An Odd God (24th Sunday after Pentecost; 1 Kings 17:1-24; October 30, 2016)

An Odd God

24th Sunday after Pentecost
1 Kings 17:1-24
October 30, 2016

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

Last week we were in the beginning of Davids reign. He ruled for a long time and then he died. His son Solomon became king. Solomon ruled for a long time and then he died.

When Solomon died the kingdom split in two. David’s dynasty continued to rule over Judah from Jerusalem. But in the north, in Israel, there was a series of short-lived dynasties. One of the rare exceptions was the dynasty of Omri.

Our story takes place in the time of Omri’s son, Ahab. Ahab married Jezebel, a princess of the royal family in Sidon, a city on the Mediterranean coast. Ahab turned away from Yahweh and worshiped Baal and Astarte. The Bible blames Jezebel, but that’s probably not fair. Ahab seems willing enough to sponsor the worship of Baal and Astarte all by himself.

Into this scene comes Elijah the prophet. Elijah was a new kind of prophet. He was not on the royal payroll for one thing. That allowed him to tell truths that the king did not want to hear. He was Yahweh's man, not the king's. He had a great deal to say to and about the king and queen, none of it good.

He disapproved of the worship of Baal and Astarte. Baal and his consort Astarte were the Canaanite gods of fertility. As fertility gods, Baal and Astarte brought the increase of flocks and herds. They also brought conditions favorable for good harvests. They were economic gods, gods of production, profit, and accumulation. They were hungry gods, demanding a share of the profits. Human beings existed to work for them. With them there was no covenant peace, no covenant justice, and no covenant mercy.

I said that Elijah disapproved of the worship of Baal and Astarte. That is really an understatement. Elijah loathed them. He was a Yahweh-only kind of guy. To worship any other god alongside of Yahweh was religious treason.

At Yahweh's urging, Elijah set out to call Ahab to account, so he told Ahab, “As Yahweh lives, there will be no rain until I say the drought is over.” This was hitting Baal head-on, since giving rain for the growing of crops was Baal’s specialty. If Yahweh's prophet can hold back the rain, how powerful can Baal and Astarte be? And Ahab and Jezebel’s policy of worshiping them is proven to be not only religious treason, but bad policy.

So that's the big story, the story of public policy, of political theology. That story is about the dramatic confrontation between the king and Yahweh's prophet.

But there are little stories, too, lived by ordinary people who are only trying to live their lives in peace. There were peasants working to grow more because grain prices were falling, collectively producing larger harvests and depressing grain prices even more. There were the husbands and sons drafted into Ahab's armies as foot soldiers--chariot fodder--in Ahab's wars of royal ambition. And then there were the widows, orphans, and immigrants, people with no family connection, no protection in a society in which there was no covenant justice, in which looking out for number one was the only commandment. There were many such people in Israel.

But the little story inside the big story is not about any of them. Instead, the little story in our reading is about a Sidonian widow who lives in the village of Zarephath.

Yahweh sends Elijah to Zarephath. At the town gate he meets a widow who is collecting sticks. What follows is a typical hospitality story. Elijah “the guest” asks for water. The “host” widow brings him a cup of water. Elijah ups the ante and asks for bread. The widow doesn't have any. She tells a story of desperation. She has only enough flour and oil to bake a small loaf of bread. She is looking for firewood to bake the loaf. When she and her son have eaten the loaf, there will be nothing between them and death by starvation. They cannot expect charity in Zarephath. This region is where is where Jezebel came from. Sidon where she learned to worship Baal and Astarte. There is no covenant justice with Baal and Astarte. There is no covenant mercy in Zeraphath.

But Elijah promises that for as long as the drought lasts, her jar of flour and her bottle of olive oil will not run out. The effects of the drought will not fall on her nor on her young son as long as Elijah is her guest.

There odd things about this story. There is the obviously odd thing. I doubt very much whether I could plant myself on a bench in Cresco’s business district and invite myself to stay for three and a half years in the home of the first older lady who passed by. Even if I were wearing a clergy shirt with a clerical collar. But I presume that Elijah and the widow were working within the rules of hospitality as they understood them. We have different rules |and that's why this seems odd to us.

Leaving the obvious aside, there is still something odd here. Jesus noticed it. In Luke 4 he reminds the congregation of his home church that while there were many widows in Israel in Elijah’s time, he chose a foreign widow in a foreign place.

Even odder, I think, is that Elijah chose a widow at all. Why not find someone who actually had the financial ability to act as host? Elijah is sitting at the town gate, where the town worthies would have been. Why not ask one of them?

And here the oddity is not a matter of differing customs. The oddity here is the oddity of Yahweh. Elijah had an odd God. We have an odd God.

We have a God who, when forced with choosing some place for Elijah to keep his head down for a couple of years, chooses a poor widow, one who worships other gods. Remember that when she speaks to Elijah she refers to Yahweh as “your” God.

We like to imagine that God is fair and that we can expect a level playing field, but fairness is not one of this God’s core values. God chooses. God picks sides. We like to imagine that God is everywhere and I suppose that is so in some sense. But the God of this story chooses to be more present in some places and with some people than in others. This God prefers to be with a poor widow in Zarephath than with Ahab and his queen in Israel’s capital. For three and a half years this God hangs out in Zarephath, not in Israel.

So, I wonder, where has this God been hanging out this week?

I think we can guess where God wasn’t. God was not following the campaign very closely. God wasn’t hanging out in the boardroom of Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. And God has certainly not been hanging out at Wrigley Field the last two nights. God wasn’t those places.

