A Noon Day, Maundy Thursday Sermon

Reflection on Psalm 116

“I love the Lord BECAUSE he has heard me…”

The Church Calendar marks today as Maundy Thursday. “The day of new covenant,” when during the Passover meal, Jesus took bread and broke it, “Take and eat, this is my body. Do this in remembrance of me.” Then Jesus took a cup, possibly the Passover cup known as the “cup of salvation” and gave it to the disciples saying, “Drink from it, all of you, for this my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins.”

And shortly before heading out to the Mount of Olives after the meal, they sang a hymn.

Today’s Psalm, Psalm 116, comes from the Egyptian Hallel, otherwise known as the praise songs centering on Israel’s deliverance from Egypt. Psalms 113 through 118 compose this collection, with Ps. 114 as the centerpiece as a report of the events of the Exodus. Today’s Psalm in particular, Ps. 116, recounts an individual’s deliverance from death. The delivering hand of God that brings about exodus from death on the macro, works to bring about deliverance on the micro.

And so, it is this collection of Exodus psalms that is traditionally sung at Passover. It might not have been the final hymn, but sometime during that night before the crucifixion, Jesus and his disciples probably prayed and sang Psalm 116.

And I wonder if these words haunted Jesus as he prayed in Gethsemane:

I will lift up the cup of salvation

“Father, is you are willing remove this cup…”

“Because, he has inclined his ear to me, therefore I will call on his name…”

“Why are you sleeping, get up and pray with me..”

“For you have delivered my soul from death,

my eyes from tears,

my feet from stumbling.”

“In anguish he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat became like great drops of blood falling on the ground…”

““I love the Lord BECAUSE he has heard me…”

“Judas, is it with a kiss that you are betraying me?”

““I love the Lord BECAUSE he has heard me…”

Does prayer work? How does prayer work? How should I pray so that it works?

We’ve all asked these questions.

Example:

Use of Self Help Books & the corporate mandated moments for meditation…instead of questioning the 80 work week that causes the need for breaks for meditation.

While facing execution in a Nazi concentration camp, theologian and pastor Dietrich Bonheoffer became concerned that the Christian understanding of God had been reduced to a mere psychological crutch. Bonhoeffer describes this understanding of God as the dues ex machina.

Literally translated, Deus Ex Machina means “god out of the machine,” which originally refers to a technique used by the ancient Greek playwrights to lower a person (representing a god or goddess) onto the stage of a play to interrupt the plotline.

Eventually this plot device became so overused by lazy and second rate playwrights, that unsolvable problems were solved by introducing the dues ex machina, and it became known as a clumsy plot device for interjecting an unexpected solution to the internal logic of the narrative.

Of course this plot device is common in today’s literature and tv, especially soap operas.

If you are familiar with the hit 80’s TV show, Dallas, then you probably know of one of the most famous modern day examples of dues ex machina. At the end of season 6, Patrick Duffy who played Bobby Ewing wanted to leave the show. So of course, the writers killed him off.

After his death, it became obvious from the huge drop in ratings that Bobby was one of the most popular characters on the show. After convincing Patrick Duffy to come back to the show, they ended season seven with one of the most surreal cliffhangers in TV history.

Just moments before the credits roll, we see Bobby Ewing’s widow wake up and approach the bathroom. She is shocked, as are the viewers, to find her husband standing in the shower, safe and sound.

The reason? The entire 7^th season had been nothing but his wife’s dream.

The church in the West and especially those of us who consider ourselves religious often, unwittingly approach God as dues ex machina. God is merely an idea dropped clumsily into our world in order to fulfill a task. Or to put it in more modern terms, God is a vending machine, if I push the right buttons and do the right things I’ll be given what I need.

Instead of expressing a lived reality, God has merely become a solution to our problems. We broach prayer only or mostly when we are in need.

Thus, the result is a neutered God who simply justifies our beliefs and practices without questioning the status quo. A status quo that allowed the german church during the time of Bonhoeffer to be complicit in the murder of millions of Jews,

A status quo that today allows Christian churches to hide behind security, wealth, and psychological projections of who we wish God to be.

The same status quo that allows:

“A florida boy to be chased down and shot for wearing a hoodie,”

“A San Deigo Mom to be beaten to death in her own home for wearing the traditional Muslim garb, the hijab.”

The status quo that allows CEO’s to make 315% more than the average employee.”

“the USA to incarcerate more of its population than any country, and incarcerate minorities at alarmingly disproportionate rates”

A status quo that creates

“a world with more slaves than ever before.”

“where the world’s wealthiest 16% consume over 80% of the world’s resources.”

A status quo that calls for peace by means of violence, security by means of fences, and wealth by means of injustice.

As Martin Luther King taught us, "Injustice anywhere, is a threat to justice everywhere."

What we must realize is that as long as some are dehumanized in this world, all are dehumanized. Or until we are all set free to live fully, we are all held in captivity.

Does prayer work? At this point I’m not ready to answer this question, but I do know that prayer and God can be used to simply uphold our dehumanize and dehumanizing lifestyles when God becomes an empty vessel we dump all of our fears, desires, and wishes.

When we stop at letting God work to bring about new reality, or God’s kingdom as Jesus called it,

and we settle into the status quo as our home,

then God becomes merely a legitimating force,

so prayer becomes nothing more than the human psychological tendency for wish fulfillment, to help us cope with our own dehumanized lives.

What does it mean that Jesus, moments before his betrayal, trial, and murder prayed this prayer of deliverance in Ps. 116?

“I love the Lord BECAUSE he has heard me…”

Jesus bends down in the garden, brow dripping with sweat, heart pounding with anxiety and prays, “Father, if you are willing, let this cup pass from me, yet, not my will but yours be done.”

The Psalmist empowered Jesus to trust that it is not prayer that works, but rather it is God who is at work.

God is at work in the world, and to be honest, I need Jesus to help me embrace God’s will:

the will that calls into question the dehumanizing status quo of violence, security, and unchecked wealth, that calls into question my need and desire to only have a little bit of God, to approach God as my vending machine.

