Bu, Bu Bubbalin’ (Genesis 1:1—2:4a; Matthew 28:16-20; Trinity A; June 15, 2014)

Bu, Bu Bubbalin’

Genesis 1:1—2:4a;
Matthew 28:16-20
Trinity A
June 15, 2014

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

“[T]he earth was without shape or form, it was dark over the deep sea, and God’s wind swept over the waters,” or better “God’s breath” or perhaps “God’s spirit hovered over the surface of the water.”  Picture a lake on a windless afternoon when the surface is ruffled by the slightest breeze.  God’s breath brooded over the watery chaos and then creation erupted.

The fertile Spirit, says John’s Jesus, is like the wind, blowing wherever it wants to blow, accountable to no one but to God, and certainly not to us.  Neither its origins nor its destination is visible to us.  We only hear it and feel it on our faces.

“The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the Spirit of the Most High will overshadow you,” Gabriel whispered into the ear of the perplexed and skeptical peasant girl Miriam.  The Spirit broods once again, preparing an act of new creation in the womb of May.

The Spirit of God descended like a dove, alighting on Jesus after his baptism by John, launching a ministry of renewal.

“And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where [the disciples] were sitting.”  This time it appeared as divided tongues like flames and set the world on fire.

Brooding doves, flames, breezes, tempests, the Spirit is elusive.  It cannot be grasped at all and can only be glimpsed in metaphor and figure of speech.  Poetry, not prose, is the fit vehicle to approach the Spirit.  “As” and “as if” are the closest that language comes to capturing the Spirit.  That’s why the Spirit is a nightmare for middle-level managers, like bishops and even pastors. 

Oh, sure, we talk a good game.  We bless in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  We lay hands on confirmands and ordinands, transmitting the Spirit.  But we also know it doesn’t really work that way.  The Spirit blows wherever it wants.  The Spirit is impatient with procedures and processes.  Trying to capture the Spirit is like trying to bottle the wind.

We can imagine the first two persons of the Trinity, whom we most often call Father and Son.  We can imagine them in a relationship in which the Father tells the Son what to do and the Son does it.  John’s Jesus lends much support to this image.  It’s neat and orderly.  But the Spirit, the Spirit is the wild card, making a mess of neatly arranged orders, ranks, strategic plans, and calendars.

The Spirit tends to avoid the center, the establishment, institutions, and structures.  The Spirit tends to show up instead at the margins, in the crevices and cracks, in all the places where ordinary power is absent.  So the smart thing for bishops and pastors to do is to make as much space as they can tolerate for the Spirit to work from below to foment, stir up, and provoke new ideas, new visions, and new ministries.

So what might that look like?  Where would we see it?  The short answers are, “Anything and anywhere.” It might look like a conversation during Coffee Fellowship one cold January Sunday after a blizzard with sub-zero temperatures and a few downed power lines:

[Skit]

 Syd, Gary, and Dave- Misc chit chat about recent weather....  then one of them relates about somewhere up in Minn or Wisc where the storm was much worse and a whole community was without power for several days.

·         What would we be able to help out with if that happened here?

·          

·         Imagine people who depend on power for medical needs? Oxygen, dialysis...

·          

·         What resources could we use?

·          

·         _____? other suggestions of talking points?

·          

·         _____ 

·          

Then Coffee server Nancy comes with pot to refill cups and asks what they are discussing with such enthusiasm?  When they explain and express that they feel like they wish they could develop a plan for our church to be ready to help. Nancy encourages them that this would be a good example of a Bubble-up Ministry and they should talk with John about their ideas.

And so a ministry vision begins to emerge. 

Make no mistake; visions are not usually the knock-you-off-your-feet experiences that we read about in the Bible.  They are usually mustard-seed sized ideas with some divine oomph behind them. 

Sometimes, visions come to people whose life circumstances prevent them from doing the work needed to bring the vision to life.  Sometimes.  But it isn’t good idea to think of that as normal.  At least I hope we don’t.  Over the years in parish ministry I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard a professional visionary say to me, “You know, Pastor, I think it would be a great idea if we…”  And by “we” they always seem to mean “me.”  And then, having delivered this gift-wrapped suggestion, they walk away, their job done.  Imagine their consternation six months later when nothing much has happened!

