Jesus Loves Children; Empire Kills Children

This is the rough text of a sermon preached at Emmanuel Lutheran Church in Atlanta, Georgia on the 20th of September, the 17th Sunday of Pentecost, Year B.  The Gospel reading for the day was Mark 9:30-37.   Please note that these are not exact transcriptions and that there may be some spelling and grammatical errors.

Good morning again, Emmanuel!  For those of you whom I haven’t met, let me introduce myself again, I’m Vicar Jonathan and I am blessed to be here at Emmanuel for the next two years or so.  And I am excited.  And it’s been interesting, because whenever you start a new venture, it’s really like beginning a new life as you leave behind everything that you had previously been a part of and move into what can truly be described as a new life. 

And I have to say, I love it here.  I feel so welcomed, I feel refreshed.  This new life is for me, a truly amazing thing.

And even though it is almost fall, it seems like new life is all around us right now.  A lot of friends online have been posting pictures of butterflies in various stages of transformation.  Just this morning I watched a video a friend posted of a caterpillar cocooning itself.  It was the transformation of life happening right there in front me, the journey from an old life to a new life, the leaving behind of old ways for rebirth as a new creature and it was beautiful.

And part of what Jesus is talking about in today’s Gospel reading is new life and what it means to have a new life as a result of following him. 

Mark is subtly telling us that a big part of following Jesus is following Jesus’ journey to Jerusalem.  There are multiple meanings to the fact that the Mark refers to this group as being ‘on the way’.  They are on the way to the cross, they are on the way to Jesus’ eventual death, and if we’re being honest, following Jesus means that we are on that same path of death and resurrection that Jesus is walking.

And Mark is interesting because he never really portrays the disciples in a good light, because you’d think that knowing that are walking with Jesus to his eventual death, the last thing that would be on their mind is, ‘who is the greater disciple’?  Not to mention, that at this point in time, what does it really mean to be a great disciple?  Did you catch more fish than the rest?  Maybe you collected more loaves of bread after the feeding of the 5,000.  It’s an odd question if we really think about.

But don’t we do the same thing?  Don’t we try to use worldly measures to  figure out who is the greatest?  Both individually and as a church, we place value and judgment on things in a way that shows we are really looking to figure out who is best.  We can’t just have two styles of worship that are simply different expressions, we argue how one version is so much better than another.  And that kind of misses the point, in this example worship is about God, not about demonstrating our own greatness. 

And Jesus emphasizes this point to the disciples.  Greatness, real greatness, is not about ourselves, real greatness is about others.  Real greatness comes about not by ruling over other people, but by serving other people, by caring about other people.  True greatness comes not by seizing power, but by giving up power!

So in following Christ we die to our old way of thinking and are reborn into this new understanding that reflects God’s own love and compassion.  And this really is what begins in our baptism.  We often talk about baptism as being a washing or a cleansing, and with the manner in which we baptize, a little sprinkle here and there, it’s easy to get that understanding, but the original imagery of baptism was one of drowning, where we are immersed in the water and our old self perishes while we are fully reborn as new creatures in Christ with new ways of understanding and seeing the world and a new way of living with each other and of acting towards each other.  We are changed to be great in God’s eyes by being servants to each other.

And while yes, we are called to be servants to all, throughout scripture, and again in the reading for today, we find that God continually lifts up those whom the world has cast aside, God lifts up the ones who those hold worldly power have said don’t matter, God lifts up the oppressed and says that it is in these people, in the rejected, that we find the kingdom of God.  We are called to be amongst these people.  Not to just visit, but to have real relationships with them.

The other thing that being called to be among those in need tells is that if we are called to be there, God is already there amongst them.  Working on their behalf, comforting their pain, healing their wounds.

You see, Jesus is standing against an empire.  A vast and powerful empire that does not care about the lives of the Jewish people, they have said that their lives don’t matter.  In Jesus’ teachings he continually subverts the traditions of the empire, ‘Render unto Caesar what is Caesars’ is an example of this, even the use of the term the Son of God is a subversion of a title that was used by the emperor.  Jesus is standing against the systematic oppression that faced so much of his world.

