Scriptures: Various gospel verses
Happy New Year! This sermon has its origins in the New Year holiday, even though it probably won’t seem much like a sermon that has anything much to do with the New Year. I don’t seem to be able to get through the beginning of a New Year without giving at least some passing thought to resolutions, even though I have never been notably successful at keeping New Year resolutions and therefore they have never really been very life-modifying, much less life changing, and therefore it’s hard to attach much importance to them. But I can’t help but have the thoughts…
Let’s see. Am I going to make resolutions this year or just give up on the idea of improving myself in 2008? And if I make resolutions, are they going to ambitious ones or modest ones? Are they going to aim high and thus have some noble goal that if I accomplished it I would be really proud of myself, or are they going to be much more realistic and achievable and therefore not very significant? Am I going to ask a lot of myself or really not very much? And do I go into all of this with the thought in the back of my mind that I have never really kept any kind of resolution and so it doesn’t make much difference whether the goals are ambitious or modest and thinking quietly to myself that this is all just a silly game I play with myself every year, knowing the outcome ahead of time, or do I try to talk myself into a more positive attitude and try my best to convince myself that this year I really mean it, this year will be different? And how does that work, with the hopeful side of myself trying to convince the experienced side of myself that it doesn’t really know what it thinks it knows. Sometimes I can make my head hurt trying to think about something as seemingly simple as new year resolutions and whether to make them or not.
Well, I was going through this little routine this year, when I realized that this all has a lot to do with things that are much more important than how I resolve my issues with New Year resolutions. There is a crucial question here that has to do with my relationship to God, and it is therefore not something I deal with only on or about January 1. It is actually something I am dealing with all the time in one way or another and that I consciously think about frequently, because it has to do with my religious faith, which is to say the way I live out my relationship to God. Let me try to explain a little more what this “it” is that I feel like I’m dealing with more or less constantly in my faith life.
And let me begin with the scripture readings for this morning. Maybe as you were listening to these words from scripture you got a sense of why I chose to present scripture in this somewhat unorthodox way this morning. But just in case that wasn’t so clear, I figure I better explain. What I did was to go through the gospels and pull out some verses or short passages that represented two different kinds of voices I hear in the scriptures. I could have done this with all of scripture, but that was a much bigger job than just looking at the four gospels, and I also wanted to focus particularly in this still-Christmas season on my relationship to Jesus as well as my relationship to God, and what is involved in being a follower of Jesus. Jesus does not resolve this issue for us, in fact maybe makes it more pointed. So what is this issue that Jesus doesn’t resolve?
Some of the scriptures that were read this morning were what we might think of as the kinder, gentler voices of scripture. These are the voices from scripture that I hear assuring me, reassuring all of us that we are of value, without doing anything or having to prove anything, that we are of value. “Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them is forgotten in God’s sight. And even the hairs of your head are all counted. So do not be afraid; you are of more value than many sparrows.” (Luke 12:6)
These are the voices that tell us that God’s love for us in unconditional, and tell us too that the love of Jesus is like that of God’s and in fact embodies that unconditional love, so that he can say to the woman caught in adultery, “neither do I condemn you”, and can say essentially to all humanity from the cross, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do,” and can say, “Let the little children come to me, and do not stop them, for it is to such as these that the kingdom of heaven belongs,” (Matt. 19:13-15) which means to me not just that Jesus was nice to and inclusive of children but that the children represented people who came to Jesus or presented themselves to God without credentials, without any resumes detailing how productive or righteous they had been, but who were welcomed and embraced just for being themselves, and it would be to such as these that the kingdom of heaven belonged.
These are the voices of scripture that tell me that in the company of Jesus and in the presence of God I will find rest and nurture and comfort and safety, “Come to me, all you who are weary and carry heavy burdens and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” (Matt. 11:28-30) These are the voices from scripture that speak of blessing: “Blessed are the merciful and the peacemakers and the poor and the poor in spirit and those who mourn.” They are voices that suggest to me that at the beginning of each day, regardless of what has gone before and before I have a chance to make a success or to make a mess of the day ahead that I know my life to be “of God”, that I wake each day as a blessed creature of God and that at the end of the day I fall to sleep in the arms of God.
What you heard this morning was a sampling of those voices from scripture that speak to me in these ways. Maybe they don’t all speak to you in that way. Maybe there are others I didn’t include that speak to you in that way more clearly. But there are such voices in the scriptures that speak of God’s unconditional love and Christ’s embracing, inclusive love that extends explicitly and especially to those who may feel unworthy or unwelcome, unloved or unlovable. There are voices that echo through the gospels, indeed through all of scripture, that tell me that in order for me to know myself to be among the blessed, that I don’t have to do a blessed thing.