No, I believe that visions are mostly entrusted to the people who are called to make them a reality.  Visions are a summons to ministry.

Of course, this a new way of thinking, a new way of seeing ourselves as God’s people, a new way of doing the church’s work.  It will take some time to live into it.  It will take some effort to move in that direction.  It will take some mistakes and failures to learn how to do it well.  But with the Spirit’s encouragement and working together, we can make a start.

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.

A Spirit of Wisdom (Ephesians 1:15-23; Ascension Sunday; June 1, 2014)

A Spirit of Wisdom

Ephesians 1:15-23
Ascension Sunday
June 1, 2014

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

Next Friday afternoon the Iowa Annual Conference will begin its work as the clergy session meets to decide on all the questions that have to do with licensed and ordained ministry.  The most important of these questions will be about who shall be ordained as elders and deacons. 

Then the next day the whole of the Conference will gather to worship, to decide on programs and budgets, and to speak as a Conference to the issues of our day.  We’ll hear reports—many, many reports.  We’ll collect a bunch of special offerings.  We’ll vote and make motions to amend this proposal and table that.  At least once we’ll turn ourselves inside out trying to understand how Robert’s Rules applies to our situation.

A week from today we will ordain elders and deacons to lead the United Methodist Church in Iowa.  It is always a high and holy moment.  But there is a troubling question that in all probability will be neither asked nor answered: Lead the church into what future?

Thirty years ago the answer to that question was easy, or at least assumed.  You lead the church by helping to do what the church has done for as long as we can remember.  And you could measure your success by simple numerical yardsticks: Did your membership increase in the last year?  Did you have adult professions of faith?  Did you pay your apportionments?  If the answers to these questions were “Yes,” then you had fulfilled your promise to lead.

But the landscape has changed in the last decades.  The territory no longer corresponds to anything we can see on the maps we inherited from the past.  We are no longer sure of where we are going, let alone how to get there. 

The last decades have been hard on the United Methodist Church.  We’ve lost membership almost everywhere in the country.  The church is wracked in a debate that appears to be about the role of gays and lesbians in our church, but masks deeper struggles over the nature of Christian discipleship and the authority of Scripture.   When it comes to important social issues, we no longer carry the weight that we used to.  The Des Moines Register no longer sends a reporter to listen to what the Conference has to say. 

Here in Decorah, where thirty years ago it would have been unheard of for a sports club to schedule a game on Sunday, parents are schlepping their kids to neighboring states for meets that last all weekend.  Thirty years ago nobody would have dared to propose that the school athletic program crowd into “church night.”  Thirty years ago no one could have imagined, after the community’s pastors had unanimously requested that the Wednesday afternoon schedule remain as it was, that the School Board would then have approved the change.  This is not a complaint, only a mark of just how much our context for ministry has changed.

Some in our Conference are looking for ways to bring back the fabulous fifties and the supercalifragilisticexpialidocious sixties.  Others are looking to succeed in the emerging world by adapting to its core values.  Those in the middle are just trying to muddle through, trying to meet the demands that arise, trying to keep people happy.  Some of us are trying to figure out, not how the church can succeed by the number-obsessed standards of our culture, but how we can be faithful as Christians and as a church.

The next thirty years are going to be a challenge for the United Methodist Church, for our congregation, for each of us.  Across the globe we are facing a series of crises that will challenge every institution and all of us.  It is not only that the mainline Protestantism has lost its privileged position as the unofficial but nonetheless very real established church in the United States.  Historically, the middle class has historically provided the foundation of the United Methodist Church, but the middle class itself is in trouble.  Massive indebtedness—especially in the form of student loans—and the generations-long stagnation of wages and salaries, have left the middle class unable to maintain its economic success.  Half of all Americans will at some time in their lives qualify for the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program. 