Maybe instead God was hanging out near the Standing Rock Reservation, standing with the Standing Rock Sioux and hundreds of North American First Nations who are supporting their efforts to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline project. It was originally routed near Bismark, but the good folks, the Anglo folks, of Bismark would have none off it, so the route was changed to go near the reservation through treaty lands given to the Sioux by the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851.

All over the world indigenous people have stepped forward to defend the earth, and especially the fresh water of the earth. And everywhere they are being met with industry and government suppression and violence. I imagine that this God, the God of our story, has been at Standing Rock this week.

I imagine that God was in Flint, Michigan, where the water is still poisonous because some people in Lansing decided that the cheap water of the Flint River was good enough for the mostly black city of Flint. Mothers and fathers are trying desperately to find usable water, trying to scrape together enough money to buy bottled water, while the city is still charging them for the poison in their pipes. I’d like to think that this God was with them in that struggle this week.

Wherever powerful people met to make decisions with no regard for anything but short-term gain, the God of this story was boycotting the meeting. And wherever the outsiders, the poor, the marginalized, and the powerless struggled to live lives that are human and humane, this God was there. Wherever voices were raised to demand justice, wherever people placed their defenseless bodies between the ones they love and threatening greed, the God of our story was present.

What an odd God we have!

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No House for God, But a Dynasty for David

23rd Sunday after Pentecost 

2 Samuel 7:1-17
October 23, 2016

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

The Bible has a strange relationship with David. On the one hand we have the Sunday School David, or rather Davids.

David is a shepherd boy who, when he gets bored watching his family's sheep, practices slinging stones. He even learns to scare off predators with this useful trick. One day he manages to use this skill to fell the giant Goliath, the Philistine warrior who had been defying the armies of Israel under King Saul. Goliath challenged any Israelite warrior to single combat, but the Israelite warriors were reluctant. "You fight him." "No, you fight him." Nobody wanted to fight Goliath, even if it meant getting Saul's daughter for a wife. David wasn't experienced enough to understand that he couldn't fight Goliath, so he volunteered. Goliath was heavily armed and armored. David just had his sling and a couple of stones, but he was an accurate shot and he won.

The other Sunday School David is David the harpist and singer, the composer of psalms. David played and soothed the spirit of the more-than-a-little unhinged King Saul.

After some stuff happens and some other stuff, David becomes the King of the Israelites and establishes his capital in Jerusalem.

Always after that, David is remembered as the ideal king and Jerusalem as the city of God. There will always be a king of David's line to sit on the throne in Jerusalem. Even the Messiah is to be born in David's line. The Gospels of Matthew and Luke both have Jesus descended from David, although their genealogies are not reconcilable. No matter. David is Jesus' ancestor. Even the Apostle Paul who doesn't seem to be interested in the details of Jesus' life says that Jesus was a descendant of David.¹

On the other hand, Jesus himself argues that the Messiah cannot be descended from David. Did you know that? Well, it's only one saying, even if it is in three of the gospels. In Mark 12 and its parallels in Matthew and Luke, Jesus fends off questions and arguments from Pharisees, Sadducees, and Herodians about taxes, the resurrection, and the greatest commandment. Then he has a question of his own:

"Why do the legal experts say that the Christ is David’s son? David himself, inspired by the Holy Spirit, said, The Lord said to my lord, ‘Sit at my right side until I turn your enemies into your footstool.’ David himself calls him ‘Lord,’ so how can he be David’s son?"²

Mark records that the large crowd gathered in the Temple "listened to him with delight."

Why the delight? Maybe because the crowd knows that kings are not such a good thing. And David, in particular, once we step back from the "Once and Future King" idealized Sunday School version, had some pretty serious shortcomings. That's true even if we leave aside the story that everyone already knows: how David used his position as king to coerce the woman next door into his bed and then tried to cover it up by calling her husband home from the war and, when the husband proved to have more honor than the king, contrived instead to have her husband killed. David, in short, was a warlord who waged a decades-long rebellion against the reigning king. When his right hand man brought the war to a successful conclusion, David blamed him for "touching the Lord's anointed." David treated his first wife miserably even though she had risked her life to save his. David was a charismatic user with a talent for military strategy. David was the sort of king who wages war, gathers glory for himself, and leaves a trail of widows and orphans behind. He is, in reality, a familiar character. History is littered with his sort. And the common people are the ones who pay the price for his history-making. Maybe that's why the people were glad that Jesus painted a picture of a Messiah who was not coming to them in the pattern of David.

And maybe that's why the priestly scribes who set down in final form the story in our reading for today were clear that the Temple, that center of priestly power, was not to be connected with David. God doesn't need a house, certainly not a house from the likes of David.

David had already moved the ark of the covenant, the box that was the place of God's presence among the people, into his city. It was David's city, the city of David, because he had captured it and it belonged to him. With the ark in his city, the ark was under David's control. That was bad enough. But to build a Temple, an impressive and permanent monument, to house the box was just too much. Even Nathan the royal prophet, inclined to rubber-stamp everything that David did, found this to be a step too far.

