INTERGENERATIONAL CONGREGATION: When Your Children Ask You (17th Sunday after Pentecost; Exodus 12:21-28; September 11, 2016)

When Your Children Ask You

17th Sunday after Pentecost
Exodus 12:21-28
September 11, 2016

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

Five core values. It sounds familiar. Mission statements, core values, strategic goals: all of them fancy phrases that sound like they were invented by consultants who are trying to justify their high fees. Church management, like its older sibling business management, churns out jargon. Every few years the latest thing comes off the presses and soon everyone is talking the latest language.

I sound pretty cynical, I know. But I've been around this business long enough to have gone through several earth-shaking, paradigm-shattering management fads. They tend to blend together. Oh, what is it this time? Development paths? Well, all right then! The higher-ups are all excited, or at very least it is clear that they expect me to be excited. And, who knows? Maybe there is something useful to be gained from the re-packaging and re-branding.

I actually heard a church administration consultant say something useful. She was talking about staff supervision, but I think it applies to any part of our institutional life: staff job descriptions, budgets, or program development. She said, "It's not the document that counts; it's the conversation."

We have a statement of five core values. They are themselves the product of a lot of conversation, some of it in the planning committee, some of it in the Administrative Council, some of it among anyone in the congregation who was interested and available. The statement is good, as good as anything I've ever seen, but the statement doesn't really count. It's just a document. It only counts if it spurs us to conversation and if we let the conversation carry us forward.

The five core values statement grew out of the questions that we asked several months ago. We shared the responses early this year on lists posted around the sanctuary. Then you tagged the statements that rang most true for you with sticker dots. Then the planning group sorted the statements and arranged them by theme. As we did that we realized that what we had was a statement of what we value in First United Methodist Church. The list is not a referendum on our programs or proposals for future ministry. It’s a list of what is important. Programs come and go. So do pastors. Values are more permanent.

And they are helpful when we know what they are. They can guide us as we make decisions. They can help us understand ourselves and explain ourselves to others. They can spur our ministries forward as we imagine what these values would look like fully enfleshed. They can give our shared life greater focus without constraining us to a tight agenda that would be out of date by the time it was drafted and published.

I struggled a little about the order of presentation, but this week at least is settled, because we begin a new Sunday School year and present Bibles to our fourth graders. That's pretty intergenerational, I think.

The Bible doesn't spend a great deal of ink talking about children. In the ancient world children were mostly invisible. Stories about children were mostly stories about the early detection of an adult's character and fate. "The boy is the father of the man" was a popular way of saying it.

But there are a few times when children come into view in ways that actually take seriously their need to learn the culture of faith, their need for identity-formation as members of the people of God. Our reading this morning is one of them.

The passage is part of a larger unit of the text that remembers the deliverance of the children of Israel from slavery in Egypt. At the center of that story is a meal--the Seder meal, or Pesach--and at the center of the instructions for the meal is a reminder that children need to understand why this ritual meal is celebrated.

Unlike the Christian ritual meal, the Eucharist, the setting for this Jewish meal is in the homes of the community's families. Three or four generations were gathered at the Seder. In the story this meal would have been new to everyone at the table, but later when they "enter[ed] the land that the Lord [had] promised to give to [them]" there would have been layers of experience. The oldest generation would remember decades of Seder meals. Their memories would trace their own path from when they themselves asked the questions through their maturity as adults and parents to their place as the guardians of wisdom in their families and communities. The youngest children might well have been agog at the unusual actions taken in preparation for and participation in this meal. They might indeed have asked the question, "What does this ritual mean to you?"

Later in the life of the Jewish people, the rituals around Passover were standardized and part of that process included providing a place in the ritual itself for the question. It was expanded until, in one version of the ritual, one of the children present asks:

Why is this night different from all other nights? On all other nights, we eat either leavened or matzoh; on this night--only matzoh. On all other nights, we eat all kinds of herbs; on this night, we especially eat bitter herbs. On all other nights, we do not dip herbs at all; on this night we dip them twice. On all other nights, we eat in an ordinary manner; tonight we dine with special ceremony.

In this model of religious education, how does a child become a fully-participating member of the community? By fully participating in the ritual action of the community and by being allowed to ask questions of adults who are prepared to give appropriate answers.

This question--and its presence in the Seder meal--is a token of a total approach to religious education. There will be questions all along the way. "Mama, Jimmy had pork chops last night. He said there were really good. Why don't we ever have pork chops?" "Papa, Louisa's family has a Christmas tree decorated with pretty ornaments and colored lights. On Christmas everyone gets presents. Why don't we have a Christmas tree? Why don't we get presents?" "Rabbi, why do we have to learn Hebrew?" Good questions, all of them. And the community expects that any adult would be able to answer them or take the asker of the question to someone who can.

The Jewish people live a multiple-generational and even inter-generational life. Children learn from adults about the how and the why of their way of life. Adults reconnect with the deep meaning of that life through the experiences of children. Adults bring rational thought and mature emotion to the relationship; children bring the magic. Both are needed. Each generation must show the next their way of life and tell about it as well. Show and tell is at the heart of religious education. The adult generation must not allow this process to fail. The Jewish people are not allowed to not teach their children.

We're not so different:

As a congregation we value the relationships that are formed between different generations which nurture each person's spirit and create a sense of belonging.

We are a congregation that aspires to inter-generational life. We value inter-generational relationships for at least a couple of reasons. It is in fact a biblical value, one that is most often taken for granted, hardly ever noticed, but almost always present. It is also part of our own experience in families. How does someone become a Caldwell? You can be born into the family or you can marry into it. But then, what? You become a Caldwell by living with Caldwell's (which is the principal reason there are so few of them). You learn (and contribute to) the specialized dialect of English spoken by Caldwell's. You listen to the stories told at family gatherings. You do what the Caldwell's do.

