People Of The Passion: At The Trial

Here is my sermon for Sunday. The text was Luke 22:66-23:25:

Last week we looked at the different people who were found at the crucifixion and while there were some we probably would not want to emulate or to be like, most of the others were people we could learn something from about our own faith lives.  Today’s characters are not like that.  While we have heard of some of them, they don’t really serve as examples of faith or faithfulness.

One of those is Caiaphas, who was the high priest and in charge of the Temple and therefore responsible for the religious life of Jews because Jewish life centered around the temple.  But although this was a key position in the religion it was also a position appointed by the Romans allowing them to hopefully have some control of the people.  Behind the scenes was Caiaphas’ father-in-law Annas who had overseen the appointment of the last five high priests.  As you might imagine, this did not make Annas or Caiaphas very popular with most of the population.  In fact the whole reason why Pharisees arose was in opposition to those who controlled the temple, who were known as the Sadducees and were the aristocrats of society.

People Of The Passion: At The Cross

Here is my sermon from Sunday. The text was Luke 23: 26, 32-34, 39-56:

Today is the first Sunday of Lent, the time of the year in which we called into forty days of repentance as we make our way first to the story of the passion, of the cross and the darkness of the tomb, and then completed on Easter morning when we celebrate that the women found the tomb empty.  Now if you do a count of the days, you will notice that there are actually 46 days in Lent, so why do we talk about only 40 days? Well it’s because the Sundays of Lent are not technically a part of Lenten because every Sunday is a little Easter and so aren’t included as part of Lenten practices.  Now normally when people find this out, especially those who have given something up for Lent, they are quick to ask, “Does that mean that I can have chocolate on those Sunday’s without breaking my observance?”  Technically it does, but as some of you have heard me say, it is questions like this that make me dislike most of the practices that take place during Lent, and just to show you how convoluted Lenten practices have become, this week we found that the Pope is going to give up being Pope for Lent.

Part of my problem with Lent is its emphasis on sort of the darkness of the passion story, and acting in many ways like it is the cross and the suffering that is most important for our faith, as if Easter is sort of secondary to that, as if it’s an epilogue to the story of the passion.  Of course the other side of the coin is those who want to downplay the repentance aspects of lent, or of Christianity all together, who sort of want to ignore the cross and the suffering and focus solely on the Easter story.  But somehow we have to combine these two things and hold them in tension with each other.  I don’t believe that the cross makes any sense, in fact serves no purpose, without Easter, but similarly we cannot have Easter without the cross.  In order to celebrate, to truly celebrate Easter and its meaning for us, to understand that we are an Easter people, we have to spend time at the cross, but in order to spend time at the cross we also have to remember what comes after the cross.  And so for the Sunday’s of Lent, we are going to look at the people of the passion, learning something about who they were, what they were doing there, and then trying to see what we can learn from what they did that we can apply to our own faith lives.  This week we are starting with the people at the cross, next week at those of the trial, then we will look separately at Peter and then Judas, and then those who participated in the preparation for the week.  Although our scripture readings for this series will come from Luke’s gospel, I will make reference to differences or other information given in other gospels when necessary.  And with that, away we go.

How God Transforms Our Whys

Here is my sermon from Sunday.  The text was Romans 8:18-39:

I was just two months into my first pastoral appointment when I received a call asking me to perform a funeral.  While I had assisted with one funeral during my internship, I didn’t do much for it, and the person it was for died at age 96, so it wasn’t really a surprise.  This would be the first funeral I ever did by myself, and it was for a family that had lost their son.  Ethan had been born with a genetic defect called Spinal Muscular Atrophy.  It is a disease caused by a recessive gene which means that both parents have to carry the gene, and even if both parents carry the gene there is only a 25% chance of the child being born with it.

Jane and Anil had two children when Ethan was born, neither of whom had the disease, and they did not know they were carriers until they sought help from their pediatrician when around three months Ethan stopped progressing in growth, and were told that not only would he not improve, but he would never be strong enough to lift his head, let alone walk or crawl.  The disease would cause his muscles to continue to deteriorate with respiratory functions usually being most affected.

His lungs would fill with fluids and mucus making breathing difficult, so that his parents and caretakers would have to pound on his chest and back numerous times each day to break the mucus up, as well as having to stick a catheter through his nose several times a day to drain the fluids out of his lungs and that with all of this he might live to be two years old.  He didn’t make it that long, dying at 15 months, and so I was called to work with this family and to perform my first funeral for Ethan.

Any time a child dies, especially an infant or toddler, there are bound to be some hard questions asked of God.  At the time of Ethan’s death my oldest daughter was 18 months, and Linda was three months pregnant with our second child, so this hit really close to home, and I’ll be honest I didn’t know what to do or what to say.  What can you say at a time like this? So I sat with the family and listened to their story.  I made some mistakes, as is to be expected, but those mistakes did not include the things that are often said to parents who have lost children.

I know that some people inevitably said to Jane and Anil, that God loved Ethan so much that God wanted Ethan to be in heaven with God.  But if God is everywhere, and if God is with us, then why would God need Ethan in a specific place.  Or maybe they said, as they did to Harriet Sarnoff Schiff when her son Robbie died of a congenital heart defect, “I know that this is a painful time for you.  But I know that you will get through it all right, because God never send us more of a burden than we can bear.  God only let this happen to you because he knows that you are strong enough to handle it.”  Schiff remembers her reaction to those words, “If only I were a weaker person, Robbie would still be alive.”

Sometimes we get so wrapped up in trying to answer what we think are questions, or to defend God or make ourselves feel better, that we truly miss the other’s statement all together.  In the Book of Job, Job is a righteous man who cries out , why has this happened to me, and his friends seek to provide him with some answers, but end up making him feeling worse, because Job is not really looking for answers.  Instead his cry of despair, just like those who make similar cries, should not be heard with a question mark, but instead with an exclamation point.  Job was not asking a question, he was crying out to the universe in despair, seeking not an answer but compassion and to know that he was not alone in his suffering, that people cared about what happened to him, that he still had self-worth and that God cared about what happened to him.

In the 121st Psalm, we hear “I lift up my eyes to the hills – from where will my help come?  My help comes from the Lord, who made heaven and earth.”  Notice that the psalmist does not say, my pain, or my suffering, come from God, but that my help comes from God.  As we looked at two weeks ago, I do not believe that God causes us to have pain and suffering, God did not cause Ethan to be born with a genetic disease as part of some grand master plan that we don’t understand, but what I do believe is that God was with Ethan and his family the entire time.

