Use Your Words

Text: Jeremiah 1:1-10 January 28, 2006

Words matter. They are not just ways to label the world. They influence how we see the world. What categories we have for things. How we perceive things, how we perceive time. People—like advertisers or politicians—try to put words in our brains so that we will see the world and our place in it in a particular way. When we see things, we attach them to categories we already have words for. New ideas take a while to take hold because they either demand new words or new ways of using old words.

The words for things we think a lot about seem to take up a lot of space in our heads, and things that are not so important take up less space. There is less chatter there. But the reverse is true, too. If we spend a lot of time with the words of an idea, we begin to think a lot about it. Partly, that’s what education is. Partly that’s why TV is so powerful. And books. It makes a difference in your head depending on whether you read a lot of murder mysteries or The New York Times or Consumer Reports or the Bible.

It turns out the on the piano, in the key of C major all the notes are played on the white keys. C D E F G A B C. In the key of A minor, also, all the notes are played on the white keys. A B C D E F G A. Same notes. This is pretty “duh” if you know music, so please bear with me a moment. But if you know nothing about music, as I know nothing, you might find this pretty mysterious, as I did until last week, when I read a book explaining it (the book is called This Is Your Brain on Music). How do we know, if the scales are exactly the same, in which key a song is written? The answer is that in a song in C major the note C is played a lot, and played strongly, and played longer, and that the song returns to it. And a song in A minor, it is the A that is played lots, and loud, and so forth. The note that gets the most attention is a good clue to our brains about the key. It is the same with ideas. The words that get the most attention in our brains tell us what ideas are important to us.

Last week I went to a conference at the new convention center in Boston. The half-day program was sponsored by Microsoft in order to tell everybody about the new version of Microsoft Office that they are releasing. I’m a little embarrassed to admit to you that I went to this conference, and I can’t quite say why I did. It was my history as a techy, maybe, that drew me there. You know I like to think about technology, but this was kind of an overdose of it. The people there were professional technology managers, designers, and engineers.

What was amazing to me was not the software, which it turned out I didn’t really care much about. What was amazing was that it seemed to me that in many ways people had come to the convention center to worship. Not that Microsoft was like a god—far from that. But that the attitude of many of the guests was worshipful. They were there because they had a deep-seated need to know important things that affected their lives in significant ways. They came for guidance. They came for truth. They came for a way to behave, a way to live, that would give them a kind of peace in their work. They came to be nourished and energized. As someone might come to church.

I imagined what was going on in the minds of the guests. They had come to sit for at least three hours, six for some who stayed all day. What I saw—and I admit I’m just making this up—I saw a bunch of emotions. I saw boredom and anxiety. I also saw desire, a kind of lust for this technology. And coupled with that a disgust at themselves for these desires. I also saw ideas, revelations, understanding; I could see people imagining solutions, possibilities. Some had come for salvation: help me!, I’m in a pickle, show me the way out. And in some I saw a sense of dislocation. What am I doing here? What does this have to do with my life, my family, my children, my worries about the war, the kind of world I want?

Microsoft’s purpose in this conference was evangelical. That is, they had hoped to spread the word, the good news about Microsoft Office. (It is not an accident that technology companies have people called “Evangelists.”) They hoped to fill the heads of the people there with Microsoft kind of words. To think in the key of Microsoft, so to speak. Microsoft wanted people to look at the world of their own work and the problems they face with Microsoft eyes. So that when they saw something, they would think about it in terms of Microsoft products.

Except for the details, my fellow conference goers were like the people that the prophet Jeremiah was sent to talk to. Jeremiah’s audience probably wasn’t worried about Solutions Management or Continuous Content Replication, but I’m sure they had other things on their minds that were more appropriate to the age. Crops and rituals and family feuds—or whatever. Things in their world that were important, scary, and confusing. In other words, they were just ordinary people. Seeking guidance for daily tasks and decisions, a way of life, and salvation from fear and pain.

The prophets that God calls in the Bible are by and large ordinary people. Moses was embarrassed about the way he talked, David was a young shepherd, Isaiah a man of unclean lips. Jeremiah was a twelve-year-old boy. “I’m only a boy,” he said when God calls him. They were nothing special. Just ordinary people like you and me.

We are like these prophets. Hesitant to speak about things that are important to us. We are, after all, Lutherans. And some of us Yankees, to boot. We are hesitant, perhaps, to talk about our faith and our relationship with God. We are like Jeremiah, who says, “I don’t know what to say.”

It is usually not the knowing but the saying that is working against us here. We know what to say about all sorts of complicated things in our lives, things about how things work, how they ought to work, why they work the way they do. We are good at knowing and for many things in our lives, good at saying. But not so good, we think, at saying about faith.

