God Commands Christians to Call No One Profane or Unclean

God Commands Christians to Call No One Profane or Unclean

a sermon based on Acts 11:1-18

given at Palm Bay, FL on April 28, 2013

by Rev. Scott Elliott

The lesson that BEV/HOWIE just read is about Peter’s defense of his baptizing a Roman Centurion enemy solider named Cornelius, and his family and friends.

You know. . . Whenever I hear the name Cornelius I cannot help but think of the musical Hello Dolly. I played the role of Cornelius, a hapless Yonkers hardware store clerk who drags his assistant Barnaby on a tour of New York where they fall in love and sing and dance– that’s right, dance.

At one point in the play Cornelius runs to hide from his boss by, at least in our production, hurdling a full-sized dining table. That leap garnered applause and it was actually pretty cool. Back then I wasn’t much of a dancer, but I could run and leap. Alas those days are long gone.

My Cornelius story has a character in a musical clearing a hurdle– a table. And today’s story is about Cornelius a Roman Centurion enemy soldier clearing a hurdle to joining the Jesus following. The hurdle was the exclusion of culturally profane and unclean people. God, through Peter, makes sure the hurdle’s removed.

Let me back up. The Jewish texts of the Bible, what we tend to call the Old Testament, repeatedly claim that God’s love is steadfast and forever. It’s a main theme of Judaism and Scripture, and therefore, you may have noticed, often in my sermons.

And what it means is that we’re loved, and we can’t lose it. Everyone gets loved, there are no hurdles to God’s love. That’s pretty radical, because there are lots of hurdles to human love.

Jesus was Jewish and he glommed onto that very simple and precious theological gem, that God’s love has no strings attached.

And so Jesus sets up this Way to God – to love– that has no hurdles in place for those who want to follow Jesus. It’s really very, very cool.

And for those who wonder why I preach about love all the time, it’s because the God of Jesus is love and the Bible is about that very God and Christianity is supposed to be about Jesus’ Way of the wide open unconditional embrace of the God who is love.

See, Christianity done Jesus’ Way is really all about love. Unconditional love.

It sounds simple, but the work is hard and risky. Jesus’ no-hurdles-to-love ministry got him killed.  Jesus was executed because of his bold and passionate unwavering (OUT LOUD!) commitment to love. It’s risky stuff, love.

I saw the movie “42″ a few days ago. It’s the story of Jackie Robinson. He and team owner, Branch Rickey broke down baseball’s color barrier, the hurdle that kept African Americans from playing in the major leagues.

In the movie, some take action to break the hurdles down, some act to keep the hurdles up, and some take little or no action.

Even though the story’s well known, the movie draws you in and you root for Jackie and Branch, and root against the racists, but the most frustrating thing is the characters who do nothing.

And finally when more and more take action against oppression, things start to fall in place.

Jesus’ movement was about taking action to take down hurdles. It was decidedly not about putting them up. Nor was it about inaction.

The Jesus movement from its inception was about taking action to end oppression.  Jesus’ ministry begins in Luke with Jesus declaring he expressly came to proclaim release of captives and to let the oppressed go free.

Jesus was not afraid to proclaim his no-hurdles-to-love theology . . . and thankfully neither is the United Church of Christ.

The UCC banner in front of our church proclaims the essence of this no hurdles-to-love theology. The banner reads quite simply “Jesus didn’t reject people . . . Then adds “neither do we.”

That last bit’s our putting Jesus’ Way into action, a promise of not being inactive like those who sat back letting Jackie Robinson be threatened and abused, letting racism go unopposed aloud by them.

It’s our promise to be like southerner Pee Wee Reese, the Dodger shortstop, who put his arm around Jack Robinson at first base, and stood with him openly and proudly . . . Whether anyone else liked it or not.

“Jesus didn’t reject people, neither do we.” Why do you suppose that banner is up at UCC churches? Because a lot of churches do reject people and people are leaving churches or not coming to them because of that rejection.

So we have to take action. We have to boldly set ourselves apart from churches that act against Jesus’ Way of all inclusive love.

We have to stand up for that inclusive love, and proclaim it aloud.  Another UCC slogan is: “Wherever you are on life’s journey, you are welcome here . . .”

Our bumper sticker and this week’s church sign proclaim it like this: “God’s love has no strings attached.”

See in this church we want no hurdles, because Jesus had no hurdles to love. It’s the very core of his Way and this church.

Because so many churches in America have gone out of the way to put hurdles up for Gay, Lesbian, Bi-sexual and Transgender folk, Churches like ours and – 1,089  other UCC churches– which have no such hurdles, go out of the way to declare we’re “Open and Affirming,” meaning we are open to all and actually affirm all as equal.

Our ONA statement is really quite wonderful. It was adopted without a vote in opposition. Here’s what it says about everyone:

We are an Open & Affirming church, welcoming all with love into our life, leadership, ministry, community, worship, rites, sacraments, responsibilities and blessings, including lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, heterosexuals and all others regardless of race, age, gender expression and identity, marital standing, family structure, socio-economic status, profession, faith background, nationality, mental abilities, or physical abilities.

Can you hear how all hurdles are taken down by that proclamation?

One of the greatest moments of my ministry was when an elderly man in tears came up after that vote and said to me “Thank you. My partner and I have been together over fifty-years and this is the first church we could feel be a part of, that we could call family and home. Thank you.”

I told him I was glad he found us. I also apologized to him because every church that beautiful man had ever been in should have been a church he could feel part of. Jesus had no hurdles to God, to love to love on his way.

While the ultimate truth is that God’s love has no strings attached, the reality is that Christianity as a whole has failed to live that truth out by putting hurdles up to God’s love.

I am so glad this church takes the opposite tack, we glom onto what Jesus glommed onto, the belief that God is love and that caring, having compassion and the desire for well being of others is our call.

And make no mistake about it, our beautiful ONA statement is not just about our LGBT brothers and sisters, it’s about everyone.

I’ve heard that detractors claim our church is just about helping Gays.

I’ve even heard that I only preach about Gays.

While we’d be doing great work if tending to LGBT folks was our only mission – since no one other church in South County proclaims to be doing it– it is of course not our only mission, but one of many.

Yet, anyone who claims we are a one issue church or that I am a one issue pastor is on to something, boiled down our one issue is compassion and care and the desire for the wellbeing of everyone, poor, sick, alien, stranger, other, imprisoned, hated and outcast–YOU ARE LOVED HERE.

As our vision statement puts it: we exist to experience and share Christ’s unconditional love by thinking openly, believing passionately and serving boldly.

We aim to love and welcome all, as Christ does, unconditionally. Our theology is like that of Jesus,’ how to relate to God and self and the world with Love. That is actually the whole of the Bible boiled to its essence.

And despite the risk that making Jesus’ Way of love for all our passion and our proclamation, the importance of making sure we let folks know we do just that, that we are open and affirming of all– cannot be stressed enough.

That actor who played Barnaby in Hello Dolly with me, I first met at a church when we were teens. He was Gay. The church  was not Gay friendly.

That friend, Jeff, took his life . . . took his life.  I have little doubt a Gay friendly church would have made all the difference.

Hurdles to church matter. We need to proclaim loudly the truth that there are none at Riviera United Church of Christ.

And I am not off on a tangent. Hurdles to church are exactly what is at issue in the Lectionary lesson today. Hurdles are being taken down. Peter understood God to COMMAND there are to be no hurdles, so he boldly and passionately took action to take them down.

The Jesus Followers at the time were Jewish. Jesus was Jewish. The disciples were Jewish. After Jesus was crucified, after he was experienced as risen, a post-Easter following of Jesus continued, but they still considered themselves a sect of Judaism.

The Book of Acts reports that at least this sect within Judaism had in its early days, prohibitions against eating and gathering with the unclean and profane Gentiles.

Like some churches today, the early church began putting hurdles up to who could choose to follow Jesus’ Way. Perhaps they were worried that following an executed criminal, Jesus’ Way was “out there” enough, so they tried to tow the line.

Whatever the reason, once Jesus is no longer physically present and leading the way, the Apostles in Jerusalem put up hurdles to what had been Jesus’ unobstructed Way. Thankfully, this changes pretty quickly. 

Peter and Paul are instrumental in pushing down these barriers which were erected after Easter. Today’s lesson is about Peter defending this hurdle removal.

Peter’s efforts began earlier in Acts 10 (23-29), where we are told Peter had a vision and met with that Roman Centurion, Cornelius and a gathering of his Gentile relatives and friends. Although they are non-Jewish and enemies, Peter baptized them.

Since they were not Jewish Peter’s hauled before the leaders of the early post-Easter Jesus Movement (what later becomes the church) in Jerusalem to explain what he was doing hanging out with non-Jews and inviting and initiating them into the fold when they weren’t to even be associated with.

Peter knew the rules; he even explained the exclusive rules – the hurdles– to Cornelius and the other Gentiles. In Acts 10 we are told Peter explained to them “it is unlawful for a Jew to associate with or to visit a Gentile . . .” But Peter tossed that hurdle aside. He preached and baptized Gentiles.

Our lesson today picks up with Peter explaining his unseemly conduct.

Again, Jesus let everyone who wanted into his following, but, the Apostles are not so inclusive, at least not at first. They don’t want to rock the boat, wanting to be mainstream they have strict rules that only the Biblically clean can come into the fold.

This is, of course, ironic. It’s ironic since Jesus had no such rules. He let in everyone. Women, men, children, foreigners, rich, poor, tax collectors, Gentiles, Roman Centurions, and the every other clean or unclean person who desired to follow him got in as equals –just like our ONA statement.

It’s also ironic because throughout history we have leaders in Christianity who put up hurdles. They want to make The Way only for those they deem clean and kosher. That’s the nature of the debate in the nation today. Right? That is what is driving many young folks from church or to stay the heck way from it.

Many Christians loudly proclaim our LGBT brothers and sisters are profane and unclean, and churches who stand up and say otherwise are criticized, often vehemently so.

That criticism of letting in those whom others object to happens today and it was happening way back when Peter and other Apostles were alive.  That’s what is going on here in the story BEV/HOWIE just read. Peter has dared to knock down hurdles to those others would call profane or unclean.

The lesson starts off with these words:

Now the apostles and the believers who were in Judea heard that the Gentiles had also accepted the word of God. So when Peter went up to Jerusalem, the circumcised believers criticized him, saying, “Why did you go to uncircumcised men and eat with them?”

Peter responds with the only defense needed, that God COMMANDS for such a broad inclusion. Peter had a vision of unclean animals that God tells him to eat. Peter resisted. God argued back “’What God has made clean, you must not call profane.’”

We are told Peter gave in, went to Cornelius, and brought him and his crew into the Jesus movement because the Holy Spirit commanded him “not to make a distinction between them and us.” This is what Peter tells the other leaders. Amazingly they did not respond with anger and accusations, but with silence and then “they praised God . . .” They saw it as a good thing!

Peter risked a lot openly, passionately and boldly welcoming into the church a Roman Centurion enemy and his family and friends. These types of folks were repulsive to many in the culture, they were considered profane and unclean. But God sees no one as profane or unclean.

The culture’s way is not God or Jesus’ Way. So UCC churches, like this one, embrace as equal and welcome as beloved everyone even those others wrongly – WRONGLY! – claim to be unclean and profane, even repulsive.

That Peter was out on limb may be why he only shared with the leaders a part of the defense God gave him. He only asserted to the co-leaders that he was told “What God has made clean, you must not call profane.”

But, you see, Peter held back the whole story. Acts 10 evidences Peter told the Romans that had assembled, “‘You yourselves know that it is unlawful for a Jew to associate with or to visit a Gentile; but God has shown me that I should not call anyone profane or unclean.’”

“God has shown me that I should not call anyone profane or unclean.”  God, GOD COMMANDED that we “should not call anyone profane or unclean.”

That’s in the Bible. It’s in the New Testament. It has been there for two thousand years.  God’s way is that Christians should not call anyone profane or unclean.

Not enemy Roman soldiers.

Not Gentiles.

Not Jews.

Not women.

Not men.

Not children.

Not people of color.

Not disabled.

Not divorced.

Not gays.

Not lesbians.

Not transgenders.

Not bisexuals.

Not aliens.

Not strangers.

Not poor.

Not sick.

Not criminals.

Not anyone.

Although it took the Apostles a while to get this. Jesus taught this stuff to them long before God COMMANDED it in Peter’s vision.

Jesus said don’t judge. Jesus said love everyone. Jesus said do to others as you want done to you. Jesus did not have rules that barred what type of person could choose to come to his table and be part of his following. He helped and welcomed the unclean and profane, the Romans, Samaritans, lepers, adulteresses, Canaanites, the dead and the dying, the criminals and ostracized, the stranger and outcast. All got in.

All.

Got.

In.

And not secretly through a back door, but by Jesus’ loud, bold passionate proclamations. Christ made it loud and clear that all got in. All. Got. In. You see God declares steadfast and forever love and Jesus plays it out boldly and passionately.

Jesus’ open and affirming statement did not just hang on a wall in a church, it hung in the air in all he did, it was proclaimed in his every word and deed loud and clearly!

Like Pee-Wee Reese – if you will – Jesus continuously puts his arm around the oppressed holding them for all to see that they are loved.

See Jesus didn’t reject people.

And neither do we.

Thank Jesus.

Thank God.

May it ever be so.

Amen.

COPYRIGHT   Scott Elliott © 2013 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Illuminating Every Atom of Creation

Illuminating Every Atom of Creation

 a sermon based on Psalm 148

given at Palm Bay, FL on April 21, 2013

by Rev. Scott Elliott

I am going to talk about the environment this morning even though things like global warming are a heated topic.

That was a bad joke so let me try again, do you realize that if we don’t conserve water we could go from one ex-stream to another.

Okay, here’s the last bad (which means good) pun of the morning: with everything we read about spray cans and the ozone layer it’s enough to sca-aerosol to death . . .

Those are the only light-hearted words I have this morning, as I actually turn to the serious topic of ecology and our environment.

I’m addressing the environment this morning because, tomorrow is Earth Day and because we are involved in a United Church of Christ project called Mission 4:1 Earth. As a part of this project during Eastertide (the fifty days from Easter to Pentecost) we are striving as a church to put in 1,000 hours toward environmental work, plant 30 trees and write 30 letters to politicians on the ecological topics like stopping pollution and the depletion of resources.

This is important stuff and a part of our call. The Bible claims that humans are charged with being stewards of creation. In other words, as a people of God we are not only supposed to take care of our neighbors, but we are to take care of the earth too.

Alas, we do not seem to be doing a very good job of it. From individuals littering, to companies dumping, to our culture– and others– wasting and not replenishing, we are not tending to creation very well.

Earth Day is a day meant to remind everyone – not just Christians – to take care of this fragile little rock we inhabit. Earth is the only, well . . . earth that we have.

The first Earth Day was on April 22, 1970. It was started by a Democrat and a Republican Senator, Gaylord Nelson and Pete McCloskey. This was back in the day when elected officials had the novel idea that politics ought to include now and then doing what’s best for the world.

