A Matter of Life and Death (6th Sunday after Epiphany, Year A)

6th Sunday after Epiphany
Deuteronomy 30:15-20; Matthew 5:21-37
February 13, 2011

A Matter of Life and Death

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

I set out this week intending to preach a sermon on the rather sharp-edged demands of the text from Matthew. “No Excuses” is the title that you find in the bulletin and announced to the community on our sign board. But events have overtaken me and I found myself hearing the passages from Deuteronomy and Matthew quite differently than I had several weeks ago when I made my choice of text and topic. I will get to the question of how that happened in a moment, but first, let’s begin with the text from Deuteronomy.

In this reading Moses is addressing the people of Israel for what he knows will be the last time. It is his farewell address. Moses used this occasion to reflect on what the Israelites had gone through in their recent past and to sound a warning. As the story tells us, these events began a little more than a generation before. The Israelites had found themselves as slaves in Egypt, slaves who served the Egyptian imperial machine and the gods who protected it. Their lot was wretched. They were forced to make mud bricks to build cities of warehouses to store the plunder of empire. They had quotas to fill. They were given starvation wages. They served the gods of production and profit.

When they complained about how hard their work was, their Egyptian masters forced them to gather their own materials without adjusting their quotas. The Israelites lived unhappy lives. Then as now, God’s people have felt free to complain. They didn’t know God, so their complaint was addressed to the universe at large, to whoever might be listening, to whom it may concern. And God heard the cry of the Israelites. Yahweh came to Moses and said:

“I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt; I have heard their cry on account of their taskmasters. Indeed, I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them from the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey...The cry of the Israelites has now come to me; I have also seen how the Egyptians oppress them. So come, I will send you to Pharaoh to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt.¹

And God did indeed bring them out of Egypt. God set them free from slavery to Pharaoh.

We’d like to be able to say that everything went well for the Israelites after that, but we know better. They had experienced the world as a harsh place, a place of scarcity, a place of lack. They experienced life in the empire as a constant struggle. They lived under the thumb of an empire whose only interest in them was its own self-enrichment. They produced great wealth, but enjoyed none of it. The whole experience made the Israelites anxious and distrustful.

Strangely, it made the Egyptians anxious and distrustful, too. The Egyptians worried about how many Israelites there were and how rapidly they multiplied. They were afraid of an uprising. They were afraid of their own slaves. The Egyptians, too, were driven by anxiety and fear.

We would think that the Egyptians would not be anxious or fearful. After all, they were powerful. They were the strongest empire they knew of. They had so much stuff they had to have slaves build warehouse cities to hold it all. Why should they be anxious?

But they were. In fact, if I read the whole of the Bible correctly, it is anxiety that is at the heart of all imperial ambition. When we are anxious, we are less able to live in community. We are distrustful of others. We see the world as a place of scarcity. We see others as rivals, as competitors for scarce resources. When we are anxious we are less able to work out peaceful ways of living with each other. Our minds play tricks on us so that we can justify nearly anything if only it will make us less anxious. Naked aggression becomes “securing our vital interests.” An ancient and nearly universal piece of wisdom like the one we know as the Golden Rule—“Treat others as you would be treated”—gets twisted into something like: “Do unto others before they do unto you.”

So the Egyptians looked out at their world and saw nothing but threats and danger. They responded accordingly and, in the course of history, became a threat and a danger to everyone in their neighborhood. Anxiety drives us to try to control things. But the more we try to control, the more there is to control.

This is why anxious rulers tend to become tyrants. At the root of every dictatorship is anxiety, whether on the scale of a household or an entire nation. This, I argue, explains a great deal about a man like Hosni Mubarak. He became the president of Egypt when President Anwar El Sadat was shot and killed by a radical Muslim assassination squad. Mubarak himself was wounded in the same attack. We can understand his anxiety. And we can see where it led. And we know that, in the end, his strategy for managing anxiety did not work. However much he tried to control the events around him, there were always events just beyond his grasp. And in the end, as we have seen in the last two weeks, he could not control his people.

Moses, of course, did not know about any of the events of modern Egypt. But he saw easily enough that an anxious people cannot create a humane life for themselves. In their quest for control they would never be able to live with the God who had delivered them from slavery in Egypt. Indeed, they would recreate their slavery in their new land. They would make one of themselves a king. They would act like the nations around them. They would fashion their own gods out of wood, metal and stone, gods whom they could control, gods who would in their turn offer them control of their world, gods who would be just as cruel and harsh as the gods under whom they had suffered in Egypt. Moses knew this.

So Moses warned the people while he had one last chance. This way, he told them, was the way of death. They could choose it, but it would not offer them good lives or long in the land of promise. What then would?

It’s natural to read Deuteronomy as if the deal that God were offering the Israelites were actually a threat: Follow my rules or else! In reality what God is giving them is a choice. If existence in Egypt was slavery under an anxiety-driven imperial regime of scarcity and control, then the life that God offered the Israelites was in every way its opposite.

In place of control God offered a life of covenant. Life with Yahweh was not to be some sort of technology or technique that guaranteed that the world would be run for Israel’s comfort. Israel and Yahweh were not bound together by their mutual convenience. Israel and Yahweh were bound together by love. In their covenant they are both free. God deals with real people who are stubborn and resistant but also intimately honest. Israel deals with a God who has a passionate commitment to justice and a massive ego and who will not stop loving them no matter what the cost.

In the place of empire, God offered life in community. In community others are not regarded as competitors for scarce resources. Others are not regarded as untrustworthy strangers to be rejected. Others are not regarded as enemies to be fought and conquered. This how empire treats others. In community by contrast we embrace others as those with whom we share a common life and common future. We welcome them as those who already belong. We see them as those with whom we might enjoy the blessings of peace.

In place of slavery God offered freedom. This is not the freedom to do whatever we want, not the freedom to make our own rules or treat each other as we please. It is instead the freedom to live truly human lives in covenant community. Let me say by way of a footnote at this point that this is the freedom that Jesus offers us in the Gospel reading. Not only murder but even hatred are incompatible with life in a covenant community. In a covenant community reconciliation is more important than victory. In a covenant community, we cannot treat others as objects for our gratification. In a covenant community we do not play games with truth. What Jesus is doing in the text that I’m not preaching this morning is laying out in exacting detail what it takes for us to live into the choice that Moses set before the Israelites. The freedom to become truly human is not easy, but anything else is in fact slavery. In place of slavery God offered freedom.

In place of scarcity, God offered abundance. The land that they were about to enter was a “land of milk and honey.” It would give the Israelites everything they needed. In fact it would give them enough that they would be able to do something no one had ever done before: they could set aside one day out of every seven and do nothing at all, but celebrate the goodness of life. Six days of work would yield seven days of living. There would be an end to production quotas and the endless postponement of promised rest. There would be enough of everything, even enough of rest and leisure.

Covenant, community, freedom, and abundance all rested on one last choice, the choice that the whole sweep of the Biblical story regards as fundamental to human life: the choice between anxiety and trust. What God offered to the abused survivors of the empire was a relationship that they could trust. If they would trust God to be their God, if they would be faithful to their covenant with God, then they would have no need for anxiety and for the inhumanity that anxiety spawns.

In truth, God was not easy to trust. Truth to tell, the Israelites weren’t all that easy to trust, either. Have you ever done a thing called a trust walk? A group is divided into pairs who will be partners. One partner is blind-folded. The other partner leads them through a series of obstacles. The blind-folded partner has to trust their guide. The guide has to behave in trustworthy ways. In the trust walk that is life in covenant, it seems to me that God sometimes forgets that we cannot see. And we sometimes forget that God can. So naturally there are misunderstandings on both sides. Trust means being vulnerable. Being vulnerable means we can get hurt. And sometimes real hurt happens to Israel or to God or to both.

