Light in the Darkness (Luke 2:1-20)

Christmas Eve
Luke 2:1-20
December 24, 2010

Light in the Darkness

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

It’s a strange night. It’s among the darkest, longest nights of the year and instead of huddling in front of a fire or curling up beneath blankets, we have come here, for no more compelling reasons than to tell and to sing the Story again. We live in a culture that values the new above all else, but in spite of that we have come here for an old story, a story that we already know.

We have come and we encounter more strangeness: a finely appointed table set in the presence of barn doors, a suggestion of a feed trough, and enough candles to make us wonder whether there has been a power failure. Stranger still, we have that most ancient pagan symbol—a living tree, an evergreen—cut down and given a place of honor in a Christian holy place. And strangest of all, none of this seems wrong or out of place.

We turn to the story itself and we find emperors and peasants, frightened subjects and the rulers that order them around, shepherds and angels, good news given to the scorned and the poor, and darkness in the light.

There are two worlds set out in the story. On the one hand there is the world of the powerful and rich. They are people like the emperor, Gaius Julius Octavius, known to history as Augustus, the title given to him by the Roman Senate.

On the other hand there is the world of the weak and the poor. They are people like the tradesman Yosef and his peasant fiancée Miriam—Joseph and Mary. They are people like the shepherds, distrusted and scorned by folks who lived in the villages.

The two worlds rub against each other in our story. Augustus wanted to count the subjects of his empire. He wanted to know how many subjects he had so that he could better estimate just how much tax and tribute he could squeeze out of them. So he ordered a census. Everyone was to be counted in the city of their citizenship. So folks like Joseph and Mary dropped everything and scurried off to their hometowns. They knew better than to think they could defy the powerful rich.

If that were the end of the story, it certainly wouldn’t make the news. That peasants and shepherds don’t count for much, but emperors and kings do, would not surprise anyone.

But that isn’t the end of the story. There is another character in our story. God has crept in beside us. God has crept in beside us and everything has changed. The old structures are turned upside down. The old values are eclipsed. There is now the hope that old pains will be eased, old longings fulfilled, and old questions answered.

And look where it is that God has come! God could have chosen Rome, a city of power and dignity, an unanswerable arrangement of propaganda in marble and concrete. God could have visited the emperor, clothed in purple, honored as the Savior, the Son of God, the Prince of Peace. But God chose the peasant couple Yosef and Miriam and the backwater village of Bethlehem. The Prince of Peace, the Savior, the Son of God was born this night and the emperor in Rome never had a clue.

The angels could have made the announcement of Jesus’ birth to the nobility and the religious leaders. They could have appeared in Jerusalem and sung their glad news from the rooftop of the Temple. But the angels chose shepherds who were living with their flocks in the Judean hills. Shepherds were despised in those days as barely civilized, untrustworthy, sneaky and dangerous. People would have said that they lived like the animals they lived with. But it was not to the nobility that the shepherds appeared. It was the shepherds who had the chance to run to Bethlehem to see for themselves the signs that the angels had promised. The nobility slept through the night, unaware.

The significance of the story doesn’t just lie in these ironies, which I find delicious in themselves. God crept in beside us and everything changed. God came to Yosef and Miriam and from now on, peasants matter. God came to Bethlehem and from now on, backwater towns matter. The angels appeared to shepherds and from now on those who are despised and looked down on matter. God crept in beside us and from now on we matter.

There are, of course, those of us like me who already believe that we matter, that we matter a lot, actually. The truth is I do matter, but probably not in the way nor as much as I think. It was not to the holders of PhDs that the angels appeared. The learned and wise of Jesus’ day were more often than not found working against him and we who accounted today among the very best educated are warned in this way to be careful we are not still working against him.

But I’m not thinking so much of those who seem to matter as of those who seem not to. God has crept in beside us and things are no longer what they seem to be. Emperors and kings and capital cities seem to matter but they don’t. Peasants and shepherds and hick towns seem not to matter, but they do.

Nearly one in ten of our workforce is looking for work and cannot find it. The unemployed are scorned as lazy parasites for whom continued support becomes a “hammock” even though if every job in the United States were filled, our unemployment rate would still be 7.6%. When economists decide whether a recession is over, they don’t count unemployment. So those of us who are unemployed may not believe that we matter. But the story we tell and sing tonight says to us, “To us is born in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord. God crept in beside us. We matter.”

It’s Christmas Eve, but one in six children in Iowa will go to bed tonight without a sure source of food for tomorrow. Perhaps the real scandal of this little fact is that there are thirty-one states where children are at greater risk. Nationwide, the rate of food insecurity among children is about twenty percent, or one in five. Either way, when economists decide whether a recession is over, they don’t count food insecure children. So those of us who are children who live in a home where the food for tomorrow is not in our cupboard tonight, can’t really be blamed for thinking that we don’t matter. But the story we tell and sing tonight says to us, “To us is born in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord. God crept in beside us. We matter.”

There are some of us look on the outside like we’re doing just fine. We have good jobs, nice homes, good marriages, beautiful children. But somehow it isn’t fine for us on the inside. In spite of all the things we’ve accomplished, we’re convinced that we’re not really worth anything. Some of us were abused or neglected, while others of us received no more than the usual sorts of bumps and bruises that come from being raised by people who, while they loved us and did the best they could, were human and therefore not perfect. From whatever cause, not matter how much or how well we do, it’s never quite enough to satisfy the tyrant in our heads. But the story we tell and sing tonight says to us, “To us is born in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord. God crept in beside us. We matter.”

We celebrate this night and its news with joy. At the same time we mourn the hungry, the oppressed, and the victims of war and violence. We grieve for our world, where life and health are sold so cheap and wealth is bought so dear. We have thrown our weight into the struggle for peace and justice, but we are tired. And we wonder what difference our effort makes. We are surprised that we have lasted another year and wonder if we will last one more. But the story we tell and sing tonight says to us, “To us is born in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord. From now on until forever, no matter what else happens or fails to happen, the world has changed and so have we. God has embraced this world in the most intimate way possible. From now the world matters. God has crept in beside us. From now on we matter.

©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 Poetics of Hope (Isaiah 11:1-10; Matthew 3:1-1)

2nd Sunday of Advent
Isaiah 11:1-10; Matthew 3:1-1
December 5, 2010

A Poetics of Hope

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

All of this sounds a little unlikely: wolves, lambs, leopard, kids, calves, lions, toddlers and poisonous snakes all sharing a peace-filled life. His images become even stranger when they are placed against the reality of life in Isaiah’s day. Judah, never a particularly strong kingdom, lived under the threat of invasion and domination from the empire du jour from the Tigris and Euphrates river valleys to the north and east. Perhaps it was the Assyrians, perhaps the Babylonians.