On the night that Ethan died, Jane said that they took turns holding Ethan, rocking him and telling him how much they loved him.  Jane said that Ethan’s death was the most heartbreaking and heart wrenching experience of her life, but at the same time the most peaceful.  She and Anil felt incredible calm in the midst of everything, and Jane, pregnant with another child, said that the baby was rolling and kicking Ethan as she held him, almost like a sign that everything was going to be okay, but what she also said was that they found God present in everything that happened throughout Ethan’s life, from the support they got from friends and neighbors, to the doctors, nurses and social workers who not only gave all they had to the family, but who gave themselves to so many others in need, and to the way that Ethan lived his life and the way he approached everything he had to undergo.

As I prepared to do the funeral sermon, I could not get through it without bursting into tears, and I really didn’t know how I was going to make it through, and so I stopped and prayed to God to give me the strength to get me through it, and I knew that at the same time that other friends and colleagues were praying for me, because I had asked for their prayers, and I was able to find within me a strength that I never knew that I had, and that I know that I wouldn’t have had without the strength I received from God as a result of those prayers.  And one of the members of my congregation was also there that didn’t know the family, she simply came because she knew that I would need the support, and so she came to be there to support and pray for me, and that is where I found God and how God was able to transform this experience in my life.  I find it in the strength and peace and hope and endurance that we never thought possible that we receive from our prayers, and it is the presence of each other as we support and carry each other.  This is how God tells us that we are not alone, that we have not been abandoned, and that God cares what is happening to us.

Now if the Chitkara family were to truly ask me why this had happened to them, I would have told them that God was not the cause.  God was not punishing them for something, God was not trying to teach them a lesson, God was not using them to demonstrate faith and perseverance, that God did not allow this to happen because God thought that they could handle it, or that having lived with Ethan that they might be better people or that others would learn from how Ethan approached life and become better themselves.  Instead I would have said that there is chaos in the world, and that Ethan had a defect on the SMN1 gene that codes for a specific protein needed for motor neurons to survive, which is the medical reason, but does that really answer anything?  I could tell them that we are all mortal, and since we are mortal that means that children die, just as middle-aged people die, as wrong as that might be, and the pain that we feel from that I believe is part of the pain of childbirth that God talks about when Adam and Eve are expelled from the garden of Eden.  But does that really answer anything?  I could simply say, as I did two weeks ago that the reason that bad things happen to good people, is because creation is still taking place in the world, which means that there is still chaos in the world, which means that there are things which happen contrary to how God might want them to happen, and so cells and genes sometimes go wrong causing negative things to happen, and we also have free will and so we sometimes choose to do things that bring negative consequences to us, or others choose to do differently than what God would have them do, and we are sometimes caught in those negative consequences as well.  But do those answers really answer the question?  The reason why those answers are not satisfactory is because none of those answers really give any true meaning or purpose to what we are undergoing.

This past week we celebrate Samantha’s birthday, and I am also coming up on the 2nd anniversary of my being struck with a kidney stone.  Now what those two events have in common, which I am sure you were wondering about, is the fact that according to doctors these are the two most painful things that we can undergo as humans.  But even though the pain might be the same, there is a significant difference between these events.  While child birth might be painful, there is some positive outcome, some purpose that makes it all meaningful and worthwhile, and makes it so worthwhile that women are willing to undergo the experience more than once.  But anyone who has ever had a kidney stone will say, without exception in my experience, “I hope I never have to do that again.”  Because a kidney stone has no underlying purpose of meaning, it’s simply a mistake that’s happened in the body which has caused the pain.  When we ask the question why, we really aren’t searching for answers so much as we are searching for meaning and purpose, because we feel we can bear anything as long as we feel that there is some greater reason why we must endure.

In her seminal work, Suffering, the German theology Dorothee Soelle says, says that in the midst of suffering we should focus not on where it comes from, but where it leads, what is going to be the result of this, how are we going to redeem this in our lives and in the lives of others.  Science and medicine can tell us about illness and disease, about earthquakes and hurricanes and other natural disasters, but science and medicine cannot give meaning or purpose to these events, only we can do that by allowing God to transform these events in our lives.  We shouldn’t be worrying so much about the why questions, because in most ways the answers are unsatisfying and for some ultimately unanswerable, but we can give these events meaning, we through God’s works in our lives, can redeem them, we can give them meaning.

In today’s passage from Romans, Paul tells us, just as we heard last week, that the Holy Spirit, as the gift of prayer, “intercedes with sighs too deep for words,” and that God makes all things work together for good.  Notice that he does not say that everything that happens is good, which is what those who claim that God causes everything might say, but instead that God makes everything work out for the good.  That even in the midst of the worst tragedies of our lives, that something good can come from them, not because God caused these things in our lives, but because God can use them and work and walk with us through them, so that they can be redeemed, so again the question we must ask is not really why, but instead what?  Now that this has happened, what am I going to do about this, how can God use me and this situation to make something better?

When Joe and Sherril Garrett lost their 7-month-old son to what used to be referred to as SIDS, they were devastated.  “It just seemed like our whole world just collapsed and we didn’t really know what to do,” Sherril said.  But then they found a way to make a difference.  She and a friend had previously talked about how expensive it could be for girls to go to prom, and as her friend’s daughter prepared for this event, he friend said, “You know, I want to tell you that as I sit here and listen to my daughter talk about who she’s going to go to the prom with, and I couldn’t help but think that 15 years from now you’re going to wonder who Jake would have taken to the prom.”  Sherril’s initial thought was “15 years from now?  I just need to get through today.”  But that conversation planted a seed in her mind, and together she and her husband founded Dresses for Jake’s Dates, an organization which loans out prom dresses, shoes and jewelry, to girls who otherwise would not be able to afford to go to the prom.  “If we can provide financial relief for one family and make one little girl feel like a princess for one night, then we’ve accomplished what we set out to do,” Sherril said.  “We could crawl into a hole and feel sorry for ourselves because we lost our son, we really could.  But we don’t feel like that’s what God would have us do.”  Does this group make them miss their son anymore?  No, but they are allowing God to transform their loss, to move from the why, to what are we going to do about it.

Rabbi Harold Kushner, who we’ve heard from quite a bit these past few weeks, in his book When Bad Things Happen to Good People, writes of his son’s death “I am a more sensitive person, a more effective pastor, a more sympathetic counselor because of Aaron’s life and death than I would ever have been without it.  And I would give up all of those gains in a second if I could have my son back.  If I could choose, I would forgo all the spiritual growth and depth which has come my way because of our experiences, and be what I was fifteen years ago, an average rabbi, and indifferent counselor, helping some people and unable to help others, and the father of a bright, happy boy.  But I can’t choose.”