So trust isn’t easy. But it’s the only alternative to anxiety. Anxiety is the way that leads to death. Trust is the way that leads to life. Those are the alternatives. There are no others. So the Israelites had to choose.

Now to the events that overtook my sermon writing. The Egyptians are an ancient people whose civilization was old when my ancestors were still painting themselves blue and worshiping trees. They are a people of heritage and dignity. They have suffered over the centuries and in the last few decades this suffering took the form of a series of autocrats. They have known what it is to live under anxiety-driven oppression and anxiety-induced scarcity. They have finally had enough. The people of Egypt have reclaimed their dignity and their humanity. Like the Israelites in our text they are poised on the brink of a new future.

Now they have a choice. And it’s not the choice many in Washington and Tel Aviv suppose that they have. It’s not the choice between being ruled by a secular strongman or a fanatical theocrat. That’s like saying they have a choice between being ruled by a devout thug or a non-devout one. Not much of a choice. No, the choice is between thugs or the genuinely new possibilities of a trust-based life in covenant community.

That’s the same choice that all of us have. We can surrender to anxiety, seeking control over our neighbors and over creation itself. In that case we will know slavery, scarcity and death. Or we can choose to trust God and begin the careful, messy, difficult work of fashioning a covenant community. In that case we will know freedom and abundance. That’s our choice.

In the mirror of the choice that lies before the people of Egypt I have seen our choice and mine, a choice that both thrills and frightens. I feel overwhelmed for my fellow human beings in Egypt. I will pray for them that they will choose well. I hope that they will pray the same for us.

©2011, John M. Caldwell. Permission is given by the author to reproduce and distribute the unaltered text of this sermon provided this notice is reproduced in full and provided that this sermon shall not be offered for sale, nor included in any collection or publication that is offered for sale, without the express written permission of the author.

1Exodus 3:7-8a, 9.

Fish Gotta Swim, Light Gotta Shine (Isaiah 58:1-9a; Matthew 5:13-20)

5th Sunday after Epiphany - A
Isaiah 58:1-9a; Matthew 5:13-20
February 6, 2011

Fish Gotta Swim, Light Gotta Shine

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

This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine.
This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine.
This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine,
let it shine, let it shine, let it shine.

I learned that song at a pretty young age and I’ve led kids in singing it many times since. “Let your light shine,” says Jesus in our Gospel reading.

Do we read the rest? Do we know the rest? “Let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven.”

We’ve been a little vague about what that is supposed to mean. Whether rightly or wrongly, I always assumed that letting my light shine had something to do with other people becoming Christians and joining the church. This was a comfortable notion for mainline folks, since it meant that all we had to do was to “let our light shine” and people would be drawn to us and to our church. We wouldn’t have to embarrass ourselves. We wouldn’t have to learn any new skills. We wouldn’t have to talk to anyone about God, which we find unbelievably hard to do. Church growth would just happen. All by itself. And all we had to do was to “let our light shine.”

Never mind that we never bothered to decide just what “letting our light shine” meant. Never mind that when I was growing up in the church, the church was growing because of the baby boom, not because of shining lights. Let’s face it, however much we have sung about letting our lights shine and however much shining we have done, we United Methodists haven’t made converts in any appreciable numbers since the 1880s.

Never mind all that. We were supposed to let our light shine so that other people would see our light and join us and they in turn would let their light shine so that still more people would see our light and join us.

I’ve often puzzled over this vision of growth for the church. Each church member brings two people into the church. They bring in two more each, and so on. This is a familiar mathematical puzzle called “the king’s chess board.” The way I heard it a king borrowed money from a shrewd banker. When the king asked the terms of repayment, the banker, said, “I’d just like a few pennies. If you majesty will take his chessboard and place one penny on the first square, two pennies on the second, four pennies on the third and so forth until each square on the chessboard is covered, I’ll call it even.” The king agreed, not realizing, of course, that this agreement would bankrupt him. In fact, the total would amount to one hundred eighty-four quadrillion, four hundred sixty-seven trillion, four hundred forty billion, seven hundred thirty-seven million, ninety-five thousand dollars. This is a lot of money. The banker settled instead for the hand of the king’s daughter.

I get a little leery anytime I hear a scheme of exponential growth. A scheme of exponential growth must sooner or later run into the fact that we and our world are finite. This is the wall that caused Bernie Madoff’s operation to come unraveled. But that doesn’t keep us from dreaming this particular dream.

I imagine that Jim Skinner, the CEO of McDonald’s, may indulge in the fantasy of exponential growth. He may only talk in terms of increased “market share.” He, like any other business person, would like to increase the share of the market that comes to his organization. But what is the upper limit of that fantasy? Does he really imagine that there might come a day when the only restaurants in the country, or even the only fast-food restaurants, are McDonald’s? If so, he is shooting himself in the foot, since an “all McDonald’s all the time” diet would kill off his customers. In his case at least, a scheme of exponential growth is neither possible nor even desirable.

Infinite expansion is a dangerous fantasy. Three examples of infinite expansion come to mind. The first is the chain letter. We’ve all gotten them. Send this letter to ten of your friends! Sometimes there are even threats: Someone didn’t forward this letter and they slipped on ice and broke a leg, got fired, discovered that their spouse was cheating on them and were featured in People magazine as among America’s ten worst-dressed people. But the king’s chessboard tells me that I had better break the chain before the Internet is occupied full-time just passing this letter around. If you send me a chain letter, I will not forward it. Just so you know that it’s not personal; it’s a matter of principle.

Another less fun example of exponential growth is what happens when a virus against which we have no immunity enters our bodies. The virus invades a cell and uses the cell material to make more copies of itself which then enter other cells where the process repeats. Until what? Until it kills its host, which is a really stupid thing for a virus to do. If it should succeed in killing every human on the planet, what then? A well-adapted disease does not kill its host, but settles instead for making its host miserable, like the virus that causes the common cold.
The third example of exponential growth is an unmitigated disaster: a thermonuclear explosion.

Why should the Church take as its image of growth a process shared by chain letters, virulent diseases and thermonuclear war? Is it possible for the Church to grow to include everyone on the planet? Would that even be desirable?

That is assuming, of course, that we know how to grow the Church that way. But we don’t. I’ve been around the church growth movement for most of my career, although I have to confess that the king’s chessboard keeps me from taking it too seriously. My overall impression of the literature that this movement has generated is that we have some pretty good ideas about how to grow new churches in growing suburbs of growing cities. That, quite frankly, isn’t saying much.

About turning one hundred forty year old stable congregations in stable communities in rural Iowa into growing congregations we know hardly anything at all. Our denominational leaders keep telling us that we should grow and they keep shoving at us the latest packaged program guaranteed to make us grow.

I’ve been around just long enough to have learned a secret which I will share with you, if you promise not to tell anyone else. Do you promise? Here it is: No one knows what they’re doing. No one knows how to make congregations like ours grow. Oh, sometimes it happens. I assume that it has something to do with the right combination of pastor and people at the right moment in history in the right place in the space-time continuum. The trouble is, I’ve never seen anyone bottle it, turn it into a method that anyone could simply apply, with a few adjustments, to another combination of pastor, people and opportunity. There are no methods, only stories of people who experienced it, and, truth to tell, very few even of those. No one knows what they’re doing!