Isaiah saw tough times ahead and he wasn’t shy about making his opinions known. Judah was in deep trouble, he believed. Judah’s resources for withstanding such a threat were meager. The dynasty of King David the son of Jesse sure didn’t measure up to the way it used to be. The current king was no David son of Jesse. Jesse’s tree was rotten and hollow. It looked impressive enough, but it’s strength had long since dwindled. Any storm would blow it down. That’s what Isaiah saw.

His seeing didn’t stop with what his eyes could see, though. He saw with his heart as well. With his heart he saw what David’s dynasty could have looked like. He saw what the king should be. His vision was simple: kings would be great if they lived up to their own publicity. If the king judged by realities instead of appearances, if the king judged the poor with justice, if the king sided with the weak, if the king struck down the wicked strong, then there would be a peace worth having and living. If kings lived up to their own campaign promises, the peace would be so profound that prey and predator would live in peace. Bears and lions would even become vegans, if only the king did what kings were supposed to do.

But we could have told Isaiah that campaign promises are not kept.

I don’t know how you voted last month, but I can tell you that, even if your candidate won, when the 112^th Congress convenes in twenty-nine days, the headlines will not read: “Wolf Lives with Lamb.”

No, we’re going to wake up on January 3 and find that the world has not changed all that much. We long for peace and for justice, but we will not for that reason awaken to find that our electoral process has yielded our hearts’ desire. Isaiah’s words were brave: “They will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain; for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.” But brave words don’t seem to have made the king a good king or dispelled the threat of conquest by foreign powers. Like Isaiah’s Jerusalem, we are stumped. All we have are Isaiah’s words. And they don’t seem to have changed much of anything at all.

Isaiah isn’t the only one who seems to think that human beings can take words and images and weave them together in speech and action and use them to change the world. Only John seems to use gesture as much as speech to face down the reality of his age. John wore garments made of camel’s hair (not to be confused with “camel hair”) and held them together with a leather belt. But get this: he ate locusts. Really?? Locusts?? Yep, grasshoppers. Now, that’s very odd. His rough clothing and his bizarre diet are gestures that are part of his message. Matthew’s Jesus tells us not to worry about what we are to wear or what we are to eat. John the Baptist acts out in unmistakable and unforgettable gestures what it would look to be Jesus’ disciples.

Even where John is serves as a gesture. He’s out by the River Jordan. John knew and so did his audience and so do we that the River Jordan was the place where the dream of the land of promise began to become a reality. The ancient Israelites—ancient even in John’s day—entered the land of promise by crossing the Jordan, by, in a manner of speaking, being baptized in its waters. For the ancient Israelites crossing the Jordan meant freedom from oppression by empires like Egypt where they had been slaves, it meant the chance to live in a community that was just, humane and neighborly, it meant leaving in a peaceable covenant with each other and with God. In a later day and against a later empire, John the Baptist gestured toward freedom, community and peace.

There is something peculiar about this idea that words have power, that images have the power to resist an empire, that gestures are not futile as we have been taught.

Come to think of it, how have we come to believe that gestures are futile, and speech is empty? Who has taught us these things? To whose advantage is it? If we believe that gestures are futile, we won’t make them. We won’t stand with John the Baptist with his odd clothing and even odder diet and make the gestures that make kings shake with fear. If we believe that words are empty, we won’t cry out the need and space for changing our ways as individuals and as a culture.

So we in the mainline churches have come to be silent. What have we gained from our silence? Whatever we have gained has come at a very high price. With very few exceptions we have no twenty-somethings. If you ask their generation why that is they will tell you that while they are fascinated by Jesus they want nothing to do with the church. “Why is that?” we ask. Because they grew up watching churches condemning people in the name of Jesus, dressing up intolerance as piety, and rejecting people who are different from them in the name of the gospel of love. They watched as some churches searched the Scriptures to justify their homophobia, their sexism, and their disdain for the poor.

“But we’re not like that,” we say. No we are not, but we were silent. And that is all that it took.

It turns out that words and gestures are important, far more important than we have come to believe. Tyrants go out of their way to make sure that there are no words but theirs, no gestures but theirs. Tyrants are afraid of many things. They are afraid of massed armies and lone assassins. But most of all I think they are afraid of poets. Tyrants want everyone to believe that the reality of their rule is the only possible reality. Poets won’t accept only one possible reality.

Freedom begins in poetic imagination. Imagination gets its life from words and gestures. Isaiah was a poet who imagined a world freed from empire. Isaiah was a poet who imagined a king who lived up to his own press releases. Isaiah was a poet who imagined a world in which the most basic distinction—the distinction between prey and predator—is set aside in favor of life in the beloved community. John the Baptist was a poet, too, a performance poet. He acted out the oddness of a life grounded in trusting God without deference to empire.

John saw how high the stakes were. He raved to the crowds who came to him that they were like trees about to be chopped down: “Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees,” he howled. “Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.” Every fruitless tree is stumped. That’s what the poet John the Baptist says.

“But that’s not the end,” says the poet Isaiah. “Yes, David’s dynasty is stumped. Judah is stumped. Jerusalem is stumped. Even I am stumped,” says the poet. “But that’s not the end.”

Unlike John, who always seems to shout, Isaiah whispers, “A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse.” Being stumped is not the end. “A shoot shall come out.” There can always be new life. Being silenced is not the end. “A shoot shall come out.” There is always the possibility that we may find our voice. There is always the possibility that we may find our gestures with meaning once again.

Take the gesture of this common meal. Jesus gave it to us and told us to observe it forever. So, we’ve done that even if we’re not sure why. For many years, centuries even, we have restricted it to a private transaction between us and God. It has become a stump. But we are rediscovering something. We are too aware that out there many people have far too little food, while many people have far too much. We are too aware that many live in great need and others in great plenty.

We find that our lives have been increasingly privatized. A generation or two ago we counted on and trusted each other to help us raise our children. We bought them bicycles and they rode all over town. We knew our children couldn’t go anywhere where someone wouldn’t know who they were. Now we no longer trust each other. Our children are under house arrest. Their worlds are smaller. Someone taught us to mistrust each other. And we believed that bad news. So now we’re on our own.

