Come, Creative Chaos!! (Pentecost B, Acts 2.1-21, May 27, 2012)

Pentecost B
Acts 2.1-21
May 27, 2012 

Come, Creative Chaos!!

• Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
• First United Methodist Church
• Decorah, Iowa

There are many peoples in the world who know just how unlucky it is to happen to live in a place coveted by a stronger neighbor. The Scots, the Cornish, the Welsh and the Irish can all tell tales of what it was and is like to have England as a neighbor. Similarly the Iroquois, the Cherokee, the Dakota, and even the Oneonta can tell you about what life was like as a neighbor of an expanding American empire. 

Those who are unlucky enough to live next door to strong and greedy neighbors are in for some hard times. If you are unlucky enough next door to a series such neighbors, your life will be very difficult indeed. Those who manage to stay will have to adapt to life under a series of overlords. They will learn the skills of compromise, accommodation, and sucking up. 

Those who do not manage to stay will become what is called a “diaspora.” Diaspora is a Greek word that means “a scattering.” The first people to be called a diaspora were the ancient Jews who, tired of playing host to a succession of invading armies and occupying empires, got “scattered” into southern Europe, northern Africa, and western Asia. 

They called themselves a diaspora, because they had been scattered, and that is hard thing for any people. But there is in the use of this term a little bit of hope. Diaspora is also the word to describe the sowing of seed. Seed in ancient agriculture was scattered on top of the soil which was then thinly plowed so that the seed was covered with a little soil so that it could germinate and grow into a crop. Calling themselves a diaspora was the way that ancient Jews claimed that their scattering might actually be something positive. Perhaps they were seed that God had scattered into the world. Perhaps they would take root and grow. Perhaps some good fruit would come of their suffering and struggle. Perhaps they would become a blessing to the nations among whom they found themselves. Perhaps. 

Life as part of a diaspora isn’t easy. It’s one thing to move somewhere and just blend in and become a part of the community without trying to keep some ties with the old country. Most immigrants do that. Maybe at first, among those who carrying memories of their homeland, they cherish what little remains of their old identities. But their children are usually pretty quick to leave behind all traces. They grow up speaking their new language without an accent. They dress like their neighbors. Except, perhaps for special holidays, they eat what their neighbors eat. They become, for example, Norwegians-descended Americans who eat American food, wear American clothes and speak American English. Oh, perhaps on a few days of the year they wear some sort of traditional costume, and eat lefse and lutefisk. And they might root for the Vikings. But they are not Vikings, and their Norwegian identity serves to enrich and deepen their American identity rather than shoving it aside. Substituting a few terms, the same could be said of all immigrant groups: the Germans, the Scots, the English, the Guatemalans, the Hmung and the Somalis. 

Jews presented a special problem, though. They were what the Greeks called an ethnos, a nation, a people, but it was a unique part of their identity that they had a special relationship with a particular God. The God of the Jews was not only particular, but peculiar. The God of the Jews cared about their rhythm of work and rest days, about what they ate, how they dressed, and even the style of their haircuts. Because of their special relationship with their God, the Jews could go only so far in becoming like their neighbors. They couldn’t become Parthians, Phrygians or Pamphylians. 

They were what today we would bi-cultural. In some ways there were like their neighbors and in others ways not at all like them. It’s a lot of work being bi-cultural. They have to work to maintain their old identities. It’s a lot of effort and sometimes they end up trying too hard. Irish-Americans drink green beer once a year, something that the Irish regard as very strange. Scottish-Americans may put on the kilt even when they are not going to a wedding, something that Scots hardly ever do. 

It’s not work at all for someone living in Oslo to be Norwegian or for someone living in Inverness to be Scottish. Not so for Norwegians or Scots living in Decorah. And not so for Jews living in Parthia, Phrygia or Pamphylia. It’s not unlikely for a Norwegian living in Decorah to be a better Norwegian that one living in Oslo, precisely because they have to work at and commit to it as something that is done on purpose. They also almost always don’t get it quite right. The difference is the difference between a dancer who knows all the steps and a dancer who feels the music, the difference between someone who speaks English as a second language and a native speaker. 