In today’s reading, Jesus takes a small child into his arms to say that whoever welcomes a child is not only welcoming Christ, but is in fact welcoming God.  While today everybody loves children and we love to have babies around and we have entire industries built around children.  The Romans didn’t quite share our opinion.  It was legal to abandon children to die, to just leave them out in the road, and it was pretty common.  The children that were picked up weren’t picked up by rich, caring folks, they were picked up and raised so that they could be sold into slavery.  And all of that is if they didn’t die of disease. 

Being a child was hard and they had no rights, no status, they were nothing.  The Jewish people didn’t abandon the children, but they still weren’t treated well.  So for Jesus to take a small child into his arms was a radical move of love and compassion.  This small act is a true act of revolution.  It takes what the empire says is the least important thing and makes it the most important thing.  Jesus says to love and protect the children, but the empire kills children.

And I have to tell you, and you already know this, but the empire is still alive and well all around us and the empire still kills children.  Our children are still dying at the hands of empire.  We’ve seen in it Florida, we’ve seen in Missouri, we’ve seen it in Ohio, we’ve seen it in Texas.  We’ve heard the names Trayvon, Michael, and Tamir.  We see what the empire has said is not important and we know that God has called us to stand with our brothers and sisters.  We know that God has said that in fact, these are the ones who are most important.  That we are called to stand against the evil in our midst.  And make no mistake, it is evil. 

This is what our servanthood looks like.  This is what Christ’s servanthood looked like.  Christ stood against an empire that said that some lives were not valuable.  We stand up and say that the lives the empire has devalued are in fact the ones that are most valuable.  That they are the ones that matter the most. 

We are not passive participants.  We stand up; We speak out.  We march.  We participate in God’s work in the world as God brings us to unity; as God brings peace, as God’s love is poured out over the earth and we are brought together in servanthood towards each other and in love of each other.

Emmanuel, we are walking this road of discipleship together.  We are called to be a presence in this community.  We are God’s light in the darkness.  We are God’s hope in the face of injustice.  We are called to be a visible part of God’s work in the world.

But I’m not going to lie, this kind of call can be frightening.  The disciples were frightened when Jesus talked about the road they were walking down.  Standing up to the forces that seek to hold us down can be terrifying. 

But faith is stronger than fear.  We put our trust in God because we know that there is no place we can go where God is not already present.  We trust that God is with us as we speak out; that God is with us as we march; that God is with us through all things.

We trust in God’s presence.

We know that God has won the battle through Christ on the cross;

We know that love triumphs over hate;

We know that love triumphs over persecution;

We know that life triumphs over death;

We know that God triumphs over all!

Brothers and sisters, we serve a God who is for us; who is actively working for our good in this world and who is constantly bringing the kingdom of God into reality; bringing light into the darkness of this world, bringing hope to us every day.

We serve a God who is with us; a God who stands against the empire and never leaves us.  A God who loves us despite our actions; a God who gives us strength;

And we serve a God who is out ahead of us; clearing a path for us; making a way for us to move in the world and constantly working for our good.  We are called into a new life through Christ where greatness is measured by servanthood and love is the ultimate currency. 

In spite of the threat that the empire poses to us, we already know the end of the story.  We know that God wins.  We know that through the cross, the forces of sin and darkness cannot prevail.  Brothers and sisters, love wins.  God wins.  The empire loses and God will reign over all creation; God’s justice will prevail; God’s mercy will cover us all and God’s love will bring us together in unity, in equality, in love. And because of that, we can truly say, thanks be to God.  Amen.

A Barrier Breaking God

So I recently started my tenure as the vicar at Emmanuel Lutheran church in Atlanta, Georgia.  I've decided to start using this blog to share my sermons.  Please note that these are not exact transcriptions and that there may be some spelling and grammatical errors.  