No one knows how to grow First United Methodist Church. Our superintendent Anne Lippencott is a pretty savvy pastor, but she doesn’t know how to grow our congregation. Jaime Glenn-Burns is a gifted consultant, but she doesn’t know how to grow our congregation. Bishop Trimble is a fine pastor and bishop but he doesn’t know how to grow our congregation. And I can tell you in no uncertain terms that the salespeople who bother Rhonda trying to get to me so they can sell the latest thing that’s been working wonders in Dallas, Texas, they for certain don’t know how to grow our congregation. I don’t know how to grow our congregation.
That sounds like it should be bad news, but I don’t think it is. I think it’s news that can set us free. That’s because Jesus didn’t talk about growing churches. That wasn’t what his message was about.

After all, the point of salt is to flavor food, not to take over our cuisine. A little salt goes a long way. Too much, and salt stops being a seasoning and starts trying to be food. The point of a lamp is to illuminate a house, not set fire to it.

Jesus talks about salt and firelight on the way to talking about something else. We are salt, he says, and we are firelight. We can’t help being salty and we can’t help shedding light. It’s who we are. It’s not something we have to learn or strive to do. We really can’t help acting according to our nature.

On the other hand, he is also telling us that we need to act in certain ways and live in a certain direction. Our “righteousness” must be greater than that of the Pharisees and scribes. Or at least that’s what our translation says. The trouble is that we could get the idea that being “righteous” means being “better” than other people. We have this terribly small idea of what righteousness is. A righteous person we imagine refrains from doing certain things, like using coarse language for example. In an earlier day we would have said that a righteous person doesn’t play cards, dance or drink alcoholic beverages. A righteous person does certain things, like going to church every Sunday and reading the Bible all the time.

But this is a small notion of what the word means. Really, the word that is translated as “righteousness” would much better be translated as “justice” because it contains the idea of settings things right. So Jesus told his disciples that “their justice must exceed the justice of the Pharisees and scribes.” And when Jesus told them that he was appealing to a long tradition.
They didn’t have to guess what he meant. They didn’t have to make up stuff about being lights so that other people would want to be lights, too, and then they could report a net gain in membership to the bishop.

Jesus was appealing to the prophetic tradition that is as well represented in today’s text from Isaiah. Isaiah had some very strong words about “setting things right,” about justice in other words. The people of his day were careful in their religious observance. They participated in ritual life. They kept the rules. They even prayed and fasted. They were righteous in that small sense of the word. They were respectable. But God was not listening to them.

That’s because God was not looking for respectability. God was looking for justice. God wanted to see them loose the bonds of injustice. God want to see them undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke. God wanted them to share their bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into their houses. God want them to clothe the naked when they saw them, and not to hide themselves from their own needy family members.
God didn’t have a plan for their growth. God had a plan for their faithfulness and it was built around justice. This is the tradition that Jesus evoked in this part of his sermon. Jesus calls us not to growth but to faithfulness.

Jesus calls us to loosen the bonds of injustice. Jesus calls us to let the oppressed go free. Jesus calls us to share our bread with the hungry. Jesus calls us to make sure that the poor have shelter from the weather and a place to call home. Jesus wants to make sure that every child is protected against the brutal Decorah winter. Jesus wants us to care for the sick and visit the imprisoned. Jesus wants us to welcome strangers even when they look like strangers.

If we will do these things, we will season the life of this community. If we will do these things we will shed light into the shadows. In Isaiah’s words, “Then [our] light shall break forth like the dawn...[our] light shall rise in the darkness and [our] gloom be like the noonday.”1

There are people who aren’t a part of our congregation who would like to being doing justice. If we don’t shut the door in their faces, if we don’t put too many barriers in their way, they’ll join us. I don’t know if there will be enough of them to yield net growth, but I guarantee that there will be some who want to be part of a congregation that does justice and loves mercy. But even if it weren’t so, I would still urge us to be faithful and let bishops and God worry about the numbers.

©2011, John M. Caldwell. Permission is given by the author to reproduce and distribute the unaltered text of this sermon provided this notice is reproduced in full and provided that this sermon shall not be offered for sale, nor included in any collection or publication that is offered for sale, without the express written permission of the author.

Blessed? Really!? (Matthew 5:1-12)

4th Sunday after Epiphany - A
Matthew 5:1-12
January 30, 2011

Blessed? Really!?

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

These Beatitudes are not among my most favorite parts of the Bible. Maybe it’s because I had to memorize them when I was in confirmation some forty-six years ago. I am a still a part of the church in spite of, rather than because of, my confirmation experience. The classes consisted of thirteen weeks of Wednesday after-school meetings with the pastor, an imposing man of whom I was afraid. The twelve or fifteen of us sat around a square of tables and listened to him drone on about that week’s chapter in our textbook. That mind-numbing boredom, though, came as a blessed relief. The first thing that happened each session was that each of us would take a stab at the weekly memory assignment. All together, we had nine memory assignments: the books of the Old Testament, the books of the New Testament, the names of the twelve apostles, the Lord’s Prayer, the Ten Commandments, Psalm 23, Psalm 100, the Apostles’ Creed, and, yes, the Beatitudes.

There is nothing wrong with memory work, but it was mortifying to stand up in front of the class and individually struggle to recite our latest piece, especially when I was not prepared, which, let’s face it, was most of the time. Once, in fact, I procrastinated so thoroughly that Wednesday came around and I hadn’t even looked at the assignment. What made it worse was that this particular Wednesday happened to be my birthday. I regarded this predicament as a lousy gift from the universe, so I appealed to its Maker. I prayed something like, “God, if you’ll get me out of this somehow, I promise I’ll do all of the rest of the assignments on time.”

If you ask me I will tell you that this is not a good way to pray. Making bargains with God is a bad idea on several levels. But I’ll say this: that Wednesday was the only snow day I remember from my elementary school days! I learned a valuable lesson from this: Whenever I am in a jam of my own making for which I—and no one else—am entirely responsible, I can always pray and somehow God will get me out of it, even if it means redirecting global weather patterns.

I’m kidding! It’s not true. But that was the lesson I took away and I’ve spent the rest of my life trying to unlearn it. So, kids, do not try this at home. And do not say to me, “But you said...” Just make sure you remember all of what I said.

Okay, back to the Beatitudes. I find them impossible. They stand my world on its head. The don’t make any sense. “Blessed are those who mourn...blessed are the meek...blessed are the merciful...blessed are the peacemakers...” Remember, “blessed” isn’t a word that describes some other-worldly thing. The word describes, according to my dictionary, “the privileged recipient of divine favor.” Another translation of the word is simply “happy.” “Happy are those who mourn...” What? “Happy are those who mourn?” Jesus, are you kidding me? “Those about whom people say all sorts of nasty things are the privileged recipients of divine favor?” Really??

I guess we should be grateful that we aren’t stuck with Luke’s version of these. How about this?

“Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.
“Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled.
“Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh.
“Blessed are you when people hate you...¹

And, just in case there was any doubt, just in case we thought we saw a little wiggle room there are four woes to match the four blessed’s:

“But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation.
“Woe to you who are full now, for you will be hungry.
“Woe to you who are laughing now, for you will mourn and weep.
“Woe to you when all speak well of you...”²

These are hard words for us. We like to laugh. We like to have people speak well of us. We like a good meal with plenty of the foods that we like to eat. We may not aspire to being rich, but we like having a little money. We don’t want to be grief-stricken, to have the people we love stripped away from us. We don’t want to be hungry, I mean the hunger we have when we haven’t eaten for a day or more and don’t know where our next meal is coming from. We don’t want to be hungry like that. We don’t like it when people say nasty things about us. In short, it’s really hard for us to call the state the Jesus describes for us as something to be sought after, even if we would then be “the privileged recipients of divine favor.” If that’s divine favor, I think I’d rather go without.

