, ``as though we did God an especially great service in making our mouth and ourselves tired by praying constantly.'' ⁵

Where did they pray? Just about anywhere. One of the things you might be interested in is that none of the early Anabaptists had church buildings. The movement began in 1525, but the first Anabaptist meetinghouse that we know of wasn't built until 1590. ⁶ In other words, for the first 65 years, Anabaptist churches met just about anywhere they could find room. Usually they met in homes, which meant, of course, that the congregations were very small, no larger than you could fit into a living room. However, sometimes they did have larger meetings, perhaps in a forest or a cave. We have a report about one of these large meetings in 1545 in the Eckelsheim Forest near what is now Stasbourg, France. At 10:00 one night, 300 Anabaptists met deep inside the forest to escape detection from the authorities. The order of service looked like this. And as I list what they did, notice that they had no singing, probably because 300 singers can make a lot of noise and they didn't want to be caught:

�         A 3-hour sermon that began in the book of Exodus and ended in the book of Revelation;
�         The reading of 2 scripture passages, the first from Hebrews 11 and the second from Luke 18, the story of Zacchaeus;
�         A second sermon on the importance of doing penance for our sins;
�         The installation of a new deacon;
�         Prayer, which was mostly a prayer for fellow Anabaptists. This prayer was done in great earnestness, with a lot of crying and weeping.
�         The service finally ended when someone spread a cloth on the ground and placed bread and pears on it which people could take as they left. The ending time? Dawnwhich would have been about 6:00 or 7:00, depending on the time of year it wasa service lasting something like 8-9 hours! Oh yes, you might also like to know that one of the brothers carried a lightmaybe a torch or candle, or something like thatand his job all night long was to walk around among those 300 people and wake up whomever had fallen asleep!⁷

Of course Anabaptists prayed not just in worship services. They also prayed when they were alone, such as in prison, or when they were with their families.

What did they pray? Often they prayed the Lord's Prayer, along with other intercessions, petitions, and thanksgivings. Most of their prayers were extemporaneous. That is, they made them up as they went along, rather than reading or reciting a prayer someone else had written. They prayed for their children, for the sick, for those in prison, for justice, for each other, for strong faith and insight into the Bible. Many of their prayers were simply scripture passages hooked together.⁸

Since those early years, we Mennonites have continued to pray with great variety. An older practice among Dutch Mennonites was to begin and end each worship service with silent prayer, everyone in the congregation kneeling. The reason Dutch Mennonites felt strongly about silent prayer was their belief that each person in the congregation should call upon the Lord ``without confusion or indecent noise.''⁹ Sometimes we've written our prayers down and published them in prayer books. Perhaps the most important of these in our history is the Ernsthafte Christenpflicht, first published in 1708, or possibly a little earlier, by German Mennonites. It has 36 prayers and was frequently reprinted. The Amish, in fact, still use it today.¹⁰

Sometimes we have fought over prayer forms and styles, even passing regulations that now seem bizarre. For example, did you know that in 1872, the Indiana-Michigan Mennonite Conferencethat's our conference, folkspassed a resolution banning scheduled prayer meetings?! I am not up on the situation behind this resolution, but it appears that at the time scheduled prayer meetings were in some way threatening the peace and unity of the church. But this conference wasn't the only one. In 1911 the Franconia Conference in eastern Pennsylvania also took action against regular prayer meetings because they thought such meetings were ``worldly.''¹¹ As recently as the 1970s we had disagreements over forms of prayer such as praying in tongues that came from the charismatic movement.

Today I detect in the Mennonite Church an interest in exploring new, more meaningful ways to pray. Ten years ago Marlene Kropf and Eddy Hall published this little book called Praying with the Anabaptists. It's something of a primer on prayer, rooted in especially in the gospel of John, that includes some short prayers from early Anabaptists.

Another is The Rhythm of God's Grace, written by Arthur Paul Boers, a Mennonite pastor who teaches at our seminary in Elkhart. It goes partly out of his experience as an oblate in the Benedictine order of the Catholic Church. It may seem strange to you that a Mennonite pastor and professor also belongs to a Catholic order. However, it you know our history this is really not so strange at all. Thanks to the fine work of Mennonite historians like Arnold Snyder, we now know that the origins of Anabaptist spirituality lie in late medieval Catholic monasticism. One of our earliest important leaders, Michael Sattler, had himself been a Benedictine monk just before he became Anabaptist. This means that from the very beginning of our history, we a number of important things in common with the Catholic Church. So in this book Arthur is simply going back and reconnecting with a practice of prayer that was formative for some of our early leaders.

A third book, just published by a group of four editors, is called Take Our Moments and Our Days: An Anabaptist Prayer Book. It's available both on the internet for free and at the seminary bookstore in Elkhart for the modest sum of $6.50.¹² From the title you might think this is a collection of old stuffy prayers from the 1500s, but that's not so. Instead it's mostly scripture passages and hymns, artfully arranged into a two-week cycle of morning and evening prayers. It's written so you can use it as an individual, as a household, or as a small group. I think it's very well done, and commend it to you if you're looking for a fresh approach to prayer.

Over the last five centuries, we Anabaptist-Mennonites have prayed in a great variety of ways. This is a sign of good health, it seems to me. God has made each of us a bit different, and even each congregation is a bit different. We therefore have somewhat different ways of praying to suit our particular temperament, needs, and stage of life. May your personal practices of prayer, and our corporate practices here at BAMF, feed our faith with the warmth of God's love.

Notes
1. C.J. Dyck, ed., An Introduction to Mennonite History , second edition (Scottdale: Herald, 1981), 48-49.

2. C. Arnold Snyder, Following in the Footsteps of Christ: The Anabaptist Tradition (Maryknoll: Orbis, 2004), 116.

3. Snyder, 126-127.

4. Quoted in C.J. Dyck, ``The Life of the Spirit in Anabaptism,'' Mennonite Quarterly Review 47 (1973), 318.

5. Both quoted in Snyder, 128.

6. Timothy George, ``The Spirituality of the Radical Reformation,'' in Christian Spirituality: High Middle Ages and Reformation , ed. Jill Raitt (New York: Crossroad, 1987), 349.

7. Snyder, 124-125.

8. Snyder, 130-131.

9. George, 351.

10. ``Ernsthafte Christenpflicht,'' Mennonite Encyclopedia , http://www.mhsc.ca/encyclopedia/contents/e7565me.html.

11. ``Prayer Meetings,'' Mennonite Encyclopedia , http://www.mhsc.ca/encyclopedia/contents/p738me.html.

12. On the internet at http://www.ambs.edu/prayerbook.

Quartet October 3 2004.rtf

Tue, 5 Oct 2004 19:21:24 GMT

Quartet

Psalm 85:10
Sermon by Anita Kehr and Dan Schrock
October 3, 2004
25 ^th Anniversary Celebration

Verse 1

Anita Steadfast love and faithfulness will meet;

Dan righteousness and peace will kiss each other.

Anita He illustrates steadfast love in the congregation. When someone needs help, he quietly shows up at their house to install a new water heater, paint the living room, or mow the grass. Some of the people he helps are his best friends in the congregation, but many are newcomers he barely knows, while a few are people with whom he's had tense relationships over the years. He is generosity incarnate. If someone needs to borrow a tool, he offers to lend any of his from his garage workshop, which is so complete that it resembles the tool section of a home repair store. He doesn't advertise himself; he just does these things year in and year out. He is one of the reasons the congregation has thrived over the last few decades.

Dan She illustrates faithfulness in the congregation. On Sunday morning she walks into the meetingroom and sits down in her usual chair. She's been coming to this church since almost the beginning, and regardless of whether the congregation is experiencing good or difficult times, you can count on her to be there in her seat: persistent, patient, prayerful. At one time or another she's served on almost every committee in the congregation, done almost everything there is to do. She doesn't advertise herself, but she's one of the reasons this congregation has prevailed over the last few decades.

Anita He illustrates righteousness in the congregation. Hardly anybody knows about this, but he gets up early in the morning, before anyone else even thinks of rising. And he gets up so early every morningexcept when he's sickin order to pray. No one else in his household is awake then. He gets out of bed, puts a robe on over his pajamas, splashes water on his face, and walks to the living room. There he sits, a Bible and small wire-bound notebook on the beige carpet beside him. And for the next hour he prays. Part of his prayer is reading and meditating on a passage from that Bible. Part of the praying is looking over the list in his wire-bound notebook, naming people in the congregation, issues in the congregation, hopes and dreams and fears for the congregation. Part of his praying is journaling and writing his conversation with God. For an hour he wrestles with the Holy One in silence. Then he gets up and begins the rest of his day. He is one of the reasons the congregation has prospered over the last few decades.

Dan She illustrates peace in the congregation. Sooner or later, most people in crisis make their way to her. She has coffee with them, eats lunch with them, talks with them on the phone, stops by to see them in the hospital. She is gifted at person-to-person care. Her network of relationships within the congregation is so extensive that she usually knows what's going on in people's lives even before the pastors do. She listens carefully to people's problems, asks gentle questions that invite them to imagine new possibilities, and speaks cautiously but in a way that renews hope in difficult situations. She's one of the reasons this congregation has held together over the years.

Together A quartet in congregational life: love, faithfulness, righteousness, and peace.

Anita A quartet that makes church life strong and supple, satisfying and sustaining.

Dan A quartet of characteristics rooted in God's own character but expressed in the lives of God's people.

Anita Dan and I see this quartet of virtues in Berkey Avenue Mennonite Fellowship, this congregation that we honor and celebrate today. We live within the music of this quartetincompletely and imperfectlybut we hope that God will one day bring it to perfection within us.

Dan Over the last 25 years, hundreds of people in thousands of ways have written the song this congregation sings. In lean and fruitful years, through hard and good times, during painful and pleasing experiences, the people of this congregation have tried to love, be faithful, act righteously, and live peacefully.

Anita Some of the voices in this congregation have been here from the very beginning; they have provided a strong continuo throughout the years. Some of the singers of the song of this congregation came, stayed for awhile, and then moved on. They added depth and breadth to our song while they were here. Some of the members of our congregational chorale have come at various points in the life of the congregation, from many years ago to only a few weeks ago, and the voices that they continue to offer have enriched our singing. And some of the singers from our congregational family have died, and they now sing in the eternal care of God.

Dan This morning at this anniversary, we want to speak the names of these people, these music-makers, who have died since the congregation's founding. As a church we're only 25 years old, and saying goodbye to those who die is never easy. These beloved friends and family members sang with us in worship services, laughed with us at fellowship breaks, sat beside us in nurture classes, served with us in outreach programs. With gratitude and sadness, we name those who no longer sing with us:

Anita:
·         Marianna Brubaker, sister of Jesse Kehr
·         Linda Bergey, wife of Roy and mother of Lisa and Krista
·         Don Hostetler, like a brother to many
·         Randy Pflederer, son of Bob and Lorraine and brother of Matthew
·         Herman Tann, husband of Jo and father of Amy Buckwalter

Dan:
·         Alvin Hostetler, husband of Goldie and father of Phil
·         Celeste Garboden, mother of Steve and Allen
·         Betty Hernley, wife of Chuck
·         Marilyn Miller, wife of Richard and mother of Phil
·         Harold Miller, father of Genie Kehr

Anita These ten are the loving, the faithful, the righteous, and the peacemaking who have gone before us from this congregation. They are no longer right here with us and beside us but have now become members of the cloud of witnesses who urge us to continue to sing the quartet of love, faithfulness, righteousness, and peace. In the mystery and in the reality of the resurrection, we continue to have communion with them, the saints gone before who have helped us come to where we are today.

Dan At the communion table, time comes together. Here at the table we remember the past: the last supper that Jesus ate with his disciples before going to the cross and resurrection. And we remember believers who have gone before us, who have lived the way of Christ.

Here at the table we also encounter the present. We gather now as a community of believers, a congregation that shares a common faith in Jesus Christ, that sings the song of discipleship. Here and now we come to the table to be strengthened in love for God and for work in this world.

Anita And the future is also here at the table. We gather because we hope. We gather because we stake our very lives in trust that that quartet of characteristics really is rooted in God's own character, that God really does love, and really is faithful and righteous, and really does make peace. We trust God with all the rest of our earthly time and then we trust God for all of eternity.

Verse 2:

Dan And so today, to mark 25 years as a congregation, we gather at this table where past, present, and future come together in the presence of Christ, without whom our church would be nothing and matter not at all.

Anita This morning, therefore, we celebrate Christ, our bread and wine, our savior and lord, our founder and finisher, our source of love and faithfulness, righteousness and peace.

Dan Art, Richard, and Peter, would you please join us?

We remember that at the last meal with his followers, Jesus took a loaf of bread . . .

Anita In the same way we recall that he also took a cup . . .

Dan Let us pray: Eternal Christ, you have been our help in ages past, and our hope for years to come. Thank you for claiming us and not giving up on us, for gracing us with yourself and the ineffable work of the Spirit. As we eat this bread and juice, knit us together in love, now. In your name we pray. Amen.

If you have been baptized, please join us in this meal of faith. Anita and I, along with these your former pastors, will serve you at three different locations. We six serve you to symbolize the unity of the congregation over the last 25 years.

As you come, we will also be singing, led by the worship team.

Come, the table of the Lord is ready.

Verse 3:

Dan Steadfast love and faithfulness will meet;
Anita righteousness and peace will kiss each other.

Dan A quartet in congregational life: love, faithfulness, righteousness, and peace.

Anita A quartet that makes church life strong and supple, satisfying and sustaining.

Dan A quartet of characteristics rooted in God's own character but expressed in the lives of God's people.

Together Steadfast love and faithfulness will meet; righteousness and peace will kiss each other.

Anita Bob Pflederer and Eleanor Nafziger and I were talking together this past week about today's celebration. We remembered the last anniversary service, the 20^th, that took place only five years ago, and we thought about how much had changed in those brief intervening years. And then we started thinking about when the next anniversary celebration (the one after this one) might be for this congregation. We concluded that perhaps the next one would be the 50^th. We started laughing when we began to figure out how old we'd be then; I'll be 69, and probably an empty-nest grandmother. My life will likely be very different, although I hope you'll be able to recognize me! And now, I wonder: what will have changed at Berkey Avenue and what will have remained constant and recognizable?

Dan T.S. Eliot once said that ``Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future, / And time future contained in time past.''¹ So what lies ahead for our congregation?

The short answer, of course, is that only God knows. It would be terribly presumptuous of Anita and me to say much of anything about what lies ahead for our congregation. But we would like to suggest that if the quartet of love and faithfulness, righteousness and peace has nurtured us well for 25 years, it will also nurture us in the future, no matter what else changes around us.

Anita And much about our communitywhich is the context of our congregationis indeed changing and will continue to change. The percentage of Christians in Elkhart County has dropped significantly in the last 25 years. In 1980 when our congregation was only a year old, a majority of people in Elkhart County still considered themselves to be a member of some church. Ten years later, in 1990, only 45% of the people in the county considered themselves to be a member of some churchslightly less than half. And ten years after that, in 2000, only 38% of the people who live in this county identified with some church. If that declining trend has continued in the last four years since 2000, then by now perhaps only one-third of the people in our county affiliate with a local congregation. Think about it this way: two of every three people we meet at the shopping mall or at the Friday night football game or at the county fair are not Christian.²

Dan Since there are a lot of church buildings in and around Goshen, it may appear that Elkhart County is still very Christian. But in this case appearances deceive. The truth is that we followers of Christ have become a minority people. This is a significant change since the founding of our congregation 25 years ago, and it's a trend that will likely continue. We can no longer assume that our neighbors, business associates, and casual acquaintances share our core religious commitments. Many of them do not. And if we admit to people out in the general public that we are Christian, especially Christians who want to live in love and faithfulness, righteousness and peace, some of them may very well think we're weird.

Anita Which takes us back to the New Testament. In the first centuries of Christianity, Christians were also a minority people. Yet being in the minority, being thought of as weird, did not faze those first Christians. They kept right on obeying God, following Jesus, and heeding the wind of the Holy Spirit. They persisted in living love and faithfulness, righteousness and peace.

Dan Therefore God blessed those early Christians, just as for 25 years God has blessed the Christians at Berkey Avenue Mennonite Fellowship, in lean and fruitful years, through hard and good times, during painful and pleasing experiences. And so our call for the future is to keep on living the way we've been trying to live since 1979: singing the holy quartet of love and faithfulness, righteousness, and peace.

Together May God prosper this congregation and cause it to thrive.

Notes
1. ``Burnt Norton,'' I.
2. The source for these statistics is the American Religion Data Archive, on the web at www.arda.tm.

Repent March 28 2004.rtf

Fri, 26 Mar 2004 16:26:49 GMT

Repent
Luke 13:1-5
Sermon by Dan Schrock
March 28, 2004
Fifth Sunday of Lent

At that very time there were some present who told him about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices. He asked them, "Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way they were worse sinners than all other Galileans? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish as they did. Or those eighteen who were killed when the tower of Siloam fell on them--do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others living in Jerusalem? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did." (NRSV)

Most news reports are full of evil events. Pick up almost any newspaper, listen to almost any radio report, watch almost any TV news, and you are likely to encounter some new expression of evil. ``Three People Die in Weekend Crash'' reads the headline on the front page of Monday's paper. Or when you push the buttons on the car radio to hear the news at the turn of the hour, you may very well hear something like, ``Today in the central Iranian town of Bam, an earthquake measuring 6.5 on the Richter scale leveled buildings over a four square mile area. As emergency workers rushed to the scene, observers feared that hundreds, perhaps thousands of people are dead.'' Or, when you turn on the TV to watch the local news, you might very well see video footage of fire trucks in Shipshewana, spraying water on burning buildings. Or, on the news you might hear reports of who was arrested for possession of cocaine, who was sentenced to life in prison for murdering his girlfriend, who was arrested for accounting fraud that caused thousands of people to lose their jobs. Or again, you might hear about the continuing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the fighting among rival factions in Colombia and Sudan, the ethnic strife in the Middle East and Indonesia, religious conflict in Northern Ireland and Nigeria. After a while all this evil gets to be a bit repetitive and monotonous. It starts to dull our minds and numb our feelings.

One day some people come to Jesus with evil news. This is one of the few times in the gospels when Jesus responds to specific news events of his day. In fact, it might be the only time he comments on the news; at least I cannot think of any other instance, although I might be forgetting something. At any rate, recall how people in the first century got their news. There were no newspapers in those days, no radios, no televisions broadcasting the ABC Nightly News with Peter Jennings, and no Internet where Jesus could log on with his laptop and read the morning edition of the Jerusalem Post or the Rome Tribune. None of these sources of news that we take for granted today had been invented yet. The only major source of news was other peoplein other words, gossip networks. If there was a big fire somewhere that destroyed a lot of buildings, say in the village of Bethany, an eyewitness might tell the news to a traveling fig merchant, who might carry it with him up north to Galilee and pass it on to people in towns like Nazareth or Cana. In turn they told other people, and so the news traveled rapidly from one place to another until everyone heard it who cared to hear it. News got to people by word of mouth.

This is one of the main reasons why the Romans crucified criminals and political rebels. Crucifixion was a very public event. Whenever they wished to crucify someone, the Romans deliberately chose the most visible, public location they could find, such as the intersection of two highways, or perhaps outside the city walls beside the major road in and out of town. In the absence of TV, radio, or newspapers, the Romans crucified where as many people as possible would see it. The Romans then relied on eyewitnesses to tell others who would tell still others until the news got out everywhere. What message did the Romans want to communicate to the populace through these crucifixions? The message was simple and direct: ``you scumbags had better not mess with us. If you do mess with us, this is what we will do to you. Whip you to an inch of your shabby, worthless life, and nail up your bloody body until you die in agony.'' Crucifixion, in other words, was a form of state terrorism, deliberately intended to instill fear into subject peoples.

The particular news in Luke 13 that the gossip networks bring to Jesus is another act of state terrorism, this one created by Pontius Pilate, Rome's governor of the region. The details of this incident are not clear, but apparently some Galilean Jews traveled south to Jerusalem to observe one of the Jewish religious festivals. As a part of this festival, these Galileans planned to offer a sacrifice to God. We don't know what they hoped to sacrifice, perhaps a lamb or a some grain or what have you. Somewhere along the way they did something that displeased Pilate, again we don't know what. So Pilate ordered his soldiers to kill these Galileans, and then to mix their blood with the sacrifices. By the way Luke tells this story, it's clear that Jews saw this incident as an example of the great suffering they had to endure under Pilate. This story fits very well with what we know of Pilate from other ancient historians. Pilate was a little too violent as a governor, a little too cruel to the locals, a little too willing to use brutality and meanness.

The second news incident Jesus comments on was not an act of state terrorism, but an accident. A tower in the city of Jerusalem, called the Siloam tower, suddenly crashed to the ground one day. The falling stones hit eighteen people who were walking underneath the tower at the time. Possibly the tower had been badly constructed and was inherently weak. For whatever reason it fell, and it killed people who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Today if such a thing happened I suppose the families of the victims would sue both the architect who designed the tower and the contractor who built it; but in Jesus' day lawsuits of that type were not possible so far as I know. When disasters like that happened you poured out your laments to God and then went on as best you could.