Pentecost 14B 30 August 2015  

Well, I guess first I should probably introduce myself.  I’ve met a lot of you, but I have a feeling a few of you are thinking, who is this person?  Well, I’m Jonathan and I’m the new vicar here at Emmanuel.  That just basically means that I’m in an internship as part of my journey to, hopefully, be ordained as a pastor after this.  And I’m really excited to be here.  A few other things about me;  I also work at the Center’s for Disease Control and am doing my seminary studies through Luther Seminary in St Paul, Minnesota.  But, the more important thing to know about me is my family.  My wife, Elizabeth, and I have been married for over 10 years and have been together for about 15 years.  We have one son, TJ, who is 2 and is visiting my parents this weekend.  Rounding out the family in Atlanta is Chris, my mother-in-law.  So my family is very important to me.

And I’m sure that like many of you, after we got married, we made certain that our household had rules.  You talked about things you do and things you never do.  It helps keep order.  It helps create an environment where everybody can live together in harmony.  So rules, in and of themselves, are not bad.  They help set a stage where people can live together. 

And the setting for today’s gospel reading is a discussion about rules.  More specifically, it’s a discussion between Jesus and the Pharisees about Jewish law about what is required of members of the faith.  The religious rulers of the day are questioning why Jesus is not following the customs of the time which dictated certain requirements regarding washing before meals.  Now let’s be clear that the requirements that the Pharisees articulate have no biblical basis.  There is nowhere in the Torah where these rules are written.  They truly are customs that have grown out of traditions and over time have become requirements so that whether or not a person does or does not perform them is now a basis for assessing how truly Jewish they are. 

Jesus first responds by essentially calling the Pharisee’s out on creating these laws.  He let’s them know that in their actions they are only paying lip service to God’s laws while adhering to the laws of man, to the traditions of the elders. 

So when confronted with the accusations that he is subverting the law and is in some way making himself an outsider, Jesus expands the conversation to talk about what it is that truly pollutes a person, whether it is something that enters a person from the outside, in which case ritual washing would be a benefit, or if the root of evil actually comes from within a person. 

And Jesus’s response to the Pharisee’s is somewhat surprising, because he tells them that evil comes from within, that, in effect, we are, when left to our own devices, truly sinful being; what we produce is sin.  We are to blame for the things in this world that separate us from each other and that separate us from God.  We create the systems that hurt each other and deny each other our rights.  We create hunger, fear, injustice and oppression. 

We can’t cast that off onto some supernatural force because it’s our own sinfulness that creates the evil we find in this world. 

Jesus tells us that we are the originators of evil, but it’s also important to remember that we are also all victims of this evil too.  We have all in some way been hurt by the systems and the rules that have been put into place.  We have all been made to feel less than human, we have all been excluded from participation in the greater society.  We may be the creators of the laws that exclude and oppress, but we are also the victims.

The Pharisees are operating as if there is something that they can do to keep this evil out of their body but then Jesus turns their world around by telling them that there is nothing that can be done to keep it out because the evil they are seeking to avoid in fact originates within them, this evil originates in us and there is nothing that we can do to prevent being stained with sin.   

And it’s important to recognize that Jesus is not rejecting law in a general sense in this text.  Jesus is rejecting the law of man.  Jesus is holding strong to the laws of God, to the laws given in the Torah.  And don’t misunderstand, the Pharissee’s weren’t seeking to do bad, these practices are the result of hundred’s of years of interpretation of the Torah to try and help folks live out and apply God’s laws; but because of our nature, they, and we, end up corrupting it so that instead of following a set of laws intended to bring humanity together and to direct all of our focus to God.  We end up creating divisions, excluding our brothers and sisters.  Telling one group that they are not worthy.

And it’s not a problem that was unique to that period in history.  We haven’t overcome this.  The church has a bad history of misusing God’s revealed Word in the Bible to hurt people, to exclude people, to justify evil things being done.  It’s why the church was able to justify slavery and to stay quiet during the jim crow era.  It’s why the church turned a blind eye to apartheid for so long and why it ignores the apartheid situation in modern day Palestine.  And it’s also how congregations and people today continue to exclude the LGBT community and to treat our brothers and sisters like they have done something wrong by living as God created them.  We have created these barriers to entry.  We have misused the law to punish people. 