The reason that Nathan gives is most revealing. Nathan speaks for a Yahweh who longs for the freedom of the past when the people of God wandered from place to place in an empty land following their God in an immediate and intimate relationship. "I haven't lived in a temple from the day I brought Israel out of Egypt until now. Instead, I have been traveling around in a tent." And now, David wants God to settle down, to put down roots (in his city, of course), to live in a Temple, a building. You can call it whatever you like, but a building—even if it is made of cedar or marble—is essentially a box. David wants God in a box, even if it means that God loses God's freedom. David wants God in a box, the better to use God as a tool in the art and exercise of political power. David can bring God out when convenient and useful for governance and banish God back into the box when God's job is done. This is the role that kings (and political candidates) have in mind for God. But this king at least will not put this God in a box.

It is an amazing thing that, as pro-Temple as the Hebrew bible is on the whole, there is a strain of anti-Temple thought that got past the priestly scribes, a strain of thought that remains in the text. We can see it again in Jesus' ministry. You remember when Jesus took Peter, James, and John up the mountain and Jesus was changed in his appearance and Moses and Elijah appeared and talked with him. Do you remember that Peter came up with the brilliant idea of building three boxes, one each for Jesus, Moses, and Elijah? And how this idea was quashed by God who spoke from the cloud? God is not fond of structures.

The word that we translate as church in the New Testament actually means "assembly" and it was what people called the city council in their local communities. "Assembly" is a political term or, more precisely, a counter-political term. The church was the alternative assembly in each town. Nowhere in the New Testament does that word refer to a building. Of course the church met, but always in the homes of its members, never in buildings dedicated to that purpose. For us, though, church means a building first and only then an assembly.

In God's resistance to being "temple-ized", in God's nostalgia for the days of desert wandering we are being warned. One of God's character traits is freedom. God is not bound to any place. God is not bound to any structure, whether that structure is a building or an organizational chart. God is not bound to any political agenda or theological point of view. God is free. We do not build a structure, whether of bricks or of committees, and expect God to fit into it.

We are the people of God. We follow God. We watch. We wait. We look for signs. We listen for God's voice. And then we follow. We go where God goes. We are the people of God.

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.

1Romans 1:3

2Mark 12:35-37.

My Soul Gives Glory (Twenty-Two Sundays after Pentecost; 1 Samuel 1:9-1, 19-20; 2:1-10; October 16, 2016)

My Soul Gives Glory

Twenty-Two Sundays after Pentecost
1 Samuel 1:9-1, 19-20; 2:1-10
October 16, 2016

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

Much of the story of Hannah seems quite familiar. We can sympathize with her struggle to have children, with her earnest prayer to conceive, with the joy at her son's birth. This is especially so for those of us who have struggled in the same way or watched those we love struggle with infertility.

But there is more to this story than that.

Hannah was the wife of Elkanah, a man of the tribe of Ephraim. He had two wives, Hannah and Peninnah. From the order in which they are listed, I assume that Hannah was his first wife and Peninnah his second. Peninnah, we are told, had children. Hannah, as we know, did not.

In fact, I infer that Elkanah had married Hannah first and when it was clear that she could not have children, he married Peninnah.

This is strange to us all by itself, but the reasons are even stranger. Ancient Israel was strongly, even rabidly, patriarchal. The men ruled or, more precisely, the fathers ruled. Elkanah needed sons, or at very least a son. Only a son could inherit property. Only a son could stand with Elkanah in the sometimes vicious in-fighting that was the struggle for honor and prestige in the ancient villages of Israel. Elkanah needed a son.

It didn't matter how much Elkanah love Hannah. And he loved her very much. The value of a woman was what she could contribute to her husband. A wife's main contribution was sons or, at every least, children. Hannah could not do that.

So, for example when Elkanah's family brought offerings to the shrine at Shiloh, Elkanah would divide it into portions and give one portion each to Peninnah and her sons and daughters for them to offer. And he gave one portion to Hannah, because she was childless. He was bound by the rules of the game. He could not give her more.

Hannah's co-wife Peninnah taunted her and made her life miserable. Peninnah was the wife who did what wives were supposed to do and Hannah was not and she never let her forget it. In her depression Hannah couldn't sleep. She couldn't eat. All she could do was weep.

"Hannah, why are you crying?" her husband Elkanah would say to her. "Why won't you eat? Why are you so sad? Aren't I worth more to you than ten sons?"

The short answer, of course, was, "No, he was not." Her status was determined by her sons not her husband. In the eyes of patriarchy, the eyes that Hannah had made her own so that she was only able to see herself through her culture's eyes, she was worthless.

This is a story about men:
Elkanah, whose wife Hannah was unable to have children; Samuel, the son eventually born to that wife who was the last judge and the first prophet of Israel; and, most importantly of all, David, Jesse's son, whom Samuel anointed as king over the tribes of Israel. We only know the story of Hannah because that story figures in the foundation story of David's dynasty.

Kings, priests, and royal prophets are not interested in the struggles of women. They are not interested in their sleepless nights, their meals prepared without the slightest bit of appetite, or the taunts and gossip of other women. They are only interested in property and royal succession. When Hannah is at Shiloh with her family and her humiliation is fresh and she is praying desperately and quietly on account of her shame, to the priest Eli she is only a drunken woman disturbing the holy silence of his sanctuary. Hannah is an intrusion into patriarchy's otherwise smooth functioning.

I wish I could say that patriarchy is dead, but it is alive and well. This has been brought home forcefully in the news of the last few days. We cannot ignore the fact that there are men who believe that their wealth and fame entitle them to have access to the bodies of the women they find attractive and to ridicule the bodies of those they do not. And, from the support that these men get, we know that for every one of those who can get away with treating women this way there are many, many more who aspire to that status, men who resent having to treat women as people who have a choice about who touches them and how.