The words Jesus uses to respond to these two news events sound odd, at least they sound odd to my ears. In the first place, Jesus communicates no compassion whatsoever toward either the unfortunate victims or their friends and family members. People have been deliberately murdered by the regional governor, while others have tragically died in a tumble of stones. In many other situations Jesus appears to be a very compassionate person, but not here. In the second place, Jesus turns these news reports into a heavy duty moral lesson. If you will permit me to paraphrase Jesus a bit, he says something like this: ``Well, do you think all those dead people were worse sinners than other Galileans who survived, or than other citizens of Jerusalem who survived? No, those people who died were not worse sinners. Their sins were no bigger and no more awful than your sins. So let all those dead people be a lesson to you. Repent now, while you're still alive and have the ability to repent. If you do not repent now, you might die as suddenly and as unexpectedly and as painfully as those people in the news did. Repent or perish!''

Ouch. That sounds a little harsh, a little cold and frightening, don't you think?

Maybe, or maybe not. Perhaps we could look at this another way. All four gospel writers, including Luke, believe that the reign of God has arrived in a new and profoundly different way in the person of Jesus. Jesus himself represents the best that God is offering to this mean and brutal world. Now is the time to respond to this Jesus, now is the time to respond to this new initiative by God. Time is short. Even if the world continues for thousands of years more, you and I may have only days left to live. Not one of us really knows. I could be driving down Greene Road and unexpectedly die in a car accident. Or it could be you. At any time, evil could end our life.

So considering all of this, maybe Jesus' words that sound so harsh have a whiff of compassion in them after all. Maybe Jesus is simply being realistic. The world has plenty of deliberate evils like political assassinations, and accidental evils like falling towers. That's the way the world is. And if that's the way the world is for now, then perhaps the most grace-filled, the most loving, the most compassionate response to the news that Jesus could possibly make is precisely the one he did make: repent. Repent.

Sabbath January 4 2004.rtf

Fri, 2 Jan 2004 16:22:32 GMT

Sabbath

Deuteronomy 5:12-15
Sermon by Dan Schrock
January 4, 2004

Observe the sabbath day and keep it holy, as the LORD your God commanded you. Six days you shall labor and do all your work. But the seventh day is a sabbath to the LORD your God; you shall not do any work--you, or your son or your daughter, or your male or female slave, or your ox or your donkey, or any of your livestock, or the resident alien in your towns, so that your male and female slave may rest as well as you. Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the LORD your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm; therefore the LORD your God commanded you to keep the sabbath day . (NRSV)

I don't know about you, but I have hard time keeping the sabbath. In fact, I confess that last year I probably kept the sabbath fewer than five times. I could try to make the excuse that because I work on Sunday, I never really have a chance to keep the Sabbath. But that excuse would be hogwash. The truth is that all the congregations I've ever been in have given me two days off every week, generally Saturday and Monday. Therefore I usually have two chances every week to keep the sabbath. Yet most of the time I don't.

For me Saturday is not a good day for sabbath, even though that's when Jews and Seventh Day Adventists observe their sabbath. Saturdays at our house are filled with vacuuming the carpet, repairing broken things around the house, taking Peter to a ball game, doing miscellaneous stuff we didn't have a chance the rest of the week, and getting ready for preaching, teaching, or leading worship the next day.

That leaves Monday. But I usually don't observe the sabbath then either. For a number of years Nicholas and I have been in the habit of shopping on Mondays. Monday is a splendid day to shop at Kroger or Meijer, Lowe's or Menards, because almost everyone else is at work and the stores are relatively uncrowded. Monday is also a good day to study for whatever class I happen to be taking at the time. So on many Mondays, you'll find me reading books, taking notes, and writing papers. The crushing demands of graduate school combined with working here at the church three-quarter time mean that most of my waking hours are filled with church work, school work, or house work. Nine-tenths of the time, I ignore God's command to observe sabbath.

The other nine commandments are easier to keep, at least for me. I've never made a statue of oak or marble and then prayed to it; I've never murdered anyone; I generally find it easy to honor my mother and father; and when I covet something belonging to my neighbor, I try to repent of it quickly. But keeping the sabbath is more difficult. I have other things to do, or other things I'd rather do. Even though I have plenty of days off, I rarely use them to keep the sabbath. Therefore I am not paying attention to one of God's central injunctions: to make one day a week holy by dedicating it to the Lord God.

Sabbath was the real reason for the exodus from Egypt. We normally say that God delivered the Hebrew people from Egypt because they were oppressed and enslaved. This is true enough, as far as it goes. The Hebrews were oppressed and had been enslaved. But making all those bricks had become so oppressive precisely because Pharaoh never allowed the Hebrews to take a break, rest, and focus on their life with God. Instead Pharaoh made them work all the time. His economic plan for the empire required them to work seven days a week, year round. The Egyptian economy's supposed needs for ceaseless producing and consuming had become a terrible burden that no one should have to bear. This is why the very first thing Moses talks to Pharaoh about is the need for a sabbath. In the text we will hear in a moment, Moses has just left the wilderness where he met the Lord God at the burning bush. He has traveled to Egypt's capital city and walked into the palace. Listen now to what happens next, from Exodus 5:1-9:

Moses and Aaron went to Pharaoh and said, "Thus says the LORD, the God of Israel, 'Let my people go, so that they may celebrate a festival to me in the wilderness.'" But Pharaoh said, "Who is the LORD, that I should heed him and let Israel go? I do not know the LORD, and I will not let Israel go." Then they said, "The God of the Hebrews has revealed himself to us; let us go a three days' journey into the wilderness to sacrifice to the LORD our God, or he will fall upon us with pestilence or sword." But the king of Egypt said to them, "Moses and Aaron, why are you taking the people away from their work? Get to your labors!" Pharaoh continued, "Now they are more numerous than the people of the land and yet you want them to stop working!" That same day Pharaoh commanded the taskmasters of the people, as well as their supervisors, "You shall no longer give the people straw to make bricks, as before; let them go and gather straw for themselves. But you shall require of them the same quantity of bricks as they have made previously; do not diminish it, for they are lazy; that is why they cry, 'Let us go and offer sacrifice to our God.' Let heavier work be laid on them; then they will labor at it and pay no attention to deceptive words."

All Moses and Aaron ask for is a sabbath, a break from work so the Hebrews can take a short trip into the wilderness to worship God. At this point in the story, Moses and Aaron are apparently planning to bring the Hebrews back to Egypt after this sabbath is over. ``We're coming back to work,'' they seem to say, ``but our people badly need a sabbath to worship God.'' However, Pharaoh will have none of it. He needs that quota of bricks by Tuesday morning at 8:00 so his pyramid doesn't fall behind schedule. ``You all must not have enough work to do!'' he retorts. ``So now you will also have to find your own straw. Get back to the factory!'' Pharaoh's rejection of this very reasonable request for a day of worship sets off the whole chain of events that follows. The conflict between God and Pharaoh ratchets to higher and higher levels until God trashes Egypt with ten plagues and leads the Hebrews out of that hell-hole, never to return. We don't know how the story might have turned out if Pharaoh had just said yes to that first request for sabbath. If he had just allowed his workers the freedom to worship God, and if he had just treated them more humanely, maybe they would have stayed. As it was, his own fool stubbornness made him lose his entire workforce. The book of Exodus therefore turns on God's desire for sabbath and the empire's refusal to give it.

Empires can take any number of different forms. Nearly anything or anyone that demands more work than is humanely just is a good candidate for being called an empire. Work that does not allow for sabbath might very well be work that God will lead us out of. I once had a job in a Christian organization where the director, a fine Christian person, refused to provide a regular sabbath day. On Saturdays we often worked a half day or a full day; we worked again on many Sunday mornings; and then we were expected to be in the office from 9-5 Monday through Friday. Now this was a thoroughly Christian organization. All the employees were Christians. We did good and important work for the sake of Christ. Our goal was to honor and serve Christ. But the director never allowed any of the program staff, including himself, to take a regular, full day of sabbath. So you know what happened? I engaged in my own personal exodus. I quit. I handed in my resignation.

After God liberates us from an empire's demand to work all the time, actually observing sabbath is our responsibility. God can't keep the sabbath for us; we have to do it ourselves. For a long time I assumed that having a regular day off is a good enough sabbath. I assumed it didn't matter a whole lot what I did on my day off, as long as it wasn't church work. I could read a book in the morning and cook in the afternoon. I could buy ceramic tiles at Lowe's and spend the rest of the day laying them on the bathroom floor. I could rake leaves, surf the internet, dream about my next home improvement project, or take a long nap, and it would all count as sabbath.

I now think I was wrong about that. As worthwhile as a day off might be, it's not the same thing as sabbath. On a day off we can be just as busy, just as workaholic, as the days we work at our jobs. But on sabbath, we stop doing any kind of work. On a day off, we might still buy and sell in the local stores or on line. But on sabbath, we stop producing and purchasing.

Sabbath has two parts. The first part, according to Deuteronomy 5, is that we stop working. The second part is that our children, our servants, and even our animals also stop working. In other words, during our sabbath we neither require ourselves nor others to work. The main distinguishing feature of sabbath, so far as I can tell, is that the day belongs to God. The purpose of sabbath is to focus on God in special ways that do not happen the rest of the week.

Richard Foster tells a story about his own struggle to keep sabbath. Once while at a conference in Canada, he left the meeting room and took a walk. On his walk he found a wooded area to sit down. He soaked up the warmth of the sun and the singing of chickadees and blue jays. Soon he found him praying simply, ``Refresh me, Lord. Refresh me.'' What next surfaced to his conscious mind was this: ``I want to teach you sabbath prayer.'' Foster leaned forward in anticipation, but he was not sure what sabbath prayer was. ``You will have to lead me, Lord, because I don't know what I am supposed to do.''

Then came the words, ``Be still. Rest. Shalom.'' That was all. Those words and no more. So Foster focused on each word, allowing the words to mold him in whatever way God wanted them to. It was a wonderful experience, Foster said, but he became concerned and thought, ``It's nearly noon. People at the conference will miss me and wonder why I've stayed away so long. I'd better get back for lunch.'' But then the same words came to him again: ``Be still. Rest. Shalom.'' The words calmed his spirit, and he returned to quiet attentiveness.

After a while, his mind became agitated by a kind of hyperresponsibility. ``The next session will begin soon,'' he thought to himself. ``I need to be there. What kind of example will my truancy make? Besides, everyone will be concerned about my absence.'' In full gear now, his mind began envisioning selfish, surrealistic scenarios: ``People might think I got lost, and right now they are probably discussing whether to mount a rescue effort!'' But again, the same words came back to him: ``Be still. Rest. Shalom.''

The final temptation, says Foster, was the most alluring. He began thinking to himself, ``This experience is absolutely wonderful! I must captu4e this moment for the future. But how? I cannot possibly remember everything that is happening to me here. Where is some paper? I must write it all down!'' Again, he says, those words came: ``Be still. Rest. Shalom.'' So once more he settled again into sabbath prayer.

A short time later, it seemed to Foster that God's presence in the middle of the silence ended. So he made his way back to the conference, which, as you probably guessed, had scarcely noticed his absence and was going right on without him. ¹
In the end, you see, sabbath is not just a command. It's a gift.

Note
1. Adapted from Richard J. Foster, Prayer: Finding the Heart's True Home (HarperSanFrancisco, 1992), pp. 94-95.

Saying No to Say Yes July 4 2004.rtf

Sun, 4 Jul 2004 00:54:06 GMT

Saying No to Say Yes
Esther 4:10-17
Sermon by Dan Schrock
July 4, 2004

The time will come in your life, if it hasn't already, when you will need to say NO! to something major. Something will happen in your workplace, in your community, or in your country, and you will no longer be able to sit quietly and watch. With great reluctance and at great personal cost, you will gather your courage and say no, this thing that is going on is wrong. And when you say no, you will also be saying yes to something else, for in every no lies an implicit yes.

Consider the story of Esther.

By good fortune and her willingness to be a team player, Esther had become the wife of the great King Ahasuerus and therefore Queen of the Persian Empire. It started when her predecessor, Queen Vashti, said no after the king ordered her to come over to a drinking party he and his buddies where having so that she could show off her fabulous beauty. Queen Vashti quite rightly decided the king was treating her like a common slut, like a sex object; and so she said, ``NO!, I'm not coming over to your wine-besotted party just so you can parade me around like a piece of meat. I am a person of inherent worth. I have personal dignity and personal standards. Forget it! I refuse your order'' (1:10-12a). Her no made the king mad, so he fired her (1:12b, 19).

Since every king needs a queen, the government bureaucracy in the palace came up with the idea of having a national beauty and sex contest just for the king. The bureaucrats proposed to gather up all the most beautiful girls from every part of the empire, have the palace cosmetologists make them over with facials and hairdos, manicures and pedicures and fancy clothes, then send them in to sleep with the king, a different one each night, until he found one he liked well enough to make his queen. Being the egotistical, pleasure-loving person he was, the king felt this was a splendid idea. It fit right in with his hedonistic personality.

So whether they wanted to go or not, whether their parents consented or not, the most beautiful girls in the vast Persian empire were hauled off to the capital city, all of them probably teenagers. That's how Hadassah, a young Jewish woman, arrives at the palace. Following the advice of her adoptive father, Mordecai, she hides her ethnic identity. Instead of Hadassah, a distinctively Jewish name, she takes the Babylonian or Persian name Esther (Fox, 30), so that she can more easily pass as Persian. She puts on fancy clothes. She accepts lavish beauty treatments (2:12). She listens to the advice of palace bureaucrats (2:15). She goes along and gets along so well that some of the most powerful people in the palace take her on as a protégé, giving her the best possible shot at becoming queen (2:9). We don't know what Esther did that night in the king's bedroom, but he falls in love with her and makes her his queen (2:17).

For the next five years, Esther lives in the pampered luxury of the Persian palace. Like hundreds of other people at the imperial court, she benefited from the king's vast wealth and power. The Persian Empire was the largest empire the ancient near east had ever seen, stretching all the way from Greece to India and the Caucasus Mountains to Egypt. The great kings of Persia were among the most powerful, ostentatious, and wealthy rulers the world had ever seen. Thanks to the military successes of the Persian army, the kings of Persia were able to force their rule over a wide variety of lands and peoples, and to demand from them taxes. With these taxes the great kings of Persia built enormous palaces at Susa and Persepolis, and carried on royal life in grand style.

Consider first of all the personal attention which the Persian king received. He had hundreds of servants to pamper his every need and carry out his every order. Some were female servants who did menial tasks, some were male eunuchs who were advisors, and some were concubines who awaited the king's pleasure. Whenever the king sat on his royal throne, his feet rested on a footstool that only he could use, and that symbolized his elevated status above all other human beings. When he walked from one place to another in the palace, he often walked on special carpets that no other person was permitted to walk on, signifying once again the king's exalted rank above everyone else (Briant, 301). He himself wore the finest robes made from the richest fabrics dyed in the costliest colors.

Consider also the special gardens, called paradises, which were located next to the palace. In these paradise gardens the king planted exotic flowers, trees and bushes brought to him from every area of the empire. These plants were watered by special irrigation systems installed solely for the purpose of keeping the paradises green and lush. Sometimes the king even stocked his paradise gardens with strange animals from the farthest regions of his empire. In many ways the paradise gardens resembled a cross between a botanical garden and a zoo, reserved exclusively for the king's use. No way did the general public ever go into those gardens.

Especially consider the food. If you want to understand the terrible power, luxurious lifestyle, and egotistical nature of the great king of Persia, then look no further than his feasts. The first chapter of the book of Esther tells about two grand banquets thrown by the king. The first one is for the elite members of the empire, the officials, governors, and army commanders (1:3). Reportedly lasting six months, the king puts on this extravagant feast to ``display the great wealth of his kingdom and the splendor and pomp of his majesty'' (1:4). When this banquet finally ends, the king immediately throws another one for people in Susa lasting seven days (1:5). Although the second banquet is shorter than the first one, it has lavish surroundings. Held in a garden on the palace grounds, the guests recline on gold and silver couches arranged on a mosaic floor crafted from porphyry, marble, mother-of-pearl, and colored stones. Around the guests are white cotton curtains and blue hangings, tied with linen and purple cords to silver hardware and marble pillars (1:6). Wine flows ``without restraint,'' gulped down with goblets and flagons (1:7-8).

Other ancient writers also talk about the feasts of the Persian kings. These ancient writers say that the Persian kings sent servants throughout the empire to hunt for fine wines and special recipes that the king had never tasted before. The best food from even the remotest corner of the empire was brought back to the palace: the freshest figs and the finest dates, exquisite wines, finely-ground choice flour, specialty cheeses, the most tender meat, olive oil from the first pressing, honey to make sweets, and other foods so rare, or so unusual, that we can barely imagine them today. It was all for the king's pleasure, because the king was the center of the Persian empire. The empire existed for his benefit, catered to his whims, and served his ego.

And for the last five years, as a side benefit of being queen, it has all been available to Esther, undercover Jew. For five years, Esther has been able to pass in the palace as Persian. No one except her adopted father and perhaps one or two of her most trustworthy servants knows she is really Jewish. For going along and getting along, she has been highly rewarded. She satisfies the king whenever the king wants to be satisfied and he rewards her with luxury and ease. She has it made.

Until Haman. It all changes when Haman comes along. Haman, the king's best drinking buddy and custodian of the king's signet ring, has it out for Jews. Without quite realizing what Haman is up to, the king allows Haman to issue an edict calling for the murder of all Jews in the empire. Once the edict gets out, Mordecai sends a copy to Esther, urging her to go to the king and try to get the edict reversed.

At first Esther refuses to act. The king hasn't had me to his bedroom in a month, she says. I'm not sure he still likes me. And any fool knows that if you go to the king on your own initiative, he'll have you killedunless he mercifully holds out his scepter and permits you to enter the throne room. So I'm not going. I don't see that it will do any good (4:11).

Ever the patient, persistent father, Mordecai presses his case. Look, he tells her, you have to do something. You're uniquely positioned in the court as queen. If Haman's edict is carried out, don't think you'll escape being killed just because you're in the palace. Somebody will rat you out, and then you'll die with the rest of us Jews. And besides, who knows but that you have gotten to be queen for a situation like this one (4:13-14)? Act!

At this moment, Esther looks death in the eye. If she does nothing, she will probably die with all other Jews in the empire. If she approaches the great and mighty king of Persia, she will probably also die. This is a weighty decision for such a young woman. At most she cannot be more than about twenty-five years old. Depending on when she became queen, she might even be as young as twenty. So young to die. Whatever she chooses, she may die; but her choice may affect thousands of other people.

What does Esther decide? She decides to call a fast. A three-day fast. She orders Mordecai to gather all the Jews in the city together in one place, to fast. She and her maids will lead this fast from inside the palace. No Jew in the city of Susa will eat or drink for three days. Then after three days of fasting, she will go to the king of Persia, and if she dies, then she dies. But she will have given it her very best effort.

I submit to you that Esther's fast is aimed right at the stomach of the great king of Persia. This fast is a loud and resounding NO! to the self-indulgent feasting and drunken frivolities of the Persian court. In this fast Esther symbolically rejects the oppressions and injustices of the empire, the forcible extraction of food and money from outlying areas of the empire just so that a few hundred Persians can live in grandiose style and hedonistic luxury. In this fast Esther reclaims her Jewish heritage. She identifies with her people. She returns to her roots, to her training and upbringing. She realizes that at the very foundation of her life she is Jewish. And her fast shapes the Jews into a community of solidarity. Until now Jews in the story have been random individuals, without a leader and without cohesion. But from now on in the story, they will be a community, united around her and led by her.

Esther's decision to fast with her fellow Jews is absolutely brilliant, the mark of an intellectually agile woman who is fixing to outsmart everyone else in the Persian court. She has matured into a wise woman, capable, determined, politically sophisticated. Her NO! to Persian life makes it possible for her to say yes to an alternate reality. Her no testifies that the world has other realities more important than empire. Empire does not have the last word. Empire does not define the limits of what is possible. Empire, in fact, is silly and ridiculous and pompous, especially when you look at the man at the top, that so-called great king Ahasuerus who is portrayed again and again as a fool.

Ultimately Esther is vindicated. She successfully appeals to the king, successfully out-foxes Haman, and successfully saves her fellow Jews. If you continue to read the rest of the story, you will discover a curious thing: that later on, Esther and her fellow Jews feast. They throw parties. They drink wine. They eat lots of food. But if you read carefully, you will notice that these Jewish feasts are not at all like the Persian feasts. There are at least two significant differences. First, when they feast, the Jews are never self-indulgent. In contrast to the king's feasting which is intended to display his power and wealth, the Jewish feasts celebrate safety and express the joy of deliverance from evil.

The second difference is that unlike the Persian king who cares nothing about poor people, the Jews give gifts to the poor during Purim. In fact, the only place in the book poor people are mentioned is in connection with the Jews. The empire displays no compassion to the vulnerable, but the Jews, themselves a vulnerable people, connect with the economically vulnerable every time they celebrate the feasting of Purim.

Somewhere, sometime, somehow, you and I may find ourselves in the sandals of Esther. We may find ourselves living comfortably near the top of some empire that extracts goods and services from other people in other places in order to concentrate it in centers of power. The political and economic forces of empire may well be vast, powerful, and intimidating. For a while you and I might try to pass, to go along and get along, concealing our identities undercover. But somewhere, sometime, somehow, circumstances might force upon us a choice: to stay quietly in the palace, saying and doing nothing about the injustice at work in the empire; or to say no with some powerful symbolic action, using our intellectual ability to try to outfox the forces of wrong.

So I ask you: is there something unethical going on right now in your workplace, or community, or nation? Who or what is urging you to do something, to say no, so that you can say yes to a better reality? And what choice will you make?