But God’s laws are very different than human rules.  Human rules are about punishment, but God’s laws are about relationship.  God’s laws lead us to loving God and to loving our neighbor.  We create barriers and push people away, but God breaks barriers.  This is what Jesus was doing, he was breaking down the barriers that the Pharisee’s and the traditions of the elders had erected so that he and the disciple’s could eat with the people the elite’s had deemed unworthy.  And what does it mean to keep God’s law except to show love and compassion to all those in need.

God’s laws aren’t designed to push people away, but God’s laws are designed to call people to God, to show God’s mercy and grace to a world so in need of it.  How do we know this?  Look at the Deuteronomy text for today.  God’s law draws the outsider in, it produces justice, God’s law shows compassion.  God law is not just welcoming, God’s law is actively inviting people into a relationship with God.  God’s law was given so that people would recognize their need for God.  And in recognizing that, we begin to recognize what God has been and continues to do for us each and every day. 

We love a barrier breaking God who through Christ seeks to unify all of creation.  God’s love is not set aside for a certain few, but God actively reaches out to those we have pushed aside and calls out to them.  God stand with those that our barrier creating laws pushed aside.  Because of that we can find God where people are fighting to end to racism, sexism and we can find God where people are fighting to end homophobia.  Because God is a welcoming and loving God and God calls and empowers us to be welcoming and loving towards each other. 

God’s heart is open to us and we are empowered by the spirit to open our hearts to others because exclusion is unsustainable.  A closed heart is at some point going to stop beating.

So a couple of weeks ago, Pastor William shared with us this vision he had of the future for Emmanuel and it was a vision of the parking lot overflowing and of cars parked on the grass and of our building filled with people of all types and from all different backgrounds standing united as we worship together.  And the text today just made think about that because that is what happens when those barriers we have created start to fall.  When we become doers of God’s word, not just hearers of it, to borrow from the James text for today.  When we show love and compassion to the people we may have previously pushed aside. 

So what if…  What if Emmanuel became known in the community for being a place of inclusion.  A place where people were not just welcomed, but a place where people felt invited to be a part of this community.  What if we were known as community that was filled with people of all colours, all political stripes, all sexualities?  What if we reflected the beautiful diversity of God’s creation? 

Because God is a barrier breaking God, we are called to be a barrier breaking church. 

As a final point, it’s interesting that Jesus and the Pharisees are talking about purification and a perceived need for continued washing in order to be made clean.  And I say it’s interesting because there is, ultimately, some truth in the underlying thoughts of the Pharisees.  But rather than being a ritual washing that we do, we are reminded that in our baptism, God has broken down the barriers of sin and death and raised us as new creature’s in Christ and in that ‘daily baptism’ the Luther describes, God continually breaks down that barrier of sin that tries to separate us from God so that we might be freed to love and serve God and our neighbor.  And it’s because God has torn down those barriers that we might tear down the barriers that separate us from each other in order to experience God’s love as one unified body of Christ.  And because of that, we can truly say, thanks be to God.  Amen.

We all need teammates...

It is July and that, generally speaking, has one main meaning for me... the start of the Tour de France.  I love it, I love cycling.  I used to race... a lot... and I loved it, and I just devoured anything I could find about bike racing.

And I said earlier that I love bike racing.  I should probably say I loved bike racing... past tense.  And it was the drugs that did it.  I ended up racing with some guys who raced against the big names (think, Lance).  And there was a massive gap between myself and these guys that was all due to natural talent.  But then I watched those same guys barely hold onto the main group against the European pro's and it was obvious that something wasn't right.

And so I got disillusioned and I stopped racing...

But the other day I was watching the tour again and explaining the tactics being employed by the teams on a mountain stage.  And my mother-in-law turned and said, 'wow, you really need a team to win this.'  And that sentiment often comes as a surprise to people who only see the individual glory of the winner.  They don't understand that there's a whole group of people blocking the wind for the leader, bringing the leader food, giving up a wheel or their bike to the leader if that's what's needed, sacrificing themselves so that somebody else can win.

