Meaning what we say

Sermon on Deuteronomy 4:1-2, 6-9 offered to the people of the Church of the Redeemer in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania.

The latest issue of Commentary magazine includes an article by Michael Lewis called “How Art Became Irrelevant.” Lewis, who is a professor at Williams College, begins this elegy by describing a recent incident in one of his classes. He had just shown his students “Shoot,” a performance piece in which artist Chris Burden orders a friend to shoot him through the arm with a .22 caliber rifle. This piece was the first example of what came to be known as “endurance art,” an unnerving genre in which the performer subjects himself to pain, tedium, or deprivation. After viewing a clip of Burden’s seminal work, Lewis’ students exhibited none of the shock or revulsion one might expect from a group of people who had just witnessed the spectacle of someone being shot on camera. Indeed, the handful of students who responded at all only worried about the shooter’s legal liability. No one responded with anger or even discomfort. No one gave voice to the fact that Burden’s piece had committed a violation against human dignity in some way. In other words, no one was willing to pass judgment.

Michael Lewis sees this classroom incident as the signal of a larger trend. When it comes to art, he argues, contemporary society has become so tolerant, so broadminded, so unwilling to be discerning that it has become largely indifferent to the work of artists. Lewis suggests that this indifference is a consequence of the fact that over the last 100 years artistic movements have been so anxious to rebel that they forgot what they were rebelling against. His prognosis is grim: “While the fine arts can survive a hostile or ignorant public, or even a fanatically prudish one,” he writes, “they cannot long survive an indifferent one.” This indifference is not limited to the arts. In our culture’s honest and worthy effort to be tolerant, we are no longer willing to identify what is true, and this has very real consequences for the way we live. It has led us to forsake relationship for social network, enlightenment for spectacle, discernment for blithe disengagement. No longer are we willing to be challenged. No longer are we willing to engage anything with honest curiosity. Instead, the primary posture of our age is one of disengagement and apathy. In our dogmatic effort to avoid the appearance of judgment, we have abandoned the possibility of discernment.

The passage we read from Deuteronomy this morning addresses this condition. We tend not to pay much attention to the book of Deuteronomy. Though it is part of the Torah and thus has a privileged place in the Hebrew Bible, Deuteronomy is not likely to make many people’s “favorite books of the Bible” lists. For one, it has none of the exciting stories of death and liberation that we get in Genesis and Exodus. Moreover, it covers material we’ve already seen. The name “Deuteronomy” comes from the Greek for “second Law,” and that’s exactly what the book is: a recapitulation of the law that has already been articulated in Leviticus. Nevertheless, Deuteronomy remains a crucial component of both the Jewish and Christian narratives. In fact, it is the book of the bible that Jesus quotes most frequently in the gospels. This raises an interesting and important question: what it is that makes this repetitive book of Laws so compelling?

To answer this, it’s important for us to remember that the books of the bible were not written or edited together at the same time. The writers of Leviticus probably did not know the writers of Deuteronomy. As a result, each book can be placed in context and given a historical frame that guides the way we read the text. Deuteronomy’s context, in particular, is crucial to our understanding of the book. Most scholars agree that Deuteronomy entered the Jewish community during the exile, the time when the people of Israel were removed from the land God promised to them. The exile was a time of great soul searching, a time when God’s people wondered where they had gone wrong, a time when they reached back into their traditions to remind themselves who they were.

This is what is happening in the reading we heard this morning. The people of Israel are being reminded that they are a wise and discerning people, that unlike the nations of the world, they have a Law that is the symbol of God’s claim on them, that they have a God who is closer to them than their own breath. In the midst of this congratulatory language, however, there is a poignant hint of warning, an almost wistful note of lament: “But take care and watch yourselves closely, so as neither to forget the things that your eyes have seen nor to let them slip from your mind all the days of your life.” In the context of the exile, these are words of regret. “This is where we went wrong,” the people listening are meant to say, “this is why we have been removed from our homeland and from everything we have ever known: because we have allowed these things to slip from our minds.” Interestingly, this passage does not suggest that the exile occurred simply because Israel failed to follow the statutes and ordinances that had been set before them, but because they had forgotten how near God was when they called upon the LORD. Israel was in exile because they had become indifferent to God’s presence among them. They had replaced the living God with totems made of wood and gold, they had abandoned true devotion for the spectacle of idol worship, they had given up wisdom for the sake of easy answers. This passage from Deuteronomy calls God’s people to discernment, which is not about labeling things “good” or “bad,” “sacred” or “profane,” but is instead about remembering the indescribable nearness of our God.