But then there are other voices, that were also read this morning, that deliver quite a different message, or at least leave me with quite a different feeling. These are voices that tell me that the life of faith is not after all a matter of unconditional love and affirmation, that there are some expectations that go with this territory, rather high expectations actually. “You have heard that it was said “love your neighbor”, but I say to you, “love your enemies” and pray for those who persecute you…Be perfect as God in heaven is perfect.” (Matthew 5:43, 48)
These voices speak rather sternly, or at least urgently, of the need not just to be but to do, to walk the walk, if you will. Jesus curses a fig tree for not bearing fruit, with obvious implications for humans who don’t produce good works. (I didn’t even include that one.) But I did include this: “A woman in the crowd raised her voice and said to him, “Blessed is the womb that bore you and the breasts that nursed you!” But Jesus said, “Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and do it.” (Luke 11:27-28) And there are many like it.
These voices speak of sacrifice: “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will save it.” (Luke 9:23-24) They speak of following a path that few people will choose to follow or perhaps be able to follow. “Enter through the narrow gate, for the gate is wide and road is easy that leads to destruction, and there are many who take it. But the gate is narrow and the road is hard that leads to life, and there are few who find it.” (Matt. 7:13-14)
Sometimes these voices set before us demands for things that may even seem not very clear so far as what we are being asked to do, and that may seem bewildering in their unreasonableness or their lack of regard for ordinary human feelings: “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, sister and brother, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple.” (Luke 14:26)
And then there are the sayings about wealth. Some suggest doing things that will put you on a path that can be as narrow as can be because there just won’t be many people wanting to travel that path. “There is still one thing lacking,” Jesus said to the rich man who had been careful to keep the commandments. “Sell all that you own and distribute it to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come and follow me.” (Luke 18:22) And what are we to make of the well known saying that follows that? “How hard it will be for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God! Indeed, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.” And again, “Woe to those who are rich now for you have already received your consolation.” These are not sayings that ask us to use some percentage our money for good purposes or that warn us about being greedy or selfish. They are sayings that warn us about just having wealth period. Leaves you maybe wondering a bit just what is required to be a disciple. What does Jesus want of us, those of us who want to follow? For that matter, what does God want of us, those of us who may think more just in terms of being fully human?
Again, you may not receive these particular verses quite the way I do, and in terms of sayings that seem to demand a lot of us, maybe there are others that you would identify as particularly challenging. But you understand what I’m trying to get at here. There are these other voices in the gospels, again throughout scripture, but specifically in the gospels, that clearly call us to a high standard, that expect a high level of lived faith, maybe even an impossible level. And I have several things to say about these sayings. First, there are lots of them, many more than I might wish for, many more of them than there are of those nice, unconditional love kinds of sayings, so many that I come away from reading the gospels thinking that this is the main message, not so much that we are blessed, though that is certainly there, but that we are called to live up to some pretty high standards as people of faith, even though we’re sometimes not quite sure what they are or when we have succeeded, or if we can ever say we’ve succeeded. That’s one thing.
Another is that these scriptures can easily be abused, that is they can be mishandled and mistreated in such a way that they themselves become abusive. They can present to us a God who is demanding and judgmental and a religious faith that is joyless and guilt-ridden. No matter how many passages there may be that urge us to bear fruit, to do the will of God and not just talk about it, to enter by the narrow gate, to be perfect in the ways of God, to divest oneself of wealth, or to give up everything for the sake of following Jesus, we will need to resist that stern and strenuous and spirit-killing approach to religious faith.
But having said that there is a third thing I believe needs to be said. That is that these passages with such seemingly high expectations are necessary if the messages of blessing and unconditional love are to be understood to encourage something more than complacency, self-satisfaction, and the pronouncement of a divine “whatever” over our very imperfect humanity. Neither of the kinds of sayings I have been talking about this morning are able to stand on their own.
And of course the point here is not my relationship to what the Bible says but my relationship to God. The words of scripture merely reflect and articulate the dynamics of my relationship to God. With or without the aid of scriptures my relationship to God consists, if I open myself to it, of unconditional blessing. It also consists not so much of excessive expectations and stern demands as of a series of callings. Those two faces of God, the blessing God and the calling God, go together. They don’t always go easily together. It feels more often like they live in tension with each other. But it’s a tension we need to live with and not try to resolve in one direction or the other. I begin a new year knowing myself blessed, knowing my life and every person’s life blessed, before we have had much of a chance to make a success or a mess of the year ahead, knowing our lives to be “of God”. I also begin a new year knowing I am called to a journey of faith that will not let me alone so far as the doing of justice and the practice of mercy is concerned, knowing that I will disappoint myself and others along the way, but resolving nonetheless to take that calling seriously and not to be deterred. That effort too is “of God”. And in all of it I trust there is to be found joy and the presence of God. Amen.
Jim Bundy
January 6, 2008