Alive with the hope and imagination of the Psalter, Jesus is able to give up his own needs and wants and give into God’s will, God’s work. Alive with this beautifully rich prayer from Ps. 116,

Jesus can trust that God delivers both on the micro and macro level.

So, Jesus doesn’t allow God to merely be an empty vessel for us to dump our fears and wishes into like a vending machine for our happiness.

Rather, like Bonhoeffer, Martin Luther King, and Jesus we must trust this new reality even to the point of giving up what we think we most need.

And with the Psalter and Jesus we wait for the day when “we will walk in the presence of the Lord, in the land of the living,” where none are dehumanized, oppressed, or put to death unjustly.

Until then,

“I love the Lord, …”

I love the Lord.

Traders for or Traitors of the Kingdom, A Sermon

Here's a sermon I preached during FBC's noon day Holy Week services, reflecting on the "Parable of the Talents."

As we explore the theme this week, , “Give Me Jesus [Question Mark],” I’m reminded that we needed to be unsettled in our faith journey, in order to ask hard questions.

“Is it Jesus that I really want or do I prefer the Jesus who helps me feel self-fulfilled, the Jesus I use to make me feel good.”

And in order to unsettle us this afternoon, I want to offer up, what some may consider to be an uncommon reading of this common parable about talents. I want to explore a different interpretation that steers us directly into the heart of: “Give Me Jesus?”

Just in case you’re unfamiliar with the common interpretation of this parable, it goes something like this. Everyone has God-given talents or abilities, and what this parable teaches us is that God wants us to use our “spiritual gifts” or talent to grow his kingdom while we wait for Christ to return.

But the more I studied this parable, the more I became uncomfortable with this way of reading it. And so, I ask you to listen again as I offer up a modern reading that I hope will make the meaning plain.

He stumbled into the room, resting on the door frame in his usual drunken stupor. The Owner of the land, or Lord has he liked to be called, eyed his workers with hopeful greed and piercing hate. It had been several months since the Owner left, leaving these three day-laborers in charge of his estate.

As migrant workers with no papers, and thus no rights, these three men were no better than slaves to their Lord. They were hostages to this life now. If they’d known what kind of man he was, maybe they wouldn’t have jumped into his truck to work for him.

He is known among many of the migrant workers for his cruel spirit. On several occasions he has been known to deliver his workers to the border patrol if they anger him or try to leave.

Among the day laborers, who live in daily fear, the border patrol is commonly referred to as the dark place, or the “place of weeping and gnashing of teeth,” because it is there families are torn apart, forced from the country, forced from their wives and children.

Yet, the Owner was very wealthy and could offer work, which was hard to come by these days as families grew hungrier. So, these three men remained, unable to leave because of their own need for work, and their fear of the Owner.

Disappearing for months was a common affair for their Master. They had grown used to being left to manage the fields and estate while he lived a life they couldn’t imagine, one of luxury and extravagance. But this time was different. Before wandering off, the Owner, probably as a cruel trick, left each of the workers an inexplicably large amount of money.

To one worker, he gave five talents, to another two talents and to the third he gave one talent. One talent. These men knew, a single talent was enough to feed one of their family’s for 20 years. It represented lavish wealth, almost an entire life’s worth of work balled up into one, large piece of metal.

Familiar with their Lord’s avarice, they inferred his intent.

It was his common practice, without a blink of an eye, for the Owner to cheat people. Anyone. Everyone. His singular goal was to build his wealth, and of course that meant building on the backs of others. His practices were harsh, always reaping where he did not sow, making money off of his neighbor’s crops, and gathering where he did not scatter seed.

Uncertain what the reward would be, if there would even be a reward, these three men knew the Master would arrive expecting a plentiful return, reaping where he had not sown. It was a perfect plan, for the Master at least. Go on vacation, live it up, and come back to an even larger amount of money or talents.

With the fear of their Master’s cruelness haunting them in his absence, two of the workers fought diligently to make his money grow, allowing theirs hearts to grow cold long enough, hopefully just long enough, to make it past this malicious ordeal. They only wanted to work. Their families needed them to work. What choice did they have? And so, for week after tireless week, they scraped, stole, created false investments schemes, ponzi schemes, triangle schemes, whatever it would take to make the money grow.

But the third, who was given 20 years worth of wages instead of 40 years or 100 years like the other two, went off early one morning and found a safe place in a field and buried the talent. He was there to live and help his family live. But he knew, life could not be found in this injustice. There was simply no excuse to do his living off the backs of others, and so he buried the treacherous demand of the Master.

Holding himself up on the doorframe, the drunken Master waited perversely to hear the news of how the workers had carried out his longing for gain. When the first two told him how they’d made to make his money expand, he grew elated. No longer needing the door frame to hold himself up, he declared just how much Joy they had given him and they would both be given even more responsibility than they already had, of course, more responsibility, but not more pay.

Then he noticed the third worker, sitting in silence. He demanded to know how he made the Owner richer. The meek man rose to his feet and clearly said, “I know you reap where you do not sow. You take from the poor and live like you’re the only one that matters. You cheat, you steal, and you harvest where you don’t plant seeds. I was afraid of losing the talent due to your harshness, but I was more afraid of becoming like you because of your harshness. So, I didn’t steal or cheat, but merely hid the money.”

“Don’t you understand boy,” raged the Owner, “this is how the world works. Those that have will be given more, even in abundance. But the “have-nots,” like you, they’ll be stripped what little they do have, because they’re not even worthy of that tiny amount. You’re type don’t deserve the scraps from my table.”

With vile, the Master loaded the single, resolute worker in his truck and drove to the place of “weeping and gnashing of teeth,” sending him away from his loved ones and their only source of life and income.

Well, I’ll be the first to admit this reading of the parable isn’t very warm or fuzzy, but it is certainly more unsettling. And it needs to be unsettling, because the older, more common interpretation, for me at least, is too comfortable, too self-fulfilling. “God gives to those that help themselves.” But As Walter Wink and other Biblical scholars have noted, this way of thinking, this older interpretation, goes against the social conventions of Jesus’ time.