Sweating It Out April 4 2004.rtf

Tue, 6 Apr 2004 22:24:38 GMT

Sweating It Out

Luke 22:39-53
BAMF
April 4, 2004
Passion Sunday

He came out and went, as was his custom, to the Mount of Olives; and the disciples followed him. When he reached the place, he said to them, "Pray that you may not come into the time of trial." Then he withdrew from them about a stone's throw, knelt down, and prayed, "Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me; yet, not my will but yours be done." Then an angel from heaven appeared to him and gave him strength. In his anguish he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat became like great drops of blood falling down on the ground. When he got up from prayer, he came to the disciples and found them sleeping because of grief, and he said to them, "Why are you sleeping? Get up and pray that you may not come into the time of trial."
While he was still speaking, suddenly a crowd came, and the one called Judas, one of the twelve, was leading them. He approached Jesus to kiss him; but Jesus said to him, "Judas, is it with a kiss that you are betraying the Son of Man?" When those who were around him saw what was coming, they asked, "Lord, should we strike with the sword?" Then one of them struck the slave of the high priest and cut off his right ear. But Jesus said, "No more of this!" And he touched his ear and healed him. Then Jesus said to the chief priests, the officers of the temple police, and the elders who had come for him, "Have you come out with swords and clubs as if I were a bandit? When I was with you day after day in the temple, you did not lay hands on me. But this is your hour, and the power of darkness!" (NRSV)

One of my early encounters with evil happened in 5 ^th or 6 ^th grade, before I was baptized. It started one day when I did something or said something that offended Johnny, a classmate of mine at school. I don't remember what I did that affronted Johnny's sense of personal dignity, but whatever it was, he got mad at me and promised to beat me up. ``I'll see you tomorrow after school in the parking lot at Macy's convenience store,'' he yelled, ``and I'll beat your face in until you don't have one left.''

I was scared. Actually, petrified. I was a thin boy, long-boned maybe, but still thin and scrawny. I had no muscles to speak of. I wasn't athletic. I didn't know how to fight. And the muscles on Johnny looked dense and round. I was pretty sure I could predict the outcome of this match: in thirteen seconds I'd be sprawled on the hot asphalt, my mouth bleeding from all the teeth that just got smashed in, my eyes purple from Johnny's left hook. Assuming I could limp back home afterward, an ambulance would certainly have to take me to the hospital. I'd be laid up for days. I'd miss a week of school. I'd probably lose the few friends I had, because they'd think I was a wimp.

On the other hand, if I didn't show up at Macy's convenience store my friends at school would also think I was a wimp. Several other kids were standing around when Johnny promised to remove my face, so if I didn't show up to meet Johnny other kids would find out. I stewed the rest of the day over what to do. I fretted in bed that night, tossing from one side to the other. I had nightmares. In the morning I dragged my sorry body off to school and spent the day alternately avoiding Johnny and trembling at my fate.

I don't think it ever occurred to me to pray. It did occur to me to ask my parents for advice, but I quickly decided I was not going to tell them about my dilemma. They were Mennonites, after all, and I knew very well the Mennonite church thought fighting was wrong. I saw no way my parents, or their Mennonite faith, could help me in this situation. So I carried the burden of fear all by myself.

When school finally ended that afternoon, I went to Macy's convenience store and was slightly relieved to see that Johnny had not yet arrived. I paced back and forth in the parking lot, nervously glancing up and down the street, my heart erratic, my palms sweaty. Perhaps I will even die this afternoon, I told myself. The church will have to plan a funeral. My parents, especially my mother, will weep for weeks.

A year or so after this incident, I joined my parents in becoming a member of the Mennonite church, and since then I have thought a lot about how to resist evil. I have heard many sermons on resisting evil, and have even preached some myself. In college and seminary I took classes and read books on the topic. For four years I served in Mennonite Central Committee and strove against evils like social dislocation and racism. For three years I worked at the Lombard Mennonite Peace Center and struggled against the evil of violence. For fourteen years I've been a pastor and have witnessed all sorts of evil flowing in and out of people's lives.

More importantly, in the thirty-some years since Johnny vowed to delete my face, God, along with a few of God's agents like my immediate family members, have helped me see how deeply evil has sunk its roots into my own life. Evil has many forms, and one of them is violence. All my life I've known that violence is wrong, but it's taken many years for God to help me understand how pervasively evil has penetrated my psyche.

So far as I can tell, prayer is the main way God deals with the evils running around inside us. Prayer is mostly about what God does in us, rather than about what we say to God, or what we persuade God to do to other people. The most important action we take in prayer is simply opening ourselves to God, allowing God to do whatever God wants to do in us. After we open ourselves to God, much of what God chooses to do in us happens in secret, in ways beyond our ability to perceive it. Some spiritual writers call this passive prayer, in which we are passive and God is active. Of course we keep on having an active part in prayerafter all, we have to be willing for God to work in us. But at a profound level, prayer is more about God's activity in our lives. One way God struggles against evil is through our prayer.

This is why just minutes before his arrest, Jesus struggles and sweats in prayer. He knows the forces of evil are closing in on him, knows he will need all the inner strength he can get for the coming confrontation. For some time now, the bullies of priesthood, police, and empire have been looking for a way to get at him. Judas' offer to tell them where Jesus is merely gives them the chance they've been wanting. So while Jesus prays on the Mount of Olives, the clergy team up with the police to capture Jesus and hand him over to the empire.

More than the other gospel writers, Luke portrays the anguish of Jesus' praying, the sweat, the struggle, the torment. Why this tortured praying? Because here, in the last moments of his life as a free man, Jesus struggles mightily against the temptation to resort to violence. As the gospel of Matthew points out, Jesus could call twelve legions of angels to come and fight for him, 24,000 angels to keep the temple police at bay, 24,000 of God's heavenly hosts to overwhelm the Roman army, a grand and bloody war to kill tyrants, end terrorism, and vanquish evil. It is this temptation Jesus sweats out in prayer: the temptation to respond to violence with more violence, the temptation to fight evil with swords and spears, fighter jets and Apache helicopters. As evil surrounds him, Jesus prays. His defense, and in some ways also his offense, is prayer.

Moments later, the clergy and their police encircle Jesus. One of the disciples draws a sword and slices off an ear of a slave owned by the high priest. With this act of violence, a war has begun. If all the swords were not yet drawn from their sheaths, if all the daggers were not yet pulled from their belts, if all the spears were not yet ready to be thrust, they all surely were after that one act of violence. Give it a second or two longer, and everyone on the scene would be hacking and thrusting, stabbing hearts and lungs, cutting off arms and heads.

Until Jesus unexpectedly reaches out and fixes the man's ear. With this simple act of nonviolence, this profound act of kindness, Jesus prevents the war from escalating, effectively ending it. And then he hands himself over. I will not fight you with violence, he says. Take me and do with me what you want. I will go with you willingly. My life, at least my outward life, is in your hands.

What the clergy and the police and the empire did not know, but you and I know, is that Jesus had already fought evil in his heart, and had won. So far as we know, Jesus was no longer afraid to die. They could try him, convict him, deny him, taunt him, beat him, kill him; but he was no longer afraid of them. When the police arrested Jesus, it may have appeared that he was no longer a free man. But in reality he was the freest person among them. All the othersthe clergy, the police, the imperial functionaries, the soldiers, even the disciplesthey were all trapped in the need to retaliate, trapped in the impulse to kill, trapped in the desire to control events and manage the outcome of history. Each of them was boxed in by fear.

Except Jesus. The only truly free person among them was Jesus. He no longer wanted to get even. He no longer had any wish to kill. He no longer needed to control or manage or predict or manipulate. He was not afraid of anything, because in prayer he had given himself utterly and completely into the care of God.

Thirty-some years ago outside Macy's convenience store, I was only an eleven or twelve year old boy. I had not yet decided to follow Jesus. So of course I was petrified of what Johnny would do to me when he showed up. But you know what? Johnny never came. I waited at least ten to fifteen minutes, but Johnny never came.

That was a long time ago, and now I am a different person. If a violent person ever again threatens to beat my face in, I hope to open myself to God in prayer, letting God do in me what God wishes, relinquishing my need for revenge, and receiving the gift of God's true freedom. Because that's how we become peacemakers.

The Conversion of Zacchaeus February 1 2004.rtf

Tue, 3 Feb 2004 15:08:16 GMT

The Conversion of Zacchaeus

Luke 19:1-10
Sermon by Dan Schrock

February 1, 2004

He [Jesus] entered Jericho and was passing through it. A man was there named Zacchaeus; he was a chief tax collector and was rich. He was trying to see who Jesus was, but on account of the crowd he could not, because he was short in stature. So he ran ahead and climbed a sycamore tree to see him, because he was going to pass that way. When Jesus came to the place, he looked up and said to him, "Zacchaeus, hurry and come down; for I must stay at your house today." So he hurried down and was happy to welcome him.

All who saw it began to grumble and said, "He has gone to be the guest of one who is a sinner." Zacchaeus stood there and said to the Lord, "Look, half of my possessions, Lord, I will give to the poor; and if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I will pay back four times as much." Then Jesus said to him, "Today salvation has come to this house, because he too is a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man came to seek out and to save the lost." (NRSV)

I don't know about you, but I grew up thinking that the only way to be converted was at a revival meeting. To get people saved at revival meetings, you find a really big place to meet, like a campground, or a large canvas tent, or a football stadium, or a convention center. You find a large place for the crowds and you persuade a famous preacher to come to town for a series of meetings. You get fabulous musicians to perform on the stage. You print glossy brochures, develop your own web site, and send out e-mails. You train counselors to help people confess their sins, say they're sorry, and sign a pledge card committing their lives to Jesus. Then you get people to pray, pray, pray for revival. In American Christianity, this is a venerable, tried and true way to do evangelism.

It's not what happens in Luke 19. We could certainly say that a famous preacher named Jesus comes to town, but it's hard to find anything else in the story of Zacchaeus that matches the way Americans have often done large-scale evangelism. People in Jericho did not form a committee to invite Jesus to town; in fact, nobody in Jericho knew he was coming until the minute he showed up. Jericho had a huge outdoor theater that Jesus could have held a large convention in, but that's not what he choose to do. ¹ There were no music bands, no posters, no round-the-clock prayer warriors. One day a plain-looking thirty-something man walks into town with a scruffy group of fishermen and other lower-class folk. He's just passing through Jericho on his way from Perea to Jerusalem.

There's a crowd, but that's normal because in the ancient world the streets are always full of people in the daytime, buying, selling, yakking with their neighbors. However, there's a peculiar knot of people around this ordinary-looking, thirty-something man; and Jericho's chief tax collector, a short guy named Zacchaeus, wants to see what's happening. So he gets out of his tax office and hops up into a sycamore tree. Sycamore trees have low branches, so they're easy to climb up into.

Nobody in Jericho is best friends with Zacchaeus. He's a tax collector, after all. How many people do you know who have tax collectors for best friends? I suppose most people in town knew who Zacchaeus was, because sooner or later most of them had to pay Zacchaeus taxes. Actually, tolls. Zacchaeus collected tolls. Anybody who transported stuff across a bridge, a river, or a political boundary usually had to pay a toll. The tolls were calculated at so much per axle, per wheel, or per animal. So far as we can tell, even pedestrians carrying nothing but the robes on their bodies had to pay tolls. ² Every time you wanted to cross a river or enter an area ruled by somebody else, you first had to stop and pay the toll collector.

Zacchaeus was the chief toll collector, which probably means he had a bunch of other toll collectors working for him. Zacchaeus likely didn't spend much time out at the toll booth by the local river. One of his employees probably did that, while he stayed in town and managed the business. Toll and tax collectors in the Roman empire were businesspeople, not government employees like they are today. Our toll collectors sitting in booths at the interchanges along the Indiana Toll Road or Ohio Turnpike are employees of the state. They earn a fixed wage regardless of whether they collect $1,000 or $11,000 on a particular day. They have health benefits and they get a pension when they retire.

That's not how it was in the Roman empire. Instead, toll collecting was a independent business. To show how it worked, I'll use a hypothetical example with U.S. dollars, so it's easier to understand. The Romans decided that every year they wanted to collect x amount of money from each province of the empire. For the province of Judea, we'll say they wanted something like $100,000. I haven't been able to find out exactly how much the Romans wanted from Judea, so we'll just say $100,000 per year. The Romans then made a deal with somebody who lived in Judea. You pay us the $100,000 at the beginning of each year, they told him, and we will give you the right to collect all the tolls in the province of Judea. You can charge other people as much as you want, we frankly don't care. That's your business. Just give us the $100,000 in advance, then you can do whatever you want to recoup your expense.

The guy who paid out $100,000 for the right to collect tolls in the whole province then turned around and made the same kind of deal with local toll collectors in each town of the province. He made a deal with somebody in Jerusalem, somebody in Hebron, and somebody in Joppa. Pay me $25,000 at the beginning of the year, he might have said to each of them, and I'll give you the right to collect tolls in your town. I don't care how much you charge the locals, just give me my money up front. What you do after that is your business. Since there were a lot of towns, the head toll collector in Judea probably made a handsome profit on his initial investment of $100,000.

Luke says that Zacchaeus was the chief toll collector in Jericho. At the beginning of each year, he paid the businessman above him a set fee, $25,000 in our hypothetical example. Now Zacchaeus has the right to charge local people whatever he wants when they travel in or out of town, when they cross a river or creek. He charges by the wheel, the axle, the animal, the person. His expenses include $25,000 to the guy above him, salary to his employees, office expenses, and building and maintaining toll booths. Whatever he makes beyond that is profit. ³
It so happens that Jericho was a wonderful place to be in the toll business. Jericho was in Judea, an area ruled by Pontius Pilate, but was located just five miles from the border with Perea, which was ruled by Herod Antipas. That meant that everybody who left Perea and traveled to Jericho had to cross a political boundary. Apparently a lot of people crossed the border, since the major southern road out of Perea went right through Jericho and on up the mountains to Jerusalem. Most of the olive oil that people in Jerusalem used had to be transported from Perea, because that's were most of the olive trees were. ⁴ Guess what? Zacchaeus' employees were waiting at the border for all those travelers and olive merchants, ready to charge everybody a toll. In addition, most of the dates that people in Jerusalem ate were grown around Jericho. Again, Zacchaeus' toll collectors were waiting at the outskirts of Jericho, ready to collect tolls on dates. All this traffic in people and transported goods apparently made Zacchaeus a very rich man. His business is going well. He's turning handsome profits.

Notice that nothing in this story criticizes business people. A lot of folks in Jesus' day had some sort of business to earn their living. Some business people raised sheep, some tanned leather, some wove cloth. This is not a story about business people. Instead, it's a story about somebody who has a lot of money and apparently keeps it all to himself.

One of Zacchaeus' problems is that people in town hate him. Ordinary people really hated toll collectors. We know that from other documents of the first century. First of all, toll collectors were in league with the Roman empire, and most people hated the empire. People thought toll collectors were traitors who supported the Roman occupation. ⁵ Second, most people thought toll collectors charged more money than was necessary. Since people just didn't like toll collectors, toll collectors were a lonely bunch of people. They didn't have many friends. As nearly as we can tell, Zacchaeus is rich in money but poor in friends. He has wealth, but not a community of people care about him, who ask him how his aged mother is getting along and who cook him hot chicken soup when he gets a cold.

So Zacchaeus hops up in the sycamore tree to get a good view of the small crowd walking up the street. When they gets to his tree, an ordinary-looking, thirty-something man from the crowd stops and looks up into the tree where Zacchaeus is leaning against a branch. Zacchaeus has never seen him before, but the man knows a thing or two about Zacchaeus. He, and the other people who came with him from Perea, each paid a toll to Zacchaeus' employees back at the border. Maybe back at the border this ordinary-looking, thirty-something man heard the locals grumbling about Jericho's chief toll collector who charges more than the locals think he should. Maybe during the five mile walk since then, he heard people talk about how rich the chief toll collector was. Maybe he even heard people crack jokes about how short the chief toll collector was. I don't know how Jesus knows, but he knows, and he even knows his name.

``Zacchaeus,'' Jesus said peering up into the tree, ``hurry up and come down; for I must stay at your house today'' (19:5, NRSV).

With an astonished look on his face, Zacchaeus hops off the tree to welcome this stranger (19:6). The crowd doesn't like this turn of events. In their eyes, Zacchaeus is a sinner, plain and simple. Good people like Jesus shouldn't have anything to do with bad people like Zacchaeus. So the crowd grumbles.

Standing there in the street looking at Jesus and sensing the disapproval of the crowd around them, Zacchaeus makes two mathematical decisions. ``Lord,'' he says to Jesus, ``I'm going to give half of everything I own to the poor.'' That's the first mathematical decision: to give half away to the under-privileged. Since there were no mission agencies or social service programs in those days, Zacchaeus probably means he's going to give half of his stuff directly to poor people he knows, the ones right there in Jericho. Since he's a rich man, this is a substantial amount of money. His second mathematical decision is that if he's defrauded anyone, he will pay them back four times the amount he swindled. Notice that important little word ``if.'' It sounds like Zacchaeus is not entirely sure whether he's actually defrauded anybody. Maybe he has; maybe he hasn't. But at the very least, he promises to check his account books and if he has, to generously refund the money four times over.

At this moment Zacchaeus converts. He calls Jesus ``Lord,'' which means Zacchaeus now accepts that Jesus has some kind of authority over his life. But Zacchaeus doesn't say some things we would expect to hear in a conversion story. Zacchaeus doesn't explicitly confess any sins. True, the crowd calls him a sinner, but the crowd often turns out to be wrong in the gospels. ``Sinner'' is not a word Zacchaeus uses for himself, and more importantly, Jesus never calls him a sinner either. In fact, Jesus says nothing negative about Zacchaeus. The only thing Jesus says to Zacchaeus is: ``I want to stay at your house.'' No criticism or judgment in that. Instead, it sounds like an offer of friendship to a lonely person who doesn't have much of a community. From now on, Zacchaeus belongs to the community of people who call themselves followers of Jesus.

Jesus gives Zacchaeus a new life of friendship, generosity, and business integrity. And Jesus says that salvation has happened.

Notes
1. Herod the Great had built a theater in Jericho, which still stood during the events of this story. So H.G.G. Herklots, Publicans and Sinners: A Study in the Ministry of Jesus (London: SCM Press, 1956), 48-49).

2. Herklots, 22.

3. John R. Donahue, ``Tax Collectors and Sinners, Catholic Biblical Quarterly 33 (1971), 49-54; K.C. Hanson and Douglas E. Oakman, Palestine in the Time of Jesus: Social Structures and Social Conflicts (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1998), 116.

4. Joachim Jeremias, Jerusalem in the Time of Jesus: An Investigation into Economic and Social Conditions during the New Testament Period (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1969), 45.

5. Donahue, 60.

The First Confrontation February 29 2004.rtf

Fri, 27 Feb 2004 18:01:46 GMT

The First Confrontation

Luke 4:1-12

Sermon by Dan Schrock
February 29, 2004
First Sunday of Lent

Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the wilderness, where for forty days he was tempted by the devil. He ate nothing at all during those days, and when they were over, he was famished. The devil said to him, "If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become a loaf of bread." Jesus answered him, 'It is written, 'One does not live by bread alone.'" Then the devil led him up and showed him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world. And the devil said to him, "To you I will give their glory and all this authority; for it has been given over to me, and I give it to anyone I please. If you, then, will worship me, it will all be yours." Jesus answered him, 'It is written, 'Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.'" Then the devil took him to Jerusalem, and placed him on the pinnacle of the temple, saying to him, "If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here, for it is written, 'He will command his angels concerning you, to protect you,' and 'On their hands they will bear you up, so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.'" Jesus answered him, 'It is said, 'Do not put the Lord your God to the test.'" (NRSV)

If we want to understand what is at stake in this story, then we need to understand something important about Luke's worldview. As he took a stylus in hand and sat down to write this gospel on a roll of papyrus, Luke had one great assumption foremost in his mind: that the world of human beings is ruled by the devil. ¹ You and I may be startled to hear that, because in twenty-first century North America we are not used to viewing the world that way. Our Anabaptist foreparents saw the human world as fundamentally evil, but we don't. The Anabaptists drew a sharp distinction between God and evil, between the true church and the rest of society. We tend not to think like they did. We mostly think the world is pretty good. Yes, of course, we know from reading the papers and watching the news that the world has a lot of brutality and meanness, but we don't necessarily believe the world is fundamentally evil, ruled by the devil. Many of us suppose that the world is not such a bad place. After all, it treats us pretty well.

Luke would disagree with us. In his mind human governments, human institutions, and human societies are covered in a thick shroud of evil. Luke believes that for thousands of years the devil and his demons have pretty much done as they pleased, within certain limitations set by God. The devil has ruled authoritatively over nations and empires and cities, over peoples and institutions. Luke finds proof of the devil's rule in the fact that so few people in the world worship the one God of heaven and earth, and that so many of them worship something else. So many people suffer from war and poverty and disease and demon possession or are trapped in magic (Acts 8:4-25; 13:4-12; 19:8-20). From Luke's point of view, most people in the world are in bondage to the devil as surely as the ancient Hebrews were in bondage to the pharaoh in Egypt. ² In this vast sea of evil, Christians are just a tiny, vulnerable group of people.

Therefore in Luke's theology the mission of Jesus is to fight the devil and to wrestle away from him the loyalties of people and institutions. The mission of Jesus is to shrink the rule of the devil and to expand the rule of God. If you want an interesting and mind-bending Bible study sometime, read through the gospel of Luke and then the book of Acts with one focusing question in mind: what evil is going here on in the story, and how do Jesus and his followers fight that evil? I think you will find it a very intriguing study.

