Again, this is a portion of this past week's sermon. I was preaching on Rom 12.1-8 and, as I was studying the text, became acutely aware that this familiar text (vv. 1-2) is situated in a very specific context--Paul teaching on the gifts given to the church and the unity of the body of Christ. It is also dense with the language of grace.
But let us also notice something in this text that is extremely significant for understanding what this sort of thing looks like. Paul writes that we should present our bodies, plural, as a living sacrifice, singular. I’m not sure how many bodies you have, but as for me, I only have one! Paul is talking here to the church! To the gathered body of believers who, together, are called to offer their bodies as one sacrifice, he is making his appeal. He is not asking you to make one herculean effort alone to be the most pious person you can be so that your body can be a living sacrifice, but he is rather requiring that together as the church, as the community of God’s people gathered together, our lives are to be offered to God. There is no room here for the solitary individual standing holy before God. There is only room for the community, for the body of believers, for the real, tangible, gathered assembly of Christians that we have come to call the church.
And this is just where Paul goes in the following verses of our text for this afternoon. Verse 4 reads, “For as in one body we have many members, and not all the members have the same function, so we who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members one of another.” In this sense when Paul writes of a sacrifice , he writes of one sacrifice, to which we are to add our bodies, that is our lives. We are to live our lives together as one sacrifice to God. What this makes problematic is those lives of Christians that have no reference to any particular, local, community of believers. It makes problematic the assertion that “I like Jesus, but not the church.” It makes no sense of the claim that “I am a follower of Jesus but not the church.” It drives us to ask the question, “In which community of Christians—that is, local and particular—is your faith embodied?”
Monday, August 25, 2008
Monday, August 18, 2008
On Joseph and Not Voting
Here's another portion of a recent sermon, this one was dealing with the story of Joseph...
It is not too extreme to suggest that each of our presidential candidates offers some sort of vision of salvation--perhaps not in an ultimate sense, but at least in a political sense. Then again, the line between these two is quite blurry. The rhetoric we hear often crosses the line between the temporal and the transcendent. That the political sense often becomes ultimate should remind us that we have lost a sense of the transcendent in our common discourse. We no longer recognize a need for ultimate salvation. Politics is all that there is.
In the face of this lie, the story of Joseph reminds us that God is Lord over all—families and even empires. It is God at work through the faithfulness of His people that He will accomplish His purposes. If we doubt this, remember Joseph. Joseph went from the eleventh of twelve brothers of a generally nomadic family to slavery, to being accused of rape, imprisoned, then, through his gift of the interpretation of dreams, he becomes Governor of Egypt.
Egypt is at this time a grand empire. Yet we discover through Joseph’s life that Egypt and by extension, all great empires, are subject to the Lordship of the God of Israel. While Joseph is in prison in Egypt, the Pharaoh has a dream. Joseph is able to interpret this dream and tells the Pharaoh that a famine is coming and that in order to survive the famine the Pharaoh needs to store grain over the next seven years. The Pharaoh takes Joseph’s advice and puts Joseph in charge, taking the very ring of his authority and pacing it on his hand. In all of this the empire is saved, but only because God has gifted Joseph with the ability to interpret dreams.
We learn also of the precarious nature of the position of empire. Famine could destroy Egypt, a reminder that even empires are at the mercy of nature, and we know that God is Lord over nature. Incidentally, this is why we should interpret Jesus’ miracles over nature—healing the sick, calming the storm, increasing the catch of fish—as political signs. God’s kingdom is not like the fragile kingdoms of this world that have no such control and authority.
So we learn that even in our own day, while the choices seem limited to two candidates, we are wrong to think that God’s purposes are bound up in one or the other—in John McCain or Barak Obama. No! His purposes are bound up with Ron Paul….Just kidding! God’s purposes are accomplished as he sees fit to accomplish them. That is why it is our task to discern what it is God is at work doing in the world.
It may be the case that we decide not to vote this November. It seems radical, but I can think of reasons why I wouldn’t vote for either candidate. Such a position may be interpreted as apolitical, that is, uninterested in political questions and solutions, but it could also be seen as radically political. As a friend of mine wrote in an essay recently regarding the church’s calling to engage in mission to concrete political concerns, “the church may have to carry out this task by refusing to endorse one party or another, but its neutrality is not benign. The church’s neutrality is an open rebuke against the self-deifying claims and dehumanizing practices on both sides.” [See G. Scott Becker, "Serving by Abstaining: Karl Barth on Political Engagement and Disengagement" in Electing Not to Vote: Christian Reflections on Reasons for not Voting (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2008).]
It is not too extreme to suggest that each of our presidential candidates offers some sort of vision of salvation--perhaps not in an ultimate sense, but at least in a political sense. Then again, the line between these two is quite blurry. The rhetoric we hear often crosses the line between the temporal and the transcendent. That the political sense often becomes ultimate should remind us that we have lost a sense of the transcendent in our common discourse. We no longer recognize a need for ultimate salvation. Politics is all that there is.
In the face of this lie, the story of Joseph reminds us that God is Lord over all—families and even empires. It is God at work through the faithfulness of His people that He will accomplish His purposes. If we doubt this, remember Joseph. Joseph went from the eleventh of twelve brothers of a generally nomadic family to slavery, to being accused of rape, imprisoned, then, through his gift of the interpretation of dreams, he becomes Governor of Egypt.
