Called to be a Doing Love Church

Called to be a Doing Love Church

a sermon based on Jeremiah 31:31-34

given at Palm Bay, FL on March 25, 2012

by Rev. Scott Elliott

In 1976 when I met my wife Nancy I was an avid agnostic and frankly I strongly disliked Christianity. I had unfortunately experienced it as quite judgmental and unloving. I didn’t like the church. There was some trouble with this. See Nancy’s parents were both avid Christians.

Even so when Nancy and I first lived together I proudly put up a poster with words from my favorite fiction writer, Mark Twain. The poster had a huge picture of Jesus above the words.

When Nancy’s parents came to visit I forgot to take the poster down. Sure enough they saw it. The words below the picture of Jesus had this famous quote of Twain’s: “If Christ were here there is one thing he would not be – a Christian.”

I felt pretty bad about that incident, it was disrespectful and may have hurt Nancy’s parent’s feelings. My dislike of Christianity had a personal affect upon others that I cared for.

It should be obvious that my jaded view of Christianity and the church has drastically changed over the years, because, well, if some of you have not figured it out I’m a very Christian minister of this very Christian church. Both of which try quite hard to be non-judgmental and loving.

And a part of my journey getting here was that I had to get to know my Christian in-laws – there was no way around it – and I learned to love them both very much.

Indeed in my experience I have never met a more Christ-like Christian than my mother-in-law. She is as full of love as anyone can hope to be – as is her daughter, my wife, Nancy.

Through experiences of Christians close to me my understanding of Christianity began evolving way back in the mid – 1970s.

It took a long time but eventually I came around to see that Mark Twain was wrong, that Christ was actually here and one thing Christ could be was a Christian.

That’s not to say that there are Christians and forms of Christianity that Jesus would never be, it is to say that Christ IS here now and Christ CAN be found in Christianity and Christians. In places like this church and thousands of other communities that follow Jesus’ loving Way.

My understanding of Christianity has clearly evolved.

Today’s text is about a whole people’s understanding of God evolving. The catalyst was not a poster and a loving mother in-law. It was utter defeat and humiliation. See God works in a wide range of mysterious places.

Babylon was a powerful city-state in 6th Century B.C. It went about conquering other peoples and nations. And one of its techniques was to round up all of a conquered enemy’s leadership and important people and march them back to Babylon and keep them captive there.

The idea was, as you might imagine, to gut the enemy of its leadership, stymy rebellion, and soften up the rest of the population in hopes they’d be more docile and easier to control.

In the early 6th Century Babylon began conquering Judah. There were revolts, but, by 587 B.C. Jerusalem was burned and the Temple destroyed and most everybody who was a leader or other elite was captured, with basically farmers and workers left behind. God’s promised land was taken and most of God’s people too.

Some fifty or so years later in 539 Cyrus the Great of Persia would act as the Messiah was expected to act by conquering Babylon, letting the captives go, and reestablishing the kingdom of Israel.

Once home the ex-captives were allowed to rebuild Jerusalem and the Temple, with Cyrus giving back much of the treasures taken by Babylon from the Temple during the Exile. 1

The passage we heard read so well from Jeremiah was written during this Exilic experience. God’s people had had their world turned upside down. Everything was topsy turvy. “Where’s the God who sides with us?” was the big theological question of the day.

We heard a few weeks ago in the Genesis 17 story that Abraham and Sarah were given new names and blessings and promises of being the co-founders of nations of God’s people as a part of the re-imagining God that occurred during the Exile experience.

As we discussed that Abraham-and-Sarah-renaming story we heard how God was evolving in human imagination from an-out-there-away-from-us-angry-punishing-god, to the Holy One who cares enough to initiate personal relationships with us – men and women, small flawed beings that we are.

Today we have another Lectionary Text from the Hebrew Scriptures. It’s from Jeremiah and it too reflects this re-imagining, this evolution of understanding of God that goes on.

The People of God needed to wrestle with and understand that the Exile was not the result of God hating and punishing them, of God being out there transcendent and distant and unfaithful to them in light of the Exile.

The Exile created a very real crisis of faith. And Jeremiah is helping reform and reestablish faith in God. But in order to do that God needs to be understood in a whole new way, as does the relationship between God and God’s people. The Exile shatters the preexisting image of God that Israel had imagined.