For Luke the real battle between Jesus and the devil does not begin in chapter 2 with the birth of Jesus. If Jesus is going to fight evil, he has to be born, of course; but that's not where the real skirmishing begins. Jesus makes the first frontal assault on evil when he agrees to be baptized in chapter 3. There in chapter 3:21-22, Luke reports that after Jesus was baptized, the Holy Spirit descends onto him ``in bodily form like a dove,'' and then a voice from heaven announces: ``You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased'' (v. 22). The descent of the Holy Spirit and the pronouncement of sonship are God's way of announcing to the devil that the age-old struggle between God and evil has now taken a new twist: God's own flesh and blood, God's own holy power, are now entering this human world for the first time in history, to fight the devil where the devil lives, to confront the devil where the devil rules.

If you have been baptized into Christ, then you know what this is all about. You know from your own experience, I suspect, that the day of your baptism marked a significant turning point in the way you struggled against evil. For some of us, the struggle against evil actually intensifies after our baptism. After baptism we do not enter a hermetically sealed chamber that magically wards off evil so that we never see it, hear it, or feel it. No, after baptism the struggle with evil typically gets sharper, becomes more acute. The Holy Spirit, given to us in our baptism, may lead us to places in the world where evil is strong and nasty and fierce. The Holy Spirit may help us to discern evil in places where we never recognized evil before, such as the evil that lies deep within our own hearts. That's a little how it was with Jesusthe struggle against evil became sharper and sharper as his life grew longer. Immediately after his baptism, the Holy Spirit lead him into the wilderness to fight the first skirmish with the devil (4:1).

For people in the biblical world, the wilderness was a nasty place. When we think of wilderness, we think of beautiful glossy photographs of snow-crested mountains on Sierra Club calendars. We think of driving through the National Parks in our air-conditioned cars, with the windows safely rolled up and a well-stocked supply of food stashed away in the cooler back in the trunk. We think of a nice, tame wilderness.

That's not how people in biblical times thought of the wilderness. For them the wilderness was a dangerous, scary place, full of hyenas and wildcats, thorns and thistles, goat-demons and evil spirits such as Lilith, the night hag (Isaiah 34:13-14). The wilderness was not a place you ordinarily went into alone, for it could and sometimes did kill you. The wilderness was a place of evil.

Sure enough, the devil appears to Jesus in the wilderness. The devil will not take lightly this invasion by Jesus into the territory he, the devil, has been ruling. So the devil fights back with subtle, sophisticated temptations. ``Since you are the son of God,'' croons the devil, ``why not change this stone into a loaf of bread?'' Bread is a good thing. Bread feeds hungry people. Bread fights starvation. Just think of the fantastic good you could do by turning all the world's stones into bread! You are the Son of God: you can end hunger!

Evil often presents itself to us in just this way: packaged and advertised as something good. On the outside it looks like it will lead to security or justice or peace, but when you look a little more carefully you realize that inside it's evil. Smoking cigarettes looks cool, but eventually they kill you. A one-night stand looks harmless, but it messes up the relationships you value the most. Changing stones to bread looks like it will end hunger, but what happens when you use up the last stone? People will be hungry again the very next day, and you've done absolutely nothing to change the inner orientation of people. People's hearts will still be inclined to evil. Therefore quoting Deuteronomy 8:3, Jesus replies to the devil, ``One cannot live by bread alone.''

Next the devil shows Jesus all the governments of the world. ``Bow down and worship me,'' he says, ``all I'll give you all of them.'' Now on this point the devil is not lying. He is telling the truth. The governments of the world do belong to him. The devil does have authority over them, and he can in fact give them to anyone he pleases. Again, this offer looks good on the outside: for Jesus, Son of God, to have authority over all governments. Doesn't that sound good? But Jesus won't fall for it, because the price is devil worship, and Jesus will have none of it. Only God is to be worshipped.

Finally the devil takes Jesus to the highest point of the temple. ``Throw yourself down. Since you are God's Son, the angels will come and snatch you to safety before you hit the ground. It says so right in Psalm 91:11-12.'' Once again, it sounds good. There's even scripture to back it up. Why not perform a stunt in public to razzle-dazzle the crowds in Jerusalem? Prove to them all that Jesus is who the voice from heaven says he is, God's own beloved. Jesus resists this one too, observing that we should not test God, quoting Deuteronomy 6:16.

At that the devil departs, for a little while. So ends the first confrontation between Jesus and the devil, with the score 1-0. It will not be the last meeting between these two. For as long as his life lasts, Jesus will confront this devil again and again, at nearly every turn: confronting the evil of illness, the evil of demon possession, the evil of greed, the evil of brutality, the evil of violence. In the coming weeks of Lent, Anita, Heidi, and I will continue telling the story of these confrontations.

But let there be no misunderstanding in your mind about the outcome: in the end, God wins.

Notes

1. Susan R. Garrett, The Demise of the Devil: Magic and the Demonic in Luke's Writings (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1989), 38.

2. Garrett, 101.

The Long Hard Way August 22 2004.rtf

Sun, 22 Aug 2004 16:11:21 GMT

The Long, Hard Way
Luke 19:11-27
Sermon by Dan Schrock
August 22, 2004

As they were listening to this, he went on to tell a parable, because he was near Jerusalem, and because they supposed that the kingdom of God was to appear immediately. So he said, ``A nobleman went to a distant country to get royal power for himself and then return. He summoned ten of his slaves, and gave them ten pounds, and said to them, `Do business with these until I come back.' But the citizens of his country hated him and sent a delegation after him, saying, `We do not want this man to rule over us.' When he returned, having received royal power, he ordered these slaves, to whom he had given the money, to be summoned so that he might find out what they had gained by trading. The first came forward and said, `Lord, your pound has made ten more pounds.' He said to him, `Well done, good slave! Because you have been trustworthy in a very small thing, take charge of ten cities.' Then the second came, saying, `Lord, your pound has made five pounds.' He said to him, `And you, rule over five cities.' Then the other came, saying, `Lord, here is your pound. I wrapped it up in a piece of cloth, for I was afraid of you, because you are a harsh man; you take what you did not deposit, and reap what you did not sow.' He said to him, `I will judge you by your own words, you wicked slave! You knew, did you, that I was a harsh man, taking what I did not deposit and reaping what I did not sow? Why then did you not put my money into the bank? Then when I returned, I could have collected it with interest.' He said to the bystanders, `Take the pound from him and give it to the one who has ten pounds.' (And they said to him, `Lord, he has ten pounds!') `I tell you, to all those who have, more will be given; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away. But as for these enemies of mine who did not want me to be king over thembring them here and slaughter them in my presence.''' (NRSV)

We usually interpret this parable as a call to faithful stewardship. The typical interpretation of the parable goes something like this. The pounds, we say, are gifts or financial resources that God gives us to use wisely for the sake of God's kingdom. If God gives you the ability to play the organ well, then you should be a good steward of organ playing and use it to glorify God. If you make $50,000, you should use that income wisely and well. Whatever gift or ability you have, you should steward it well. All this is true. The Bible has lots of passages about careful stewardship.
But I believe this parable is about something else. I don't think it's about stewardship. Instead, I think the parable warns us that the world is going to continue being greedy, mean, and brutal. It says the world is not going to become Christian any time soon. It says God's kingdom is not yet fully here. It says there will always be a profound tension between Christian ethics and the world's ethics.
Let us begin with a simple question: on the day Jesus told this parable, would the people standing around listening to him have heard the same things we hear in the parable? After all, they were poor Palestinian peasants while we are middle class Americans. They lived in the first century, while we live in the twenty-first century. That culture and this culture are radically different. So how might they have interpreted this parable as persons of their culture and their time and their worldview? This morning I invite you to join me in trying to hear this parable with the ears of a first century Palestinian peasant. Please keep a critical mind this morning. Don't automatically assume everything I say is correct. Consider and decide for yourself.
Let's start by being honest about who we are. You and I are members of the American middle class. We are well-educated. We own homes, cars, and retirement accounts. We aspire to a more comfortable life than our parents and grandparents had. We assume society will respect our rights, that other people will value our skills, our expertise, and our personal qualities. If someone doesn't treat us fairly, we assume we can usually appeal to a higher authority for a redress of wrongs. If we're robbed, we can call the police. If elected officials do something we don't like, we can vote them out of office. Basically we believe the system is going to work for us. And for the most part, the system does work for us. We are middle class.
When in comes to economics, we assume there's an unlimited supply of goods and services, at least in theory. If there's a shortage of cars, it's not a big problem; we simply produce more. If there's a shortage of teachers, we train more of them. We know we can expand or contract the pie of available goods and services in order to match demand. We know that if one household buys two cars, that doesn't automatically mean someone else has to get along without a car. It might only mean that the factory worked overtime and produced more cars. ¹
When we read this parable, we read it though our twenty-first century middle class American eyes. We assume the money that the nobleman gives his servants represents good old capital investment. The first two servants take their money, invest it responsibly, make a nice profit, and are properly rewarded by the nobleman. The third servant is stupid, we think, because he refuses to invest his pound and just wraps it up for safe-keeping. In our eyes the nobleman correctly scolds this guy for not putting the money in a bank where he could at least have collected interest.
We middle class folk go on to develop an inner spiritual meaning of the parable. The nobleman represents God, we say, and the pounds represent spiritual gifts God gives us. God wants us to use these gifts responsibly for the advancement of God's kingdom. At the final judgment God will demand an accounting from us on how we've used our gifts. If we used them well, we'll be given more. If we used them badly, God will be angry and we might be punished.
That is more or less the standard, conventional interpretation of this parable. Now it could be that this is the best interpretation; but I have some serious misgivings.
The basic problem is that the lower class people who were standing around listening to Jesus when he first told this parable in the first century almost certainly did not understand it this way. First century Palestinian society only had an upper class and a lower class. Essentially there were no middle class people who could have heard it the way we hear it. In that world you were either rich or poor; and most of the people who followed Jesus were poor, including fishermen, paralytics, lepers, and widows. Jesus himself was poor. He had some contact with rich folks, but most of the people who hung around him were poor.
Poor people in the ancient world did not have many options. If someone took advantage of them, there was almost nothing they could do to seek justice. If somebody robbed them, there were no police to call; and if they appealed to a Roman soldier he would probably just laugh at them. If politicians did something they didn't like, so what? Nobody in government cared about their opinion and voting wasn't even an option. Poor people knew the system was not going to work for them. The rich took advantage of them at every turn. It always was like that and always would be like. They got no respect and had few personal rights.
When it came to economics, everybody in the ancient world agreed that the economic pie was a fixed size. They thought the supply of goods was limited. Because the pie could not get any bigger than it already was, whenever someone took a larger piece it automatically meant that everyone else got a smaller piece. So if someone made a profit and got rich, that person was automatically guilty of extortion and fraud. The notion of an honest rich person was a simply unthinkable. A truly moral person would only take his or her fair share.
Put all that in your mind for a moment, and try to imagine what people would have heard when Jesus told them this parable. Jesus begins by saying, ``A nobleman went to a distant country to get royal power for himself and then return.'' Later in the parable Jesus also says, ``But the citizens of his country hated the nobleman and sent a delegation after him, saying, `We do not want this man to rule over us.'''
Now almost none of Jesus' parables refer to any historical event, at least that we know about. They are probably stories Jesus created to make a spiritual point. But this parable is an exception. It seems to refer to something that actually happened. In 4 BC, Herod the Great died and three of his sons started squabbling with each other over who would succeed him. One of these sons was Archelaus, who in 4 BC sailed to Rome, where he tried to get more power for himself by appealing to the emperor Augustus. Archelaus wanted the emperor to give him the title of ``king,'' the same title his father had. But soon after Archelaus sailed for Rome, a delegation of about 50 Jews got together and decided they did not want Archelaus to rule them. So they also sailed to Rome to persuade the emperor to throw out all the sons of Herod the Great so the Jews could rule themselves. After the emperor heard both groups, he tried a compromise: he allowed Archelaus to rule, but gave him the title of tetrarch, which did not have nearly as much prestige as the title of king.
In the parable Jesus says that when this nobleman got home, he slaughtered the delegation that spoke against him. We don't know what the real-life Archelaus did to that delegation of 50 Jews when they all got back to Palestine, but we do know that for the rest of his reign Archelaus was brutal and assassinated a number of Jews.
What can we conclude from this? We can conclude that the people listening to Jesus never would have thought the nobleman represented God. In their minds the nobleman represented Archelaus, whom Jews thought was evil, unjust, and violent.
Now what about the servants and pounds? The people listening to Jesus would have thought that the servants and pounds belonged to Archelaus, this brutal ruler who tried to get more power for himself. The first two servants invest their money and make a outrageous profit with it, for the first servant a profit of 1000% and for the second a profit of 500%. If we stand for a moment in the sandals of the poor people around Jesus, assuming a world where the economic pie was thought to be fixed, we can conclude only one thing: those two servants make their outrageous profits by stealing what rightfully belongs to others! The first two servants are not heroes; they are villains! They are robbers who cooperate with an evil Archelaus to extort money that doesn't belong to them.
The third servant who does not invest his pound but simply wraps it up, is actually the hero of this story, at least in the eyes of a first century peasant. He does not use the money to extort others. Instead he acts honorably, justly, compassionately, because he stands up to Archelaus and refuses to participate in his brutal schemes. He follows his conscience. The third servant knows Archelaus is a harsh man, taking what he did not deposit and reaping what he did not sow. Of course the nobleman (or Archelaus) responds just as you expect a greedy ruler would: he harshly condemns the third servant.
I suggest that is how the people standing around Jesus would have heard this parable. Now what does it mean?
To answer this look at the context of the parable, especially at what happens just before it. Immediately before this parable is the story of Zacchaeus, a rich tax collector who unexpectedly has a conversion. He gives half his possessions to the poor and returns four times as much as he stole. Jesus says that today salvation has come to the tax collector, that Zacchaeus is now a member of God's kingdom. Then Jesus goes on to tell the parable of the pounds. Let me re-read the beginning of the parable, and as I do so, imagine Jesus, the crowd, and Zacchaeus all standing around that sycamore tree. Here's what Luke says:
``As they were listening [to Jesus pronounce Zacchaeus' salvation], Jesus went on to tell [the crowd] a parable, because he was near Jerusalem and because they supposed that the kingdom of God was to appear immediately.''
In other words, a bunch of poor people have just witnessed a wonderful miracle: Zacchaeus, a rich man who has stolen from other people, unexpectedly commits himself to giving it all back. Zacchaeus rejects greed, joins the kingdom of God, and refuses to take more than his fair share of the economic pie in the future. In the experience of those poor people, this was unprecedented. Rich people never had a change of heart. Yet here the kingdom of God was happening right in front of them! Just imagine what would happen if more rich people converted! Just think what the world would be like if all rich folks redistributed their wealth. If that can happen, maybe even people like Archelaus could convert too. Why, maybe even the emperor will soon become a Christian!
But Jesus knows it's not going to happen. Jesus knows that not all rich people are going to do what Zacchaeus did. So to temper the crowd's expectations, to help them be realistic, to prepare them for living in a world that is not going to share their values and their commitments, he tells the parable of the pounds. His message is this: yes, some powerful people like Zacchaeus will join the kingdom. But the world still has a lot of people like Archelaus and those first two servants. Rich and powerful rulers like Archelaus are going to keep right on ripping you off. They will keep right on taking more than their fair share of the economic pie. They are not going to treat you with justice and righteousness. Yes, a small handful of people in government might take a stand for a better way, just like that third servant did. Those people are heroes. But you need to know that the powers and principalities are going to sweep those few good people aside. The God's kingdom is not yet fully here. So you will be aliens in a world that rarely operates with the values of God's kingdom. When the world's powerful people do operate with the values of the kingdom, it will be a highly unusual occurrence. Governments won't bring in the kingdom of God. It just will not happen. You must rely on God, the true Lord of history, to bring the kingdom to its final fruition. It might be a long time coming. But it will come through the gracious power of God.
After Jesus finished telling the parable of the pounds, he went to Jerusalem, where in another week he would be arrested and killed. It's obvious that the crowds didn't understand what Jesus was trying to tell them in the parable. When he entered the city the crowds shouted and celebrated and danced because they thought Jesus was starting a new political kingdom. The crowds wanted the easy way out. They wanted to achieve God's kingdom by grabbing power and passing new laws to force their morality on other people whether those other people liked it or not.
Jesus allowed the crowds their moment of celebration and dancing. During his so-called triumphal entry into Jerusalem, he allowed them to wave palm branches and sing happy songs. But their way was not his way. Instead of grabbing political power, a few days later he allowed the political powers to grab him. Soon he was hanging on a cross, as naked as the day Mary birthed him, powerless and dead.
I don't know for sure, but maybe then the crowds finally got the point: if truly good things are going to happen in this world, God will ultimately have to do them. Until the end of human history, which may be far into the future, the followers of Jesus have no other choice than the long, hard way of speaking truth to a world that will not listen, of modeling faith to a world that will not watch, of witnessing to a world that stubbornly continues its injustice, brutality, and thievery.
The way will be long and hard, but one day it will come to an end! One day, injustice, brutality, and thievery are going to end. One day God is going to renew this old earth by the power of resurrection. One day God is going to heal and bless and save in astonishing ways we cannot yet imagine. Praise be to God!

Note
1. Bruce J. Malina and Richard L. Rohrbaugh, Social Science Commentary on the Synoptic Gospels (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992), p. 324. See also pp. 324-325 and 386-390.

The Power of One December 5 2004.rtf

Sat, 4 Dec 2004 14:59:07 GMT

The Power of One

Isaiah 11:1-9
Sermon by Dan Schrock
December 5, 2004
Second Sunday of Advent

A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots. The spirit of the LORD shall rest on him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the LORD. His delight shall be in the fear of the LORD.

He shall not judge by what his eyes see, or decide by what his ears hear; but with righteousness he shall judge the poor, and decide with equity for the meek of the earth; he shall strike the earth with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips he shall kill the wicked. Righteousness shall be the belt around his waist, and faithfulness the belt around his loins.

The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them. The cow and the bear shall graze, their young shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder's den. They will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain; for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the LORD as the waters cover the sea. (NRSV)

Sometimes is it said that one person cannot do very much. When we see an evil or an injustice in our world, sometimes we despair that we could ever do much to change it. The war in the nation of Sudan is a case in point. The civil war in Sudan has been dragging on now for 4 decades. Since war prevents farmers from raising crops, the Sudanese are not able to grow enough food, which in turn means a lot of people are starving, including children. Relief agencies are very concerned about this and are trying to find better ways of helping with food. Now handing out free food to starving people is a good and worthy thing; but as you know, it does nothing to help people stop fighting. Only when people stop shooting bullets at each other and start planting crops will the famine end.

And that's why it's easy to despair: how do you persuade people to stop a war? What can one person do to stop a war on the other side of the planet? Pray, certainly; but what else? The answers are not at all clear. I do not know what else to do. I feel powerless. I am sad. I despair, because it does not seem I can do much. And Sudan is only one of dozens of similar situations where hope for change seems slender. What effect can you or I have on war, hunger, poverty, racism, harassment, sexual abuse, joblessness, or any other evil you care to mention? It's a sad truth that sometimes there really is very little that one person can do to effect positive change. Often our ability to change things is extremely limited.

But this is only part of the truth. It is also true that in almost every situation there's at least one person who has tremendous power to make things different and better. In most situations, the main leader has quite a bit of power to change what happens; or in situations of shared leadership, the main leaders have quite a bit of power. In a nation this person who has the power to change things will be the president, premier, dictator, or king. In a school it's the principal, and in the classroom or laboratory it's the teacher. In a college or university it might be the president, provost, or dean. In a corporation it will be the chief executive officer or the division head. In a small business it might be the owner or the manager. In a church it will be the bishop or the pastor. In a committee it will be the chairperson. In a family it's the mother or the father. The key leaders in the organization, in the system, have enormous ability to effect change.

Some years ago I heard an anecdote about Edwin Friedmann that indicates how much influence a key leader has. Edwin Friedmann was a Jewish rabbi, pastoral counselor, and organizational consultant, and was a leading thinker in what is called systems theory. Toward the end of his life, Friedmann was a consultant to synagogues, churches, and other organizations that wanted to change the way they operated. The anecdote I heard is that when he arrived for a consultation, Friedmann only wanted to talk to the key leader: the rabbi, the pastor, the CEO, or the president. He was not interested in talking to anyone else. In his view, working with that one key leaderor in cases of genuine shared leadership, with the key leaderswas almost always sufficient to move the system toward change. Friedmann was not talking about dictatorial leadershipfar from it. The real power of leadership, according to Friedmann, was something he called ``the power of self-definition.'' Self-definition happens whenever the leader clearly articulates her or his personal preferences, goals, hopes, or visions; and then encourage other people in the system to respond to that self-definition in whatever way they want to respond. In other words, self-definition begins by stating your preferences and is followed by quiet patience and listening. Change of some sort usually happens in response.

Like us, the Old Testament prophet Isaiah lived in a time of war, famine, oppression, injustice, and other evils. During his lifetime, in the year 722 B.C., the northern nation of Israel was defeated by Assyrian armies under the leadership of Sargon II. Some Israelites fled for safety to places like Egypt, while others were captured and hauled off to cities in Assyria. Israel was torn into pieces, and in the vacuum of war evil flourished.