What he could choose, however, was what he was going to do with it, how he was going to make his son’s death meaningful, what meaning he was going to give not just to his son’s death, but his son’s life, and he has made meaning for millions of people.  I know that walking with Ethan’s family has made me a different person and a different pastor than I would have been without it, which is why I talk about this even, but like Rabbi Kushner if I could choose to have it never to have happened, to be who I would be without that event, to have Ethan being a healthy happy little boy and his family unaffected by tragedy I would make that decision in an instant, but I too cannot choose, you cannot choose, none of us can choose.  But what we can do is to allow God to transform our whys and make them meaningful not just for us but for others as well.

When we decide to get rid of God because of our tragedies, we don’t change the realities of the situation, they still remain tragedies and all we’ve done is to remove the only thing that can give us hope and peace and assurance and strength and power and mercy and grace and all the other things that we need to be able to move through these events in our lives, when we try and remove God we get rid of the only person who can work to transform our whys and instead to work together all things for good.

“Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away,” John says in the book of Revelation, “and I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, ‘see, the home of God is among mortals.  He will dwell with them; they will be his people and God himself will be with them; he will wipe every tear from their eyes, death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more.”  What God tells us, what scripture tells us is that tragedies and suffering do not have the last word in our lives, God has the last word, and that God can transform our whys, God can transform the worst events in our lives to the good, God can give them and us meaning and purpose if we allow God to do so.  In Deuteronomy, God says “Behold, I have set before you the path of good and the path of evil, the way of life and the way of death.  Choose life” (Deut 30:19).  May it be so my brothers and sisters. Amen.

My Tax Receipt

I paid $8,272 in federal taxes last year, and here, according to ThirdWay.org, is where my tax money went (based on 2011 information, they did not have 2012 info up.  My figures are also slightly off since I pay self-employment taxes for social security purposes):

Thirdway has been promoting the idea that everyone should receive a receipt for their taxes from the federal government so that people would truly understand where their money was going.  If this happened it would stop politicians from spouting about how they are going to balance the budget by doing things like cutting funding to the NEA and PBS (.1%) of the budget.  Congress could no longer lie to us and make blatantly stupid suggestions because we would know better.  But, until the average person truly understands what the federal budget actually looks like then we can never really have honest dialogue about spending cuts/increases.

President Obama did pledge to make this information available, and you can find it here.  The problem with this one is many fold.  First, they too only have 2011 up, and second you have to know what you paid in social security, medicare and federal income taxes separately, which I am sure most people do not know, and they are not going to take the time to find out.  Finally, I also doubt that few people were even going to the website to use it, versus if everyone just automatically received this from the IRS.

I receive a statement from social security every year laying out what I have paid in and what my pay out is expected to be every year, so why can't the IRS do something similar and say this is what you paid in and this is where your money went?  I can name one reason and that is because many politicians do not want you to know where your money went.

The High Cost Of Being A Small Church

Last week I wrote about the high cost for clergy to serve small churches.  A cost which is born significantly by new clergy and female clergy.  But the small church also pays costs that are not significantly born by larger churches.

I will be reappointed this year, and so the church I serve is having to put aside money in order to be able to pay for the move of the incoming pastor.  This conference maxes the reimbursement at $1500.  They paid this amount two years ago when I moved in, and two years before that when my predecessor moved.  In fact the average length of appointments for this church is 2.3 years, and when you take out two outliers, it's actually 1.8 years.  So basically every two years they are having to pay for a new pastor to move here.  Compare that to large churches which are only having to pay this expense every five to ten years, or more.

In addition, because we are located in a rural area, which means we have to drive long distances to get anywhere, my mileage reimbursement line is higher than that of other large churches, or even small churches in urban areas.

My reimbursement line at my last church, which was a large congregation, was $4600.  But only about half of that went to mileage.  My reimbursement line in this church is $4500 and all of that will go to mileage, and depending on what my hospital visitations end up being like this year, I may expend even more than that on mileage.  To truly cover my professional expenses I should probably have a reimbursement line closer to $5500.

But the worst is the cost born by the small church for health insurance premiums.  Here is the breakdown for this conference:

In looking at the chart what you will notice is that the more money clergy make, the more they pay towards their health insurance.  There is just over a $500 difference between the lowest and highest.  That makes sense in principle, although there is a potential $20,000 difference in salary for the $500 cost, a trade-off I'm willing to make.

If you move over and look at what the churches pay, you will see that same amount accounted for.  But the difference is that the larger churches who can afford large salaries pay less for insurance, and the smaller churches who can only pay a small salary, and the lowest amounts are below minimum salary, end up paying the most.

This is what they call a regressive tax.  Those who can least afford it are hardest hit.  So this is yet an additional cost that is born on the backs of the small church that is not similarly felt by our larger churches.  I certainly have some suggestions for ways to make this more equitable, but do not have the magic bullet for this, and yes I also recognize that some of our larger churches have gotten themselves into financial positions in which they are having a hard time paying these amounts, but these costs, I believe, are unfairly born by our smallest congregations.

Why Doesn't God Answer Prayers?

Here is my sermon from Sunday.  The text was Luke 11:1-13:

Today in our series of looking at our why questions we tackle the question that most Christians have asked at least at one point in their life, “Why do my prayers go unanswered?”  It’s a question that we ask because sometimes we feel impotent in our prayers.  We pray and pray, just like we are told to, and yet nothing seems to be happening.  We are told about people’s illnesses being miraculously cured and all the credit given to God because of prayer, and yet the people we pray for are not miraculously healed, the people we pray to survive die, the problems we pray about at work are still a problem, the child we pray for that God will protect or will lead to the right path just keep on doing the same thing, and so we wonder, are we doing something wrong?  or maybe prayer just doesn’t work at all, and so we contemplate giving it up altogether, and maybe some of us have even done that.

If you are to do a Google search for why God doesn’t answer prayers, depending on how you phrase the question, you’ll get somewhere between 3 million and 60 million hits, and some of the answers are what you would expect.  There is the old cliche that God answers all prayers with yes, no or maybe, not really helpful.  They say that prayers aren’t answered because we aren’t seeking God’s will, maybe.  Other answers are a little less charitable.  God didn’t answer our prayers because we have sinned.  In fact one website said, and I quote, “We know that God doesn’t listen to sinners.”  I pray that’s not the case because then I know that God is not listening to me, but I know it’s not the case.  When we have communion later this morning, we will hear Paul’s words from Romans, that “Christ died for us while we were yet sinners” and that proves God’s love for us. 