The Feasting on the Word commentary puts it like this:

PARAGRAPHWhen the Babylonians razed the temple in Jerusalem and dragged King Zedekiah off in chains, it destroyed the twin symbols of God’s covenantal fidelity. The people of Judah faced a crisis. Not only had they lost power and prestige, freedom and security; they had also lost God– or at least the assurance of God’s faithfulness, which may amount to the same thing. An unfaithful god is no better than no god, and probably a good bit worse. 2 (Feasting on the Word)

And so we have this remarkable beautiful deep and rich text from Jeremiah promising a new covenant, offering hope through a vision of God who is so close that our own hearts carry the Word, the Law, the essence of what God wants and is.

God is so close that every single person, from the culturally highest to the culturally lowest, is understood to know God, to actually know God.

The high priests and the clergy in the Temple do not have an elite “in” with God.

The scribes and others who can read are not alone privileged with access to the Law.

And God’s forgiveness is not doled out by specialized human mediators. All of human iniquity is forgiven, and sin is remembered no more.

God has evolved in the imagination of humankind from an Ancient Near East aloof and moody super power warrior, to a God who cares, a God who loves, a God who’s there.

Listen again to the text from Jeremiah 31 and you can hear God evolving in human perception to a very personal-present-accessible-to-all God:

The days are surely coming, says the LORD, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt– a covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, says the LORD. But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the LORD: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, “Know the LORD,” for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the LORD; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more. (Jer 31:31-34 NRS)

The Law that is written in human hearts is in essence the Torah, or the essence of the Torah.

Quite often I remind us all that Jesus claimed all of the Torah, the Law and the Prophets, hangs upon God and Christ’s commandment to love. Love God. Love others. This is relational stuff.

Religion is about how we relate to creation, and most especially other humans. And in this Judeo-Christian tradition of ours relationship is supposed to be all about love, all the time. Which is why you hear me say that all the time. Because it is ALL about love.

And that love stuff is in our hearts. It’s written there. That’s the Law boiled down and embossed in our very being. And love is not just the essence of the Law, love is also the primary characteristic of God. God is love.

And so in our hearts, our very soul we have Love, the very spark of God within. And we know this. All of us. Love sits within us all calling us to believe in Love and to the action of love.

I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, “Know the LORD,” for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest…

We are not called to believe specific dogma, doctrines or creeds, we are called to do deeds.

Jesus did not run around pushing certainties about God like many churches do today, Jesus ran around doing some thing. Jesus’ thing that he did, was love.

In fact, the very early church followed Jesus’ suit and did not push and teach one another correct creeds. They went around doing loving deeds. They responded to the Law writ on every person’s heart, to love, by becoming doers of love.

Listen to how the followers of Jesus in the early church became God’s hands and feet in the world– these are excerpts from a new book (The Underground Church) by Rev. Robin Meyers,

The early church was … an underground movement, a growing, largely secretive collection of “stations” where rich and poor alike chose to practice a radical form of hospitality, a generous but scandalous communalism, and to commit themselves at personal risk to nonviolent resistance and the protection of the stranger and the alien. They were not sustained by the assurance of personal salvation in the form of a ticket to heaven. It was not conformity of belief that united them, not hierarchy, not creeds. Rather it was a powerful confidence that in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, God had changed everything.

…[T]hey responded in a strange and unexpected way. They did not fashion creeds and demand that they be taken as vows. Rather they simply refused to worship Caesar, stopped practicing animal sacrifice, threw open the doors of their underground assemblies to all who would come, redistributed wealth, and made the dangerous claim that “Jesus Christ was Lord.” 3.

Jesus was Lord, not Caesar. And they did not do all of this for personal salvation in heaven’s sake.

It was confidence that God had changed everything through the Jesus story. God’s Law of love was understood to be in our hearts, but it was also re-imagined that that love could blossom and grow and bring heaven to earth through the new Way Jesus showed us and left us. What he taught, what he did, how he continues to live in us, mattered much.

A Christian duty in those early days was to actively strive in the world for an alternative way of being, a way where all have enough, a way where Christian communities do love in the world and oppose oppression, seek justice and tend to those in need. That’s still our duty now!

The prophets in the Bible tell us time and again that God does not want us to worship without doing.

In Hosea God says: “For I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.”

In Amos God proclaims: I hate, I despise your festivals, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies. Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them; and the offerings of well-being of your fatted animals I will not look upon. Take away from me the noise of your songs; I will not listen to the melody of your harps.But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream. (Amo 5:21-24 NRS)

Isaiah has a similar claim: …bringing offerings is futile; incense is an abomination to me. New moon and sabbath and calling of convocation– I cannot endure solemn assemblies with iniquity. Your new moons and your appointed festivals my soul hates; they have become a burden to me, I am weary of bearing them. When you stretch out your hands, I will hide my eyes from you; even though you make many prayers, I will not listen; your hands are full of blood. Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean; remove the evil of your doings from before my eyes; cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow. (Isa 1:13-17 NRS)

And the prophet Micah asks: “With what shall I come before the LORD, and bow myself before God on high? Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old? Will the LORD be pleased with thousands of rams, with ten thousands of rivers of oil? Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?”