Earth Day was created in response to the terrible smoke stack billowing, exhaust pipe spewing, and water-way polluting that was going on in the nation. It was the big beginning of what was then often know as ecology, it’s where what we call today environmentalism coalesced into an agreement by Republicans and Democrats and much of the rest of the nation that we ought to take care of creation.

And actually a horrible oil spill in 1969 off the coast of Santa Barbara in my home state of California was a catalyst for the first Earth Day, Senator Nelson visited the spill and was moved to do something, so he proposed an annual day where we celebrate the earth and remember our sacred charge to take care of it.

Earth Day was effective. It led to not only teach-ins, but the creation of the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) and laws like the Clean Air, Clean Water and Endangered Species Acts. 1

I was in elementary school at the time of the Santa Barbara spill, then sadly in 1971 when I was in Junior High School there was another spill up the coast in the San Francisco Bay, not far from my hometown. A bunch of us at the Junior High took a field trip on a school bus with the ecology club and spent the day cleaning up a beach, trying to rescue oil soaked sea life and throwing hay in the Pacific to sponge up oil.

I remember even now the dank, dark murky film of oil in the water, blackening everything it touched, not just the hay we carried out and tried to throw beyond the breaking waves, but sea birds and fish and even us. I remember oil and tar stuck on the pant legs of my Levis and shoes and a sickening smell of oil on the bus on the trek home.

That day even as a young teen, it was clear to me that far from being good stewards of creation, humankind had found ways to take the shine out of the Glory of God which naturally, innately, saturates creation.

And it’s certainly not just out in California that humans have messed up creation.

I came to Florida for a visit in my early twenties and was so impressed with the wildlife, there are lots of extraordinary animals here.

One thing we real west coast people did not grow up with is fireflies. That may seem like a small thing, but, the thing I remember best about my visit three decades ago was all the fireflies. They are amazing and beautiful and fascinating. Sadly, in the seven years I have been here I have never seen a firefly.

And it’s not just exotic flashing bugs of light that are dwindling. There are fifty-six species of animals in Florida that have so diminished in existence that they are listed as threatened or endangered. 2.

Among them, manatees, pumas, sea turtles, crocodiles, jays, rabbits, rats, bats, snails and whales.

And there are endangered and threatened plants in this state too, fifty-five plants in all, among them wild rosemary, mints, flowers, willows, plums and cacti.

Obviously it’s not just Florida and California that have environmental concerns. In fact it’s not like we are the only nation that has been less than kind to our planet. It’s not a national problem, it is a global one.

Humans are destroying the planet.

This is not good from any stand point. It’s also something from a Christian standpoint – as stewards of God’s creation– we have to do something about. . . . Our love of God must include love of God in creation.

My theology includes a belief that God calls all of creation, not just humans, to the best that it can be.

Moreover I believe that God is – as the Apostle Paul indicated – that which we live and move and have our being in.

This matches up with a number of other Bible verses. Genesis tells us that all of creation is made of the very words of God, and that living things have God’s very own breath in them.

Coming from God, ALL of creation is a part of God. We are in a God soaked world.

Psalm 19 (1-4) reflects on the Genesis claim that the word of God is in all things, noting:

The heavens are telling the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims his handiwork. Day to day pours forth speech, and night to night declares knowledge. There is no speech, nor are there words; their voice is not heard; yet their voice goes out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world.

Psalm 139 has a beautiful question and answer section declaring God is absolutely everywhere:

Where can I go from your spirit? Or where can I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, you are there; if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there. If I take the wings of the morning and settle at the farthest limits of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me fast. (7-10)

Jeremiah (23:24) sums this up too, quite succinctly: “Who can hide in secret places so that I cannot see them? says the LORD. Do I not fill heaven and earth? says the LORD.”

The Apostle Paul says it even simpler in Ephesians “[There is] one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all.” (4-6).

God, you see, soaks creation.

And Paul also connects this soaked in God reality up nicely for us Christians with respect to Christ, our name for God incarnate on earth. He writes in Colossians (1:15-17):

[Christ] is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers– all things have been created through him and for him. He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together. (Col 1:15-17 NRS).

God is in all of creation.All of creation is in God. The theological word for this is “panentheism” which means all-in-God.

We float in and are soaked by the Sacred. Creation floats in and is soaked by the Sacred.

Every human being I know wants to be the best they can be.

And that pull that we feel to be the best we can be is also felt by every molecule and atom, every proton and electron in the universe. It’s the fluid God particle or wave vibrating in and soaking everything calling all that is to shine the Sacred – what I call, expressing the Glory of God!

And Psalm 148, today’s “lesson” can be heard to be saying just that.

One of my seminary professors, Rev. Dr. Clint McCann, is a renowned expert on the Psalms.  Dr. McCann notes in his wonderful book Great Psalms of the Bible that in Psalm 148 “[a] world-encompassing crowd, consisting of both creatures and features God has made, is invited to praise God.” 3

Dr. McCann goes on to write:

No doubt Psalm 148 lays an impressive theological foundation for what we would call today environmentalism, or ecological responsibility, or more recently, thinking and acting green. 4

The good professor urges that Psalm 148 – along with other Bible texts–  “demonstrate that from a biblical perspective, theology and ecology are inseparable.” 5

Psalm 148 in the translation we heard today is about God getting praise from all of creation, not just humans, but everything– the “creatures and features” as Dr. McCann cleverly calls them in the poignant pages of his book. His assertion is that human mistreatment of creation has muted the praises God wants from creatures and features– from animals and plants and water and geography.

The word translated as “praise” in Psalm 148 is “halal” (haw-lal) it’s a Hebrew word that can also mean “to shine ” or to illuminate.

I actually wrote and asked Dr. McCann a few weeks ago if we could also hear in Psalm 148 creation being called to “shine” God.

Dr. McCanm indicated that it was indeed fair to hear “halal” (haw-lal) as shine or illuminate in the Psalm.

So I am going to read the Psalm again with shine and illuminate in place of praise (and with more inclusive language) so we can hear what that sounds like:

¹ Shine the LORD! Shine the LORD from the heavens; illuminate God in the heights!

² Shine God, all the angels; praise God, all the host!

³ Shine God, sun and moon; shine God, all you shining stars!

⁴ Shine God, you highest heavens, and you waters above the heavens!

⁵ Let them illuminate the name of the LORD, for God commanded and they were created.

⁶ God established them forever and ever; God fixed their bounds, which cannot be passed.

⁷ Shine the LORD from the earth, you sea monsters and all deeps,

⁸ fire and hail, snow and frost, stormy wind fulfilling God’s command!

⁹ Mountains and all hills, fruit trees and all cedars!

¹⁰ Wild animals and all cattle, creeping things and flying birds!

¹¹ Kings of the earth and all peoples, Queens and all rulers of the earth!

¹² Young men and women alike, old and young together!

¹³ Let them illuminate the name of the LORD, for God’s name alone is exalted; God’s glory is above earth and heaven.

¹⁴ God has raised up a horn for God’s people, shine for all God’s faithful, for the people of Israel who are close to God. Shine the LORD!  (Psalm 148:1-14 NRS, with my modifications)

Notice how this way of hearing Psalm 148 fits the theological notion that God calls all of creation, both features and creatures, to its best, that is, to shine God – to express the Glory of God– for all to see.  We should be able to look at earth and see God shining in all things – we should not do anything to dull that shine, rather we should do all that we can to give luster to that shine.

On Earth Day we’d do well to remember that humanity has not only fouled the planet, but part and parcel of that fouling, is we have lessened the shine of God in creation. We are preventing creation from fully illuminating God for all to see. Or to use the New Revised translation, we are preventing creation from crying out praises for God. Instead it cries out in anguish and in sorrow for us to stop abusing and ignoring it, to stop dulling God’s glory in the world and help it shine again.

We can hear the light of God in Psalm 148 wanting to break forth and  be illuminated in every square inch and atom of creation.

And sadly we have hindered that call. In parts of creation we are crippling and dulling the glow of the Divine spark of God with acid rain, global warming, toxic waste, resource depletion, smog, littering and abuse of our waterways and aquifers, by our misuse and lack of care for our flora and fauna and that which we live and move and have our being in. There is no way around it, Biblically speaking parts of God are being fouled by us.

Our church is involved in Mission 4:1 Earth, a UCC effort to make a difference. We have committed to put in one thousand hours of green work, plant thirty trees and write thirty letters to elected officials. Please consider helping us meet, or better yet exceed, those goals by May 19^th.

Lets help creation shine the Lord, just as God intended and calls us to do.

Lets be good stewards of creation just as God intended and calls us to do.

May it be so.

May we help the glory of God shine from sea to shining sea, and not just this Eastertide, but all the time.

AMEN.

ENDNOTES

1.  Earth Day Network at http://www.earthday.org/earth-day-history-movement

2. Endangeredspecie.com http://www.endangeredspecie.com/states/fl.htm

3. McCann, Clint, Great Psalms of the Bible, (2009) 135.

COPYRIGHT   Scott Elliott © 2013 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Shameless, Outrageous Love

Shameless, Outrageous Love

a sermon based on Luke 15: 1-3, 11b-32

given at Palm Bay, FL on March 10, 2013

by Rev. Scott Elliott

A Sunday School teacher told his class the story we just heard, the story of the Prodigal Son. Hoping to emphasize the resent of the elder brother he described the happy welcome and party with a fatted calf for food, then asked, “Okay class who was most unhappy about the party?”

A nine year old shouted out: “I know! I know! The fatted calf.” 1.

I thought about focusing on the fatted calf in this sermon, milking the puns, uddering jokes and steering you all toward having a steak in that meaty vein of humor.

But I decided I didn’t have the time to spare. Rib me if you will, but on the horns of that dilemma, I decided to beef up the sermon with more theology than fatted calf jokes.

I just hope I haven’t butchered the sermon with too many puns because I wrote it while heavily calf-inated . . .

I will begin by making a theological observation that relates to the fatted calf, the story of the Prodigal Son has meal references: meal for all the swine; a dreamed of meal with swine; a dreamed of meal with some family, and a meal for the entire family.

I’ve mentioned numerous times over the years how Jesus had this amazing meal ministry going. Rome had elite meals that you had to be invited too, the poor dreamed of being invited to them, but mostly could not go because they were not in the elite circles.

Jesus had meals that were the very opposite of elite, all who wanted could attend.

Jesus used meals to protest elitism, protest cultural exclusion and to offer food and community, and most of all, love to absolutely everyone. His was the dreamed of meal for the entire family of God.

Most people can tell you that the story of the Prodigal Son is about love. But what most of us folks in modern readings fail to appreciate is that this is not just ordinary love, but, unconditional, unconventional, topsy-turvy, wild, unchecked, outrageous love.

Love your neighbors is not just a platitude it has real deep far reaching meaning for Jesus.

Jesus tells the story of The Prodigal Son in response to complaints by religious folks that he’s hanging out with tax collectors and sinners. Those types of people whom the culture finds dishonorable and shameful, the folks it is literally a shame to hang out with and you are a fool and a sinner to hang out with them. Guilt by association. 2

Jesus opponents grumble and say “This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.” They refuse to validate Jesus’ stretching God’s commandment in Leviticus to “love your neighbor” as far as it can go. Jesus’ teaching to “Love your enemies” indicates the entire spectrum of people are to be loved.

So you betcha, tax collectors and sinners get in. EVERYONE who wants in, gets in.

That last bit can sound like a platitude, so I am going to say it again and ask that we all hear it loud and clear” EVERYONE who wants in, gets in.

And they sit at the table as equals with Jesus and everyone else.

And they are loved. They are taught to believe in Love and to love others. That is what matters most to Jesus; a belief in love and the loving others.

Love, that beautiful thing where there’s compassion and care and desire for the well being of EVERYONE. That’s what Jesus’ Table ministry and Jesus’ Way is all about.

Jesus table ministry and Way, is to use Hebrew Scripture, the verses in Micah 6 (8), in action. Jesus table and Way is where DOING justice, loving kindness and walking humbly with God gets played out. It’s where the rubber meets the road.

And love takes place not just at the table feast. We don’t just eat the fatted calf and play nice and then go home and be mean or do nothing or just love a select few until we return to the table again.

It’s supposed to be loving everyone as best we can all the time.

It’s supposed to be doing justice for everyone as best we can all the time.

It’s supposed to be loving kindness for everyone as best we can all the time.

It supposed to be walking humbly with God as best we can all the time.

Since Jesus took very seriously the commandments to love God and neighbor, we are called as Christians to take them very seriously too. Jesus places them above all other commandments. So it is fair for us to filter Biblical texts and Christian traditions through that love lens. Indeed all acts and actions and laws need to be filtered through that love lens. Is this scripture or act or law loving?

With Bible verses it is particularly important that we ask if they can be read or interpreted as loving, because Jesus claimed there is no greater commandment than to love.

Today’s story is, as I said, clearly about love. But what we miss in our reading is about how radical that love is. It’s disturbingly radical, yet comfortingly so. Jesus tells this story and he has layered it so thick with meaning it’s absolutely brilliant in it’s original context–making God’s love and Jesus’ love stretch as far as it can go.

Jesus filters cultural shameful acts through his love lens and the result is not anything like what scriptural literalists and tradition oriented religious leaders liked to hear back then, or for that matter now.

It’s a story where shameful acts keep no one from the Father, where all come to the table and get love with open arms. Everybody.

The only ones who don’t come to the table are those who choose not to and judge and insist on non-love for those the culture finds shameful.

In Israel land was given to the Jews by God and it was a gift passed from generation to generation, and honoring parents was a deep and abiding commitment, which included staying with them to work on the family property and to take care of them in their old age.

To ask for in inheritance of a living parent was a shameful act. 3

To sell family property was a shameful act.

To abandon your parent was a shameful act. 4

To travel to another place and squander the property to Gentiles in scandalous living was a doubly a shame. 5

The prodigal son does all of these shameful acts in first two sentences of the story:

The younger of them said to his father, “Father, give me the share of the property that will belong to me.” So he divided his property between them. A few days later the younger son gathered all he had and traveled to a distant country, and there he squandered his property in dissolute living.

To do these things in first century Palestine was terrible. It was shameful and dishonoring. Not only to the son, but to the Father and to the family.

The father entrusted the son with the land and the son sold it to outsiders, and not even to survive but to do scandalous things.

The father is shamed in the culture by not only by his son’s lack of honor toward him, but for handing over of a piece of God’s promised land to an irresponsible rascal son. 6

But is gets worse. The son piles on more dishonor and shame. He works with unclean pigs striving to be a swine-herder in the Gentile world, perhaps the worse possible thing for a Jewish son to become. 7 Well, there is something worse, being a swine itself. And actually the son has sunk so low he essentially longs to be a pig. 8. Jesus tells us that

When he had spent everything, a severe famine took place throughout that country, and he began to be in need. So he went and hired himself out to one of the citizens of that country, who sent him to his fields to feed the pigs. He would gladly have filled himself with the pods that the pigs were eating . . .