Another common refrain is that our prayers aren’t answered because we don’t have enough faith.  I’ve told this story before, but the minister who married Linda and I when he and his wife were expecting their first child, that she received a pamphlet that told her if she had enough faith, and prayed well enough, and properly enough, that she wouldn’t have any pains during childbirth.  And if you did have child birth pains, or worse your child was born with birth defects, then it was because you didn’t have enough faith.  Imagine explaining to someone that only if they had a little more faith, that their child would not have been born with a birth defect, or maybe if only they had more faith their child wouldn’t have died.  I’ll be honest, I think that God should sue for slander for most of the reasons we give for why prayers are not answered, because they are obscene and cruel, not just to God, but to those that we say these things to as well.

Jesus says that if we have faith as small as a mustard seed that we can say to a mountain move, and it will move.  Now I’ve never seen anyone do that, so how much faith do we really need for our prayers to be answered, what do these statements really mean?  Now I believe strongly in the power of prayer, I think it is first in the membership vows for a reason, but I do not believe that prayer works the way most people think it does.  If we were to get everything that we asked for, then there would be no deaths, because surely the most ardent prayers are those delivered for people facing death.  If we got everything we prayed for, then the world might be a really boring place, and how would that work anyways?  How would God decide the winner of the Super Bowl today, since there are invariably people who will be praying for both sides to win?  Would there be enough horses in the world to provide every little girl with their own pony? And how big would major league or NFL rosters have to be to allow every little boy who prays to play professional sports to fulfill that dream?  And could God make someone love you just because you prayed for it?  Once we really think about we realize how silly some ideas we come up with prayer really are.

But we still have to take account of the passages, like the one we heard today in which it appears that Jesus says that we will be granted anything we ask for.  In fact six times in scripture Jesus says something very similar to this, so what do we make of that, is that what Jesus said and meant or is there something else going on here?  First to start with, The Greek text does not really say “ask and you will receive.”  Instead, it says something like, ask and keep on asking, seek and keep on seeking, knock and keep on knocking.  The verb implies ongoing action.  This is not a onetime event, it is a constant activity.  There is also a command of boldness to this, which is what I think Jesus is saying here, and in his others passages.  Jesus used hyperbole a lot, and when we try to take hyperbole literally things break down.  

So, for example, if I was to say, “I’m so hungry I could eat a horse,” I really wouldn’t expect you to say to me, “you know John, we don’t eat horses around here,” or ask me how I could possibly eat an entire animal all at once.  You won’t say that because you understand it’s hyperbole.  Hyperbole allows us to make an gross overstatement in order to make a point, and this is something that Jesus does all the time.  Another example, Jesus says that if your hand causes you to sin to cut it off, and if your eye causes you to sin to gouge it out.  Now I don’t see a lot of one handed, one eyed people walking around, so I suspect we are not taking this literally, because it is hyperbole, again Jesus is trying to make a point, and I think he’s doing exactly the same thing here.

And if you don’t believe me notice that the disciples didn’t go off an pray that the Romans would suddenly disappear, and poof they were gone, or that suddenly there would be world peace, and there was, or that suddenly they would be wealthy and powerful, and they were.  They didn’t pray for those things because they didn’t expect that that was the way that prayer worked, and all we need to do to prove this further is to look for prayers that weren’t answered in scripture, and in the New Testament we find two fairly big ones.  The apostle Paul says that he was given a thorn in his side, what that was we don’t know although there is a lot of speculation, but Paul says that he prayed three times, and not just prayed but pleaded with God to have it removed, and it wasn’t.  and then there is Jesus’ prayer in the garden of Gethsemane when Jesus, on his knees, prays for God to take the cup from him, and it doesn’t happen.  But in each of those cases something does happen, and it is also what today’s passage says.  Jesus says that through prayer that we receive the Holy Spirit.  That means that every time that we pray all prayers are answered because God gives us the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit gives us what?  Power.  Paul is given the courage and strength to bear his thorn, and we are told that immediately after Jesus prayed for the cup to be taken that an angel appeared and he was given strength.

Jesus tells us to go to God in prayer boldly, but we also have to understand what prayer can and cannot do.  God is not going to grant prayers for things that we can and must do ourselves.  Someone asked me why God needs us to do things when God could easily do them by Godself, and the simple answer is because God won’t do things that we are told to do but are unwilling to do.  Or as St. Augustine said, without God we cannot, and without us God will not.  We cannot just pray for world peace, when God has given us the ability to solve that problem through our own actions.  We can’t just pray for God to end starvation, when God has given us the ability to solve that problem.  We cannot just pray for God to end racism, or injustice, when God has given us the ability to end those problems.  In 1952, there were 58,000 cases of polio in the United States alone, and people prayed for something to be done, and we created a vaccine, and last year there were 250 cases of polio in the entire world, and it is believed that within five years it will be eradicated.  We can’t just pray for miracles to happen, when we can cause miracles to happen, when we can be the miracle. 

But even though we might pray for miracles, especially medical miracles, I do not believe that is the purpose of prayer, and if that is how we are to judge it, then we will always think that prayer isn’t effective.  Rev. Adam Hamilton says that he has probably prayed for more than 30,000 people in need of prayer during his ministry, and of those he can count the number of people who appeared to be miraculously cured on two hands.  Not a very good return. But, what I have found is that when I pray for healing that healing is found, even if there is not a cure, and more importantly that when I, or others, pray for peace and strength and courage and grace, find those things in abundance and find the ability, the power, to move through things that they never thought possible, and that is the work of the Holy Spirit.

But what prayer also does is to connect us as a community, even though we often think of prayer as an individual thing, it is truly communal.  Notice that the Lord’s Prayer does not use personal pronouns, but instead we prayer, “Our Father,” and “give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses.”  The Lord’s Prayer which is given to us when the disciples ask to be taught how to pray, is given in the third person plural.  Prayer not only connects us with God in a deep and meaningful way, but it also connects us with each other.  When we lift up our prayer concerns, when we pray for others, including many people we have never even met, we are reminded that we are not in this alone, that we are not isolated, that we are not abandoned either by God or by God’s people.  In fact what we find out about prayer is that we are to pray boldly, understanding what prayer can and cannot do, but also knowing that every prayer connects us with God and it connects us with each other, and in the end every prayer is answered because when we ask, and keep on asking, search and keep on searching, and knock and keep on knocking, then we receive not necessarily what we ask for, but instead we are given the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit gives us what?  Power, and strength, and peace and assurance and healing and grace, and in that sense every prayer is answered.