There aren't any classes you can take; there are no books to read, no websites with links to the knowledge you hope to acquire. Being a Caldwell is caught more than taught. To date, there is no known cure, only treatment to help you live a relatively normal life in spite of it. Maybe you this sounds familiar.

We value inter-generational relationships. And for good reason: they are the principle means by which identity as a Jesus-follower is formed. Just as the Jewish Seder imagines Jewish identity being formed by conversation between the elders of a family and its youngest members, so does the Rite of Baptism imagine Christian identity being formed by the relationship between an infant being baptized and her parents and baptismal sponsors:

Will you nurture these children in Christ's holy church, that by your teaching and example [that's just a phrase that means "show and tell"] they may be guided to accept God's grace for themselves, to profess their faith openly, and to lead a Christian life?

we ask. And the parents and sponsors reply "I will".

As important as Sunday School is and as useful as a Sunday School class might be for some things, to put the full weight of our efforts at forming Christian identity on it is simply doomed to failure. Consider this: Suppose that parents brought their children to Sunday School every time it met from birth to age eighteen. Never mind that we don't start classes at birth and haven't had a Senior High class for years. Add up the hours that each child would spend in a Christian Education classroom setting. How many years would a child have to go to public school in order to accumulate the same number of hours? Just think about that for a moment.

When I do the math, here's what I come up with: One hour a week for 34 weeks for each of 18 years comes to 452 hours of Sunday School. Divide this total by 7 hours a day of public school and we have an equivalent of 65 days of school. This year the sixty-fifth day of school falls on December 6. To summarize: weekly attendance at Sunday School for eighteen years yields the same amount of face-to-face classroom time as attending Kindergarten through the first week of December. The good work that the Sunday School does is simply not enough.

There are historical reasons for our relying on Sunday Schools to do the Christian Education heavy lifting. There are also reasons to see that we need a different model. And, after all, we've only had Sunday School for two hundred thirty-two years. It's not as if we've always had it!

What if we took inter-generational relationships seriously as the main carrier of education? What if we moved from the more head-centered focus of the classroom to a more relational understanding of education? What if we put more focus on households as the place where most identity-formation happens? What if we asked of each ministry of the church that it foster forming inter-generational relationships on purpose and not simply as a happy accident? What if, for example, when we have a church cleanup day, we put together cleaning teams with three generations wherever possible, and not necessarily three generations from the same family? What if parents knew when they brought their young children with them to church, that there would be other adults, especially older adults, who would be willing and even eager to sit with those young children? What if parents were free to worship as grownups knowing that their children were safe, loved, and fully participating?

The culture of our community often works against forming deep inter-generational relationships. Parents and grandparents go to work or "work" at retirement while children are segregated with their own cohorts in schools. Parents and grandparents sit in the bleachers and watch as their children perform in sporting events. Neither of these scenarios gives much time for forming relationships. And what about the many, many families who do not have grandparents living nearby or the grandparents whose grandchildren live a half-continent away? What if we could help those "orphaned" generations get together and come to value each other? What if there were someone who could explain to me what Pokémon-Go is all about?

What if coming to church brought people into a space where these relationships were valued and where the work of transmitting and transforming culture and identity were on the agenda? What if we extended the length of our morning gathering to include time for generations to learn together around the theme of the worship service?

What if? What if? Well, you can keep this going! And, if an answer that embodies our core value of inter-generational relationships emerges, grabs you, and wrestles you to the ground, you may well have become the custodian of a Bubble-Up ministry. Let's talk!

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The Once and Future Covenant (16th Sunday after Pentecost; Jeremiah 31:27-34; September 4, 2016)

Exile and Homecoming: The Once and Future Covenant

16th Sunday after Pentecost
Jeremiah 31:27-34
September 4, 2016

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

Exiles dream of homecoming. They tell stories about what life was like before, before the disaster, before the defeat, before the foreclosure, before the diagnosis. They remember.

But memory, especially the memory of how things were before, plays tricks on us. It polishes, it amends, it edits, it Photoshops our memories until the past becomes a Golden Age. Memory becomes nostalgia; the past becomes a fantasy, anesthesia against present pain. We can project our hopes for the future into the past and they can become, in Walter Brueggemann's words "a subversive memory of the future."

When the survivors of the siege of Jerusalem went to Babylon as exiles, they were forced to leave behind much of what had defined them as a people. But they didn't leave everything behind. They took their stories and, above all, they took the scrolls. While in exile the scribes who were the guardians of those scrolls gave a final shape to most of what we now call the Old Testament. They brought together the traditions, written and unwritten, and wove them together into a single story. They reflected on their experience as the covenant people of God. They thought deeply about the meaning of the exile in the light of their status as God's covenant people. Or maybe they thought deeply about their status as God's covenant people in light of the exile. They told stories and they debated. They recorded these stories and debates and those writings eventually became what is called the Talmud, a vast encyclopedia of Jewish thought, experience, and sensibility.

When--after "seventy" years--Babylon fell to the Persians and there was a change of policy that allowed the exiles to return to Jerusalem, there were some who decided to stay in Babylon. They had made a place for themselves there as a community within the Babylonian culture. They were prosperous and saw no reason to take the risks of going home to a place they had never seen. The others, the ones who decided to return, quickly discovered that Jerusalem was not the place they had heard their grandparents talk about wistfully when people got to telling stories in the evenings after their work was done.Jerusalem was a mess and they was no homecoming welcome waiting for them.

The reality is that there is no going "home" from exile. If exile is when we can no longer live in the place that we call home, then homecoming is complicated by the fact that nothing stays the same. The home that we knew changes when we are gone. We change when we are gone. When we who have been changed return to the homes that have been changed, that's when we find out that exile has become our home. Exile is permanent. We cannot go home. We can only go on.