For this reason the heartland always looks down its nose a little at the diaspora. That was certainly true for the Jewish diaspora when they came “home” to Jerusalem—perhaps once in a lifetime—to observe a festival like Pentecost. Oh, sure, the Jews in Jerusalem were glad to see them come. They were more than happy to take their shekels. Or even exchange their denarii, if they were foolish enough not to have exchanged their currency before leaving home. But it was the politeness of the year-rounders toward the summer visitors on Cape Cod. 

So it was a crowd of diasporan Jews who heard “the howling of a fierce wind” when the Spirit came upon Peter and the rest. The sound filled the whole house. There were “what seemed to be individual flames of fire” touching each of them. And, moved by the Holy Spirit, they each began to speak in other languages. 

If you remember the story about Cornelius and Peter from a couple of weeks ago, you will remember that the theme of that story was the demolition of the barriers between Jews and non-Jews by the battering ram of God’s all-inclusive love. This week, in a story at the very beginning of the book, there is another barrier that falls and it is the barrier of language. 

Among these Jewish visitors, Hebrew was a ritual language, confined to gatherings of the Jewish community and to prayers. Everything else was done in the local language. Even the Scriptures were translated into the local language for the sake of those whose Hebrew was not quite good enough to be able to use it for study. They worshiped in Hebrew, but they thought and felt in their local tongues. 

So when the followers of Jesus were blown away by the Holy Spirit and started speaking in other languages, it was the language of the heart, of the nursery, of the most intimate of relationships in which those devout Jewish pilgrims heard God’s praises. Not in Hebrew, but in Parthian, Phrygian, and Pamphylian. 

From the very beginning, the Jesus movement was committed to translatability. You do not have to learn Hebrew to be follower of Jesus. You do not have to learn Arabic to be one of God’s people, nor Greek, nor Latin, nor English. 

The howling of a fierce wind blew down the walls created by language. And it blew down the arrangement of privilege that such walls support and justify. The power of the Jerusalem center over the religious lives of the communities of the Jewish diaspora was blown away forever. 

And that’s the way the Spirit moves. The Spirit moves and a jumbled cacophony of dozens of voices raised in praise gathers a crowd. The Spirit moves and each one of the gathered crowds hears the praises of God in the language of their own heart. The Spirit moves and there is holy chaos. The Spirit moves and there is holy order. The Spirit moves and words like “center” and “margin” lose their meaning and oppressive power. 

The Spirit moves and there is a trembling in the halls of power. The power of the Holy breaks out of confinement to the Temple apparatus. The power of the priesthood that controlled access to the power of the Holy is set aside. 

That power is not replaced, either. It’s not as if the high priest is set aside and Peter becomes the first pope. Peter isn’t put in charge. He’s just the preacher. His only role is to name what has happened. And what does Peter say? He points his listeners to the prophet Joel who saw that day when the distinctions that keep the power in power are dissolved in the Spirit’s melting fire: male and female alike will speak forth God’s word; young and old alike will have visionary dreams; slaves and masters equally will be vessels of the Spirit. 

This must be scary stuff for bishops in the United Methodist Church, for pastors, too, if they are the sort that need to have control over everything. I feel for them. They spend their time carefully building up structures so that everything is predictable and manageable. They spend their energy bringing order to chaos. And then the Spirit blows it all away, bringing holy chaos to their order and a new ordering in its wake. 

No one seems to be in charge. Commissions are useless. Reports go unread. And the Spirit blows. 

It is possible to build a hurricane-proof house and maybe even a tornado-proof one. But it is impossible to build a Spirit-proof church. And we are living in times when the Spirit is moving. There is the sound of fierce wind. We don’t know what will emerge out of the chaos that we’re living through, but we know that God’s mighty deeds will be proclaimed. 

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA.

Praise Begins in Torah (Psalm 1, Easter 7B, May 20, 2012)

Easter 7B

Psalm 1

May 20, 2012

Praise Begins in Torah

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
 First United Methodist Church

Decorah, Iowa

Over twenty years ago a conservative rabbi named Harold Kushner published a little book called When Bad Things Happen to Good People.¹ This was no high-minded academic treatise on the question known to philosophy of religion as theodicy. It was an urgent quest for answers to the painful questions in his heart when he found out that his young son had an incurable degenerative disease and would not survive his teenage years. “Why, God? How does my son possibly deserve this? How do I deserve this? And where are you in all this?” Like Jacob wrestling with the night demon at the ford of the Jabbok, Rabbi Kushner grappled with these questions. Like Jacob he came away limping, but also came away with a book that was on at least one of the New York Times’s bestseller lists for over a year and for a while on two lists at once and has sold more than five million copies so far.