Just like last week, I am again going to give the last word to Rabbi Harold Kushner who relates a story in his book When Bad Things Happen to Good People about a young woman who challenged him about prayer after her husband had died of cancer.  “She told me that while he was terminally ill, she prayed for his recovery,” he says.  “Her parents, her in-laws, and her neighbors all prayed.  A protestant neighbor invoked the prayer circle of her church, and a Catholic neighbor sought the intercession of  St. Jude, patron saint of lost causes.  Every variety, language, and idiom of prayer was mustered on his behalf, and none of them worked.  He died right on schedule, leaving her and her young children bereft of a husband and father.  After all that, she said to me, how can anyone be expected to take prayer seriously?

"Is it really true, I asked her, that your prayers were not answered?  Your husband died; there was no miraculous cure for his illness.  But what did happen?  Your friends and relatives prayed; Jews, Catholics, and Protestant prayed.  At a time when you felt so desperately alone, you found out that you were not alone at all.  You found out how many other people were hurting for you and with you, and that is no small thing.  They were trying to tell you that this was not happening to you because you were a bad person.  It was just a rotten, unfair thing that no one could help.  They were trying to tell you that your husband’s life meant a lot to them too, … and that whatever happened to him, you would not be totally alone.  That is what their prayers were saying, and I suspect that it made a difference."

"And what about your prayers?, I asked her.  Were they left unanswered?  You faced a situation that could have easily broken your spirit.... [yet] somehow you found the strength not to let yourself be broken.  You found the resiliency to go on living and caring about things….  You faced a scary situation, prayed for help, and found out that you were a lot stronger, and a lot better able to handle it, than you ever would have thought you were.  In your desperation, you opened your heart, to prayer, and what happened?  You didn’t get a miracle to avert a tragedy.  But you discovered people around you, and God beside you, and strength within you to help you survive the tragedy.  I offer that as an example of a prayer being answered.”  Amen, amen and amen.

Clergy Already Have An Imagine Problem, And Now We Have This

When I was in seminary I worked for Kinko's, and one day a member of the clergy came in wearing their collar so it was obvious who and what they were.  They then proceeded to be belligerent, rude and several other very uncharitable things, treating the staff like they were trash and certainly of a much lower personhood than this minister was.  After they left the staff looked at me, the one training to join that group, for some explanation, and I had none.

That experience left an impression on me, and one I have also tried to convey to others, that when you are a pastor, especially if you can be identified as such, that you are always on.  Maybe that person was having a bad day, although they were always like that so I doubt that, but even if you are then take your collar off, or go lock yourself in your office, home or sanctuary until you can be civil and treat people with decency and respect, because it reflects not just on you, but on other clergy and on the church in general.

I was thinking of that story when I first heard of the story, which I'm sure most of you have already heard, of a receipt left at an Applebee's restaurant in which an automatic gratuity was added, and the person crossed it off and wrote "I give God 10%, why do you get 18."  And as if that is not arrogant and ignorant enough, they then inexplicably wrote pastor next to their name, I guess to somehow justify what they were saying.

The server who posted the receipt online, on an atheist section nonetheless, did not blur out the persons name and so this pastor was tracked down and identified as Alois Bell, who later said "I've brought embarrassment to my church and my ministry."  I think that might be an understatement, because she has also brought embarrassment, again, to clergy and Christians as a whole.  And then to make matters worse, she complained to Applebee's who have now fired the server.

Now we might discuss the entire idea of tipping, but the simple fact is under the current system the only way servers make money is through tips.  I know there are lots of people who complain about having to tip servers, and who do so sparingly, but they are people who have never waited tables for a living.  The minimum wage for tipped employees is $2.13 a hour, and yes you read that correctly.  I don't know anyone who has ever worked for tips who doesn't tip very well, even if the service is absolutely terrible, and yes this includes me.

But the terrible fact is, restaurant employees know that the worst time for tips is if they see everyone at a table bow in prayer before a meal, the tip has just gone down significantly, and on Sunday mornings.  In his book, Justin Lee recounts his first job in a restaurant:

"Sundays are the worst," one of the servers explained to me. "That's when the church crowd goes out to eat."
"What's wrong with the church crowd?" I asked.
"Oh, honey," she said. "They're usually the most demanding, and they're always the worst tippers. I guarantee you, if you see your table praying before the meal, you can mentally subtract a third from your tip."
Standing nearby, the manager cracked a smile. "They already gave at church," he said. "They don't have any money left." 

I'm sure that this waitress would have been fine taking the 10% that Rev. Bell gives to God, instead of the small 18% of the bill, mandated, it should be noted, by the restaurant who fired her not by the waitress. If there were problems with the service and you don't think they deserved that tip, then please raise it with management, but don't make this a "God" issue, because God has nothing to do with it.

And it's not just servers in restaurants who experience this type of behavior.  I knew someone who worked for the City of Santa Fe and he said he knew he was really going to hear it whenever someone began the conversation by saying "I'm a Christian...."  As soon as those words were spoken he knew he was about to hear a tirade and words unlike he would hear from anyone else, including drunken sailors.

We have enough image problems without things like this happening which only perpetuate the negative image that so many people have of the church and of clergy in general, and the fact that this story has gone on so long only highlights that reality.   And where is the sense of radical hospitality, or any hospitality, in this message?  Is this what we are called to do?

Every morning I pray a prayer while I'm in the shower, and the last line says "I pray that I might live as your child today and honor you in all that I do."  Am I always successful at that?  No. Sometimes I fail miserably, just ask my family, for which I give thanks for grace and mercy and extend that to all involved in this situation.  But maybe if all of us who proclaim Christ were to not only say that, but to live it out, then the perception of Christians and of Christianity would be radically different.

If we tried to live so that the glory of God would be manifested in us and our actions I think the world would be a different place, and instead of slandering God's name with notes like this, Rev. Bell might instead have given more money, and written simply "May God bless you today and every day."  I know that God's grace is with Rev. Bell, and I hope she truly knows what a terrible mistake she made, and maybe next time she, and all of us, will simply extend God's grace and God's radical hospitality to those we meet as well.

The High Cost Of Serving A Small Church

There have been studies done on the high cost of being poor, and the extra expenses they have that are not born by most of society.  Yesterday it really occurred to me that the same could be said of those of us who serve small churches, especially small rural churches.  I already knew this as a reality, but didn't really put a name to it until a conversation I was having with other clergy serving in the area.

We gather every Wednesday morning for breakfast.  I have a 52 mile round trip to get there, and while I know that most of them are putting the meal on their expense account I am not because I don't have enough to do that, and so every week the meal comes out of my pocket.  They were talking about joining together to do an online class, and the more who joined the less expensive it was.  One of the other clergy, who is the only other one there who serves a small rural church, asked if the district would be paying for it, and he was told that it should come out of the church's continuing education line.  He replied "I don't have one," and I said, "neither do I."  I'm sure that we were the only two there who that was true for.