Our lives have become increasingly monetized. United Methodist pastors used to get a pension based solely on how many years they had served. Now it’s based on our salaries over the course of our careers. Pastors are no longer supported in retirement based on their faithful service. They are now rewarded in retirement based on the “success” of their ministry measured in dollars. Even we pastors have walked away from covenant community.

But today we gather around a table. Money buys no special access here. Rich and poor alike come to this table and are received in the same way. The poor get not one bit less than they need. And the rich get not one bit more. This meal is a gesture toward the beloved community.
In a world where we’re supposed to parcel up and sell out our communities so that a few people can make a lot of money, I have to say that this gesture has its work cut out for it.

But the poets teach us that this gesture is not meaningless. As we gather at the table we act if only for a few minutes out of a world differently imagined. There is a little play, there is a little wiggle room, there is a little imaginative space for us to dream a better dream. We may be stumped now, but that’s okay. We know what comes next.

©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 Dream of Peace

1st Sunday of Advent - C
Isaiah 2:1-5
November 28, 2010

A Dream of Peace

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

It’s the Sunday after Thanksgiving and the “holiday” shopping season is in full swing. Serious shoppers spent the early hours of Friday morning queued up in lines outside of electronics stores. They didn’t sleep, of course, but if they had they would have dreamed of the latest devices at bargain prices. Christmas musak is playing in the stores and malls. Once again Bing Crosby is “Dreaming of a White Christmas.” According to Clement Moore in his poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” sleeping children dream of “sugar plums.” (My suspicion is that Moore didn’t know any actual children. At least I don’t know of any who even know what a sugar plum might be.) Parents dream of successfully steering between failing to please their children on one side and financial ruin on the other. We all dream of finding ten minutes to call our own, a chance to breathe a little, and maybe, just maybe a moment for the kind of spiritual attention we seem to believe the season deserves but seldom gets.

A whole series of industries—retailing, consumer credit, advertising, and manufacturing—is dominated by those who dream of consumers who spend to their limits and beyond. If this year does not exceed the last, their dreams will be dashed and it will all be our fault.

In the meantime the Church has a different dream, a dream as old as the Bible, a dream often-delayed and long-deferred. It is a difficult dream, a demanding dream. But it will not go away. It has haunted us all our lives. It has haunted us for centuries since the days of Jesus, since the days of the prophets.

We shy away from the dream because we believe that it is too hard for us. And besides, we say, it’s Christmas! We have visitors or long-time members whom we have not seen for months—maybe since last Easter—but who have wandered back in. We don’t want to make it harder for them to visit or come back than it already is. It will be hard enough. First-time visitors will have to make their anxious way through the doors, past the greeters and ushers, to find their ways to a seat that doesn’t already “belong” to someone else. This is hard because we don’t label them.

The others, the twenty-year members who are back after long absences, will have to endure greetings from newer members who ask, “Oh, are you new here?”

We’re concerned about these folks. We imagine that they will be put off by a serious dream that comes with a serious demand for serious discipleship. We’re more than a little put off by it ourselves. We imagine that they come to see the baby Jesus, so they can say, “Aw, look how sweet!” We’d like to see the sweet baby Jesus ourselves. We imagine that the fewer demands our message makes, the more winsome it will be.

I think we are mistaken in our imagination. I think that the folks who stop by are prompted by the Church’s dream. I think that our visitors are hoping against hope that they will see a bit of the dream realized, a glimpse at least of the dream come true. I think that we hope to get a glimpse ourselves.

They are looking for more than a dose of Christmas feel-good. They want to know if there is something here that is worthy of their devotion, their passion, their energy. If the answer turns out to be yes, then they’ll be back. If not, then we’ll not see them again until next year, maybe, when their disappointment has faded and they are willing to try again.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, I think that Advent and Christmas are indeed times for a serious call to serious discipleship in the service of a serious dream. And I think that the texts that we read during Advent and Christmas present just such a compelling vision.

At first glance, the Isaiah text is all sweetness and light. In this reading we have the gentile nations coming to Judah in order to discover the ways of God. We have justice done among the nations in such a way as to render preparation for war unnecessary, so that the nations may turn their energies from the production of weapons and preparation for war to the peaceful activities of planting fields and tending orchards.

Of course, as usually happens with the prophets, there is more to it than that. These five verses come as a rather surprising interruption between the first two chapters of Isaiah. Before our text, Isaiah complains on God’s behalf that Judah has forsaken its God. Its sacrifices are all in order, but they are unacceptable to God. Justice has been trampled in the courts. The vulnerable are being exploited. No one rescues the oppressed. No one defends the orphan. No one pleads a case on the widow’s behalf. God rejects worship without justice. Therefore the people are called to repentance otherwise their society will lose its vitality: "[Y]ou shall be like an oak whose leaf withers, and like a garden without water.”¹

Following our text there is more of the same: Judah is warned that a day of judgment comes when Judah will be held accountable for its failures.

This is not what we have in mind neither for us nor for our visitors in Advent. It’s a shock. William Willimon, formerly the Dean of Duke University Chapel, now the Resident Bishop of our North Alabama Conference compares the shock of this to getting a Christmas card, not from the infant, but from the adult Jesus: “Go, sell all that you have and give it to the poor, then follow me. Merry Christmas.” Or “Whoever takes up the sword dies by the sword. Happy Holidays.”²

But Isaiah’s dream comes in a context and it comes with a commission: the offer of a plowshares and pruning hooks vision comes to a world of swords and spears. And the vision demands a response: “O house of Jacob,” Isaiah says, speaking on his own behalf this time, “come let us walk in the light of God.”

There is a certain genius at work here. Whoever has assembled and arranged Isaiah in its final form knows something: Being God’s people is never easy. There are demands that go against the grain of our nature and of contemporary culture (no matter where or when we live). It will take a dream of great power, a dream sufficiently compelling to motivate the kind of action that God is asking. I think Isaiah’s vision has that kind of power. I think that Isaiah’s dream is sufficiently compelling.

For we, too live in swords and spears world, a world that is violent enough and unjust enough that a dream of peaceful justice resonates with our deepest longings and highest aspirations.

What couldn’t we do if we beat our swords into plowshares and our spears into pruning hooks? According to one account, the nations of the world spent $1.5 trillion last year on making or preparing for war.³ The United States’ share of that was $661 billion, or 43% of the total.⁴ That’s a lot of plowshares and pruning hooks!

Let’s dream of other uses for that money.