Jesus’ audience in the Gospel of Matthew was comprised mostly of those at the margins of society. They were familiar with the practices that profited the prosperous, as they were the victim’s of fraud, exorbitant rates with ambiguous contracts (much akin to predatory lending in our time), and sidebar taxes that allowed the collector to skim off the top.

Moreover, in first century Jewish culture, individual pursuit of wealth, especially at the cost of others members of society, was looked down upon as a violating communal and religious loyalty. Therefore, to even be able to own a single talent, much less several, was seen as anathema, a sinful cheat among Jesus’ audience. Thus, for the villain in this story to represent God, wouldn’t have made any sense to the first century listener.

Besides the common interpretation being nonsensical to its audience, another reason I think we should read this parable in this new way is that it fits with the larger picture of Jesus’ agenda. Unlike some theologians who would have us believe that God sent Jesus to earth for the sole purpose of being a divine punching bag, or the only reason Jesus was sent to earth was to die, we must remember that Jesus had an agenda, in other words, Jesus had a mission.

Sewn throughout the Garment of Matthew’s Gospel is Jesus’ mission. And this thread of mission is that Jesus is bringing about a movement of God’s justice and love here among us now through costly follower-ship.

Jesus came proclaiming the good news, “the Kingdom of God is near, repent and come join the movement.”

And the readers of Matthew knew that Jesus’ kingdom proclamation was being united with a very powerful, hebrew concept: tsedawkaw translated to greek, dikaiosune.

Dikaios and dikaiosune are the Jewish and Christian answer to the perennial human question, “what does it mean to live a full, and good, and righteous life before one dies? What does it mean to live life eternally beginning now? What does it mean to be truly human?”

If there was ever a word appropriate enough for something as mysterious and beautiful as God’s kingdom, Dikaiosune is that word.

In the greek, dikaios or dikaiosune is a word so pregnant with meaning that if it were to inhabit the heart, it would birth God’s kingdom. You see, dikaios is one of those words that’s hard to render into English because it’s so full of meaning.

Often interpreted in the New Testament as “Righteousness”, Dikaiosune means three things all at once, never mutually exclusive: justification, righteousness, and justice. In Jesus’ dikaiosune movement, we find that God is restoring our relationship with him (justification), restoring our inner selves as God’s image bearers (righteousness), and the restoring human relationships/community through equity (justice).

So we see in Jesus, that God is setting and restoring our humanity in righteousness in order that humanity can be restored to itself through justice.

In the Septuagint, the Greek Old Testament, we read in Genesis that “Abraham believed the LORD; and the LORD reckoned it to him as dikiaosune.”

In Isaiah we find that “all our dikiaosune is like filthy rags.

And in Amos, the verse forever heard in my head through the voice of Martin Luther King Jr, “But let our justice roll down as water, and dikaisune as an ever flowing stream.”

Thus, Jesus’ mission was to establish God’s dikaiosune among us now. And he expected this endeavor to be costly.

In the beatitudes Jesus declared, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for dikaiosune for the will be filled.”

“Blessed are those who are persecuted for dikaiosune’s sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

The kingdom belongs to those who like the third servant in the parable object to unjust practices that destroy justice even to the point of being persecuted or cast from society. And certainly the persecution Jesus is talking about here isn’t when we don’t get along with go workers or when we suffer some illness, but persecution is being marginalized and force to live uncomfortably because of our faith in this Jesus way of restoration.

But of course we shouldn’t seek out suffering for suffering’s sake, but rather we should seek out life and justice for God’s sake.

In the parable directly following this one in Matt 25, we learn that God hides himself among the poor and the forgotten, those who will never make history books. Thus we must stand for dikaiosune’s sake and resist evil practices that misuse and abuse God’s very self found in the thirsty and oppressed.

This week we need to be unsettled, because the injustices born on the backs of the poor are unsettling. And what is even more unsettling is these injustices are born on the back of God’s very self.

Jesus was and is the embodiment of God’s kingdom come. To meet Jesus, means to bump into God’s Kingdom. Thus, we have to remember that the cross wasn’t God’s sadistic torturing of his Son, but it was the ultimate cost of Jesus’ mission. Jesus was crucified for bringing a new way, God’s way of life on earth, because when God’s kingdom of dikaiosune confronts the evils and injustices of our world, the world convulses and pushes it out to the margins, even to death.

But as Jesus said, “Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.”

So, Dikaiosune is the unsettling vision that all might not be well with the way the world works, the way we live, the lives we exploit, the poor we neglect, the voiceless we hush, the enemies we murder, and the pain we hide our faces from.

Dikaiosune is the unsettling vision that all are created equal and deserve a chance to live while we go on living lavishly and not just beyond our own means, but the very means of the our earth.

Dikaisune is the unsettling vision that we may stand alone, and be cast aside, we may be put to death, but at the core of following Jesus is a vision for restoring the world until dikaiosune flows down as an ever flowing stream.

The answer to the perennial question for all of humanity, “what must I do to be good and live the fullest possible life now,” is found in Jesus’ Kingdom of dikaiosune and a life devoted to bringing it about no matter the cost.

So may today be about coming to Jesus in a new way, and giving up our pretenses, declaring our desire for him not because of what he can give us, whether earthly or heavenly rewards; but rather may we learn to desire Jesus in our lives for our own restoration as well as the restoration of the world. May we desire Jesus, because this dikaiosune vision is the hope of the world, and there is nothing, not even death that can conquer this Kingdom.

May we be like the third servant, knowing this is a kingdom worth being put to shame for, worth being marginalized for, and worth being persecuted for, knowing that in the end it is not death that prevails, but life everlasting.

Benediction:

Here these words from Jesus,

Matt. 6:25 “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? 26 Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?

Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, 29 yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. 30 But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith? 31 Therefore do not worry, saying, ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we wear?

But strive first for the kingdom of God and his dikaiosune, and all these things will be given to you as well.