And the answer is given in this beautiful prophetic verse we love here so much: 8 He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God? (Mic 6:6-8 NRS) 4

Worship alone does not cut it. It’s good, but it is not enough. We cannot just come here on Sunday hear the word, sing some songs, and pray. The prophets claim that God rejects that if that’s all there is.

We must move from this space out into the world doing loving things in the world.

That Law God has written upon our hearts is going to call and call and call us to action. The great American evangelist Billy Graham has noted that “The word of God hidden in the heart is a stubborn voice to suppress.”

So let’s not suppress that voice. Let’s answer it. We need to take time this fine Lenten Season to figure out how we are going to answer God’s call in our hearts to loving action in the world.

What can we do small or medium or large to cultivate love blossoming in our family, a stranger, our neighborhood, our city, our state, the world?

There’s lots to do at the church, time, treasure and talent are always needed here.

And there’s lots to do in the world and through other organizations, as well as this one.

There are things we can just do to bring more love to friends, family, enemies and the earth.

Let’s DO. Let’s do love and justice and peace here and out there. Let’s DO love.

We are God’s people.

God is our God.

From the least of us to the greatest we Know God.

Let’s figure out how we are going to go and do something loving about it.

Let’s help bring heaven to earth bit by bit.

This Lent let us prayerfully discover where we are called to act out God’s love in the world and then plan to do it and then really do it committing time and talents and treasures.

That’s what God’s people do.

That is the Way of Jesus.

It’s the Way of Love!

AMEN

ENDNOTES

1. Holman Illustrated Bible Dictionary, “Exile,” “Babylon” (1998).

2.Floyd, Richard, Feasting on the Word, Year B, Vol 2, p. 122

3. Meyers, Robin (2012-01-12). The Underground Church: Reclaiming the Subversive Way of Jesus (p. 44, 47, 48). John Wiley and Sons. Kindle Edition.

4. I got this idea of listing the prophets from Crossan, John Dominic, The Greatest Prayer.

COPYRIGHT Scott Elliott © 2012 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

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Pastoral Prayer for Trayvon Martin and His Family, Our Nation, and George 3.25.12

Pastoral Prayer for Trayvon Martin and His Family, Our Nation, and George 3.25.12

God, we gather today with your love written on our heart and we have been hearing from our hearts a call from the deep and sorrowful tragedy of the senseless killing of a youth, our brother Trayvon Martin. We pray for the family of this young man tragically lost in our state, less than a hundred miles from here.

We are outraged and saddened that this awful type of violence happens. We pray for this nation too full of fear and violent words and acts. Please guide us, help us, as a your people to stop feeding fear and feed love – what you have written in our hearts – instead.

Teach us to not only be outraged at injustice and systemic failings, but to also remember in our prayers to not demonize doers of evil. It is hard for us to remember they are your children too, broken images of You.

Show us how to be doers of love and pray not only for Trayvon and his family, and that “justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream,” but for George, the man who killed Trayvon, and George’s family as well.

Teach us to hate no more, to love even those perpetrating acts of hate and racism; fear and violence. We must, as Jesus taught, love all even our enemies. It’s so hard to do this. Show us the way. Teach us what that means and how to do it.

Guide us out of the wilderness of racism, God so that no one is suspect, no one is an other because of the color of their skin, or any other way that You made them, for all of humankind are your beloved children.

Lord please, please, guide us to love.

This we pray in your name. Amen

COPYRIGHT Scott Elliott © 2012 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Foolishness of Enough is God’s Wisdom

Foolishness of Enough is God’s Wisdom

a sermon based on 1 Cor. 1:18-25

given at Palm Bay, FL on March 11, 2012

by Rev. Scott Elliott

I recently heard about a city dweller who moved to a rural area and called the local highway department to request removal of a “Deer Crossing” sign on her road. She wanted it removed because too many deer were being hit by cars and she thought the sign should be taken down so that the deer would stop crossing there. 1

Now that’s a bit of foolishness. And it does relate to a “deer cross,” but that is not the foolishness about the “dear cross” that Paul is talking about in today’s lesson from 1 Corinthians.

Paul writes “ For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.”