A few days ago, Alison Parker and Adam Ward, two journalists from an ABC affiliate in Virginia, were shot to death during a live broadcast. Just after pulling the trigger, the murderer sent a chilling fax that read, “I’ve been a human powder keg for a while….just waiting to go BOOM.” Whatever his motives, this gunman saw these innocent victims as part of a grim spectacle through which he would make himself and his particular issues known to the world. While many have expressed their shock and revulsion at this senseless act of violence, the fact is, events like this are what tends to get noticed in our culture today. Those who crave our attention rely more and more on empty, and in some cases, violent spectacle to hold it. The age we live in is desperate for a spirit of discernment. Discernment is not judging one thing to be better than another; discernment is about determining what is worth our attention. And as people of faith, we are called to devote our attention to what is true, what is real. We are called to remember the indescribable nearness of God and embrace the transforming reality of God’s presence. In large part, this is what we attempt to do every time we gather for worship. The primary purpose of our liturgy is not to entertain, distract, or even edify; it is meant to articulate something real. During the hour or so we gather on Sunday mornings, we lay aside cliche and doubletalk and strive for the rarest of goals: to mean exactly what we say. While this may not seem like much, it is profoundly countercultural, it is the core of what it means to be a Christian, it is the embodiment of what it means to remember the nearness of God, and it can change the world.

The Disciple Abides

Sermon on John 15:9-17 offered to the people of the Church of the Redeemer in Bryn Mawr, PA. Audio for this sermon may be found here.

In 1998, Joel and Ethan Coen introduced us to the Dude, the main character in a movie called The Big Lebowski. I won’t summarize the whole movie for you (it’s really worth watching), but I will tell you that it follows the Dude as he gets caught up in an escalating series of predicaments in which he is used by various powerful people for their nefarious purposes. It is an homage to the film noir genre, but unlike those films, in which the protagonist tends to get so caught up in the spiral of events that he ends up in a ditch somewhere, the Dude is unperturbed and ultimately unaffected by the drama that surrounds him. Indeed, the Dude seems to practice the Zen art of detachment; nothing seems to bother him all that much. This works out well for him; by the end of the movie, in spite of everything that happens to him, the Dude is back where he started. He summarizes his resilience with a memorable phrase: “the Dude abides.”

“Abide” is one of those words that tends to show up only in very specific contexts. Even though it just means “stay” or “remain,” we tend not to use it in everyday conversation. It shows up in hymnody all the time: “Abide with me, fast falls the eventide,” “O come with us, abide with us, our Lord Emmanuel.” And as a result of its frequent appearance in hymns, “abide” has become something of an explicitly religious word. Perhaps this is why we don’t use “abide” regularly; it is reserved for loftier purposes. But I wonder if there is a deeper reason that abide is not part of the modern lexicon. “Abide” shares a root with “abode”; if we say that we abide somewhere, we imply that we are making that place our home. “Abide” implies permanence, contentment, a sense that we are not going anywhere for a while. Is there anything that is more at odds with our contemporary preoccupation with progress than a sense of permanence? Our culture insists that we shouldn’t stay in any one place for too long, that should move out of the starter home as soon as it’s financially feasible, that we should always be on the lookout for new job opportunities, that we should always be thinking about what comes next. This impatience for what comes next is motivated by a profound anxiety that there is much more to do, much more to strive for before we can achieve peace and contentment. In this anxious cultural context, the worst thing we can possibly do is abide.

This kind of anxiety is nothing new. When Jesus gathers with his friends prior to his crucifixion, the disciples are riddled with apprehension, uncertain about what will happen next. This morning’s gospel reading comes from a section of John in which everything the disciples say betrays their trepidation: “Are you going to wash my feet?”, “Lord, we don’t know where you are going, how can we know the way?”, “Lord, just show us the Father, and we will be satisfied.” It’s no wonder that the disciples are anxious. After all, Jesus has predicted his execution; the disciples know that it is only a matter of time before the authorities come to arrest him. It is in the midst of this swirling anxiety that Jesus offers these startlingly simple words of assurance: “As the Father has loved me, so I love you; abide in my love.” These words are surprising because they do very little to alleviate the anxiety of the disciples; indeed, Jesus doesn’t even address their concern about what will happen next. Rather than engaging their concerns about the future, Jesus challenges the disciples to embrace the present.

This would have been countercultural for the disciples even if they weren’t worried about Jesus’ impending Passion. Much of the first century Jewish experience was about waiting for what comes next. There are two pivotal stories from the Hebrew Bible that gave shape to the way the Jewish people understood the world. One was the Exodus, the story of how God liberated God’s people from slavery and led them to the Promised Land. The other was the exile, the fact that God’s people were removed from the place God promised and forced to live in a strange land. The centrality of the exile meant that the Jewish worldview was one of yearning and expectation. This continued into the first century because even though the Jewish people lived in the land promised to them by God, they did not posses it; it was a territory of the Roman Empire. The centrality of both Exodus and exile meant much of the first-century Jewish experience was about looking to the future: the future when God would expel the foreign occupiers from the promised land, the future when the Messiah would rule with justice and equity, the future when God’s people would be free to live in peace.