It seems that he was not the only person who struggles with those questions.

One of the targets of Rabbi Kushner’s passionate argument is the thinking of the Deuteronomistic Historian, the person or—more likely—the group of people who produced the book of Deuteronomy where this thinking is put forth most often and most insistently. Here’s the theory: God works through human history in such a way that there is what theologians call “moral symmetry.” Put more simply, the theory is that God makes sure that people get what they got comin’.

The Deuteronomistic Historian developed this theory to explain the catastrophe of the Fall of Jerusalem and the Exile in Babylon. The people had broken covenant with God, therefore God had sent them into exile in Babylon. God punished the people for their wickedness using the conquering armies of Babylon to destroy Jerusalem and tear them from their homes.

We know this theory. We use it. “What goes around, comes around,” we say when some scoundrel living a charmed life finally gets their comeuppance. We like to think that, at least in long run, good people will be rewarded and bad people will “get what they got comin’.”

We work the theory backwards, too, to suggest that the reason why we are pretty well off is because we are pretty good: we’ve worked hard, done the right things, etc. Prosperity is a reward given by history (and by the God who works in and through history) to the good. Poverty is likewise the punishment handed out by God to those who have failed to live as they should. This is moral symmetry. And we like the idea. At least we like it when things are going well for us and for those we love.

And yet we know it isn’t quite that simple. We buy books like When Bad Things Happen to Good People, because we know there’s more to it than that. Actually, the book I’d like to buy is entitled When Good Things Happen to Bad People which would explain why it is that God lets a small group of investment bankers who answer only to their own greed drive the world’s economy to the brink of disaster, turn four million American families out of their homes, plunge a quarter of our country’s children below the poverty line and still walk away with bonuses. I’d love to buy that book. Unfortunately, it hasn’t been written.

So, on the surface at least, we know that moral symmetry isn’t always an obvious feature of our universe. Bad things happen to good people. Bad things fail to happen to bad people. And we still aren’t as rich as we deserve to be.

So where does that leave us with Psalm One? Here it is again, in another translation:

Happy are those

who do not follow the advice of the wicked,

or take the path that sinners tread,

or sit in the seat of scoffers;

but their delight is in the law of the LORD,

and on his law they meditate day and night.

They are like trees

planted by streams of water,

which yield their fruit in its season,

and their leaves do not wither.

In all that they do, they prosper.

The wicked are not so,

but are like chaff that the wind drives away.

Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment,

nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous;

for the LORD watches over the way of the righteous,

but the way of the wicked will perish.

On the face of it, Psalm 1 seems to be a very clear statement of Deuteronomistic History. The good prosper. The wicked fail. God watches over it all to make sure that it is so.

There are some particular things that we should notice, of course. The goodness talked about in the psalm is not generic. It is quite specific and it has to do with Torah. The Torah refers in particular sense to the first five books of the Bible, Genesis through Deuteronomy. We might describe the Torah variously as God’s law, God’s path, God’s way, God’s instruction, and much more besides. As our psalm makes clear Torah-delight is the rich, moist, fertile soil in which God’s people find themselves planted as fruitful trees planted beside an irrigation ditch.

The book of Psalms doesn’t really have a plot. But like our own hymnal, its arrangement isn’t entirely random, either. At least the first and last psalms have been placed where they are for a reason. The book of Psalms begins with Torah-delight. It ends with Psalm 150 which calls all sorts of creatures to praise, from the angels in heaven, to every living creature on earth. It lists all sorts of musical instruments that are to be used to praise God. I am pleased to note that the list includes the bagpipes. But whatever the instrument, and whatever the sort of sound they make, it is all to be turned to God’s praises. The book of Psalms ends in praise.

In the way it passes through the highs and lows of human experience. If we have only paid attention to the 23^rd Psalm we may have missed the fact that it isn’t all sweetness in the psalms. More than half of the psalms are laments that cry out for God to act in the face of a world gone wrong. In many laments, God’s saving answer can be seen to be approaching. In others there is no sign that God has heard, much less answered. One of them is—Psalm 88—is so bleak that its last word is the darkness that covered the face of the deep until God spoke light into being.