The extraordinary concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the very wealthy that characterizes our time has nearly destroyed our sense that we will face national and global challenges together, sharing the burdens and the gains. 

Our economy is up against a wall as compounded growth collides with the limits of a finite earth.  We can no longer count on being able to vent the massive amounts of carbon dioxide and methane that our civilization produces into the global system without suffering the consequences in climate-related disasters, disrupted food production, and a competitive struggle for the resources that all of us need.

How do we respond faithfully to this unprecedented challenge?  How will we prepare ourselves and the next generation to be the kind of Christians who can tell the truth about our world when the stakes are high?  How do we prepare ourselves to be able to make the kind of choices that we will need to make?  What sorts of organizations and institutions will serve us well as we figure these things out?  These are the questions that we need to focus on.  Instead our denomination is fighting about sex. 

Can we face our fears and focus on what is really going on in our world?  I’m not optimistic.  But I am hopeful. 

Which brings us to the letter to the Ephesians.  While we can’t be sure that it was written specifically to the church at Ephesus, nor even that it was written by Paul, we can say with assurance that it was written to a church or churches in what was then called Asia Minor, modern western Turkey, by someone who was quite familiar with Paul’s thought.  Anyone in Asia Minor who was trying to be a Christian was in a hard place.  Besides the local cultures and city life, there was the Roman Empire.  You know the old joke that runs, “Where does a five hundred pound gorilla sit?” to which the answer is, “Anywhere it wants to.”   Well, the Roman Empire was a cultural, religious, and political five-hundred pound gorilla.  Trying to be a Christian in Asia Minor was as hard as trying to be a Ukrainian living next to Russia, or worse, trying to be a Canadian living next to the United States.

And unlike us the ancients recognized that the world was not simply a material reality, but also a spiritual one.  Every city, kingdom and empire, every gathered assembly, every mob, every extended family, every religious society, even the world itself had its spiritual counterpart.  When they tried to resist becoming Roman they were not only resisting Roman government, religion and culture; they were resisting the invisible powers that stood behind each of those things.  And they were just a pitifully few Christians, meeting before dawn on the first day of the week, doing their best to follow Jesus whom the Empire insisted had been executed for treason but whom they nonetheless believed was alive and living among them.  How could they possibly manage?

Well, writes our author, you’re not doing so badly.  You are trusting in Christ and you love each other.  That’s no small thing.  And, he says, I will pray that you receive a spirit of wisdom, that is a spirit that will let you see what is really going on in the world, behind the pomp and glitter of empire.  Yes, there are rulers and authorities—and he means the spiritual powers and authorities first of all, and then their earthly expressions—yes, there are powers and dominions; yes, there are names of power that people invoke.  That’s all true.  But God.  You see, those words are the words that give Christians their power and freedom to follow Christ: But God.  But God with the power that gives life to the dead, starting with Jesus, has put Christ above the rulers and authorities, above the powers and dominions, above all the names of power.  And, as strange as it may seem, God has done this for the Church, that is Christ’s body, and that, in turn is God’s full presence in the world. 

And that’s why, even those I’m not optimistic, I am hopeful.  In the final analysis the Church is not an institution, even one as fine as the United Methodist Church.  Our congregation is not the organization that we call Decorah First United Methodist Church.  And we are up to the challenges that face us, not because we are ready as an institution or an organization, nor because we are good and competent and bright people.  We are up to the challenges that face us, because the power of God is at work in Christ, and we are Christ’s body and it is God’s full presence in the world.

There are great powers in our day.  They are the “isms” that reign over our world—neo-liberal capitalism, militarism, consumerism, racism, sexism, hetero-sexism, and individualism, to name just a few.  They are daunting.  Before their power our hearts quail and our knees shake and we can hardly find our voices.  The Annual Conference gathers and adopts its strategic plans.  Local congregations develop mission statements.  But strategic plans and mission statements won’t topple the “isms,” nor give our hearts courage, nor steady our knees, nor give us our voices. 

We are no match for the “isms” of our day.  But they are no match for the God whose power gave new life to Jesus and gives new life to us.  And it is God’s purpose to bring new life to the world through us, the resurrected body of Christ. 

