Jesus as King

Here is my message from Sunday. The text was Matthew 25:31-46:

Today is Christ the King Sunday, the day we celebrate and recognize that Jesus is the Christ, the messiah and King, or that he is the King of king and Lord of Lords, a phrase most of us are familiar with from the Hallelujah chorus from Handel’s Messiah, but actually is found in the 1st letter to Timothy and also in the book of Revelation. And so this title of King is an early title given to Christ, and not just by the church, but even by others, even if ironically, remembering that the charge that appears over the cross, the reason why the Romans sought to crucify him, was that he was said to be King of the Jews. And of course in Matthew’s gospel this claim about Jesus being a king goes all the way back to the nativity story when the wise men come seeking the one who was born King of the Jews, which is the reason that Herod sought to have him killed. And so this was a title not only that was applied to Jesus, but which had significant ramifications in proclaiming it, and still should today. Because although there are lots of people who say that we should never talk politics in church, the simple truth is that is impossible, because to proclaim Jesus as King, Jesus as Lord, is a political statement. It was a political statement in the first century, and it is a political statement today.

Because to proclaim Christ as King means is to claim where our allegiance belongs, and also where our allegiance doesn’t belong, to the things of the world. As I said, the reason I decided to do this series talking about the offices of Christ after the election was to help us remember that neither political party holds a monopoly on truth, nor is any politician going to save us. We have a savior and he is not running for election. Christ is our hope, our salvation and our King, and that is a political statement, even if we don’t comprehend that as much today. But what we have to understand is that most of the titles that got applied to Jesus, also happened to be titles that were applied to Caesar Augustus, including that of Lord, Son of God, bringer of peace, savior and even the beginning of good news, to name just a few. Even more importantly, even though we talk about the Roman Empire, that’s not how they referred to themselves. Instead it was called the Kingdom of Rome, which also makes the emperor a King, whereas Jesus was talking about and proclaiming the Kingdom of God, and of course a kingdom needs a king, whom was found in Christ. And so the question the early church posed to its followers, and still poses today, is who are you going to follow, Jesus or Caesar? Who is Lord, Jesus or Caesar? To whom do you pledge allegiance, Jesus of Caesar? That is not a rhetorical question, because it demands an answer.

Thanksgiving and Gifts

This morning, The Washington Post published an article about the best toys of the year according to Stephanie Oppenheim, a toy tester. Oppenheim said that while puzzles have been making a comeback in recent years, this year has solidified their place, along with games, because “Everyone is very hungry for something that is very low-tech and doesn’t involve a screen. I think, more than ever, it’s just a nice way to spend time together,” she said.

Of course as we move into another holiday in which we aren’t spending time together, perhaps this can serve as another reminder of the things that truly matter in our lives, and it’s not the things. I know that I am going to miss, and have missed, the gathering of the congregation for worship, which is more than just about the worship. It’s also about community and relationship.

In talking with my mom last week, she said how much she misses us and seeing the girls, whom she hasn’t seen since last Christmas. That’s a lot of missed time, especially with Elizabeth, let alone Abigail and Samantha. Talking on the phone or even over zoom or facetime, just isn’t the same, and honestly I think most of us, as Oppenheim said, want to do things that don’t involve a screen.

And so as you think about the coming holiday season, and gifts, let alone what we are thankful for, I encourage you to think of things that connect us. And so perhaps a gift this year might not be something someone can enjoy right away, but instead is an experience you can have together once we are back to being able to socialize. Or it’s a game or a puzzle that can be shared together. Or maybe even something as simple as being in touch more often than we have been.

We have a turkey in the church that is waiting for you to create a feather with the things you are grateful for to be put on it, and you can also reach out to those who are important to give your thanks to them and also learn to have less screen time, and more together time.

What crises always do is to take us out of our ordinary lives, the ordinary routine, and make us remember what life is really about and what is truly important. We have that same opportunity right now, so let’s not let it pass us by. Let’s turn something positive out of what is happening.

And let me finish by saying that I am grateful for this congregation and all of you!

Jesus as Priest

Here is my message from Sunday. The text was Genesis 14:17-20 and Hebrews 7:11-28:

Immediately after Moses comes down from Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments, the people, who have seen the thunder and lightning and the mountain smoking, basically said to Moses “Don’t let God talk to us anymore because that scares us. Instead you talk to God and then tell us what God says, and then you can tell God what we say.” Basically they wanted Moses to be an intermediary, an intercessor, between them and God. Now last week I said that Moses was considered the greatest of the Israelite prophets, even though we don’t normally think of him that way, because he served as God’s spokesperson delivering God’s message to the people, which was one of the primary roles of a prophet. But, what we also see in Moses, at least at this point is also the role of a priest, someone who serves as a mediator between God and the people, communicating information both ways. And that is the historic role of a priest in ancient Israel. To be an intercessor between God and the people.