But we don’t have to think we are good at saying, any more than Jeremiah did. Partly, because God can do the saying. “I have put words into your mouth,” God tells Jeremiah. And partly, because God tells us to. “You shall speak whatever I command you,” God tells Jeremiah. But mostly because people need to hear us.

It makes a difference—to me and to the world—which words are in my head. I can be thinking about Windows Vista, or OS X Leopard, or Ubuntu—all computer operating systems. When I think of operating systems, those words look to me like answers. Or I can be thinking about what God has done, or what God is showing me and what God wishes I would do. Or what God is showing Faith and what God wishes Faith would do. When I think about God, the words look to me mostly like questions.

We all are called to speak because it is good for people to have lots of God-words in their heads. To think in the key of God more than the key of operating systems. And we are the ones—not the only ones, but some of the ones at least, to help put God-words there.

What if we read Jeremiah replacing the Jeremiah with Faith Lutheran Church? It would go like this:

Before I formed Faith Lutheran Church, … I knew it, and before it was built, I consecrated it; I appointed it a prophet to the nations. Then Faith said, “Ah, Lord God! Truly I do not know how to speak, for I am only a small church.” But the Lord said to Faith, “Do not say, ‘I am only a small church; for you shall go to all to whom I send you, and you shall speak whatever I command you. Do not be afraid …

How would that be?

Or better, what if you put your own name where Jeremiah’s is. Think along with me: “Before I formed <your name here>, I knew <your name here>. I appointed <your name here> to be a prophet. Then <your name here> said, “I do not know how to speak. I am only an ordinary person. ” But the Lord said, Do not be afraid. I am with you.

Everybody is like the people at the computer conference. Everybody has a deep-seated need to know important things that affect their lives in significant ways. Everybody longs for guidance, for truth. Everybody wants to know how to behave, wants a way to live, that will give them peace.

You don’t know all the answers, but you’ve thought hard about the questions. And you have words in your head that maybe they have not heard yet, but long to hear in their own heads. You and I, we are ordinary people. We are the prophets.

Speak up! Do not be afraid. God is with you.

Good News How

Text: Luke 4:14-21 January 21, 2006

Jesus came bringing good news. But not everyone agreed the news was good.

This speech of Jesus we just heard are the first words of his ministry, following immediately after his baptism and his temptation in the desert. As a reader in the synagogue, he is given or chooses a passage from the prophet Isaiah. It is a song of hope and trust and change for the better for a beleaguered people. After hard times, good times are ahead. An anointed one—which is what the word messiah means—has come, called to proclaim good news. A time of restoration (Isaiah adds that “they will raise up the former devastations, they will repair the ruined cities.”)

This anointed one brings good news to the poor, frees the captives, restores sight to the blind, and liberates the oppressed.

This is a reading of promise, but to those who heard Jesus on that day, the passage is old hat. They’ve heard it countless times, so many times that perhaps it has lost its impact. To those oppressed people to whom Jesus speaks, those under Roman occupation, it sounds perhaps like wishful thinking, or whistling in the dark.

So it is a shock when Jesus puts away the scroll, and sits down, and tells them “today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

At first they are pleased and proud. This is his home-town, he’s come back as a grown-up. Joseph and Mary’s boy. But they are little nonplussed, too. What does he mean? And by the time Jesus compares himself to the great prophet Elijah, they are furious, and they take him to the edge of the cliff and try to throw him off. But he escapes.

But his home town buddies were not the only people to be bewildered and upset by Jesus’ words or his claim to fulfill them. In his life and since that time, the poor have been worried that what he said would happen had not. And the rich have been worried that it might.

Of all the four Gospels, Luke is the most interested in the plight of the poor (and by poor, he means everyone who is disenfranchised and dispossessed). In Luke, Mary sings of the poor raised up and the mighty cast down. In Luke, the poor, the hungry, those who weep are blessed. In Luke, Jesus comes proclaiming good news to the poor. In Luke, Jesus comes to the poor.

Today’s reading has historically been a problem especially for those who not poor. Those who have things and who by and large don’t go to bed hungry. For the privileged. There is a bit of cognitive dissonance as those who are mighty try to reconcile their status with their commitment to this Son of God they follow. There have been lots of strategies to make things fit, of which the top five are these.

Strategy one. Sentimentalizing. The poor have a special life, according to this strategy, a kind of blessed life not available to the rich, a simple life. Their relationships are fundamental and their living is homey. They are good, simple folk favored by God.