Consuming Jesus: A Sermon on Being Church

Well, here is my first consecutive sermon, or first sermon to have preached directly after preaching another. This last Sunday the student ministry at First led us in worship and we ended in Communion. You can listen to the sermon from last week or yesterday on our website or download fbcaustin's podcast.

Get Lost: A Sermon on Finding the Way

Well, here's the sermon I preached last Sunday. I think it's also available in iTunes as a podcast under First Baptist Austin. Give it a listen, let me know what you think.

Sermon: Hope and Advent

Hope:
Text:Revelation 21:22-22:5

If you had asked me when I first became a Christian, moving from atheism to Christianity, what THE Christian hope was…I’d probably have said something along the lines of “heaven.” Jesus died on the cross for me, so that when I die I’ll go to heaven. As Charlotte my wife likes to recount, when we first started dating, I was often quoted as saying such things as “I think only the right Baptists are going to heaven” and other things like “this world is not my home.”

See, I had met the grace of God in the muck of a legalistic tradition, a tradition that taught me all the right words and gave me all the right answers.

So at odds with my introduction to faith, a few summers back I went on a pilgrimage to India…the land of openness and difference. Landing first in the Western capitalist landscape of Hong Kong, I decided everything was up for grabs. The question I needed answered for myself was…

so what am I hoping for, what do I place my hope in? Do I believe in Jesus so I can go to heaven? So I can be a nice or good person? Do I believe in Jesus because I was born in the USA had no other choice?

Certainly my earlier faith had outlined it simply enough: Believe in Jesus, get to heaven. My hope was not of this world. But this was no longer enough.

The final book in our sacred Scriptures, the Book of Revelation may be the most popular book in all of the Bible…at least, the most popular to misinterpret and misread. Certainly much of my own shortsighted hope, my fire insurance Jesus, came from a different emphases found in Revelation.

Revelation I was taught, gives us a picture of what the last days, the end times will be like. Ultimately the picture I was given was one of separation: people like me and with my beliefs on the inside, those without my beliefs on the outside.

Here is where hope is often confused. We oftentimes confuse hope, with anticipation. We’ve all anticipated something: anticipation means an expectation within the realm of possibilities, anticipating what we can already see and know, what we can enact and bring about. Anticipation- centers on our human activity, and because of that anticipation often reflects human belief.

“God created man in his image and then man returned the favor.” Reflected Voltaire.

Anticipation is the creation of God in our own image, created by our own expectations and wishes. Even in my early stages of faith, my anticipation of the afterlife was a wish to be free from the cares of this world and to be separated from all those I disliked: all the sinners, drinkers, smokers, etc.

But the Christian hope weaved throughout the narrative of Genesis to Revelation, is a radically different hope: the hope of resurrection.

Unlike expecting something within the realm of possibilities, within what I can do as a human…hope is something new, hope creates new possibilities within my realm because it relies on God’s coming to us.

Many have written off the historical possibility of Christ’s Resurrection or the idea that God came down as a baby as ill-logical…not fitting within the realm of rational possibilities.

But this misses the point of resurrection and incarnation: this is God’s action toward us, this is a new possibility in the realm of possibilities. And so we see in this final picture of Revelation, a restored creation, everything resurrected and made new. The hope laying not in some ethereal heaven, but the hope laying in God’s newly created world, where those whom Christ has died for gather to worship.


To be honest, I still struggle with this idea of hope at times. I remember standing in the halls of an amazing Hindu temple, irreverently gawking at statue after statue of Krishna, Ganesh, Ram, and many more in the form of their avatars: elephants, turtles, boars, and many more.

And while as an outsider I cannot pretend to value or understand the truth of Hinduism or any other culture or religion, I encountered God in the streets of India more than it’s majestic temples. I experienced God more in the lives of men and women who devoted their lives to serving the HIV positive, considered dalits and untouchables in that culture, and in the lives of the sisters at Mother Teresa’s home of the dying.

And the place I learned to see God among the untouchables, the experience that gave me eyes to see and ears to hear God among the cast out and nameless, was in the unique person of Jesus Christ. And while I consider the conversation of world religions, universalism, pluralism, truth, and God in many forms valuable, and there’s certainly not sufficient time to cover that subject tonight, I walked away from the land of difference and otherness with a fresh grasp on Resurrection: hope: the person of Jesus Christ.

So what I learned from the sisters who served the poor in the streets of Calcutta, what I’ve learned from people in our church that adopt and work with the homeless in our own city is that Christ died, as NT Wright likes to say:

To give - Hope for life before death, not life after death.
And this for me is what changes. What is Christian hope, what does it mean to put your hope in Christ.

It is significant that the author of revelation ties the new creation to the city of Jerusalem, and certainly this a metaphorical city pertaining not to the actual city, but rather it could be any city where God resides.

Aristotle once wrote that “people come together in the city to live; they remain there in order to live the good life.”

Hope is a learned activity, and the question is, who is teaching us? We find throughout the world cities that capture the imagination in their ability to transcend time and space, their ability to be more than national, but international. Cities like Hong Kong, London, New York, and possibly even Austin.

It’s now the cities that are informing rural youth how to live and dress, college students what to dream for and where to live. Billboards, flashing lights, and larger than life ads distract us into what to hope for…the good life.

Thus, we are taught the good life, lies in the realm of human possibilities, that we can act and achieve happiness if we live right, get the best education, reside in the best part of town, drive the newest car, own the newest device, wear the hippest clothes…hope becomes the anticipation of the good life.


The Christian season of Advent is a season pregnant with hope, as sacred and sacred as the virgin Mary. The Incarnation, God with us points us to the reality that God is active and working in the world and the Resurrection is teaching hope for the good life.

What will give the church, Christians the ability to resist the manipulation by the international city, in hopes of God’s resurrected city? The same thing that gave Mother Teresa and the many nameless sisters serving the nameless the ability to live in poverty, the same thing that gave Martin Luther King strength and endurance as he nonviolently worked toward racial reconciliation, and the same thing that gives people all throughout the world the ability to suffer for another’s sake: the hope of the good life.