The son is willing to be swine-like. That’s as low as you can get. Unless you are a dying pig. And sure enough he is, he is starving and Jesus tells us “no one gave him anything.”

This is a shameful, shameful man to Jesus audience. You could do nothing worse than do and become what this son had done and become.

And there at the bottom of life he repents, a word we’ve been hearing a lot at Lent. It means to turn around, to get back on track. Jesus tells us this son bottomed out and then:

…when he came to himself he said, ‘How many of my father’s hired hands have bread enough and to spare, but here I am dying of hunger! I will get up and go to my father, and I will say to him, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son; treat me like one of your hired hands.”‘

The son knows he is no longer an elite, his shameful acts make him like one of the many peasants and expendables in that culture.

The younger son’s biggest hope is to maybe return as one of them and get a hired hand spot in the family business.

Ironically this once elite Jewish landowner’s son will be happy to move from dying swine to living nobody– and most every body in Jesus’ audience was just that, a living nobody to Rome and its elite.

It is not much of a cultural step up, but it’s a dream that would allow the son to live, because, as it is, he is just a dying pig of a man.

So (Jesus tells us) he set off and went to his father. But while he was still far off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion; he ran and put his arms around him and kissed him. Then the son said to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son.’ But the father said to his slaves, ‘Quickly, bring out a robe– the best one– and put it on him; put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet. And get the fatted calf and kill it, and let us eat and celebrate; for this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found!’ And they began to celebrate.

Notice that the father does not wait for the culturally shameful son to come to him. He is filled with compassion from afar and rushes out and hugs and kisses him and gives him gifts and love galore.

That’s crazy. The father has been shamed. He should not even speak to the son who is not just shameful himself, but has shamed the father and brought shame on the family.

But this father’s love is unconventional, it’s unconditional, it’s topsy turvy, it’s wild, it’s unfair, it’s outrageous, and it’s . . . well, it knows no shame and so it is shameless love.

The father is a fool for love. And the really cool things is we love this story for exactly that reason!

We all want love like that. Love that is ours regardless of whether the culture or anyone else (including us) thinks we are shameful or dishonorable or unfit to be at the feast, not to mention the deeply beloved guest of honor.

The father runs to the son and hugs and kisses him before there is an apology. This kid only had to turn from his walk away from love. To repent to get on the right path, the path to love. The son gets on that path and is extravagantly loved and celebrated and brought to the table by the Father.

Jesus ministry is about love so wide and expansive that he refuses to recognize shame. Think about that! Real and perceived shame and shameful conduct never keeps us from God’s love. Never!

Good news does not get better than that!

Remember today’s parable is told in response to Jesus opponents’ grumbling that he “welcomes sinners and eats with them.” Jesus takes their criticism and makes a hero out of the Father who lets in the worse-of-the-worse sinner: a parent-dishonoring, land-losing, swine-herding, pig-wanna-be.

In today’s lesson Jesus stretches God’s commandment to love your neighbor as far as it can go. The enemies, the cultural worthless, the shameful and the shameless get in.

Jesus is saying “You betcha, I love tax collectors and any sinners because God does. So EVERYONE who wants in, gets in. Just take steps toward love and you’ll see just how much you are loved.”

And we can hear this in the teaching today for sure, but we can also hear it in other acts of Jesus. He sides with the outcasts, the rejected and the ne’er-do-wells. Tax collectors. Adulteresses. Lepers. Poor. Even the criminal on the cross beside him. Even those who come at him with swords and those who crucified him.

Nothing can keep anyone who turns toward love from Jesus’ table or God’s love. NOTHING. Not shame, not shamelessness. Not Biblical or cultural mores.

The filter of love that Jesus applies to our lives and everyone else’s washes away whatever it is that the world thinks is filth that ought to keep us from love. There is no dirt that keeps us from the table, from Christ’s community or from God’s love. 9. We don’t have to do anything to get it, but turn and walk toward love to know and experience that.

The story of the Prodigal Son is a story where shameful acts keep no one from the Father, where all can come to the table and get love with open arms.

In fact the only ones who don’t come to the table are those who choose not to and judge and insist on non-love for those the culture finds shameful.

Here’s how Jesus put it:

“Now his elder son was in the field; and when he came and approached the house, he heard music and dancing. He called one of the slaves and asked what was going on. He replied, ‘Your brother has come, and your father has killed the fatted calf, because he has got him back safe and sound.’ Then he became angry and refused to go in. His father came out and began to plead with him. But he answered his father, ‘Listen! For all these years I have been working like a slave for you, and I have never disobeyed your command; yet you have never given me even a young goat so that I might celebrate with my friends. But when this son of yours came back, who has devoured your property with prostitutes, you killed the fatted calf for him!’ Then the father said to him, ‘Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. But we had to celebrate and rejoice, because this brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found.'”

The elder son is actually welcome and invited to the feast.

The story ends with him standing in the field wanting a lesser feast for only himself and friends, a feast of goat meat, when all-the-while the prize fatted calf awaits his feasting and a dream meal for the entire family.

The elder son like the prodigal son has a choice to make, he needs to repent, turn and get on the path to love.

He needs to chose to come to the shameless feast of the Lord his Father.

It’s the same choice we all have to make. God loves us just as we are, whether we like it or not, and that sounds great.

But God loves everyone else too– just as they are.

Here’s the thing, we can choose to reject that and stand in the field lamenting that we didn’t get a goat feast with just our friends (pardon the pun, but Jesus’ teaching suggest that is a baaaad choice).

Or we can choose to celebrate that God – the Father– loves everyone, at what could be punfully called a very moooving love-filled, everybody’s invited fatted calf feast.

May we all choose to go to the feast where God’s Shameless Outrageous Love overflows for everyone who merely steps on a path toward love.

AMEN!

ENDNOTES:

1. http://www.jesussite.com/jokes/jokes3.html

2. Patterson. Stephen, The God of Jesus, 157 (this brilliant work –along with Jesus and the Holy Spirit– inspired much of this sermon , especially pages 73-80, 152-158)

3. Hultgren, Arland, The Parable s of Jesus, 73, Feasting on the Word, Year 3, Vol 2 at 117.

4. Hultgren at 73.

5. Feasting on the Word, at 119.

6. Patterson at 154-155.

7. Hultgren at 75.

8. Patterson at 156.

9. Ibid at 77.

COPYRIGHT Scott Elliott © 2013 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

There’s Light in the Dark, it’s Love

There’s Light in the Dark, it’s Love

a sermon based on Luke 13:1-9

given at Palm Bay, FL on March 3, 2013

by Rev. Scott Elliott

In the beginning God was talking to the angels and said “I’ve just created a 24 hour period of alternating light and darkness.”

One of the angels asked “What are you going to do now?”

God answered “I think I’ll call it a day.” 1.

Our days are filled with light and darkness which are a part of what we moderns call natural law, right? It’s basic science. The earth rotates around the sun and the earth itself spins so that one part is in the dark while another is in the light. Light and dark. Day and night.

The laws of nature set into motion by the creative force we call God gives us light and dark. And it happens day after day regardless of whether we are good or bad.

We are a rational people. We live in the Age of Reason. Through the blessing of science we understand that just like night and day can be explained by science, things like hurricanes and earthquakes and tsunamis, even lightening bolts are also a part of science that can be explained by the laws of nature playing out in creation.

Warm air and water and low pressure systems cause winds and moisture and storms to gather and swirl and become hurricanes.

Giant “tectonic” plates of rock move beneath our feet. Mostly it’s slow movement, sometimes it slips and shifts and sends out shock waves that quake the earth.

Shockwaves from earthquakes near the ocean can shove massive amounts of water about creating a huge rush of water– what we call tsunamis which can swamp land with water.

Water droplets collide in clouds and build up electrical charges that can create huge sparks between clouds and earth creating lightning, and thunder (the explosive noise of lightning’s electrical discharge super heating the air around it).

Gravity pulls things to the earth and so when hurricanes, quakes, tsunamis or lightening hit, things can fall and crumble. And fire, another natural event, can occur and burn things.

These happenings, as I’ve described them, are a part of the world we live in.

Each of them is caused by naturally occurring elements and events.

Each of them is an awesome force of nature in the truest sense of the word.

Although humans can to some extent control fire, pretty much the power of these forces is beyond our control. But we understand a lot about them and we know that they are a part of nature, a part of the way things work.

The same can be said to a great extent in general about disease and dying, they too come as a part of nature.

Living things get sick.

Living things die.

We have learned, and are learning, how to control and stave off some illness and sometimes even death, but, still we know that as a part of nature these things happen and will continue to happen.

In nature powerful, awesome and destructive things happen. We do not control them. They do not happen because God is acting in response to human actions. It’s nature’s way of being. It’s the laws of nature at work.

It’s like light and dark, like night and day, they happen in due course, not as dues for things done by us.

In short, unless we have messed with the environment in some way natural disasters are not related to human conduct.

Even though we know that natural disasters happen as a part of nature, when humans are aversely affected by a natural disaster insurance companies call it an “act of God.” This is because before the age of reason natural disasters were credited to the influence of God or gods.

The law courts and insurance companies now know that natural law is at play in disasters that are categorized as “acts of God.” So do we by-and-large.

My guess is that most of us would pretty much agree with the rational reasoned explanation for how and why natural disasters occur. We agree because they are based on basically indisputable scientific reasoning.

So the truth of the overwhelming evidence is that nature sometimes unfolds in mighty uncontrollable ways and living things can get caught up and hurt or killed in them.

Despite all the reason and rational thinking at our disposal we have this cultural myth that nags at us that somehow nature’s power is unleashed by God to punish individuals and peoples.

We lament with phrases like “What did I do to deserve this?” or “Why me?” as if what we do controls the weather or other natural events.

The whole Book of Job is about this myth; you see, it goes way back.

The myth, simply put, is that bad things only happen to bad people. The myth is that we somehow earn natural disasters that befall us as individuals and as a people, that we somehow deserve fate dolled out by disasters.

Job is a righteous man and bad things happen to him and his friends blamed him, but he was blameless. And so the Book of Job’s lesson, that should seem obvious, is that bad things can happen to the blameless; that good people get hurt by naturally occurring events and diseases; and they happen because they happen and not because of our actions. Life is messy, it is not a Hallmark movie. Disasters and disease and injury and illness and death occur.

Our call from God with respect to natural disasters is not to do what religious leaders tell us to do or we’ll be smitten, rather our call from God in the face of disasters is to do our best from wherever it is we find ourselves.

Job has to deal with life’s troubles not because he’s bad, but because he’s alive and being alive means dealing with life’s messiness.

And Job is righteous because he does his best from wherever he finds himself in life, in the good or the bad of it.

Here is a truth you can take home from the sermon today: Acts of God never include acts of harm. Natural disasters are natural acts they are not acts of the God of Jesus– everybody’s God.

God acts in the world by calling us to always do our best.

And sadly if life wasn’t hard enough with natural disasters, there are disasters caused by humans who are not doing their best.

Shooting people in a mall or at a school or in a church is one horrific example of humans and humanity not doing their best.

Assaulting, harassing and bullying are examples of humans not doing their best. Hoarding resources, not aiding those in need or oppressing others is not doing our best.

Naturally created disasters are by and large uncontrollable by humankind.

Humanly created disasters, on the other hand, are by and large controllable by humans, but not by God.

So here’s another truth you can bank on: The long and the short of it is God does not control disasters of any kind, but humans can control human made disasters.

God doesn’t cause nature to do harm.

God does not cause humans to do harm. Humans cause human made disasters.

You’ve got to be wondering about now what is the pastor going on about? What does this have to do with the Lectionary text? Well, Jesus in the Lectionary reading is talking about these two types of disasters, natural and humanmade.

The folks around him are talking about a human made disaster. Pilate, like a government sanctioned church shooter, caused a senseless blood bath at the temple killing worshipers from Jesus’ hometown as they offered their sacrifices to God.

Apparently, like today, some people were claiming God had put the victims in harm’s way.

This is like the Westboro Church’s rants that God’s killing people to punish America for not doing things Westboro’s leaders want done.

That’s terrible thinking and theology and it’s not rooted in Jesus’ teachings. Listen to Jesus’s response to such nonsense:

…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.

The people that Pilate massacred did nothing to deserve the fate that befell them. Their sins did not bring about their death. God’s judgment did fall upon them. They were no worse than anyone who wasn’t massacred.

And Jesus’ threat of the living perishing as the massacred did was, and is, not a threat that God will cause them to be massacred or let God’s judgment fall in such a way. It’s about not changing the way things are and the way we are. Massacres of the innocent continue to this day. All of us who are alive need to work toward changing that. Our culture is allowing these massacres to go on, that is not doing our best. It’s not. We have to change that.

And we need to not only change the culture but repent – change course – so that humanity and each of us dies not as we presently are but as our better self, best self.

Lent is about contemplating a change of course, of repentance. Jesus in the lesson today applies his teaching of repentance – turning onto the right course – to evil acts of humans, like massacres.

Jesus can also be heard to apply it to natural law disasters, a tower topple by nature. Jesus says:

Of 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.

Bad things like towers tumbling due to earthquakes or winds and gravity happen, and people can get hurt. Not because they deserve it due to some sort of divine retribution.

Televangelist Pat Robertson is infamous for claiming God uses nature to punish folks for not believing as Robertson does. Among other things he’s claimed the earthquake in Haiti and Hurricane Katrina were God’s doing. According to Robertson God killed innocent people because people did not do as Robertson thought they should do.

That’s bad theology and it is not rooted in Jesus’ teaching. Natural disasters strike because people are in the wrong place at the wrong time, not because God sent the disasters after them.

Jesus makes it clear that the tower of Siloam did not fall on the victims because they were worse sinners. Jesus’ threat to us of perishing as they did was, and is, not a threat that God will cause us to be crushed by nature or let God’s judgment fall in such a way.

Repent (as I’ve indicated) means to change course.

If Rome was allowed to continue its course of bloody massacre without people standing up – even at great risk – for a form of justice that stopped it all, the threat would continue to be there. Just like the threat of massacres continue today. We – you and me – and everY other follower of Jesus has to do something about it, not stand around and blame the victims or God.

Repent means to change the course of our ways that are unjust and unloving to the better way of being. We have to save the world from the world’s ways and move it to God’s Way which is love – caring about everyone and doing something about it.

And repent also means to change our own course to a Way that leads us to be the better self we are supposed to be.

Unless we repent, we die as the Galileans did, the lesser self we are as humanity and individuals without repentance. We are off course corporately and personally and need to repent, turn onto the right course. And not because God is going to get us, but because we are going to get us.

Last week we discussed Jesus being hen-like, spreading wings of protection and people choosing not to get under that protection.

And in Bible study two weeks ago we discussed how chicks are born with an innate drive to get under the protective wings, as babes that’s their call. If they don’t do it they are off course.

To repent the chick would simply choose to go to the way that God calls it to do, get under the wings of love, not some other way. Applying that metaphor to humans, we are not running to love as we are naturally meant to do, we are running away from love, by casting blame on God, or victims, or on things not being our way, or oppressing others, or condoning violence to fight violence.