In 2006, the United Nations set a goal for efforts to treat and prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS. It set a number of benchmarks to be reached this year. We’ve fallen behind. The world has been spending about $16 billion a year to fight HIV/AIDS. To meet the UN’s goals we need to spend another $10 billion.⁵ That’s $26 billion dollars all together. That’s a lot of money to you and me, but to the world’s militaries, it represents a mere 6 days, 4 hours and 45 minutes.

Or how about feeding the estimated 35 million people in the United States who live in food insecurity? That’s 35 million who may not actually be hungry right now, but who don’t know where their next meal is coming from. It would only cost $12 billion to eliminate hunger and food insecurity in the United States, problems that actually cost us $90 billion a year.⁶ That’s 2 days, 20 hours and 39 minutes worth of the United States’ military expenditures to makes sure that no child goes to bed hungry and no senior citizen has to choose between eating and paying the rent.

Isaiah’s words not only provide a vision, they provide a strategy as well. The vision is a vision of peace. But it is a peace that comes from justice, rather than dropping from the sky or coming about by magic. And we can do justice, or at least we can live in that direction. We can live more justly. We can treat our own bodies with justice. We can treat each other with justice. We can treat with justice the people who make the things that we use. We can treat with justice the earth and the creatures who live on it and in its seas and in its skies.

This is the Advent vision according to Isaiah. We can commit ourselves to journeying toward God’s peace by working for God’s justice. We can summon others to join us in this journey and this work. We can live within the vision of Isaiah and invite others to live within it with us.

Advent is a time for a serious call to serious discipleship. I am convinced that people hope for such a call. That’s our own deepest hope. We and they are looking for a cause that we can embrace passionately, something to which we can give ourselves, a vision worthy of our lives.

©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.

1Isa. 1:30.

2I found this citation in old notes, but I have no information as to its source other than it is attributed to William Willimon. I don’t doubt that it is his, though. It certainly sounds like him!

3Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, “Military Expenditure,” in SIPRI Yearbook 2010 (Stockholm: SIPRI, 2010), 177.

4Ibid., 198.

5Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS, “At least 56 countries have either stabilized or achieved significant declines in rates of new HIV infectionsUNAIDSTODAY | UNAIDSTODAY,” November 23, 2010, http://unaidstoday.org/?p=1673#more-1673.

6Dr. J. Larry Brown et al., “The Economic Cost of Domestic Hunger: Estimated Annual Burden to the United States” (Sodexho Foundation, June 5, 2007), 4, http://www.sodexofoundation.org/hunger_us/Images/Cost%20of%20Domestic%20Hunger%20Report%20_tcm150-155150.pdf.

The Riches of God’s Glorious Inheritance

All Saints’ Sunday
Ephesians 1:11-23October 31, 2010

The Riches of God’s Glorious Inheritance

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

Does anyone know what today is? Halloween? No. Well, yes, it’s Halloween, but that’s not what I’m thinking of. We’re in the stewardship campaign and today’s the last Sunday before Consecration Sunday. Next Sunday as we are gathered in church we’ll fill out our pledge cards and bring them forward as a way of committing ourselves to the support of the congregation’s mission and ministry in the coming year. We’ll you’ll be filling out cards. I’ll be in New Jersey, but don’t worry, Carol and I will be filling out one of these cards and bringing it in. We’ll just be a little late.

Theoretically, you could make your decisions next Sunday, but the reality is that you’ll probably make up your mind this week, if you haven’t already. That makes today the last chance that I’ll have to influence you. Of course, if you’ve made up your minds already, then you don’t have to listen to the sermon. Listening to my preaching today will be like watching political ads if you’ve already voted.

This is a task that falls to the preacher at least once a year. I preach about stuff more often than that, and I firmly believe that money is an important area of Christian discipleship. After all, Jesus talked about money a lot. But today I have the specific and focused task of parting you from your hard-earned coin. It’s actually even more challenging than that. My task is to part you from your hard-earned coin and leave you feeling good about it. Most people think this is done best if I manage to persuade their neighbors to increase their giving without implying that they themselves should give more. Of course, that isn’t going to work. Any time someone comments on my sermon with words like, “You sure told them,” I know I’ve failed.

So, ideally, I will persuade you to give more without your even noticing that this is what I’ve done. That’ s a pretty tall order. I skipped the class at seminary entitled, “Hypnosis for Stewardship,” so, instead I have to kind of sneak up on it, kind of sidle into it. Maybe a little misdirection is called for, a little slight of hand, that directs your attention to where the trick isn’t happening.

So let me start again: Everyone knows what today is: it’s Halloween. It’s time for diminutive versions of ghosts and goblins, superheroes and celebrities, witches, monsters and princesses, bugs and sports figures to dash in the twilight from house to house demanding to be paid off with candy in exchange for which the trick-or-treaters will...will do what?

Centuries ago when I was a participant, trick-or-treat used to be a sort of protection racket. Those who refused to give out treats or whose treats were not good enough for us were liable to our revenge in the form of soaped windows or teepeed trees.

Halloween gets its name from Scotland where, in the middle of the seventeen hundreds, it was the shortened form of “Allhallows Even,” that is, the Eve of All Saints’ Day. So it seems at first blush to be originally a Christian festival, but the ghosts, goblins, witches and monsters suggest something else. In fact, there is a much older festival in all Celtic lands, called in Scottish Gaelic Samhain, that marks the last day of the Celtic year. It fell on the 31^st of October and marked one of the times in the year when the walls between this world and the next were especially thin. Ghosts, banshees, the so-called “little people,” who were in fact the old gods were apt to break through the wall and move about in our world. And those in this world were, if not careful, liable to get pulled into the next world from which they might never return.

When November 1 was set as a day to recognize the many unknown and unrecognized saints, it was a more or less unsuccessful attempt to baptize the pagan Samhain and turn it into something Christian. It never really worked. It’s not hard to see why. I can picture it now: Who do want to be for Allhallows, sweetie—Hroswitha of Gondersheim or Hanna Montana? Sebastian of Rome or Spiderman? No contest!

The saints may not be able to hold their own in the costume aisle at Wal-Mart, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t deserve a more prominent place among us than they have gotten. We have our local saints, of course, but their place in our hearts is usually limited to the time before living memory of them fades. We have a couple of saints that we celebrate—the Wesley brothers on the Sunday closest to May 24 and maybe Martin Luther King, Jr., on the second Sunday in January. And you can bet that they’ll be singing “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God” in every Lutheran church across the land today as they mark 1483^rd anniversary of Luther’s nailing the “95 Theses” on the door of Wittenberg church. But aside from assigning their celebrations to the wrong days—saints’ days are celebrated on the anniversaries of their deaths, that is the day they victoriously finished the course of their lives—these few celebrations miss the amazing breadth and variety of the people who, like us, have struggled to live faithful lives in their own place and time.