At the beginning of all this exilic messiness, Jeremiah had thought deeply about the covenant and exile and the future. Of course, the future that Jeremiah saw coming was mostly about digging up and pulling down, about destruction and demolition. The old covenant was not working. The people of Jerusalem, the elite of Judah, were simply failing to do what they were called to do. They undermined the life of the people of the land for their own gain; they subverted God's justice for their own convenience. They even worshiped other gods whose characters seemed more in line with the interests of the one percent. Jeremiah and other prophets railed against them in God's name, but the elite would not listen. And, even more to the point, they would not change the practices and the institutions that promoted their power and wealth. They were unteachable, unreachable.

Of course it was their fault, in a sense, since they refused to listen, refused to learn. But when the student does not learn perhaps there is something wrong with the curriculum. Perhaps it was the covenant itself that was at fault. Perhaps the covenant expected impossible things.

Jeremiah had thought deeply about the covenant and had come to the conclusion that something had to change. He imagined a future in which God would write the covenant on the heart of Judah and even on the heart of Israel that had ceased to be a nation and whose people were scattered across the ancient world. In that future keeping the covenant would be like breathing; it would be reflexive. From the youngest of them to the oldest they would know God without having to be taught or reminded. What was needed was a New Covenant.

We Christians have imagined for centuries that we belong to that New Covenant. At the start of what we call the New Testament in many translations there are even words like: "The New Covenant Commonly Called the New Testament of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ." We look into this text and see our own reflection. It is not unlike looking into a fun-house mirror, only our reflection in this case is an improvement on reality and we see ourselves as better than we really are.

The covenant under which we live with God as the followers of Jesus is not, I repeat, not, the New Covenant that Jeremiah speaks about. "How can you say that?" you ask. I'm glad you asked! I say that because when we read closely we see that under the covenant that Jeremiah is talking about there is no need for anyone to be taught to know God because everyone just will. But that isn't how things are with us. We need to be taught; we need to learn and teach how to know God. If we were living in Jeremiah's New Covenant we wouldn't have a Sunday School or a Wednesday After School Program or a Vacation Bible School or an Adult Forum. We wouldn't need directors of Christian education or preachers or Sunday School teachers (and we can always use a few more of those). Parents wouldn't need to answer their children's questions about God, because the kids would already know.

We are not living under the New Covenant. We are still waiting for it, longing for it, and praying for it ("...hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come. Your will be done..."). We are waiting for it just like our Jewish friends. It still lies in our future.

In the meantime? In the meantime, we still live in exile, making our lives in a place that in an ultimate sense we cannot call home, waiting for a summons to pack our things. We built houses and live in them; we planted gardens and eat what they produce; we prayed for the place where we have been sent. But we are not at home here. We are citizens of a different commonwealth. We reject calls for us to give our full allegiance to anything and anyone but God and God's dream. The rhythms of our life are out of sync with the calendars of our culture. We are the people of God in exile and we will remain in exile. We are the people of God who have found the desert of our exile to be a place where God meets us and where God leads and sustains us. Poised between a past of covenant failure and a future of new covenant hope we are still God's people and exile is our home.

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Strangers in a Strange Land (15th Sunday after Pentecost; Jeremiah 29: 20-14; August 28, 2016)

Strangers in a Strange Land

15th Sunday after Pentecost
Jeremiah 29: 20-14
August 28, 2016

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

This was not the week that we had planned. The universe dealt us a wild card. We had a forceful reminder of how fragile our human arrangements really are, a reminder of the sheer power of something so simple and ordinary as water.

For many of us it has been a week for repairing the minor damages and cleaning up the mess left behind. This is has been an inconvenience that will not change our lives much one way or the other.

For those in our community whose houses suffered collapsed walls in their basements, it has been more than an inconvenience; it has been a disaster. Their homes unsafe to live in, they have become short-term "internal refugees" while they figure out what comes next and either rebuild or find other permanent housing.

But neither of these experiences can really be counted as exile. There can be pain from the loss of precious items stored in a flooded basement. There can be inconvenience from having to set aside plans and attend to the demands for clean-up and repair. There can be hardship from temporary homelessness. But this is not exile.

Even being declared a disaster area does not mean that this experience is equivalent to exile. Exile is when it is no longer possible to live in the place that you call home and when you have to live in a place that you cannot call home. A temporary relocation until life can get back to normal isn't exile. In exile life never gets back to normal. It seems to me that this distinction isn't about the amount of pain; it's about a quality of the experience.

A diagnosis of cancer is an exiling experience even if the cancer is successfully treated with minimally invasive methods and low levels of pain, because once having been diagnosed, "normal" life is changed. Successful treatment, even remission, cannot remove the possibility of recurrence. We don't have to think about it all the time or even often, but it is never not a possibility that hovers at the edges of consciousness. No amount of forgetfulness with restore life to normal. Exile is not about how much suffering there is, but about a quality of the experience that alienates us from our old lives and forces us into a new lives.

We Americans--and maybe everyone, but I know Americans best--resist the notion that we would be forced into a new life, one that we didn't choose for ourselves. History doesn't apply to us; we make it up as we go along. We are exceptions to the rules that bind everyone else.

For many Christians it is God who guarantees that our futures are sunny and bright, that we will have everything we need and, really, everything that we want. Some Christians even take this so far as to say that prosperity--material abundance--is God's gift to everyone who believes and acts in the right way. To them Joel Osteen´s 2.5 million dollar parsonage is not a scandal, but the necessary proof they, too, are the rightful heirs to wealth as God´s children. It´s not wasteful for him and his family to live in that monstrosity, but his duty as their spiritual leader.

Christians of this ilk scour the Bible for texts that will prove that God wants them to be rich. Every now and then they find a text new to them and ride it for a while. A few years ago it was the Prayer of Jabez that promised unending expansion. Recently, I've notice that they landed on this:

I know the plans I have in mind for you, declares the Lord; they are plans for peace, not disaster, to give you a future filled with hope. (Jer 29:11 CEB)

They read it from their favorite translation, the New International Version, which has slightly but importantly different language:

For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future." (Jer 29:11 NIV)

I've seen this text on plaques and calendars, notecards and posters, this assertion that our prosperity is God's plan, and that any hopeful future must be a rich one.