And what Paul is talking about is how Christianity in its early stage – the stage Jesus initiated and Paul and other early followers continued and spread – was seen by others, especially earthly power as foolish.

See, the early church was understood to be foolishly following a peasant Jewish nobody criminal who was executed in the most humiliating manner, a dark skinned poor homeless man who went about teaching and acting in loving caring ways toward all, to his own demise.

And the church was following that very Jesus; and calling it all good news! And it was not, as Paul calls it, the “wisdom of the world” to do such things.

Jesus told people – and WE think tells us still – that those who tend to the least amongst us inherit God’s empire, that it is our call to love everyone – everyone – and act upon that call by doing it.

In Matthew 25 Jesus lists some of the least amongst us and notes that NATIONS are held accountable to tend to them. Jesus lists the hungry, the thirsty, the naked, the imprisoned and the stranger. And Jesus notes that Christ is in each of them.

God, the superpower of the universe, is in the misfits and the discards? Right … That’s Foolishness!

We are supposed to use our resources to help the poor and sick and the aliens and those in jail? And when we do we actually tend to God, to Christ? Right … That’s Foolishness!

All that lovely-dovey give a darn for the poor and sick and aliens and prisoners stuff; it’s foolishness to the worldly wisdom of Jesus’ and Paul’s day.

Jesus says a lot of great things in the Bible, but, I like to think that his “stump speech,” the stuff with most of his highlights, is best reflected in his “ Sermon on the Plain.” That sermon is found in Luke 6 and it goes on for a bit, and it would be interesting to one day read it in its entirety as a sermon, but today I’m just going to read a bit of it, my favorite part. This is a part of what we are told Jesus preached that day:

I say to you that listen, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you.

If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also; and from anyone who takes away your coat do not withhold even your shirt.

Give to everyone who begs from you; and if anyone takes away your goods, do not ask for them again.

Do to others as you would have them do to you.

If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them. If you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners do the same. If you lend to those from whom you hope to receive, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, to receive as much again. But love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return.

Your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High; for he is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful. Do not judge, and you will not be judged; do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven. (Luk 6:27-37 NRS)

Well, Rome and the ancient world thought this forgiveness, love, compassion and do unto others love stuff of Jesus’ Way was nonsense, was foolishness.

Paul notes that “We proclaim Christ crucified” and that it was in his day a stumbling block and thought to be foolishness.

Tending to the least was a Jewish tenet, but most in Palestine expected the Messiah to be a macho warrior who took down Rome and reestablished the Kingdom of Israel, not a peasant Rabbi with no apparent earthly power who was executed on a cross.

Most in Rome just thought it was ridiculous to live and move and have our being as if all humans matter, as if all were in and a part of God. Tending to the least was a foolish Jewish practice, and doing it wholeheartedly while following a lower class expendable who was a crucified nobody to boot, was ridiculous.

Believing Jesus, acting like Jesus, following Jesus, considering Jesus’ way as The Way was thought to be foolish. Indeed Mark 3:21 tells us at one point Jesus’ family tried to restrain him “for people were saying ‘He has gone out of his mind’.” Pastor and theologian Robin Meyers notes that the world avoids doing as Jesus did:

…actually trying to follow him and risk looking crazy too. He was a homeless single man, after all. He was a wandering teacher, healer, and teller of strange and subversive parables about the reign of God. If his contemporaries thought he was possessed by a demon, what would we think about him today? 2

In our own modern world 2,000 years later we hear a lot in the news lately about how folks running for president (for power) on both sides are, or are not, connected to Christianity. I’ve heard at least one person assert the other’s theology is basically some sort of foolish version of Christianity.

Two weeks ago during Bible study a part of our discussion led us to talk little about “The Greatest Prayer,” a book by John Dominic Crossan that our Adult Sunday Seminar just finished studying.

In the introduction to that book Dr. Crossan explains that “justice” in the Bible means “distributive justice,” where all have enough to survive, and how that is God’s vision for humanity. The world, Crossan argues, is God’s home and God is the householder and all who are here are supposed to be treated with kindness as God’s honored and invited guests. As the Householder’s agents and guests, Dr. Crossan asserts that God wants each person to ask these following questions with respect to all the other guests on God’s planet, God’s house: “Do all have enough? Especially that: Do all have enough? Or, to the contrary, do some have far too little while others have far too much? 3.