Scholars are pretty much agreed that Luke’s version of the Beatitudes (with matching Woes) is older and lies closer to Jesus than the version in Matthew. We can certainly sympathize with the members of the early Jesus followers who read Luke’s words and said, “Are you sure this is right? Are you sure that’s what he meant?”

When Christians who were well enough off not to be able to call themselves poor—we think maybe in Antioch—when these better-off Christians first heard someone say, “Blessed are the poor in spirit...” and “blessed those who hunger and thirst for justice...” we can easily imagine them saying, “Oh, so that’s what he meant! The poor in spirit.”

We all have our little tricks, you know, to avoid the more uncomfortable ways of reading the text. The move that the members of the First United Methodist Church of Antioch made even has a name. It’s called “spiritualizing.” We take a text that has a clear economic or political message and we turn it into something spiritual and therefore safer and more comfortable.

More comfortable, maybe, but not entirely comfortable.

We can turn these words into pretty little plaques. We can embroider or cross-stitch them on fine cloth and frame them for our walls. We can even decorate them with cutesy Precious Moments figures. But the words are still hard: meekness, mercy, purity of heart, poverty of spirit—these are not in vogue today. Meekness is not a useful virtue on Wall Street. Poverty of spirit is not what we look for in our leaders. Mercy is not a trait that is valued in a time of war. The paparazzi do not swarm around the pure of heart. These are all profoundly counter-cultural aspirations.

The Beatitudes describe someone who has been stripped of everyone and everything they love and depended on: these are those who mourn. They describe the state of someone who has so little to lose that they are willing to risk whatever is left for the sake of justice. They hunger and thirst for it. They want it so badly they can taste it.

Standing outside of that state, it’s hard to imagine what it’s like inside. I suppose we’re seeing some of it on our televisions and in the YouTube videos from Egypt. We’re having a hard time imagining a state in which the present is so bad that we would be willing to risk what little we have left—our bodies and our lives—for the sake of a better future for our poor and shackled nation. But Janis Joplin sang it right: “Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose.”³

If we were free, free enough to enter the world of the Beatitudes, we might find that we were able to become that rarest of human beings, the peacemaker. Wouldn’t that be something to see? And wouldn’t that be something for the world to see?

I confess to you, my brothers and sisters, that I am afraid of the world that Jesus offers us. I have so much to lose, you see. But I’m also unwilling to let go of Jesus’ words.

Or maybe that’s the wrong way to say it. It’s never really been up to me to decide whether to hang on to them or not. They won’t let me go. They hold out a dream that won’t die. I am haunted by the “blessedness” that Jesus describes and offers. So I have hope that grace will overcome my fear.

I have hope and I have something else, too. And so do you, if you want to be a part of this. We have each other, you know. We have each other to encourage each other, to egg each other on, to exert some positive peer pressure on each other.

So here’s the deal. I promise to take some risks in following Jesus. Will you promise to egg me on? I will urge you on if you take some risks in following Jesus. Will you promise to take some? If we do this, if we encourage each other in the profoundly counter-cultural gesture of following Jesus, we have Jesus’ promise that we, too, will be the oddly “privileged recipients of divine favor,” that we, too, will be blessed. It sounds scary. But it also sounds good.

©2011, John M. Caldwell. Permission is given by the author to reproduce and distribute the unaltered text of this sermon provided this notice is reproduced in full and provided that this sermon shall not be offered for sale, nor included in any collection or publication that is offered for sale, without the express written permission of the author.

1Luke 6:20-22.

2Luke 6:24-26.

3Kristofferson, Kris and Fred Foster, “Me and Bobby McGee,” Combine Music Corp., 1969, recorded by Janis Joplin for her album Pearl in 1970.

Immediately...they followed (Matthew 4:12-23)

3rd Sunday after Epiphany - A
Matthew 4:12-23
January 23, 2011

Immediately...they followed

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

This is story that is familiar to the point of being a cliché. Maybe it was our Sunday School days and the songs we sang about being “fishers of men.” (This was in the days before we gained some appreciation for the power of gendered language, and rightly so.)

I remember that it was certainly expected that I, like Simon, Andrew, James and John, would want to engage in this “fishing for people.” At first I was looking for something literal and wondered what size hook and what sort of bait I was supposed to use. Later when I learned that my teachers had not meant this literally, I still wondered what it meant. If it meant finding people and bringing them into the church, I didn’t see a lot of that.

And in fact there hasn’t been a lot of that. The United Methodist Church and its forerunners have relied on birthrates to grow and sustain the church. We haven’t made any converts in significant numbers since the mid-1880’s. Birthrates aren’t what they used to be, either. I suspect that people would look askance if I were to answer the question, “How can we get more members?” by saying, “Have more children!” But that, in fact, is how we’ve been doing it for the last one hundred and twenty-five years.

We’ve come to assume that this story is about what my Sunday School teachers and the preachers I’ve heard during my lifetime have said it is about: getting more church members. But that is not what sticks out for me when I read it. What sticks out for me is some funny stuff going on with time.

A story gives us signals about time. When a story begins, “once upon a time in a far away kingdom,” or more recently, “a long time ago in a galaxy far away,” we know that we are being invited into an imaginary time. Strange things can happen in that time, things we don’t expect to happen in ordinary life. When we hear the words, “and they all lived happily ever after,” we know for a certainty that this story is set in that imaginary time. We also know that the story’s end brings us back into regular time, the sort of time you can put on a time line. These words confine dragons and castles, heroes and princesses, within that imaginary time.

Matthew sets us up for his playing with time by the way he quotes Isaiah. The words he quotes are:
Land of Zebulun, land of Naphtali,
on the road by the sea,
across the Jordan,
Galilee of the Gentiles—
the people who sat in darkness
have seen a great light,
and for those who sat in the region and shadow of death
light has dawned."

This is, more or less, Isaiah 9:1-2. Now Isaiah wrote this to announce the end of Assyrian rule and a renewal of the kingdom of Judah. Although he has something historical in mind, his language is vibrant enough that he tends to slip into the world of poetry and metaphor. As Isaiah’s words were treasured and pondered through the centuries these and others like them were thought to refer to the judgment of God on the nations and the good things that would happen to Judah when history was over. Now, of course, we’re playing with time. If history is made of stuff that happens in time, can it have an “after”? Is there an “after” outside of history?

What Matthew does with this text is to say that when Jesus found a place to stay in Capernaum beside the Sea of Galilee, “light dawned on those who sat in the shadows of death.” An event that supposedly belonged to the “after” of history became in event in history. Confused? Well, in the words of the prophet of Mammon, “But wait, there’s more!”

Jesus begins to preach in the district of Galilee. Here is his message: “Repent [that is, reorient your life] for the kingdom [or empire] of the heavens [an indirect way of referring to God] has come near.”

“Has come near.” Now there is an odd phrase. The original word means “to approach or come near.” That’s not so hard. What puzzles is that the verb is in the perfect tense.

The perfect tense describes actions that are complete, done, finished.
—Have you done your reading assignment?
—I read the assignment.

That sounds like the assignment is done, but there is still some wiggle room. Let’s say the student in question had done some of the reading, but not all of it. Then it would still be true to say:
—I read the assignment.

The past tense by itself is not quite enough to answer the question without leaving some doubt. For that we need the perfect tense:
—I have read the assignment.

There. That’s a clear statement with no wiggle room. Of course, it may still be false, but that’s another matter.

So, here we have an event, an action in the perfect tense. “The kingdom of heaven has come near.” So it has approached. That should be a completed action. But the action itself is not clear. “The kingdom of heaven has come near.” So, is it here, has it arrived? The statement doesn’t say that exactly. Okay, so is it not here? No, the statement doesn’t say that, either. So is the kingdom of heaven here or not? Yes. Frustrated? “But wait, there’s even more!”