It is fairly typical for "new" clergy to be assigned to small rural churches in order to get broken in and pay your dues so that you can move onto something else.  Serving a small church means that you will be making minimum salary, which I do, and yet we also normally have the highest amounts of student loans due since we are just out of school, and thus it is bigger portion of our salaries.  These churches also have small and tight budgets which means that there is limited money for discretionary items like continuing education or other expenses.

Now I have taken some continuing ed classes online since I've been here, but I paid for them myself.  My mileage reimbursement last year was $1500.  I blew through that by April, not because I was incautious but because almost everywhere I have to go is a long distance away.  I then drove another 5094 miles for which I was not reimbursed (at last year's reimbursement rate that's $2082).  I will be honest that there were some hospital visits that I probably should have made, but didn't because the hospital most people end up at is 124 miles away (that's one way).  So for me to drive there is one tank of gas, or an extra $60 out of my pocket.  And anything I bought for children's time or other things I need to do my job, all out of my pocket.  I did not seek reimbursement for meals for annual conference, because I knew it would be tough for them to cover.  I did submit for my hotel room.  And books and magazine subscriptions?  Don't even think about it.

And then that doesn't count personal expenses.  The closest grocery store is also 26 miles away (one way) so whenever I need to go grocery shopping that's two gallons of gas, or $6.50 just to make the trip.  There is no preschool in the town, and so I have to take my youngest daughter into town three days a week for daycare, another $19.50 every week just in gas money.

And then there are the little things that the conference expects us to be able to do, like attend clergy retreats at $200 a pop.  For most clergy it's not a problem, but for those of us serving small churches, we're wondering which Peter we need to rob so that we can pay Paul, and yet the expectation is that we have to be there.  I had to get support from the district office for one of these events because it was simply the only way I could afford to go.  The church didn't have the money and I didn't personally have it available either.

There are lots of financial realities with which the church needs to deal, but one of the major ones is the disparity for clergy between larger urban churches and small rural churches.  Because there is a very high cost of serving the rural church that is simply not born out by other clergy members.

Why?: Explaining When Bad Things Happen

Here is my sermon from Sunday.  The text was Psalm 88:

When my older brother was twenty, he was diagnosed with testicular cancer; the number one cancer killer of men under the age of 35.  He went into the student health clinic on Monday, had surgery on Wednesday, and my grandfather died of cancer on Thursday.  As you might imagine it was a rather rough week for my family, leaving us all with a lot of questions but without a lot of answers.  As we discussed last week when we began this series looking and answering some of our why questions, there are some fairly typical answers that have been provided for why bad things happen to seemingly good people, and one of those answers is that bad things happen as punishment for sins we have committed.  That is the answer that my father provided for himself in the midst of this.  He believed, and still believes, that my brother’s cancer was God’s punishment for my father for some sin that he had committed.

There is certainly scriptural witness for this idea.  After King David commits adultery with Bathsheba and then has her husband Uriah the Hittite killed, we are told that the first child they have together dies as an infant because of David’s sin.  And then there is the curse given to Ham, the son of Noah, that is acted out on the next generation.  But as I have said before, scriptural does not always provide a universal witness on this because the Bible is a series of books in conversation with each other and they often disagree.  And so we read in Numbers of Zelophahad’s daughters, who are not to be punished for their father’s sins, but most importantly for us is the story found in the Gospel of John.  Jesus and his disciples see a blind man, and the disciples ask him “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”  And what does Jesus say, “Neither this man nor his parents.”  The reason people believe things like this are the result of sin is because we want to make some sense of what is going on.  There is also a large amount of guilt that gets taken on, some of it survivor’s guilt, of why wasn’t it me instead of them, and so we search for something to give meaning and purpose to it, but I do not believe that others are punished for our sins.  But are we punished for our own sins or for corporate sins?

Again this is something that we hear all the time. If an earthquake strikes LA or San Francisco, we’ll hear all about it being God’s punishment for the perceived sins being committed in those cities.  When Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, it was the sins of the city that caused it all to happen, and we could go on down the list.  And again there is scriptural witness for this, especially from the prophets.  The reason why ancient Israel is being captured by other empires, the reason why Jerusalem will be taken and the Temple destroyed is because of the sins of the people in not following the will of God.  But do we really believe that New Orleans, or Florida, or other gulf coast states which are prone to be hit by hurricanes are filled with more sinners than Minnesota is which seemed to be spared from Earthquakes and Hurricanes?  Now I’ve lived in Minnesota and so feel safe to say that I don’t think it’s the case, and if there is more sin in New Orleans it’s because all the Minnesotans go down there to do their really good sinning.

Two thousand years ago when we didn’t understand how hurricanes form or plate tectonics worked, this might have been a reasonable explanation, and would certainly explain some things. But today we know that Haiti and Los Angeles and San Francisco and Chile are not punished by earthquakes because they are sinful, but instead because they sit along fault lines.  We understand that we live on plates that are moving around, which are part of the creation.  We know that in order to have mountaintop experiences we have to have mountains and they are formed by the collision of these tectonic plates pushing against each other, and when they do that there is a lot of destruction that takes place.  We understand that the center of the earth is full of molten lava, but in order for the earth to cool itself so that the planet doesn’t explode, that lava rises to the surface where it cools and then sinks back down, cooling the planet itself, and sometimes that lava moves all the way to the surface and a volcano is formed or explodes.  We can still see this process taking place in Hawaii as the islands are continuing to be formed.

But let me put one final nail in the coffin on the idea that these things happen because of sin, or as punishment for sin.  First, it’s often said that God has to punish us for things we do wrong, because that’s what good parents do.  I certainly punish my daughters when they have done something wrong, and sometimes they don’t fully understand all the reasons, and so doesn’t God do the same?  Well here is the big difference.  When my daughters are in trouble and are being punished, they know exactly what they are being punished for.  God does not do that for us, our punishment could be for one of any numerous transgressions we have done wrong.  If I was to just go up to my daughter and spank them or send them to a timeout without telling them why they were being punished, you would rightfully question my parenting skills, and worse if I was to do something to them, like inject them with cancer or aids or paralyze them, you would rightfully think me a monster and put me in jail for a very long time, but that is the very thing that we say that God does to us and to others all the time, so what is the difference?  I’ll tell you there isn’t a difference, and God doesn’t do it.