Crossan goes on to note that: It is that vision of the well-run household, of the home fairly, equitably, and justly administered, that the biblical tradition applies to God. God is the Householder of the world house, and all those preceding questions must be repeated on a global and cosmic scale. Do all God’s children have enough? If not—and the biblical answer is “not”—how must things change here below so that all God’s people have a fair, equitable, and just proportion of God’s world? 4

And Crossan expressly cautions that with respect to God’s Way we are not to “let anyone tell [us] that is Liberalism, Socialism, or Communism. It is—if you need an -ism—Godism, Householdism or, best of all, Enoughism.” 5.

So this “Enoughism” this way of the cross where God sides with Jesus’ Way, is the heavenly way, it is not the earthly way.

Or as Paul puts it, the earthly way is human wisdom and human strength, and not what the world treats as God’s foolishness. Paul proclaims, “God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.”

As we discussed “enoughism” at Bible study around the room there was a shaking of heads when we came to the question of whether Jesus and his enoughism could ever win even a nomination in an American election. There was a resounding “No” to that question. You see, there is no place for Jesus’ policies in the present existing American political party platforms. There is no place for Jesus’ policies there.

Jesus is mentioned all the time in our political discourse and debates by name, but not named or claimed are Jesus’ teachings, or for that matter his God, Love.

My daughter recently sent me a comic-bit by a fellow named John Fugelsang about Jesus running for president in 2012. He aimed it at the current election news around Republican candidates, but, I believe it holds true for the Democrats and each election I have witness in my lifetime.

Mr. Fugelsang’s bit was dripping with irony as he asked how we’d feel about voting for the real Jesus, the one in the Bible, as he puts it:

A guy who was a peaceful, radical, non-violent, revolutionary who hung around with lepers, hookers and criminals; who never spoke English; was not an American citizen; a man who was anti-capitalism, anti-wealth, anti-public prayer (yes he was Matthew 6:5), anti-death penalty, but never once even remotely anti-Gay, didn’t mention abortion, didn’t mention pre-marital sex; a man who never justified torture, who never called the poor “lazy,” who never asked a leper for a co-pay; never fought for a tax cut for the wealthiest Nazarenes, and was a long hair brown skinned … homeless middle eastern Jew.

Mr Fugelsang ended by noting that this was, of course, JESUS “only if you believe what’s actually in the Bible.” 6

This is one of those sermons where I want to remind you that in this church you do not have to agree with what I say up here. Because some of you may disagree today, you might just think I’m crazy too.

See the sad truth to me is that John Fugelsang is absolutely right. And his comic bit isn’t funny when we think about it as Christians, it is tragic.

Jesus could not get elected in America. Our culture does not want his practices woven into the fabric of our living, not just because we have a clause protecting us from religion being imposed by the government, but because Jesus’ policies when it gets right down to it are seen as foolish, they are crazy and anyone who would promote them is crazy.

In American politics that lovey-dovey good Householder stuff is for church on Sundays and for us to do on our own if we want. Helping the least amongst us as a nation is not action our politicians get elected promoting, indeed they get pummeled if they come anywhere near promoting it. Power in this country steers clear of the Gospels.

Let’s face it, Jesus’ Sermon on the Plain would be panned across the nation if uttered as a candidate’s stump speech or as a summary in a debate. Those in power and seeking power pretty much take the approach that governing ought not to be about providing help for persons in need.

Yet our nation recently helped a whole bunch of “persons” get help, corporate persons, banks and industries. Both sides of the aisles of power backed this. Earthly power by-and-large accepted it as a part of capitalism, the majority of our leadership surely did.

What does it mean when the powerful accept the need to help corporate persons, but fight or ignore helping real persons?

When our nation recently discussed helping a whole bunch of real “persons” out of work, poor and sick we kept hearing it called socialism as Dr. Crossan portends. Helping individuals in need didn’t – and doesn’t – go down so well in the circles of earthly power.

We seem to have an ethos of sink-or-swim, pull-yourself-up-by-your-own-bootstraps, God-only-helps-those-who-help-themselves approach to people.

In short what Heavenly power, what Jesus calls us to – helping the least – it is denigrated in American politics. That’s the ugly truth. And shrill voices call it foolishness, and proponents of The Jesus of the Bible are called crazy, or worse.

The truth of the cross is ugly. It’s foolish to the earthly way. It is. The powerful killed a man whose only crime was promoting and providing love and justice and peace – exactly what God wants!

That man was Jesus. And today we hear a lot of those holding and seeking power raising Jesus’ name and claiming his way as theirs yet they disavow, denigrate or ignore the very love and justice and peace he promoted when it comes to applying it outside of church or by individual choice.

They call it socialism or communism. They in essence call it foolish.