Strategy two. Spiritualizing. Jesus doesn’t really mean poor when he quotes Isaiah. He means poor in spirit. Matthew does this in his version of the beatitudes. Blessed are the poor in spirit. We are all poor in some ways, even those who are materially rich. Releasing the captives doesn’t mean letting people out of prison, according to this strategy, it means releasing our inner demons.

Strategy three. Metaphorizing (that’s not a real word). The poor and blind are not real people, but symbols for something else. The exiled nation of Israel. The infidels and atheists. Evolution. Sin. This earthly life from which we will one day escape.

Strategy four. Displacing. Jesus said it, but it doesn’t mean what it sounds like. This is not about the poor, but about Jesus. The focus is not on the poor, but on the savior, who is using the poor, and this prophecy, as just one example. This passage is about Jesus’ character, not about those he happens to mention.

And strategy five. Denying. According to this strategy, this passage has nothing to do with us, Gospel readers of the past 2000 years. It is pretty, but pretty irrelevant to the faith I claim. I don’t even see why you’re talking about it. Get to the point!

The point is that no matter how hard we might try to avoid these verses or excuse them, they nag at us. In a good way. That is, they seem right. Not irrelevant or immaterial, but appealing. Jesus is not trying to fool us or frighten us. This is good news; we can feel it.

It feels good, I think, because the verbs are good. Release, restore, recover, go free. Though we may think it expedient to put people in prison, no one thinks it is good. Though people are blinded by all sorts of natural causes, no one thinks it is good. Though we might understand how one group oppresses another, no one thinks it is good.

These verbs work no matter what the context. When we hear “release to the captives,” it makes sense whether we are in prison and long to escape or in bondage to some kind of obsession and long to escape or stuck in a cycle of revenge and long to escape.

When we hear “recovery of sight to the blind” it makes sense whether we have cataracts and long to see or in ignorance and long to see or lost in mental confusion and long to see.

When Jesus refers to the year of the Lord’s favor, most scholars think this is code language in Luke for the Kingdom of God, a favorite phrase of Luke, and as much a place of the physical present as of the spiritual future. When we hear of the prisoners being set free, and the blind healed, and poverty eliminated, and oppression ended—when we hear of these things we think that’s how it will be in the Kingdom of God. When the inhumane things we do and the sorrows we suffer will no longer happen. Sickness, and sadness, and craziness, and brutality are not the way things ought to be, and in the Kingdom of God they have no place.

What draws us to this passage, what makes us embrace it instead of deny it through all those different strategies, is that we want this kingdom now, here, in our time, for humanity and all creation. Jesus says that these words of Isaiah will be fulfilled. Are fulfilled.

As Christians, we are officially naïve. Intentionally so. We believe Jesus when he says things like this. We live expecting the Kingdom of God, and we trust that the Spirit will strengthen and guide us to help make that so. There will be an end to captivity, poverty, blindness, and oppression. Jesus proclaimed this good news. And we agree it is good.

Praising Mediocrity

Text: 1 Corinthians 12:1-11 January 14, 2007

Let's hear it for mediocrity.

Let us celebrate just getting by. Let us commend doing less than your best. Let us extol what in the college I went to they called “gentleman's Cs.” Let us praise doing okay, satisfactory, good enough.

If this makes you squeamish, you are in the right culture and the right time. “Be all you can be” is not just an advertising slogan, it is the motto for our times. Kindly mentors tell their charges, “I don’t care how well you do, just as long as you do your best.” That is, the results don’t have to be perfect, but the effort better be.

To live in the expectation of giving 100% all the time is to live constantly on the edge of judgment. And if effort, and not result, is the criterion, then there is never a time for rest, for a little slack, for down time. And we’ll always fall short, for the job is never done, because the job is not accomplishing something but working hard. Which has no end. Live hard, play hard, is hard. Where is the Sabbath in that?

It is a kind of idolatry. Anything that commands us—orders us around—and commands our attention—that we pay attention to in a constant awareness—that thing, that force is an idol for us. Doing the best you can is a close cousin to striving for perfection. And they are both good friends of optimization: striving to make things the best possible, rather than simply satisfactory. [A friend] says I’m an optimizer when parking my car in our neighborhood. I want to be right in front of our house, so I look for the rarely-found elusive perfect spot, while passing by good spaces a half-block away that she would have taken. And perfection and optimization are both buddies with performance. Performance is doing something for the presentation of it and usually also to impress. A good performance is perfect (though no real performance ever quite is, just as no real endeavor ever quite is, either).