To be able to dream and end when all will gather and worship God, when every person, no matter of color or creed will have enough to eat, have choices beyond menial tasks, and been given a place at the table of dignity- the good life of resurrection, the good life found in the counter-cultural Resurrection and Incarnation of God.

So while our cities of glitz and glamor, celebrity and wealth may capture our eyes…it’s the hope of new life for all, worshiping the true God that gives us the ability to here and now embrace an alternative future. For what we do now, whether painting, preaching, singing, sewing, praying, teaching, building hospitals, digging wells, caring for the earth, campaigning for justice, writing poems, caring for the needy, loving your neighbor as yourself- will last into God’s future.

So the invitation this Advent is to reflect resurrection, to work alongside God who is here and now in the midst of our busy lives, and bring the future hope into the present.

My Second Sunday AM to Preach

Well, I recently had the opportunity to preach my 2nd Sunday morning worship service at First Baptist. While I definitely felt more comfortable in the pulpit, I wasn't overly excited about the sermon itself. If you want, here's a link to listen to it here and click on 2009-11-29 or click here for the Itunes link.

Here's the sermon:

I’m very fortunate in that my sister and I have almost always had a good relationship. Separated by 3 years in age, and probably 6 years in maturity levels we hardly ever fought, only because I knew who would win…and I hated to lose. The only fight I may have ever won was well, do you remember the hot-wheels airplanes? Unlike the hot-wheels cars, these little planes were akin to weapons, in that their wings were very pointy. And in the intensity of an argument, I chunked one at her face. She still wears the scars of that battle.

Besides those few fights, we mostly played, colored, and laughed together. Certainly one of our favorite times of the year was Christmas. Not having a grown up in the church, this time of the year held a certain mysticism, it was a magical time. Every December, we’d load up as a family in my dad’s old, Ford pickup and drive down to the Rotary Club Tree Lot and spend about hour finding the right tree. Then we’d toss it in the back of the yellow truck, drive home, and with Alvin and the Chipmunks playing on 13” vinyl, we’d adorn the house and tree in glitter and gold…all in anticipation of Christmas morning.

Slowly over the next few weeks, we’d watch as the Christmas tree’s skirt filled with gifts of all shapes and sizes, waiting for mom and dad to leave the room so we could shake and hold the wrapped gifts guessing and hoping for what lay inside.

But one year, I noticed that the house adorned and lit, filled with a decorated tree …was missing on element: gifts. Unlike all my previous experience with Christmas, no presents magically appeared under the tree, the few gifts were to be found were for aunts and uncles, but where were my family’s gifts? more importantly, where were my gifts?

Unbeknownst to me, my parents decided to hide them a few weeks longer seeing that my sister and I..mostly me…would shake and really try to figure out all the presents. By the time the last week before Christmas came, I was getting nervous. How would I celebrate Christmas morning with nothing under the tree for me?

Distinctly I remember one night my father had returned from work and all of us were sitting in the living room, I began to inquire about the lack of what obviously we all had known. And so I just asked, innocently and nicely, “But where are my gifts?”

You have to understand, my dad has always been a bit of a prankster, so his quip back to us was, “well, this year things are different. Since you’re sister got braces just a few months ago, we weren’t able to get you anything. Maybe next year.” I forgot to mention, but sister had just gotten braces.

I didn’t know what to think…“Maybe next year…nothing” I remember being dumbfounded, certainly my dad was mistaken…could we get a refund on all that metal in my sisters mouth…my sister…it’s her fault. So I turned to my sister, who to this day says that was the meanest look she has ever received from anyone, even more than the time she had a toy airplane thrown at her face and scowled.

Once my dad realized how well I was taking to this joke, he sprung up and left the room into the garage. I was sure we had checked all the hiding places in the house, but I guess we hadn’t discovered the garage. And within seconds, there standing in the living room was my dad with a big box of presents with my sister’s and my name on them.

Well, we are once again into this time of year we call Christmas. Unlike my childhood anxiety and angst over what I would or wouldn’t get under the tree, my anticipation of this Holiday has greatly changed in the last 5 years or so.

This morning is the first morning in something I never knew existed growing up: the Christian season of Advent: the intentional weeks leading up to and preparing us for the most radical interruption in human life and history: the Incarnation: God with us.

The Gospel reading from Luke paints for us a picture. He begins with a name, Herod, King of Judea, or Herod, King of the Jews. It’s easy to overlook this name and go straight into the story, but Luke makes sure Herod’s name stands at the top of story, as his name often stood at the top of Jewish life.

Herod’s job, procured at the hands of Roman authority was first and foremost to keep the peace for Rome. Thus, for 34 years he ruled Israel, manipulating everyone from Rome, to the many Jewish insurrectionists.

Everyone in Israel knew the name, and many shuttered with detest for his unscrupulous ways, murdering his favorite wife, his uncle, mother-in-law, and at least 3 of his sons as well as countless slaves.

Yet many in the area couldn’t help but be in awe.

For Herod’s way of creating and sustaining peace occurred through captivating the imagination with large building projects, structures strewn throughout major cities-amphitheaters, hippodromes, palaces, shrines, fortifications, aqueducts, forums, roads, new and restored cities, foundations, and of course his pinnacle of success…the rebuilt Jerusalem temple. It was as if Herod was trying to out-Rome, Rome. At every turn in Israel, one found reminders of the “King of the Jews.”

What captures our imaginations as a collective group of people, as Americans, as Christians, as mothers, fathers, daughters, and sons? As the church? Certainly as a church in downtown it’s not hard to see the pinnacles of architecture meant to grab at our attention and inform us who’s in charge or who really matters. We know what matters according to our culture: it’s easy to label those things: money, power, sex, influence, and fame.

But what is your imagination held captive to, what does your life reflect? This may be as simple as looking into your checkbooks…looking at your computer’s history or bookmarks…reflecting upon time spent or not spent with loved ones, hurting ones, and forgotten ones.

What is holding your imagination captive as to prevent you from asking those around you hard questions, or keeping your children or spouse accountable? What’s keeping you from having deep and meaningful relationships? Where do you spend your life?