That’s what society was saying back in Paul’s day. That’s what Paul is writing about, human power’s way of labeling God’s call as foolish.

The Lectionary reading today ends with Paul noting that “God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.”

Basically no matter how our politicians, our culture or even we, dismiss the call to “Enoughism,” what we may think of as the “Foolishness of Enough,” is nonetheless God’s wisdom.

We don’t get to tchoose that, we don’t get to change that.

And that foolish crazy wisdom, taught by Jesus, will never stop being where God calls us as a people and as individuals. That call has echoed for thousands of years and it will echo for all time. “For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.”

As Christians – whether we want to or not, whether it troubles us or not, whether it goes against our upbringing or not, whether it goes against our party line or not – we must ask Dr. Crossan’s powerful questions: Do all God’s children have enough? If not—and the biblical answer is “not”—how must things change here below so that all God’s people have a fair, equitable, and just proportion of God’s world?

Jesus’ Way moves us towards bringing about those very changes. It is the good news that we strive toward. And we must continue to do so.

And Jesus’ followers would do well to ask every politician who claims to admire or follow Jesus these questions: How can the nation put in effect a form of Jesus’ Sermon on the Plain?

Do you plan to promote enoughism?

When do you expect we will begin to make sure all of God’s invited guests on planet earth will be honored and taken care of?

And we should ask ourselves those questions too, because it’s doubtful anytime soon that our nation’s powerful will put into effect these things, which means we have to, because at the end of the day we are called by “God’s foolishness [which] is wiser than human wisdom.” to put into effect the Sermon on the Plain, to promote enoughism and to makes sure every human is honored and taken care of.

Being a Christian on Jesus’ Way is not simply about believing and getting saved in a life hereafter, it’s about working to bring about heaven on earth for the living, it’s about working for the Great Householder and seeing to it that all Divinely invited guests are well cared for. That’s where God draws us to on this Heavenly Way.

And that is where we will always be pulled and always be drawn.

And the good news is that in the end we will get there, because – thank goodness – God’s weakness is stronger than any human strength.

AMEN.

ENDNOTES

1. http://www.bellaonline.com/articles/art17703.asp 1A

2. Meyers, Robin (2012-01-12). The Underground Church: Reclaiming the Subversive Way of Jesus (pp. 12-13). John Wiley and Sons. Kindle Edition.

3. Crossan, John Dominic, The Greatest Prayer: Rediscovering the Revolutionary Message of the Lord’s Prayer. Harper Collins, Inc., (2011).

4. Ibid.

5. Ibid.

6. Fugelsang, John from his short comedy bit at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijD_WnhNnZs&feature=player_embedded&fb_source=message

COPYRIGHT Scott Elliott © 2012 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

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Jesus’ Open Table, God’s Open Love

Jesus’ Open Table, God’s Open Love

a sermon based on Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16

given at Palm Bay, FL on March 4, 2012

by Rev. Scott Elliott

I can’t remember if I have used this joke in a sermon before. It’s short and it sort of relates to communion: Do you know why at first Last Supper there was only wine and bread? Because it was a pot luck and only men were invited.

Now, that joke only works based on a presumption that just men were there when Jesus last broke bread. That may be how the Last Supper is remembered, but it doesn’t seem likely.

I say this because we know that Jesus’ table was not just open to men, not only were women invited, present and honored as equals at Jesus’ table and in his community, but so were all the “others” that society rejected or disrespected or otherwise walled out. Jesus takes down all the walls. No one, rich or poor, Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female were denied a place at Jesus’ table or community.

Two thousand years ago at Jesus’ table all were welcome and all were invited; and that’s the very same table that we remember and reenact and celebrate whenever we have Communion at this church. All are invited, all may partake at the open table we practice.

I did not invent the open Communion table, Jesus did.

And one of the things that drew me to accept a call at this church was that the Table at Communion here was wide open … long before I got here.

Jesus’ open table and community is good news that we think needs to be shared far and wide.

While Jesus’ inclusion of both men and women was an act of love and an act of open opposition to the oppressive “men only” stuff that went on in his patriarchal culture, you might be surprised to learn that as radical as Jesus’ equal rights treatment was, it was not necessarily new to Judaism. Today’s lesson from Genesis can be heard some 500 years before Jesus, to have God telling men that women equally matter to God.

So far this liturgical year we have considered – as I promised – a number of Old Testament lessons from the weekly Lectionary readings.

“Old Testament” is what most of us have grown up calling the portions of the Bible written before Jesus. It’s an unfortunate label, because it suggests the text has been replaced to some extent by the New Testament and so a lot of Christians give its contents a lesser status and, frankly, short shrift.