And yet, as the society grew and became more complex, the role of the priest also increased and could no longer be done by someone in the family as Abraham and Jacob had also done. Instead there was a need for more centralization to provide stability and continuity as the 12 tribes of Israel grew. And so it isn’t much longer after the people ask Moses to be an intermediary, a priest for them, that we actually get the call of the Levites to become the priestly class, and of course this happens after the failure of Aaron in the story of the golden calf while Moses is away. It becomes clear that the people need more than what Moses can provide, and so new priests are called to lead the people and be responsible for the people in this way, and Aaron, Moses’ brother becomes the high priest.

Jesus as Prophet

Here is my message from Sunday. The scripture was Hebrews 1:1-4, 2:5-12  and Luke 4:14-24:

In his first letter to the church in Corinth, Paul says that he didn’t come to them using lofty words or wisdom, but instead to make known amongst them only Christ and him crucified. And yet, that term Christ had a lot of meaning that eventually would have to be unpacked. Because Christ is a specific term. Even though we talk all the time about Jesus Christ, Christ is not his last name, and H is not his middle initial. Christ is a title, coming from the Greek word Christos which is the Greek word used for the Hebrew word Messiah, which means the anointed one. And so in proclaiming Jesus as Christ, Jesus as messiah, Jesus as the anointed one, there was a lot of understanding that went along with that. Or we might say that there was a lot of explanation that the early church had to do to come to understand who Jesus was that encapsulated his life, his death and most especially his resurrection. Jesus did not match the role that people expected of the Messiah, and so a new interpretation had to be given about Jesus, and one of the first titles was that of Christ. But when people asked “who is Christ”, or when the disciples and apostles set out to explain who Christ was, they didn’t seek to talk about his nature, but instead about his function. What does Christ do? Why is he important? How do we find salvation in his acts? How do we understand him as the Messiah?

And so the church spent years and years trying to answer some of those questions. And one of the ways that explanation was done was through assigning certain offices, or positions to Jesus, namely that of prophet, priest and king. And we have these titles and ideas appearing early on in the church. In the mid-first century, Justin Martyr was writing about these three offices, and just as an aside, like Jesus, Martyr was not Justin’s last name, that was given to him after he was martyred, otherwise that would be a rather unfortunate circumstance and heavy burden to carry. Later, Eusebius, the father of church history, would do the same. In the middle ages, Thomas Aquinas took up the topic, as did John Calvin in the Protestant Reformation, and John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist movement encouraged the preaching of Christ in all three of his offices.

A Purple Nation

Take a deep breath. Pause. Then release. Keep doing that until you feel your anxiety going away, because the election is going to be a very narrow one. And the fact that we don’t know the winner shouldn’t be surprising to us, because that’s more the norm then knowing on the night of the election. That’s the reason states have dates well after the election to finalize their numbers and that the Electoral College members don’t meet until December. It’s to give time for everything to be sorted through.

But, one of the problems with elections is that there are “winners” and there are “losers.” Some in the country, and in our congregation, will feel happy and others will mourn, with little of the in-between. Or at least that’s how it often gets cast. And if you look at the maps of red states and blue states, it looks like there is a deep divide in the country, an “us” and “them.” That seems to be true even if you break it down by county. And yet that’s not really true.

A number of years ago, political scientists tried to come up with a better way to represent voting in the country. Dr. Robert J. Vanderbei, a professor at Princeton, said his county was showing as red, but it had a split 51-49 in the presidential election. Which meant that saying his county was red wasn’t true at all. So he began looking for a different way to show elections and came up with using the color purple: (This is from 2016)

It turns out that we are a lot more purple than we are red or blue, and I think that’s a good thing to remember.

One of the our core values we have at our church is that of being inclusive. While there are lots of things that that means, one of them is that we welcome a wide spectrum of belief, and I certainly see that represented in the congregation. It also means that we are just going to love people, even if we might disagree with them. But we also believe that we can disagree without being disagreeable. And of course that also goes along with that whole loving neighbor thing.

What this also means is that there are a lot more things that unite us then things that divide us. And, as I wrote last week, those who seek to divide us are not offering good news and they should be called out, because it doesn’t have to be this way.