We know very little about most of them, of course. Famous saints have always been pretty rare. Most of the saints live lives of anonymous holiness, then as now. So it’s fitting that we have a reading from Ephesians today. It’s called the Letter to the Ephesians, but the only indication of its addressee is a phrase that is missing from the oldest and best manuscripts. On top of that and for a number of reasons, the great majority of scholars are convinced that Paul was not its author. Instead, it was written in the generation after Paul by an author who stood in Paul’s tradition. The letter is an exercise in “What Would Paul Say?”

So here we have a letter written by an unknown author to an unknown addressee and it is our text on the day when we celebrate the lives of the unknown saints. It’s kind of fitting, I think.

Still, we do know something about the people to whom it was written. We know what we can guess from the letter itself. We can guess that they felt a little overwhelmed. The Christian church was very small in the early days, even in the larger cities. Take Ephesus as an example: the church was probably not much bigger than ours in a city that was about the size of Des Moines and its suburbs. By the time this letter was written, the trial separation of the Christian church and the Jewish synagogue had become a finalized divorce. Christians had lost the protection of being part of a legal religion. They were on their own.

The writer—and I’ll just call him “Paul” with quotation marks, since that’s easier than saying “an anonymous writer who wrote in Paul’s name and from within the tradition associated with Paul”—the writer tells the readers—and I’ll just call them the “Ephesians” with quotation marks—“Paul” tells the “Ephesians” that the power that raised Jesus from the dead also enthroned him “far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the age to come.” And terribly weak? Otherwise “Paul’s” argument makes no sense. If he is reminding them that the power at work in Christ (and therefore at work in them) is so strong it must be because he thinks that’s what they need to hear.

They believed—as Paul did—that the world was crowded with spiritual realities. Every city, every permanent political arrangement, had its own spiritual counterpart, a “power” or “authority” that was the invisible reality behind the visible. There were free-floating spirits that could inhabit and “possess” a crowd or a person.

This was not as far-fetched as it sounds. We still speak about “team spirit” in a stadium at game time. The morale of a military unit is called l’esprit du corps, literally, “the spirit of the body.” People sense the spirit of an office or of a congregation and they aren’t really conscious of how they do it.

The people of the church at “Ephesus” felt very small compared to the spirits that surrounded them—the spirit of the city itself, the spirit of Roman Empire, the spirit of crowds gathered for pagan festivals. Paul reminds them that all these spirits and many more besides have been brought under the power of God that raised Jesus from the dead. They have nothing to fear.

They were not a rich people—the early Christian movement was not popular among the rich and powerful—but they have become the heirs to an unimagined wealth. In the first part of our reading there is a cluster of words that are property terms: “obtain an inheritance,” “seal,” “promise,” “down payment,” “inheritance,” and “redemption.” Through what God has done in Jesus Christ, they have received a promise of great wealth. They have even received a down payment, a pledge, earnest money against the fulfillment of that promise. Against this wealth the riches that they have now, or rather the riches that they don’t have now, are not to be compared.

Those ancient readers were not the only people ever to have felt overwhelmed, by the forces that they perceived in the world around them. Those ancient readers were not the only peopleever to have felt overpowered, frightened, and intimidated.

There are lots of folks today who are frightened.There are lots of folks in our country who are deeply afraid of government, especially the federal government. They see government as a threat to practices and identities that they hold dear. They are afraid that the government will take away their guns. They are afraid that the government will take away their religious practices. They are afraid that the government will take away their choices about health care or even the health care itself.

Me, I’m not so afraid of the government as I am of corporations, especially the very large, multi-national corporations. I see corporations as limiting my choices, imposing a certain set of values on our culture, while operating in nearly utter disregard for the welfare of people who are deeply affected by their actions. I’m afraid that the fear of government will strip away our last protections from corporations and leave us at their mercy.

So which of these sets of fears are right?

According to “Paul,” both sets of fears are misplaced. The power of God which raised Jesus from the dead has overcome every every government, every corporation, every brand name or trademark. The power of God has overcome the military-industrial establishment. The power of God has overcome the liberal-biased media. The power of God has overcome the health care industry. The power of God has overcome Obamacare.

That same power is at work in us. We do not need to be afraid.

When people are afraid, they have a hard time being generous. But we do not need to be afraid,so we can become an even more generous people than we already are.

(Did I sneak up on separating you from your hard-earned coin quietly enough? Was that indirect enough?Or did you see me coming?)

There are all sorts of reasons for being generous. And there are many ways to be generous. We can do it with our time, with our skills, with our money. Far be it from me to say that the only way to be generous is to fill out a pledge card. And there are other vehicles of generosity than this congregation. But committing ourselves to significant giving through First United Methodist Church is one way, and it’s a good way to commit ourselves to growing in generosity.

But it’s the generosity that is vital. What comes out of this text is that generosity is a gesture of resistance against the fear we’re living with. Generosity is an act of rebellion against the powers that swarm around us. Generosity is a demonstration of the power of God at work in us. Generosity is an declaration of the freedom that we have in Christ.

The unknown author of today’s reading invites us just as he invited the unknown first readers of the reading to say, “I am Christ’s subject and no one else’s. The power that raised him is at work in me. I have already seen the evidence of that power in my own life. Therefore I will live under no other power. I will live in anxiety no longer.I will live in fear no longer. I am free.”

©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.

Minding Our Own Business

Proper 25C
Luke 18:9-14
October 24, 2010

Minding Our Own Business

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

Jesus told a story about two people who went to church, one a Pharisee, the model of piety and righteousness, and the other a despised tax collector. Of the two of them, Jesus said, the tax collector found favor with God.

Honestly, I have to tell you that my reaction is, isn’t there another choice? Because, really, I don’t like either of them all that much. Isn’t there a third alternative?

We’ve all been taught to despise the Pharisee in the story. We’ve been taught to despise all Pharisees. The New Testament encourages us to believe that the Pharisees were all hypocritical folks who bitterly opposed Jesus and everything he stood for. If we read that a character in a story in the Bible is a Pharisee, that’s all we need to know about him. He’ll be the villain of the piece.

This rubs against the grain of our character a little. We mid-western folk, we tend to have our opinions, but we also believe in giving a fair hearing. Condemning the Pharisees out of hand would be a little out of character, even if Luke seems to be encouraging us to do it.