Not only do they pick and choose carefully among translations, but they take this text out of its context. You might remember--and if you don't I'll take this opportunity to remind you--that a few weeks ago I preached on the text that immediately precedes this one. The exiles in Babylon had asked Jeremiah what they should do there, especially since Hananiah was telling them in Yahweh's name that the exile was only going to last for two years. Jeremiah told them to build houses and live in them, to plant gardens and eat what grew, to marry and have children, and to pray for the shalôm of Babylon because its shalôm and theirs were bound up in each other.

Only then comes that promise that, after seventy years, God would return them to Jerusalem. God's plans for the shalôm of the community of exiles in Babylon are given in the context of exile. After seventy years, after three generations have passed, after there were no longer any survivors who had lived in Jerusalem as adults, then and only then God's plans for their peace move from future hope to present reality.

There is no shortcut past exile on the way from the collapse of dreams in the present to a life of shalôm in the hoped-for future. For the exiles, the full experience of exile is inescapable. There is simply no way around it.

The reason is this: something happens in exile. In the experience of exile, the exiles were transformed into something new, something they had never been before and never would be without that experience. Stripped of all the defenses that the elite of Jerusalem had used to avoid coming face-to-face with God, they were left with nothing but God. With no Temple and no sacrifices, with no kings and their royal yes-men, they were left with no alternative but to face God. And no one comes away from a face-to-face encounter with God without being changed.

Exile was like an alchemical crucible in which base materials are crushed and heated, the impurities burned away, and the rest transformed until what was left was the philosophers' stone. In the crucible of exile Judeans became something new; they became Jews.

We have a stake in this, of course, because without Jews there would have been no Jesus and without Jesus I would still be painting myself blue and worshiping trees as did my ancestors. That is not to make the experience of exile okay, to wipe away the real misery, suffering and death, that came with it. It is only that the misery, suffering, and death are not the only stories that exile has to tell.

We already know this, really. We just need to be reminded of it from time to time. Easter follows Good Friday, but something is happening on Holy Saturday. Out of sight and sound, some work of transformation is taking place in the sealed tomb.

Slavery in Egypt is followed by settlement in the Land of Promise, but along the way, in the desert, something happens to the ex-slaves, some transformation that begins the work of forming the People of God.

We see it in the world around us, too. Caterpillars weave cocoons and emerge months later as butterflies, but something happens inside the chrysalis, some work of transformation.

Seeds fall into the earth and seem to die, but out of that burial come new plants.

A little yeast is added to dough; the dough is kneaded until it becomes elastic, almost alive; the dough is placed in a warm dark place and it becomes a loaf; and, the loaf is placed in a hot dark place and becomes bread. Water and flour and yeast and a little salt become daily bread by processes of transformation that the dough, if it could talk, would regard as torment.

The experience of exile, whether it comes in the form of a forced march from Jerusalem to Babylon or the intensely personal form of a struggle against cancer, is an experience we avoid with all of our might and at the same time it is an experience on which our own transformation depends. New life requires that, in one way or another, our old life must end, or to put it more bluntly, we must die.

We Christians live under the sign of baptism. I am reminded that baptism in its boldest form is a ritual drowning. We drown our infants so that we may be reminded that, as precious as their lives are, their new lives are more precious still. We confirm our young people so that they can say, Yes, drown me, too, so that new life becomes possible for me. We remember our baptisms whether by crossing ourselves or by calling our baptisms to mind as a reminder that, Yes, we too are in need of fresh dying and new life.

We who fell asleep in an earlier time when churches were honored institutions in our nation's life and were readily given time, money and attention, have awakened from a long and unpleasant dream to find ourselves in Babylon. The values that dominate our national conversation are implacably opposed to the values that Jesus taught. Calls for justice and peace are sneered at and marginalized. Vengeance, intolerance, and selfishness are put forward as Christian virtues. Hate groups claim to be churches and are consulted when the media wants to hear from the "Christian" perspective.

We have lost our place of privilege in our culture. The strategies that used to "work" no longer put people in the pews. The United Methodist Church, our own denominational home, is wracked with self-destructive conflict as it relives in our own time the crisis years of 1844-48. The world has become a strange place. The church in North America has gone into exile.

What will happen? I don't know much. If ancient Judah's experience is anything to go by, three things can be said with confidence: (1) There is no getting around the exile. There is no magic way to recover the church of fifty or even ten years ago. (2) Much that we value will be lost. Our pain and grief is and will be real. We need to face that pain and honor that grief. (3) We will be transformed. We will come out the other end of this time a changed people. It is possible that none of us will live to see it. But it will come. After the disaster, it will come:

I know the plans I have in mind for you, declares the Lord; they are plans for peace, not disaster, to give you a future filled with hope. (Jer 29:11 CEB)

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Packing for Exile (14th Sunday after Pentecost; 2 Kings 23:8-12, 21b; August 21, 2016)

Packing for Exile

14th Sunday after Pentecost
2 Kings 23:8-12, 21b
August 21, 2016

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

What would you take with you if your house were on fire? What would you grab if you had seconds to get yourself and your family to safety?

This is an exercise in something called "values clarification." Only it's a trick question, because the answer is, You take nothing with you if your house is on fire. You get your family out; you get yourself out. And you stay out until or unless the fire department says that it's safe to go back in.

But what if you had some notice of a coming disaster that required you to evacuate your home with the assumption that you could not return and that everything you left behind would be lost? This doesn't happen much in Iowa. We don't have hurricanes, earthquakes, volcanoes, or large brush fires. We have blizzards, but even if we are forced out of our homes, what we leave behind won't be destroyed. We have tornadoes, but they leave no time at all for last-minute decisions.

