May 16, 2010
Texts:
Luke 24:44-53
Acts 1:1-11
The purpose of any speech or talk is to offer a particular group of people something they can chew on and maybe even want to talk about afterwards. The purpose of a Christian sermon or teaching is more than that. It goes beyond saying things that hold people’s attention. It is to share truth that builds community.
To get into this promise of building community, let me offer a frame of reference for your and my speaking. In I Cor. 4:1, Paul says, “This is how one should regard us, as servants of Christ and stewards of the mysteries of God.”
I have prepared this teaching by thinking of myself as a servant of Christ and a servant of 8th Day Church. One follows from the other. In the foot washing story in John 13, Jesus presents himself as God’s servant and the servant of his disciples. This is what we have in mind when we use the term “servant leadership.”
For those of us who are given the opportunity to deliver the teaching, our role is dual – to offer leadership and to do it as a servant. That means this is not about me and when you stand up here it is not about you. We stand here as servants of Christ and servants of the community.
We also stand here as “stewards of the mysteries of God.” What is Paul talking about with this mark of identity “stewards of the mysteries of God?”
We who have been in the Church of the Saviour network for any length of time know what it means to be “stewards of mysteries.” The reason we do not invite people to become members the first Sunday they are here but rather to first get exposed to our mysteries is because people deserve to know what they are getting into. Without an appreciation for the Church of the Saviour mysteries membership is likely to be onerous. Jesus said, “Take my yoke upon you, for my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”
If you don’t get the mysteries the yoke will be anything but easy and the burden anything but light. Take tithing for example. The commitment to give 10% of your gross income in order to meet some membership requirement is never light or easy unless you have moved to a point where you have a new relationship with money, a relationship grounded in the mysteries of God.
That is only one example. Think of other C of S mysteries – putting call and gift at the top of your priority list. When I draw upon that insider vocabulary, the stranger has to ask “What are these people talking about?” Remember those of you who are now members, you once were as confused as any other stranger. To belong here you had to learn the mysteries.
Are you with me so far? If not ask a friendly face later, what I was talking about.
The title of my teaching today is “Bridge to Hope.” This is also the title of the mission group of which I am apart along with Maria Barker, Hayley Hathaway, and David Hilfiker. We are in process of clarifying our call. We recognize ourselves as standing under and alongside the mysteries of the Church of the Saviour. At the same time we are exploring moving into mission in unfamiliar territory.
About 50 years ago, Gordon Cosby, who along with his wife Mary and a few others founded the Church of the Saviour, felt the leading of the Spirit in the direction turning the church inside out, so to speak. Instead of worship and Christian education being the be-all and end-all of the church, he concluded that they were the beginning with mission as the next step. The church thereupon added mission to the core understanding of community and membership. Our call as Christians is to be servants and servant leaders in the world, in the mix of its hopes and its suffering. What that got translated into initially was to understand mission as project. At one point we had 26 distinct missions of service going to distinct populations of need from sick and dying street people, abused and neglected children, the homeless, jobless, people with AIDS, people leaving prison, etc., etc.
Without taking anything away from the importance of these tangible projects, our “Bridge to Hope” mission is exploring how might the church at the grass roots exercise its call to be servant leader in the face of the larger threats to life on Planet Earth such as climate change, global warming, shortages of water, consumerism, an economic system now operating more like a casino than a level playing field.
We realize that thinking mission about making a difference on a world scale is absolutely crazy from any secular point of view. But this is one of the mysteries of the Church of the Saviour. If the spirit leads, follow and newness can happen beyond your imagining provided that you stay grounded in the mysteries that got you started and new mysteries that are revealed along the way.
It is not my intention today to talk about the “Bridge to Hope” mission per se. I am simply drawing on what I think is a creative name and using the promise in this name to talk about the “mysteries of God”. This includes the role of every Christian, who has been introduced to and persuaded by the mysteries of God, to be a faithful steward of those mysteries.
So far I am tried to give a fairly clear idea of “mysteries” as they apply to the Church of the Saviour. I want to take you now to “mysteries of God” in scripture that are the bedrock of the mysteries of the Church of the Saviour.