Today’s lesson is that we must oppose living by the sword. We must oppose that which leads to individual and government massacres. Being docile and doing as the Pilates of the world bid is not opposition. We must actively oppose further bloodshed. The wings of love will protect us and we need to spread them out.

Jesus’ point is that we need to follow the natural law for us humans.

It’s not natural to blame the victims.

It’s not natural to blame God.

It’s not natural to let violence and oppression continue unchallenged. Love calls us to stop such things.

In tragedies we can hear Love’s call in haunting images and grief stricken faces of the victims, living and dead.

In the dark of any disaster, natural or manmade, there is light. That light is love. It is a beacon that beckons us. It beckons us to change our ways, to stop human-made disasters. It beckons us to comfort and aid victims of any type of tragedy.

Seeking the light of love beneath the wings of God is what we need to do.

Our cultural tendency is to run from love to darkness, that’s unnatural.

Our God-given nature is to run to the light of love.

Jesus wants us to repent, to turn from the path that leads to running away from love and onto the path that is to run to love.

If we don’t do that, we face disasters as sinners, those who miss God’s mark, and that mark is always love.

So Jesus ends his teaching that we heard today with a hopeful story where love is found in the least likely metaphor, manure spread beneath our trees, that have yet to give a fig and the bear fruits of love:

[H]e told this parable: “A man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard; and he came looking for fruit on it and found none. So he said to the gardener, ‘See here! For three years I have come looking for fruit on this fig tree, and still I find none. Cut it down! Why should it be wasting the soil?’ He replied, ‘Sir, let it alone for one more year, until I dig around it and put manure on it. If it bears fruit next year, well and good; but if not, you can cut it down.'” (Luk 13:1-9 NRS)

Before life cuts us down, may we let Christ’s fertilizer of love cause us to give a fig and bear the fruits of love, to do the best we can in the face of natural and human made disasters, to not cause manmade disasters and to work to passionately and boldly stop those that we can.

May humanity, and each of us, all turn and run to seek refuge under the wings of love and help others to do so too.

AMEN!

ENDNOTES:

1. Adapted from a joke in Tibballs, Geoff, The Mammoth Book of Jokes, 176

2.”http://www.advocate.com/crime/2012/12/18/james-dobson-and-co-blame-shooting-gays-and-lack-god

COPYRIGHT Scott Elliott © 2013 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

God’s a Hen in the Yard

God’s a Hen in the Yard

a sermon based on Luke 13:31-35

given at Palm Bay, FL on February 24, 2013

by Rev. Scott Elliott

I have to start with an apology. I seem to have what I can only describe as a “chicken joke disorder.”

Nancy just read that Jesus was like a hen and now I feel compelled to tell a few chicken jokes.

Forgive me.

If you count the following puns that I have free range to preach, I’ve hatched eggxactly a dozen and a half little yolks for you.

Shell we begin?

-Why did the chicken cross the basketball court? She heard the referee calling fowls.

-Why didn’t the chicken skeleton cross the road? Because he didn’t have enough guts

-What do you call a crazy chicken? A cuckoo cluck !

-Why couldn’t the chicken find her eggs? Because she mislaid them.

-If fruit comes from a fruit tree, what kind of tree does a chicken come from? A poul-tree.

-What do you get when a chicken lays an egg on top of a barn? An eggroll. 1

Alright that’s it for canned chicken jokes. I know they are nothing to crow about, but for those of you groaning, rooster-sured I’ve poached no more jokes, so not a peep more about it.

I know, bad jokes, right? . . . Kinda fowl, actually. . .Well you can blame Jesus. He started it. He did.

Today’s lesson is another one those times Jesus is being funny, poignant, but funny. Herod Antipas, is the rival “King of Jews” to the Jesus Luke’s community knows as the real “King of the Jews.”

Herod who cut off the head of John the Baptist is threatening Jesus. Jesus calls this Jewish leader who’s a stooge of Rome, a fox which in the Hebrew Scriptures is not only an unclean animal but is associated with destruction (Song 2:15, Ezek 13:4) 2.

And it seems to me that it’s no coincidence foxes kill chickens by breaking their necks, often ripping the head off. So Jesus has this double entendre going. Herod is a fox, an unclean, destructive attacker of the weak, and decapitator of prophets.

There’s ironic humor in Jesus’ comments. Herod is Jewish, but unclean. Herod is a religious leader, but violates the commandments against killing and oppressing– he doesn’t love his neighbor as himself. Indeed Herod, like a fox, beheads and destroys a very good and Godly part of the good flock of Israel.

Jesus is sarcastically criticizing Herod who’s power is of the earthly, not the heavenly kind.

Jesus mocks Herod’s earthly power as petty human power that cannot defeat God’s mighty power:

“[S]ome Pharisees came and said to him, “Get away from here, for Herod wants to kill you.” [Jesus] said to them, “Go and tell that fox for me, ‘Listen, I am casting out demons and performing cures today and tomorrow [. . .], and on the third day I finish my work. Yet today, tomorrow, and the next day I must be on my way, because it is impossible for a prophet to be killed outside of Jerusalem.”

In the Book of Matthew Herod the Great, the father of Herod Antipas hunted Jesus when he was a baby. Herod the Great could not stop Jesus’ ministry.

And here in Luke neither can his son, that unclean destructive fox who beheads God’s prophets, and hunts Jesus, and CANNOT stop God’s work through Jesus.

The Feasting on the Word commentary notes that:

Jesus’ harsh words for Herod reflect [Jesus’] utmost confidence in the providence and will of God in the task that he, the Son of God has been called to complete. For his opponents to suggest that he would somehow be killed anywhere or at any time outside the Holy City was to venture into the absurd. 3

The New Interpreter’s Bible commentary on this point is a bit more succinct, it notes: “Herod will not hinder Jesus from completing his work . . .”

Jesus is tweaking Herod’s nose is the story as he sends Herod’s cronies back with the biting sarcastic truth that an unclean scoundrel of a fox can’t outfox God.

In England they’d say Jesus was being a bit cheeky. In this pun-filled sermon I say he was being a bit chicky. (Cheeky. Chicky. Get it?).

That pun has more than a humorous intent, as do all these chicken jokes.

See, Jesus does this absolutely remarkable thing. First he notes that seats of power destroy those who oppose their power. Jesus laments “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it!”

Prophets, are those who oppose leaders and cultures on behalf of God for the oppressed, they are those who do God’s work in the face of power and are very often imprisoned, tortured or killed– history proves this in our own time.

And in Biblical times it was true too. Biblical prophets Naboth and Zechariah were both killed in Jerusalem. Naboth was stoned there and Luke tells us later that Stephen is stoned there too. And of course, John the Baptist and Jesus are brutally killed by the powerful who rule Jerusalem for Rome.

Obviously the killing of prophets is not humorous. But what Jesus says next is, like I said it’s chicky: “ How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!”

Jesus, Christ on earth, the incarnation of God’s very power on earth, faces off with a fox as . . . domestic fowl, a chicken if you will . . . And not even as a fighting rooster, but as a hen.

“How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!”

This is like that joke of Jesus that I mentioned a few weeks ago where Jesus compares God Almighty to a . .. tiny mustard seed that grows into the world’s mightiest . .. bush.

God’s going to take on the unclean, unscrupulous, destructive fox Herod as a . . . chicken, as a hen.

There’s reason Jesus chooses a remarkable female image for himself as God incarnate.

To begin, it’s an image that can be fairly understood to be God’s image at the very beginning of creation. Genesis 1:2 reads: ^“ the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.”

The word translated as “swept” in English is the Hebrew word “rachaph” (raw-kaf) it has a richer meaning than “swept.” In the King James Version the translation is “hovered” which is closer.

The word means hovering around like a hen does when she broods. 4.

And that word “brood” is a word Jesus uses “How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings . . .”

A brood is not just a group of chicks but the group of chicks a mother bird frets over, right?

The word brood means to sit and hatch eggs, to protect the vulnerable chicks even if it means covering them under the shield of wings while being vulnerable and exposed to the threat herself.

It means to hover in the protective looming sort of way. 5

Can you hear how that’s the image of a loving God caring for us, desiring our well being at any and all expense?

In Genesis the Spirit “ruach” is understood as a female image of God brooding over creation.

In today’s lesson we can hear Jesus refer to that very same female image of God, the one who hovers and broods over us, who envelopes us under her outstretched protective wings.

Luke’s story can be heard to hold up Jesus as offering new creation, new life, and that he is the same caring, hovering brooding incarnation of God that created the world. Jesus is understood to be that God incarnate in the world.

And notice how God incarnate is not a violent power that out-violents violence.

We expect – and even want – the metaphor of the unclean unscrupulous, destructive fox Herod to be met by a bigger badder metaphor animal in the story, a wolf or a man with a weapon, but that’s not what happens. That’s not the God of Jesus.

The God of Jesus appears on earth incarnate as another bird in the yard with us offering love. God’s in a bird like us, one who lives with us, one that is capable of caring for others and desiring others’ well being, so much so she broods over us and is willing to sacrifice herself for those of us under attack. She puts her wings up and covers others at great risk, right?

She’s vulnerable in her love. Her head may get bit off by the fox, her body might be brutalized and strung out to die.

The point is that the great Good News of the Gospel is that God acts in the world through those who treat others as their children, with such deep, caring protective love that she is willing to risk life itself for others. That’s some God.

That’s God incarnate as played out in the whole of the Jesus story isn’t it?

Our Savior isn’t a wolf, or a man with a weapon who out muscles the fox.

Our Savior is a non-violent peace-monger whose defining power is love.

That’s God in the world, incarnate, in action.

And she bests the fox because despite his capturing, torturing and crucifying her, that God lives on. Christ lives.

Christ lives. The caring, hovering, brooding God of Heaven cannot be defeated by a fox or anything else.

Love wins!

Love may not be the God we tend to hear about and picture or maybe even want. Time and time again the savior humans long for and dream about even preach and write about is Rambo or the Terminator or at least John Wayne fully armed, but time and time again the Savior is something altogether different.

She’s a hen.

She’s a dove.

He’s a man who doesn’t fight back with violence but with protective acts and loving ways. Christ’s arms stretched out on the cross are the wings of a hen spread out in love for us.

God’s actors are lovers not storm troopers . . . God’s actors are lovers not storm troopers.

God Almighty is like a hen brooding over her chicks.

Hens and chickens are not rare or uncommon, they are not even elite in the animal world.

They are easy to find and virtually everywhere.

They eat pesky bugs, and provide all sort of things: eggs, fertilizer, feathers, food and even comforting medicinal foods like soup.

God Almighty is like a very useful common everyday, everywhere creature.

God Almighty is like us when we take the form of one who broods over others; when we act in the world by treating others with such deep, caring protective love that we are willing to take risks for them like we would for our own children, like we would for our self.

God Almighty is – to use Jesus’ own words – like loving your neighbor as your self. That is the touchstone commandment for Jesus. Jesus God is love, unconditional, sacrificial love.

That’s some God. Jesus believes he is to be Holy like God is Holy; caring like God is caring; loving like God is loving, and so he becomes like a brooding hen protective of others, desiring the well being of others above his own interests.

He becomes literally a man willing to die for love. So much love does this man have, so full of “ruah” (the Spirit) is he, he forgives those who kill him as his wings are stretched out on the cross to protect everybody.

The last words of Jesus in the story for today tell us humans are not willing to accept the refuge under God’s wings of love. Oddly chicks by nature are innately drawn to those wings, yet we fight that inclination.

And they can be heard to tell us that if we want to see the likes of Jesus again, we must bless those who come in the name of the God of the brooding hen.

^“Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing! See, your house is left to you. And I tell you, you will not see me until the time comes when you say, ‘Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.”

The name of God is love.

The God of Jesus is another bird in the yard with us. One who lives in the yard of life with us. One who is capable of caring for us, of desiring our well being, so much so she broods over us and is willing to sacrifice herself for those of us under attack. She puts her wings up and covers others at great risk.

Her head may get bit off by the fox, her body might be brutalized and strung out to die.

The Good News is that God acts in the world through those who treat others as their children, with such deep, caring protective love that she is willing to risk life itself for others. That’s some God.

That’s God incarnate as played out in the whole of the Jesus story.

Our Savior isn’t a wolf, or a man with a weapon who out muscles the fox.

Our Savior is a non-violent peace-monger whose defining power is love.

See love is God in the world, incarnate, in action.

We don’t need to be lions or cougars or eagles or falcons, we need to be hens; caring, protective, brooding, hovering, risk-taking, love-first hens!

And we must bless those who are such beings in the world.

If we do that, then we will see Christ again on earth, in one another and in the mirror.

AMEN.

ENDNOTES

1. I actually lifted these jokes (but not the puns) off an internet site called (I swear): http://www.chickenjoke.com/

2. Hoppe, Leslie, FOW p 71

3. Deffenbaugh, Daniel, FOW 70

4. http://biblesuite.com/hebrew/7363.htm

5. The Free Dictionary on line at http://www.thefreedictionary.com/brood; see also, this conservative Christian creationism website that does a beautiful job describing God brooding in Genesis 1:2: http://www.accuracyingenesis.com/God_made_the_sun_moon_and_stars.html

COPYRIGHT Scott Elliott © 2012 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Grace is Free and Ours Whether We Want it or Not

Grace is Free and Ours Whether We Want it or Not

a sermon based on Romans 10: 8b-13

given at Palm Bay, FL on February 17, 2013

by Rev. Scott Elliott

A pirate walked into a bar and the bartender said, “Hey, I haven’t seen you in a while. What happened, you look terrible!”

PIRATE: “Arrrrr. What dah ya mean? I’m fine.”

BARTENDER: “But what about that wooden leg? You didn’t have that before.”

PIRATE: “Arrrr w’ere in a battle and a cannon ball hit me leg but the surgeon fixed me up. I’m fine, really.”

BARTENDER: “Yeah, but what about that hook? Last time I saw you, you had both hands.”

PIRATE: “Arrrr we wuz in a sword fight and me hand was cut off but the surgeon fixed it with this ‘er hook.  I feel fine, really.”

BARTENDER: “Oh? What about that eye patch? Last time you were in here you had both eyes.”

PIRATE: “Arrr a wave crashed over the deck and got salty water in me eyes.

BARTENDER: “So? What happened? You couldn’t have lost an eye just from sea water!”

PIRATE: “Arrr. Well, I wasn’t used to the hook yet,  was I laddy?”

I’m thinking about now that I should not have told that ARRwful joke.

But that mistake sort of makes one of the points of this sermon, that to err is human, to Arrr is pirate.

You can blame Amy for that last pun. She sent it to me last week.

Okay. On to today’s Lectionary lesson. Which is one that can be quite bothersome when we first hear or read it, especially the part where Paul writes, …”if you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.”