But it's an interesting exercise. Try it when you get home or think your way through it now. You have thirty minutes to pack a single suitcase small enough to fit in the overhead compartment. It can't weigh much because you're going to have to carry it. One small suitcase and a bag. That's all. What would you pack if you had to leave home and everything you have behind?

That's what the people of Jerusalem had to decide. The city was in ruins, the promise of God's protection shattered like the city walls. The Temple was burned, its sacred implements melted down for their metals: bronze, copper, and gold. After months of fear, after a season of hunger and then starvation, after the collapse of the defenses and the looting of the city, they found themselves still alive. The Babylonian army herded them together for the long walk to Babylon. They could take only what they could carry.

What did they take? What did they leave behind? There was no way to take any furniture, but they would need a blanket each. They needed a change of clothing. What about cooking utensils? They weren't even supposed to have them, but I'll bet many of them had to decide whether to take their household idols, their Baals and Astartes. Maybe not: those gods hadn't saved them either and what would be the point in taking the gods of their land to a distant city, a city that had its own gods?

The priests faced even more difficult choices. They had to decide not only about what their families would take, but about what holy things they could take with them. They couldn't take the Temple; it was in ruins. Everything of importance had been looted or destroyed. Everything except the scrolls. Now, these priests weren't just ritual specialists. Some of them were librarians. My sister is a librarian, so I know a little about them and the way they think. These librarian-priests would have taken as many of the scrolls as they could carry. Never mind extra clothing. Clothing could be replaced. Never mind cooking utensils, never mind photo albums, never mind family keepsakes, never mind their wife's wedding dress, never mind the children's toys. They took the scrolls.

Some of these scrolls were already considered sacred: there were scrolls that contained much of what would eventually become the Torah. But in addition to these there were some psalms, some annals of the kings of Israel and Judah, some of the writings of the prophets, some wisdom literature. It wasn't all compiled into one easily carried book like our Bible. What we call the Old Testament was far from finished--more on that in the next couple of weeks--and the scrolls were bulky. The priests packed all that they could into their suitcases and tucked extra clothing around them as padding and protection.

That was the physical baggage. We carry other sorts of baggage and so did they. They carried their memories, collective memories of slavery and deliverance, times of famine and plenty, and personal memories of life in Jerusalem with its rhythms of planting and harvest, of holy days and sacred seasons. Overlaid on their deep memories were the horrors of defeat and destruction and despair. What could they make out of all those memories? Was there any way to hang them all together, to make a unified story of all that had happened, a story with a past and, even more importantly and improbably, a story with a future?

In a way a culture is a kind of baggage. A culture is all that we have created or adapted in order to interact with our environment. Culture includes all of the ways that we look at the world and the patterns of how we think about ourselves and the world, our frames of reference and even our language. We don’t think about these things very much—we just use them. Could they keep these? Could they take them with them? Maybe. They would have to learn the language of their captors just to survive. Would it be worth the extra trouble to be a permanently bilingual people?

What about their unquestioned habits of thought? Every culture has some. We have some. When the disaster befell us in 2001 our first question was, Why do they hate us? That’s a question that might have led to real insight. But we didn't spend much time on it. The myth of American Exceptionalism quickly took over and gave us the answer: There is nothing wrong with us. We have done no wrong. We are innocent. They hate us because we are good and they are evil. The habit of blaming others for the things that happen to us is a heavy habit to carry, one that keeps us from learning and maturing as a people.

Ancient Jerusalemites had their habits, too. For centuries Jerusalemites had viewed the world through their certainty that Yahweh would protect the city of David, the city where "God's name lives", the city where the Temple of Yahweh stood. If the people found it hard to keep all the rules, especially the rules about economic and social justice, in the covenant, God would understand. The covenant would stand and it would withstand the armies of Babylon as it had withstood the armies of Egypt and Assyria. They were God's people no matter what. They were safe.

But this Judean Exceptionalism had proven to be a house built on sand. It had been swept away by the flood of soldiers from the North. And now what? Perhaps this bit of mental baggage was too heavy to carry with them, especially since it no longer seemed to serve any useful purpose.

Say whatever you will about the experience of exile; it has a remarkable ability to help us sort out what is vital, what is merely important, and what is more of a burden than a blessing. What do you really need to be a Judean or a Jerusalemite? If we had seen the people going into exile and observed their choices, we would have seen the beginnings of an answer to that question.

Other groups have had to answer that question for themselves. Sometimes it's because they have been driven from their homes by famine or force. Other times it's because they have been drawn to another place by opportunity. I think of the choices made by countless immigrants to this country. What could they fit in a steamer trunk? And what of their culture would be useful enough to bring with them? The Vesterheim Museum is a record in material culture of the answers to those questions. Looking back we see their choices as natural and inevitable, but I'm sure they were pretty hard for the people making them. Norwegian-Americans are indistinguishable from the rest of northern European folks among whom they settled. They speak the same language as the rest of us, follow the same fashion trends, live in the same kind of dwellings. Once a year they trot out their bunads and make piles of lefsa. Perhaps they point with pride to their ancient legends and myths. Perhaps they are a little embarrassed about their bad manners when they began to drop in on their neighbors in the ninth century. Along the way, they have answered the question of what it means to be an American of Norwegian descent, giving about as many answers to the question as there are individuals.

Another group that interests me very much are the Muslim immigrants from various Muslim-majority nations. Almost entirely, they have come for the same reason that our forebears did: opportunity. But along the way they have to decide what the essence of being Muslim really is. In their home countries the culture is so permeated by Islam that being Muslim is mostly a matter of going along with the mainstream. But here it is different. Ramadan comes and goes for most Americans without our even being aware of it. The public call to prayer is not a feature of American villages, towns and cities.

Some few Muslims I am sure have decided that the problem is that the United States is not a Muslim nation. Others have decided perhaps unconsciously that they will leave Islam behind as they melt into the American pot. But the vast majority, I suspect, are trying to figure out what the essence of Islam is and what being Muslim is in the American context. I suspect that, if we do not make them into an oppressed minority, the results of that struggle will be a great good for them, for our shared world, and for the ancient homeland of Islam.