But as Christians here is the biggest problem with this argument.  If God punishes us or others for sin, then what is the purpose and role of Christ and the cross?  If God still punishes us for sin, then Christ’s sacrifice was meaningless, because it obviously did not do any good.  It has not reconciled us with God; Christ did not bring salvation to the world, because Christ did not bring forgiveness!  If we are to take our understanding of the purpose, the mission and the results of Christ and the cross seriously then we have to abolish forever the idea that God continues to punish us or the world for its sins.  God doesn’t do that because of the cross.  If other religious traditions want to make that claim about God, they can, but as Christians for us to make that claim says that everything we have been taught and believed is a total sham, that Christ’s sacrifice for us was not sufficient and does not apply for all time, that God still needs to collect his pound of flesh.  But that is not the Christian witness.  Christ died for our sins, the price has already been paid, God doesn’t collect any more.

The answer most often given now for why bad things happen is that everything happens for a reason, that absolutely everything in the world planned out and that nothing happens without it being a part of God’s overall plan, or at the very least in contributing to God’s plan.  So no matter what happens, from someone getting cancer, to plane crashes, to infants dying, it is all part of God’s plan, and it all makes sense in some way even if we cannot understand how.  I’m sure that all of us have at least heard this idea presented before, and some of us may believe it.  There are lots of reasons given as analogies to explain this, but one of the best known is that the universe is like a rug or a tapestry.  This idea was popularized by the author Thornton Wilder, who said that all we see is the bottom of the tapestry, which has strings of various lengths and it appears random and haphazard, as if there is no real rhyme or reason, but God sees the front of the tapestry which is this beautiful image and so each of us plays a role in the beauty of the whole, and to be a part of that we sort of have to accept what happens to us as the part of that whole.  It’s a nice thought, and a nice image, and perhaps it brings comfort to some people, but I am not one of them.

At the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, you can see a series of seven tapestries known collectively as The Hunt of the Unicorn.  They are widely regarded as the greatest tapestries ever created, and thus one of the greatest works of art as well.  They were probably created in the 16th century, but no one knows for sure, they might have been done in Brussels, but no one knows for sure, and it’s possible they were made for the marriage of Anne of Brittany to Louis XII of France, but no one knows for sure.  One of the greatest masterpieces ever made is shrouded in mystery, but there was still one surprise that no one expected.  In 1998, the tapestries were taken down so that some conservation work could be performed .

At some point, linen backings had been added to the tapestries to protect them and also to help support them so they could be hung, but the backings had become brown and brittle with age, and so they were going to be removed and replaced.  But as they removed the backings, what they found astonished the conservators.  Because instead of finding the backs looking like the image given by Thornton Wilder, instead what they found was a mirror image of the front, but done in different colors from the front.  The tapestries were basically two different tapestries woven into one.  It turns out they were even more amazing than anyone had known about for centuries.  If God is weaving a tapestry that is what I imagine God’s tapestry looks like, and that we not only participate in it, but that we can also see it before our eyes.

But even though this idea that everything happens for a reason and that God is responsible might be the most popular reasoning given for our question of why bad things happen, it is also the least biblical.  While it might be used to explain natural phenomenon, although as we already discussed even that is a stretch with modern understanding, it cannot be used to explain human behavior and why we do bad things to ourselves and to each other.  All we have to do is look at scripture to see time and time and time again that God is not in control of what is happening because people are constantly doing things that God does not want them to do.  We can start with Adam and Eve and move our way through and we see this is what is happening.  Why does God bring destruction in the flood as recounted in the Noah story?  Because God is totally exasperated at what people are doing.  Why is Jerusalem being destroyed?  Because Israel didn’t do what God wanted.  Scripture continually tells us about all the ways that we disobey God, but it also tells us about the ways that people remain faithful even in the midst of suffering.

But let’s just say for a moment that God is in control of everything and that everything happens because God, at the very least, allows it to happen.  That means that a daughter who is sexually molested by her father, that’s part of God’s plan.  An infant who is born with a genetic disease and dies shortly after birth, that is part of God’s plan.  The kindergartener’s who were shot to death at Sandy Hook Elementary, God wanted them to die, it was part of God’s plans.  That what Hitler did was not some massive tragedy, or maybe not even evil, because it was part of God’s plans.  God needed 11 million people to die in concentration camps, and maybe at the end of time we’ll all be told why.  If God caused it, allowed it to happen, then that means that God willed it to happen.  God wrote this piece into your life story.  Is that really what we believe?

In responding to this very claim, a woman whose infant died at the age of six weeks said, “There is no way that the death of an innocent six-week old… is part of some master plan.  And if it is then I’m simply not interested in the God that has that plan.”  I agree.  If that is the God who created the universe then I will put down my Bible, fold up my degrees and hand in my ordination, because that is not a God I can believe in, and it’s certainly not a God who is worthy of worship and praise.  As Rabbi Harold Kushner, in his masterful work When Bad Things Happen to Good People said, “To try to explain the Holocaust, or any suffering, as God’s will is to side with the executioner rather than with his victim, and to claim that God does the same.”

We are told that we are made in God’s image, so where does our sense of justice, of righteousness, of kindness, of generosity, of mercy come from?  Where do we get our sense of right and wrong, of good and evil, of decency and virtue, but from God?  So how can we possibly say that we find the holocaust, or the death of a kindergartner through random and senseless violence evil and repugnant unless God too finds them evil and repugnant?  How can we cry out to God in the midst of our pain if God doesn’t have any qualms with our pain, and in fact is the one who inflicted it upon us?  Is it possible that we have a better and more just sense of right and wrong or good and evil than God does?  I think that’s what we say when we say that God is responsible for everything, and that it is all part of God’s plan, that our understanding of good and evil are not complete.  I reject that idea, while I might not understand true justice, mercy, kindness, or righteousness, I know that my understanding of them is just a fraction of what God’s is and God guides me in my understanding.

I do not believe for even one minute that my brother’s cancer was given to him by God.  I do not believe for even one minute that the children of Sandy Hook died because it was God’s will.  I do not believe that the 316,000 people killed in the earthquake in Haiti, or the 283,000 killed by the tsunami in South Asia, were killed because it was God’s will.  When the Rev. William Sloan Coffin’s son was killed in an automobile accident, in an attempt to comfort him, and perhaps also to defend God, Coffin was told that “it it God’s will,” and Coffin thundered, “The hell it is.  When my boy was killed, God was the first who cried.”    The God that I believe in, the God that I know and read about in scripture, and the God that I worship knows what it is like to lose a son to senseless violence.  He knows what it is like to hear his son cry out in the midst of pain and suffering, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me,” and he knows the pain of watching his son take his last breath, because we are told that when that happened that the sun’s light failed and the curtain of the Temple was torn in two and I believe that that was God’s cry of pain and anguish.