Not all men behave this way, but enough do. Enough do that a walk through the halls of our high school becomes a test of a girl's self-esteem. Enough do that nearly every woman has been sexually assaulted. Enough do that women select their wardrobes as if they were responsible for what the men they meet do and say. Enough do that the legal system is often more concerned with the impact of a rape conviction on a young man's career prospects than with the impact of rape on the well-being of the young woman who was his victim. Enough do that all men enjoy a kind of privilege in every encounter they have with any woman.

But, this still isn't the whole story. I've really only set the stage. Nothing has really happened yet. When something does happen it isn't Elkanah who does it, nor Eli, nor even Peninnah. When something happens, quite unexpectedly, it is Hannah who acts. She has been the victim so far without a shred of agency, without any clue that she can act on her own. She changes that. She pours out her heart to Yahweh. She just dumps everything in God's lap.

That not much agency, but it's a beginning. She deems her experience and her suffering to be worthy of God's attention and response. She may be worthless in her own eyes, but she's not worthless in God's. Eli speaks and blesses her and, for the time being, that is enough. She had something to eat. The sadness lifted. She went home with Elkanah and in due course she got pregnant. She named the boy Samuel, "I asked God." She named the boy.

One little act--pouring her heart out to God--leads to the bolder act of naming her son, a privilege reserved for fathers. And soon this act leads to another: She decides that this son will not belong to Elkanah, but instead will belong to Yahweh. And when the boy was weaned she took him to Eli the priest at Shiloh and gave him to Yahweh.

As a subversion of patriarchy it wasn't much. But it wasn't nothing either. Yahweh had opened up a little wiggle room for Hannah in an oppressive system and Hannah grabbed her chance and made the most of it. And because Hannah cried out and because Yahweh heard her and answered her cry, this is more than the story of the founding of David's dynasty. It is also a story of liberation. So much so that her song echoed through the ages and found an answering song from the heart of a Galilean peasant girl with a reproductive problem of her own. Mary's song became the evening song of the Church, a part of our legacy. We, too, worship the God who loosens the bonds of patriarchy.

That's why I must say this, and say it in particular to women and girls. You do not exist for the convenience or benefit of men. Your bodies do not belong to them. They are not entitled to touch you or to make comments about your bodies without your permission, even if they are a boyfriend or husband. You are human beings, children of God, worthy of all the dignity and respect this implies. It's true. It's true not because I say so, but because God says so in the lyrics of Hannah's song.

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.

FRIENDLY, SUPPORTIVE WELCOME: Comfort the Afflicted; Afflict the Comfortable (21st Sunday after Pentecost; 1 Thessalonians 5:12-26; October 9, 2016)

Comfort the Afflicted; Afflict the Comfortable

21st Sunday after Pentecost
1 Thessalonians 5:12-26
October 9, 2016

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

At the heart of Christian life are relationships.

You wouldn't know that to listen to the media. The media think they know who Christians are. They focus on a very small, vocal, and nasty part of the people who describe themselves as Christians. One preacher is calling Hurricane Matthew God's punishment on Orlando and Savannah because they are hosting gay pride parades. He joins a long line of Christian extremists who have blamed all sorts of public disasters on God's judgment on tolerance of LGBTQ folks.

Judgmental intolerance, gay bashing, and Islamophobia have come to constitute the public face of Christianity. Laziness in the media is partly to blame, but enough Christians have behaved badly enough for long enough that the media portrait of our movement is plausible. If we want to change the public image of the Church, it's up to us to behave differently and to make it clear that our extremists neither speak for us nor act on our behalf.

A good place to begin is by remembering that at the heart of Christian life are relationships. For us Methodist Christians, this is not a new idea, nor a particularly shocking one. God's love for us, our love for God, and our love for our neighbors: these are what matters. When we are the clearest about this, we are the most faithful to our calling.

It makes sense, then, that the value that resonates most clearly with the largest portion of us is this: "As a congregation we value extending and receiving a welcoming hand of friendship and support." The explanatory paragraphs unpack this statement:

Our United Methodist community develops through conversations before worship and at coffee time, working together in small groups or in ministries, knowledge that men and women are received equally at FUMC, and the faith and forgiveness they feel from being with Christian friends. Members find and give support in everyday living in both good times and bad times. We value and appreciate a sense of belonging and inclusion no matter our age, ability or life situation.

We value relationships more than believing the "right" things or worshiping "correctly" or a host of other possibilities. God's love for us, our love for God, and our love for our neighbors are at the heart of our shared life. As the heirs of the Wesley brothers, we seek to grow in this love. Loving as God loves is what we mean by perfection and that is the goal toward which we press.

For a long time I have believed that each denomination has a particular gift, a way of living and being in the world that grows out of its origins and experiences. Roman Catholics call this a "charism." I like that word because it is grounded in a New Testament notion of the gifts of the Holy Spirit. Each denomination has a gift that God has given it. Each congregation in a denomination, if it is healthy, shows evidence of that gift.

Now, no one has published an official list of the charism of each denomination, but I have taken a stab at some of them. For example, the Episcopal Church's gift seems to be beauty. If you worship at an Episcopal church you should encounter something beautiful. It might be the architecture or the music or the liturgy or the vestments, but it should be there. If there is no beauty there, the congregation is unwell.

Presbyterians pride themselves on doing everything “decently and in order." If you attend a Presbyterian church you should experience a sense of orderliness. That's not the same as stiffness or fossilization, although that is always a danger. If worship proceeds haphazardly, if no one seems to know or care what comes next, the congregation is not healthy.