I feel indebted to Connie Ridgeway for her sermon a few weeks ago about the call so obvious in scripture to repent of our “fixed ways of thinking.” This includes all of us, including me. Any time we work with the “mysteries of God” we are working at two levels. One is at the level of conserving the core of Christian teaching. The other is allowing imagination to guide us to deeper insight into those mysteries.
For the rest of this teaching I want to focus on some of the mysteries of God as contained in the lectionary texts from Easter Sunday to today’s text about the ascension of Jesus. I want to mention four of these foundational mysteries. I have already described how Church of the Saviour mysteries have built and sustained community in this setting in the 20th and 21st century. What I now want to do is pick just four to show how these mysteries of God built community among the earliest Christians in the first century C.E. It is important for us to go back and forth between then and now, now and then. My preaching professor in seminary often reminded us, “Preach the Bible but don’t leave it wandering in Palestine.”
What he was getting at is the critical role of imagination in interpreting the Bible. Some people try to teach the Bible devoid of imagination. All you need to know is the literal language of the text. Anybody who reads about Jesus in the New Testament is quickly aware of the freedom he took in interpreting the Old Testament. Again and again he said, “You have heard it said … but I say to you.” Paul likewise exercised freedom in interpreting the Old Testament in order to make plain its intended message as Paul understood it. The same goes for Matthew, Mark, Luke and John and every other New Testament writer.
Each of these four mysteries I will mention offer a bridge of hope to the future God wills for the church and the world. Each of these stories requires imagination and faith. You cannot get the mysteries of God apart from imagination and faith. Let me give you an illustration of why imagination is necessary.
Last Sunday, John Mohr quoted Gordon Cosby from his sermon on the 50th anniversary of the Potter’s House. Gordon said, “Don’t do anything that God doesn’t tell you to do.” John said in response, “If we take that literally it doesn’t make sense. It would stop nearly all our activity. I think Gordon is saying the same thing Jesus said to his disciples after his resurrection, ‘Don’t leave Jerusalem till you’ve received the Holy Spirit,’ … Don’t go off half-cocked. Don’t go off and follow every idea that pops into your mind. Wait until you’re ready, till you’ve … received the Holy Spirit.”
I think John is on the right track. In the Hebraic way of thinking the reality we call God is a mystery to such an extent that they were reticent to use any name to refer to God. Instead they used four letters without any vowels. In a way they were saying when you come to the place where God is named honor it with silence.
A friend of mine tells the story of a fellow seminary student when called upon to open a class with prayer, prayed, “Lord, forgive that we become familiar with the divine.” That is a very Hebraic request. “Lord, protect us in our glib speaking about you from losing the capacity to hear you speaking to us.”
Some of us have trouble thinking of God as a person. There is a reason for that difficulty. To be a person is to be an individual. And there is something in thinking about God as an individual that violates the mystery of God because God as the Bible presents God is always more and different from our human conception. It doesn’t work to think of God as individual when God is the whole and it doesn’t work to think of God as the whole when God is also the still small particular voice. So like the ancient Hebrews we are again and again reduced to silence.
God can only be expressed and be related to with the vocabulary of mystery. That is what John Mohr was saying about Gordon’s comment in isolation from the context of the mysteries of God. Be careful in thinking of yourself in an intimate relationship with God, despite all the claims of so called “born again” Christians. The Spirit brings a feeling of intimacy but as quickly strips it away. And this dialectic confuses many religious people. But it also explains why the Biblical writers wrote as they did and conveyed what they wanted to say in the form of story even when the story from a rational point of view seems absurd.
The first of four Easter season mysteries of God I want to share is the mystery of Jesus’ resurrection. The New Testament contains several different stories of the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. While different in detail they are indeed a family of stories, each telling the same thing from different vantage points. They were written down years after the fact to conserve them and enable them to be passed on person to person and generation to generation. Their variety of detail say one thing – Jesus is our contemporary. This means that the one the world looks upon as past, confined to history, like any dead person, is actually contemporary. He is alive and present in the here and now and in the future as it comes toward us.