I just finished a biography of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and I knew about her close friendship with Antonin Scalia who was her polar opposite in many ways. But, what I didn’t know about was her relationship with Sandra Day O’Connor, who, as it turns out, was farther away from her on court decisions than any other justice while they served together.

When Ginsburg was set to deliver her first majority opinion, O’Connor, who wrote the dissenting opinion, handed her a note that said something like “Relax, you’ll do fine. It’s a good opinion and I look forward to hearing many more in the future.” That is called collegiality.

We don’t have to agree on everything to get along, and we don’t have to reject someone simply because we disagree. Our table should be larger than that because we are enlarged by being around people who are different from us. And, more often than not, as we get to know people it turns out they aren’t all that different after all.

Envy Versus Persecution

Here is my message from Sunday. The text was Matthew 10:16-31:  

John Chrysostom, who was the 4th century arch-bishop of Constantinople, in writing about rules for clergy, especially in relation to abuse of power, said that he thought that rather than lust being the chief clerical sin, as most people supposed, that it was instead greed. Now, I don’t know much about 4th century clergy, and perhaps he was right for his day, but I would argue that today, at least amongst United Methodist clergy, our chief clerical sin, when looking at the seven deadly sins, is that of envy.  And it’s been said that out of the sin of envy come many of the other sins, including lust and greed, but we clergy like to look around at what other clergy are doing and make judgments. We look at other clergy salary, sometimes whispering under out breaths, can you believe how much they make? We look at what other churches people get appointed to, and make judgments about whether they deserve it or not. We look at what committees people get appointed to, or where the conference might be sending some clergy for some training or to represent the conference, and we make judgments. But, it’s a specific type of judgment. It’s been said that with suffering we ask “why me?” but with envy we ask “why not me?” or sometimes leading to “why them?” which comes with the follow-up; I’m so much better, or more deserving, or more honorable, or whatever it might be, than they are.

Earlier in this worship series we heard the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector praying at the temple, and the Pharisees prayer of thanksgiving to God for not making him like the sinners there, especially like the tax collector. And so his prayer became one of self-righteousness, rather than true thanksgiving, because he felt superior to others, but only because he was spending his time looking at everyone else and comparing himself to others, rather than being focused on his prayer. Envy does the same thing to us. Envy is a sin of looking around and seeing others and making destructive comparisons either because we judge ourselves less than, or others less than. And so remembering that the seven deadly sins were compiled in monasteries, where, for the most part everyone was exactly the same, and wore the same clothing, and ate the same things, any little change that could cause envy could destroy the community that had been established. And as Joseph Epstein said, of all the deadly sins, only the sin of envy is no fun, and it is the only one that is always directed at someone else, which is not true of the others, because even lust can be directed at an inanimate object.

Wrath Versus Peacemakers

 Here is my message from Sunday. The text was Matthew 5:38-48:

One of my favorite movie characters comes from the movie Inside Out and it’s the character of Anger, voiced by the inestimable Lewis Black. For those unfamiliar with the movie, most of it takes place inside the head of a 12-year-old girl, and features the emotions of joy, sadness, disgust, fear and anger as they sort of battle for their spots in how Riley lives her life. And so anger plays a role as one of her natural emotions, and really has some of the best lines in the whole film, including after Riley and her mother receive pizza with broccoli on it, saying “Congratulations San Francisco, you ruined pizza. First the Hawaiians and now you.” Although I actually like Hawaiian pizza. But, as it turns out that even though Joy is trying to deny sadness a place in Riley’s life, she can’t because sadness belongs, just like anger belongs as a primary emotion. 

And so as we think about anger, we have to understand that there is a natural place for anger in our lives, it’s just a matter of what that place is, and why we are angry. After all, we are even told that God “is slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.” So God gets angry, and when God is angry it’s normally because of injustice or violation of the commandment to love. We even see Jesus getting angry, thinking of him turning over the tables of the money changers is probably the most prominent of them, but would anyone describe Jesus as being an angry person? No, just as when we talked about gluttony we said that while that was an accusation made of him, it would not be how we would describe him.

Five Reasons Why The Big 10 Is Playing Football

Today, the Big 10 will begin playing football (although they technically started last night). There are five reasons why the Big 10 is beginning and feels justified in doing so:

1. Money

2. Money

3. Money

4. Money

5. Money

The Big 10 was the first of the big 5 conferences to come out and say that they weren't going to play football this fall. They were quickly followed by the Pac-12. Now they weren't the first conference to say they weren't playing. Many of the smaller conferences, I think led by the Ivy League, had already said they wouldn't play. 