For Methodists, ever since John Wesley's heart was "strangely warmed," warmth--the sense of welcome, inclusion, and support--have been been our defining charism. If you ever go to a Methodist church and find that it feels cold, run! Run for your life! Run before you catch whatever it is that ails them!

Folks who believe that God's grace is at work in everyone's life--everyone without exception--will be quick to extend a welcome to each person who comes through our doors and each person to whom our daily life brings us. Folks for whom grace is not something that happened some time in the past, but a present reality that beckons us deeper into love, will support each other. Folks for whom grace is not parceled out to some and withheld from others, but for whom grace is God's loving presence often felt and experienced, but always acknowledged as always present for and in all, will find and forge a sense of ever-deepening community with each other, with God, and with every creature with whom we share this world.

Folks who know that they are deeply and constantly loved are resistant to the many invitations to be afraid that are offered to us these days. They are open to hearing each others' stories even when those stories make them uncomfortable. They don't cling to the privileges granted to them by unjust systems.

They are able to comfort the afflicted. And there are many who are afflicted. There are those who are coping with life-threatening illness or constant pain. There are middle class parents who watch their children struggling in vain to get some purchase on the American dream. There are veterans who came home deeply injured without having received a single scratch on their bodies. There are African American parents who, in addition to raising their children well, teaching them to be polite, insisting on their working hard in school, and doing all the things that other parents do, must teach their children "the rules" in hopes that their encounters with the police do not turn deadly. There is affliction aplenty in our world.

Folks who have been comforted through the relationships they have experienced among the people of God are willing to offer that same comfort to those who come to us in pain. The "friendship and support" that we so value are powerful expressions of God's love and thoroughly rooted in the Methodist tradition.

There are hazards here, though. Every positive value has a dark side, a possible distortion. A congregation that offers comfort can easily become a congregation that values being comfortable, which isn't quite the same thing, but looks enough like it to fool the unwary.

When folks visit us I try to have a short conversation with them before they leave. I’m often not sure if I have met them, so I tell them that I don't recognize them. That makes the conversation a little less awkward if I have met them and just don't remember. If we're meeting for the first time they almost always say so. Then I'll ask what brings them to us this morning. They'll tell me that they are camping nearby or visiting a son or daughter at Luther. Sometimes they'll say that they are recent arrivals in the community and are "shopping for a church." This is fine, incidentally. They will often say something like, "We are looking for a church where we'll be comfortable." Sounds likely, doesn't it? But I try to engage that motivation. I'll reply something like, "A comfortable church is an option if you don't want to grow as a follower of Jesus. What most of us need in order to grow is a church in which we are safe on the one hand but are also challenged and sometimes a little uncomfortable. When we feel unsafe we do what we already know: there's no growth in that. When we're comfortable we don't have a reason to risk change so we keep doing what we're doing. There is a sweet spot where we are safe but a little uncomfortable and that's what we need in order to grow as followers of Jesus." I tell our visitors that I hope we are a church like that, but if we are not, I hope they will find another.

Another hazard related to this is that we'll enjoy the loving support that we're receiving but forget to extend it to others. The most common place for this hazard at First United Methodist Church is Fellowship Hall. Folks gather around the tables—often the same folks around the same tables—and in these groups of five to eight people find support week in and week out. It is a wonderful thing, really. It makes me wonder what we did before a space for the hall was dug out and the hall built in the 1920s.

Some people have tried to break these small groups up, to shuffle the tables around or to compel different combinations of people to sit together. Some have even proposed—gasp!--eliminating the tables altogether to force people to mingle. I promise never to attempt that. What happens at those tables is important. I am not willing to toss away what has grown organically in the hopes that we can engineer something better.

But I have to point out that our coffee-time practice is hazardous. When I come down the stairs I see table groups in eager conversation. Each of those small groups is alive. It's beautiful.

But that isn't what newcomers see. Newcomers see a room full of hedgehogs. Hedgehogs, as you know are covered on their backs and sides with sharp spines. You may not know, but if you disturb a hedgehog, not only will it roll into a ball so that there is nothing on the outside except those spines, it will also twitch. You don't even have to touch a balled-up hedgehog to get stabbed!

When relaxed, hedgehogs uncurl and some will even permit themselves to be turned upside down. Their bellies look amazingly soft, warm, and fuzzy. I say that they look that way because hedgehogs always seem nervous around me. They always do their spiky ball twitchy thing when I'm around.

That's the thing about hedgehogs: they are warm and soft on the inside but cold and spiky on the outside. And that's what our newcomers see. Each table is like a hedgehog. Those who are seated at the tables are experiencing a gentle, supportive warmth. But from the outside, each table looks cold and prickly, and perfectly defended.

I won't break up those tables, but I will observe that if we are serious about sharing the love that we have received, of welcoming as we have been welcomed, we will figure out a way to invite strangers into those circles. You may have other ideas, but here is mine. When someone is visiting or is fairly new--and you know when that's the case because during the passing of the peace you have introduced yourselves to the people around you and you have discovered who the newcomers are. Haven't you? Of course, you have. So you know who is new or relatively new. When the final blessing has been pronounced, lean over to a newcomer and say, "Won't you join me for coffee-time? I have some friends I'd love for you to meet." And then, unless they beg off, which they may--but don't be discouraged. Ask them the next time you see them--bring them with you and make a place at your table for them. Introduce them. Ask them some questions to get the conversation started. And then trust that this is one way you can grow in your love for God and your neighbor.