If the whole of the book of psalms begins with and is rooted in Torah-delight and ends in praise, it is not because the psalmist doesn’t get out much, has led a sheltered life, or is unaware that the universe is a complicated place where moral symmetry is all too rare. If the psalmist sings that whatever the lover of God’s Torah does turns out well, it’s not because she is unaware that bad things can and do happen. This is not, I am convinced, a naïve psalm.

You and I know that there are the righteous poor and there are the wicked rich. The psalmist knows it, too. So Psalm 1 is not intended to argue otherwise. It is not a survey of leading economic indicators, nor is it a study in political economics. Neither the followers of Smith nor the followers of Marx can take much comfort here.

I think we might place this psalm alongside Jesus’ statement about following him:

For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life? Indeed, what can they give in return for their life?²

To take delight in God’s Torah, which is in the end to take delight in seeing the world as God sees it, is a way of life. In poetic, not political, fashion the psalmist sketches what that way of life is like. It is unexpectedly fruitful, since this is a tree planted by an irrigation ditch, not by a natural river. It is a life of dependable abundance, that wonderful quality of having enough and a little more besides and having it without the anxiety that our culture teaches us to have so that we will go out and buy more insurance and vote in a particular way.

The one who delights in Torah, recites it or meditates on it day and night. That’s what our translations say, but the original is richer in its imagery. The delighter in Torah mumbles the Torah. She delights in the words, makes a feast of them, repeats them, turns them over and over, hears how they sound, repeats them until her heart beats with their rhythm. That’s Torah-delight.

The life of the Torah-delighted community is rich in ways that we have forgotten. Land is never alienated from its original owners for long, but returns to them after a time. Debt forgiveness is practiced regularly. There is rest for the weary—for the good and the wicked alike. The earth is not pushed into unwise over-production. The Torah-delighting community knows when there is enough. It knows contentment. It knows freedom from anxiety. This is the life of the Torah-delighting community. It is like a tree planted right beside the irrigating waters. It bears its fruit at the right time. It weathers drought.

Those who scorn the Torah on the other hand live a far different kind of life. They may well be rich, but their lives are worthless. They are like the covering on seeds of grain. Hard, dry and inedible, the grain has to be beaten with sticks or stepped on by oxen to break it off the grain. Then the wind blows and the useless chaff blows away, but the nutritious seed remains. Those who scorn the Torah may become rich. Wealth means more to them than justice or compassion. They end up with lives that are dry and worthless.

So the psalmist has set before the picture of two different ways of life. For the most part, I suspect, these two ways of life are themselves their own reward.

So the book of psalms begins. The psalmist leaves the wicked to go their own way. Wherever such lives go, they do not move from Torah-delight to the praise of God. But if we will begin with the psalmist in Torah-delight, then the path of the book of Psalms will be ours and, whatever struggles we encounter along the way, our destination will be praise.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA.

1Kushner, Harold S. When Bad Things Happen to Good People. New York: Schocken Books, 1981.

2Mark 8:35-38.

The Conversion of Peter's Church (Acts 10:44-48, May 13, 2012, Easter 6B)

6th Sunday of Easter, Year B

Acts 10:44-48

May 13, 2012 (Mother's Day)

The Conversion of Peter's Church

 Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD

First United Methodist Church

Decorah, IA

“While Peter was still speaking, the Holy Spirit fell upon all who heard the word.” Clearly we are missing something. Who were these people? What was Peter saying to them? Why were others astounded? What’s going on here? 

 

To find out what’s going on we have to go back to the beginning of the story, back at least to the beginning of the chapter. I don’t wonder that the lectionary committee decided not to include the whole of the tenth chapter of Acts in our lesson for this morning, but, really, unless we get the whole story, these five verses will only tease us when they ought to shatter our world and put it together aright.

Simon Peter begins the chapter in town of Joppa on the Mediterranean seacoast. He was staying at the home of another man named Simon. This other Simon was tanner. This might not matter to us. After all, what difference does it make what Simon did for a living? Well, it would have been obvious at the time. Simon took the skins of butchered animals and processed them into leather. It’s no wonder that his house was near the coast. Without the tides to wash away the waste materials, Simon’s house would have been unlivable. 

