Reformation On-going

Text: John 8:31-35
October 29, 2006

This is a big day for Martin Luther. We sing hymns that he wrote, and we hear his words quoted. The Lutheran church worldwide is especially proud of Martin Luther on this day, and will celebrate the day more energetically than most other Protestant denominations. You would be forgiven if you thought that the name of this day was Martin Luther Sunday.

But it is not. This is Reformation Sunday. What we celebrate today is The Reformation. That period about 500 years ago when the unity of the formal Christian church was shattered. Though there had been major splits in the church before, in the Reformation the very idea of what the Christian church was made of changed. It wasn’t Luther who made this happen. Forces were already weakening the Roman church. Luther was just the right man in the right place.

Lutherans and other Protestant churches celebrate the Reformation because that was the time of their incubation. Without the Reformation there would be no Lutherans or Methodists or UCC or Disciples of Christ or Baptists or any of the hundreds and maybe thousands of Christian denominations.

Not everybody sees this as good news, all these little grouping of Christians, and during the Reformation most people thought the upheaval in the church was bad news. Luther himself was unhappy about how things went. He was not interested in breaking the church apart. He would have not been pleased to see a denomination named after him, as we Lutherans have done. “What is Luther,” he said, “After all, the teaching is not mine. Neither was I crucified for anyone.”

Luther sought reform, not replacement. He was a “work in the system” kind of guy. The system was broken, he thought, and he had a few ideas about what was wrong and how to fix it. But he was surprised at what he helped cause. For a long time he thought that if the Pope were only made aware of the problems in the church, he would move to fix them and everything would be ok again. Luther’s early letters to the Pope are heartbreaking and naïve, saying essentially, “I think you are a great guy; why are you letting these bad things happen?”

When we see how the Christian churches are going at each other, we might join Luther in having mixed feelings. So what we celebrate today is not so much the period of the Reformation (capital R) but the idea of reformation (lower case r).

All organizations need reforming from time to time. Good starts and good intentions break down either because an organization forgets its mission or allows it to be corrupted, or because the mission is good but the implementation is not. So a hospital may begin to think that its mission is to make money for its shareholders instead of caring for people. Or a government may begin to think that its mission is to protect the holdings of the rich few instead of the well-being of the many. Or a church may begin to think that its mission is to keep things orderly, privileged, and successful instead of to bring about God’s realm of peace, healing, and justice.

Or the mission may be on track and the execution not. So the hospital may harm people through poor controls and standards, or the government through corruption and cowardice, or the church through greediness for power, success, and admiration.

The church exists so that people may know God. Worship and teaching and service and music and all the other things we do provide ways for people to know God, each person in his or her own way. There is no single path to knowing God, so the church’s most important task is to say what it knows and share what it experiences and teach what it has figured out so far and to nourish people in their faith, and then to get out of the way. The church’s most constant job is to remove barriers between people and God.

We are slaves, as Jesus says, to many things in this world. His audience takes him literally and protests. We are not and have never been slaves to anybody, they say. But Jesus knows that our masters are many. What are the things that boss you around? What are the things that keep you from doing what you know is right? What are the things that make you do what you know is wrong? Those are our masters. When fear is strong in us, we are not ourselves. We are someone else’s. We belong to someone, something else. “A slave to sin” is another way to say this. It feels sometimes is as if we were trying to get through a door, except there is this big guy in our way, blocking the passage. Or as if people have put up Jersey barriers, like they do in construction projects, and our way which seems like it should be short, direct, and pleasant winds all around in annoying detours.

The job of the church is to make those barriers ineffective. Either by removing them, or by showing us that they are not really substantial and permanent, just flimsy and fake. Margaret Payne, the bishop of the New England Synod, wrote about the job of the church this way: “By means of worship, courage, compassion, and teaching, to remove all barriers that resist God’s transforming power.”

All too often, though, the church does the opposite. It puts up barriers. You can’t come in, it says, because of the rules, because of the way you are, because of the way we are. So Paul writes in Romans about how the rules of the church in his should not be used to keep out the pagans who wish to follow Jesus. So Luther speaks out against a church that insisted on mediating between God and people. So Paul extends access to the church to gentiles so that all might follow Jesus. And Luther translates the Bible into the everyday language of the people so all might hear the word of God.