God's love for us, our love for God, and our love for our neighbors: these are what matters. When we are the clearest about this, we are the most faithful to our calling.

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.

FAITH IN PRACTICE: Practical Theology (20th Sunday after Pentecost; James 2:14-26; October 2, 2016)

Practical Theology

20th Sunday after Pentecost
James 2:14-26
October 2, 2016

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

I went to a Presbyterian Seminary. The Presbyterian Church is a part of the Reformed tradition of the Protestant movement in the Western or Latin or Catholic wing of the Christian Church and traces its roots to the Swiss Reformation under John Calvin and Ulrich Zwingli.

The Reformed tradition has many virtues. One is its idea of local ordination, that is, that baptized persons are ordained in the local church for leadership that includes worship, administration, and acts of justice and mercy. That's a strong idea.

The great Scottish tradition of sung Psalms owes its existence to John Knox's rejection of hymn singing.

Another strength of the Reformed tradition is its love of order, especially when it comes to theological thinking. John Calvin was a systematic theologian, that is, a theological thinker who was concerned to give a logical and complete explanation of Christian Faith. Several versions of his Institutes of the Christian Religion are still in print. A one-volume edition weighs in at just over 1000 pages.

Movements tend to mimic their founders and the Reformed tradition has produced a number of systematic theologians. Perhaps the most notable in the last century or so was Karl Barth, a Swiss pastor and then professor whose 14-volume Church Dogmatics is stunning in its density.

Methodists by contrast can't really boast of any influential systematic theologians at all. Charles Wesley was a thinker who did his thinking in the form of hymns. Some of them are theological jewels. Take a close look, for example at "Hark! the Herald Angels Sing" or "Christ the Lord Is Risen Today" and you can see what I mean. But the hymns don’t add up to a system.

John Wesley, who did most of the publishing and organizing in their branch of Methodism, was a capable thinker. His master's degree from Oxford was in logic. But he used that logic, not to decide how many angels could dance on the head of a pin, but to solve the problems of his growing movement.

Let me share just one example. In the 1760's and early 1770's the Methodist movement grew quickly in the lower thirteen of the United Kingdom's colonies in North America. At this time Methodism was a renewal movement inside the Church of England. Methodists were members of classes and they listened to Methodist preachers when they had the chance, but for their ordinary Christian life, and especially for the sacraments, they depended on the Church of England, the Anglican church.

Like Wesley, most Anglican priests were Tories, that is, they favored continued union with the crown and believed that rebellion against the king was deeply sinful. As you can imagine, this opinion became quite unpopular in many places in the newly self-proclaimed independent states. Anglican priests all fled their posts back to England, there to wait for the rebellion to be put down and order restored so that they could resume their ministries.

It didn't work out that way. By what Wesley called "a strange providence" the colonies were free. But the priests did not come back and Wesley couldn't spare any of the priests that were at work in his movement in England.

By the early 1780's the sacramental situation had become desperate for Wesley's Methodists in the New World. There had been neither baptisms nor communion for nearly eight years. This situation could not continue. Wesley himself was only a priest and under the law of the Church of England was not qualified to ordain priests. Wesley begged several bishops to send priests to serve the Methodist societies, but he was refused. (Wesley did not have a great number of fans in the Church of England hierarchy.) He even tried to convince a Greek bishop to ordain him as a bishop, but to no avail.

So Wesley convinced himself--from reading early Christian writings--that bishops and priests were essentially one order of clergy and that the work of the bishop was really only a matter of a specialized ministry of a priest. On that reasoning, John Wesley, as a priest, was already qualified in the practice of the early church, to ordain both priests and bishops.

However much he was convinced of this in his own mind, he knew that this would not look good in public. So instead of ordaining a bishop to go to the former colonies and ordain priests, he "set apart" Thomas Coke and Francis Asbury as "superintendents" who would "set apart" "elders". Of course, to ordain means "to set apart", bishop means "superintendent", and priest is the worn-down pronunciation of presbyter which means "elder".

Methodists in the New World now had their own clergy, access to the baptismal font and the communion table, and their own rules, a book of services and, yes, a hymnal. Crisis solved. And the way it was solved was part of a pattern that we follow to this day: solve the problem, figure out how the solution was merely an application of ancient tradition, and then stick to our story.

I sound flippant, but this is the territory we have staked out: we adapt and adopt for the sake of increasing the love of God and neighbor. We do not start with first principles and then systematically work our way down to practice, especially if our principles seem to point us away from love.

There was a split in the early Methodist movement between the followers of the Wesley's and those who, like their college friend George Whitefield, were Calvinists in their theology. And the reason why the split happened was because John Wesley saw that Calvinism, however logical it might be, stood in the way of people experiencing God's love and of their increasingly loving God and neighbor. When theology gets in the way of love, love wins. Period.

That's why we Methodists don't have catechisms. We don't use creeds as a way of deciding who is in and who is out. That's why, when people ask us, "What do Methodists believe?" we get a puzzled look on our faces and don't know how to answer. If you're in that position, here's what you can say: For us, how we have been loved and how we love in turn are more important than what we believe. That's why we like to look for common ground. That's why we leave a lot of room for differing opinions.