We, too, struggle with the question of what baggage to take into a changed world. Our older people do that when they decide that it's time to "downsize." What goes with them? What is going to the children, or sold at a yard sale, or placed at the curbside? Our young people do that when they go to college and begin to work out what they can take with them of all they have learned at home and what will have to yield to a wider world of learning. What are they going to believe? When people decide to get married, they have to decide what can come with them and what cannot. Furniture is one question, but far more important is the mental baggage, the long habit of thinking like individuals.

The Church (with a capital C) in the United States is going through this. We know that our nation is undergoing a massive racial shift. Across our country white children are no longer a majority in public school kindergartens and first grade classrooms. By 2040 or so, there will be no racial majority in our country.

But one shift has already happened. When we factor in the large number of "nones" and "dones" in our younger generations, we have already passed a major milestone. White Christians are no longer a majority. Demographically, this is no longer a white Christian nation. That's not the future; that's our present reality.

I stayed in one place, but the world has changed around me. So I have gone into exile without ever having left home. So, I believe, has the United Methodist Church. Consciously or not, we are now deciding on the baggage we can and can't take into the new world. We can look at the struggles over the role and place of LGBTQ folks in our denomination through this lens. Can we carry our gender and sexuality baggage with us into the future? Or do we need to find other ways to define the essence of what it means to be a follower of Jesus in our new world? What do we need to take with us?

This question will be with us for a long time. We'll have questions like: Does a congregation function best with or without a permanent building? Is a once a week classroom setting the best way of introducing our children (and adults) to this matter of following Jesus or are there ways that make more sense in the world that emerging around us? What do we do with denominational organizations? Do we need an ordained clergy? If so, for what?

We have gone a long way to preparing ourselves to make those kinds of decisions by distilling our shared experience into five statements that set out what we value. We'll be introducing them in the next few weeks and I'll be preaching about them after Labor Day. Buildings, programs, and structures may go with us or they may not, but our values are almost certain to go with us wherever we have to go.

When the survivors of the disaster at Jerusalem set off, they were grief-stricken and in shock. They made their choices about what to take with them in a daze. I imagine that their path was littered with the evidence of changed minds as they decided that this or that treasured item was too heavy after all. What was never visible were the discarded habits of thought. They were, as all exiles are, in mourning for their lost homes and the lives that they lived there. I'm sure they never imagined that they had a future. I'm sure they thought God had abandoned them forever.

They could not see that they would build new homes and live in them. They would plant gardens and eat what they produced. They would marry. They would have children. Their children would marry and have children. They would not die out. They would live. And they would discover that Yahweh had not abandoned them. They would discover that, if they had to go into exile, Yahweh would go with them. They would discover that God is the God of their future as well as their past.

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.

Life After the End of Life As We Know It (11th Sunday after Pentecost; Jeremiah 29:1-9; July 30, 2016)

Life After the End of Life As We Know It

11th Sunday after Pentecost
Jeremiah 29:1-9
July 30, 2016

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

This summer we have been exploring the experience of exile through the lens of Jeremiah. Against the mandatory optimism of the royal regime of Jerusalem, Jeremiah had announced first a call to repentance. Jerusalem had no free pass, no get out of jail free card. There was no Judean exceptionalism. If Jerusalem failed to care for the widow, the orphan, and the stranger, if the elite of Jerusalem continued to arrange things for their own benefit, if Judah's leaders continued to treat their relationship with God as a technique for gaining power and wealth instead of a way of life characterized by seeking justice for the poor and the powerless, God would bring about the capture of Jerusalem, the destruction of the Temple, and the captivity of the people.

Then, when there was no repentance, no change of heart, only a self-protective defense of the status quo, Jeremiah announced that the time for repentance had passed and God's judgment would be executed by the hand of Babylon's empire.

Last week the disaster struck. In the summer of 587 the armies of Babylon laid siege to Jerusalem and in the spring of the next year it fell. Its walls were toppled, its gates burned, the Temple desecrated, the city looted, the leaders deported, and a puppet king installed.

The elites of Jerusalem found themselves living in Babylon, unable to live in the place they called home, and unable to call home the place where they were forced to live. They were exiles.

The Bible contains a single narrative pattern. It moves from optimistic complacency to abysmal despair, from abysmal despair to impossible hope, and from impossible hope to astonishing salvation. In the Hebrew Bible this is found most clearly in the movement from Isaac to slavery in Egypt to the Exodus deliverance and in the movement from faithless Judah to the exile in Babylon to the home-coming under the Persians. In the New Testament this is the movement from Palm Sunday to Good Friday to Easter Sunday.

This narrative arc from complacency to despair and from hope to salvation is a large part of what holds the two testaments together. And, because this is not just a plot device for a piece of literature but also characteristic of the life of God's people, themes like exile and home-coming, slavery and deliverance, death and resurrection resonate with us.

Of course, we'd like to skip from complacency straight to salvation, from wandering in the land to owning it, from prosperity to more prosperity, from Palm Sunday straight through to Easter without having to go through Good Friday. We are certainly impatient with Holy Saturday when nothing happens and we are stuck in death.

The people of Jerusalem, even after their defeat, were no different. There were some who were simply crushed by the exile, who suffered heartache and despair until they either literally died (not at all uncommon among captive people) or they died figuratively by becoming Babylonians.

Others wanted a shortcut. And these others had prophets who pandered to that wish. The prophet Hananiah declared that in two years Babylon would be overthrown and the captives would return, bearing the Temple utensils with them. Jerusalem would be restored and God would "make Judah great again". God was still on their side. This present unpleasantness was only a temporary setback.

Jeremiah countered that Hananiah was not a true prophet but a man who told lies and called them prophecies. Further, said Jeremiah, before two years had passed, before one year had passed, Hananiah would be dead.