From within this context of despair, Isaiah offers his fellow Jews a vision of hope in chapter 11. We Jews live in a rather pitiful state of affairs, he says. We are like a grand, stately tree that the Assyrians chopped down. Things look gloomy because we appear to be dead, without hope. But sometime in the future, the Spirit of God is going to raise up a leader such as we have never known before. One leader: a key person whom Isaiah calls ``the shoot of Jesse'' (verse 1). This leader will not be at all like the typical ruler who operates the machinery of state in order to benefit himself and his rich cronies. No, upon this one ruler God's Spirit will rest. This ruler will be smart, insightful, and wise. He will be completely dedicated to God. He will not accept bribes to pervert justice, and he will not believe any of the propaganda people try to tell him. He will treat the poor fairly and strike down the wicked. He will be righteous, not capricious. He will be faithful, not selfish.

And you know what? This one leader, this king, will be so clear about who he isabout his vision, goals, and methodsthat the whole system around him is going to change drastically. Not only will the economy and social relations be just, but even the animals are going to change. The prophet's evocation of what will happen verges on hyperbole. It will be as if there is a re-creation of the world. Meat-eating animals will in effect become vegetarians: wolves will no longer eat lambs; lions will no longer kill calves; bears will not attack cows; and poisonous snakes will not bite little children.

This is powerful language, regardless of whether you think of it as literal or symbolic. One biblical scholar proposes that the predators in this passagethe wolf, leopard, lion, bear, and snakesymbolize the powerful nations of the world while the lamb, kid, calf, cow, and infant symbolize the weak and defenseless nation of Israel. He bases this symbolism on 5:29 where Isaiah refers to Assyria as a ``lion'' that attacks Israel and on 9:12, 20, and 21 where Isaiah speaks of the Syrians and Philistines as ``devouring'' Israel. If so, then this passage evokes a future where Israel and the nations of the world will live in peace. ¹
But either way, the text is clear that the future hinges on one person called ``the shoot of Jesse,'' who will be empowered by the Spirit of God, whose consistency and integrity of life will essentially change the world. To put it another way, his self-definition will change everything.

Now none of us is the Messiah. The shoot of Jesse in Isaiah 11 does not describe anyone in this room. And very few of us in this congregation are presidents or chief executive offers. But most of us are key leaders somewhere . Maybe you are the key leader in a classroom, an office, a department, a business, a committee, or a family. If so, then in that setting, in that system, you do in fact have tremendous power to effect change. If you are a key person somewhere, then you need not feel powerless in that situationbecause in that setting you are best person to change things.

I close with a story to illustrate the possibilities. You remember, I'm sure, how badly divided and violent the nation of South Africa used to be. Under apartheid, white South Africans systematically oppressed black South Africans. There were riots, hazings, lynchings, shootings. A lot of people died in the crucible of South Africa. No one knew how to end apartheid and heal a badly divided nation.

Until Nelson Mandela. When he became president of South Africa, Nelson Mandela practiced what some people called ``the politics of grace.'' Mandela did not try to change the world. He knew he couldn't do that. But he knew that as the key leader of South Africa he could begin to change South Africa. He knew that through the power of self-definition, he could all South Africans to move toward forgiveness, healing, and unity.

Approximately ten years ago this happened through the sport of rugby. I gather that rugby is big in South Africa, maybe a little like basketball in the state of Indiana. For many years the national rugby team, the Springboks, had been white. Black players were not allowed. Whites followed rugby avidly while blacks boycotted it. At one point the African National Congress, the leading black organization in South Africa, asked that at matches the mostly white fans not sing the old national anthem or display the old national flag from the days of apartheid. But white fans persisted. At one match between South Africa and Australia, the stands were filled with the old South African flag and 60,000 white voices sang the old anthem as if their lives depended on it. Consequently, rugby became yet another point of contention between whites and blacks.

Until Nelson Mandela. Mandela knew about the power of symbolic acts to encourage or discourage community. A few days before the World Cup, he went to visit the South African rugby team in private. He then emerged from the meeting, went on national TV, and stated to the entire country that before the end of apartheid, he, like most other blacks, rooted for whatever team was playing against the South African team. But now he urged everyone, white and black, to unite behind ``our boys.'' And there, standing beside him on national TV was the captain of the Springboks, a white man, who told the nation that the team was going to win the game ``for our president.''

That turned the tide. The whole nation seemed to swing behind the team, and to everyone's surprise they won the first game. Eventually the Springboks qualified for the finals. Once again Mandela acted. At the opening ceremonies of the finals, Mandela walked onto the field wearing the jersey of the Springbok team captain. The crowd jumped to its feet and erupted in a chant of ``Nelson, Nelson, Nelson''and most of the crowd was white. Later while touring the black townships, Mandela wore that same jerseyand again the crowds responded positively. Through such simple but powerful acts of self-definition, Nelson Mandela nudged his country toward healing and wholeness. ²
Now, what about you? What can you do in the place where you are the key leader?

Notes
1. Christopher R. Seitz, Isaiah 1-39 (Louisville: John Knox, 1993), 106-107.
2. Robin Petersen, ``Parable of the Kingdom: Rugby and Grace'' Christian Century , January 17, 1996, 36-37.

The Sign of A Baby December 19 2004.rtf

Sun, 19 Dec 2004 05:00:00 GMT

The Sign of a Baby
Isaiah 7:10-17
Sermon by Dan Schrock
December 19, 2004
Fourth Sunday of Advent

Again the LORD spoke to Ahaz, saying, Ask a sign of the LORD your God; let it be deep as Sheol or high as heaven. But Ahaz said, I will not ask, and I will not put the LORD to the test. Then Isaiah said: "Hear then, O house of David! Is it too little for you to weary mortals, that you weary my God also? Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Look, the young woman is with child and shall bear a son, and shall name him Immanuel. He shall eat curds and honey by the time he knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good. For before the child knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good, the land before whose two kings you are in dread will be deserted. The Lord will bring on you and on your people and on your ancestral house such days as have not come since the day that Ephraim departed from Judah--the king of Assyria. (NRSV)

We don't usually realize it, but the birth of Jesus Christ is a political event. The reason we don't usually realize it is that our culture long ago successfully turned the birth of Jesus Christ into a harmless, homey event that doesn't threaten anybody. In America, Christmas is largely about spending lots of money, getting lots of presents, and eating lots of food. Thanks to the domestication of Christmas, in our culture the birth of Jesus Christ has nothing to do with national and international politics.

Our culture is wrong. For New Testament Christians, the birth of Jesus Christ was very much a political event, and to show how this is so, I invite you to go back with me in time to about 2,700 years ago, to a brief conversation between two men. This conversation happened in the city of Jerusalem, ``at the end of the conduit of the upper pool on the highway to the Fuller's Field'' (Isaiah 7:3). The two men who exchanged words were King Ahaz of Judah and the prophet Isaiah.

To understand this conversation, we need to understand the political events that led up to it. By this point in time, the nation of Assyria had become the leading superpower in the ancient Near East. Everywhere smaller nations like Judah were terrified of Assyria, and for good reason. The Assyrians fielded the largest army to that point in time, some 150,000 to 200,000 men, and for the first time in history used all-iron weapons which were far superior to the bronze weapons previously used. ¹ As a result, the Assyrians crushed the opposition. After the army of Assyria started winning battles, word quickly got around that you didn't want to mess with those guys. Not only were they vicious in combat, they were also cruel to prisoners. The Assyrians themselves left us carvings that show how they poked their spears in the eyes of some captives to blind them, and how they stuck hooks through the lips of other captives, attached rope to the hooks, and then pulled on the rope to lead those captives around. ²

Smaller nations were scared spitless by all this. So in a desperate effort to protect themselves, two of the smaller nations, Syria and Israel, formed a military alliance with each other, hoping against hope that their combined armies might be large enough to keep the terrifying Assyrians at bay. These two nations then asked the equally small nation of Judah to join their alliance.

King Ahaz, the ruler of Judah, refused to join this alliance. He correctly judged that their three tiny armies could never defeat the powerful Assyrian army. However, the nations of Syria and Israel would not take no for an answer. They decided to attack Judah and force King Ahaz to join their alliance. So they assembled their two armies and surrounded Jerusalem, hoping that King Ahaz would join them. This attack scared King Ahaz so much that the text says his heart shuddered like trees in a windstorm (7:2). Worried about his own national security, King Ahaz then sent diplomats to the Assyrian king with an offer to form a military alliance with the Assyrians. He decided his only hope for survival was to outmaneuver his attackers by siding with the Assyrians.

That's when God sent the prophet Isaiah to have words with King Ahaz. You'll find the king out walking the streets by the upper pool on the highway to the Fuller's Field, God tells Isaiah, go and talk to him (7:3). Now whenever life crumbles around us and our hearts quake like trees in a storm, the Lord God offers us a choice: to trust in God, or to trust in our own puny human plans. That's why God sent Isaiah to Ahaz: to offer the king a choice between two different security systems. Don't be afraid, Isaiah assures the king, those two little pip-squeak nations of Syria and Israel are not going to defeat you. They are not even going to bother you again. Trust in God, and do not form a political and military alliance with Assyria. If you, O king, trust God for your national and personal security, then you will continue to rule the nation of Judah (7:4-9).

To prove God is telling the truth, Isaiah offers the king a special deal: ask for a sign of proof, any sign you want, and God, will give it to you. King Ahaz apparently knows his scripture, because following the advice of Deuteronomy 6:16, he says no, he would never put God to the test. At first glance the king's answer sounds pious, but it's not pious at all. Perhaps Ahaz knows that if he gets a sign from God, he will have to follow God's advice. He will have to put away his fear, end his overtures to Assyria, and trust in God's security. If Ahaz gets a sign, he will not be able to do things his own way; he will have to do them God's way. And that's precisely what Ahaz doesn't want to do. He does not wish to yield to the Lord God. Invoking false piety, the king refuses to ask for a sign.

Now the prophet Isaiah is not stupid. Standing there on the streets of Jerusalem listening to this political evasion, Isaiah sees what Ahaz is up to and decides to cut through the pious subterfuge. Ok then, he curtly says to Ahaz, God will give you a sign anyway. This is what will happen. Even as we speak, the young woman is pregnant with a son (we don't know exactly who this young was, but presumably it was someone the king and the prophet both knew). When this son is born his mother will name him Immanuel, God with us. By the time this boy eats adult food and quits nursing (in other words, by about the time he's two years old), the two nations who attacked you, Syria and Israel, will be crushed, and the Assyrian army that you've been negotiating with to protect you will in fact be at the gates of this city. Except that the Assyrian army will not be here to protect you, but to fight you and destroy you. Since you obviously have no faith in God, God sees no reason to have faith in you. You are obviously abandoning God to trust in armies and alliances, so God will now abandon you to those armies and alliances. You will be dumped unceremoniously from your throne. And all the while this baby, this son, will stare you in the face. His name, God with us, will be like salt in the wound of your soul, reminding you day in and day out for the rest of your sorry life that God is not with you, that you had your chance to keep your throne but you screwed up. ³
And with those words the prophet Isaiah turned on his heel and walked away.

These are sharp words. The seventh chapter of Isaiah begins with God offering the king mercy and grace, but when the king refuses, the chapter ends by God withdrawing that mercy and grace. Into this context of foreign policy and international politics, God inserts a baby who represents a choice between two vastly different security systems. On one side is the security system of alliances and armies, Humvees and Black Hawk helicopters. On the other side is the security system of a baby. When someone threatens the first security system, it retaliates by shooting bullets, dropping bombs, and humiliating prisoners. When someone threatens the second security system, it responds by singing hymns and praying like mad. The first system starts preemptive wars while the second loves its enemies with creative, astonishing initiatives. The system of violence acts as if this life is the only one that counts. The system of peace knows that this life is followed by a better one that lasts forever.

This text asserts that rulers and ruled have a choice: we can, like King Ahaz, choose to trust Humvees and Black Hawk helicopters, or we can choose to trust God's sign of a newborn baby, vulnerable, defenseless, but ever so full of promise and radical possibility. This is no small matter. We have a real choice, a choice God will respect. And our choice has huge consequences. If we choose to trust in Humvees and Black Hawk helicopters, then God will abandon us to that choice (Romans 1:18-25). Those who trust in swords and spears may very well end up dying by them. That is just what happened to the nation of Judah. In the due course of time, after a long history of trusting in its own armies and alliances, Judah was virtually annihilated by war. Its land was wrecked, its cities burned, its leaders exiled, its people impoverished.

However, that doesn't have to happen to us. If we choose the security system that this baby represents, then God will indeed be with us. If we side with the small but earth-shattering acts that God initiates in this world, then God will be with usnow, tomorrow, next year, forever.

I don't know about you, but if I were the nations, I'd be scared, because the tired old security systems are about to crumble. The sign of a new security system has been born to us, and his name is Jesus Christ, Immanuel. He is our choice.

Notes
1.       http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/gabrmetz/gabr0009.htm
2.       For an example, see the illustration on this website
3.      I follow the line of interpretation offered by Walter Brueggemann in Texts for Preaching: A Lectionary Commentary Based on the NRSV Year A , ed. Walter Brueggemann, et al (Louisville: Westminister John Knox, 1995), 28-30.

The Thorny Life July 25 2004.rtf

Sun, 25 Jul 2004 15:55:42 GMT

The Thorny Life

2 Corinthians 12:1-10
Sermon by Dan Schrock
July 25, 2004

It is necessary to boast; nothing is to be gained by it, but I will go on to visions and revelations of the Lord. I know a person in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven--whether in the body or out of the body I do not know; God knows. And I know that such a person--whether in the body or out of the body I do not know; God knows--was caught up into Paradise and heard things that are not to be told, that no mortal is permitted to repeat. On behalf of such a one I will boast, but on my own behalf I will not boast, except of my weaknesses. But if I wish to boast, I will not be a fool, for I will be speaking the truth. But I refrain from it, so that no one may think better of me than what is seen in me or heard from me, even considering the exceptional character of the revelations. Therefore, to keep me from being too elated, a thorn was given me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to torment me, to keep me from being too elated. Three times I appealed to the Lord about this, that it would leave me, but God said to me, "My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness." So, I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may dwell in me. Therefore I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities for the sake of Christ; for whenever I am weak, then I am strong. (NRSV)

What is your thorn in the flesh? What is the biggest frustration you face? The most vexing situation? What part of your life do you most want to change?

A woman once sent me a letter about her thorn in the flesh. For years she and her husband had tried to have a second child. Their first child, a girl, had been conceived relatively easily, after a few tries. But when they decided to have a second child, they had nothing but trouble. The first problem was their sheer inability to conceive. For two full years they tried every month, charting cycles, taking temperatures, the works. Nothing happened. In the third year of trying, they finally managed to conceive. But two months into the pregnancy, the bleeding started, and after they went to the hospital the doctor informed them their child had miscarried. But they kept trying. In the fourth year of trying, when their first-born daughter was eight years old, they conceived once again. The second month of the pregnancy passed, then the fifth, and the seventh. In the eighth month, the mother suddenly felt something go wrong inside of her, and then all movements in her womb stopped. She went to the doctor. They did an ultrasound. The baby, a boy, was discovered to be dead. Nobody knew why. But he was dead. Several days later they induced labor, and the woman gave birth to a dead son.

After all these experiences, the woman wrote me a letter, and in it she said this:

What do I want most in life? What is my deepest desire? I want another child! A living and perfectly healthy child, not a dead one or disabled one. Plain and simple. I have begged God for another child every way I know how to beg. I've prayed once a day, five times a day, out loud and in silence, through bitter and angry tears, prayed for months on end, banging on the door of heaven until my hands hurt. And I don't hear a single thing back from God!

So I'm stuck. I have come to believe that I'm not going to get what I want. I'm exhausted from trying so hard. I think somehow I am going to have to get along without a second child. It's not what I want, but I don't know what else to do, and even if I did know what else to do, I no longer have the energy to do it.

What is your thorn in the flesh?

Paul was plagued by a thorn in the flesh too. That's what he calls it, a thorn in his skin. The Greek word Paul uses for thorn refers to the kind of plant thorn you might get in your foot when you're walking outside without shoes, or to a wood splinter you might get in your finger when you're working with wood. But clearly Paul is using the word in a metaphorical sense. If it were a literal thorn, he'd get some doctor to pull it out. Even though the doctors in Paul's day didn't know very much about the human body, they certainly knew enough to pull a thorn or a splinter out of someone's skin. But no human doctor in the first century had the ability to fix Paul's problem, whatever it was.

People have tried hard to figure out what Paul means by this thorn in his flesh. They've suggested all sorts of possibilities, such as epilepsy, hysteria, depression, migraine headaches, eye problems, leprosy, malaria, or stuttering. But nobody really knows, or will ever know, because Paul simply does not give us enough details to make an accurate diagnosis.

Since no human doctor can fix whatever ails Paul, he goes to the divine doctor. In prayer he pleads three times for God to take away this thorn in the flesh, because in Paul's view the thorn is hampering his ministry, the thorn is making it harder for him to do the work God has called to do. In Paul's mind his prayer is a no-brainer, it makes perfect sense: you, God, have called me to travel around the Roman empire to proclaim that Christ is Lord and Savior, and not the emperor. You have asked me to help your Holy Spirit create alternative assemblies of Christians who are loyal to you and not to the emperor. You're the one who gave me this ministry! Now look God, I have this little thorn that makes my work harder. If you take this thorn away, I could be so much more effective. If I didn't have this thorn, I could convince hundreds, maybe thousands of more people that Christ is the true Lord! Just think of all the new churches I could help you start in places like Egypt and Spain and Gaul. I could operate at peak efficiency and effectiveness if I didn't have this blasted thorn in my flesh. Take it away. If you take it away, I'll be a far better Christian. Taking the thorn away will benefit both you and me. So do it.

No. That's essentially what God tells Paul. No, I am not going to take away your thorn in the flesh. Yes, Paul, I know very well that this thorn in your side came from a messenger of Satan. I know this thorn is a manifestation of evil. I know you don't like it. I know that you think it impedes your work, that you think it hinders your effectiveness. But I am not going to take it away. And here's the reason: because my power is made perfect in weakness.

God's power is made perfect in weakness.

Now notice that this thorn is not sin. If it were some sin in Paul's life, he'd ask God for forgiveness and the issue would end there. Instead this thorn is some impediment that life has laid down in Paul's path. It dogs him, nags at him, irritates him. It might be some kind of physical disability or some kind of mental disability, although we can't be sure about that. Whatever it is, other people apparently know about it, because some of the Christians in Corinth use it to belittle Paul. They say this thorn makes him a second or third-rate Christian. They say he's made out of inferior stuff. Some of those Christians in Corinth are even questioning the quality of Paul's spiritual life. God must not love Paul very much, they say. If the Holy Spirit were really in his life, then Paul would not have that thorn. Who ever heard of a Christian with a problem, a Christian with a weakness? In their minds Paul is like a soccer player who can't run very fast, like a chess player who tries hard but still makes stupid moves, like a cook who can't measure the baking powder accurately.

It's completely understandable why Paul would want God to take away that thorn. But God refuses, so that God's holy, divine power can become strongest in the weakest areas of our life. Again, this thorn is not about sin. There are plenty of rotten things that happen to us which have nothing to do with our sin. Instead they are limitations. They force us to reckon with boundaries beyond which we just can't go no matter how hard we try. These restrictions remind us we are human beings, after all, and not gods. These limits are simply part of the human condition, even a part of the Christian condition.

Most of us, maybe all of us, have a thorn somewhere. Your child does something that causes you deep pain, and out of that experience you realize that ultimately you cannot control your child, fix your child, even save your child. There is something about your spouse that irritates you to no end. It stares you in the face nearly every day. You want to change your spouse, you've tried every way you know how to change your spouse, but finally you accept that you cannot change your spouse. Your best friend spurns you for reasons you cannot figure out. You have an accident and some part of your body never again works the way it used to. You have some condition that you were born with, and there's nothing that you or anyone else can do to make it go away. Even if somehow you manage to pull one thorn out of your skin, life soon sticks you with another one. Your life is thorny.

In 2 Corinthians 12, God tells Paul, and us, that life will continue to be thorny. God will not pull the thorns out of our skin. God will not magically make them disappear. God will leave the thorns right where they are.

In the next breath, God astonishes Paul with a paradox, with something that sounds as if it could not possibly be true but in fact is true: you, Paul, will find me, God, in the very place you thought you would never find me, in the very thing you wanted to flush out of your life. I live inside your limitation. The restriction that frustrates you to no end is precisely where I am. The boundary beyond which you cannot pass is exactly where you will most profoundly meet me. The place that feels so dead to you is exactly where I live. Where you are feeble, I am strong. Where you are weak, I am powerful. The thorn that life stuck into your skin will now permit me to bless you, to kiss you, to express my love to you, in a way you have never experienced before.

Maybe God invites us to love our weakness, to grow fond of our thorn. I know a man who was profoundly lonely. He had a wife, yes, and children. He went to church every Sunday, served on various committees of the church, taught Sunday school, led singing in worship. A fine Christian manand he was lonely to the depths of his soul. He tried to find friends who would take away his loneliness, somebody, anybody, who could deliver him from what felt like a curse. But no matter how hard he tried, no matter how desperate he became, no matter how much he clung to the people around him, no one filled the vast void in the center of his life. He even cried out to God about it, begging to be delivered; but God was wrapped in silence. Finally the man sort of gave up. He opened his hands and let go of his need to have a friend, and slowly, ever so slowly, he got used to the loneliness.

After a while he noticed that the loneliness was not completely empty. Sometimes his loneliness shimmered, sometimes it moved a little bit, as if something or someone, was actually in the loneliness. Eventually he didn't think of it as loneliness anymore, but thought of it as solitude, and he began to realize that he sort of liked solitude. The solitude became like an old friend whom he had known for a long time, who was so thoroughly integrated into his life that it was hard to imagine life without the solitude.