When the focus is on love, on how we have been loved, and on how we love God, each other, and our near and distant neighbors, what each of us believes becomes part of our shared story. Different experiences lead to differing perspectives. When we share those perspectives in the context of love, the result may be simple agreement, but more often it is increased appreciation. This value of ours, then, that "As a congregation we value a theology that focuses on common ground, leaves room for differing opinions, and leads to increased love of God and neighbor" is at the heart of the ethos of our movement.

Sometimes, though, I think that we're not really sure we trust that. Sometimes, I think we're afraid that if we say what we believe or share how we have come to believe it, we'll run into a judgmental wall. 

Sometimes we look at the state of our national political conversation or we look at the level of rancor in the struggle to determine the future of United Methodism and we, rightly I think, don't want anything to do with that. So we stifle opinions, ours and others', and hope that we won't come up against anything that will cause each other to be angry or upset.

But I don't think that's the way to live out this value. If for any reason, we fail to create a space where we can love in the midst of disagreement or even misunderstanding, then we need to step back and attend to guarding that space. This value is not simply a description of the way we do things; it's also a call to model what love looks like in theological conversation. Sometimes, it's even a call to repentance when we put theological conformity ahead of the unity of love.

After all, we see now only distorted images through bad optics, to paraphrase Paul. One day we will see clearly. But until then let us above all see lovingly.

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.

WORSHIP: My ancestors were starving Arameans (19th Sunday after Pentecost; Deuteronomy 26:1-11; September 25, 2016)

My ancestors were starving Arameans

19th Sunday after Pentecost
Deuteronomy 26:1-11
September 25, 2016

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

Sometimes, when I have asked congregations to describe their mission as they understand it, they have responded with lists of things that they do: These lists sometimes have odd omissions. While sometimes people mention music or even more rarely sermons. they have never listed worship as important to their mission or at the center of who they are or what they do. Sometimes worship is seen as one way to attract new members to the church or the place where the congregation is conveniently congregated so that some information might be shared or they might be convinced to do something. Worship might be a way to transform individual lives or to grow a church.

We find it pretty easy to point to some goal or end for which worship might be a means, but have a hard time with the idea that worship is an end in itself. Somehow we have lost the sense that worship is central to who we are as followers of Jesus and that it needs no justification beyond itself.

So I really appreciate what we have said about worship in our statement of core values: "As a congregation we value gathering together in meaningful worship." That’s good. But what do we mean by "meaningful worship?" The extended statement teases that apart a little:

From our worship experience we want to be inspired to leave the church pew and live out our Christian faith. We appreciate the feelings we receive through music that moves and lifts our spirits. We wish to hear sermons based in scripture that stimulate us, reinforce and strength our faith journeys, and show us how to apply God’s Word to our daily lives. We appreciate the familiar rituals of communion, baptism, Christmas Eve and Easter Sunday services. We welcome the participation of young people and youth in our services, from lighting candles to Puppets of Praise.

A lot of the pieces are there: music, preaching, tradition, participation by young folks.But I wanted to relate all of these things to something deeper, to ground them in the nature of worship, and to connect what we do on Sunday with the long story of God's people at worship.

So I went back as far as I could to one of the most powerful texts in the Bible. It's found in Deuteronomy, oddly enough. It is set in the story of the escape of the Israelites from Egypt as part of the law that God gave to Moses. It is presented as instructions for what the people are to do once they have reached the land of promise, taken it for themselves, settled down, and begun to produce crops.

A careful look at the reading shows that it cannot be what it pretends to be: instructions for the people who are wandering in the desert. There is something out of place in the text, or better, out of time. They are told to bring the offering from the first harvest "to the location the Lord your God selects for his name to reside." But there would be no such place for several hundred years, not until Solomon built his Temple in Jerusalem. We call this an anachronism, something that is out of its time, like the famous anachronism found in the movie Ben Hur set in the early Roman Empire in which one of the chariot racers is wearing a wrist watch.

Though it is certainly not simply an instruction given to the desert wanderers by Moses, it may well be part of a liturgy (or liturgies) for the Festival of First Fruits that has been projected backwards into history. Anyway, that's my interest in this passage is liturgical, not historical.

So I want for us to do a couple of things. First I want for us to read as those to whom it is addressed. So here is what we, the people who live in Judah, are to do. When the first harvest comes in--the lettuce and the strawberries, I guess--we are to put some of them in a basket and bring them to the Temple. (Or maybe, simply to the nearest shrine served by a priest of Yahweh.) And there we are to say to the priest, "I am declaring right now before the Lord my God that I have indeed arrived in the land the Lord swore to our ancestor to give us." The priest is to take our offering and place it before the altar.

Then we make this profession:

My father was a starving Aramean. He went down to Egypt, living as an immigrant there with few family members, but that is where he became a great nation, mighty and numerous. The Egyptians treated us terribly, oppressing us and forcing hard labor on us. So we cried out for help to the Lord, our ancestors’ God. The Lord heard our call. God saw our misery, our trouble, and our oppression. The Lord brought us out of Egypt with a strong hand and an outstretched arm, with awesome power, and with signs and wonders. He brought us to this place and gave us this land—a land full of milk and honey. So now I am bringing the early produce of the fertile ground that you, Lord, have given me.”

Then we place our offering on the ground and bow to Yahweh. (Yes, there is another little textual problem here, since we have already given our offering to the priest and he has placed it in front of the Lord's altar. Is there more than one liturgy that has been combined here? Maybe, though it's not terribly important.)

So the first thing is that we are to put ourselves in the place of the first of our people who came into possession of the land of promise, even though we may be living many generations later.