So when Jesus tells his disciples to abide in his love, he challenges this worldview. And by telling his disciples to abide, Jesus taps into another deep tradition from the Hebrew Bible, one affirmed by the psalmist when he calls us to make “the Lord our refuge and the Most High our habitation.” Jesus taps into God’s promise that we will abide with God regardless of what happens to us. The story told in the Bible is the story of a God who abides with his people even when they have been cut off from everything they know. The Exodus, therefore, is not a story about a circuitous journey to the Promised Land; it is a story about a God who remains with his people as they fail and falter their way through the desert. The exile is not a story of mere deportation, it is the story of how God’s faithfulness endured even though God’s people had been removed from the promised land. Moreover, the incarnation is the embodiment of the reality that God abides among us, and the resurrection the affirmation that not even death can disrupt God’s abiding presence. Jesus challenges the disciples to recognize that God is with them even in the midst of their anxiety and uncertainty. Jesus challenges the disciples to abide in the knowledge that God’s love endures even the most difficult circumstances of their lives. Jesus challenges the disciples and challenges all of us to get out of the endless cycle of striving, to buck the culture of “what’s next,” and recognize that we have a home in God.

For many of us, the very idea of abiding is frightening. We think that if we stay in one place, the world will pass us by. We assume that in order to abide, we have to adopt the the Dude’s perspective, detached and disengaged from the world. But Jesus does not tell his disciples to abide in blissful ignorance; he tells them to abide in his love. Abiding is not just about remaining in one place oblivious to the realities of life; it is about being in a mutual, dynamic relationship with the one who created and redeemed us. We enter this relationship through worship, through the practice of sabbath. The practice of sabbath, the discipline of staying put, allows us to understand that God sustains creation even when we take a break. The discipline of sabbath allows us to understand that the time we have is a gift from God. At its best, our worship is about providing a space in which we can put away anxiety and abide in God’s love.

 

Saltiness

Sermon on Matthew 5:13-20 offered to the people of the Church of the Heavenly Rest on February 9, 2014.

 When I first learned to cook, I was scrupulous about following recipes.  If a cookbook told me to heat something over medium-high heat, I would carefully turn the knob on the stove so that the arrow rested on the precise midpoint between “medium” and “high.”  When a bread recipe instructed me to knead dough for ten minutes, I would set a timer and press that dough against the counter until the precise moment the bell rang.  Most importantly, when a dish called for a teaspoon of salt, I would pour salt into a measuring spoon, careful not to add even a few extra grains to the dish.  After all, I didn’t want the food I prepared to be too salty.  For the most part, this scrupulosity seemed to pay off.  The results of my first attempts at cooking were mostly edible, and some were even moderately successful.

But when I watched more experienced people cook, I noticed that they tended to be less wedded to the recipe.  When my father heated something on the stove, he would turn the knob without carefully examining the place it landed.  When my mother kneaded bread dough, she wouldn’t set a timer to tell her when to stop; she would know how the dough was supposed to feel after it had been kneaded.  Perhaps the most shocking revelation was that when my parents cooked, they didn’t carefully measure out the salt they added to dishes.  In fact, they grabbed what appeared to be huge handfuls of salt and used those to season whatever they were preparing.  The first time I saw this, I shouted, “What are you doing?  It’s going to be too salty!”  Giving me a knowing smile, they said, “Just wait and see.”  Of course, those well-seasoned dishes were not salty at all; in fact, they were far more flavorful and complex than those dishes that I had assembled so scrupulously.  It gradually dawned on me that the primary purpose of salt in cooking is not to make food salty; it is to make food taste the way it is supposed to taste.  The purpose of salt is to make a dish what it is supposed to be.

Today, we hear one of the more interesting passages from the Sermon on the Mount.  Part of the reason I think this passage is interesting is that it seems so disjointed.  Just after Jesus preaches the beatitudes to the crowds, he jumps into these two metaphors, telling those listening to him that they are the salt of the earth and the light of the world.  This is the kind of teaching we expect from Jesus; he’s making us feel good about our Christian vocation to go make the world a better place.  It’s no accident that upbeat songs like “This little light of mine” draw on the images that Jesus uses in this passage.  But just after Jesus tells us that we are the salt of the earth and the light of the world, he brings down the hammer: “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have not come to abolish, but to fulfill.”  In other words, it seems that Jesus is saying, “If you thought that being my follower was going to be easy and free of rules and regulations, you’ve got another thing coming.”  In fact, he concludes the passage we read today by saying, “Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and the Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”  Yikes.  Just so we’re clear, the scribes and the Pharisees were known for their righteousness under the law, known for their ability to keep all of the rules and regulations prescribed under the Law of Moses.  Jesus is setting an extremely high bar here: “unless you are more righteous than the most righteous people around, you are not fit for the kingdom that God is bringing into being.”