Simon’s smelly job also meant that he has often unclean. I don’t mean dirty, though he was that, too, I don’t doubt. I mean unclean. As it was (and is) for many religious traditions, the Jewish world was divided into two parts: the clean and the unclean. Some things were inherently unclean and some things might be either clean or unclean depending on the circumstances. All animals, for example, clean or unclean, became unclean when they died. A person became unclean if they touched the body of a dead animal. Being unclean meant that a person wasn’t allowed to do some religious things. It sounds like a bigger deal than it was, since there were cleansing rituals that took care of this. But for tanners—like Simon—or butchers, uncleanness was something that had to be dealt with on a daily basis, otherwise ordinary Jewish life would have been impossible. When the story tells us that Simon was a tanner, it’s tipping us off that the issue of cleanness and uncleanness is going to come up again. And so it does.

Peter is in Joppa with Simon the tanner. Meanwhile in Caesarea there was a retired soldier named Cornelius who had used his pension money to settle in Roman Palestine. To a fair number of non-Jews in those days, the Jewish religion was attractive, mostly because of the clear call to an ethical life that came from the Jewish God, a call that was unusual in the ancient world. Cornelius had heard that call. He was both pious and compassionate. 

 

One afternoon Cornelius was praying and saw a vision. In this vision, he was told by an angel that his prayers had been answered and that he was to send for a man named Simon Peter who was staying in Joppa at the house of a man named Simon Tanner. Cornelius sent two of his servants along with an army buddy of his to go to Joppa and return with Simon Peter.

Now the scene shifts again to Joppa where it was noon and Peter was praying. Peter was up on the roof of Simon Tanner’s house, maybe to get away from the smell. Anyway, Peter was hungry. He was trying to concentrate on his prayers, but his stomach was growling. In spite of that—or maybe because of that—Simon Peter had a vision. Heaven was opened and a sheet was lowered down to earth. In the sheet were all sorts of animals. A voice told him to kill and eat. Peter refused, saying, “I have never eaten anything impure or unclean.” (Didn’t I tell you this would come up again? But wait, as they say on television, there’s more!) The voice said, “Never consider unclean what God has made pure.” There’s the vision: sheet with animals, a voice saying to kill and eat, Simon Peter refusing, voice saying not to consider unclean what God has made pure. Simon Peter saw this vision three times. 

 

In the meantime, Cornelius servants and the old army buddy arrived at Simon Tanner’s house. No, I’m sorry. They arrived at Simon Tanner’s gate. This important. 

 

The voice that had been inviting Simon Peter to kill and eat told him that three people were looking for him and that he was to go with them without asking any questions. He wasn’t to appoint a commission, file a petition, make a motion, hold a hearing, schedule a referendum. He was just supposed to go with them.

He went down to the gate. “Yes, I’m the man you’re looking for. What do you want?”

The three men told him the story of Cornelius’ vision. They were at Peter’s disposal and would listen to whatever it was he had to say. Peter invited them into the house.

Wait a minute! They had been waiting at the gate for a reason. And the reason was that, if they, being Gentiles, were to come into the house, the house would become unclean. But Peter—maybe already under the influence of his hunger-induced vision—invited them into the house.

The next day, Simon Peter, Cornelius’ army buddy and two servants, together with some of the Jesus-followers from Joppa, got up and traveled to Caesarea. Cornelius was waiting. In fact, he had invited some friends and relatives. When they arrived, our text tells us, “Peter entered the house.” Peter entered the house. Peter, the good Jewish boy, who had never eaten anything impure or unclean, entered the house of Cornelius, the Gentile. This house was, by definition, unclean. For Peter to enter it rendered him unclean. Peter entered the house. 

 

Traditionally, this story is known as the Conversion of Cornelius, but that’s not a good title. Cornelius didn’t need any converting. He was just fine the way he was. Yes, he became a Jesus-follower, but he ended the story has he began it, as a man who was trying to obey the God of Jesus by being as wise and good and compassionate as he could be. It wasn’t Cornelius who was converted. It was Simon Peter. Simon Peter, the pious insider in the community of Jesus-followers, was the one who needed converting. And it happened for him, beginning with the hunger induced vision and culminating at the doorstep of Cornelius’ house. At that moment, Simon Peter’s fundamental commitments and his view of the universe were changed for ever. 

 

The new convert Simon Peter began to speak. 