The second thing to notice is that there are some important changes in grammatical person and number in the profession. We begin by talking about our ancestors: “My father..., he went down..., he became...”And then in the next verse we switch to the first person: "The Egyptians treated us..., we cried out..., our call..., our misery, our trouble, our oppression..., The Lord brought us out..., brought us..., gave us...” And then, finally, we move from the first person plural to the first person singular. We are no longer speaking as we and us, but as I and me: “So now I am bringing the early produce of the fertile ground that you, Lord, have given me.”

Someone else becomes we and us; we and us become I and me. That is what happens in meaningful worship. In meaningful worship we become a part of the story of God's people.It doesn't matter to begin that we who are here in this space and time were not present in ancient Egypt as God set the Israelites free. It doesn't matter to begin that we were not there to settle in the land of promise. It doesn't matter to begin that we were not gathered with the crowd when Jesus fed them with two loaves and five fish. It doesn't matter to begin that we were not there in the upper room when Jesus broke bread and said, "This is my body."

Meaningful worship makes us a part of events and part of a story that we were not present for. The liturgy begins with "he" but it moves us to "we." It is as if we had been present at the first celebration of the early harvest in the land of promise. It is as if we were the disciples who walked to Emmaus on that first Easter Sunday. History that happened somewhere else to someone else becomes in worship our story.

Meaningful worship not only moves us to name ourselves as the people of God; it also moves us to commit ourselves to our own lives and world as members of the people of God. "So now I am bringing the early produce of the fertile ground that you, Lord, have given me." In meaningful worship his-story becomes our story becomes my story. That's meaningful worship in a nutshell.

Worship isn't really about holy entertainment, or about getting tips for holy living or just plain living for that matter, or about raising our children right, or about a lot of things. Any of those things can happen, but that's not the heart of it. The heart of it is our coming together in all our variety from all sorts of places and becoming together the people of God. The heart of worship is identity: God's and ours. In worship we become God's people and God becomes our God. It's like a wedding in which we are asked, Do you people take this God, Yahweh, to be your God? Do you, Yahweh, take these people to be your people?

What if we could figure out how to make that more readily apparent for all of us who gather here? Music, preaching, rituals and sacraments, and the participation of all generations, are certainly a part of how that happens. What if we are missing something?

For instance, Protestants have always been a little ear-focused, a little worried about the visual arts. Statues, for example, have always been suspect in Protestant churches. In general, Protestants have been more committed to what can be heard than to what can be seen. We've lost something from that, I think. What if we did more with color and texture, not to communicate a message in words, but to set an environment that invites us into the story?

Protestants don't go in for lots of gestures, but the participation of our physical bodies in worship is important. I'm not sure that the free-throw line on a basketball court is the right place for the sign of the cross and a remembrance of our baptism. But the fact that a practice can be abused doesn't mean it should be banished, only practiced well. But what if the church at worship became a right place and time?

When we come to music, we step onto the battlefield of the worship wars, which I have never really understood. Maybe it's because I appreciate too many kinds of music. Organ music and fuzzy rock guitar both touch me in places that the other can't reach. If I'm going to worship with all of me, I'll need them both. But others seem not to feel the same way.

There is certainly a generational divide. Those who were born before 1948 want to clap their hands on the first and third beats of the measure. For those born after, it's the second and fourth. Music is written to favor one or the other of those two basic accent patterns. I'm always amused when an elderly congregation tries to clap along to modern music. The music has a two-four accent pattern and the people are trying clap one-three and it's just a mess!

The fact is, to the pre-1948 generations, a two-four pattern feels uncomfortable; it even hurts a little. To put themselves into the music, there has to be a rhythm that matches their one-three sense of rhythm. For younger folks, it's just the opposite. Of course, most of our music in church now has one-three accents and fewer and fewer of us are one-three accent people. Could this be one of the reasons that most two-four people are somewhere else on Sunday mornings?

Inter-generational worship isn't simply a matter of having fifth graders reading the lessons, although there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. Worship that invites all generations into our story must speak the language that each generation speaks and that includes the musical language. What if we had a band that could lead us in singing the music that some of us need and just aren't getting? I'm not suggesting all rock, all the time, but some rock or some blues, some of the time doesn't seem that unreasonable to me.

The furniture of our sanctuary suggests that the proper posture of the worshiper is to sit upright and still on marginally uncomfortable benches while I talk and they listen. Many adults can handle this, but most younger children cannot. They can sit still for five minutes and then the fidgets set in and it becomes increasingly painful--yes, painful--for them to sit still.

The conventional response to this is to banish younger children to a nursery, but that assumes that because children do not worship like adults, they shouldn't be in worship at all. What if we made a space available with pillows and cushions and soft toys for kids to sit or lie or sprawl and overhear the worship, at least for the sermon? What if we planned worship so that every generation received an invitation to become a part of the story?

Over the centuries the "what" of worship has changed and evolved. In the fifth century, Augustine of Hippo, felt forced to comment on the recent arrival of the practice of singing the psalms. He was a little worried the music might overwhelm the sense of the words, but all-in-all he was for it: Later, he even famously said, “Qui cantat, bis orat (To sing is to pray twice).”

Worship music has changed a great deal since then, and that's all to the good. At the heart, though, we worship to remind ourselves (and to remind God if it comes to that) that we are a part of the story of God's people and that God is a part of our story. We speak and sing and act as if we were there and because we do we are the people of God. And by the time we are finished we will be able to say, Because I am God's child, now I am ready to do the work of the people of God!

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.