But the older texts are not only full of deep meaning, but we also need to keep in mind that those very texts were Holy and Sacred to Jesus. As a first-century Jewish Rabbi, the Hebrew Scriptures and traditions shaped and formed his ministry. And so they ought to be Holy and Scared to us too, just as much as New Testament texts are.

The Old Testament may be what we tend to call it, but the first part of our Bibles would better be referred to as “The Hebrew Scriptures” which is what you will hear many scholars refer to it now-a-days.

So how is this text we just heard read from the Hebrew Scriptures, then, in any way radical good news?

Well, let me give you some interesting background to set the scene. Thousands of years ago the stories in Genesis were added to and modified by different writers over time, so a number of different threads run through them. In Bible Study we have talked about this weaving of a tapestry of stories with these threads clearly put there by looms, if you will, of different story weavers.

There are traces of a few authors in Genesis. No one knows the authors’ names but one is called the “Yawehist” because he refers to God as Yahweh (I say “he” because most academics think he’s a he but one notable scholar has argued the Yawehist was a she!) .

Another author whose threads are woven into Genesis is called the “Elohist” because he refers to God as the Elohim in the Hebrew.

Yet another is called the Priestly Writer(s) because he is believed to have been a priest or perhaps a number of priests.

At any rate, the Priestly Writer has a certain style that appears in today’s reading and so he is considered the author of the text we heard read a few moments ago from Genesis 17.

The Priestly Writer’s works are thought to be the last of the threads added to the Genesis story and placed in the book in the 6th century during or shortly after Israel was conquered by Babylon – and its leaders, like the priests and perhaps even the “Priestly Writer” – were taken into exile – marched out of Israel and kept in captivity in Babylon.

The Exile was a terribly disorienting time for those who understood God to side with them. How could God let them be defeated and captured and taken from their promised land?

Out of this disorientation Israel ends up re-imagining God. The god they imagined before as being their banner carrier into battle and throughout life was not what they experienced in defeat and exile.

So too their sense of what it meant to be God’s chosen people needed to be reoriented, under the previous way of understanding God it appeared that God had abandoned them and punished them. The Exile resulted in, as Walter Brueggemann puts it: “the death of everything that gave identity to the life of Israel.” 1

But Dr. Brueggeman goes on to also note that: From the bottom of loss and guilt arose in Israel a series of new imaginative voices who took the loss with deep seriousness but who shrewdly reinterpreted old faith traditions to turn exilic Israel in toward the future. 2.

This is the background for the story we heard in the lesson today where God enters into a covenant not just with Abram, the father of the Hebrews, but also with Sarai, the mother of the Hebrews. God in this text lets males-in-charge know (in no uncertain terms) that God honors, respects, blesses and makes promises to women. Out of the Exile can be heard this remarkable new understanding of God as the One Divine being who equally honors men AND women.

That image of God in turn suggests that out of the Exile men were treating women with respect and honoring them as well. A good thing indeed! God’s community, like Jesus’ community, includes both males and females at the table.

Under the pre-Exilic way of understanding God, the Exile made it seem impossible that God as an angry, punishing, patriarchal God, was in a good relationship with humans. It seemed impossible that there were no strings attached to God’s love. And impossible that God cared for Israel, or even that Israel could continue on to the next generation.

So the Priestly Writers develop a whole new way of understanding God, that which is impossible under the old way of thinking about God, is made possible under the new way. God is no longer understood as an out there angry God; or a tending to males only God. God is not about fear and punishment but caring relationships with all. God cares for and initiates relationships with humans, both male and female.

The post-Exilic idea of God leads to relationships being altered, so much so every character in the story gets a new name. God for the first time is called El Shaddai, which is translated in the story as “God almighty.” We are told that

When Abram was ninety-nine years old, the LORD appeared to Abram, and said to him, “I am God Almighty …I am El Shaddai.”

Abram has up to this point acted more than a little like a scoundrel: deceiving Pharaoh; letting his wife be bartered as his sister to Pharaoh; causing havoc in Egypt; taking Sarai back at a price; doubting God’s promise of a son; and taking Hagar as a concubine disrupting his marital relationship, treating both Hagar and Sarai poorly.

Abram can be heard to symbolize Israel before the Exile, not doing as God called, acting as scoundrel by not taking care of, and cavalierly and poorly treating, others.

Abram is old in the story, he is ninety-nine. Ninety-nine and someone who like Israel – like each of us – has not been perfect. But El Shaddai, God Almighty, deigns to appear to him even though he is a flawed little being in the universe.