One day the man went to a realtor and said, ``I want to buy a small house, a cabin really, in a secluded spot away from other people. Do you know of anything like that for sale?'' The realtor did, and soon the man signed the papers for a modest cabin in a wooded area at the foot of a mountain. Every Saturday from then on, the man drove to his cabin and spent the day in wonderful, splendid, glorious solitude, no longer empty, but full of life. He came to love his thorn, and found out that God lived inside.

This Adventure in God September 12 2004.rtf

Tue, 14 Sep 2004 19:13:12 GMT

This Adventure in God

Deuteronomy 1:21-25
Sermon by Dan Schrock
September 12, 2004

[Moses speaking:] ``See, the LORD your God has given the land to you; go up, take possession, as the LORD, the God of your ancestors, has promised you; do not fear or be dismayed. All of you came to me and said, `Let us send men ahead of us to explore the land for us and bring back a report to us regarding the route by which we should go up and the cities we will come to.' The plan seemed good to me, and I selected twelve of you, one from each tribe. They set out and went up into the hill country, and when they reached the Valley of Eshcol they spied it out and gathered some of the land's produce, which they brought down to us. They brought back a report to us, and said, `It is a good land that the LORD our God is giving us.''' (NRSV)

For more than a decade, I watched Star Trek on television. It was, in fact, my favorite show. I've probably seen every installment of the original Star Trek series, all installments of Star Trek: The Next Generation at least three times, and most installments of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Star Trek: Voyager . What I loved most of all about these shows was the sense of adventure they gave, of not knowing what exciting things you might find as you traveled to some new part of the galaxy. As Captain Jean Luc Picard said at the beginning of every show, ``Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. It's continuing mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no one has gone before.''

Much of the stuff on Star Trek is imaginary. But exploring strange new worlds is very much a part of our lives. Throughout history real life explorers have gone on lots of exciting adventures to see what no one has seen before. The Italian explorer Christopher Columbus adventured across the Atlantic, discovering a new world that he, at least, did not know about before. Explorers like Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett left eastern civilization behind and walked west into new territories few white people had ever seen before. Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, of the famous Lewis and Clark Expedition, explored new lands between the Mississippi River and what is now called Oregon. Stirred by the excitement of this adventure, other men eagerly signed on with the expedition even though they had no idea what might happen to them. Wilbur and Orville Wright, persistent bicycle mechanics from Ohio, tried and tried again before they finally figured out how to build a plane that would allow humankind to explore the air. The French explorer Jacques Cousteau invented the aqua-lung so that he and his colleagues could travel underwater to find out what life was like at the bottom of the sea. And then of course there was astronaut Neil Armstrong, who in 1969 became the first human to physically explore the moon.

For human civilization, outer space may be the final frontier. Maybe. But I propose that the most important frontier lies somewhere else. I suggest that the most important frontier is inner space, the territory of the soul where God meets us and we meet God. Our soul, our spiritual life, contains a vast inner space of mountains and valleys, of rivers and streams, of plants and wildlife, of deserts and wildernessmost of which you and I have not explored.

For some Christians, it seems as if the spiritual life is only about being saved. Visit some churches, and you'll hear an altar call every Sunday. In those churches the pastor uses every sermon to persuade you to walk down the aisle, get down on your knees, and repent of your sin. After listening to these altar calls Sunday after Sunday, you start to get the impression that for these Christians the most important thing is getting saved. You start to get the idea that once you're saved, there really isn't much more for you to do as a Christian. You're saved; you're redeemed by the blood of the Lamb; you know Jesus as your personal Lord and Savior; so now you can just sit back and take it easy. Sure, you need to avoid sin, go to church every Sunday, and serve on a church committee. But basically, you're all set now. You have your ticket to heaven. You're baptized, safe and secure, and there's not much else for you to do. Easy street.

The result, I suggest, is often shallow Christians. Shallow. Thin. Not very deep, not very mature, not very prepared to withstand the hardships and vicissitudes of life. Of course getting baptized is important! But baptism and church membership are only the beginning of the Christian life. Joining the church is not end, not the goal, not the best and highest spiritual achievement you can make. It's just the beginning! The Christian spiritual life is like a journey. Baptism is the necessary beginning to that journey; but if you pack your suitcase and open yourself to the direction of the Holy Spirit, God will eventually take you to places you've never been before. If you open yourself to God with integrity and sincerity and willingness, God will boldly take you to new, adventurous places. You will explore strange new worlds; you will find new life and a whole different view of human civilization. You will travel to mountains and valleys, streams and rivers, deserts and oases, woodlands and meadows that you didn't even know existed. You will taste and see God in gracious ways you once knew nothing about.

At the beginning of Deuteronomy the people of Israel are on a journey. Their journey began back in Egypt, when they were enslaved to the ceaseless work, the frantic busyness, of a world superpower. Their whole lives were oriented around working vast amounts of overtimefifty, sixty, seventy hours a weektrying to meet the goals set by higher ups, constructing monuments to institutional pride, serving the demands of corporate ego, and in the process losing whatever soul they had. They cried out to the Lord, and God heard their cries. God lead them out of Egypt and all it stood for, symbolically baptizing them in the Sea of Reeds, and setting them off on their great journey into the wilderness. Their journey was not always easy. During the journey they found it was more difficult to leave Egypt behind than they thought it would be. Out in the wilderness they found out that they were still attached to the material comforts of Egypt. And so God used part of their journey to purge them of their deep spiritual attachment to Egypt's material comforts such as fleshpots and fish, cucumbers and melons, leeks and onions and garlic (Exodus 16:3; Numbers 11:5).

In the huge stretches of wilderness they encountered a new world they had not known before. The wilderness was for them a vast undiscovered country, a world of rocky mountains and soaring eagles, a world of dry wadis that suddenly filled with fresh clean water after a rainstorm, a world of rippled sand dotted with sturdy plants and sometimes even lush oases teeming with life of all kinds. During forty years of exploring this world they learned to savor silence and slow time. They reveled in being rather than doing. They found out that spiritual growth came not from how much they could produce, but from how willing they were to say yes to God's odd, mysterious promptings. Through it all, God led them as a cloud by day and a fire by night. God provided them water and bread and meat when they needed it. Though frequently mysterious, God was also trustworthy; so consequently they learned to rely on God.

Here in Deuteronomy the people of Israel are poised to journey into the land of promise, for them yet another strange new world where they, at least, had not gone before. And Moses says to them: Now you're ready. During these forty years in the wilderness, God has been preparing you spiritually for milk and honey. Without fear or dismay in your hearts, go into this new world. Cross over. Enter it. Explore it. Revel in it. Taste it. Experience God in it. Let your adventure in God take on new qualities.

In a sense, this story illustrates some of my own Christian journey. Ten years ago the church Jenny and I belonged to gave me a three month sabbatical. Of course that meant I had to decide what to do with it. Because it was the first sabbatical I ever had, I wanted to use it wisely. I wanted to get the most out of this sabbatical that I possibly could. I wanted to choose something that would benefit me and the congregation I served. I had lots of ideas about what I could do, some of them silly and some of them serious. For months I dithered over this decision. I prayed. I wrote in my journal. I got advice from Jenny. But for a long time, I had no clear sense of direction. I was in a kind of crisis.

Late that summer a breakthrough finally happened, although it was not the breakthrough I expected. We were on vacation and had traveled east to visit Jenny's parents in Pennsylvania. One afternoon I took a leisurely walk around the retirement home and came to a decision about my sabbatical. It was almost as if the decision was given to me, as if suddenly I knew what I needed and how I could respond to that need.

On the walk that day at Rockhill Mennonite Retirement Community, the veil was torn away. I realized how shallow my own Christian life was, and that what I wanted more than anything else was spiritual growth. I had been a follower of Jesus for 23 years and had been in major church leadership positions for 11 of those years. I had completed 4 years of voluntary service in Mennonite Central Committee. I had gone to seminary. I had become a pastor. Because of all these events I had plenty of opportunities to practice Christian faith and to study Christian faith. But inside I was hollow. I was pretty sure I did not need spiritual ``renewal'' in the sense that we normally understand that term. I did not need to go to a Billy Graham crusade; nor did I need to have some charismatic experience that would supposedly fill me with the Holy Spirit. No, I had already been saved and had already received the gift of the Holy Spirit. That was not the problem.

What I really needed was spiritual growth. Yes, I knew very well how to use all the tools of the Christian journey. I had been given the passport of baptism and received the life insurance of hope. I knew how to interpret the map of Bible study, how to use the compass of prayer, and how to read the road signs of faith. But I hadn't traveled much of anywhere yet. I could tell the difference between south and north, east and west, but I had never explored anything more than a few blocks away. I had heard a few deeply spiritual Christian explorers talk about something called the Rocky Mountains, and I could see where these mountains were labeled on the map; but I had never traveled there to see them with my own eyes. Other Christian explorers described what it was like to hear the sound of waves crashing on the Maine shoreline; but since I had never heard this sound with my own ears, I really had no idea what they were talking about. Some explained to me the musty smell of an Arkansas woods after a heavy rain; but alas, I had never been to Arkansas so I did not understand. For 23 years of Christian living I had stayed on the easy chair in my living room, leaving only occasionally to see what life was like 2 or 3 blocks away, but never leaving the familiar landscape of my own street, much less traveling to another state, another country, or another continent of what God has to offer.

In other words, on that summer day in 1994 I realized that the Christian spiritual life was a vast new world waiting for me to discover. I knew of some other Christians who had explored parts of that world and had returned to tell about it, people such as Thomas Merton, Henri Nouwen, Mother Teresa, Christine Weaver, and my own father. But I had never been there, and so far as I could tell quite a few of the Christians I knew had never been there either. So I decided to go. I packed my suitcase and set out on a journey to see and hear and taste for myself. I wanted to experience what I had only read about and heard about. I wanted to immerse myself in this new world, to see where God might take me. I decided that during my sabbatical I wanted to read books by Christians more mature than I. I wanted to learn from people who had explored some of the farthest reaches of God's vast country. I wanted to become an adventurer myself.

I do not have time to tell you right now about all the adventures that have happened to me. Maybe as time goes on I'll tell a few stories here and there. But what I will say now is that I am still journeying in the wilderness. I think I've left Egypt, mostly, although certain aspects of Egypt still live in me. Be that as it may, I do know I've not yet arrived at the border of the Promised Land. I'm still mucking around in the wilderness, attending to God as best I can, learning to be, learning to watch, learning to wait, learning to trust. In the last ten years I've explored some of the wilderness but certainly not all of it. I do not know what lies around the corner, what I will see on the other side of that mountain just ahead, or what streams I might encounter. But as nearly as I can tell, my mission is to explore God's strange new world, to seek out new life, and to boldly go where I have not gone before.

So what about you? What exploratory mission are you on?

This Portable Sanctuary April 18 2004.rtf

Tue, 20 Apr 2004 16:41:51 GMT

This Portable Sanctuary

Daniel 6
Sermon by Heidi Siemens-Rhodes

April 18, 2004

I'd like you to take a moment and think about your body. We don't do that very much in church, I suppose, but here goes. Take a moment to recognize yourself, not evaluate, but become fully aware of yourself as a physical person, here in this room, on the chair where you are sitting, breathing the breaths you are breathing. You may want to close you eyes for a moment.

Remember, we are here in spirit and in body, we are loved by God, and other people, in spirit and in body, and we worship and pray in spirit and in body, as Daniel did in the scripture we just heard. We'll get back to Daniel and his prayer life a little bit later.

We who sit here in our bodies this morning have been told a number of dangerous lies about them, about our bodies. There is a strain of philosophy, represented by the French philosopher Rene Descartes' quote, ``I think, therefore I am,'' that says the mind and spirit are good, and the body is bad. Some passages in the New Testament about the flesh and the spirit could be read in this way, too. Another lie that we have been told, a prevalent lie in the culture around us, is that our body is about sex and only sex, and that our sexual identity is the very core of who we are. Lastly, we are told every day by the advertising that surrounds us that what we look like, our physical being, is an accurate measure of what we're worth. Many of us struggle with body image not because we actually feel terrible in our own skin, but because we don't quite meet up with the Hollywood image of personhood.

I have named these ideas about our bodies as lies, but I suppose they are closer to half-truths. It's true that we can identify and differentiate between our mind and body, to some extent; and we are indeed sexual beings; and our bodies do represent, in a sense, our worth. But in contrast to the magazine and TV ads, the Bible teaches us that all of our bodies are of equal worth, of great worth. Our bodies and the pains and pleasures they bring us are holy. God created us, not just spirit, but body, from the dust of the earth, shaped into God's own precious imageour bodies reflect who God is. And Jesus became incarnate, took on the flesh that we share, further hallowing and honoring the physical body. Those of you who have seen Mel Gibson's movie, ``The Passion of the Christ,'' will likely not soon forget Gibson's graphic depiction of the physical suffering Jesus endured. On the other end of the spectrum, the Gospel of Matthew tells us that Jesus so enjoyed eating and drinking that he was criticized by some as a glutton and drunkard. Even more importantly, in this season of Eastertide, we are reminded that Jesus' body rose again, leaving the tomb empty. Our bodies are important to God.

There are a number of passages in Paul's letters in the New Testament that reflect this theology of the body as holy. In I Cor. 6:19 Paul refers to our body as a temple of the Holy Spirit. We are further urged by Paul to glorify God in our body. Then in Romans 12 Paul writes:

I appeal to you…brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of Godwhat is good and acceptable and perfect.

In a book about children and prayer by Betty Shannon Cloyd, the phrase ``this portable sanctuary'' is used to describe our body as the residence of the Holy Spirit. As children, most of us were likely told that when we accepted Jesus, he would come into our hearts, and while we probably guessed that the teacher or evangelist didn't mean Jesus would be in the blood and muscle of our physical heart, still, this metaphor gives us a sense of God within us, not just looking down at us from heaven, or listening to our thoughts from afar. God is with us.

So how do we then pray, if all this is true? We read numerous accounts in the Old Testament of the covenant people, individually and as a group, dancing and kneeling, bowing and falling on their faces before God. These same postures of prayer, as well as standing to pray, lifting hands and laying on of hands are also evident in the New Testament and documents of the early church. ¹ We know that it was the practice of the early church to stand and face the east, holding their arms up and out, almost in the shape of a cross, to say the Lord's Prayer. I was at a worship time at the seminary yesterday where Professor Willard Swartley led us in this ancient practice. I happened to be on the west side of the room, and the forest of raised arms in front of me was very beautiful. These days at Berkey Avenue we practice the embodied prayer of communion, and footwashing. I was in Iowa on Maundy Thursday this year, but I hear that footwashing was a meaningful part of that service here at Berkey. These are a couple of embodied practices that we retain as a community, and there might be more that you would name.

However, I suppose most of us pray with our minds more than our bodies. I know I do. Especially in public, but in private as well. When I pray I quiet myself and focus my thoughts on God, and this is good. But I have felt a longing recently to connect more deliberately to God in the action of the body God has given me. Good, you say, so you have begun using your body more in prayer, then! Well, no, I haven't done much yet. And why not? For one thing, I'm used to the practice of stillness. And then there's the shyness factor. Feeling shy at home, alone? Perhaps not as much as in public, but even at home I find myself feeling silly when I sense that my hands want to turn up, to open to Godbut do I need to do this? God doesn't require me to pray in any certain way…and so on, the inner dialogue drones on, and I have yet to develop a regular practice of embodied prayer.

This is a trend I wish to break. For all the reasons I have mentioned this morning, and for another: on those rare occasions when I have allowed myself to raise my cupped hands to God, to kneel, even to lie flat on the floor or dance in God's presence, these simple acts have opened me to God in ways deeper and more moving than words. In my portable sanctuary, the temple of my body, prayer has become true worship.

This morning's story of Daniel in the lions' den is a favorite Bible story, full of intrigue and courage and miracle, but I've only recently been reminded that this is a story about prayer as much as it is about lion-taming! Daniel, a captive in a culture not his own, is a model for us as we navigate the culture we live in, which so often lies to us about who and whose we are. There are four things I'd like us to notice about Daniel's prayer life:

·         It was regular. He prayed three times a day, year in and year out.
·         Secondly, it was more than just thinking thoughts about God. Daniel faced Jerusalem, the holy city, and knelt to pray. We don't know what words he prayed, or whether he prayed in words at all, but we are told that he adopted a prayer posture, a physical position, that was different from his regular way of being.
·         Thirdly, Daniel's prayer practices were non-negotiable. Nothing was more important to Daniel than meeting God daily in prayer, not even the threat of a ridiculous, but menacing, law.
·         The fourth thing about his prayer life is perhaps more a result of the three above: Daniel's prayer life, in this story, got him into very dangerous circumstances, but the God to whom he prayed rescued him. Daniel's prayers were effective: they connected him in a powerful way to his creator and savior.

I can remember being encouraged by scripture and church practice and sermons to pray regularly, and in all circumstances. But I am challenged by Daniel's practice of kneeling, and orienting himself toward God's city. The Mennonite Church has in the past had a tradition of kneeling to pray, I understand, but we don't do that together much anymore. Taking a different stance when we pray at home, with our family or alone, may still be happening, but it seems sort of old fashioned, doesn't it? And I think that's a problem. We have been given so many other ways than words to express our prayers to God. How often do we settle for a quick prayer on-the-go, when slowing down to kneel or raise our hands would be a truer gift to God, God who loves us and longs for our time and attention?

How can we heal our prayer-body split, to worship and pray from within the temple God has given us? Here are several bits and pieces of an answer to this that I have picked up in my reading, and I would love to hear other ways that you may already be doing this.

·         As I suggested, we can try different postures: praying on our knees, raising or simply opening our hands, or other ways of physically indicating that our attention is on God. For some of us this may be a struggle. But we can tell ourselves, echoing the many biblical messengers of God, be not afraid! And be not embarrassed! This gesture is for God, whose words and hands created us.
·         We can try prayer walking, where the rhythm of our steps becomes a part of the prayer. When Jewish theologian Abraham Heschel walked in the civil rights marches with Martin Luther King, Jr., afterward he said, ``My feet were praying.'' ²
·         We can choose a simple activity that causes us to slow down, like dusting or brushing our teeth or cooking a familiar dish, and use that time, every day or as often as we do it, to pray.
·         Mitch and I have enjoyed learning prayers with actions that we can do with our son Theo, even though he hasn't begun to do the gestures with us yet.
·         Writing by hand (or typing, perhaps) is another way to slow down and use our body's action to make our prayer more deliberate and focused. How many of us have experimented with keeping a prayer journal?

Just as God created you a unique person, God has given you ways to use your body in prayer, ways that will fill your portable sanctuary with joy and communion with God. Have you found those ways? These days I have begun to feel God's presence close to me as I stretch my arms high in prayerthis is usually over Theo's crib in the dark of the night after I have finally succeeded in putting him back to sleep. This God-ward stretch brings me back from the feelings of frustration I may have been experiencing, and reminds me that life is a miracle and a gift.

My mother has been an example for me as I begin to form my own practices of embodied prayer. I want to close by sharing with you the story of her prayer cranes, a story which illustrates how embodied prayer practices can gain meaning over the course of a lifetime. My mother currently works in human resources at Mennonite Central Committee, but her first career was as an elementary school teacher. Peace and justice were key themes in her teaching, and she and her sixth graders would yearly read the story of Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes , a story which we have in the Library here at Berkey Avenue. Sadako Sasaki was a Japanese girl who was living in Hiroshima when the atomic bomb was dropped on that city in 1945. She contracted leukemia because of the effects of radiation from that event, and she died at the age of 12, but not before folding many paper cranes like this one. The crane symbolizes long life and good fortune in Japan, and grouping 1000 paper cranes increases the power of the symbol. After hearing this story, my mother and her students would fold cranes as they prayed for peace between nations and healing for victims of war. That was the first step of this embodied prayer practice.

The second development came when Mitch and I decided to go to Japan after graduating from Goshen College. My mother folded a paper crane daily while we were there, remembering us to God with her hands. After we had been there three years, she had folded over 1000 paper prayer cranes. Then last spring she folded cranes while God was knitting together our son Theo, one crane every day from January 1 ^st until the day he was born, which was a year ago next week, by the way.

The third step in the development of my mother's prayer cranes has become even more personal. I shared with the congregation this December that she has been dealing with breast cancer. It was caught very early, and she has responded incredibly well to surgery and chemotherapy (she has a beautiful head!), and she is now nearing the end of her radiation treatments. This final passage from cancer patient to cancer survivor has been made more meaningful for her as she reflects again on the life of Sadako, who would be close to her age if she had lived. Sadako's life was snuffed out by radiation, and my mother's life is being saved by that same force. As she waits for her daily radiation appointment, she folds a crane, using papers given to her by family and friends, papers which they have inscribed with quotes and well wishes. Her fingers fold elegant, sturdy, prayers of hope.

How do you inhabit your own portable sanctuary? How do you use all that you have and all that you are when you pray? How do you offer your body to God as a living sacrifice?

Notes

Schroeder, Celeste Snowber. Embodied Prayer: Harmonizing Body and Soul. Ligouri, MO: Triumph Books, 1995.

Sweeny, Jon M . Praying with Our Hands: 21 Practices of Embodied Prayer from the World's Spiritual Traditions . Woodstock, VT: SkyLight Paths Publishing, 2000.

Thoughts on Communion July 11 2004.rtf

Thu, 15 Jul 2004 13:59:26 GMT

Thoughts on Communion

Matthew 26:26-29
Sermon by Kelly Shenk

July 11, 2004

While they were eating, Jesus took a loaf of bread, and after blessing it he broke it, gave it to the disciples, and said, "Take, eat; this is my body." Then he took a cup, and after giving thanks he gave it to them, saying, "Drink from it, all of you; for this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins. I tell you, I will never again drink of this fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father's k ingdom."