How do Jesus-followers follow an absent Jesus?  We do it by leaning into God’s purpose for us just as Jesus leaned into God’s purpose for him.  As our writer put it:

I pray that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation…that…you may know…the immeasurable greatness of God’s power for us who believe, according to the working of God’s great power at work in Christ when God raised him from the dead and seated him at God’s right hand in the heavenly places,  far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the age to come.  And God has put all things under Christ’s feet and has made him the head over all things for the church, which is his body, the fullness of God who fills all in all.

Amen.

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The One Truth among Many Truths (5th Sunday of Easter - A; John 14:1-14; May 18, 2014)

The One Truth among Many Truths

5th Sunday of Easter - A

John 14:1-14

May 18, 2014

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD

First United Methodist Church

Decorah, Iowa

“I am the way, and the truth, and the life.”  Wow!

Jesus is the way.  There isn’t any other.  There is only one mountain and there is only one road that goes up the mountain.  If someone isn’t on that road, they’re on the wrong road.  Pretty simple, huh?

Jesus is the truth.  There isn’t any other truth.  Anything that looks like truth that isn’t that truth isn’t the truth at all.  This could save a lot of money for anyone who had thought to go to college—what would be the point, really?  We already know the whole truth.

Jesus is the life.  Any life that isn’t Jesus is really death in disguise.  If you want the life that God has to offer, it’s right there in Jesus and nowhere else. 

Jesus is the way, and the truth, and the life.  Apart from Jesus there are only false roads, falsehoods, and death.

If we follow this logic, then the practical upshot is this: the only way to get to heaven is to profess Jesus and believe in him in our hearts.  Otherwise we are going to hell.  There are hard truths in life and this is one of them.  Good people whom we may admire, people like Gandhi, the Dalai Lama, even our grandparents and our children are all either in hell or headed there unless they—the ones who are still alive at any rate—become professing Christians.  After all, Jesus is the way, and the truth, and the life.

Now there are, I think, at least three problems with the reading that I have laid out.  The first is a pastoral problem.  The problem is this: how do I go about explaining to a family’s Aunt Sarah that her husband Fred, though he was a good man who worked hard, loved her and their children, and strove to leave the world a better place than he found it, is in fact not in heaven because he wasn’t a Christian.  It seems that he experienced the church as falling pretty far short of its ideals and this scandalized him, so much so that he refused to have anything to do with Jesus or with Jesus’ God who, after all, ought to stand behind the brand name of the family business.  I can’t paper over this difficulty, either, not if there is a chance that someone will misinterpret my kindness as suggesting that they don’t need to be a Christian to avoid his fate.

So, at a time when this family needs the love and care and support of God that is present, however imperfectly, in the church, they get from the church instead a proclamation of God’s merciless wrath against those who don’t believe or say the right things.

The second difficulty with this “Jesus’ way or the highway” reading of John is theological.  It asks us to believe that the God who loves us so much that Jesus came to die for us is also the same God who sentences people to hell forever with no possibility of parole for failing to confess the right creed or have the right experiences.  It asks us to believe that God is not as merciful as the governor of Iowa or the President of the United States because they pardon people, but God does not.  It asks us to believe that because I am willing to forgive Gandhi for not being a Christian I am more loving than God.

I know I can’t point to a specific biblical text that says this, but from what I have learned from the Bible of what God is like and how God is with us, I have come to believe that God never stops loving us.  God will woo us through this lifetime and into the next if need be until we respond in kind.  Because we are free to refuse God’s love, I believe that hell exists, but I also believe that it’s mostly empty and that the only residents are the temporary ones who still think they don’t want to be in heaven.  If God’s ultimate nature is love and if love is the deepest meaning of the universe, then hell as proclaimed by the Christian right makes no sense.