A theologian writes about the ongoing nature of faith. “Now, faith, is a living thing … It is not a once-for-all accomplishment. It is not a possession, like a Visa card, that some have and others don’t. It is an ongoing response to God, to the world, to life. It is therefore a matter of decision—taken not once, but over and over again.” So the church, grounded in faith, and renewed through trust in the ongoing and often surprising guidance of God, is formed over and over again.

In a moment [ ... ] will be installed as the vicar here at Faith. She will take on a role as a leader in the Lutheran church. And she will take another step on her path that, God willing, will lead her to ordained ministry.

[ ... ], there is no perfect church that calls you. There is no church known by human beings that is right now complete and true. There is only—as Luther and his friends wrote— there is only an assembly of those who gather to hear the gospel of Jesus and to share in his supper. There is only a church that works daily, over and over again, to free people from the barriers that keep us from God. There is only a church in constant reformation.

Where Do You Want to Sit, John?

October 22, 2006
Text: Mark 10:35-45

Last week the Greater Boston Food Bank held a luncheon for the people who work in what they call agencies. The Food Bank is where we get almost all our food for Faith Kitchen, and we are an agency. An agency is some organization that feeds people by giving them food or serving them meals, as Faith Kitchen does. Once a month someone from Faith goes down to the Food Bank in Boston, loads cases of fresh, canned, and frozen food into a van, and brings it back here so we can make meals for hungry people. Every month we pick up between 300 and 600 pounds of food. It costs us anywhere from nothing to $30 for all that food.

There are many agencies. We are one of the smaller ones. Last year through the agencies the Food Bank distributed 25 million pounds of food in the Boston area. That’s 70,000 pounds of food a day.

The luncheon was held on the 25th anniversary of the Food Bank, and it was held to honor the agencies. At the tables, about a thousand people sat, people who in one way or another worked to help people who were hungry get food to eat.

There were lots of congratulatory speeches, saying how great the agencies were. Tom Menino, the mayor of Boston was there, and so was Senator Ted Kennedy. The speeches and the bigwigs were there to make the agencies feel good about themselves, good about their work feeding hungry people.

The meal we ate was great. (Almost as good as a meal at Faith Kitchen.) And it was good to meet people from other agencies, just ordinary people. But I think all the praises made a lot of people queasy. It made us queasy because I bet there was not a person in that room who fed people in order to be praised. There was not a person in that room who fed people in order to get a pat on the back and a fancy meal. There was not a person in that room who fed people in order to sit next to a mayor or senator.

And it made us feel queasy because though there were lots of speeches telling us how good we were, we agencies were, there was not one speech about hungry people.

It is so easy to divide people into givers and getters. Between, in the jargon, providers and clients. In the hunger business it is especially easy. Some people serve other people. From there it is easy to say “people of a particular kind serve other people of a different kind.” At Faith Kitchen the structure tries to work against making those distinctions. People who come to eat help cook, and people who come to cook eat. That is happening more and more, but even so, differences appear to be evidence for judgment. Even people at the Food Bank seem to feel confident about who is the giver and who the getter.

James and John ask to sit next to Jesus. People see in this passage in the Gospel of Mark a power grab by the two disciples. We want to sit next to you, at your left and your right, they say to Jesus. And the other disciples get annoyed. Indignant, the passage says. We imagine them to be jealous. They wanted those seats themselves. Jesus tells them all, Sorry, those spots are not mine to grant.

Just before these verses, Jesus has told his disciples once again (for the third and last time), that he is on his way to Jerusalem, going to a certain and painful death. One way to look at the request of James and John is that they are looking beyond this prediction to a better time when their party will be in power, in glory, as they say. They are looking to escape the inevitable sorrows of this world. And they want Jesus to do something for them.

But perhaps not. Perhaps there is another way to read it. Perhaps their request is a sign of solidarity with Jesus. After hearing the horrible prediction, they say to Jesus, we are with you all the way. I’m on your right hand, says one. I’m on your left, says the other. We’ve got your back. They are willing to immerse themselves in the sorrows of the world. They want to do something for Jesus.

And when Jesus says to them, Do you know what you are getting yourselves into, do you know what you are asking, can you take it, they say, Yeah, we can. We are able.