Ivan Illich was once asked, how do you change the world? Revolution or gradual reform?

After thinking for a few seconds, he replied neither, you must change the world by telling a alternative story.

At face value this story of Zachariah and Elizabeth’s visitation and pregnancy seems simple enough, but Luke is a master storyteller, interweaving the thick narrative of God’s history found in the Jewish Scriptures.

Luke writing to a predominantly gentile, non-Jewish audience, and probably a gentile himself sets out to write a history of Jesus’ birth…therefore he makes the story very Jewish. I’m not sure if he expected his audience to know the history and stories from the Law, the Prophets, and Apocalyptic literature, but we see in this story several flashbacks to these things. Did you catch them all?

There’s the obvious illusion to the elderly barren couple: Abraham and Sarah. The couple that God gave the promise to bless the entire world through. The couple with whom God’s mission of love and movement toward humanity found its inception.

Then there’s a hint in Luke’s writing to another couple: Elkanah and Hannah- parents of Samuel, the last judge, the pre-cursor to Saul, the King. Samuel, debatably the best ruler and judge of the OT.

And finally, with the appearance of the angel Gabriel, Luke’s technique becomes more dominant. He not only ties the story he is writing to the Law and Prophets represented by Abraham and Samuel, he’s ties it to the last part of the Jewish Scriptures: the writings. The book of Daniel mentions Gabriel, the angel of the end times.

So as you can see, Luke is very purposefully writing in such a way to say that God is once again acting in continuation this story, but at the same time this is new and unique.

For every good Jew knew what the end times in biblical history meant, and it’s not the oft-portrayed destruction of apocalyptic movies like 2012 or the Day after Tomorrow. Rather, the eschatological end time meant that God would act in a new way, and this new age would be an age of mission, where every nation would gather in praise to God’s kingdom. Where the promise conceived in Abraham would be born into the world.

Thus for Luke, this age of mission began long ago with God’s promise to Abraham, but would be enacted in a promise to this elderly, barren couple: righteous before God, but without child…a curse in that culture.

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And so I hope the foolishness of the story is obvious: on one hand there is this very powerful and fertile man who holds everyone in Israel captive with pomp: Herod who has built the magnificent temple, the place where God dwells. And instead of talking to Herod, God’s messenger comes down and gives a promise to Zachariah and Elizabeth, nobody’s in the grand scheme of things: righteous and holy, but impotent and barren.

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From my understanding, the church is this couple. We stand before God’s promise, chosen to be the parents of the one who prepares the way for God Incarnate. Not the hope itself, but to be witnesses to the Hope of the world.

But like Zachariah and Elizabeth, we must learn to listen in silence and wait until our hope is born.

This Advent, as we move toward Christ’s coming to us to redeem and make the entire creation new; let us wait and listen. In these two practices we will find that God equips us to Incarnate Hope in the midst of alternative stories, even in the Temple itself.

As Zachariah’s ourselves, it’s important to see that God placed a silence over him, so he wasn’t able to speak until he worshipped God at the birth of his Son, John.

The study of linguistics, how we communicate, reveals that we communicate more in silence than we do in words. Confucious says language is like a wheel: spokes centralize it, but the spaces make the wheel.

Anyone who has ever learned to speak a foreign language knows that it takes much more delicate understanding and listening to learn the silence of a language than its words.

First, we must become silenced in order to open ourselves to God’s conception of hope. We must be deep listener’s of God’s movement in us and around us. It’s easy to allow ourselves to get caught up in the Herodian structures and influences surrounding us, so we laugh at God’s way of working: coming down in human flesh, among the weak and forgotten, using the barren and impotent.

Of course, There is a silence that threatens true listening: this is a silence of apathy. The silence of a wife who tunes out her husband, the silence of a father who would prefer not intervene and correct his child, the silence of a friend who would rather let you hurt then hear the truth. This is the silence of someone who comes to church week in and week out, never committing to anything, as if perfection or conversion has been reached. This is the silence that allows for anger in the home to dwell, giving importance to the trivial matters of this world. This is the silence that moves people toward isolation and loneliness.

True silence, silence that opens one person to another for listening is never easy. It’s even harder when a greater difference in relationship exists: such as between a busy working father and a homeless mother, or a confused parent and hurting child. –but the greater the distance, the greater the sign of love and opportunity for God to work… for it’s much more difficult to listen someone’s deep passions than to talk about football or TV, or whatever we are comfortable talking about.

This silent listening must not only be practiced among those whom we are different from and called to love; but must also occur in prayer for no greater difference occurs than in the relationship between a person and God.

Only in silence is Zachariah prepared to make the faithful proclamation, and in silence we will learn to listen to and prepare ourselves to Incarnate hope.

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After the silence of conception, allowing ourselves to become aware of others’ needs and God’s action; comes the silence of nurture. This is silently waiting for the right moment for hope to be born into the word; not forcing ourselves into situations, but working with God.

But this silence of acting in the right moment is threatened by our busy lives.

It’s ironic that there may not be a harder time in the year to make room for others and act patiently then the Christmas time. We run about shopping, cooking, decorating, working longer hours to pay for things unneeded, filling our hours with busyness.

We also jump past this prudence of acting with God, by short-circuiting his ways for the sake of our own efficiency, and speed.

G.k. Chesterton, one of the most influential writers of the 20^th century wrote this about our his time, which is a greater reflection upon our own:

“the chief mark of our time is a profound laziness and fatigue; and the fact is that the real laziness is the cause of the apparent bustle. Take one quite external case; the streets are noisy with taxicabs and motorcars; but this is not due to human activity but to human repose…Our world would be more silent if it were more strenuous.”

All those years ago, God acted in one of the most strenuous of human activities to bring hope ..real hope ..the very definition of hope: new life…into the world not by acting according to the measures and expectations laid out by Rome or Herod; but rather by giving new life to an old, barren couple.

The church in the United States, Texas, and Austin is in the midst of change, we are finding ourselves less and less relevant or important to the pomp and power of our culture.

Much like this couple, the church, we at FBC have been given a promise and mission: to give our lives to the service of God acting in the world.