So I actually got excited about the fundamentals of bike racing and I realized that it's a great analogy for how we are called to live as Christians.

We need a team.  Our lives are going to be more enjoyable, more fulfilling, more an expression of love and caring when we have a community around us to share in our lives.

When we go it alone, we generally don't succeed.  Watch any flat stage of a grand tour and you'll always see one guy or a couple of guys go off the front and try and launch a solo charge for the win.  With few exceptions, these always fail.  We are not called to live in isolation, but to live in relationships with others.

Sometimes we need to put others before ourselves.  We can't all be the leader.  Very often, we willing sacrifice our own wants and desires so that somebody else can achieve theirs.  That's what true love and caring entails, putting others ahead of ourselves.

Sometimes our leaders are servants.  Sometimes you will see a team leader give of himself to help a teammate win (this often is when the teammate is the stronger rider on the day, so the analogy kinda breaks apart here, but go with it..).  Christ is our leader who gave himself for our sake.  And that servant leadership is what we should aspire to.

So this whole post may be a 'Jesus Juke', but it was interesting to watch the Tour and think about how the interaction of the cyclists and the tactics being employed demonstrated so many real concepts about how I understand how we should act in our daily lives.

So did I got a step to far with this one?  Or did I leave something out?  Or do you really not care about cycling but would much rather hear my theories about football is popular because it reflects the way the world works?

The Power of Social Media

With all of the recent goings on in Egypt (See a good overview of articles from the BBC here), I was thinking about the role that social media played in organizing the initial uprisings last year and of how social media devices were used in Iran and elsewhere.

The power of these tools to help organize like minded people and to help them develop a sense of solidarity was/is amazing.  These are people who had/have been held down under rather totalitarian regimes for years (and yes, I recognize the massive differences between the situation in Egypt and the situation in Iran and I am not trying suggest that the experiences of the people in each country are same) and they would have very major challenges to organize and form the mass groups that actually succeeded in overthrowing the government in Egypt (thought I think the fact that the military largely stood by as a third party and let it happen probably had a lot to do with it too.  (and if you think that the military isn't the real power in Egypt, I invite you to look at the recent ouster of the democratically elected government and the replacement, on a 'temporary' basis, of ousted democratically elected politicians.

Digital media has let us see what was happening in these countries and spread the word so that when the governments attempted to crack down on protestors and turn off the internet, users in other countries came together in solidarity to figure out ways to keep the voices of the protest movement heard throughout the world.  In the case of twitter, users could phone in their tweets and they would be transcribe them and repost them for the world to see.  (This is also a great study of how large groups of people can convene temporarily to solve a problem and then disperse to do other things, new models of learning at work!)

So I think about how powerful a toold we have for engaging in world changing activities and I see people tweeting about where a star NBA player will sign, or complaining about the rain canceled their fourth of July fireworks, and it makes me wonder if people do realize what a massive powerful tool is literally at our fingertips.

I don't think people realize it.  It's been marketed as entertainment, but it's truly a tool of revolution.  It can be used to call out oppression, to organize for change, to help usher in a more fair and just world.

Or we can talk more about Kim and Kanye's baby.

What you do you think?  Tool or toy?

Proper posting or a 'Pinterest Pastor'?

So I stumbled across this article today about ‘Pinterest Pastors’ and had to read it.  Now upfront, I’ll say that I do not have a pinterest account and my familiarity with it comes entirely from my mother in law, who has an undying love for it and routinely shares recipes or other ideas with my wife and I.  My wife uses it to collect ideas like a virtual mood board when she’s designing shows, but that’s about it. 

That said, I think that the concerns that are raised about how pinterest can inspire both boasting and feelings of jealousy are well taken and I think that they apply to social media in general.  Depending on how we use social media, we can feel guilty and get depressed because our friends are all off at the beach or traveling the European countryside while we’re back home in the office for just another day. 