Jesus walks along the lake shore and sees two fishermen, Simon and Andrew casting their nets into the water. And Jesus says to them, “Follow me and I will make you fishers of people.” And Simon and Andrew left their nets immediately and followed Jesus.

A little further along the shore, the three of them met Zebedee and his sons James and John. They were sitting in their boat mending their nets, something that needed to be done on a daily basis. Jesus summoned James and John who immediately left their boat and their father and followed Jesus.

Now, we know that Simon had a household to support, or at very least a mother-in-law. We know that James and John were part of the family business and that Zebedee would eventually need them for his support. We don’t know what all of Andrew’s obligations might have been, but as part of Simon’s extended family, he owed something to him. We don’t know either if this is the first time that these four had seen Jesus. Maybe they had met before. Maybe they had known each other for a long time. What we do know for certain is that they would not have been prepared for Jesus’ summons to them. And yet, they not only didn’t have to think it over or consult with their relations, but they respond immediately. Their decision took no time at all; there was no time between hearing Jesus’ summons and following him. Again, with the time thing! This time we have events in the ordinary world and in ordinary time that are affected by decisions that are made outside of time.

So where are we now? We have Isaiah’s poetic world that lies in the future after the future made present as Jesus signs a lease in Capernaum. We have the kingdom of heaven, God’s empire, which is both present and not present in such a way as to demand that we reorient our lives. Finally, we have fisherfolk deciding to become Jesus’ disciples and making the decision immediately, that is, in a way that is outside of time.

Well, now, how are we going to make sense of this? There are probably other ways, but here is one way. The world that we live in, the one where the ordinary stuff in our lives, is not as secure or stable as we usually think it is. Our world is porous and leaky. There are holes in it, cracks that let in something else. In Matthew, Jesus calls that something else “the kingdom of heaven.” It’s real, too, but the problem is that we have only the words from the ordinary world to describe this something else and the words don’t really fit. So we have to talk about the kingdom of heaven in metaphors and poetry instead. Every time we try to say something about it in plain ordinary language, we end up speaking against ourselves, one word crossing the next. Again, that our speech should become a series of crosses shouldn’t be too surprising.

We live in this world and cannot change that. But that’s not the most important thing. The most important thing is that “something else” keeps leaking into our world. And the most important things that happen to us and the most important things that we do are things that happen because of those “something else” leaks.

We decide to leave our nets and the family business to follow Jesus, just because he asks us to. A life-altering decision and it takes no time at all. When Simon, Andrew, James and John did it that even changed our lives. That’s because our world is leaky right around Jesus and something else leaks in.

A little water is poured on our foreheads and a few words are spoken. We don’t even remember them because we were too young to remember anything. But our lives were changed forever. That’s because our world is leaky right around the baptismal font and something else leaks in.
So the journey with Jesus begins with hearing a voice that resonates with “something else.” It goes on from there, Matthew tells us, to those who were suffering from “every disease and every sickness.” Now we are no longer surprised that this should be so, for it is through the broken places in our ordinary world that something else leaks in and God speaks. And this, in turn, is why Jesus wants us to stay close to the sick, to the hungry and thirsty, to prisoners and strangers. It is through the broken places of our reality that the reality of the kingdom of heaven comes pouring into our world.

Our world is leaky. “Something else” is leaking in. May it leak on us!

©2011, John M. Caldwell. Permission is given by the author to reproduce and distribute the unaltered text of this sermon provided this notice is reproduced in full and provided that this sermon shall not be offered for sale, nor included in any collection or publication that is offered for sale, without the express written permission of the author.

Mission Creep (Isaiah 49:1-7)

2nd Sunday after Epiphany - A
Isaiah 49:1-7
January 16, 2011

Mission Creep

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

“I will give you as a light to the nations” is the great promise given in our reading this morning to the people of Judah.

Light is a theme that runs through the Bible. “Let there be light,” God said in the third verse of the Bible. Just four words—two in Hebrew—and the great story begins. In the very last chapter of Revelation, we are told that those who live in the New Jerusalem will have no need for the sun or a lamp, for there will be no more night and God will be their light.¹ From light to light the story goes.

Light is a good thing. Who hasn’t gotten up in the middle of the night and tripped over a toy left on the floor or stumbled into a piece of furniture? In my experience, in any collision between my toes and furniture it’s never my toes that win. Did you know that for forty dollars you can buy a pair of slippers with built-in lights that turn on whenever you put your weight on them?² It’s true. It’s the most useful ridiculous idea I’ve run across in a long while. A little light in the darkness might can be a good thing.

But light isn’t always a good thing. Too much light can leave us as blind as no light at all. Light casts shadows which means that security lights may leave us less safe than the uniform darkness they replace. Stray waste light dims the night sky and deprives us of the experience of awe. Light in the shorter wavelengths increases our risk of cancer. Concentrated light in a single wavelength can be so powerful that it strips the electrons from an atom, turning solid matter into stray ions. Lasers using this ability can serve as a surgeon’s scalpel, performing delicate operations. Lasers using this ability are being studied and developed as weapons. Light can be lethal.

So we are warned as we take up this text, that light might be good or not. It very much depends on the context.

“I will give you as a light to the nations.” Is there anything more dangerous than someone who is convinced that they know the one thing that everyone needs to know and that it is their mission to make sure that everyone knows it whether they want to or not? Is there anything worse than someone who knows what is good for someone else, especially if they are powerful enough to impose it?

This is the trap into which empires fall, even when they believe that they are doing good things for the peoples whom they encounter. This is one source of my mixed feelings about the deployment of the 322^nd Engineering Company.³ We sent them off this week, although I believe that there is still one more parade to go, a little later today. On the one hand I have nothing but respect for the 160 men and women from 19 states who make up this unit. They face their 400 day deployment with dignity and determination that their courage will not fail. They have given up their homes for a time, their families and communities. They are traveling far away where they will face real danger. And they do this because we have asked them to do it. I have been a soldier and I understand from my own experience some of what they are facing. Other things they are facing are outside of my experience. I have nothing but respect for them and for their families.

While deployed in Afghanistan their mission will include building roads and houses. These should be good things, at least that’s what I imagine. But I am also aware of how easily we deceive ourselves into believing that what we intend to do is being done for the benefit of others. I do not know what the historians will say about us. I do know that historians have not been kind to earlier empires.

The Roman governor of Britannia in the early 80s CE was a man named Agricola, a competent general and administrator. The plan was to bring the benefits of Roman rule to the Celtic tribes of Britain. But in the year 82 Agricola faced a rebellion led by a Celt named Calgacus. Agricola may have thought that he represented civilization and peace, but Calgacus saw things differently. Before their two armies clashed somewhere in Scotland, Calgacus observed of the Romans: “To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace.”⁴

These are hard words. Harder still, when we realize that they were recorded by Agricola’s own son, the historian Tacitus. I hope that we fare better in our historians’ hands, but I fear that we may not.

It makes a difference who is reading the the prophet Isaiah. When a powerful empire decides that it is being given “as a light to the nations,” this more often than not comes as very bad news indeed to said nations, who face an adversary out do them good whether they like it or not.

But this is not where the first hearers and readers of this passage were. They were not citizens of the world’s greatest military power. Instead, they were the members of a tiny exiled religious and ethnic community.

They were the children and grandchildren of the elite of what had been the little kingdom of Judah. Their parents and grandparents had been sent into exile when the Babylonian army showed up outside the walls of Jerusalem on a mission to bring civilization to Judah. The Babylonians, too, created a desert and called it peace.