 

I wish I could say that his words lived up to his new reality. They didn’t. That happens sometimes. Sometimes takes a long time for our heads to catch up with our hearts. And our big fat mouths lag even further behind. So it was for Simon Peter, “You all realize that it is forbidden for a Jew to associate or visit with outsiders. However, God has shown me that I should never call a person impure or unclean. (Even you.)” Well, it was a start. And that’s all we could ask for. 

 

Simon Peter went on to ask Cornelius to explain why he had been sent for. Cornelius did that and Simon went on to tell Cornelius about Jesus’ ministry and message. And while Simon was still speaking, it became clear to the Jewish Jesus-followers that God had given them the Spirit just as God had given it to them. Cornelius and his family and friends had done none of what there were supposed to do: they hadn’t become Jews. They hadn’t attended a membership class. They hadn’t even been baptized. None of that mattered for the moment. For the moment all that mattered was that God had made them pure.

Now there are some people who believe that the most important story in the book of Acts is the conversion of Saul who became the Apostle Paul, carried the good news of Jesus through the cities of the Eastern Mediterranean, and wrote a huge chunk of the New Testament. Some people believe that Acts turns on the gift of the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost that gave the little band of Jesus-followers the audacity and courage to share their message in the same city where Jesus had been executed. Others say that the story climaxes when Paul reaches Rome, the center of their known world which was , in principle at least, the same thing as the “ends of the earth.”

But I say that the story of the Conversion of Simon Peter is the pivot of the whole book. I say that because at the heart of Simon Peter’s conversion lies this pivotal realization: We do not get to decide whom God loves. It does not matter if we are Simon Peter,leader of this band of Jesus-followers. It does not matter if we are ordained. It does not matter if we are bishops, even. It does not matter if we are delegates to General Conference,or members of the Judiciary Council. We do not get to decide whom God loves. God decides whom to love. God decides and Simon Peter could only try his best to keep up. And we can only try our best to keep up with Simon, so that the story of his conversion may at last become the story of our own.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA.

Branches, Not Franchises - John 15:1-8; May 6, 2012

Easter 5B
John 15:1-8

May 6, 2012

Branches, Not Franchises

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

It was one of the moments of my life that haunt me. I remember it like it was yesterday. It happened during a session of the Iowa Annual Conference. To be specific it was during the ordination service.

The preacher for the day was Rev. Peter Storey. Peter Storey is a former bishop of the South African Methodist Church. I listened very carefully to what he had to say as he addressed those about to be ordained and those, like me, who were reflecting on their own ordinations.

He spoke about the temptation to avoid hard questions in the quest for what our culture calls success. He spoke about the need for prophetic ministry. Bishop Storey had served the church during the bad old days of apartheid. In fact he had been Nelson Mandela’s chaplain when Mandela was in prison. He has some authority to speak of these things.

He said to the ordinands, “You are not being ordained today to be the managers of the local franchise of the United Methodist Church, Inc.” God, he told them, had something more significant in mind for them than to become a successful part of a large denomination of the institutionalized church. God had called them to speak God’s liberating truth regardless of what it meant for their careers.

It was powerful stuff, coming at a time when I desperately needed to hear it: I had not been ordained to be “the manager of the local franchise of the United Methodist Church, Inc.” Wonderful!

Too bad it isn’t true. In the first place The United Methodist Church is in fact organized very much like McDonald’s or Target or any other institution with a recognizable brand name. We do have local franchises and we have local managers. We call them pastors. We have district managers that we call superintendents. We even have regional managers that we call bishops.

There are many people who are quick to say that “the church is a business and it should be run like a business.” We have a product and we have customers. We have revenue streams and they must at least equal our expenditures, at least over the long haul, or we cannot continue to operate.

I was ordained to be the manager of the local franchise of the United Methodist Church, Inc. Of course bishops will deny this. They will point to the fact that I was ordained to ministries of word, sacrament and order. I am to proclaim the word of God. I am to preside at baptism and at the table. I am to order the people of God for ministry in this place.

Yes, it’s true that this is not the sort of language spoken at Harvard Business School. But our theological language is often little more than an attempt to hide from ourselves the meaning of what we’re saying. We often say “evangelism” when what we mean is “member recruiting.” We say “stewardship” when what we mean is “fund-raising.” We say “servant ministry” when what we mean is our plausibly deniable ways of gaining and exercising power. We are past masters at taking the language of the empire and sprinkling a little holy water on it for use in the church. The imperial language of our day is the language of business and there are many in the church who believe that the values and practices of the business world could be the salvation of the church.