Or, we are always posting super trips we’re going on, talking about ourselves, and some more about ourselves, and then even more about ourselves before we wrap up the day with a post about ourselves. 

And really, nobody likes either person.  Both are so curved in on themselves (thanks, St Augustine!) that they can’t really participate in the outside world in a meaningful way. 

But, and here is the key thing, their biggest mistake is that they are not listening to others.  Their social media connections become a megaphone instead of a walkie-talkie.  They are lacking in balance.  While we don’t want to be a lurker, we don’t want to be the 500 foot billboard that blots out the sky.

So instead we need to listen, to hear what our friends are saying, be supportive of them, share our own stories, but not in a boastful way, and then listen some more. 

My wife says that when she is teaching theatrical design she will ask the students what the first three steps of the design process are.  She receives a variety of suggestions, but correct answer is to ‘read the script.  2. Read the script. And 3. Read the script.’  In social media the three primary rules are: Listen; listen; and listen. 

Then you can speak.

Are you a pinterest pastor?  (or a pinterest lay person?)

Racism, Paula Deen, and the Supreme Court

Professor Hess talks about the need to be actively anti-racist in her book and this is a sentiment that resonates with me.  And I was thinking about that this past week with the whole Paula Deen ‘scandal’ and the decisions by the Supreme Court that gutted affirmative action and the Voting Rights Act.  I haven’t seen a lot of people tie the two together, but think about it, the Supreme Court is effectively saying that, ‘no, race isn’t a problem in the country anymore.  We don’t need this crazy old provision to ensure access to silly things like job, education or the ability to participate in democracy.  We’re a post-racial society now!’  And then the next story says something to the effect of ‘Paula Deen was fired from the Food Network because of admitted use of the ‘N-word’.’ 

But remember kids, we don’t think racially anymore.  Really? 

Now, I’ll not try an pretend that I know if Paula Deen is a racist or not, but I do know that in the south, that term is still used and even if it was 20 years ago, she should have known then that it was wrong.  Though if she didn’t use the word, there has been recent footage of her suggesting that a black employee was as dark as the black backdrop he was standing against, and needed to move so that the people could see the assistant, and that suggests some kind of ingrained lack o awareness and insensitivity that is almost as bad as saying the n-word.  She may not be a racist, but damn, some of the stuff she has done (on film!) has been quite racially insensitive.

And so where are we today?  Well, we have people who grew up hearing the word and have realized, ‘wow, that’s hateful and wrong’ and are teaching their kids differently.  Unfortunately, we also people who don’t understand why it’s so offensive to refer to any group of people by a racial slur, or worse, actively wonder why ‘they can say it, so why can’t we?’ 

Why do you want to say it?  Also, have you ever heard of the concept of empowerment/disempowerment?  If they take ownership of a term, it might be less hurtful when an idiot like you says it. 

I have only ever known one person who I feel used the word without understanding it was mean, and that was my grandmother, who immediately after starting a story with, ‘you know, we had a ‘n-word’ family that lived down the street from us.’ And then followed it up with, ‘I just don’t know why people were so mean to them.  They were just like us.  We are were just poor and trying to get along.  It just wasn’t right.’  I’ll also mention that she was in her mid 80’s and in the early stages of alzheimers, but I actually believe that at that point in her life she didn’t understand it was not a good term because of the alzheimers.  I don’t condone it, but a story like that is probably that one case I can think of.

But in spite of these attitudes, and in spite of the persistence of stereotypes in society, we’re told that the protections of the law are no longer needed, that we all truly have equal opportunity now, cause it’s a post racial society!

It bothers me.  It bothers me to watch people try and defend this racism and prejudice.  We have to stand up to this kind of quiet hate. 

But then sometimes I get discouraged and I think that perhaps Avenue Q had it right.. 

Oh, I will give the Supreme Court their due for doing the right thing regarding DOMA.

Is this the future of churches and technology?

So I came across this article about Joel Olsteen's use of social media in his evangelism and I'm curious to hear what others think about it.

Click 'Pray' to Pray: How Evangelical Megapastor Joel Olsteen is Saving Souls With Facebook