The third problem with this line of thinking has to do with the fate of the world and the splendid and bewildering array of life that it hosts.  If there is only one truth and we are in possession of that one truth and everyone else is either wrong or agrees with us, then any other opinion firmly held must be a threat to us.  This line of thinking carves the world up into “us” and “them.”  “We” must oppose “them” with every fiber of our being, because we are right and they are wrong.  “We” can never make peace with “them” because that would mean betraying the truth.  “We” can’t even engage “them” in serious conversation, at least not the kind where we really listen to each other, because we dare not risk being converted away from the truth.

By definition there is only room for one absolute truth in the universe.  It must exclude every idea that is not already implied by it.  Of course, each of us will understand this truth differently and so only one of us is right and the rest of us are wrong and the one who is right has an obligation to persuade the ones who are wrong.  By force, if necessary. 

So what, then, do we toss out John’s gospel, since I seem to be saying that everything is relative?  I mean, what’s the point if we’re all going to heaven anyway?

Well, I don’t have any problem opposing a text of the Bible.  Remember I’ve said that the Bible is not a book so much as it’s a conversation.  We are not so much being asked to submit to the Bible as we are to enter its conversation.  And sometimes in conversations we agree and sometimes we disagree—at least if it’s a conversation worth having—and the important thing is to stay with it.  So if we need to disagree with John, I’m okay with that.

But let’s make sure that we understand him first.  At first reading John’s Jesus is serene and lofty, far removed from the ordinary world.  He may give his life, but no one can take it from him.  The Jesus of Matthew, Mark and Luke struggles to understand and do what God wants, but not John’s Jesus.  John’s Jesus knows what is going to happen before it happens and is untroubled by it.  The disciples may not get it, but Jesus lays it out for them over and over again. 

The reality of John’s community was far from the serenity we see in John’s Jesus.  John’s community was in trouble.  They had come to a final divorce from the Jewish synagogue.  The anger and pain left over from that are very much in evidence.  They were having real struggles trying to decide who they were as a community and what their task in the world was to be.  They were wounded and confused.  They felt abandoned.  They took it out on each other and their Jewish neighbors. 

John was writing to a demoralized community, divided against itself and threatened from the outside.  Jesus’ declaration, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life” was meant as a comfort for their grief and as a support that would strengthen them in their difficult struggle for existence.

It was not meant to become a program for oppressing people who did not follow Jesus.  It was not given as a creed to an institution with a membership of a billion so that they could use it as a club against its non-member neighbors.  No, it was something more modest than that.  It was reassurance and a reminder to a struggling community of Jesus-followers.

John’s community had other options available, other ways of being in the world.  There were other ways of thinking, speaking and seeing the world, other truth systems that they could choose.  There were other possible lives than the hard one they were living.  John wanted to remind them of who they were.  John wanted to remind them of the commitments they had made and how that shaped the world they lived in.  For Jesus-followers, Jesus is the path.  For Jesus-followers, Jesus is the truth.  For Jesus-followers, Jesus is life.

When the going got rough these Jesus-followers needed to be reminded of this. 

We find ourselves in difficult times, too.  Our difficulties are not the same as those faced by John’s community, but sometimes we need the same reminders.  We’re not always sure how to live in the world as Jesus-followers.  In fact most of the time we’re pretty unsure.  There are other ways of being in the world, there are other messages, there are other lives.  Being a Jesus-follower is not the only available option.  Any of us can see this simply by turning on the television or opening up a web browser. 

I’m here is to remind us of the commitments we have made.  At one time or another we stood in front of this congregation or another and committed ourselves to being Jesus-followers.  If we’ve tried to do that on our own, we may have discovered just how easy it is to place that commitment in the background while we’ve gotten on with seemingly more important things: getting good grades, making a successful career, or raising kids. 

I’m here to remind us all—on behalf of the Church—that we are Jesus-followers.  Jesus is our way, our truth and our life. 

That’s not an invitation to intolerance or arrogance.  Our neighbors may have their way, their truth, their life and they may be different from ours.  We don’t have to impose our way, our truth or our life on our non-Christian neighbors.  We just have to follow the Jesus who is our way, our truth and our life.  That’s all.  Because we are Jesus-followers.  And that’s what we do. 

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.