My very earliest memories of communion are at Olive Mennonite Church. Until I was in second grade, my dad was the pastor at Olive, where church was more formal than the way church is here at Berkey. My communion experience there reflected that formality. Children did not actively participate in communionthat was only something for the baptized adults. I remember the adults passing the tiny cups of grape juice down the aisles and gulping it down along with the bread. I really wanted to be a part of it all, not because of anything that the ritual really meant, but just because it seemed so exotic and forbiddenthat juice in those little miniature cups and the bread that I was never allowed to taste. Then I got a new taste of what communion meant when my family started attending Berkey. There it seemed so strange to have grapes and crackers for the kids. But it was something I didn't think about too much; it was just another new experience along with the many other new things I found at Berkey. When I got a little older, in middle school, communion began to feel rather awkward for me even though not many kids in Jr. High were baptized. I didn't feel like a little kid anymore, but I wasn't allowed to have the bread and juice. Then at the end of my freshman year at Bethany, I was baptized and began going through the communion ritual myself. I must say that it has not been a significant part of my spiritual journey. Often I have gone through the ritual without really thinking about what I am doing, just worried about whether I'm dropping any crumbs or dripping any juice. I haven't experienced great revelations when partaking of the bread and juice. So it was a rather daunting task when I sat down and tried to start writing a sermon about it, especially my first one. And yet, when I do sit down to think about it, communion is a significant part of Christianity and can be integral to faith, if it is allowed to be, and if we can figure out why we do this ritual, eating the bread, drinking the wine(or juice) over and over and over again. And Mennonites don't even do it that often compared to some denominations. Catholics practice communion every Sunday. So what makes this ritual so important that we go through with it so many times, when it was first instituted centuries ago. What does it mean to me? Why did Jesus tell his disciples to eat and drink, saying it was his own body and blood?

To get something out of communion todayfor me to relate to it, it's helpful for me to try and understand what the disciples might have gotten out of communion at the Last Supper. To go back to the original Last Supper, it makes the most sense to consider the scene through the eyes of the disciples. Sometimes they were pretty clueless about what was going on, which I'm sure is the exact same way God sees me sometimes (if not a little, or a lot, more confused than them).

Jesus and the disciples came together to eat the Last Supper, which was originally intended to merely be a traditional Passover meal in remembrance of when God had passed over the houses of the Jewish slaves. The disciples and Jesus probably ate it while lying down since that was the custom for Jews on festive occasions, to recline on low sofas or cushions. Because this meal was first intended to be a Passover meal, the plan, as understood by the disciples, was to have the normal rituals and stories that went on at any other Passover meal. Jesus kept some of the traditions, to a certain extent, but he also had a surprise in store for the disciples. For a Passover meal, there are cups of wine that are served throughout the meal, each with its own story, prayer or blessing along with it. The first cup is served with a blessing after which each person dips a vegetable into salt water to remember the Jews' escape from slavery and the crossing of the sea. Matzah, or unleavened bread, is then eaten to remember the hurry the Jews were in when they left Egypt and took unleavened bread with them. This bread and the cups of wine are traditionally served by the father or host who leads the family or group of people through the ceremonies. At the Last Supper, this role was naturally taken on by Jesus, and up to the point of handing out the bread, it seemed like a pretty routine Passover meal, given the circumstances. Normally, when serving the bread, the flight from Egypt is remembered, but this time, Jesus made no mention of that. He said to the disciples, ``Take, eat; this is my body.'' When hearing this, the disciples would have been surprised, even shocked. Here they were, expecting to hear the same story they'd heard so many times, and then Jesus went off on some tangent telling them to eat his body. But they did what he said, and the meal continued. I'm not sure exactly what happened next, but traditionally, the next part of the meal would be the main course, in which lamb is eaten. Then Jesus would have served the second cup of wine, which is when the exodus story is usually told and prayers for the future of Israel are recited. Jesus, however, used the words, ``Drink of it, all of you; for this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins.'' Again, the disciples would have been wondering what was going on. Some of them might have been offended that Jesus was straying so far from the traditional Passover rituals. However, by inserting this sacrament into the Passover meal, Jesus was assigning a certain amount of worth to the event. Because this Last Supper was set during the Passover, it carries the full significance that Jesus meant it to have. Passover at that time was, and still is, a core part of Judaism. Jews celebrated it regularly and knew that it symbolized God's faithfulness to them as a people and their freedom from bondage in Egypt. And so Jesus just reached or stepped into the middle of this age-old celebration and instituted the tradition that is called communion today. This showed the disciples the importance of what he told them. It showed them that this new ritual was as central and significant to their faith as Passover had been beforethat eating and drinking in this way should be held with the same consideration and seriousness as the Passover.

So there are some things that make sense to me about communion, such as why it was inserted in the middle of Passover. But there are also many things that are very confusing about the whole tradition. I couldn't tell you why Jesus set the whole ritual up the way he did. Why did he tell the disciples to eat his body and drink his blood? It was this kind of language, to ``eat of the body'' and ``drink of the blood,'' that led to early Christians being accused of cannibalism. Why would Jesus use these confusing, controversial words? I don't know. Maybe to be sure he made an impact. Or maybe he had his own reasons, his own symbolism that is just too tough for me to figure out. However, although I still have countless questions and lay no claims whatsoever to be an expert on communion, I've tried to simplify things a little for myself. As I've pondered, I've found some different ways that I think communion can be important, or significant in my life.

One way I can look at communion is to see it as a confessional ritual. To pay for their sins in the Old Testament, people sacrificed animals, but now, because of Jesus, we don't have to do that anymore. Jesus was the ultimate sacrifice, and his blood was shed to pay for every sin that a human has committed or ever will commit. And so, through the drinking and eating of communion, we can experience the confession and forgiveness that it symbolizes. Before partaking of the bread and juice, it is helpful to acknowledge and repent of the sins that we have committed, and through the drinking and eating, we know that Jesus' body, this bread, and his blood, this wine, were destroyed and poured out to wipe the slate clean for usto be the sacrifice for us, so we do not have to pay for our sins. (slight pause) Now…all that I've just said is a whole bunch of ``God-talk.'' This term was introduced to me by Kathleen Norris. She wrote a book called ``Amazing Grace'' in which there is a chapter about religious talk that uses many big words, many Christian terms that can be confusing when I sit down and try and puzzle out exactly what they mean. So really, what does it mean for me to look at communion as a confessional ritual? Well, through participating in communion, we acknowledge the bad things we've done, as well as the fact that they don't matter, that Jesus came so that all those bad things are wiped away. By going through with communion, we know the many things we've done wrong and will continue to do, but we can also simply know the immense love God has for us no matter what.

Another way to look at communion is to see it as a ritual of celebration or remembrance of Jesus' life. By eating and drinking of what are symbolically his body and blood, we can be thankful for all that Jesus has done for us. We can lovingly remember his teachings and the suffering and pain that he went through. Communion is a ritual that helps us to connect back to Jesus' time and the Last Supper he ate with the disciples. Because it has gone on for so many hundreds of years and is so widely practiced, it can also be an act to remember the richness of the tradition. Communion has widthit is practiced by many all over the world. It has depthit has been practiced over and over again countless times since Jesus first started it. I can connect with communion as a ritual of remembrance when I think about some other traditions that I have been a part of. For the past four years, the Bethany Women's Soccer Team has played in the sectional final game, always on a Saturday night. It was around my freshman year of high school that the tradition was started of getting together to have a meal and watch ``The Big Green'' before the final game. For those of you who might be unfamiliar with ``The Big Green,'' it is the classic kid's sports movie, where a whole bunch of kids who have never kicked a soccer ball before form a soccer team and end up winning the league championship. All of the girls on the Bethany team have seen it many times before, but watching it together has become a ritual, a tradition, that in it of itself is fun and meaningful. But it means much more when practiced within the context of the past years. When you know that something has been done in exactly the same way in the past, and that you are continuing that tradition, it gives you the feeling that what you are doing is more important than just your experience at that time. You are part of the continuation of something that is biggera celebration that is wider and deeper than just the act in itself. It is a celebration in itself, but it also goes back to a celebration of past years' success. In the same way, communion is a celebration of what Jesus does for our lives for today, in addition to the difference he made in the past through the crucifixion.

The community aspect of communion is another idea that can be focused on. The first communion, the Last Supper, was a community gathering. The disciples and Jesus reclined in a room and ate a meal together. As it has been emphasized so many times before, we Mennonites know how to fellowship around food. Dan even preached a sermon about how meaningful time spent around a table can really be. Personally, I have experienced this every Wednesday night when my small group meets for supper. This has been a part of my life for about ten years, and though my attendance has been less regular in the past year or two, due to the many activities I find myself caught up in, it has not ceased to show me how we can meet God in the people with us around the table. And it is not just around a table that we find ourselves in community. We are experiencing the whole faith walk in community as well. In Bible class this past senior year we looked at several different spiritual disciplines, one of which was a prayer labyrinth. To practice this, my class went out behind Bethany where my dad had mowed a small labyrinth in the grass. As we walked through the labyrinth, giving each other adequate space behind and in front, it was meaningful to see my classmates all around me in the maze. I couldn't tell who was in front or behind me because of the way the path twisted, but I knew that we were all in it together, all bound for the same place. In the same way, we are all at different points with our faith, but we are all together. We are not alone as we go about our lives, our work, our play, our worship. Communion echoes this aspect of Christianity. It is not a tradition practiced alone, but in a loving, encircling community.

It is through this community piece of communion, as well as through the confession and celebration aspects, that I can see how communion can have some significance in my faith. As an 18 year old trying to find my niche in the church and the world, life can be overwhelming. Sometimes simplifying faith and asking myself how I can find personal meaning in a ritual is more helpful than asking the big theological questions like what Jesus might have meant when he said to eat his body. And so I hope that as I participate in communion in many different settings in the future, I can find the relevance for my faith, in the same way I hope all of us can take meaning from this humbling, age-hold tradition.

Waiting August 29 2004.rtf

Sun, 29 Aug 2004 16:04:24 GMT

Waiting

Genesis 12:1-3
Sermon by Dan Schrock
August 29, 2004

Now the LORD said to Abram, "Go from your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed." (NRSV)

I know a young Mennonite woman, about 24 years old, who would like to get married someday. She's dated a few guys here and there, some of them more interesting and some of them less interesting. Since all the men she's dated are Mennonite, they have the same basic Christian faith she has, the same basic stance on ethical questions, the same basic spiritual worldview. So in important ways, any of these young men might be fairly compatible with her. With any of them she might be able to create a solid, committed, faithful marriage. But so far none of these fine young men are standing out as the one she really wants to marry or ought to marry. So she is unsure.
As I said, I know this young woman. She is a deeply spiritual person. Her commitment to Christ is the most important thing in her life. She has gone on several weekend spiritual retreats. She likes to study the Bible. She has explored many different ways of praying, from praying out loud to praying in silence, from praying in bed to praying while she walks outside. In order to express her dedication to Christ by caring for human need, she did a year of voluntary service. She has read important spiritual writers of our time such as Thomas Merton, Henri Nouwen, Richard Foster, Simon Weil, and Mother Teresa. She keeps a spiritual journal where she tracks the movements of God in her life. She takes her faith seriously, and for her deciding whether to marry or whom to marry is a deeply spiritual process. For her, dating men and selecting a husband call forth the very best spiritual discernment she knows how to do. This is not a decision she wants to make by herself. She wants God's help. She wants to know what God thinks, what God wants, what God suggests. Consequently she tries to tune her inner ear to the cadences, the timbre, and the rhythm of God's voice.
One summer evening after supper this young woman wrote a little in her journal, then took a long walk in the country, opening herself to whatever she might encounter on the walka groundhog scurrying to her hole, a red-wing blackbird declaring himself on a fence post, a group of white-tailed deer alert to the world around them. When she got back home, she did some stretching exercises in the living room to relax her tired muscles. She wasn't thinking of anything in particular and wasn't feeling anything in particular; but she was spiritually focused and centered. Without exactly trying to, she had momentarily reached an inner condition very close to what Jesus describes in Matthew 5:8 as purity of heart.
And then something happened that she had never experienced before. She had a vision. Maybe it would be more accurate to say that she was briefly taken to a visionary place. In the vision stood two rows of men facing each other. She knew all of them. Some of them were male friends whom she had had for years. Others were men she had dated over the last several years. She walked between these two rows of men, stopping briefly to look carefully at each person. Most of them smiled fondly at her, or waved their hand as friends wave to each other. Then she noticed that at the far end of these two rows of men stood one man who was looking her squarely in the eyes. He was not standing in either row, but was by himself, facing her, waiting. She walked up to him, and as she came close he opened his arms wide. Simultaneously she opened hers, and in a rush of warmth, as if God was breathing on them, they embraced.
This visionary experience lasted no more than 15 seconds. When the woman opened her eyes, she could scarce believe this had happened to her. Very quickly she realized that one possible meaning of the visionand I emphasize the word possiblewas that this particular man whom she embraced was the man she would eventually marry, the man God was suggesting she marry. The question, of course, was whether this vision really came from God. Maybe it was just the product of her own wish fulfillment. Maybe it was her own imagination gone berserk. In any case, she was not sure she could trust this vision. It needed careful spiritual discernment. Was it from God or not? And if it was from God, then what did it mean?
Now this young woman did not immediately call the young man up on the phone and gush out to him, ``Oh, Sam, I just had this most amazing experiencea vision from God that I'm going to marry youso can I rush right over to your house and plan the wedding?'' No, no, nothing of the sort. In addition to the fact that she genuinely did not know whether this experience was really from God, there were, shall we say, certain impedimentschief among them that for a long time now this man had been dating another woman. For all our young woman knew, he and the other woman were very much in love, maybe they were even thinking about marriage. Then there was the fact that this young man lived far away, in a completely different section of the country. So you see, this vision seemed perfectly ridiculous. The man in question lived a long way off and was to all appearances happily dating someone else. Maybe even engaged to someone else. So how could it possibly be telling the truth? Upon sober reflection the vision seemed more like a delusion, a psychotic episode that needed medical treatment. It was all preposterous. No way was she ever going to marry that man, not because she was opposed to the ideahe was a fine person, after allbut because circumstances seemed to make the whole thing impossible.
So the young woman waited and watched, biding her time. She decided she was not going to manipulate events. She was not going to barge in on the man's relationship with the other woman. She wasn't going to tell anyone else about this visionary experience, not even her closest friends. She wasn't going to do anything or say anything that might affect what happened next. Like Mary the mother of Jesus, she merely treasured these things in her heart (Luke 2:19), relinquishing the future to God, patiently waiting in a spirit of discernment.

A long, long time ago, the Lord God told Abram that he and his wife, Sarai, would someday be the parents of a great nation. Now Abram wanted to believe this with all his heart. But there were, shall we say, certain impediments. The first was that he and Sarai had no children. You can't exactly be parents of a great nation when you have no children. The second problem was that he and Sarai were 75 years old. I have heard of 75-year-old men fathering children; but I have not heard of 75-year-old women getting pregnant. So these words from the Lord God seemed perfectly preposterous, thoroughly ridiculous. Circumstances were just not going to allow them to parent a great nation.
However, Abram and Sarai waited patientlysort of. Some years after he heard the initial promise from God, Abram's patience ran out, and he complained to God about it. You can read about this in Genesis 15:2-3. In that passage Abram whines a little bit: ``Look, Lord God, I continue childless. I know you told me I would spawn a great nation. But I have no children. My heir is Eliezer of Damascus. He's a decent chap and I like him well enough; but he's not my son; he's my slave!'' So that night, God responds to Abram's complaint by nudging him outside. ``Look at all those stars in the sky,'' God says, ``that's how many descendants you'll have.''
So Abram and Sarai wait some more. Ten years after hearing the initial promise from God, Sarai gets impatient. ``Look, Abram,'' she exclaims as she stomps her foot on the floor of their tent, ``I'm tired of waiting for a God who is supposedly going to give us children. I'm 85 years old. I am not going to be having any child. Case closed. So I propose we take matters into our own hands. Let's manage this situation. Let's control and shape it to make sure we get what we want. Here's Hagar, my slave. She's young. Take her to bed. Get her pregnant. And her child will be our child. We will get a child for ourselves yet. We will make sure we create a great nation. We will make our own destiny, determine our own fate'' (Genesis 16:1-2).
Their plan worked just like they wanted it to, at least at first. Hagar gets pregnant just like they hoped, but from that point on their plan to control and manage and manipulate unravels into a grand mess. In a word, their family life becomes dysfunctional, severely dysfunctional. Hagar swells up with pride that she is now a mother. Sarai gets so jealous she chases Hagar out of the tent into the wilderness. Abram excuses himself from the whole situation and refuses to do anything about it (Genesis 16:3-6).
And God says no. No, Sarai and Abram, that is not what I meant. You're trying to manage history, trying to determine the future, trying to manipulate and control to achieve a desired end. No! Now look at the way you mucked it up! Oh, I'll bless Hagar and her son Ishmael. Don't worry about that. And I'm still going to bless you. But Ishmael is not what I meant. Sex with a slave is not what I meant. Wait! Just wait.
Abram and Sarai wait for 14 more years. 14! They are now 99 years old. God had first told them they were going to parent a great nation way back when they were 75 years old. These people have been waiting for 24 years. Now, when they are 99, God shows up again, and this time gets very explicit. God has been speaking rather generally up to now, but now, after they've waited for a quarter of a century, gets explicit. ``Sarah, you are going to get pregnant. Pregnant with a son. It will happen now'' (Genesis 17:16; 18:10).
And the very next year, when Sarah and Abraham were 100 years old, Sarah gave birth to a son whom they called Isaac. When it finally happened, it happened in the way God chose, at the time God chose, under the circumstances God chose.

You're probably wondering what happened to the young woman who had the vision, so let me finish her story. As I said, she waited patiently and quietly, to see how events might unfold, to see how God might act in this situation that seemed so preposterous. She waited partly because she wasn't even sure this thing was really from God.
Over the next year, the young woman had several more ``visions,'' for lack of a better word to call them. The form and content in each of them was different, but each seemed to suggest the same meaning: that one day, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, she and this certain man would someday marry. But still the woman did nothing except wait.
Time passed. She said nothing to anyone. She was in contact with the young man, yes, but she only communicated with him when he took the initiative to communicate with her. For quite a while, he continued to date first one person, then another. Meanwhile, she breathed not a word to him about any of the stuff that was going on inside her. She simply released her future to God as best she knew how, fending off all her own impulses to manage, manipulate, control, determine, and influence. She yielded control to the Lord God, maker of heaven and earth, creator of what shall be.
Eventually the man, of his own accord, stopped dating all other women. At his initiative, he and the young woman started dating each other. After a while they got engaged. And 4 years after the young woman had her first vision, they married.
Several decades later, the womannow not so young anymoretold me that this whole experience of waiting for God to create the impossible widened her faith. At the time she did not realize it, but while she waited, God was training her in the fundamentals of faith. In a sense, the crucible of waiting burned off some of her natural impatience. ``God,'' she said later, ``was schooling me in trust. Ever since then, it's been easier for me to feel in my bones that God will somehow work things out. Sure, I've had lots of hard times since then, and I expect to have some more. But usually I have this unflappable sense that God is caring and healing and blessing, even when all the evidence that I can see suggests otherwise. I trust God.''
This woman gave her permission to tell you her story. So now you know it tooand may it widen your faith.

What Tithing Is For February 8 2004.rtf

Thu, 12 Feb 2004 16:44:57 GMT

What Tithing Is For

Deuteronomy 14:22-29
Sermon by Dan Schrock

February 8, 2004

Set apart a tithe of all the yield of your seed that is brought in yearly from the field. In the presence of the LORD your God, in the place that he will choose as a dwelling for his name, you shall eat the tithe of your grain, your wine, and your oil, as well as the firstlings of your herd and flock, so that you may learn to fear the LORD your God always. But if, when the LORD your God has blessed you, the distance is so great that you are unable to transport it, because the place where the LORD your God will choose to set his name is too far away from you, then you may turn it into money. With the money secure in hand, go to the place that the LORD your God will choose; spend the money for whatever you wish--oxen, sheep, wine, strong drink, or whatever you desire. And you shall eat there in the presence of the LORD your God, you and your household rejoicing together. As for the Levites resident in your towns, do not neglect them, because they have no allotment or inheritance with you. Every third year you shall bring out the full tithe of your produce for that year, and store it within your towns; the Levites, because they have no allotment or inheritance with you, as well as the resident aliens, the orphans, and the widows in your towns, may come and eat their fill so that the LORD your God may bless you in all the work that you undertake. (NRSV)

A few months ago Peter Shetler used this text in the opening for one of our elders' meetings. When I heard him read it, then comment on it, I was astonished. I can't remember hearing anyone talk about this text before, either in a sermon or in a class. I can't even remember reading it before, even though I know I have because I've read the whole book of Deuteronomy from beginning to end at least once in my life, if not twice or thrice.

What astonishes me the most is what this text tells the people of God: to gather our tithes into one central place, and then have a party. Bring a tenth of our animals and a tenth of our produce and a tenth of our money to a place of God's choosing. Buy whatever food we want, then sit down and eat it in the presence of God, rejoicing together. Welcome the Levites who have no land to raise anything and no income to buy anything. Welcome the immigrants, the orphans, and the widows who barely make it economically. All of us sit down together and have a feast.