God is acting in the streets of Austin…are you listening?

God is alive in the conversations with your children…are you listening?

God is working on the hearts of your neighbors, coworkers, and family…are you listening?

God is calling you to listen…are you listening?

This Advent, make room for God in the world by setting aside time and energy to be silent and listen, nurturing the hard labor of hope, and getting out of the way, so God can get in the way.

Pastoral Blessing:

May God bless you with discomfort at easy answers, half truths, and superficial relationships,

so that you may live deep within your heart.

May God bless you with anger at injustice, oppression and exploitation of people,

so that you may work for justice, freedom and peace.

May God bless you with tears to shed for those who suffer from pain, rejection, starvation and war,

so that you may reach out your hand to comfort them and to turn their pain into joy.

And may God bless you with enough foolishness to believe that you can make a difference in this world,

so that you can do what others claim cannot be done.

Listen to my Sermon

I preached my first Sunday morning at First Baptist Church this last Sunday. It was a wonderful experience.

You can listen to my sermon, "Sowing Seeds of Doubt" here. Check it out!

Sowing Seeds of Doubt, A sermon on Mark 4:26-32

Once long ago, a carpenter was born into a tribe of farmers, merchants, and shepherds. As the carpenter grew into a boy then a man, people in his area began to get suspicious of him. See, these people had long ago settled into the land and they survived by studying, listening to, and living off the soil, trees, and grass.

But this young carpenter came with a new vision for life, a vision of casting out and sailing the deep blue sea.

Everywhere this carpenter went crowds gathered around him. He often spoke in healing ways and told strange stories about life on the water. Crowds would disperse after hearing the carpenter speak with newfound hope and sense of life because of his beautiful visions and stories about the sea.

The carpenter continued his life going from village to village proclaiming life on the salty sea. He even began to draw up blueprints and make notes about his vision for sailing, a vision for a completely new way of life.


Along with a few faithful followers this carpenter began to build a ship on the sands of the sea. But like Moses who didn’t get to cross into the promised land, the carpenter died before ever setting sail. So his followers continued the good work and finished the boat and eventually cast out to sea.

Time passes and soon people are born on the ship who never knew the carpenter. It seems that life on the sea is as beautiful and wondrous as the carpenter ever spoke of, yet everyone still desires the land. Running deep within their veins is the soil of their ancestry, while the salt of the sea continues to burn their lungs.

Time passes and new generations come along and fortify the ship for fear of the sea. All windows are boarded up and no one is allowed on deck. The dream and vision of life on the sea is soon replaced with life in the ship. Most everyone’s effort was put forth in maintaining the vessel. Of course, once every week everyone on board would gather to read and talk about the carpenter and his notes, some even sang songs in praise of the carpenter.

Others dedicated themselves to the study of the carpenter and tried to figure out exactly what he really said, and what earlier generations might have added to his notes. Others found this study frivolous and decided to make the ship hospitable by using all their energy to adorn the vessel.

Times passes and people continue to desire the land while still revisiting the need to be on the sea at least according to the readings from the carpenter’s work. The ship is maintained and people bicker and argue about what the carpenter really meant and said. Vision for life on the sea is all but lost.

Then one day some children were playing in the hull of the ship and a mother noticed the wood beginning to crack. By this time the ship had seen hundreds and hundreds of years of service. Everyone’s minds were filled with images of the children being violently swept out to sea. Fear filled the air of the hull with the anticipation that drowning water would soon follow.

And before anyone could get to the children one child broke through the wood. But something surprising happened. Instead of a great splash of water bursting into the ship, a great cloud of dust puffed through the hole.

To their bewilderment, the sea had long ago dried up and the ship laid not in the midst of water, but rather in the midst of land and the civilization they had originally deserted all those years ago. And it wasn’t until they began to go forth from the vessel that the teachings of the carpenter began to make sense.

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This story of course, is my own parable, if you will. As we saw from the reading this morning, this was Jesus preferred way of teaching, in stories or parables. Not that I pretend to have special insider knowledge or even that a parable simply has one single, once for all time meaning, but with the gap between Jesus’s time and now, I wonder if we lose some of what Jesus meant with these simple, yet complex stories.

See,

Many of the commentaries and a few sermons I read on this text always pointed to one theme: faith. They say, Jesus was teaching about the power of a little, mustard seed-like faith or the power of God's word to plant itself mysteriously in faith. But I wonder if these parables are less about the need for faith, and more about the need for doubt.

Is Jesus sowing seeds of doubt?

Under roman occupation and a history of oppression, the Jews of the 1st century long awaited the appearance of the Messiah. This day was the eschatological day of the Lord, the day when God would come with a sword and bring vengeance to Israel’s enemies and restore the Davidic kingdom.

But we know when Jesus came on the scene; he compelled people to believe that God’s Kingdom of peace & reconciliation was right in front of them.

And this is what Jesus was focusing in on when he says: “The Kingdom of God is like”. With those words, he began to rock the religious system of every 1st century listener. Jesus spoke these words not only so people would believe toward the Kingdom, BUT so they would believe away from a religious system, doubting the very thing they measured life by.

And
This was the exact problem of Jesus: he wasn’t quite the Messiah people were expecting. Even Peter, the unshakable rock, the guy who walked on water questioned Jesus’ way of bringing in the kingdom. Not only was it not violent, but it reversed violence and called those who would follow Jesus to die with him.

Jesus still seems to defy the categories we place on him.

So,
What we find in these parables of Jesus is a call to put the primary things first and secondary things second. Or, by doubting what we place as primary, we can become people of peace, reconciliation, and love.
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Did you know Google has the power to transform how we think and read?

At least this is what social science researcher Katie McGowan writes in her article, “Does Google (re)Make Us?

McGowan writes that “we are not only what we read…we are how we read it.”

She likens this shift in thinking to the effects of the clock on humans. Before the clock was invented people measured the day, went to sleep and woke up according to the sun. But with the invention of the clock we began to change our internal habits of eating and sleeping.