I don’t know about you, but that phrase can give me the willies. I know it may surprise folks to hear this from a pastor but I can’t tell you how many times in my life I’ve been turned off by a Christian touting this verse in one form or another to get my soul or some other soul saved from eternal damnation in hell. “Accept Jesus into your heart and confess him as Lord and you will be saved from going to hell.”

I’ve heard that line so many times that when I read or hear what Paul wrote all that baggage goes into how I hear it, most especially that all non-Christians (like I was at the time) are unforgiven sinners who are going to burn forever in hell.

It’s hard to believe that that’s the primary sale pitch I’ve often heard for becoming a Christian. God loves you and everyone, but you are going to hell when you die if you don’t believe as we do.

Except for the “God loves you” part the rest is, to be blunt, illogical to the point of seeming nonsensical. Why? Because of the “God is love” part.

We are told dozens of times in the Bible that God’s love is steadfast and lasts forever. That means God’s love has no strings attached. None. Nada. You don’t have to believe to be loved. You are loved. Period. And love does not damn that which it loves.

And that’s not just in the Hebrew Scriptures and in Jesus’ teachings, but it’s one of the core tenants of Paul’s theology. So Paul could not have meant what we think we hear in his words to the Romans . . . those words I just read: “if you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.”

A lot, I mean a lot! of churches teach that in order to get God’s saving grace we have to believe this or that. But it’s not true. Paul is clear in this letters that grace is free. Free! It is a gift given by God. It is given unconditionally. Grace has no strings attached.

The Westminster Dictionary of Theological Terms confirms this fact, it defines “Grace” as “Unmerited favor.”.

So what we can understand grace to mean is that Jesus saves, not because we have done anything – like accepting Jesus into our hearts and confessing him as Lord, but that Jesus saves because Jesus did something. That’s what Paul believed and preached.

There are all kinds of theologies and arguments and discussions about what Jesus did and why he had to do it in order to save humanity, but one thing is for certain, according to Paul, the rest of us humans cannot control the grace that resulted – and results – from Jesus’ life, death and resurrection.

Paul rejects the idea that we can do something like follow rules, like the law of Torah, to get right with God. Paul writes in Galatians (2:15-16) that “ a person is justified not by works of the law . . .” and Paul notes “that no one will be justified by works of the law.” 1

You can’t follow rules and good deeds to grace, and you don’t have to. Grace is already yours. Right now. No matter what.

“To err is human, to Arrr is pirate” comes into play here. We all err. That is we all make mistakes. We all sin. We fail to hit the mark God aims us at.

But none of us is a pirate in the total evil-doer sense of the word. We Arrrrrr not one dimensional characters who do bad for bad’s sake. Being human means sinning. It does. That’s true for all of us.

We all make mistakes. Sometimes I wish that weren’t so but it is the truth.

So in that respect we are like the very human pirate in the joke, we carry wounds and scars and flaws around with us. To err is human. We are not perfect. We fail to hit the mark God aims us at – we miss the mark– which is precisely what the word “sin” means.

Paul and early church leaders wrestled with all this sin stuff. A part of their theology developed to be an understanding of the Garden of Eden Story to be about humans being made in the image of God, but falling from perfection by sinning, the mark God aimed Adam at was obedience.

Adam disobeyed God. He sinned and so he fell out of the Garden of Eden, out of grace – that’s what the early Christian theologians argued.

That disobedience was understood by Paul and church fathers as a story of how all of humanity became separated from God. The human image of God is tarnished. We are still images of God, but to sort of borrow one of Paul’s other metaphors, we are a dim reflection.

The bottom line is that Paul and some of the early fathers understood humankind as falling from grace because Adam first did.

And they see Jesus’ story as being the opposite of Adam’s story. Jesus fixes the problem for all of humanity. Where Adam was disobedient, Jesus is obedient. Whereas Adam story is about fall from grace affecting all of humanity, Jesus’ story is about restoration of grace to all of humanity.

Jesus’ life and sacrificial death results in an atonement, a word that means at-one-ness. We are restored to our oneness with God because of what Jesus did. All of us. That’s Paul’s theology.

And he thought it was true regardless of what we believe or don’t believe. That may not be what we were taught in Sunday school, and that is certainly not what “Accept Jesus or go to hell” means, but it’s Christianity 101 going back to Paul. Grace is free and for all, because of what Jesus did.

This theology does not picture us tossed into a sea needing to get onto the lifeboat of Christianity or we drown, rather it pictures us already plucked out of a sea in the lifeboat saved from drowning.

The budding form of Christianity recorded in the Bible used the words faith and belief a bit differently than we tend to. Back then they included the meaning “to hold dear.”

And actually the English word “belief’ comes from the Old English phrase “be loef,” which means to hold dear, to be beloved. As Marcus Borg notes belief, is to “be loef” is to “belove.”

To have faith or belief in the Biblical context can be heard them to mean to belove. 3 I hold dear God. I hold dear Jesus. God is my beloved. Jesus is my beloved. This is especially true with the text of Paul’s that we are considering this morning.

And we also need to understand that when Paul speaks of Jesus’ resurrection he does necessarily mean Jesus was physically raised in a bodily form. Paul himself experienced the risen Christ in a vision while blind.

The Jesus he encountered was real, but not a bodily Jesus, but a spiritual one. Jesus’ resurrection can be understood as bodily, but, it need not be. We can understand the risen Jesus as his Spirit living on in the world and we can believe in that and we can belove that, hold it dear.

The Gospels report the resurrected Jesus had a new kind of existence, one in which he could not re- experience death, and time and space no longer applied to him 2.

He appears in unknown ways, in a gardener, a traveler, a stranger on a beach; and he can be seen even when eyes are shut or blinded.

The resurrection, though mysterious has at least four truths connected to it that Christians pretty much agree on. (1) Although Jesus was killed to stamp out his life and his cause, both continue to exist in important ways; (2) Jesus was experienced in the form of both himself and strangers by those who knew him in his lifetime; (3) Jesus has been reported as being experienced by those who did not know him in his lifetime; and (4) The Body of Christ lives on as the Church.

It is fair to hear Paul’s use of the word believe as beloving, especially beloving in our heart that God raised Jesus – in some fashion – from the dead, whether it be physical or metaphysical or in a spiritual manner.

So let’s look again at Paul’s phrase “ if you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” The word “Lord” is a translation of the Greek “kurios” which means the one to whom something or someone belongs, the ruler/master/lord.

Can we confess with our lips that that we belong to Jesus? Christians are Jesus followers by definition. He’s the one who ought to be our ruler, the master of our life (in a non-slave way) the lord of our life in all things.

So it ought to be somewhat easy for any follower of Jesus to claim that he is Lord in that sense. He’s the one to whom we as Christians belong. Jesus is who’s camp we are in.

“[I]f you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” Can we believe that as Paul meant it? Can we hold dear, belove, in our heart that God raised Jesus somehow from the dead? So far I don’t get the willies when I hear it that way! It’s not about believing the unbelievable or about exclusivity . . . or anyone going to hell.

It’s about beloving the wonderful truth that Jesus lives on somehow.

Now comes the last and perhaps hardest part for a lot of us. The “will be saved part.” “[I]f you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.”

“You will be saved.” Many modern Christians insist this makes the Christian path exclusive. Accept Jesus or go to hell.

Paul says no such thing in this text. He doesn’t mention hell as what we are saved from. Moreover, there is no exclusivity about it. He doesn’t say this is the only way to be saved. He says if you do it you will be saved, not if you don’t do it you won’t be saved.

In fact, as we heard read, Paul notes a few sentenced later that, “there is no distinction between Jew and Greek; the same Lord is Lord of all and is generous to all who call on him. For, “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.”

By claiming there is no distinction between Jew and Greek Paul makes it clear that there is no difference between humans in God’s eyes we are beloved equally in God’s grace equally.

And God is God to all and all you have to do is call on God by any name. Jews and Greeks have different names for God but it didn’t matter to Paul, he understood to all be one God.

And Paul understands Christ as God on earth for everyone and generous to everyone. God’s grace is free and it’s yours whether you want it or not.

In other words, Adam’s disobedience has been erased by Jesus’ obedience and so all of us have been rescued from sin’s sea of cosmic trouble and are in the life boat out of hot water (as it were).

So what are we saved from then if we confess Jesus/God/Love is our ruler and if we belove that Jesus lives?

“Salvation in the Bible is . . .” as Marcus Borg puts it, seldom about afterlife.

Borg writes that ‘in the New Testament salvation: is occasionally about an afterlife– but most of the time it is not. So also saved and savior are not primarily about being saved from our sins so that we can go to heaven. . .” 5

In the Bible salvation mostly means being rescued from oppression like the Hebrew Exodus and Exile Stories, or the repeated rescue from peril recounted in the Psalms.

In the Gospels it’s often about Christ giving opportunity for new life on earth, Jesus the Christ brings sight, he brings health, he brings justice, he brings food, he brings open hospitality, he brings love, he even brings life, and he does all of this on earth for those who are here now in the lifeboat of grace with us.

Prof. Borg puts it like this:

The Gospels contain stories of Jesus restoring people to life. . . [W]hatever the historical basis of these stories, their metaphoric meaning is clear. Just as there are sighted people who are blind, so also there are living people who are dead. Consider the provocative and brilliant one-liner from Jesus: “Let the dead bury their own dead.” He obviously said this about living people. It’s a serous indictment–we can be alive and yet dead, it also includes good news; there is a way of leaving the land of the dead.”

And then Marcus Borg has this very specific note about Paul he writes:

The movement from life to death is also found in Paul’s thinking. Paul speaks of dying and rising with Christ (e.g., Rom. 6:3-11) and of he himself having been crucified with Christ (Gal 2:19) and entering into a new kind of life. 6

What Christianity saves us from is our old way of life. We are all on the life raft, but if we confess Jesus/God/Love is our ruler, and if we belove that God resurrected Jesus then we can be saved from the lesser way we’d otherwise be if we didn’t follow Jesus’ Way of love. We get a new life.

We are not better than others, and it has nothing to do with anyone going to hell. What we are is saved from the lesser life we would otherwise have had by not living the new life on earth that God/Christ/Love wants for us; a life where we are love in action, the new life of living as Christ on earth now.

Jesus’ Way is about bringing to others sight, health, justice, food, hospitality, love and even life– doing all of this as Christ did on earth for the living .

That’s why we confess Jesus/God/Love is our ruler and why we belove that Jesus lives because they offer the promise of salvation from our lesser older way of being, and when we act on that promise it does indeed save us and the world from the lesser existence we’d otherwise have had!

If you want to put hell in the equation, salvation is about keeping hell from life and about bringing heaven to life, NOT after life, but now during life.

And that is what Paul can be heard to mean when he writes “if you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.”

And so I say, AMEN.

ENDNOTES:

1. Laughlin, Richard, Remedial Christianity, 175

2. Ibid. I got these ideas from p 178.

3. Borg, Marcus, Speaking Christian, 118-119

4. Borg, Marcus, Wright, NT, The Meaning of Jesus, 135

5. Borg, Speaking Christian 39

6. Ibid., 47

COPYRIGHT Scott Elliott © 2013 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Waking Up Listening to Jesus

Waking Up Listening to Jesus

a sermon based on Luke 9: 28-43

given at Palm Bay, FL on February 10, 2013

by Rev. Scott Elliott

A librarian was startled fully awake at 3 AM by her phone ringing. When she answered it the voice on the other end said “What time does the library open?”

As a matter of habit the librarian replied “Nine o’clock. ” But with understandable grumpiness she added “What’s the idea of calling me at home in the middle of the night to ask a question like that?”

“Not until nine o clock?’ the caller said in a very disappointed voice.

“No, not until nine, “ the librarian tersely stated. “Why do you want to get in before nine o’clock?” she angrily asked.

“I don’t want get in,” said the caller, “I want to get out!”

In today’s lesson the disciples are up on a mountain top with Jesus, dozing off. And they too are startled fully awake, not by a phone ringing, but by Jesus’ shining Light– represented by his glowing face and “dazzling white” clothes.

And when the disciples’ snap to they not only experience the Light of Christ but they also take in the highest honored prophets talking to Jesus about his future.

His future we know is going to include the loud proclamations of love in Jerusalem that he will soon be making as a part of his journey on the Way of love.

It’s a journey that we know includes marching in a parade of palms and disrupting the Temple and being arrested and executed for such rebellious behavior.

Jesus is open and passionate and bold in his ministry. Jesus heals the sick, feeds the poor, welcomes the stranger, embraces the cultural outcast and kneels beside the accused even defending those the law condemned.

Imagine that last one for a minute, remember the adulteress caught in the act, guilty as charged, in John Chapter 8. She is facing her just desserts under Biblical edicts, but Jesus doesn’t clamor for her death under Leviticus 20:10 as some religious men did back then, and might even do today. No!

What does Jesus do?

He kneels to protect her, not to pick up stones or get a better shot. He clamors for love of neighbor under Leviticus 19 :18. He thinks her just dessert – and everyone else’s for that matter, is love in action. And for that woman love takes the form of an out-loud, bold and passionate act of protection and forgiveness.

“Love your neighbor as yourself,” . . . “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” is what Jesus demonstrates.

We’d want to be protected if the Bible was being used to take away our life, liberty or the pursuit of happiness, wouldn’t we? And we all want to be forgiven too don’t we?

In addition to love everyone as you want to be loved, there’s also another two-fold message in that story. “Let him who has not sinned cast the first stone,” gives all the sinners a reprieve as they reprieve the woman’s life– because love stepped in.

And the woman lives not because Jesus stood on the side-line thinking to himself she shouldn’t die, but because he had the gumption to be love in action that day, getting down there by her side and protecting her in both word and in action in the face of angry people with rocks to throw and Scriptures to thump.

The glory of Jesus is love in action. It’s what I called last week love advocating love.

In the reading for today we are told that “Peter and his companions were weighed down with sleep” but because they managed to “stay[] awake, they saw [Jesus’] glory and the two men who stood with him.” Then immediately “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’”

Peter and the disciples are befuddled. They aren’t fully getting what Jesus is about. Honoring Jesus and the prophets of old with what were called “booths” in the tradition of the Jewish feast of the Tabernacles was not what was called for. 1 That’s not love in action.

Putting up monuments is fine and good, but Christ is calling and calling the disciples (which includes all of us). And the calls primary purpose is not to put up buildings as monuments, or for that matter a Temple, especially like the one in first century Jerusalem that aided and abetted Rome’s oppressive rule.

To use the librarian joke concept, Jesus is not calling to be let into church buildings. He’s already in Christian communities (he’s promised that where two or more are gathered in his name, he’s there).

What Jesus is calling about, is to be let out. Christ wants to be in us and in our buildings, but Christ is also quite adamant about being let out! He didn’t take the disciples to the mountain top to get a building, he took them so they could share God (love) in the world.

We can hear in this story a metaphor for what happens when Jesus’ followers get sleepy in the faith.

We kick back and get drowsy– what the text calls being “weighed down with sleep,” and in that half awake state we don’t hear Jesus’ call to let him out.