Why is Jesus setting this impossibly high standard?  Doesn’t this insistence on the Law seem inconsistent with what we know about Jesus?  To answer these questions, it might be helpful for us to think about the purpose of the Law.  For the Jewish people, the Law was the lens through which they understood their relationship with God.  During the Babylonian captivity, Israel was unable to worship at the Temple in Jerusalem, and so the Law became what defined them.  It was a way of continuing to be God’s people even though they had been driven from the land God had given to them.  The Law retained a central role even as the Jewish people returned from captivity and dwelled in the land promised to them by God.  There were, however, some who regarded the Law not as a way to be in relationship with God, but as an end in itself.  There were some who were scrupulous about keeping the law so that they would be blameless, so that they would be perfect, so that they could look in the mirror and say, “Boy, I sure am righteous.”  In other words, there were some who regarded the law as a recipe for righteousness, who said “as long as I set the burner at precisely the right temperature, as long as knead the dough for just the right amount of time, as long as I add just the right amount of salt, I will be righteous under the law.”  Jesus, however, comes along and tells us that he has come to fulfill the Law, to remind us of its primary purpose, to return our focus from following the recipe to being in relationship with God.

This is where we see that those two metaphors that Jesus uses at the beginning of this passage are far from unrelated to his meditations about the Law.  Jesus tells his hearers that they are the salt of the earth and that they are the light of the world.  Notice what Jesus does not say.  He does not say, “If you follow the Law, you will be the salt of the earth” or “If you abide by these beatitudes, you will be the light of the world.”  Rather, Jesus says, “You are the salt of the earth” and “You are the light of the world.”  Right here.  Right now.  Moreover, Jesus is very specific about who he is talking to.  We don’t get the sense of it in English, but the Greek makes it very clear that Jesus is talking to everyone in front of him: “All y’all are the salt of the earth.  All y’all are the light of the world.  Each and every one of you is called to enlighten this world and help it to be what it is supposed to be.”  This is how our righteousness is meant to exceed that of the scribes and the Pharisees.  While they are focused on following the recipe and reaching the goal of making themselves righteous, we are to realize that we are already who God has called us to be.  Our righteousness does not come from our successful completion of the Law’s requirements; our righteousness comes from the God who loves us and desires a relationship with us.  Our righteousness does not come from following the recipe; our righteousness comes from realizing that we are salt, that we are called to season the world and make it what God desires it to be.

It is clear that our identity as the salt of the earth is meant to shape our lives.  But this begs the question: how do we live our lives with the understanding that we are salt?  Jesus tells us that we are the salt of the earth, but immediately adds a caveat: “if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored?”  The way that the question is worded indicates that once it has lost its saltiness, salt’s taste cannot be restored, that it is now worthless and needs to be thrown away.  This seems to imply that if we are not careful, we will lose our saltiness and become worthless in the eyes of God.  But here’s the thing: if you ask a scientist, she will tell you that salt cannot lose its saltiness.  Sodium chloride is a remarkably stable compound that will not lose its flavor even after being stored for many years.  So is Jesus saying that unlike real salt, we can lose our saltiness?  That just doesn’t seem consistent with the rest of this passage.  In the very next metaphor, Jesus tells us that we are the light of the world and that a city on a hill cannot be hidden, implying that any attempts to conceal the light are going fail.  It seems far more likely that Jesus is saying that even if we think we have lost our saltiness, we are still salt.  Even if we feel as though we have abandoned our call to bring God’s savor to the world, we are still who God has called us to be. Even if we think we are worthless in the eyes of God, God still loves us and desires a relationship with us.

Whether you nurture your life of faith on a daily basis or you feel that your faith has been dormant for a long time; you are the salt of the earth.  Whether you have been here every Sunday for the past thirty years or this is the first time you have ever been inside a church building; you are the salt of the earth.  Whether you embrace the life of this community or you have turned away from it; you are the salt of the earth.  No matter where you have been or what you have done, you are who God has called you to be.  In light of this identity, in light of who God has called you to be: Jesus Christ invites you, Jesus Christ invites all of us to be salt.  Jesus Christ invites us to be salt by bringing God’s savor to a world that craves compassion and justice.  Jesus Christ invites us to be salt by seasoning a world that is hungry for hope and beauty. Above all, Jesus Christ invites us to be salt by filling the world with God’s love and helping the world be what it is supposed to be.