Egypt is at this time a grand empire. Yet we discover through Joseph’s life that Egypt and by extension, all great empires, are subject to the Lordship of the God of Israel. While Joseph is in prison in Egypt, the Pharaoh has a dream. Joseph is able to interpret this dream and tells the Pharaoh that a famine is coming and that in order to survive the famine the Pharaoh needs to store grain over the next seven years. The Pharaoh takes Joseph’s advice and puts Joseph in charge, taking the very ring of his authority and pacing it on his hand. In all of this the empire is saved, but only because God has gifted Joseph with the ability to interpret dreams.
We learn also of the precarious nature of the position of empire. Famine could destroy Egypt, a reminder that even empires are at the mercy of nature, and we know that God is Lord over nature. Incidentally, this is why we should interpret Jesus’ miracles over nature—healing the sick, calming the storm, increasing the catch of fish—as political signs. God’s kingdom is not like the fragile kingdoms of this world that have no such control and authority.
So we learn that even in our own day, while the choices seem limited to two candidates, we are wrong to think that God’s purposes are bound up in one or the other—in John McCain or Barak Obama. No! His purposes are bound up with Ron Paul….Just kidding! God’s purposes are accomplished as he sees fit to accomplish them. That is why it is our task to discern what it is God is at work doing in the world.
It may be the case that we decide not to vote this November. It seems radical, but I can think of reasons why I wouldn’t vote for either candidate. Such a position may be interpreted as apolitical, that is, uninterested in political questions and solutions, but it could also be seen as radically political. As a friend of mine wrote in an essay recently regarding the church’s calling to engage in mission to concrete political concerns, “the church may have to carry out this task by refusing to endorse one party or another, but its neutrality is not benign. The church’s neutrality is an open rebuke against the self-deifying claims and dehumanizing practices on both sides.” [See G. Scott Becker, "Serving by Abstaining: Karl Barth on Political Engagement and Disengagement" in Electing Not to Vote: Christian Reflections on Reasons for not Voting (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2008).]
Wednesday, August 6, 2008
J=L
I recently heard an interview with Cambridge physicist and theologian John Polkinghorn in which he described the beauty of mathematical equations. The simpler they are the more elegant they are and yet in their simplicity they can contain a profound and deep set of relations that have a direct correlation with the way the world is. Einstein’s E=mc2 is, perhaps, the most famous example. It is helpful, I think, to see the Kingdom of Heaven-or the Kingdom of God—in a similar way. The equation that makes sense out of all of Jesus’ teachings on the Kingdom is the simple equation, “Jesus is Lord.” Or, J=L.
Plumbing the depths of “J” we find this interesting contrarian revelation. We look for a cedar and find a shrub. We look for palaces and find a manger. We look for royalty and find peasants. We look for a following of the powerful and prestigious and instead find beggars, lepers, tax-collectors, fishermen, murderers, and prostitutes among his friends. We look for the war-horse and instead find the young donkey. We look for a throne and find a cross. We look for the Lion of the Tribe of Judah and behold, we see the lamb who was slain (Rev. 4.5,6).
What this tells us about “L,” or “lordship” is significant. John Howard Yoder writes, “Jesus was, in his divinely mandated . . . prophethood, priesthood, and kingship, the bearer of a new possibility of human, social, and therefore political relationships. His baptism is the inauguration and his cross is the culmination of that new regime in which disciples are called to share.”
The kingdom of God is like a mustard seed. That is enough to shake up our imaginations and set us on a path of discovering the radical—and hopeful—nature of God’s rule, His kingdom, and the depth within the equation “Jesus is Lord.” In this time of ours with its high stakes political campaigns, the posturing of the powerful, and the promise of a hope through change that is still a hope based upon the promise of empire, we will do well to remember that the Kingdom of Heaven is like a mustard seed. This means we will look for the Kingdom in places we don’t normally look. It means that God’s rule will often be very different from the rule that governs the nations of the world. It means that submitting to the lordship of Jesus will cause us to look like contrarians and non-conformists, following that greatest of contrarians, the Lord himself.
Plumbing the depths of “J” we find this interesting contrarian revelation. We look for a cedar and find a shrub. We look for palaces and find a manger. We look for royalty and find peasants. We look for a following of the powerful and prestigious and instead find beggars, lepers, tax-collectors, fishermen, murderers, and prostitutes among his friends. We look for the war-horse and instead find the young donkey. We look for a throne and find a cross. We look for the Lion of the Tribe of Judah and behold, we see the lamb who was slain (Rev. 4.5,6).
What this tells us about “L,” or “lordship” is significant. John Howard Yoder writes, “Jesus was, in his divinely mandated . . . prophethood, priesthood, and kingship, the bearer of a new possibility of human, social, and therefore political relationships. His baptism is the inauguration and his cross is the culmination of that new regime in which disciples are called to share.”
The kingdom of God is like a mustard seed. That is enough to shake up our imaginations and set us on a path of discovering the radical—and hopeful—nature of God’s rule, His kingdom, and the depth within the equation “Jesus is Lord.” In this time of ours with its high stakes political campaigns, the posturing of the powerful, and the promise of a hope through change that is still a hope based upon the promise of empire, we will do well to remember that the Kingdom of Heaven is like a mustard seed. This means we will look for the Kingdom in places we don’t normally look. It means that God’s rule will often be very different from the rule that governs the nations of the world. It means that submitting to the lordship of Jesus will cause us to look like contrarians and non-conformists, following that greatest of contrarians, the Lord himself.
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