Jesus makes it pretty clear to the disciples that being privileged is not what following him is all about. You don’t get special seats for being a Christian. You don’t get to hobnob with the mayor and the senator. What you get to do is to serve with Jesus. I’ve come not to be served but to serve, he says.

But we have got to be careful not to confuse service with authority, with goodness, with power. We have to be careful not to think that serving others is a way to establish our goodness, our righteousness. Do we think we are better for serving meals at Faith Kitchen than those who come to eat those meals? If so, I don’t think that’s what Jesus had in mind when he said, I’ve come to serve.

We are called to serve others not because we are good. It is not our greatness of character that drives us to serve others. It is not our special skill, it is not our super-compassion, it is not our education, it is not the expectation of our mentors and parents. It is not the prospect of a fancy meal in Boston, or the praises of politicians, or days in heaven.

We serve because others exist. It is the call for help, quiet or loud, subtle or obvious, that leads us to serve. We serve food because others are hungry, not because we are such great food-servers. You give to the beggar because he needs you to. You nurture your young children because they need you to. You take care of your aging parents because they need you to. You visit the prisoners and the home-bound because they need you to. You listen to your colleague go on and on about her spouse because she needs you to. Our sacrifices—for our friends, families, spouses, neighbors, country, co-workers, teammates, strangers—giving up our time, our leisure, our chances, our money, sometimes our lives—we make sacrifices because people need us to. Not because we are so great.

Which is good for us, because people sacrifice for us not because they are so great, either. But because we need them to.

Serving others is not a chore or an obligation. It is how we bind ourselves together. It is why the guests at the Food Bank luncheon felt unduly acclaimed. In his remarks, Mayor Menino said that though the Food Bank had done great things in Boston, it was his hope that in the next 25 years there would be no need for a Food Bank, because there would be no hunger. He got it right. The Food Bank and all those agencies exist because people need them. Though feeding people is great and praiseworthy, we do it because people are hungry.

We come asking for help and guidance and healing and new life from Christ, who responds not because he is good—though that certainly is true—and not because he is powerful. But we know that Christ will serve us because we need him to.

Today, Tobias is baptized. Just now, he was welcomed into the Lord’s family, a child of God, and a worker with all in the kingdom of God. Now a follower of Christ, he has been welcomed to be cared for by Christ and, as he promised through his adults, to care for others and the world God made, and work for justice and peace among all people.

Loving and following Jesus is not an escape from the world. Jesus is not some buffer, some insulation and isolation from a demanding, difficult, and needy world. Jesus comes to be in that world. Impatient with the ten who are thinking not of human things but of heavenly things, he tells them he comes to serve. And it is because the world needs him to. To follow Jesus is not to escape from the world, but to be in solidarity with it.

Babes in the Woods

October 8, 2006
Text: Mark 10:2-16
Preacher: Pastor Stein

The Pharisees were wise in the ways of the world. They knew what’s what. They weren’t babes in the woods. They had been around. They weren’t born yesterday.

So when they asked Jesus this question about divorce, they already knew the answer. They were not trying to get new information. They were trying to trip Jesus up. To catch him in making a political mistake. Maybe he’d say something stupid that would get him into trouble with the authorities. The authority in this case being King Herod, the guy who earlier had had John the Baptist’s head served on a platter because John had criticized Herod’s own peculiar marriage arrangements. Maybe the Pharisees could get Jesus into trouble. For they knew how things worked in the world.

Against the worldly wisdom of the Pharisees Jesus sets before us the little children. This is not the first time in the Gospel of Mark that Jesus has used children as an example to the disciples. Earlier (as we heard a few weeks ago here) he told them that they had to welcome even children, a radical statement in days when children were like property and not yet persons. They, the disciples (and us, of course), were being told: welcome even outcasts. It is a little different in today’s reading. Today, instead of telling them they should be nice to children, Jesus tells them they should be as children. Be like children. If anyone wants to enter the kingdom of God, Jesus says, he or she must receive it as a little child.

This is kind of a riddle. And the riddle goes like this: how is a child not like a Pharisee? We modern types might answer from a sentimental and romanticized picture of children. Children are portrayed as sweet and innocent, powerless and pliable, not mean or greedy,. Painted in pastels, so to speak. But as parents know, that is often as not wishful thinking. And that certainly was not the view people had of children when Jesus spoke these words to the disciples.