I cannot recall any other part of the Bible that encourages us to use our tithes this way. Generally speaking, most other passages about tithing seem to emphasize the act of giving, giving, giving, without saying much about what is supposed to happen after we give to God, give to the temple, and give to the priests. The sense I get in reading most of the other Bible passages about tithing is that we are to give to God out of the sheer joy of giving.

The joy is certainly here in Deuteronomy, but with a twist. Everyone who can give, and those who cannot, are commanded to consume what they have just given. Give your food to God, then turn around and immediately eat it. Give your money to God, then immediately turn around to buy whatever food and drink your heart desires so you can all have a party.

After reading this text, I start to imagine all sorts of wild scenarios. I imagine us planning a big party with a sit-down meal to which we invite all the neighbors who live on Berkey Avenue and Waneta Drive. We provide the food and they come and eat it with us. Or I imagine us renting a banquet hall somewhere, then inviting two hundred people from Goshen who are having a hard time making it, cooking them a scrumptious meal, and sitting with them at round tables that seat eight people, four people from this congregation and four people from the community at each table. I imagine music and dancing, laughter and song.

The main question, of course, is why. Why the party? Why the feast? Why get together and then eat what you've just given to God?

This might sound obvious, but when the ancient Israelites brought all those fatted sheep and baskets of wheat and jugs of olive oil to give to God, it wasn't God who would be eating all that food. Nowhere that I know of does the Bible say God eats the food we give as tithes. In several places God smells the food being sacrificed on the altar and is reported to really love the smell of it. In a sense, when the ancient Israelites sacrificed food, they were cooking it. What happens when you put a leg of lamb or a haunch of beef on top of a fire? You get roasted meat, and in ancient Israel it probably smelled a lot like the meat smells when we cook it on the grill in our backyard. God enjoyed the smell very much, but God certainly didn't eat it.

So who ate it? Well, the priests and Levites, first of all. Offerings and sacrifices were in fact the only source of food priests and Levites had. When Israel moved into the land of Canaan after their escape from Egypt, each of the twelve tribes received a block of land to live on and to farmexcept the tribe of Levi. They were designated as the priests for all of Israel, dedicated not to raising food like everybody else, but dedicated to taking care of the tabernacle, and later on, the temple. In return for this service, the Levites ate some of the sacrifices as their food.

The second group of people who ate some of that sacrificed food, according to today's text, were resident aliens, orphans, and widows. In ancient societies these were typically the most vulnerable people around. We might think of the resident aliens as immigrants, and the orphans and widows as no-parent or single-parent households that had no income. If you have no income, you tend to have no food, and if you have no food, you get hungry real fast. So part of the tithes given by the landed, working majority went to hungry folks. It was an ancient form of economic redistribution.

The third group of people who ate the tithes and sacrifices were all the folks who brought the foodsmall farmers and business people, teenagers and young children, singles and families. Thousands upon thousands of people sitting out under the open sky, having a giant, boisterous picnic.

What do you get when you gather everybody in one place and sit down for a meal? You get community. Eating together has tremendous power to strengthen relationships among people. I once had a professor who said that if you want to create community, you have to do three things. You have to get the people together in one place at the same time, you have to eat together, and you have to tell stories, especially stories of God. As an example of this, compare what happens on the campuses of colleges and graduate schools that have a cafeteria, in contrast to the colleges and graduate schools without a cafeteria. Since graduating from high school, I've spent a total of nearly eight years taking classes at five different educational institutions, and I notice a pattern: the schools with a cafeteria where most students eat their meals have a much more cohesive sense of community than the schools without a cafeteria. I recall one school I attended for two years. It was a small school with a student body of no more than about 200, so we knew each other fairly well, at least by sight. But that school had no cafeteria, not even a snack shop. We did have a student lounge, but it didn't have any food in it. So students never sat down across tables from each other to eat and laugh and tell stories and compare professors and talk about classes. And the sense of community at that particular school was pretty thin. But at the schools with a cafeteria where people ate together three times a day, the sense of community was much stronger and deeper. This is anecdotal evidence, of course, but I suspect that eating together profoundly shapes community.

From the very beginning of our history, we Mennonites have been a rather rag-tag assortment of peoples. Originally, we came from three different geographical regions in Europe, then eventually spread all over the world because of sporadic persecution and our persistent desire for good economic opportunities. We went to Prussia and Russia, to Paraguay and Canada and the U.S. Now we've spread to every continent and are growing most rapidly in countries like Ethiopia and Congo, so rapidly that in the lifetimes of some of us in this room, the Ethiopian Mennonite church may be the largest national body of Mennonites in the world.

A lot of things have held us Mennonites together as a people over the years, but I think one of them is food. One of the cookbooks I grew up on was the Mennonite Community Cookbook , published way back in 1950. It has recipes from all over North America, wherever Mennonites were then living: Fentress, Virginia; Mountain Lake, Minnesota; Nampa, Idaho; South English, Iowa; Conestoga, Ontario. I've never been to any of those places; but because I've eaten out of that cookbook all my life, I feel connected to those places and those people, even though most of them are now dead. That cookbook created cohesive community, at least for me.

One of the things we Mennonites are most known for is food. Yes, a lot of people know us through Mennonite Disaster Service or Ten Thousand Villages, or through all the books we've published about pacifism and ethics. But our cookbooks take the cake, so to speak. I once heard Marlin Miller, the former president of Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary, say that the More with Less Cookbook has sold more copies than all our books on theology and ethics and biblical studies combined. The newest Mennonite publishing phenomenon is yet another book of recipes, the Fix It and Forget It cookbook, which I think has out sold even the More with Less Cookbook .

It may not be coincidental that a people known for their cooking also have a strong sense of community. This is even true on the international stage. After Mennonite World Conference met in Calcutta, India, I heard two things repeated again and again in the reports people made when they got back from Calcutta: they talked excitedly about the food, and they talked excitedly about the worship. Now the food cooked by the Indian Mennonites was not fancy stuff, mostly rice and curry. But something about that experience of eating together with Mennonites from all over the world made a profound impression on the people who were there.

Food and worship as a way to create community. I wonder if this is at least some of what God had in mind all along back there in Deuteronomy. Perhaps God knew that this rag-tag assortment of Israelites needed some mechanism for building their sense of we-ness, a sense that they belonged to each other and shared the same common identity. As an act of worship, they offered their tithes to God, then sat down to eat. And both things shaped them into a distinctive people.

Jesus also knew the importance of eating together. A sizable chunk of his ministry, and his mission, was simply eating with people, so much so that a lot of folks began to think of him as something of a glutton. In both Matthew 11:19 and Luke 7:34, Jesus himself mentions that ``the Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they [the crowds and other people in the general public] say, `Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!''' (Matthew 11:19, NRSV). So it is no accident that just before trudging off to relinquish himself to Roman crucifixion, Jesus sat down with his closest followers and ate a meal with them, a holy, sacred meal that to this day Christians continue to celebrate. Whenever we eat the Lord's Supper together, we engage in an act of worship and building community.

It may be that the most profound act of mission the church could do is eating together. Not just eating with people who are already in the church, but eating with people in the community who are the modern equivalents of resident aliens, orphan and widows, tax collectors and sinners. In the coming months, we will be talking with each other about the mission of this congregation. What if our mission is foundationally about worshipping and eating together? What if we have lots of parties?

Whithersoever June 6 2004.rtf

Sun, 6 Jun 2004 16:07:46 GMT

Whithersoever
Joshua 1:1-2, 5-7, 9;
Matthew 8:19-20 (KJV)
Sermon by Dan Schrock
June 6, 2004

Now after the death of Moses the servant of the Lord, it came to pass, that the Lord spake unto Joshua the son of Nun, Moses' minister, saying, Moses my servant is dead; now therefore arise, go over this Jordan, thou, and all this people, unto the land which I do give to them, even to the children of Israel. There shall not any man be able to stand before thee all the days of thy life: as I was with Moses, so I will be with thee: I will not fail thee, nor forsake thee. Be strong and of a good courage: for unto this people shalt thou divide for an inheritance the land, which I sware unto their fathers to give them. Only be thou strong and very courageous, that thou mayest observe to do according to all the law, which Moses my servant commanded thee: turn not from it to the right hand or to the left, that thou mayest prosper whithersoever thou goest. Have I not commanded thee? Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee whithersoever thou goest (King James Version).

And a certain scribe came, and said unto him, Master, I will follow thee whithersoever thou goest. And Jesus saith unto him, The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head (King James Version).

Whithersoever is an old word, one we don't use much anymore in ordinary speech. Today we would say simply ``wherever.'' But whithersoever is an important word, a good and holy word, because God uses it prominently in the divine vocabulary, as in: ``Whithersoever you go, I, God, will go with you.''

At first people were astonished to hear God say a thing like that. Thousands of years ago, people thought God was a local God, that God lived in one place, that God had power and jurisdiction only in that specific place, but not anywhere outside that place. Joshua knew God lived and worked down in Egypt, because Joshua had seen God rain down those awful but wonderful plagues on the Egyptian government. But would Godcould Godgo with him and with the people of Israel to places outside Egypt?

At the Sea of Reeds Joshua discovered that God had traveled with them to that place too. God parted those waters so they could pass through, then brought the waters together again to drown the Egyptians. Joshua discovered that God walked around with them in the wilderness of Sinai, a cloud by day and a fire by night. So Joshua concluded that God must be not just a local God, but also a regional God. And now here Joshua was, on the edge of the wilderness of Sinai, about ready to cross over into the Promised Land, and God says, ``I am with thee whithersoever thou goest.''

With that simple but astonishing statement God explodes all boundaries and limits, all walls and divisions. Whithersoever includes the Promised Land. And although Joshua had no knowledge of these places, whithersoever includes Goshen and Garden City, Calcutta and Columbia. God's whithersoever to Joshua even includes the possibility of starship travel to distant galaxies. God is a globe-trotting God, a universe-voyaging God. Anywhere you can go, God can go too.

During my senior year in college, I finally began thinking about what to do after graduation. For me college life was an easy-going, carefree time. Except for my grades, I had no worries or responsibilities in life. I lived for the present and did not worry much about the future. I was so cavalier about the future that when people asked what I was going to do after graduation, I responded carelessly, ``Oh, I'm going to be an educated bum!''

That changed my senior year. With graduation fixing its cold, hard stare at me, and with a lack of anything else to do, I decided to offer my services to four different Mennonite mission agencies: Mennonite Central Committee, Mennonite Voluntary Service, Mennonite Board of Missions, and Eastern Mennonite Board of Missions and Charities. I did not know which agency would take me; I did not know where in the world I would go; I did not know what I would be doing. One agency talked about sending me to the African-American neighborhoods of Los Angeles; another about sending me to the Coptic Christian neighborhoods of Cairo, Egypt. The only thing I was fairly sure about was that I would probably be going to live in another culture. At 22 years of age I was going to cross my first significant boundarybut I had no idea what or where that boundary was. I was scared, anxious, and stressed out about what might happen. Could I handle going to a new place? Was I really prepared to leave the familiar, friendly world of Goshen?

At this point my small group went on a silent retreat in southern Michigan. On Saturday afternoon our retreat leader led us in a prayer of guided imagery, which is a type of silent prayer where you close your eyes, relax, let go of all your thoughts, and wait for God to raise up images within you. It might be similar to what the Biblical writers call a vision. At any rate, within a few minutes I saw a sequence of images and then heard a voice which said: ``Dan, I will be you whithersoever you go.''

Whithersoever. There are actually two whithersoevers. God speaks the first whithersoever to us as a promise. God commits to stay with us, whithersoever we go. But you and I speak the second whithersoever as a response to God. We promise to follow God whithersoever. We promise to stick by God, to commit ourselves to God no matter what. God's whithersoever to us invites our whithersoever to God.

The gospel of Matthew says that a certain zealous, highly committed disciple bounced up to Jesus one day and breathlessly blurted out: ``Master, I will follow thee . . . whithersoever thou goest!'' Jesus apparently studied this person slowly and thoughtfully, and then replied: ``Foxes have holes, and birds have nests, but the son of man has no where to lay his head,'' which paraphrased means something like: ``Great! I celebrate your commitment to God. But you should know something before you begin. Following me will take you to places you'd rather not go and test you in ways you'd rather not be tested. Your life will be full of trying circumstances. So realize that your whithersoever could land you in surprising places.''

Jesus is right, of course. Making a promise with that word whithersoever in it may take you to places you never imagined.

During that retreat my senior year of college, God promised to be with me whithersoever I went. So in response I promised God to follow whithersoever God took me. By the end of the retreat I still did not know where in the world I would end up or what on earth I would do next with my life. But the uncertainty didn't concern me much anymore. I figured that God would take care of me.

Several months later Mennonite Central Committee sent me to live among Cubans and Haitians in Miami, and I found that God lived up to that promise. It wasn't an easy assignment. Since I was the leader of two different voluntary service units, I had to deal with issues the other MCCers didn't. Let me give you some examples. One day 4 MCCers resigned en masse because they were disgusted with their assignment. They simply refused to go back to work. So I had to deal with that.

One afternoon I opened the statement from our bank and discovered that one of the MCCers had stolen three checks from our unit checking account, forged my signature, and walked off with $1,580 of MCC money that frugal Mennonites all over the country had donated for our support. This MCC thief then used the money to buy cocaine which she snort up her nose. I had to deal with that.

On two different occasions there were racial riots in Miaminot large ones, but ones nasty enough to scare the vinegar out of you. I had to deal with that too.

One Sunday morning at the tiny little Mennonite church we MCCers went to we heard the pastor say in his sermon that women did not belong in any kind of leadership, and that if a woman was in leadership, there was automatically a man somewhere who was not living up to his God-given duty to be a leader. According to this Mennonite pastor, any time you have a woman in leadership in the church, the community, or the nation, you also have a man somewhere who is sinning against God and shirking his duty. All of us MCCers, male and female, were scandalized to hear this. Within a week most of us decided to confront that pastor about his rotten theology and to leave that little church. So I had to deal with all of that.

On top of all this stuff, my girlfriend and Inot Jenny, but someone elsewere having troubles. So my work life and private life where a mess, but I had to slog my way through and deal with it. But God did not abandon me! God kept that promise to be with me whithersoever I went and whatsoever I did. And I tried to reciprocate by remaining committed to God, no matter what.

Those experiences happened twenty years ago, and now I'm slightly past mid-life. By now God and I have been hanging around each other a long time. I testify to you that God has never broken that promise. In good times and bad, God comes with us. No matter where we go, to Death Valley, California or to Mt. Everest, Nepal, in a submersible under the sea or in a rocket to outer space, God goes with us. Whether we sense it or not, God stays with us. As the apostle Paul might have said in Romans 8:

Who will separate us from the whithersoever of God? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through God's promise to us through Christ. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the whithersoever of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Lets Get Fired Up .html

Thu, 22 Jul 2004 05:00:00 GMT

Sermon: Let's Get Fired Up!
by Michael Sherer, July 18, 2004

Hebrews 11 and 12. If ever there was a pep talk in the Bible, this is it. Times are tough. The church is being persecuted. Lives are in danger, sure. But look at all these amazing people who have gone before you. By faith, they've done incredible things and suffered persecution and they didn't even get to see Jesus, who is the fulfillment of all the promises. Now it's your turn. It's time to get fired up.

Admittedly, getting fired up isn't a very Mennonite thing to do. We're just here quietly living out our lives of discipleship, just followin' Jesus, not gonna get overly excited about it, sometimes it�s pretty inconvenient, but hey, it's the right thing to do.

Now I'm not going to advocate cheerleaders as a regular part of worship at Berkey Avenue, but it seems to me that the sports people have something important figured out. People need to be encouraged to get fired up. Think about a basketball game. The people in the stands need to cheer on the people on the floor. The people on the floor need to step it up a notch and make something happen, which in turn gets the crowd more pumped up, and the cycle continues. If you've every been a part of a really exciting game, either as a player or spectator, you know the enthusiasm is contagious.

Bringing that enthusiasm and energy to the church is tricky business. We don't want to appear silly or undignified. We're respectable people after all. Look at the prophets were fired up and what happened to them. They usually ended up with their heads on a platter. So passion is not only potentially embarrassing, it's risky. So it is with some trepidation that I confess to you that I'm fired up about using technology to serve the church. I know that many of you have probably guessed this. I stand up periodically and make halting announcements about Mennonite.net and I disappear into the church office after fellowship time and update the church website. But now it's out in the open.

It all started back in the 1985 when I discovered desktop publishing technology and used it to create Community Mennonite Church of Lancaster's monthly newsletter (probably the first desktop published church newsletter in the world). I was struck how that newsletter created a sense of identity and belonging for a fledgling congregation.

In 1990 I went to work for Notre Dame's Office of University Computing and my sense of call increased, but it was frustrated by the fact that there weren't obvious opportunities to serve the Mennonite Church. I had conversations with my dad about how Goshen College could use technology to serve the church, but that's about as far as it went.

In 1997 I came to Goshen to be GC's Director of Information Technology and using technology to strengthen relations between the college and the church was part of the initial vision that got me hired. There was a lot of work to do at the college, but it was just a year later that MMA and GC agreed to fund Mennonite.net, a technology ministry, charged with helping the organizations of the church get on the web.

Now, part of the challenge of being fired up about using technology to serve the church is that technology, even very useful technology can be expensive, mystifying and frustrating. Look at Microsoft Windows. Furthermore, technology projects involve an element of risk. They can go over budget, they can fall short of their promised benefits, they can outright fail.

Indeed, the first incarnation of Mennonite.net fell victim to these very risks. It didn't outright fail, but it didn't succeed to a degree where its backers felt comfortable continuing their investments. So in 2002, I took over Mennonite.net and began rewriting it from the ground up.

Two and a half years later, I'm still fired up, But it's not an unreasonable question to ask why. Mennonite.net is still losing money, I can't really afford to advertise in The Mennonite, there's no ground-swell of support from church leadership. Still very little that outwardly looks like success. The answer is two-fold, 1) the vision is still compelling, in fact it's more compelling than ever and 2) the reality is finally beginning to match the vision. But I really haven't told you anything concrete about the vision or the reality, and until I do, you really can't judge whether my passion is on target or not. Sooo....

The Vision

(Slide 1) The church has always used the latest in communications technology to spread the gospel.

(Slide 2) The Internet is the most powerful communications medium yet created and while segments of the Mennonite Church are using it, we are using it less efficiently and less effectively than we might.

(Slide 3) There are significant barriers that keep organizations and congregations (particularly the smaller ones) from being successful on the web--cost, complexity, lack of infrastructure, lack of standards, lack of coordination.

(Slide 4)   There is enormous commonality in what the organizations of the church want to do on the web--share information, publish calendars and press releases, receive donations, promote events and programs, serve existing members, attract new members,

(Slide 5) Software has a unique characteristic where you can take thousands of dollars of development done for organization A, package it up and deliver it to thousands of other organizations at very low cost.

(Slide 6) The internet gives us billions of dollars of network infrastructure that we can tap at very low cost. The Open Source Software community gives us access to millions of dollars of software infrastructure at no cost. Just add brainpower.

(Slide 7) Old way: Every organization reinvents the wheel. Right way: Do it once, do it right, do it for everyone.

Goals and Realities

G. Lower the barriers to publishing as far as they can go
R. Mennonite.net has lowered financial barriers
   No HTML Editor to buy
   Basic sites are free to congregations
Caravel lowers technical barriers
   Multi-platform, browser-based editing, no complex local site tree to maintain
   You can build a reasonably complex site knowing little or no HTML

G. Connect the people of the church with the resources of the denomination
R. The Every Resource Project is pushing the resources of the denomination into the local church website
   Missions, Peace, Education, Technology, History, Indiana-Michigan Conference are all prototyped and appear in the Berkey Avenue website

G. Pool resources to give organizations access to services they never could have afforded
R. The Mennonite.net Technology Co-op is real, working and growing
   There are six developers working on Caravel and only 3 of them are at Mennonite.net
   We expect to achieve something that looks like a mature enterprise web content management system sometime this fall.
   Just add 2,000 more members

G. Increase mission efficiency and effectiveness
R. MDS, AdNet, Mennonite.net and LaCasa are featured in the Berkey Avenue site and they supply the content.
    Your organization could be featured there too.

G. Reduce the cost and increase the speed of communicating across the church
R. You can publish a press release, a job announcement, a mission opportunity or a classified ad to a thousand church websites with a single click. Cost = $0.

G. Save thousands of dollars that are currently being wasted
R. Goshen College is the closest to realizing this. They got Caravel at virtually no cost, and while they're helping with development it's with people and budget that were previously doing similar kinds of internal development.

G. Take Caravel beyond the Mennonite Church
R. Caravel is being used at Lawrence Township Schools, Graber Designs, and several other places outside the church are seriously looking at using it.

There are two more goals that didn't quite merit slides at this point:
One is to strengthen physical community with online community. This is my next big push.

The second is to make Mennonite.net financially viable. I'm still solvent, but there's still work to do in this area. It costs about $60,000 a year to run Mennonite.net. Not inconsequential, but not a lot in the grand scheme of things. About the cost of one employee with benefits.

So that's the state of things at Mennonite.net. Not out of the woods, but getting more exciting with each passing month.

I'm still passionate about it and more confident than ever about the long-term prospects for success--if we can reach a critical mass of users--200-300 co-op members, or a couple of larger ones.

That's my calling. That's my passion. That�s my dream. Now it�s out there in the open, and it wasn�t even all that bad, tho I hope we can dispense with the platters. My invitation to you today is to prayerfully think about your calling and your passion. What are you fired up about? If I know your dreams and you know mine, we can help each other and our dreams can become a reality.

Let's get fired up.