Giving Pharisees a fair hearing is harder than you’d think, though. We know very little about them, far less than we’d like. We know that there were various sorts of Jews in Jesus’ day. There were Sadducees who seemed to come mostly from the Jewish nobility and priestly families and focused on the Temple and its sacrificial system. There were Essenes who lived mostly (we think) in their own settlements, especially in the southern deserts, and about whom we know hardly anything at all. There were Zealots, who seemed to have believed that they could prompt God’s intervention in history by offering armed resistance to the Romans. And there were the Pharisees.

Even this very rough sketch is too detailed. For the last several weeks Bob Shedinger has been introducing some fascinating material from the Qumran scrolls. I don’t know for certain what other folks got from his classes, but I can say that I was struck once again by just how complex the religious situation was in Jesus’ day. It was like Jews had this amazing religious potluck supper and everyone who went through the line made their own selections from what was spread out in front of them. No two plates looked alike. I suspect that is how it was in Jesus’ day. Each community had its own way of doing things with no two alike.

The New Testament tends to make bad guys out of everyone except for the Jesus-followers, but I think that every group and every movement was composed of mostly sincere folks trying to solve a very difficult problem: How to live as people who were faithful to the God of the Jewish covenant in the face of their lives as Roman subjects.

Some people thought that faithfulness called for trusting in God to come to their help as they rose up in revolt against the Roman conquerors who trusted in false gods. Some people thought that life in Roman Palestine was hopelessly corrupt, so they retreated into their own communities to live faithfully by avoiding outside interference. Some people looked at the might of the Roman empire and decided that it would be best to cooperate in order to preserve at least some of their distinct life of worship.

And then there were the Pharisees. The Pharisees studied the Torah and the Prophets to discover how to live lives that were holy and just. They believed that faithfulness was lived out in the dailiness of ordinary life, in activities like prayer and eating and marriage and living with their neighbors. They saw the covenant as God’s gift that let them avoid being damaged by the corruption and immorality in the gentile world. They believed that anyone could live faithfully so they lived in villages and small towns and, generally, spent a lot of time among ordinary people. Pharisees were good people and I think I would have liked most of them.

Even so it’s hard to say much nice about the self-righteous jerk described as a Pharisee in our story. We’ve all known someone like them. They think that life is graded on a curve. The worse that other people are, the better their grade.

They check out the crowd when they pray. For them piety is a performance that needs an appreciate crowd of spectators. They come to church and look down on those who don’t. The come to church and look down on those who do! No one listens as well, sings as well, prays as well as they do, or gives as well as they do.

That may sound like a strange thing to say during a stewardship campaign. Why do we care why people give, as long as they give? Money is money, right? Well, I’m not altogether sure that’s true, to begin with. Money isn’t the morally neutral thing that modern economic theory holds it to be. There’s good money and bad; there’s happy money and sad money; there’s joyful money and grudging money. Motive matters even to the bottom line.

But the bottom line isn’t the bottom line. The bottom line for us is helping each other live lives that are faithful to the God of Jesus as his followers and holding out that possibility to our whole community. In a life of faithfulness motive matters.

Whatever help toward a faithful life the Pharisee movement might have held out toward the first praying person in our story, couldn’t seem to get past his motives. He was conducting his spiritual life in front of a mirror. He caught a glimpse of himself reflected in the “other” of the tax collector and, to paraphrase TV’s Rick Castle, he exclaimed, “I really am a holy guy!”

We’ve all known someone like him. In fact, in my more honest moments, I have to admit there is more than a little of that guy in me. I suspect that I might not be the only one here who has to admit that. It’s okay, we’re among friends here.

So I don’t like the Pharisee, not because he’s a Pharisee, but because he’s a jerk and because I see a little too much of myself in him.

But what of this tax collector? We know some things about him. Tax collectors were not employees of the Roman equivalent of the Internal Revenue Service. Tax collectors were independent contractors, tax farmers who had won contracts to collect the taxes in a district. The Romans knew how much they wanted to collect. The tax collector promised to deliver that much to the Romans. He could (and did) collect more. As long as the extra wasn’t too much the Romans would look the other way and he could keep the difference.

He profited at the expense of his fellow Jews. He made his living serving the interests of the Romans. This went way beyond cooperation. He was a collaborator, a traitor.

So he went up to the Temple to pray and stood a long way away from the other pilgrims. If he hadn’t they would have moved away from him. He unburdened his justly guilty conscience in prayer. Jesus says that the tax collector was the one to imitate. “All who humble themselves will be exalted,” Jesus says. The tax collector had humbled himself. Of course, may I point out that, as Winston Churchill said of a political opponent, “but then he has much to be humble about”? Jesus tells us that the tax collector “went down to his home justified,” which is fine, I suppose. I’d like to know if he went down to his home changed. If he’s still in the same line of work, if he’s still selling out his neighbors for a few coins, then I don’t get it.

You see my problem? Two possible spiritual stances before God, neither of them very attractive. Do you see why I’m hoping for a third possibility? How about a woman who tries her best to live a life of faithfulness to the God of the covenant, but who in moments of weakness takes the easy road, who then goes into the Court of Women in the Temple in Jerusalem, who prays in genuine remorse for mercy, and finally who goes home resolving to keep trying her best? Wouldn’t that be better? Why use these two who, really, are more caricature than character?

Because this is a parable, that’s why. In the world of the parable, a realistic landscape of the universe is reduced to an ink drawing of a very few lines. The range of religious possibilities is reduced to two figures and their relationship with God: the Pharisee with whom we should feel some sympathy but who makes that impossible by being an utter jerk and the tax collector whom we should despise but find it hard to because we can’t help but feel sorry for the guy. Two guys and a choice.

A long time ago, when I was a seminary student, I was a student pastor in Vinton, the county seat of Benton County.. The nearest hospital for anything serious was St. Luke’s Hospital in Cedar Rapids a little to our south. There was a small sign in the chaplain’s office, framed and hanging on the wall. In three words it summarized the human situation: “Humility is truth.” Humility isn’t this great virtue to be carefully cultivated. Humility isn’t a pose, either, or some sort of lifestyle. It’s just the truth, that’s all. Humility is the accurate description of our place in the universe, of our place in the human community, of our place in history, of our place even before God. Humility is truth. To be humble is to know the truth about ourselves.

This is how the Pharisee blew it. He was trying hard to live a life of faithfulness to the God of the covenant. He had let that effort shape his behavior, determine how he used his resources, and how he treated his neighbors. That effort even led him to express his gratitude to God. But when he stood before God and prayed, what came out was “truthiness”¹ instead of truth.