But the smaller conferences were honest that it was both the health risk but also the economic impacts. They simply couldn't afford to pay for the testing that would be necessary to do it. Costco is now selling Covid-19 tests at $139, and so if that is a good going rate imagine testing several hundred people several times a week and you can see that would get really expensive really quick and most schools couldn't afford that.

But, the Big 10 didn't make that argument. Instead they said that they were concerned about the safety of their players and employees. They didn't see anyway to keep players safe and isolated so that there wouldn't be outbreaks. And, as it turns out, they were exactly right as we have seen with outbreaks among teams that were playing with games being cancelled or postponed every single week.

But, in seeing the other leagues start, and seeing that they were going to be making all the money that comes from college football, especially for the playoffs, and that the Big 10 would be excluded, they gave in and repented of their ways and set a schedule.

And so they start playing this weekend even as Covid-19 counts spike in nearly all of the states in which they play. They are recording rates we haven't seen since the summer, when it wasn't safe to play football, or in some cases setting new records. And yet they are going to play today.

The Big 10, and the Pac-12 following, cannot make any claims of moral superiority anymore. In fact, their claims of player safety are even worse than those of the ACC, SEC and Big 12 who at least said it was always about the money and decided to play anyways.

So congratulations Big 10 you will get your pay day, but at what and whose expense?

Lust Versus Pure in Heart

 Here is my message from Sunday. The text was Matthew 5:27-30:

After receiving the law from God on Mount Sinai, Moses came down from the mountain and said to the people, “I’ve got some good news and some bad news. The good news is that I talked God down and there are now only 10 commandments. The bad news is that adultery is still one of them.” I’ve heard that joke from several clergy over the years, but the one that most surprised me was when conservative theologian and Anglican Bishop NT Wright told it. But I thought it perhaps maybe appropriate for today’s message when we talk about the sin of lust, which is one of the seven deadly sins, and compare it against Jesus telling us that those who are pure in heart are blessed.

Now if you were to just listen to what seems to be emphasized in church, or talked to secular society about what the church emphasizes as the primary sin, it would probably revolve around sexual morality. And yet, Jesus has very little to say about it, especially when compared to other things, like money. Indeed, Jesu eats with prostitutes and says that they will enter the Kingdom of God before the more religious folks. Now it’s not because there aren’t sinful attributes, but because of their desire for salvation not being self-righteous. They know that they have fallen short of the glory of God, and know they need God’s grace in their lives, and so are seeking it out, and Jesus too is seeking them out as lost sheep. But, what we also have to know about sexual morality in the church is that our understanding of, and conversation about, sexuality is extremely narrow. We rarely, if ever, talk about celibacy, for example, even though that was the preferred arrangement in the early church, or at least according to Paul. But it’s completely ignored today.

The other thing to keep in mind is that much of the church’s position about sexuality is not really scriptural, but instead comes to us from St. Augustine, who, to put it politely, had trouble controlling his own urges, his own lust, and so therefore felt that everyone needed to be controlled. Indeed, he even once prayed to God, “Grant me chastity and continence, just not yet.” And the final piece to keep in mind is that nearly all of the moralists over time have been men, and so their views about sex and sexuality have been limited, but have been applied to both men and women, and they harbor many of their fears about women, and we can even see that in the rules surrounding adultery that Jesus addresses in today’s gospel passage. But before we dig a little deeper into that, we need to step back a little bit to look at lust itself.

Pastor Appreciation Month

October is Pastor Appreciation Month. Someone who knows I'm a minister, but doesn't attend my church, came up to me and asked what she could do to show her minister her appreciation during this time. Here is what I told her:

1. Pray for them. But don't just pray, also tell them that you are praying for them and ask if there are any particular concerns that they need lifted up. Knowing others are praying for me always encourages me.

2. Write them a card or a note of appreciation. While emails saying the same thing are nice, they are not necessarily as effective. I keep a collection of these cards on my desk and on my worst days I look at them to be reminded that not everyone hates me or thinks I am doing a terrible job, and it helps to keep me going. (Her church secretary had told her the same thing, but she didn't believe it.)

3. Volunteer to help. Tell them you are willing to assist in some ministry where there is a need, or ask them where they could be of assistance. Please note, this does not mean tell them what else should/could be done and they would assist if the minister will start it, that just adds more stress. Instead, try and take something off of their plate, or someone else's plate, in order to make the church more effective in it's ministry.

There are lots of other things that can be done, but this is a great place to start, and I can guarantee your minister will appreciate it.