We think it’s a call about getting into church, but, if we listen and wake up we find out he’s here and the call is to do our part and let Jesus out, unlock the church doors (so to speak) and get him into the world.

In the reading today, when Peter’s response is an offering to build some physical dwelling places for figures of the faith . . . God shows up.

And God’s appearance is supposed to have a bit of a funny side to it. Peter gives the wrong response and a cloud rolls in with thundering voice of God. And God’s voice bellows out: “This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!”

“Listen to him ” . . . “Listen to him.”

That is what we are supposed to do. Listen to Jesus. What Jesus last said to the disciples before they went up the mountain, sat around all drowsy and aloof to what was happening, was this:

If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will save it. What does it profit them if they gain the whole world, but lose or forfeit themselves? Those who are ashamed of me and of my words, of them the Son of Man will be ashamed when he comes in his glory and the glory of the Father and of the holy angels. But truly I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the kingdom of God. (Luk 9:23-27 NRS)

Jesus has instructed his followers – which includes us– to follow him out into the world, risk being crucified, lose the life we presently have in order to save our lives – and our world– from what it otherwise will be.

Listening to Jesus means not being ashamed of his Way. And his Way is walking toward transforming the world with love, love in action. Love in word and deed.

We are not called to simply bask in God’s Light, contemplate love, and build monuments to it.

We have to go out and do love, be love.

We have to let Christ out of the church.

Listening to Jesus, as God tells followers in the story to do, means going out into the world as Jesus did – and does– glowing with love clothed in the dazzling white light of God, of love.

The Feasting on the Word commentary for this week puts it like this: “Following Jesus, congregations must be resolute in bearing witness to the redemptive mission of Jesus Christ.” 2?

Redemptive means “saving.” Mission means the charge. We must bear witness to the saving charge of Christ.

And we must be resolute about it. Resolute means courageous, brave, fearless, unhesitating, decided, unmistakable, beyond doubt. Our church vision statement calls it being “serving boldly.”

The Scripture lesson for today evidences that the disciples were anything but resolute in bearing witness to the redemptive mission of Jesus Christ. In other words they were not serving boldly.

No less a voice than God’s tells them to listen to Jesus who had told them to be witnesses, and after God speaks to the Jesus followers the very next sentence reports “that they kept silent and in those days told no one any of the things they had seen.” In neither deed nor word there was no witness at all . . . let alone a resolute witness.

And so when they come off the mountain it really should be no surprise that the disciples’ work is ineffective. Sure enough as we heard ,

On the next day, when they had come down from the mountain, a great crowd met him. Just then a man from the crowd shouted, “Teacher, I beg you to look at my son; he is my only child. Suddenly a spirit seizes him, and all at once he shrieks. It convulses him until he foams at the mouth; it mauls him and will scarcely leave him. I begged your disciples to cast it out, but they could not.”

And you know what happens next? Jesus gets angry. He says to his silent non-resolute, non-action-taking and ineffective followers: “You faithless and perverse generation, how much longer must I be with you and bear with you?”

I mentioned last week that Jesus spits out lukewarm followers. Remember I quoted the Book of Revelation (3:15-16) where Jesus says:

I know your works; you are neither cold nor hot. I wish that you were either cold or hot. So, because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I am about to spit you out of my mouth.

Keeping silent and not bearing witness is not what Jesus calls his followers to do. It’s the opposite of Jesus’ Way.

If we listen to Jesus we are resolute in our witness to his Way. Jesus is effective in his work precisely because he has passion and boldness in advocating love.

To be effective on Jesus’ Way Christians must have passion and boldness in advocating love, we have to.

If this sounds a bit like last week’s lesson, it is. The Gospels are resolute in teaching that Jesus was resolute about his Way being about resolute witness to love.

And the Gospels show Jesus being annoyed – quite angry actually– when his followers are faithless and off the path, when they are not resolute – courageous– in love.

“Love advocating Love” was the title of last week’s sermon and love advocating love is what Jesus is ultimately teaching his followers . . . and that includes us, folks.

The cross we are to take up is the cross of bringing love to the world, even in places it’s risky to go.

The life we give up is the life of not taking love to all, the easy way of talking and not doing.

And the life we gain by following Jesus is a life filled with love-advocating-for-love; being God’s actors, as I called us last week. What could be a greater vocation than that? We have the great honor of being God’s actors in the world, acting to bring love to others.

The New Revised Standard Version translation indicates (as we heard ) that what Jesus angrily says to his silent non-resolute followers is “You faithless and perverse generation, how much longer must I be with you and bear with you?”

The word translated as “perverse” in that sentence is “disastrepho” which has a broader meaning that includes turning aside from the right path.

Jesus followers are without gumption, they don’t passionately believe and they don’t serve boldly, they don’t even think openly.

They see Jesus glowing, they see he’s with prophets of old, they hear he’ll be making public stands and demonstrations in Jerusalem for love and will die for it and what they want to do is erect monuments, shelters from the elements.

The last thing they seem to want to do is come off the mountain and listen to Jesus who is calling and calling and calling them to be more than admirers. Jesus wants them to have faith and to: “deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow [him]. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for [Jesus’] sake will save it. What does it profit them if they gain the whole world, but lose or forfeit themselves? Those who are ashamed of [Jesus] and of [his] words, of them the Son of Man will be ashamed when he comes in his glory and the glory of the Father and of the holy angels.”

Legend had it that at the end of 2012 (last year) the Mayan’s predicted the world would end. Most of us think that the Mayans legend was wrong. But you know what? Here’s a news flash the world did end as predicted.

We went to bed and we awoke to a new world with all the promise of greatness God promised, a world where anything is possible. Where everyone can have enough food and health care, a place where all can be loved and respected as equals.

Every day is like that.

Every moment too.

Ash Wednesday is this week. It’s a day where we remember that out of the ashes of life so far the promise of new life arising exists on an individual and creation-wide scale. Like a phoenix it can arise in each moment.

We are metaphorically startled awake by light of Christ, that light’s like –if you will- a phone call from Jesus, and if we give it half a chance we’ll learn he’s not calling us to let him into a building, he’s already here.

Jesus is calling us to let him out of the building, to give wings to the phoenix in the ashes of the world. Jesus by being let out into the world IS the promise of heaven on earth. For the living. Now.

And the sooner we arrive ready to let him out the better.

The sooner we arise from the ashes of life as individuals and as a world to a new way of being, the better.

Listen to Jesus. If we do we will “be resolute in bearing witness to the redemptive mission of Jesus Christ.” The phoenix of love will fly and bring peace on earth good will to all as we do our parts as God’s actors.

Lent beings this week. There is a whole heap of ashes of time that we have burned thus far, you and me and the world. Some of it wasted, some of it mistakes, much of it good and full of love.

From that pile of burnt up time, from the ashes of life so far, we are called to rise anew with the phoenix of love, the resurrected Jesus.

We need to as God says “Listen to Jesus” so that we can fly toward the best we can be out of all that we presently are.

Ash Wednesday and Lent are about the hope of a resurrection, not just Jesus’ arising on Easter, but our arising too.

That means me. That means you. That means this church. That means this world.

Today. This moment. May we arise on wings of love from all that’s been and fly to the best that we can be.

That’s what listening to Jesus means.

AMEN!

ENDNOTES

1. Feasting on the Word, p 454

COPYRIGHT Scott Elliott © 2012 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Love Advocates Love

Click Here to Listen to “Amazing Grace Amazing Love” by Scott Elliott, Chris and Rick Rakauskas

Love Advocates Love

a sermon based on 1 Corinthians 13

given at Palm Bay, FL on February 3, 2013

by Rev. Scott Elliott

I grew up loving the comic strip characters from Peanuts. Most of us remember them, and one endearing factor is that Peanuts often feature the topic of love.

Once upon a time Lucy told Charlie Brown “ You know what I don’t understand? I don’t understand love.” Charlie Brown simply replied “Who does?”

Then Lucy blurted back “Explain love to me Charlie Brown.”

Charlie Brown thoughtfully answered: “You can’t explain love. I can recommend a book or a poem or a painting, but I can’t explain love.”

Lucy wouldn’t let Charlie Brown off the hook, “Well, try Charlie Brown, try.”

So he tried, “Well, lets say I see this beautiful, cute little girl walk by…”

Lucy loudly interrupted “Why does she have to be cute? Huh? Why can’t someone fall in love with someone with freckles and a big nose? Explain that!”

Charlie Brown said “Well, maybe you are right. Let’s just say I see this girl walk by with this great big nose . . .”

“I didn’t say GREAT BIG NOSE!” Lucy shouted!

Charlie Brown’s last line is “ You not only can’t explain love, you can’t even talk about it.” 1

The wonderful thing about Charlie Brown and his friends is that they seem to get life, really state it well in simple and often funny, but powerful ways.

Charlie Brown was trying to address romantic love but his statement holds true for any love. When it comes right down to it, “You not only can’t explain love, you can’t even talk about it.” At least not without dissent.

Jesus was in the business of being a love-monger. A “monger” is someone who deals in a specific commodity. Jesus’ commodity was –and is– love.

I like to think that Christians and churches are supposed to be in the business of being love-mongers too, dealing the same commodity as Jesus, love.

Love is a word most of us like to think about and hear. It’s a commodity that we all want and need. But it’s not only a hard-to-explain commodity, it is often one that is hard to even talk about. Talking about love can lead to dissent. Advocating for love can be divisive. You wouldn’t think so, but it is.

And hear me clearly, no one has to agree with the pastor in this church so feel free to dissent with this sermon. We encourage folks to think openly. My point is not to get you to agree but that the topic of love is not an easy one.

We talk about love every week in this church because it is the center of our faith.

Love is at the heart of this church’s life. It is the focus of our faith because we believe that God is love and because Jesus declared that loving God and loving self and others are the greatest commandments.

Simply put, if Christianity is done right, nothing trumps love. Love wins It is the ace, the lynch pin, the whole enchilada, the queen and the king of our way of being.

Two weeks ago– and on many other occasions– we heard from this pulpit how love is defined in the Theological Dictionary as a:

Strong feeling of personal affection, care and desire for the well being of others . . . [a] “primary characteristic of God’s nature and a Supreme expression of Christian faith and action. 2.

That’s the kind of love that Paul is talking about in the lesson we just heard from First Corinthians Chapter 13. That love chapter is pretty famous, in the past few weeks I have read it aloud three times in public, once at a funeral and twice at weddings. It’s a lovely ode to Love and I love that it is popular.

Because it often stands alone we usually forget though that the text is from a letter that is calling to account the poor behavior of a church in Corinth.

Paul is in fact asserting that love is positively not what they are doing at their church, and that as a matter of fact love is exactly all the things they are failing to do. 3.

Paul is not saying we can be perfect love. By loving we do not become God. None of us are God. None of us is pure love.

Paul’s point in 1 Corinthians 13 isn’t to not fail to be love all the time, but rather to know that love is the plumb line by which we measure the church we build. 4 It’s what we aim to be and what we know not to aim to be:

Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.

I’m reading a book by Michael Piazza about renewing progressive churches like ours. Rev. Piazza notes that a whole bunch of Americans love Jesus but “have lost faith in the church.” Piazza in essence asks “Who can blame them” and he points out that progressive church complacency is one of the culprits of this lost faith in the church.

He writes with painful frankness that:

Because progressive people too often have failed to speak loudly or effectively in the face of bigotry, discrimination, and oppression on national platforms, the Christianity that most people think of stands against, rather than for, the positions about which moderates and progressives care most. 5

A dear friend of mine pointed out last week that I need to be careful with the word “progressive” because it has a political connotation, as well as a theological one.

Rev. Piazza and I use the term not to describe liberal progressive politics, but to describe a Christian theology that advocates love as paramount, a theology which, simply put, takes seriously Jesus’ teachings that loving God and loving neighbors is above all other commands.

In Progressive theology love trumps all, even other parts of the Bible if warranted.

Progressive theology emphasizes compassion and care and desire for the well being of others, and it understands that action on those things is critical, and so social justice issues matter.

You can be a progressive Christian, and also be politically conservative or liberal or Socialist or Green or Libertarian or a Democrat or a Republican.

Progressive Christianity is about believing in love and loving, it’s not about political doctrines.

In a progressive church love is the heart of church life, not this political litmus test or that.

Rev. Piazza, a Progressive Christian pastor, notes that recently two evangelical writers “were shocked to discover that most young Americans perceive all [ALL!] Christians to be hypocritical, soul-saving, anti-homosexual, sheltered, judgmental political activists.”

Rev. Pizza concludes that “While we as progressives can say, “Thank goodness this is not us,” we have to acknowledge that no one would actually know that it isn’t, because we too often abdicate our voice to the more conservative, radical, and outrageous among us.” 6

Rev. Piazza produces evidence detailing the reasons young adults are staying away in droves from all churches.

He lists facts I’ve more or less seen and argued, but, they are still stunning to see all piled together. Only 16 percent of sixteen to twenty-nine year olds have a favorable view of church– only 16%!

…[and] this is why they don’t like the church: 91 percent think it is antigay, and they are not. 87 percent say it is too judgmental. 85 percent say it is hypocritical. 78 percent say it is old-fashioned. 75 percent say it is too involved in conservative politics. 70 percent say it is insensitive to those who are different. 68 percent say it is boring. 64 percent say it is not accepting of people of other faiths. 7

These are Twenty-first Century facts progressive churches must face or risk fading away.

Far from being perceived as loving, whether it is fair or not. ALL Christian churches are perceived to most of the country as not having a “Strong feeling of personal affection, care and desire for the well being of others.”

We are seen from afar as not being about love, even though that is the very heart of our way of being church, of our understanding of Jesus’ Way to relationship with God, with others and with creation.

Progressive churches like ours do not have a theology that is anti-gay. By-and-large progressive churches are not judgmental, insensitive, hypocritical or unaccepting. Our theology is not unloving, yet that is how most folks who have not walked through our doors understand us.

Those facts break my heart and they are affecting our ministries and missions, our attendance and our offerings.

We have been lumped together with the churches that have gladly raised the banner in the media and in books and in worship and out on the streets of being anti-gay, judgmental, hypocritical, insensitive to those who are different and not accepting of people of other faiths.

That is decidedly not us, but, we are really and truly perceived as being such by a vast majority of people. That’s a very sad fact.

And while the UCC may be the opposite of what Churches are perceived as, we carry some of the blame as a whole for letting our church get tainted by the ugliness of churches that are not love centered.

Our fault is– as Rev. Piazza points out– “Because progressive people too often have failed to speak loudly or effectively in the face of bigotry, discrimination, and oppression . . .”

This is not just Rev. Piazza and my view. No less a theologian and saint of the church than Rev. Dr. Martin Lurther King, Jr held this view and predicted church would suffer the losses in droves it is now experiencing. That great pastor made his prediction fifty-years ago in prophetic words about the church that ring with eerie truth today.

Today marks the start of the first week of Black History Month a time we cannot help but recall the terrible oppression imposed on African Americans in our nation.

And make no mistake about it, oppression of minorities, including African American’s, continues. Injustices sadly exist.