So, in our search for knowledge Google and the internet has given us something no civilization on earth has experienced before: instant knowledge at our finger tips. McGowan makes this poignant observation: as humans use technology, technology begins to use us.

Thus, Deep textual readings and analysis are replaced by sound bytes; the discipline for concentrating is replaced by short attention spans.

According to this researcher the primary search for knowledge and study, is actually replaced by the secondary methods: research using Google, reducing the human ability to reflect, think, and analyze what is being read.
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Jesus spoke in parables because his listeners were entrenched, entrenched in their system of thought that made Jesus’ call to the Kingdom sound silly, for they all knew the Kingdom and it’s Messiah would come with force and power.

The very thing that made Jesus’ crowd “holy” kept them from Jesus & a life of peace & reconciliation.

So, what he is saying in these two parables is that despite appearances, despite our tendency to measure and control; it is not the KoG which is here and coming that should be doubted, but our religious systems that give us the appearance of goodness and righteousness.

Yet, because it’s easier to doubt the power of God’s mysterious rule than our religious life, we often approach Jesus like those on boat from my earlier story.


First, we make the voyage not about actually sailing and living according to what the carpenter taught, but about studying sailing and the carpenter’s teaching.

These Christians are like soldiers who sit in a foxhole and when the captain commands them to charge, they all remain seated. One soldier remarks on the tenor of the captains voice, another parses the words of the captain, while another argues if it was even the captain’s voice at all…all the while the front closes in on them.

It’s as if we think that thinking is doing something. As if the call of Jesus is to think about Jesus.

And
Before we know it, we think we can consume our way into following Christ.
“If I read one more book, go to one more conference, join a Bible study, then I’m more of a Christian. If I can recite to you Marcus Borg or NT Wright, Brian McLaren or whatever new curriculum, then I’m following Jesus.”
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Of course, there are others that find this way of being a Christian as frivolous.
These Christians are those of us, who spend all our energy on the life in the ship.

Much like the power of Google to shape how we think and read, making church or life in the ship primary can shape you into thinking you are a person of peace and reconciliation. But sometimes the truth is, some of the most bitter, power hungry, and angry people I’ve ever met have been people in the church.

Missiologist and church planter Alan Hirsch is right when he says:
It is theologically correct to say that the church IS NOT the kingdom. The church serves as a sign, a symbol, a foretaste of the Kingdom of God. The kingdom can express itself in and through the church in powerful ways, but the Kingdom extends to God’s rule everywhere.

Or as one of my favorite theologians says: “It is not that the church has a mission, rather it is God’s mission that has a church.”


Now, I’m not saying these things aren’t important. Of course studying and reflecting upon faith, Scripture, and history are important. Of course, church work and programs are necessary. But neither are primary.

In allowing Jesus to sow seeds of doubt, we may find that we've allowed secondary things to become primary!

We make going to church, more important than being church. We make being entertained more important than being formed. We make committees more important than forgiveness. We make amassing knowledge more important than the doing of that knowledge. We board up our windows and make our life central; over against the life of God, who as Bono says “is playing house among the poor, the forgotten, and marginalized.”

These stories of insignificant seeds point back to one thing: In Jesus’ words and work, the Kingdom had made its entrance.

Tony Campolo says, "I wish [Jesus] would ask, 'Virgin Birth: strongly agree, agree, disagree, strongly disagree? Check one.' But those are not the questions. [The questions are] 'I was hungry, did you feed me? I was a stranger, did you make room for me?"

Faced with the decision to continue the beautiful and wondrous life on the sea, the people on the ship gave up in the face of the discomforts and growth pains of transformation. All the while life around them shifted and changed.
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It was about my sophomore year of college when I all but lost my faith. As a religion major at a small Christian University: Mary Hardin-Baylor, I entered into a second and continual transformation.

My first big transformation came when I became a Christian, swinging far from being an atheist at the age of 17 to hard, fundamentalist faith as a senior in high school. For the first two years of my new life as a Christian, Christ radically transformed me with the power of forgiveness, but as this experience past away I soon replaced that vision of love and forgiveness with religious measurements for my faith as well as others.

Doing church, being a “holy” person, and closing myself off from the world became central. But in my struggle to reconnect with God, I found God planting seeds of doubt.

See, in the fall of my second year, I took two classes with Dr. Carol Holcomb, a brilliant woman theologian, a feminist and a deacon (of course in my early faith, all these things were contradictory to me, at least in the same sentence). Through her teaching and this new relationship, I internally began to question everything I had grown to know, everything that kept my faith safe.

So, my faith began to shrivel and die. I had become a judgmental, closed off person; fooled into thinking that I was righteous b/c I studied the Bible, worked at a church, and supposedly knew who was holy and who wasn’t.

It wasn’t until I learned through some mentors and friends that following Christ into the margins, actually doing forgiveness, and living love instead of just talking about them, that I again met God.

It was then I learned that meeting God and following Christ, finding love and peace were made real by giving love and peace, by following God found in the margins and often outside the walls of church.

As the world, our culture shifts around us, we, the church, are called to be a sign, a foretaste of God’s hope by going out into the world, to Austin, your neighborhood, or maybe even in this church and really doing the hard work of peace, love, and reconciliation….by making following Christ primary and real, thus realizing what has been true all along, in Christ you are a new Creation.


[God, you have loved us and been patient with your people. Holy Spirit, awaken us to your activity in us, around us, and through us. May we know you more by following you in the difficult and narrow path of reconciliation. We ask God, in your goodness that you’d give us the faith to doubt what we place over our lives and over you, relinquishing control and efficiency for the messiness of forgiveness and love. Truly in you we are already a New Creation, so we ask for faithfulness in making your kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven. Amen.]




Despite all appearances, trust that the Kingdom of reconciliation and peace is here among you. Leave this place as a servants to God’s causes, finding patience for love in the face of hate; justice in the face of oppression; and new life in the face of brokenness. May you, in the imitation of Christ, incarnate hope to the hopeless, light to the darkness, and water to the thirsty. Go now embodying a new way of life, go now sharing the gift of reconciliation, go now in peace.