But one thing we can say about children and Pharisees is this: Pharisees are old and children are new. Pharisees are experienced and children are without experience.

Being new, children have three things that Pharisees seem to have lost.

First, being new, children have no past. (For a little while, anyway.) No past means no regrets. It also means no grudges, no revenge, no payback. No unrequited loves, no disrepute, no careers made or broken.

Second, being new, children live in wide adventure. I’m not sure it feels like an adventure to children, but all that we know was once unknown to us. Every fact was once a mystery, every conclusion once a question.

And third, being new, children seem to approach life with enthusiastic expectations. I don’t mean that children don’t know sorrow or think that everything is and will be great. I mean that their expectations of life are spirited and energetic and eager.

The rest of us, being old, know a little about life. We, like the Pharisees, are wise in the ways of the world. But our wisdom has not always come in pleasant packages. We have had too many experiences that, as they say, build character. Relationships do not always work out, futures do not always unfold as we hope they will. People we admired turn out to be jerks. People we depended on turn out to be untrustworthy. People have been mean, or stupid, or corrupt, or unfair, or just weak when we needed them to be strong. Our luck has been bad: the bus pulled away just as we arrived to catch it, the door closed, the opportunity snatched by another. Not that life is bleak, but that the path from there to here has had a few rocks on it, sometime pebbles, sometimes boulders.

The Pharisees come to Jesus with dumb questions and nasty motives. Who knows exactly what they were thinking? Maybe they were afraid that Jesus teachings would disrupt a way of life that they found comfortable. Or even found good and true and right. Or maybe they felt he was disrespecting their discipline and training. Or maybe someone whom they valued or depended on told them to. I don’t know. They were doing the kind of thing that people do based on their experience of the world and other people and their ideas about how things work and should work. But the Pharisees in this story don’t seem happy to me.

The promise of Christianity is new life. Another way to say this is a life healed. Another way to say this is a life restored. Another way to say this is a life saved. The aches and bruises that result from our stumbles on those rocky paths need no longer control us. Not that everybody and everything will treat us right, but that the wrongs will not be such overwhelming burdens.

When Jesus speaks about children and the kingdom of God, he is not making up rules and requirements. He is stating an observation. The promise of new life that he offers is relief and rest for those who hold so tight to those burdens. What we hope to find is a way for us to come to God and to life in exactly the way children are different from Pharisees. What we hope for in Jesus, what we pray for, what we trust he will do, is to enable us to be as new as children.

That our past will no longer control us. That, being as children, we may live without regret and not driven to revenge and retribution, or engulfed in guilt and clothed in shame, but that we may know that we are forgiven.

That we may no longer be indifferent, living withdrawn and insulated and isolated. That, being as children, we may see our lives ahead as an adventure, not being nonchalant but welcoming surprise.

And that we may no longer think ahead dispiritedly, anticipating disappointment and disillusionment. That, being as children, we may have enthusiastic expectations for this life and for a promised life to come.

Like the Pharisees, we know what’s what. We have been around. Yet we hope to be as ones born yesterday into a new life. We hope that as the children were by Jesus, we may be embraced by God and blessed.

Vital Mutants

October 1, 2006 Text: Mark 9:38-50

In institutions there is a tendency to favor structure over vitality. Even though, as in the body, it is the vitality of the parts that strengthens and preserves the whole. Our living, energetic cells, constantly moving and making, keep us intact and sturdy. The structure of an institution is a myth. Without vitality, there is no structure. Without vitality, structure is death, like a snail shell without the snail, a skeleton without breath.

I’m talking here about the church. Not this church in particular but the wider Christian church. The church is an institution, and it seems in constant battle about its bones and its boundaries. How is it defined, what are its fundamentals, what is central, who is in and who is excommunicated, who has the power to decide and who has the power to change things. God created the church, our theology says, but then we act as if God moved to Florida, like an absentee landlord, and left us alone in charge of the property.

And when we are alone, we build institutions. Not because we are perverse, but because there is no way we can run things unless we are organized. Any group larger than a couple of handfuls of people develops a bureaucracy. With officers and rules of authority and specialization.