Rev. Dr. King wrote in 1963:

So often the contemporary church is a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. So often it is an archdefender of the status quo. Far from being disturbed by the presence of the church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the church’s silence– and often even vocal– sanction of things as they are.

But the judgment of God is upon the church as never before. If today’s church does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authenticity, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century. Every day I meet young people whose disappointment with the church has turned into outright disgust. 8

-Rev. Dr. King.

The Twentieth-first Century facts that Rev. Piazza provides mesh with Rev. King’s observations.

Rev. King was appalled at moderation in church when it came to civil rights. He noted in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail:

I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection. ~Letter from a Birmingham Jail

Those fifty year old words of Rev. King’s address a part of the love that we can’t, won’t, or have a very hard time talking about.

It’s truth that affects the Church even today on civil rights issues for the oppressed.

It is easier not to have tension than to advocate for the presence of justice.

Justice for African Americans,

Justice for other people of color,

Justice for aliens,

Justice for the poor,

Justice for the sick,

Justice for the imprisoned,

Justice for Lesbians, Gays, Bi-Sexuals and Transgenders,

Justice for the disabled,

Justice for the elderly,

Justice for child laborers,

Justice for the enslaved,

Justice for women,

Justice for those of other faiths.

All those forms of justice require that love advocates love. That is we speak, plead and argue in words and deeds with love for justice.

It is easier to say we care about the well being of others than to take direct action. It is easier to talk the talk than walk the walk. In order for Love to advocate love, Love needs a voice, it needs legs and arms. We are what love needs, our action is love’s action. We are God’s actors.

The affects of inaction were predicted by Rev. King fifty years ago, they are born out by facts today. People are leaving or not coming to progressive churches not just because we are misunderstood, but because we are too often lukewarm in the world with love. Talking the talk is not walking the walk. A warm reception for the idea of love is not hot pursuit of it.

I want to point out that Rev. King’s words about lukewarm acceptance and the church losing God’s support has Biblical backing, in Revelation 3 (15-16) we are told what Jesus thinks of churches that are only warm about love. Jesus says:

I know your works; you are neither cold nor hot. I wish that you were either cold or hot. So, because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I am about to spit you out of my mouth.

Moderation in love, is not Jesus’ Way. Jesus Way is about advocating love in word and deed. Love advocates love.

Jesus was not moderate in his passion or boldness. Neither was Paul. And the reason is: that neither is Love, God. Love advocates love.

God, Love, is about action. “It rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.”

One commentary on today’s text notes that

Paul is speaking about agape, the love most visible in God’s love for humankind in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. This love is not in the first instance a feeling, but an action. This loves seeks not its own good, but the good of the one who is loved. 9

Last spring we voted –without a single vote in opposition– to adopt a strategic plan, last Sunday we voted to speed up the implementation of that plan.

The plan is over there on the wall. You can see it is in the shape of an arrow the point of which states Riviera UCC’s purpose as “exist[ing] to experience and share Christ’s unconditional love by: Thinking Openly, Believing Passionately and Serving Boldly.”

And on that plan we, this church, intentionally aimed that purpose at five dynamic ministries: A Progressive theology ministry. Non-traditional ministries. Multi-Generational ministries. Crisis/Needs ministries. Cultural Diversity ministries.

If we pursue each of those, not warmly, but with hot pursuit that is open, passionate and bold we will engaged in the very act of Christ’s unconditional love.

And I believe – you may disagree with me– that a huge part of that has got to be the church and each of us proclaiming out loud that we are a love centered church, that we believe and practice Jesus’ way of love advocating love, aiming for justice and peace. . . in action not just in word.

Progressive churches need to no longer fail, to borrow Rev. Piazza’s words, “to speak loudly or effectively in the face of bigotry, discrimination and oppression. . .”

Or as Rev. Dr. King puts it we cannot be “more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice” we must become seekers of “a positive peace which is the presence of justice . . .”

A meeting is being held between both services next Sunday to discuss how to best further implement the strategic plan and get it running now under the budget voted on last week. How can we best be love advocating love– your input and your action matter. They are critical in answering that question.

Please plan to attend at 10 AM next Sunday to help this church best “exist to experience and share Christ’s unconditional love by: Thinking Openly, Believing Passionately and Serving Boldly.”

Attend. Please. We need all people connected to this community involved and direct action from everyone to get the word out that love is at the heart of the life of this awesome church.

We decided last week that all of us would run hard to transform the church the meeting next week is starting line.

Love is how we intend to run. Peace and justice are at the finish line.

AMEN.

ENDNOTES

1. Hodgin, Michael, 1001 Humorous Illustrations for Public Speaking, p. 215

2. Westminster Dictionary of Theological Terms, “Love”

3. I got the ideas in this paragraph from the commentary in Feasting on the Word, Year C, Vol 1 by Jeffery Jones at page 303.

4. The plumb line idea was gleaned from Jeffery Jones at 305

5. Piazza, Michael S.; Trimble , Cameron B. (2011-07-15). Liberating Hope!: Daring to Renew the Mainline Church (Kindle Locations 102-104). Pilgrim Press/United Church Press. Kindle Edition.

6. Ibid (Piazza is referring to the book Unchristian: What a New Generation Really Thinks about Christianity by David Kinnaman and Gabe Lyons)

7 Ibid.

8.King, Martin Luther, Jr., Letter from a Birmingham Jail

9. Feasting on the Word, Year C, Vol 1 by Lewis Galloway, at page 304.

COPYRIGHT Scott Elliott © 2012 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

The Body of Christ is Us, Now

The Body of Christ is Us, Now

a sermon based on 1 Corinthians 12;12-31a

given at Palm Bay, FL on January 27, 2013

by Rev. Scott Elliott

A couple of weeks ago I preached about the inaccurate images we have in our heads of Jesus, who was not a blue-eyed Caucasian, whose real name was not Jesus, and whose Way was not about judgment, exclusivity or hate.

The man of color, Yeshua of Nazareth, led –and leads– a Way of non-judgment, inclusivity and love. What I didn’t mention in that sermon (but have mentioned before) is that Jesus, who we kinda think of as humorless is remembered in the Gospels as a pretty funny guy.

A summary of some of the funny stuff remembered about Jesus in the Gospels would include:

The story of The Good Samaritan with the upside-down, outrageous assertion that an enemy can epitomize a good neighbor.

The story of The Prodigal Son where love means throwing a party for a spendthrift sinful scoundrel son and welcoming him with open arms and unconditional love.

The story of The Demonic where Satan’s soldiers are named after Caesar’s soldiers and sent into crazy pigs that run over a cliff.

Blatantly obvious advice like it’s not a good idea to give pearls to pigs.

Jesus states the funny ironic truth about busybodies and hypocrites that applies still today, that they focus on the small specs of trouble in others’ lives when they have large logs of trouble in their own lives they ought to be focusing on.

And one of my favorite I-can-see-Jesus-wanting-us-to-smile bits is his mind-bending description of Almighty God as being like . . . a tiny mustard seed that grows into the world’s biggest bush.

And Jesus digs puns. So you know I gotta like him. Perhaps his two most famous puns are calling fishermen “fishers of men” and calling Peter, whose name means stone, a rock. It’s akin to calling a guy named Stoney, Rocky.

Among the many blessings Jesus brought to earth–and us–was a sense of humor.

Jesus is not the only funny one in the Bible. Indeed I sometimes wonder if Jesus lifted some of his material from Torah. That Stoney/Rocky bit is a lot like the story in Genesis where God names the human he made out of Adamah, earth, Adam.

In English it’s like calling a man made out of humus, human. Or Clay. Or Dusty. Or Sandy. Or Mud. Or Stoney. Or Rocky.

Calling the Adamah-created-being Adam was meant tickle the rib . . . which may have given God another funny idea that very Eve.

I’ve thought about putting together a book of humor in the Bible that’s intended to be there. There is a ton of stuff to use.

Since many of us consider the Bible to be a bit stodgy and humorless we have an image of the Bible that, like the image we have of Jesus, is not all together accurate.

And you know what? This may surprise you even more. Speaking of stodgy, most of us have this image of Paul as a stick-in-the-mud-very-conservative guy, but, he’s not. Really!

Despite what we may think Paul was an amazingly progressive man in his time. He is not the misogynistic bad boy he’s made out to be. He not only welcomed women into the early Christian movement but he worked side-by-side with them and appointed them as leaders in a very patriarchal culture. If you think about it, that’s remarkable.

Moreover, Paul proclaimed the very egalitarian notion that we are all one in Christ.

Most of us have heard Galatians 3 (28) where Paul wonderfully claims: “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. (Gal 3:28 NRS).”

In Christ there is no longer distinctions along gender, ethnic or class lines. We are one. And we are all equal. That is about as progressive as you can be.

Paul is not just what we would call progressive by today’s standards, he is also funny.

You heard me right. Paul who we think of as uptight, has a funny bone. It’s true. Today’s Lectionary reading is Exhibit A, positive proof.

As we heard read, Paul first provides a summary version of his progressive idea that all are one and equals. Using the metaphor of a body he writes: one body, so it is with Christ. For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body– Jews or Greeks, slaves or free– and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.

A community as one body was a common metaphor back in Paul’s day, but he does this wonderful imagery of the Christian community as not just being any body, but the very Body of Christ. Jesus has left his old body, but he is back, he has a second coming, if you will, through Christians, acting as one.

Together we propel Christ’s hands and feet. That is a very vivid and true image for Paul. It’s brilliant. But Paul is not just clever in making that claim, he’s also playful and comedic.

Despite the truth that we are equal in the Body of Christ we sometimes act unequal.

Feet back in Paul’s day were covered with layers of dirt from dusty roads and paths. And so Paul starts off asking Christians to imagine a dusty stinky dirty foot feeling forlorn, of less value to the body. It’s not a hand clean and high up off the road, feeding the body, adorned in rings and being admired by the eyes.

Paul gives this sort of Eeyore image of the foot:

…the body does not consist of one member but of many. If the foot would say, “‘Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,’” that would not make it any less a part of the body.”

A foot’s just as much a part of the body as a hand isn’t it? We may not know it as well because it’s not right there in front of our face most of the time, but, it’s still a part of the body. It may not grab and hold onto our food like a hand, or show off our rings, but it is a part of what propels most of us along many a mile.

To put in some awful puns of my own: all toed feet are a good thing I know it sounds corny, but, feet are not arch enemies, but something we can take stock in’ –and so, de feet is not a bad thing in Paul’s metaphor.

The point is that people who feel unworthy are nonetheless an equal part of the oneness, the Body of Christ. Thinking of parts as having more or less worth is nonsense according to Paul–and for that matter, Jesus. Every member of the community matters equally. Period.

So, see, Paul’s got a talking depressed foot feeling less worthy than hands in his letter. That’s pretty funny stuff. Feet are a funny part of the body. They are. And it’s a good place for any comedian to start a joke.

Paul moves from the funny image of a sad foot to the another naturally silly body part, the ear. Ears are just kinda funny all sticking out all bendy and foldy there on the sides of our heads. So what has Paul got these silly appendages doing? Talking and worrying about not being an eye. Kinda earrie, I know (sorry I had to stick that pun in).

Here’s how Paul puts it if the ear would say, “Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body.

And Paul takes on the ear’s argument by responding with even goofier images. He suggests imagining the body as giant eye and Paul asks “If the whole body were an eye, where would the hearing be?”

Then he switches it up and says the same is true of a giant ear “If the whole body were hearing, where would the sense of smell be?”

Maybe it’s just me, but the idea of eyes hearing makes me smile. Even funnier is the whole body as a giant ear trying to smell. I’m thinking that might make a good sketch for Saturday Night Live.

And like a good comedy routine Paul moves his body parts humor in the letter further and further into the absurd all the while teaching with his metaphor.

Paul points out that “ God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose” . . . Then he has the readers picture each body part by asking “ If all were a single member, where would the body be?”

In the modern world we can picture this silliness like a Mr. Potato Head pulled apart laying about the floor, nose here, any eye there, a mouth just a off to the side by a foot.

That’s gives an idea of Paul’s image of the body sprawled about. Then he visually reassembles it all to what a body really is a blending of parts together. He writes “As it is, there are many members, yet one body.”

Then Paul goes back to the funny-body-parts-talking shtick he set up earlier. He zings in a humorous talking eyeball image: “The eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I have no need of you . . .’”

Then Paul adds the observation that body parts don’t tell other body parts they are not needed. He writes “nor [does]. . . the head [say] to the feet, ‘I have no need of you.’”

Can you hear so far how Paul has got this funny body part imagery going on to make his point about all of the church community needing one another as it acts as the Body of Christ?

All the body parts are needed and none less so than another. The specialized functions of body parts do not affect the value. All are needed. All have equal worth in the ordinary day-to-day functioning of a body. Pretty effective and funny use of body part humor.

Now I know I am the pastor and you are in church and that the last thing you may have expected this morning was to be taking about funny body parts.

And my guess is about now some of us have been thinking there’s some types of body part humor that we won’t be talking about, because well, we mostly still think of Paul as a prude, and he’d never wander down that humor path. Guess again.

Paul got that about now in his letter people would be thinking to themselves about the whole body and so he addresses the, ummm parts we cover up.

Paul refers to body parts we keep covered up as the weaker, inferior and less honorable parts.

And just like Jesus provides and teaches respect to humans who are considered weak, inferior or without honor, Paul notes that the church as the Body of Christ must respect those less honorable-to-the-world body parts.

He’s quite clever in this imagery. Listen again to how Paul puts it:

“the members of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and those members of the body that we think less honorable we clothe with greater honor, and our less respectable members are treated with greater respect; whereas our more respectable members do not need this. But God has so arranged the body, giving the greater honor to the inferior member . . .

The poor and weaker parts, the less honored, those that are the last in the society to get respect, are supposed to be the first to get respect in the church, the Body of Christ. This is the sermon on the mount stuff right?

The last shall be first.

The body parts that we don’t want to mention, get the most respect because they need it.

Why do they need it? Because out in the world they rarely – if ever– get it. Those the culture disrespects, those the culture finds inferior get special treatment in church, in the Body of Christ.

That’s not a stretch, that’s a main part of Paul’s lesson today, it’s a part of the seriousness Paul has laced in with the humor. Just when we’re about to laugh with disdain at certain body parts Paul catches us off guard with the idea that the disdained are honored. “God has so arranged the body [of Christ] giving the greater honor to the inferior member.”

In the lesson today Paul sets up this funny bit about depressed feet, ear and eye bodies, and unmentionable body parts being honored and he laces it all with the lesson that all parts of the Body of Christ, the church, are of great value, with only the most disdained having greater honor than the rest.

Paul then notes that God arranged the church body like that so (and I quote):

…that there may be no dissension within the body, but the members may have the same care for one another. If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it.

And just in case anyone has missed the point that it is the church body –us!– that he is referring to he says it “Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it.”