The elite of the defeated Jerusalemites were permitted to live in exile in Babylon, along with the elites of various other defeated peoples. The Babylonian strategy was to make Babylonians out of them and it almost worked. Babylon was rich and cultured. Babylonians were sophisticated and compared to them even the elite of Jerusalem felt like country bumpkins. If the power of a nation was the measure of the power of its gods, then the gods of the Babylonians were powerful indeed. The covenant with Yahweh seemed unreal and the promises of the covenant broken.

It was in that context that the prophet we call deutero-Isaiah worked. We call him that because we don’t know his name and it seems unlikely that he was the same person as the prophet known as Isaiah of Jerusalem who seems to have been responsible for the first part of the book of Isaiah. Deutero-Isaiah had his work cut out for him, trying to keep up the morale of the exiled community. Even keeping them together seemed impossible, let alone gathering them up and taking them home to Jerusalem. Deutero-Isaiah was tired-out, worn-out, and burned-out.

I picture the conversation that he had with God. “All my work has been for nothing,” he said, “but that’s okay. It’s just you and me, God. All I need is you.”

God has little respect for that sort of self-pity. “You have a notion of your mission that is entirely too small,” God answered. “It isn’t just about Judah. Your mission is a world-wide one.”

There is, it seems, something in Judah—or maybe it’s just in deutero-Isaiah. There is something that the world needs. There is a light there, a good light, one that illuminates the darkness—like slippers with headlights. The world that despises exiled Judah will see that light and respond to it with joy and gladness. Judah—or maybe it’s just deutero-Isaiah—bears the burdensome delight of chosenness. Its existence is not in doubt. But it does not exist for its own sake, but for the sake of the nations.

What then is that light? What is the gift for the world that God’s people bear? It’s not mentioned directly in this passage, but it runs like the center stripe of the highway that leads toward home through the whole book of Isaiah. Judah itself has not always taken this gift very seriously. In fact, it has been a bone of contention between Judah and God:

Your new moons and your appointed festivals my soul hates; they have become a burden to me, I am weary of bearing them. When you stretch out your hands, I will hide my eyes from you; even though you make many prayers, I will not listen; your hands are full of blood. Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean; remove the evil of your doings from before my eyes; cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow.⁵

Religiously, there is nothing to complain about. The churches are full. Worship is beautiful. The people pray. But there is something that God desires more than worship: justice for the oppressed, the orphan and the widow, for those in other words who have no access to justice because they can’t afford it.

Those who are able to afford it have bought up all the land, prompting a real estate boom that leaves no room for those who cannot afford it. But the boom is a bubble:

Ah, you who join house to house, who add field to field, until there is room for no one but you, and you are left to live alone in the midst of the land! The LORD of hosts has sworn in my hearing: Surely many houses shall be desolate, large and beautiful houses, without inhabitant.⁶

Those who can buy access to the legislative process have arranged things for their own profit at the expense of those who cannot afford this access:

Ah, you who make iniquitous decrees, who write oppressive statutes, to turn aside the needy from justice and to rob the poor of my people of their right, that widows may be your spoil, and that you may make the orphans your prey!⁷

Judah neglected the gift that made it unique. It did this to its own devastation. Justice, not thick walls of stone, was the fence that protected Jerusalem. Having forsaken justice Judah was wide open to the predations of Babylon. Destruction and exile were the inevitable result.

But they were not the end of the story. The God who appeared to be powerless before the gods of Babylon is in fact the author, not the victim, of exile. Exile is not the end. The justice which eluded Judah before the exile will be enthroned in its midst, embodied in the figure of Yahweh’s servant:

Here is my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen, in whom my soul delights; I have put my spirit upon him; he will bring forth justice to the nations. He will not cry or lift up his voice, or make it heard in the street; a bruised reed he will not break, and a dimly burning wick he will not quench; he will faithfully bring forth justice. He will not grow faint or be crushed until he has established justice in the earth; and the coastlands wait for his teaching.⁸

The delightful burden of God’s people is justice. This is not the justice that puts criminals in prisons. God knows we have too many of those already and they are filled to overflowing. This is not the justice of a set of rules by which the game must be played. The rules of “the game” were written to further expose the vulnerable and to protect the powerful. This is the justice that lifts up the lowly, feeds the hungry, clothes the naked, protects the stranger, and speaks on behalf of the voiceless. This is the justice that makes life human and humane. This is the justice that is neighborliness written in capital letters, the justice that renders us neighbors to our family and friends, neighbors to the stranger among us, neighbors to the life that shares the planet with us, and neighbors even to our enemies. This is the justice for the sake of which God says to us, “I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.”

©2010, John M. Caldwell. Permission is given by the author to reproduce and distribute the unaltered text of this sermon provided this notice is reproduced in full and provided that this sermon shall not be offered for sale, nor included in any collection or publication that is offered for sale, without the express written permission of the author.

1Rev. 22:6.

2BrightFeet lighted slippers, http://www.comforthouse.com/slippers.html.

3“Ask Mr. Answer Person: ‘Where are the members of the 322nd Engineering Battalion from?’” Decorahnews.com, http://www.decorahnews.com/news-stories/2011/01/8752.html (January 14, 2011).

4Tacitus De vita et moribus Iulii Agricolae, 30: Auferre trucidare rapere falsis nominibus imperium, atque ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.

5Isaiah 1:14-17.

6Isaiah 5:8-9.

7Isaiah 10:1-2.

8Isaiah 42:1-4.

We're All Wet: The Ministry of the Baptized (Matthew 3:13-17)

Baptism of Christ - A
Matthew 3:13-17
January 9, 2010

We're All Wet: The Ministry of the Baptized

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

There are times when preachers, even those who think of themselves as biblical preachers—as I do, will choose to preach without a specific text in mind. When I do that—and I don’t do it often—I hope that what I say is deeply informed by the broad sweep of Scripture. The occasion is usually some event that has happened in the world or in the life of the congregation. Then I hope for your indulgence as I claim the privilege of speaking from my heart and head.

Today is one of those times and it is occasioned by the church year that celebrates this Sunday as a festival commemorating Jesus’ baptism by John and by the crossroads that our relationship has reached. As Jesus is baptized in the Jordan I cannot help but be reminded of the baptism that we all share with him and the way that our baptism locates us in the world.

Let me begin by telling a story, Complaining about a pet peeve of mine, and sharing an observation. First the story: A young man who was an Episcopalian who worked among other things as a hospital volunteer. While he had no particular training, he had discovered that he had a gift for listening that allowed people to feel safe enough to talk about their fears and anxieties, their hopes and dreams, as they were experiencing the health crisis that had brought them to the hospital. It might have been an accident, an illness or a condition that needed to be treated with surgery. People felt safe enough to unburden themselves.

It wasn’t just in the course of his hospital volunteer work that people did this. He could hardly ride a bus or stand in a line at the grocery store without people telling him a story, often a painful one. He recognized that this was (or at least could be) a ministry. He made an appointment to see his bishop—easier for Episcopalians than for us because their bishops have much smaller administrative areas than ours. He told his bishop his story and then said that he wanted to be ordained.

The bishop was silent for a moment and then asked, “Why do you want to be ordained?”

The young man answered, “So that I will have the authority to carry out my ministry.”

The bishop smiled and said, “You already have all the authority you need to carry out your ministry: You are baptized!”