The Bible is peppered with stories of the beginning of the church. The Bible is the story of people’s discovery of and relationship to God, but it is the story mostly of groups of people.

Both the first reading and the gospel reading today tell of moments of transition. One in the growth of Israel and the other in the growth of Christianity. The question is: If the church is to expand, who can speak for it? It is like the transition that happens in an entrepreneurial venture. Somebody has a vision and gets things going. A small group forms. In the early days there is little to organize. Everyone does everything, there are few specialists or experts, there are no traditions to honor. The people involved are not necessarily the best in their fields and are not necessarily smart or skillful. They are the people who are available and eager, a lot like the disciples of Jesus, who in Mark are clueless but persistent.

Moses was the leader of Israel. He made all the decisions. When things went well, Moses got the credit. When things went badly, he got the grief. As in today’s event in the desert. You brought us out here, says the Israelites—who, remember, Moses led out of slavery—you brought us here to eat nothing but manna. We hate manna. Remember how great it was in Egypt? Slaves or no, we got fresh fish for nothing, fresh vegetables, fruits, garlic. Give us meat to eat!

Moses sees this is a crisis not of provisioning but of organization. I’ve had enough, he tells God. I cannot do this by myself. I am not able to carry this people all alone, for they are too heavy for me. If this is the way it is going to be, I’m out of here. Fire me before I quit.

But God sees that Moses needs some organizational help. Time for a little bureaucracy. Time for a little hierarchy. And God takes some of Moses authority and spreads it around. God “took some of the spirit [of Moses},” it says, “and put it on” seventy middle-managers,.

The middle managers, which by our time in the church means bishops and pastors and deacons, exist to preserve order. In particular, to preserve the orderly transmission of the message. The message of Jesus, in the case of the church. The word “ordination” comes from the word “to order.” Ordination does not convey special powers. Ordained ministers agree to maintain orderly theology. To keep the message as free from noise as possible. They are the fiber optics of the church, one way of connecting people to Jesus.

In the psalm today are beautiful verses telling how “one day tells its tale to another” and thus their message is carried to the whole world. The institution of the clergy is supposed to do the same sort of thing, each telling the ones following who in turn tell the ones after them. It is like DNA, passed on from one cell to another, creating beings in perfect copy.

But it doesn’t work. Not in biology or in the church. It doesn’t work not because the copy mechanism is imperfect. It doesn’t work because a perfect copy is not the right thing. Neither the church nor a species can survive if it remains unchanged over time. The environment changes and creatures change with it.

In biology, mutation introduces change, new and unpredicted elements. It’s part of the system.

In the church, also, a kind of mutation introduces change. People on the outside: prophets, iconoclasts, heretics, the unschooled, seers and mystics, doubters and skeptics, contrarians. When the seventy gathered with Moses, two were left out: Eldad and Medad. The others protested; Eldad and Medad were speaking without authorization. Joshua calls out in alarm: Moses, stop them. But Moses will not. He knows that they are necessary to the survival of Israel.

The disciples of Jesus complain in the same way. Teacher, someone was healing people in your name, but he was not one of us. We tried to stop him. But Jesus tells his disciples: Let them be.

The seamless transmission of doctrine and story from one generation to the next provides continuity that keeps the message alive. But the seamlessness of it makes it hard for God to get a word in edgewise. How can God affect the church when each generation is a perfect copy of the previous one? Those in the institution of the church have to be careful to listen for the voice of God in those who seem to be out of it.

No one knows in advance which mutations will be helpful and which not. Martin Luther was named a heretic and a contract put out on him. He survived, and his words and actions re-formed the church. He had a big impact, we can see, 500 years later.

Not every change is so radical. Who are the carriers of beneficial mutations now? Who is the Eldad or Medad of this day? Who is healing without authority? Whose words is God using to re-form our church now? Are they coming from the academy, the street, from the left or the right, from some Lutheran somewhere in Minnesota or some post-Christian poet? Are they coming from someone here in this gathering today?

The church is not the orderly parts of it. Not the seventy elders and the twelve disciples and the Synods and Assemblies and clergy. They are the staff, for convenience and order. The church is the body of Christ. Formed and re-formed everyday by the life and energy and wonder of all who gather. Formed and re-formed by you.