As such he is in a different category than Socrates, Martin Luther King Jr., Mahatma Ghandi. He is indeed a worthy historic figure, perhaps the greatest man in human terms that ever lived, but that is only a prelude to who Jesus is. What the New Testament writers were saying to the particular congregations of folks to whom they were writing is that Jesus is our contemporary. When we hear the words of scripture, “Come unto me all you that are weak and heavy laden and I will give you rest”, that is the risen Jesus talking – now. The story is told as a mystery, a factual reality, beyond our capacity to explain except that it was experienced by a number of people and became the bedrock of faith. This is different from metaphor.
The second mystery is the story from the last chapter of Luke and the first chapter of Acts read earlier – namely, the ascension of Jesus from earth to heaven. Here again we see the need for imagination. Luke is accounting for a mystery. It is the same as with the resurrection. The story is told in spatial terms – a transition from this space to that space, from the region of earth to the region of heaven. For a modern person, born since the birth of science, this is impossible to understand literally. But what if we use our imaginations and think not in terms of space but in terms of time. Imagine Jesus disappearing from time into timelessness. Timelessness is actually a category that cutting edge theoretical scientists are working with. They are saying that time is actually a human construct, that some experiments suggest that time is a convenient way of understanding reality but some experiments suggest time warps or even reversals of time as we know it.
A non scientist like me reads and listens in awe at some of these conversations. As a student of the Bible I know that the ancient Hebrews did indeed understand heaven as a metaphor for the time and space where reality moved in harmony with God and earth as time and space where God is resisted. They would not understand language removing heaven from earth. They are simply two spheres butting up against each other within this space called world or cosmos.
For the risen Jesus of Nazareth to ascend into timelessness conveys that our distinctions of past, present and future are superseded. It means that even the past can be healed, that nothing is wasted – that pieces of our lives that we look back upon with shame or regret are not wasted. Our past can be healed. It can be redeemed. It means that the future is not out there but also at work in the past and the present. As modern people we are taught to think almost exclusively of life as linear, as sequential, as one day and one experience following another. The fact is that by simply looking with different lens we can see life as non linear. There is movement back and forth and around as well as sequential.
The third mystery is that the risen Jesus is still the crucified Jesus. Luke is really on to this as are Matthew, Mark, and John and what it means. Notice how Luke tells the story of Paul’s conversion on the Road to Damascus interpreted so eloquently by Connie Ridgeway a few weeks ago. Read carefully the 9th chapter of Acts. “.. Saul, .. breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord, went to the high priest and asked him for letters to the synagogues at Damascus, so that if he found any who belonged to the Way, men or women, he might bring them bound to Jerusalem.” What then? The arrested followers of Jesus would be brought before the high priests and given the choice to deny Jesus and live or to admit their faith in him as the Messiah and die by stoning. These people would be found worshipping in the synagogues where the early Christians continued to worship until 30 years or so later they were expelled.
Saul, temporarily blinded as by a bright light, falls to the ground and then hears a voice saying to him, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” Saul did not know whom he was talking to. As a devout Jew, he assumed that this was Yahweh, Israel’s god speaking to him as to the prophets and in response he used the same name the Psalmists used “Lord.” “Who are you Lord?” To his surprise the reply came, “I am Jesus who you are persecuting.” Total surprise which would change his life – Jesus speaking to him in the manner in which God spoke to Moses and the prophets. Saul thought Jesus to be dead – in the past, but here Jesus identifies himself in solidarity with his followers whom Saul is hunting down as blasphemers.
This is another of those texts where it is hard to pin down what happened historically as an investigative news reporter would attempt to do, but the faith message is clear. Jesus is not in the past. He is being persecuted in the now, side by side with his followers who are being arrested, brought before religious tribunals and given an either-or, renounce any belief in Jesus as Messiah, as God’s anointed and live or die by stoning. The voice of Jesus tells Saul that the people he is arresting and demanding their punishment by death includes himself - Jesus.