That’s the story. Here’s my pet peeve: When I meet new colleagues one of the subjects that comes up is our careers. It’s the same sort of thing that happens among any colleagues. I don’t mind that, although mine is quite a bit more complicated than the average story. What I mind is the way the question is framed. They ask me, “How long have you been in ‘the ministry’?” What they mean of course is, “How long have you been in ordained ministry?” or “parish ministry?” But that’s not what they say. They say, “How long have you been in ‘the ministry’?” So I tell them, “I’ve been in the ministry since November 30, 1952.” Invariably, they look at me curiously and I can see them running the numbers in their heads and they aren’t making any sense. I let them struggle for a bit and then I say (as if I didn’t already know), “Oh! You meant how long have I been ordained! I thought you were asking when I was baptized.”

Now, if I were to press them, they would acknowledge that, yes, all baptized persons have a ministry so it isn’t really technically correct to talk about ministry as if it were the special prerogative of the ordained. I know they were asked about this in the questions they prepared for their ordination. They know this in their heads. But their speech betrays that this way of thinking is not a habit of their hearts.

I assert that to speak of ministry as if it belonged to the ordained is an act of arrogance. And it annoys me. What annoys my colleagues, of course, is my turning their attempt at polite conversation into a theological trial with them as the accused. Well, there it is.

Now for the observation: In our bulletins we list who does what. I’ve noticed that it includes these words after “the ministers”: the congregation led by John M. Caldwell. It’s there every week. I don’t know how that custom began. I know that I didn’t start it; it was already firmly established when I got here.

The story raises the question about the authority to do ministry. The bishop in the story testifies to that authority in the sacrament of baptism, a sacrament shared in common by all laity, deacons, elders and bishops. There is of course a counter-testimony in the story, the conviction of the young man that “real” ministry isn’t quite authorized by baptism; that for “real” ministry you need an ordination. If the story continued we might discover that he had changed his mind, but, as it is, the question is unresolved.

My peeve has to do with my colleagues who casually and unthinkingly empower themselves at the expense of the baptized. Of course the history of the orders of ministry as we have them shows that their growth had a great deal to do with the formal leadership of the church distrusting the laity, so I’m implicated in my own complaint which may help explain why I am so peevish about it.

The observation of our own practice around naming ministers raises the question, Do we mean it? Do we really mean that all of you are ministers and I am your leader?

Now I suspect that the answer to that question is both yes and no. How often do you speak of me as “our minister” rather than “the one who leads us in ministry”? I know that, my pet peeve not withstanding, I don’t often speak of you as “the ministers” of First UMC. I generally introduce myself as the pastor of this congregation, not “the leader of the ministers.” These habits of speech are telling, I’m afraid. They suggest that we don’t really believe what we are professing.

There is, of course, nothing wrong about professing what we don’t yet fully believe. We are allowed to make our profession something we have to live toward, to strive for. But in our habits of speech we can see the gap between where we say we want to be and where we are right now.

On the other hand, I see some evidence that we do believe and practice this profession in important ways.

In the last six months I’ve been watching and listening. I’ve had a question in the back of my mind: “Who is First UMC and what makes it tick?” I’ve been collecting observations along the way about things that might hold an answer to my question. I notice, for example, where our building is. It’s right across the street from the courthouse. I notice that a lot of the leaders of our community are members here. I notice that a lot of our folks are the workers behind the scenes who make things happen in Decorah. I notice that there are a number of ministries and programs in our church. There is a solid music program. Good things are happening in children’s ministries. I’d like to think that we’re doing pretty well in the worship and preaching department. There is a strong United Methodist Women chapter here. None of these are unusual in themselves, although it’s dismaying how few congregations manage to do them. Then there are some really interesting and unusual things happening: Puppets of Praise, Sister Parish, and the Community Thanksgiving Dinner, to name three.

I have heard some folks wonder about our ministries and especially about what ties them together. They are worried that there doesn’t seem to be any unified direction to our life and ministry. I’ve wondered about that, too. I’ve tried to discern what common theme holds these ministries together, especially the last three I named. On one level there doesn’t seem to be any common theme.

But on further reflection it occurs to me that what holds Puppets of Praise, Sister Parish and the Community Thanksgiving Dinner together is that at the center of each of them is a small group of people—or maybe only one person—passionately committed to this ministry and willing to devote the time and effort needed to make sure that it is done well. What ties them together is that in each case First UMC has given the core group permission to be passionate and some modest resources to use: meeting space for planning meetings, accounting support for managing finances, secretarial support, or a place to hold an event. Very little money is given from First UMC to these programs. What these ministries have in common is that they exemplify the ministry of the baptized. What makes them work is that we trust the baptized to be in ministry on our behalf.

When I put these programs together with what I’ve noticed about the community involvement of our people, here is what I see: First UMC has been functioning in part to provide the baptized with the equipment they need in order to engage in ministry in the congregation and in the community. The largest part of these ministries are informal. They are carried out by people who care about the life we are creating for each other in Decorah and who are willing, as Christ’s disciples, to be engaged in the often difficult work of making things happen. Some ministries are formal ministries in the church that help prepare the baptized for their ministries. Some ministries are formal ministries through the church in which the baptized are carrying out the ministries to which they have been called and to which they are passionately committed.

We haven’t been very clear about it, but here is what I think we are all about: we are a congregation that calls people to Christian discipleship, authorizes and equips them for ministry through baptism and programs of Christian formation, and sends them into the various communities beyond our doors to transform those communities so that they more closely reflect God’s dream for human life. Or to put it more succinctly: First UMC makes disciples of Christ for the transformation of the world with a special emphasis on Decorah.

Of course, just because we have been doing this doesn’t mean that everything is okay and we can simply go on as we have been doing. I believe that we entering a period of history in which we will need to be very clear about who we are and what our core mission is. This can and will involve difficult even painful decisions. But, if I’m right about the common threads that bind our life and ministry together, we don’t have to be afraid of encouraging each other’s dreams and passions. Quite the contrary! If I understand the way that God tends to work I would have to say that it is far more likely that God is speaking to me through you than it is that God is speaking to you through me.

I was baptized on November 30, 1952. Since then, as one of the baptized, I have been in ministry. At first it was mostly a ministry of Loud Noises. Some say I’m still doing that.They may be right.

I don’t remember my baptism. At least not first hand. I have been told about it. I don’t remember it first hand but I can remember it by commemorating it. That happened for me in major ways at my confirmation and later at my ordinations as a deacon and then as an elder of the Church. It happens in a little way each time I approach the table. I am grateful, though, for the festival of the Baptism of Christ because it gives me a chance to remember my baptism in a way that reminds me of who I am and who I am called to be in the world. I invite you to join me in a reaffirmation of baptismal promises, so that, together, we may remember who and whose we are and reclaim the authority that we need to be in ministry as disciples of Jesus.

©2010, John M. Caldwell. Permission is given by the author to reproduce and distribute the unaltered text of this sermon provided this notice is reproduced in full and provided that this sermon shall not be offered for sale, nor included in any collection or publication that is offered for sale, without the express written permission of the author.

A Light in the Darkness (Isaiah 60:1-6)

Epiphany Sunday - A
Isaiah 60:1-6
January 2, 2011

A Light in the Darkness

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

It’s been a week since Christmas. And some of you are experiencing a well-known syndrome: a young person yearned loudly and lobbied repeatedly for the latest toy, doll, gadget, or game. Parents or someone in the family braved cold weather, long lines, pushy fellow customers and not-so-bargain prices to buy the thing. On Christmas morning said young person was ecstatic. By now, however, interest has waned. We are wondering what all the dramatics were about. The gift failed to live up to its hype.

In spite of years of our own experience and of watching each other, we still seem to fall for the same story line time after time. We just can’t leave behind the hope that if only we could have that toy, doll, gadget, game, car, house, job, or spouse, our lives would finally be completed, fulfilled and meaningful.