The tax collector, for all his moral failure—and there was and remains a mountain of moral failure—gets it. He knows the truth about himself. In his own words he is a sinner. It’s an old-fashioned word, one that makes us cringe sometimes, one we’d like to avoid, but it says something about us that can’t be said in other words. With this word the tax collector accepts responsibility for his own moral failure and places his own behavior within a framework of accountability to God. When I’m most honest with myself I have to admit that I don’t like the word “sinner” precisely because I’m not really keen either on responsibility or accountability. I’d like to imagine that I can avoid them both. But the tax collector knows better. He knows himself as a sinner.

He knows something else, too, something the Pharisee does not, something that I forget all too often: he is not being graded on a curve. Our relationship with God does not depend on how much better in comparison to others we are doing. It’s not as if God comes to us and says, “I guess you’ll have to do!”

How I’m doing in comparison with someone else really isn’t what matters. This life of faithfulness that you and I are trying to live isn’t a competition. I don’t get extra points if you finish behind me. Which is really good, because that means that you and I can give each other every bit of help, encouragement and support we can muster, and it won’t cost us anything. This isn’t a season of Survivor.

The tax collector knows one last thing. He knows that love doesn’t speak the language of earning and deserving. He knows that he comes to God with nothing in his hands that amounts to a claim on God’s love. As Gregory Palmer has been heard to say, “God loves you and there’s nothing you can do about it.” The tax collector knew that. Of course, the flip side of that is, “and there’s nothing you can do to earn it, either!”

That’s the truth. And if that doesn’t make us humble, nothing will.

©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.

1A word coined by Stephen Colbert meaning “truth that comes from the gut, not books” and named as Miriam-Webster’s Word of the Year for 2006, http://www.merriam-webster.com/info/06words.htm.

Still Waiting

Proper 24C
Jeremiah 31:27-34
October 17, 2010

Still Waiting

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

At last we are done with Jeremiah! Today the barbed wire can come down.

Jeremiah has not been an easy companion. His was not an easy time but then, neither is ours, though perhaps for quite different reasons. Jeremiah faced a terrifying time when all appeared to be well on the surface. But Jeremiah knew that—seen through God’s eyes—there was disaster looming on the horizon. Jeremiah knew—long before and with a greater intensity than others—that exile was coming, that the people would be forced away from their homeland to a place they did not want to go and could not call home. In that sense Jeremiah’s experience of exile began far earlier than that of his fellow countrymen. Long before his fellow Judeans became strangers in a strange land, Jeremiah was a stranger in his own country.

Like Jeremiah, we know that something is not quite right. The gap between the wealthiest people and the poorest, even in our own country, let alone throughout the world is larger than at any time in our history and it’s growing. Across the country unemployment hovers close to ten percent. For some groups it’s much higher than that. Unemployment among black men was 17.6 percent in September and among black teenagers, a staggering 49 percent.¹ But for most of us the bad news is about other people.

Our lives, on the whole, are pretty good. We enjoy comfort and ease but watch with unease and discomfort the anger and resentment of great portions of the world’s population directed at us. We revel in our freedoms but are uneasy about the ways in which freedom becomes license. We bask in our prosperity but find ourselves impoverished in other ways. We have things that our parents could only dream of but we lack the time to enjoy them and especially we lack the time to enjoy each other, the time to build community, the time to become deeper. Across our land the mainline churches have suffered decline and a loss of influence. There are now as many folks who call themselves “unaffiliated” as there are who call themselves mainline Protestants.² We may feel secure behind the limestone bluffs that surround Decorah, but I doubt as Jeremiah did that we can hold out long against the armies of Babylon.

So, we too, live in a time of exile of the same sort as Jeremiah’s and find ourselves strangers in our own country, out of step with the beat of our collective drum. We find ourselves in that most-to-be-pitied of all groups: the unfashionable, the out of touch, yesterday’s news.

So Jeremiah is, I think, a neglected guide for us who live in this internal exile. He hasn't been up-beat and there have been times when his shrill voice has grated on our ears. Still, for those of us who find that our path lies away from rather than toward what we want, Jeremiah is a reliable guide. He has mapped the territory well. We can find our way because he went ahead of us.

Last week we heard his advice to exiles: build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what grows; marry; have children; see that they do the same; pray for the shalôm of your captors. We must live because we are the bearers of a legacy that must not be lost. Someone must carry the memories, the hopes and the values that have shaped us. Someone must carry them so that they will be available to those who find in them something of value. We are the only ones who can do that. We live in exile by looking to preserve the best of the past.

But Jeremiah has one last gift to give us: the gift of the future, the gift of hope. The words of our lesson this morning are familiar. They speak of the coming of a new covenant. We hear these words with Christian ears, long accustomed to assuming he means the Christian covenant, long accustomed to assuming that they have been fulfilled.

The practice of assuming so began very early in the midst of a bitter struggle between the Jewish followers of Jesus and the Jewish non-followers of Jesus. It has left its traces in the gospels. In Luke’s description of the upper room meal and the institution of the Lord’s Supper Jesus says, “This cup that is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood.” Paul has similar words in 1 Corinthians, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood.” Hebrews has a number of references to “a new covenant,” one that is better than the old.

The Christian church and the rabbinic Jewish synagogue both emerged as products of mutual rejection. They were deeply shaped by the division that produced them. The fight was over the resources of faith: Who would have the right to claim the Hebrew scriptures as theirs? Whose interpretation would govern the reading of these scriptures? Who could claim to be the heir to the tradition of faith?

The New Testament, as a consequence, bears the marks of angry division. The division continued into the early Church. Christian writers made the following assumptions:

1. The scriptures of the Hebrew Bible are entirely, completely, and exclusively fulfilled in the person of Jesus.

2. There is no room for any other reading of the Hebrew Bible than ours.

3. Jews are wrong in stubbornly clinging to their outdated and superseded religion.

4. Christians have inherited all of the promises made to God’s people, replacing the Jewish people in the sight of God and disinheriting the Jews.

If Christianity had remained a minor sect of Judaism as it began, perhaps little harm would have been done by these assumptions. But Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire and of its successor states, clear into the twentieth century. These assumptions became public policy and provided the ideology that led to two thousand years of persecutions and ultimately to the Holocaust. This alone is a good reason for removing our Christian glasses for just a moment to let Jeremiah be heard.