There are times when performance matters. When someone’s life depends on what you do, for example. But even less dramatically, in competitive situations, doing the best, optimizing, and such can make a difference. This week Steve Jobs, the head of Apple, introduced a new iPod/cell phone combo device at the MacWorld Conference in San Francisco. It was an amazing performance. The New York times said: “has there even been anybody in the history of marketing to introduce products with the sheer dazzling showmanship of the legendary Apple chief executive?” The day after the performance, Apple’s stock rose 10%.

But we, even Steve Jobs, rarely are called to situations so critical as to demand perfection and ultimate effort. That doesn’t mean that people won’t make those demands, people like bosses, families, spouses. We ourselves are sometimes the most strident demand-ers. But just because you can do something well doesn’t mean you have to. As someone said [Chesterton], if something is worth doing, it is worth doing badly. Sometimes a C- is plenty enough.

There needs to be a place in our lives where you don’t have to be all you can be. Where you can do less than best, and where perfection is neither expected nor desired. If we are lucky, home is such a place. As Robert Frost’s character says, “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.” Regardless of your performance. Though for some, homes are not that.

But the church is. Or should be. We worship a God of grace, as Pastor Seitz reminded us last week. God loves you no matter what. We have to say this over and over because it is hard to believe. Too good to be true. Very good. You have no obligation to God to live up to your potential. If “living up to your potential” is something you have to do, then it is a “work” in the classic Lutheran meaning. That is, something you do to earn God’s forgiveness, favor, and blessing. And we are taught that there is no such requirement. In Christ’s church, it is okay regardless. You don’t have to get it right.

When Paul writes this letter we heard to the church at Corinth, he writes to a group of people who are strutting around saying what good performers they all are. They all think they are Steve Jobs. That is, they think they are great, and each one thinks that he or she is doing the most important job. Paul wants to cool this competitive and ferocious ardor a bit. So he tells them three things,

First, everything you do in the church, he tells them, is for the good of the church. The “common good,” it says in the reading. The word means “to carry with others,” to share the work like a bunch of people trying to lift a heavy box. None of you is the CEO.

Second, none of the things you do is more important than the things other people do. All are necessary, he says later on in the letter, for the functioning of the body of Christ, the church. And you are not so smart that you can say one thing is more important than another, because it is not. To make himself clear, Paul says neither (A) gifts (like prophecy or praying or evangelism), nor (B) service (like helping others and visiting them or comforting them), nor just work (like anything not covered by A and B). The Greek words, FYI, are the base of the English words charisma, deacon, and energy. They are all part of the church. Gifts, service, and work.

And third, and most important, Paul tells them that it is not they but the Spirit who is responsible for the gifts, service, and work that they bring.

Unlike a manager in a corporation, God does not try to recruit the best people available for the job. God does not ask for resumes for the folk God invites to the church. It is not because God sees all people as valuable, though that is no doubt true. But it is because that is not how it works. God does not assemble the church out of available parts. God does not put together a team.

The church is the people who gather there. The Spirit takes those people and allots the gifts, services, and work according to the way the Spirit chooses. It is not so much that there are a diversity of skills brought to the church to be assigned. But that there are a diversity of gifts, service, and work that the Spirit dispenses among the people who have actually gathered. When people come to church they are transformed by the Spirit (“activated,” it says in our reading; but “energized” would be better). So it is sufficient; the church lacks nothing.

That is why no one in Corinth can be too proud, because it is the Spirit’s allotment that they have. And it also why being the best you can be is totally foreign to this passage, because you may not have been chosen for what you do best, but for something, maybe, that you don’t even do very well. But that you have been energized to do nonetheless. Nothing that happens here depends on your being skillful, even though everything that happens here is a result of your skills.

There is something wonderful and rich about this. Long ago, when I was first starting to come back to worshiping in a church after a twenty-year break, I went to a minister friend to ask what I could do to serve, to help other people besides myself and family. She quoted me a passage a little further on in Corinthians, saying to me “people have lots of gifts. Perhaps you are serving by doing what you are doing best already.” It was not what I wanted to hear. I wanted to do something that someone needed. I did not want to be valued for what I already could do. I wanted to be seized by God and led to a place that needed someone, anyone, even me. And so at my friend’s suggestion I started volunteering in a prison, where I was energized by the Spirit, though I would not have put it that way then, and transformed to do my barely satisfactory work there. Which was good enough. And for me, freeing and revealing and life-changing.

The pews of the church are made for those who choose to sit in them. The church provides a sanctuary—a safe place, a holy place, meaning a place set apart. The are enough forces in the world, in our lives, that drive us to perfect, optimum, arduous, performance and 100% effort. But the church, a sanctuary set apart, need not be one of them. It is a place to put all that aside for a bit. It is okay. This is your home. A place to bask in the grace-filled approval of God, and to be energized by the Spirit.