Given who he is as God’s servant, Jesus shares the pain and vulnerability along side his people. Imagination grounded in the Bible as a whole indicates that the people with whom the Risen Jesus is vulnerable includes those who are poor, weak and defenseless, those who persecuted for their stand for justice and righteousness, and indeed - all the rest of us. Yes, I said that – all the rest of us which includes betrayers like Peter, persecutors like Paul, and the high priests who manipulated his arrest and crucifixion as we will see in a moment.
This brings us to the fourth of the many mysteries of God in our lectionary texts during the Easter to Pentecost season. You may be wondering what happened to my title for this teaching, “Bridge to Hope.” Here we get to that bridge which is the bridge of forgiveness and confidence. Now that is some mixture – forgiveness and confidence.
Read about it in the third and fourth chapters of Acts when you go home. The reconciled to Jesus and the fellowship disciples pick up Jesus’ ministry without even thinking about it. They are in the temple and confronted by a man lame from birth. Like Jesus they heal him. The next thing that happens is like Jesus they are arrested, and like Jesus they are hauled before the same high priests and temple lawyers who sentenced to Jesus to death. And like Jesus they are fearless.
The political and spiritual leaders of Jerusalem thinking that they are sitting in judgment upon these ignorant working class people suddenly find themselves on the defensive. In the fiery speech of Peter they are now the ones being judged. Like everyone else on this earth light breaks in to hold them accountable and like Peter, the disciples, Paul and the rest of us they fail to meet the test.
Read the marvelous dialogue in Acts 4. From their throne like chairs on the dais they order their prisoners to speak: “By what power or by what name did you do this?” – this being the healing of the lame man. The next verse reads, “Peter, filled with the Holy Spirit, said to them, “Rulers of the people and elders, if we are questioned today because of a good deed done to someone who was sick and are asked how this man has been healed, le it be known to all of you, and to all the people of Israel, that this man is standing before you in good health by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, who you crucified, whom God raised from the dead.”
A couple of verses later the text reads, “Now when they saw the boldness of Peter and John and realized that there were uneducated and ordinary men, they were amazed and recognized them as companions of Jesus. When they saw the man who had been cured standing beside them, they had nothing to say in opposition.”
Bridge to Hope. What is it? It is the truth. Who is to tell the truth to power? Ordinary people. Take for example the current structure of the American economy as only one example of the complexities we face and we pray and witness for the healing of our country. David Korten calls the current structure of our economy a “casino economy.” I love that. Casinos and all the games of chance are organized so that the owners of the casinos will get their share. They don’t want all the money. They just want their majority share, and everything in the casino is rigged for that to happen.
In their empowerment by the Holy Spirit, in their experience-grounded belief in the Risen Jesus as their contemporary, in their belief that he – the crucified Jesus suffers with them and celebrates with them, these people are filled with a powerful hope which shows up in boldness, confidence in the presence of the lowly and the mighty.
Now one last thought and I am finished. Remember the story of Jesus in Luke 24 walking with the two followers on the way to Emaeus. Upon reporting their experience to the disciples they said, “Did not our hearts burn within us when he interpreted for us scripture and when we broke bread together?”
This is key to the everything I have covered today. This is the way we develop confidence that Jesus is our contemporary and that certain messages are really from the now timeless Jesus. The followers noted the burning sensation in their hearts and they checked it out with one another and other followers.
Let me now put it to you. Did at any point in this teaching, your heart burn within you? If it did, notice when and what was said. If it didn’t, this just may not have been your day. That might come this afternoon, or when you wake up one day next week or next Sunday or a year from now. On the other hand, you may be so set in your “fixed ideas” as Connie Ridgeway reminded us, that nothing is going to get through as long as you stay there.
Let me end as Luke ends on the note of confident expectation. We in 8th Day through experience know that the mysteries of the Church of the Saviour tradition work. They build community. They generate mission. They empower life and service. Likewise the early Christians as they followed Jesus became more and more confident in the mysteries of God revealed to them. And history bears witness to the power that flowed from their belief and action grounded in that belief. Let us go forth in this confidence to follow our call to allow the timeless God to build bridges to hope with our humble assistance.