In any event, my supervisors are looking for profits, whether they measure that in terms of ever-increasing membership and attendance or in terms of ever-larger budgets with apportionments fully paid each year. It is simply untrue that I have not been ordained to be the manager of the local franchise of the United Methodist Church, Inc.

I should just say that it’s untrue. But it’s not quite simply untrue. There is something at work here that complicates things, making them unsimple. Or rather, there is someone at work here who makes them unsimple.

The language that Jesus uses to describe us is not organizational or entrepreneurial. His language is drawn from horticulture and the images are drawn from the vineyards that were cultivated on hillsides everywhere in Roman Palestine. We could say that Jesus was as captivated by the language of his day as we are by the language of ours. But he could have chosen language drawn from government or the military or the household, all of them organizations of his day. He chose not to. Instead, he chose images that were organic, if not natural. “You are branches,” he said. “I am the vine.”

Remember that John’s Jesus was speaking to a traumatized community. They had left the synagogues (or had been thrown out) and separated from their Jewish co-religionists. Who started it? Who was to blame? We don’t know and it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that John’s community was in deep, deep pain, the pain only those who have gone through a church split, a divorce, or a civil war can fully appreciate.

John’s community had been forced to leave; they could not remain where they had been. They had no obvious alternative, though. They had no obvious place to call their spiritual home. John’s Jesus says to them, “You are branches. I am the vine. Remain in me, just like branches remain in the vine.”

What a wonderful word to hear in the midst of such deep suffering! “We have no home,” we cry. “I am your home,” comes Jesus’ answer.

This was a community that was deeply traumatized. It was an organizational mess. It was threatened with loss of identity and even its existence as a group.

I don’t know how they reacted to what they were facing. I do know how we typically react to similar circumstances. I know this because we in the church are not strangers to some of these things. Our disaster is moving in slow motion compared to the one that John’s folk were going through, but we can still see where this is headed. The United Methodist Church in North America has been shrinking ever since the sixties. As a percentage of the population of the United States, the United Methodist Churches peaked in the early 1880s. We grew in total numbers in the early part of the last century for the same reason that we have been shrinking ever since: birth rates. They used to be high and now they are not.

We haven’t converted significant numbers of adults for a century and a half. And lately we haven’t been doing very well even among our own children, who typically graduate from church in their early teens.

We’re responding to this slow-motion disaster in the United Methodist Church in a number of ways. Some of us panic and wail about the death of our church. Some of us ignore the obvious and hope that by doing what doesn’t work,only doing it harder, we will somehow obtain different results.

The General Conference commissions studies to find out what makes growing churches grow, hoping to be about to bottle the formula and sell it across the denomination. We mutter darkly about accountability for pastors. We throw around jargon drawn from the business world and talk about “measurable outcomes” and “being nimble” and “congregational vitality.”

And Jesus? What does Jesus have to say? What language does he toss around? “I am the vine. You are the branches. Remain in me.” In fact, the word being translated “remain” occurs seven times in the nine verses of our reading: “Remain in me, and I in you...”, “...a branch...must remain in the vine...”, “...unless you remain...”, “...if you remain in me...you will produce much fruit...”, “...if you don’t remain...”, “...if you remain in me...”, “...if my words remain in you...”

John’s community is in exile and Jesus says, “Remain.” We are dashing around with commissions and restructuring (when we aren’t panicking or hiding our heads under our pillows) and Jesus says, “Remain. Stay where you are. God is in charge and is doing what needs to be done. You’re feeling sliced and diced? That’s God at work pruning and trimming. What is your part? Stay in me. Let my words sink down deeply in you and there let them stay. Stay.”

We want to be successful franchises, but Jesus is offering us a way to live and grow as his branches. We are looking for a way of salvaging success, and Jesus is calling us to faithfulness. We are looking for a way to hang on to the life that we have made for ourselves, and Jesus is calling us to die and be raised to new life. We are looking for a way out of our predicament and Jesus is offering us a way through it. We are looking for a direction to go, and Jesus is telling us to stay. 

 

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