No, as I think about it more carefully, I begin to suspect that the dream of fulfillment, completion and meaning has less to do with the thing being bought than it has to do with the mere act of buying. It doesn’t matter much what is being bought. Advertisers seldom advertise the product; they advertise an experience. Folgers, for example, the coffee brand of the J.M. Smucker Company, hasn’t advertised coffee for years: they advertise family reunions.

My experience suggests that most of our actions as consumers have to do with the buying and selling of hopes, dreams, and yearnings that, as often as not have little to do with the actual products we end up with. Is it any wonder that we find our experience as consumers unsatisfying? Is it any wonder that our kids find the toys we bought less interesting than the boxes that they came in?

Dreams, it turns out, are tricky. Dreams exert a powerful pull on us; they resource our imaginations; they are the foundations of many of our plans. Dreams can carry us through some very hard times and give us strength to face each new day of struggle.

Not many dreams, though, can stand being turned into reality. Something gets lost in the translation. The people of Judah were finding this out the hard way when the words of our Hebrew Bible lesson were first spoken.

We have a hard time reading the Bible, especially the Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament. Our books are usually written by one person in what is basically a single point in history. Different times have different moods and they face different questions and issues. We can tell the difference between something written in the sixties and something written yesterday.

But the Bible was written over a very long period of time. Many of its books took centuries to reach the form that we have now. Isaiah is one of those books. Isaiah and much of the Hebrew Bible gained its final shape in the years after the Babylonian exile. In the early part of the sixth century BC (that is the high 500s), the Kingdom of Judah was conquered by the Babylonian Empire, Jerusalem was captured and partly destroyed, and the leadership of the people were taken to Babylon and not allowed to return to their home.

During the time of exile they were sustained by their dream of returning to their home. The dream became bigger than life. It wouldn’t be a simple matter of things going back to the way they had been. God had been the final author of their exile and God would have to be the one who brought them home. When God did this it would be part of a package that would transform the world into an almost recognizably good place for them to live.

But we know how that goes. Some of Barack Obama’s supporters believed that his election and inauguration would mean the beginning of a very different and very much better national history. They—well, let’s be honest: I—hoped for a new spirit, certainly in the White House, but also in the capital and across the nation. I voted for a dream. What I got was a president who had to deal with politics on the ground in the real world. Whether Obama has done this well or not is probably a matter for the historians, although I have my own opinion. Doubtless you have yours. We could have some fun arguing about it, if you’d like, but my point is that my own disillusionment runs parallel to the experience of returning exiles in the late sixth century BC.

A regime change in Babylon brought the Persians—or Iranians, if you’d like—to power. Their emperor, Cyrus the Great, announced a change in policy that allowed the Judean exiles to go home. They were beside themselves with joy. Well, some of them were. These got themselves ready and they went back to Jerusalem. Others decided to stay in Babylon where there continued to be a thriving Jewish community for several centuries.

The ones who returned to Jerusalem experienced a major letdown. A new day did not dawn just because God had brought them home. The desert was not covered with flowers, just the brush and scrub that grows in deserted places. No roads magically appeared to lead them home, just the same dusty, rocky paths their great grandparents had walked on their way into exile. Jerusalem was a mess. It was what real estate agents call a fixer-upper. The walls of Jerusalem were toppled in several places. The Temple was burned to the ground. The gates of the city were gone. The public utilities had fallen into disrepair. And the locals—descendants of the Judeans who had remained behind—wanted nothing to do with them.

Reality intruded into what had been a very nice dream. The dream was lovely, gratifying. In the dream, life was easy and fulfilling. But in reality there were stones to hew and haul to fix the walls. There was a temple to rebuild. There were sewers to repair. Life was hard. Much of the dream was at best unfulfilled, at worst unfulfillable. This was not a preaching context that I would envy.

And yet, in many ways, it is the one that I have. We are disillusioned. Science and technology have not delivered on the promises they made in my youth. Where’s all the leisure time we were supposed to have? Where’s the abundant cheap energy? And most important of all, where’s my jetpack? We are disillusioned consumers and yet we don’t know what else to be.
Our leaders can’t seem to have the important conversations that they need to have about pressing matters. Instead they maneuver for political advantage, but when they get it they can’t seem to get anything done. We are disillusioned citizens.

Our centers of higher education are driven by monetary concerns. There are even for-profit institutions where education is a means to the end of making money. Universities and colleges offer more and more fields of study but increasingly only one major: upward mobility. We are disillusioned learners and teachers.

We have taken apart major powerful institutions in our world for the sake of individual rights and freedoms. Churches, unions, neighborhoods, bowling leagues—all have suffered real reverses. And now we find ourselves exposed to powerful corporations that use international borders as a way to avoid accountability to anyone at all. We are disillusioned individualists.

Perhaps most of all, we are disillusioned dreamers. After so many times that a dream has been used to front a scam, we distrust dreams altogether. And truth to tell, there are parts of today’s reading that prompt me to put my hand on my wallet. I am suspicious of the prophet’s promise that the wealth of that gentiles would come to Jerusalem. It sounds like a revenge fantasy, as if justice could be gained merely by turning victims into oppressors and oppressors into victims. It seems shallow to me. Nor am I particularly attracted to the notion that we would be inundated with caravans of camels. Camels spit. They are not nice animals.

But even so there is a remainder that seems to me to be a dream worth holding onto. It’s this image of light in darkness. Darkness will cover the nations, we are told. But into that darkness God will shine. There’s hope there, isn’t there? There are depths of darkness in our world today, but no matter how deep, God’s light shines deeper still.

But we who have been called to be God’s people, don’t just sit and soak up the sunshine. The prophet goes further than that. The prophet tells us that God’s light will shine and we will be radiant. God’s light shines in the darkness and we become God’s lights. We’re going to hear that over and over again in the next few weeks. Light is a motif that runs through the readings between now and Lent. We’ll have a chance to explore light metaphors.

But for now, let me share what I find striking here. God’s light shines in darkness and we become radiant. What strikes me is that our becoming radiant is how God’s light shines in the darkness. This is how God illuminates dark places: God makes us radiant. We can’t look for God’s light to come breaking in. God’s light isn’t over there; it isn’t somewhere else. It’s right here among us, in the light that we radiate as we do the same thing that the prophet’s community did. We try to figure out how to live in faithful obedience to God’s covenant. We try some things. Sometimes we succeed. More often we fail. When we fail we get back up and try to figure out how to do it a little differently and then we try again.

We disillusioned consumers know that while we need some things to live, we just can’t find fulfillment in buying stuff. We can try to figure out what that means and how to live differently.
We disillusioned citizens know that real solutions to real problems are going to be found in the conversations that we have with people whom we value more than we value winning arguments. Civil conversation is a nearly lost art form, but we can relearn it here.

We disillusioned learners and teachers can relearn the lost art of asking questions about deeper meanings and larger purposes rather than how to be good functionaries in systems that produce a great deal of wealth for a disturbingly few people.

We disillusioned individualists can relearn the art of community, the value of a commons, the strength of congregation. We can relearn working for a commonwealth in which I know that there is no real well-being for me that doesn’t involve well-being for all.

We disillusioned dreamers can discover that the light of God will shine first into the darkness of our own disillusioned hearts. And then we will dare to dream again. When we do that, we will find that we are not alone. Others hunger for these things, too. They will come if their hunger for a good dream can be fed here. We may even find ourselves asking, “Where did all these camels come from?”

©2011, John M. Caldwell. Permission is given by the author to reproduce and distribute the unaltered text of this sermon provided this notice is reproduced in full and provided that this sermon shall not be offered for sale, nor included in any collection or publication that is offered for sale, without the express written permission of the author.