God the Almighty chooses to be in Abram’s life and makes a covenant, an agreement that establishes a personal relationship with all of humanity.

The entire Bible is about human relationships with God, God in creation, God in others and all the rest of what God is in.

God the Almighty says to Abram:

“I will make my covenant between me and you, and will make you exceedingly numerous.”

Abram, in complete humility and humbleness before God, falls on his face; and God said to him,

“As for me, this is my covenant with you: You shall be the ancestor of a multitude of nations.”

This ninety-nine year old and his ninety year old wife are being promised the impossible. God’s telling them that they are going to have a child.

Now I know that there is lots of discussion and debate about Mary conceiving Jesus as a virgin, but at least Mary was young and fertile and able to have children. Sarai is not. She has not only been barren her entire life, but, she is ninety. NINETY.

No one in this room would believe me if I told a story about a ninety-nine year old man impregnating his ninety year old wife. You’d think I got that news off a National Enquirer headline while standing in line for groceries.

It’s so impossible we’d laugh. Well that’s what both Abram and Sarai do, they laugh when they get the news. But God in the story does the impossible, gives them a new generation to carry the blood line on, and it’s not just Abram’s line but Sarai’s line too.

Israel, old and tired in Exile, seems incapable of continuation, of giving birth to a new generation. It seems as impossible as a very elderly couple giving birth. Yet in this story God promises and does the impossible. God’s relationship with Israel is renewed, reborn in a whole new way. And Abram and Sarai are promised a blood line continuation in all generations to come.

And it is such a remarkable event, such a new imagining of God and God’s relationship with Abram and Sarai and the generations to follow that, not only does God Almighty get a new name, but so does Abram and Sarai.

God says:

No longer shall your name be Abram, but your name shall be Abraham; for I have made you the ancestor of a multitude of nations. I will make you exceedingly fruitful; and I will make nations of you, and kings shall come from you. I will establish my covenant between me and you, and your offspring after you throughout their generations, for an everlasting covenant, to be God to you and to your offspring after you.

Did you hear that “this is an everlasting covenant?” That means it’s steadfast and will endure forever. It is to be passed down from generation to generation to all offspring, male and female.

God is going to love Abraham and his offspring always, and a multitude of nations will trace their lineage to him. Abraham actually means “father of multitudes.”

And regardless of whether we consider this story as fact or metaphor the truth either way is that this is true. Abraham is to this day considered the father of multitudes and not just in the Jewish tradition, but Islam and Christianity also trace their roots to him.

And, this is the coolest part to me as a feminist theologian, Sarai’s name – by God – is changed too and God makes sure to declare to the male leadership that she, and by representation all women, are honored and blessed.

God said to Abraham, “As for Sarai your wife, you shall not call her Sarai, but Sarah shall be her name. I will bless her, and moreover I will give you a son by her. I will bless her, and she shall give rise to nations; kings of peoples shall come from her.”

Sarah is a female that matters to God, and Abraham, a man, a patriarch, is told so.

The Feasting on the Word Commentary notes that: For once Sarah’s participation is neither assumed nor implied. God makes her a full partner in this enterprise, both by giving her a name and by promising her a blessing of her own. 3.

God says of Sarah, “I will bless her, and she shall give rise to nations; kings of peoples shall come from her.” That’s in the 2500 year old Hebrew Scriptures.

God Almighty cares about women, elevates then as full partners with men. And so Sarah is, according to the Bible, an equal parent of the multitude of Jews and Christians and their nations throughout time. THAT’S RADICAL!

Jesus, a Jewish Rabbi, followed God Almighty’s honoring and blessing women by equally blessing women in his community and inviting women equally to his table open to all.

The Lord’s Supper has long been open and available for women to participate in even as patriarchal cultures and church leaders have oppressed and denigrated women.

Even as women have been treated unequally in the world, they have been equal at Jesus’ table since the very beginning.

Jesus’ God was, and always has been, the God who’s almighty in the Hebrew Scriptures, the God who does the impossible, initiates relationships with us, male and female equally. The God who is Love – El Shaddai.

See God Almighty is the God we know as love. The love we ALL live and move and have our being in.

The good news is God has since the very beginning been as post-Exilic Israel finally imagined and experienced, the God who does the impossible, and loves us all.

Now that’s some good news!

AMEN.

ENDNOTES

1. Brueggemann, Walter, Reverberations of Faith, p 70

2. Ibid.

3. Feasting on the Word, Year B, Vol 2, p. 53.

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