Then Paul brings the message home, pointing out the various parts we make up in the Body of Christ. Paul writes:

God has appointed in the church first apostles, second prophets, third teachers; then deeds of power, then gifts of healing, forms of assistance, forms of leadership, various kinds of tongues. Are all apostles? Are all prophets? Are all teachers? Do all work miracles? Do all possess gifts of healing? Do all speak in tongues? Do all interpret? But strive for the greater gifts. . .

The greater gifts occur when we put all our talents and treasures, our blessings given by God, together. No one holds back. The body parts go all out.

The foot doesn’t withhold gifts because it feels unworthy.

The eye does not withhold gifts because it is better than the rest.

Those who cannot give are honored above those who can.

Being the Body of Christ means all are to be respected and all are to share the gifts they have so that what needs to be done to make the body function is done. The foot is not supposed to walk away. The hand is not to be keep others from functioning. The eye is not supposed to stay closed. The ear is not supposed to not listen.

Each member of a church community must fully give of time and talent and treasure in order for the church to act as the hands and feet of Christ. Each member must do their best. The Body of Christ needs the feet to walk; needs the ear to hear; needs the eye to see; needs the hands to give.

As Paul points out “God has appointed in the church . . . apostles . . . prophets . . . teachers; . . . deeds of power, . . . gifts of healing, forms of assistance, forms of leadership, [and] various kinds of tongues.”

Everything that needs to be done in a community like this falls within Paul’s list.

And everyone is appointed by God to do their part – to be a part– of the very Body of Christ. That makes each person in this church an envoy of God – and an equal one at that. All are an honored–HONORED– part of the church. The marginalized, the outcasts of the culture are even more honored. That’s Paul’s theology. It’s this church’s theology

Whatever part we are in this Body of Christ needs to not just be done as best we can do it, but knowing that our part matters much, and that everyone else’s does too. We. Matter. You. Matter.

And whatever other part of this Body we encounter we must be respectful and kind and honoring and loving of that part.

As this church continues on into the future we must strive for great gifts using our Divinely appointed talents and treasures – our blessings– as one, as the Body of Christ.

Let’s figure out what part we have in this body and do it with gusto and do it the best we can.

AMEN.

COPYRIGHT Scott Elliott © 2012 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Baptism’s a Radical Act Remembered

Baptism’s a Radical Act Remembered
a sermon based on Luke 3:15-17, 21-22
given at Palm Bay, FL on January 13, 2013
by Rev. Scott Elliott

I haven’t told many people this, but in high school I had a few nick names. I haven’t told people because, as I’ve mentioned to you all before, I’ve been trying for years to get people to call me “Milord” . . . and I didn’t want to muddy the water.

My nicknames included the track team handle of “Fritz” because my hair was frizzy, I thought it should have been Blitz because I was so quick.

I was also called “Professor” probably because I liked to take history classes as electives, but, I liked to think it was because if you look closely at that picture of me you can see a mustache, and at the time I was quite sure it made me look old enough to be a college prof.

The last few months of my senior year I was called “John the Baptist” I don’t think it was because some people wanted my head to roll, but because I played the role of John the Baptist is a legendary production of Godspell.

I was also called “Pinko” not because I couldn’t tan. I’m pretty sure it was because I was an advocate back then for civil rights for the poor and the oppressed (Blacks, Women, Gays) and I was a peacenik to boot. I thought people should be treated equally and that we should aim for peace though non-violence.

Folks that didn’t cotton to those ideas (especially coming from a guy with hair like you see on the screen) labeled guys like me a communist. This amused me to no end because those ideas came from Jesus– even though I was not a Christian at the time– and many of those who derisively called me “Pinko” were Christians.

There was a recent Facebook post going around with a picture of Jesus and the words “The most effective activist in the history of the world was Yeshua of Nazareth.” That post is up on the screen now.

“Yeshua” is what Jesus’ contemporaries knew him as. If you called out “Hey Jesus” no one in his following including Jesus would have recognize that name as being his. Yeshua was his name in Hebrew. The direct translation in English is Joshua. Both Yeshua and Joshua mean “Yahweh saves” which as it turns out is a very good birth name for Jesus. Through Yeshua of Nazareth Yahweh does indeed save!

The name “Jesus” is actually a transliteration of “Yeshua” from the Greek and Latin versions of the word into English. You might say it’s sort of our nick name for Yeshua of Nazareth. And I’m happy to report that unlike my unsuccessful efforts to be known as Milord (M-i-l-o-r-d), Jesus has been successful in being called My Lord (M-Y-L-O-R-D), and rightfully so.

But I find it a shame that the Jesus whom many worship is not Yeshua of Nazareth, who not only had a name that’s different than we know him by, but he had a different visage we recognize him by as well. Jesus did not really look like the picture on the screen.

Most importantly Jesus has a whole different Way that he created and led, than the way many today claim he created and led. Jesus’ Way was not about judgement, or exclusion, elitism or hate. Jesus’ Way was (and is) about non-judgement, inclusivity, egalitarianism and most of all love.

Here’s what anthropologists suggest Yeshua of Nazareth looked like. It’s at best an estimate since there are no photos or renderings of the real Jesus, and the Bible doesn’t tell us much about his looks. What the anthropologists did was make a composite of what a male Jewish peasant in Jesus day and location was likely to look like and this is what they came up with.

Notice that Jesus doesn’t have blue eyes. He doesn’t even look Caucasian like the Jesus in the previous slide. He looks like a man of color from the mid-east. Chances are “the man of color” in this picture might be racially profiled today, maybe even suspected as a possible terrorist in airports and on our streets.

This “color-full” rendition hangs on a my wall in my office and stares out at me as I work. I have grown quite fond of this Jesus and tend to think of him when I picture Jesus in my head.

I put the picture on my office wall to remind me that Jesus is not who we’ve been led to believe he is. Jesus is altogether someone not of our making, but of God’s making.

That teenage “Pinko” part of me I’ve learned was right, Jesus taught us to be advocates for what we’d call civil rights for the poor and the oppressed and to be peaceniks to boot.

Jesus – the real Jesus of the Gospels– wasn’t about judging and excluding, he wasn’t about working to deny rights to those who are different. Nor was Jesus about supporting the powerful who ignore or abuse the weak or the poor.

The real Jesus of the Gospels thought and taught that people should be treated equally and that we must aim for peace though non-violence. He taught that we must relate to one another with love.

Now folks that didn’t cotton to Jesus ideas back in his day didn’t call him a “pinko,” what they called him was a “rebel,” and they arrested and tried and convicted and executed Jesus for being a rebel.

We don’t like to think of Jesus as a rebellious criminal – it’s scandalous. We may not want to hear it, we may not like it– but Jesus, like the two men reported to be out there on the crosses with him, was a rebel and criminal. (2).

There’s no getting around it. We can try and spin the story, but scholars are convinced Jesus committed crimes (3). The Gospels suggest Jesus broke laws.

John Dear in his book The Sacrament of Civil Disobedience puts it like this: “Jesus was a peacemaker who time and time again broke the laws that oppressed people and kept them like slaves to injustice. Jesus was not just provocative; his actions were illegal, civilly disobedient and divinely obedient.” (4) Mahatma Gandhi wrote that “Jesus was the most active resister known perhaps to history. This was nonviolence par excellence” (5).

I suspect that quote from Gandhi inspired the slide that reads “The most effective activist in the history of the world was Yeshua of Nazareth.”

Jesus was a rebel. He really was. He was a gung-ho radical about love and peace. Which sadly is not how we have been taught to picture him on his Way.

So I like seeing the picture of the way Jesus may have looked, or something close to it. It reminds me to keep in mind Jesus’ origins are very different than what we tend to think.

Our sacraments have different origins than we tend to think as well.

In our church and in most Protestant denominations we have two sacraments, communion and baptism. Sacraments are outward signs (things we do publicly) which we believe are instituted by God and convey an inward or spiritual grace. In short, Jesus was baptized and Jesus celebrated communion as marks of God’s Grace and we do them for that reason too.

Now-a-days I love baptisms and I love communion. And here’s the thing, I did not grow up with them in my life and when I started going to church in my late thirties it took me a long time to take communion and even longer to decide to be baptized.

I had to get my head around those sacraments. I mean no disrespect but from the outside looking in they can seem a bit odd. Eating and drinking tea party sized helpings of bread and juice and declaring them to be flesh and blood is strange to the non-churched.

Splashing water on someone’s head in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost is a little less odd, but, not your everyday type thing to non-church people.

So when I first got into church as an adult I studied up on them and thought and prayed a lot about them. What could be so sacred about a symbolic meal and a symbolic bit of water? What could they mean?

As you might imagine I’ve studied both even more in seminary and as a pastor. And my conclusion has long been that like our modern image of Jesus that masks what he really looked like, the sacraments have a mask over their origins too.

I mentioned last week during communion that its origin includes that meal gatherings, banquets, were an important social event throughout the Roman Empire. They were hosted by the elite in order to maintain networks and loyalty with their underlings. 6

These banquets were a social institution were very common in the culture. However, except at wedding banquets, the banquets ordinarily were restricted to adult male guests who were important enough to fall within the sphere of influence of someone sufficiently wealthy to afford to host a meal – perhaps a friend, a business acquaintance, a patron, or sometimes a well-off client trying to impress, honor or obtain a favor from a patron might be such a host. 7 In other words, these were fairly exclusive meals.

Rome was a culture of exclusion on a massive scale. Many people were considered expendable; the sick, the poor, prisoners, slaves, strangers, women, children. Jesus’ message of love all and treat all equally countered that on a massive scale in the opposite direction. Instead of many being nobodies, all were somebodies.

And one of the coolest things Jesus did was challenge the inequities of the Roman Empire by flipping the exclusive Roman meal tradition on its head. He knocked down all barriers, everyone gets to sit at his table. All are invited. Consequently all manner of people get fed and brought into the community. There are no expendables on Jesus’ Way. All are loved and matter much. It’s an amazing, beautiful, God-soaked concept.

Our communion table of bread and juice is a re-enactment of Jesus’ open table and we also hold up and recall that he gave his flesh and blood leading a revolution and rebellion of love with that table.

His body was broken for us and his blood was spilled because he dared to bring and champion a new sort of love into our lives, into the world, a love for all.

And that love has never stopped vibrating and communion is a very visible sign and a very tactile remembrance of Jesus, his radical rebellion against inequity and best of all, his message of God’s radical love for all.

All of this is background for reflection on “Baptism of Christ Sunday” which is today!
Jesus was baptized and we are too. I loved officiating at baptisms. A little bit later today in the other (this) service we will be baptizing three wonderful people, Kamron, Cheyenne and JJ.

Some of my colleagues are a bit envious because I have been involved in so many baptisms over the past five years. With the three today it comes to thirty-three baptisms, this small church is doing God’s work for sure. Thirty-three baptisms!

Thirty-three, the very number of years Jesus was alive. It seems quite fitting that on Baptism of Christ Sunday we reach that number.

Each time we have a baptism we are reminded that baptism “celebrates growth, spirituality, love and camaraderie provided to the baptized through his or her personal experience of God through Christianity, and gives new life and promise of respect and praise for God. It shows also the pouring out of the Holy Spirit on those whom God loves. In baptism, God works in us the power of love, the renewal of the Spirit, the fellowship we share as people of God and the knowledge of the call to be God’s people always.”

We’ve heard those words a lot here. But I am not so sure we have ever thought about how radical baptism and those words are.

Baptism began as we heard in the reading today with John the Baptist who was baptizing as a way to protest Rome’s occupation of Palestine and its abuse of power, its unjust class system, and inhumane treatment of the majority of its population.

John was calling Jews to the desert wilderness to re-enact Joshua’s crossing of the River Jordan to symbolically take the Promise Land back and on the way across to confess sins and be immersed by John as a baptism of repentance, to be cleansed and initiated into John’s following in anticipation of the Coming One.

The Temple was an institution corrupted by Rome and the Temple elite worked with Rome in oppressing the Jewish peasantry. John’s offer and practice of forgiveness by baptism side-stepped the temple, its rites and its expensive temple fees. 8

Consequently, “[a]s John grew in popularity, he would probably have been perceived as a real threat to those whose authority was grounded in the temple.”9 His movement would have been understood as a protest against the temple, and also against Roman occupation of Palestine. 10
As we heard in the reading today Jesus was baptized. He took part in these protests and John’s movement.

As I mentioned, in first century Palestine there was drastic inequality between the haves and have-nots. The wealthy ruthlessly exploited the poor.

This ruthlessness caused peasants to resist and resistance movements like John’s arose.

The Christian baptism ritual has its very roots in John the Baptist’s God centered resistance movement.
Jesus followed John and then led his own resistance movement toward peace through love. His stand and actions against inequality included transformation of a common meal practice in a way that shattered the culture’s exclusive boundaries and called into question the inequalities of the Roman system. And it uplifted God’s way to peace through love.

Communion and Baptism have roots in two God centered resistance movements, there were – and are – all about resisting oppression and calling forth God’s justice. They are about believing in love and loving. These movements were not done quietly or behind closed doors, the proclamations that were made not popular and many rejected them. But Jesus tells his followers at the end of Matthew

“Go . . . and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” (Mat 28:16-20 NRS)

And so Christians have continued to publicly re-enact and participate for two-thousand years in the Sacraments, communion and baptism and many Christians have tried to proclaim Jesus’ teachings in both word and deed.

Like our image of Jesus, our image of baptism and communion are not of our making but of God’s making and it would serve us well to remember the radical nature of both. We are called to rebel against inequality and injustice and embrace love as the means to peace.

Simply put, our sacraments express through ritual not only our love of God but our faith and commitment to love of others.

Communion is a radical act. It requires, as our vision statement proclaims– thinking openly, believing passionately and serving boldly.

Baptism is a radical act.

Done right Christian love is a radical act.

So let’s be radical in love.

AMEN.

ENDNOTES:
2. Patterson, Stephen, The God of Jesus, Harrisburg: Trinity Press International, (1998), 201.
3. Ibid.
4. Dear, John The Sacrament of Civil Disobedience, chapter excerpt on “Jesus and Civil Disobedience” found at: fatherjohndear.org/pdfs/jesus_and_civil_disobedience.pdf.4.
5. Merton, Thomas. Gandhi on Nonviolence, (New York, New Directions, 1964), 40.
6.Hanson, K.C., and Oakman, Douglas, Palestine in the Time of Jesus, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, (1998), 74.
7 Smith, Dennis, The Greco-Roman Banquet: Defining a Common Meal Tradition, Philadelphia: Trinity Press Int’l, (1990), 21, 35, 40, 42 .
8. Crossan, John, The Historical Jesus, San Francisco: HarperSanFranciso, (1992), 231. Crossan also notes that this end run around the temple was probably John’s unique invention.
9. Webb, John, John the Baptizer and Prophet, Sheffield:JSOT Press, (1991), 204.
10. Tatum, Barnes, John The Baptist and Jesus: a Report of the Jesus Seminar, Sonoma: Polebridge Press, (1994), 124.

COPYRIGHT 2012 SCOTT ELLIOTT