No, said Jeremiah, the exile was not a temporary setback. Obedience to God now meant accepting Babylonian rule. For those still in Jerusalem it meant life in what was now no longer God's kingdom but a Babylonian province. For those in Babylon the easy paths of rebellion or assimilation into Babylon were denied to the people as faithful choices.

Some of the exiles wrote a letter to Jeremiah: What are our options? With the old covenant in ruins, what does faithfulness look like now? What should we do?

Jeremiah answered them:

The Lord of heavenly forces, the God of Israel, proclaims to all the exiles I have carried off from Jerusalem to Babylon: Build houses and settle down; cultivate gardens and eat what they produce. Get married and have children; then help your sons find wives and your daughters find husbands in order that they too may have children. Increase in number there so that you don’t dwindle away. Promote the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it, because your future depends on its welfare.

Going out in blaze of suicidal rebellion is not an option; giving up is not an option. They had not only to survive, but to prosper. There is a life after the end of life as they know it. And they are not allowed to throw it away. That's their impossible hope. That's the deal.

But wait, there's more! It's not enough for them to make a home for themselves in this place they cannot call home. They must not only live in the city of their enemies. They must also pray for the city of their enemies. (Jesus is not the one who came up with the idea of praying for one's enemies! Jeremiah had done it nearly six centuries earlier.) "Pray to the Lord for [Babylon], because your future depends on its welfare."

Their future depends on the welfare of their enemies. There's an idea. What if we let the notion that our future depends on the welfare of our enemies to rattle around inside us awhile?

But that's not quite right. The word translated as welfare twice in our reading is shalôm, the word that every other time in the Hebrew Bible is translated as "peace." Shalôm certainly has a broader meaning than peace as we use the word. For us it means that the fighting has stopped, but for ancient Hebrews shalôm meant the peace that comes when justice is done and the prosperity that comes when there is peace. After all, when you are constantly making spears out of pruning hooks and swords out of plowshares, your standard of living is going to go down. The reason we can't afford to feed all of our hungry children is because we are spending their lunch money on swords and spears. Shalôm assumes a society at peace with itself that gives itself to the happy work of assuring a good life for all its people.

To promote the shalôm of Babylon, to pray for the shalôm of Babylon is for the exiled Judeans to do more than wish it well, to bless its projects, and to celebrate its successes. To promote the shalôm of Babylon, to pray for the shalôm of Babylon, is to work to transform Babylon so that it loves mercy and does justice even if it doesn't walk with Judah's God, humbly or otherwise. Justice leads to peace; peace leads to having enough for everyone.

The exiles of Judah must do something harder than they had imagined. They have to let their full weight down: buy houses, get married, have children, see that their children get married, plant gardens, eat well, pray for their enemies, be God's people in a strange land, transform their captors' lives, change the empire they live in, bring hope to the world when they themselves have no hope and no Temple and no land of promise and no visible future.

They are not allowed to skip the exile; they are not allowed to skip Holy Saturday; they are not allowed to skip death on their way from life to resurrection. There is a life after the end of their life as they know it. There is life in exile. That was their impossible hope.

When our lives force us to live in a place we cannot call home, that is our experience, too. There is life after the end of life as we know it. There is life in exile. That is our impossible hope.

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.

The End of Life As We Know It (10th Sunday After Pentecost; Lamentations 1:1-7, 10-12; July 24, 2016)

The End of Life As We Know It

10th Sunday After Pentecost
Lamentations 1:1-7, 10-12
July 24, 2016

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

We have a problem with emotion, and especially with some emotions, and especially in worship. We say it's because we're Midwesterners of northern European descent. We don't get excited. We aren't passionate. We say to our spouses, "Gee, honey, I love you so much sometimes it's all I can do to keep from telling you." Too much emotion is unseemly, undignified, just not for us. That's what we say.

But it isn't really true, is it? Sometimes, when the wind is just right, in the fall, on a Saturday morning, you can hear the cheering all the way from Kinnick Stadium. Okay, I made that up, but you know what I mean. We do emotion just fine when we're in the stands: exultation, joy, disappointment, astonishment, and anger. A wide range of emotions are not only demonstrated but whole-heartedly participated in at a sporting event. Just not in church, not in worship.

This, I think, is especially true of the so-called negative emotions. A restrained joy or a polite gratitude is acceptable. We can sing "Joyful, joyful, we adore thee" and "Now thank we all our God," although I'm not sure that a visitor who didn't know English would be able to pick out the emotions we are singing about. "Joyful, joyful, we adore thee, God of glory, Lord of love; hearts unfold like flowers before thee, opening to the sun above." Psychologists call the gap between the emotion in our words and the emotion in our voices and on our faces "incongruence." A psychotherapist will pounce on it like a sparrow on a june bug.

But at least we allow these emotions a place in our worship. We may sing about them. We speak about them. Even if we hope they won't leak out where other people can notice.

But when it comes to sorrow our uneasy tolerance vanishes away. We can feel sorrow for our sin. At least we can sing words like, "What thou, my lord, hast suffered was all for sinners' gain; mine, mine was the transgression, but thine the deadly pain." Again, note the incongruence.

When it comes to expressing full-throated grief, there is no place for it among God's people gathered for worship. We treat some of our experiences--our experiences of loss, for example--as though they were unspeakable, that is, unable to be spoken. We banish them from our shared story.

Why do we do this? I think there are two reasons. The first is theological and the second is existential. The theological reason comes from imagining that the resurrection means that we are not allowed to mourn any more. The Revelation tells us that God "will wipe away every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more. There will be no mourning, crying, or pain anymore, for the former things have passed away." [Rev. 21:4] We act as though mourning now, crying now, or feeling pain now are a betrayal of some sort, even though this grief-less future is placed after the end of history.