But, even though we might say that everything happens for a reason, we don’t actually live our lives as if it’s true.  Because if it’s true, why do we ever go to a doctor to get better, if it’s God’s will then we will either get better or we won’t?  Why do we go to war to stop the Hitler’s of the world?  After all what they are doing is God’s will, so why are we trying to stop it?  Why do we wear seat belts, or even more why do we drive safely at all?  Why not just drive like maniacs because if it’s God’s will for us to live or die, then it’s not dependent upon what we do or don’t do?  Or more importantly for us as Christians, if everything is God’s will then we do we bother to pray, because any prayer that we lift up is just interfering with God’s plans?  With everything being God’s plan and being preordained, then prayer, which we will look at next week, is nothing more than a bunch of hot air thrown out to a God who is completely indifferent to us and to the world.

I suspect that deep down most of us do not really believe that everything is God’s plan.  As United Methodists, or at least as people who subscribe to Wesleyan theology, we also believe in free will, and that we have the ability to do God’s will and the ability not to do God’s will, and when we don’t do God’s will then bad things tend to happen.  We have within us the capacity to commit acts of absolute evil, but we also have within us the possibility to create acts of absolute beauty and love as well, but the choice lies within us.

We are told that at the beginning of creation, that everything was formless, that it was chaos, and that out of the chaos God created the earth and the heavens.  I am of the belief that creation is not done, and I see that every day I wake up.  I need look no further than my daughters to see creation still taking place, although I can see it in other places as well, and that means that there is still chaos in the world, which means that bad things happen, things that God does not ordain to happen, but which happen nonetheless.  Albert Einstein once famously said that his God did not play dice with the universe, and so he spent his life trying to disprove portions of quantum mechanics, but he was not successful.  There is even now a field of science which studies chaos theory.  This answer may be totally unsatisfactory to some of you, and obviously because of time I did not answer all concerns or all ideas, and we’ll try and touch on some of them in the next two weeks.  But here is the good news for those of you who think that what I just said is a heresy because everything is God’s will, you can’t be mad at me because it was obviously God’s will to say what I said.  And let me also say that I am not saying that God is not involved in the world, because I would not be standing here before you if God had not muddled in my life and called me into the ministry.

But here is the ultimate point: While God is not responsible for all the things we go through, the one thing we can be sure of is that God is with us as we go through them.  When we get rid of God because of our suffering or the suffering of others, we have not changed the reality of that suffering, all we have done is get rid of the only source of hope and strength and peace and assurance and healing that can be found in the midst of those events and God can bring something good out of the midst of tragedy, suffering and turmoil, not because God caused it, but because God walks with us through it.  God will be with us through everything that goes on in our lives, that is the promise we receive from God.  But today the last word comes from Rabbi Harold Kushner, who I already quoted from earlier.  His first son died of progeria, or early aging disease, at the age of 14, and he writes of the events that affect our lives, “These events do not reflect God’s choices.  They happen at random, and random is another name for chaos, in those corners of the universe where God’s creative light has not yet penetrated.  And chaos is evil; not wrong, not malevolent, but evil nonetheless, because by causing tragedies at random, it prevents people from believing in God’s goodness.”

The Ten Commandments As An Idol

There have been lots and lots of debates in the past decade or more about the display of the Ten Commandments at courthouses and other public buildings.  I noticed yesterday that the courthouse in the closest large town, which is where we go for shopping, etc., has the Ten Commandments outside of it.  I had never noticed this before.  As you enter into town there is also a large billboard with the Ten Commandments on it (it's a very conservative area).

There are lots of problems with the displays, not the least of which is the irony that most of them were placed not as a religious basis for law, but instead as publicity for Cecil B. Demille's The Ten Commandments.  The other problem is that there is not agreement on what the ten actually are, and so to post them in any form has a specific theological bent.

But the question that hit me yesterday as I saw them and thought about the Exodus story was whether we have made these tablets into another idol?  If so it is a clear violation of the very things we are supposed to be upholding.  What made me think this was the story of the golden calf found in Exodus 32.  While Moses is up on the mountain, the people ask Aaron to make them gods for them to worship as they don't know what has happened to Moses.  When God sees what they are doing God orders Moses to go down to the people, and Moses carries with him the two stone tablets with the law on them to see what is going on.

"As soon as he came near the camp and saw the calf and the dancing, Moses' anger burned hot, and he threw the tablets from his hands and broke them at the foot of the mountain.  He took the calf that they had made, burned it with fire, ground it to powder, scattered it on the water, and made the Israelites drink it." (Ex 32:19-20 NRSV)

In response to seeing the people worshipping an idol Moses breaks the tablets!  Now it could be that he did it simply because he was so mad he just threw them down, but I also think it's possible he threw them down in anger because he realized the people might make of them an idol as well.  That because they were written "with the finger of God" that the people might begin to worship them as being God instead of as something which points to God.  Did he fear that as soon as he went back up on the mountain that they would give allegiance to the tablets, like they did to the calf, and forget about God?  Then I wonder if we haven't done the same?  Is it time to break our tablets so that we can start focusing on what is truly important, and that is the worship not of laws and things in public spaces, but of God?

As a Christian I will have to admit that I am always a little puzzled by so many other Christians getting so upset about the display of the ten commandments.  When Jesus is asked by someone which commandments he should keep Jesus says`You shall not murder; you shall not commit adultery; you shall not steal; you shall not bear false witness. Honor your father and mother. Also, you shall love your neighbor as yourself.'" (Matthew 19:17-19, NRSV, also found in Mark 10:17-23.)  This led Gregg Easterbrook to recommend a compromise positions of posting the "six commandments."  (And if you aren't reading Easterbrook's Tuesday Morning Quarterback posts on ESPN you should be.)

But even more important for me is is a later interaction in Matthew: "and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. ‘Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?’ He said to him, ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.' This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: 'You shall love your neighbour as yourself.” On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.’" (Matthew 22:34-40, NRSV)

Now I don't think we should be hanging this up in courtrooms or on the lawns, but I understand that this is what we are called to do and to be as Christians.  Someone I know was recently  the guest preacher at another church and he was asked to preach on the Ten Commandments, which he was happy to do.  But I would have asked why?  Then I would have preached on this passage and expounded on what this means, including Luke's telling of the parable of the Good Samaritan, which proceeds from the question "but who is my neighbor?"

Have we missed the heart of what is going on and made the Ten Commandments an idol?  I think we have and it's time we stopped focusing on them and instead focusing on what we have actually been called to do which is to proclaim the Kingdom, for the Spirit of the Lord is upon us, and to go into the world loving God and neighbor and making disciples for Christ, or as we United Methodists say, "Make disciples of Christ for the transformation of the world."