We somehow imagine that grief isn't really Christian. We don't say that in so many words, but we leave clues to follow: In the church calendar every Sunday is a little Easter and we imagine that sorrow and Easter are not compatible. When John Wesley sent an edited version of the Prayer Book, it included a Psalter, but excluded those psalms he felt were unsuitable for Christian worship. I had a colleague whose church organist refused to play any hymn written in a minor key!

I believe that the flimsy theological reasons for excluding the full-throated expression of grief from worship are really a mask that protects us from seeing something much deeper.

Emotions, strong emotions, are problematic. That isn't the same as being a problem. Problems can be solved, at least in theory. A problematic is built into our reality and cannot be solved, only lived with. What makes emotions problematic is that they cannot be controlled. They are unreasonable. They don't play by any rules. They come out when it is least convenient.

When my Grandma Caldwell died, we took the kids out of school for a few days, and traveled to Ohio for the funeral. I was fine the whole time. Until the next time I made homemade chicken and noodles, a dish she used to make. I boiled and boned the chicken, rolled out and sliced the noodles, assembled it all, brought it to the table, served it around, picked up my fork to dig in, and promptly dissolved in tears.

Tears are anxiety-provoking. They leak out of a body whose boundaries are not secure. What threatens us in grief is that we will start weeping and never stop, that we will simply flow away in a salty stream, dissolved, unmade. What threatens us in grief is the loss of our selves, the death of our egos, that all of the effort we have put into maintaining control over our emotions, so that we don't stomp our feet and shed angry tears whenever we can't get our own way, for instance, will be undone and we will return to the state of helpless infancy at the mercy of our emotions. So we clamp down on them and keep them from leaking out. We damage ourselves rather than risk our loss of control.

Ancient Israel did not have this problem. The psalms that they left to us in the book of Psalms, but also in other places like Lamentations, are a testament to their conviction that anything can be brought to Yahweh. No experience lies outside of their relationship with God. Any emotion can be spoken, if it is addressed to Yahweh.

None of this would be an issue, of course, if life would stay under control. We wouldn't need laments and songs of grief if our relationship with God protected us and kept our lives from being shattered. But that isn't the way life is. When our loss is unbearable and we are overwhelmed by grief, when our husband or wife or child dies, for example, an enormous hole opens under us and we find ourselves cast into an abyss.

Whatever sense we had made of the world collapses under the pressure of deep loss. Our reality changes in an instant and we simply cannot keep up. We wake up at night and we are certain that the other half of our bed is occupied; we can feel their presence in the dark. But when we reach out our hand to touch them, we feel only the other side of the bed, empty and cold. We hear our wife's voice from the living room and feel a thrill that instantly arises and is dashed just as quickly against the reality of death and grief. We see our husband sitting in his favorite chair but when we look again there is only the empty chair and the empty hole in our heart where he used to live. Although they can be frightening, none of these experiences is unusual. If you've had any of them you are not going crazy. You are only trying to accept the unacceptable.

In ancient Israel the collective experience of loss was the exile. They had thought that Jerusalem, Zion as they called it, would stand forever, protected by Yahweh's might and faithfulness. But it did not stand. The walls were breached. The gates were burned. The Temple, that holy place where non-Jewish feet would never stand, was trampled by the jack-booted thugs of Babylon, its utensils stolen to be melted down for the gold, its altar fouled. Life as the ancient Judeans had known it was over, ended forever.

The covenant with Yahweh was in shambles. God had been either unwilling or unable to help them in the hour of their greatest need. If Yahweh did not hear the cries of the people when they offered sacrifices on the altar in the Temple, how would Yahweh hear their cries with the Temple profaned.

Their world had been shattered. Not just the outer world of Zion, its towers and wall, its Temple, and its royal palace, but also the inner world of covenant, the rhythms of week days and sabbath, of holy days and seasons: all of it lay in pieces, hopelessly broken. Nothing and no one could possibly put it back together. It was the end of life as they had known it.

And yet.

And yet they had a song to sing. It was a song of lament, of pain, of grief and loss, of rage and resentment, a song of despair, but it was still a song:

Oh, no! She sits alone, the city that was once full of people. Once great among nations, she has become like a widow. Once a queen over provinces, she has become a slave. She weeps bitterly in the night, her tears on her cheek. None of her lovers comfort her. All her friends lied to her; they have become her enemies. Judah was exiled after suffering and hard service. She lives among the nations; she finds no rest. All who were chasing her caught her—right in the middle of her distress. Zion’s roads are in mourning; no one comes to the festivals. All her gates are deserted. Her priests are groaning, her young women grieving. She is bitter. Her adversaries have become rulers; her enemies relax. Certainly the Lord caused her grief because of her many wrong acts. Her children have gone away, captive before the enemy.

They still had a song. It was hard song to sing. It came only with tearful sobbing. But it was their song. It told the truth of their life with Yahweh without pulling any punches or seeking to remain in control or even respectable.

Not only that, they found that the song they sang, they sang to Yahweh. Even without a covenant they belonged to Yahweh and Yahweh belonged to them. They were in uncharted territory, but that didn't stop them from moving ahead. And when they moved they would move with Yahweh. That is what the people discovered.

Perhaps Yahweh had thought that he could just walk away, lose this recalcitrant people and, after a time, find a new people who might be less stubborn. But Yahweh discovers that this is impossible. What Yahweh discovers is that if Yahweh's people must go into exile, Yahweh must go with them.

The old relationship could not survive the abyss of exile; a new relationship would have to be worked out. What that would be, perhaps, neither God’s people nor even God could see. But they would do it together.

I am convinced that without the ability to speak harsh truth to God the people of God would never have survived. We need this same ability because both in our individual and in our shared life our path will eventually lead us into an abyss in which the sense that we have made of the world will no longer make sense. There are times when only the ability and freedom to tell the whole truth of our lives can make it possible to go on living.

Ancient Israel can teach us how to speak the unspeakable to Yahweh, to sing even when singing is impossible,when have reached the end of life as we know it.

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.