And when we do that a curious thing happens. We realize that the promised new covenant remains just that: a promise. Listen to Jeremiah describe the new covenant: It will be unlike the previous one. It won't be breakable. The law of this covenant will come from the inside out. It will not require any sort of instruction (so religious educators will be out of their jobs.). This new covenant will involve the forgiveness of sins.

When we look at the Christian covenant, the one we enter at baptism, we find that there are indeed some similarities with the one promised through Jeremiah. It is not like the earlier covenant in several ways. It is based on conversion, conviction and commitment, rather than inheritance. Forgiveness of sins is central.

But there are striking differences, too. People may indeed no longer remind each other to “know the Lord.” But as I see it, that’s not because such reminders are unneeded. And the Christian covenant seems to be just as breakable as the Jewish covenant. We still need to teach each other. We still need to struggle to be faithful. We still await the writing of the law on our hearts.

In other words, this promise has not been fulfilled in the Christian faith in spite of the anti-Jewish language in the New Testament and throughout church history. In other words, we are still waiting.

But we are waiting in hope. And it is a hope that is uttered in exile, not in the safety of our homes. God did not abandon God’s people in exile. God went with them. God continued to work among them in new and entirely unexpected ways, making bold new promises.

The exile became for Judah (and it can become for us) a place and way of life. No longer able to provide for themselves in a land of their own God’s people had to look to God for survival, sustenance and support. This total dependency reminded people of Israel’s time in the desert, a period the prophets of the exile came to think of as a honeymoon when God and God’s people lived in deep intimacy. So exile became for Judah a place of hope, a hope that escaped them in Judah. In Judah they ran around on God with the Ba’als. They maneuvered among the nations to build and maintain a power base. They ignored the covenant’s call for a just and humane society. In exile, stripped of those games, they found themselves once more completely dependent on God. They found the freedom to hope. They found they could trust the future, but not as the result of their own anxious scheming and toil. Those schemes, as we have discovered, could be spoiled with any downturn of the marketplace. No, they could trust the future because it would come to them as a gift from someone they could trust, the covenant God who had not abandoned them, the covenant God who still claimed them as God’s own people.

We, too, as a congregation of God’s people live in exile. We can come to the realization that we are completely dependent on God, that our future lies in God’s hands, and that God still has a new thing to do among us. We can find the freedom that comes from not having to do it bigger, or faster, or more profitably than someone else. We can find the freedom of not having to be fashionable, the freedom of being yesterday’s news and tomorrow’s hope. We can quit trying to succeed in a world that does not value what God values. We can tell our stories. We can live out our peculiar vision of the world. We can create a zone of contagion where people can catch our strange disease, the healthy, holy wholeness that is born out of memory and meaning and hope.

And we can live right now in the gift of hope that God gives us. There will come a day when Christian discipleship won’t be so much work. There will come a day when the struggle to be faithful as God’s people will be replaced by effortless delight. There will come a day when fulfilling God’s desires will come to us as naturally as swimming comes to fish, as flying comes to birds. In the meantime we live as the people of memory; we live as the people of hope. And as long as we cherish that memory and harbor that hope, there will be a future for us. God is not finished here. God still has a great work to accomplish among us. God is not done. And neither are we.

©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.

1 US Department of Labor, “Employment status of the civilian population by race, sex, and age,” October 08, 2010, http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t02.htm.

2 Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. "U.S. Religions Landscape Survey: Religious Affiliation: Diverse and Dynamic." (2008), http://religions.pewforum.org/reports.

Shalom for the City

Proper 23C
Jeremiah 29:1, 4-7
October 10, 2010

Shalom for the City

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

I’m sure you’ve heard the story: A week ago last Wednesday, Gene Granick’s home outside of South Fulton, TN, caught fire. He called the South Fulton Fire Department and they came but refused to put out the fire. Instead, they sat in their trucks and watched as his house burned to the ground.

Inside the city limits, fire protection is a public service, like police protection, but county residents must pay an annual fee of $75 for fire protection. It seems that Mr. Granick had not paid his fee. He forgot, is what he said. So he wasn’t on their list. So they sat and watched until the fire threatened a paying neighbor and then they intervened to protect that house.¹

It has been both fascinating and horrifying to hear the opinions expressed. About half say that neighborliness and compassion dictate that the fire fighters should have responded. About half say that Mr. Granick got what he paid for.

In itself this event is not all that important. It seems to me, though, that it is emblematic of a seismic shift in the bedrock of our culture. It reveals a fault-line between two different ways of living together.

One way I’ll call a “culture of quid pro quo.” Quid pro quo is a Latin phrase, of course, but it simply means, “something for something” or “what for what.” You want me to do something for you? That’s fine. What’s it worth to you? What’s in it for me? We live a good deal of our lives in the culture of quid pro quo. When I go to the butcher counter at Fairway and ask for a pound of chicken breasts, the butcher weighs out and wraps my order and slaps a price label on it. I take it to the front of the store and pay for it. I don’t think about it much and I don’t mind. I don’t expect the butcher to give me meat just because I’m hungry.

On the other hand, when Iowa City was threatened by flood waters two years ago last spring and there was a call for help in building a sandbag levee, People didn’t ask, “How much are they paying?” They didn’t ask, “What’s in it for me?” We just went and helped, even though we had a pretty good idea that the sandbags wouldn’t hold. That wasn’t really the point. The point was that what the community needed at that moment was a tangible display of solidarity. Our efforts were successful not because they held the flood waters back but because they helped to build a community that was desperately needed after the flood waters were gone.

This other way of living together I’ll call a “culture of community.”

Most of us recognize that there are times and situations that call for a culture of quid pro quo and there are times and situations that call for a culture of community. In my lifetime I’ve watched the culture of quid pro quo advance, spurred on by calls for “free markets,” and I’ve watched the culture of community retreat. I’m not the first to notice this. Adrienne Rich, one of our poets—and poets are our prophets nowadays—wrote way back in the mid-90s that she strived to

...note
precisely how the air moved
and where the clock’s hands stood
and who was in charge of definitions
and who stood by receiving them
when the name of compassion
was changed to the name of guilt
when to feel with a human stranger
was declared obsolete.²

There was a time in the United States when the language of compassion was a part of our public conversation, when, if someone wanted to speak for greed, they had at least to disguise it, cover it up and use other words. This reflected the influence of denominations like ours, the mainline denominations. To hear the strident and clamoring voices of quid pro quo today is to awaken from a troubled sleep to discover that the Babylonians have breeched the walls of the city. It is to find ourselves waking up in Babylon itself. It is to find ourselves living in exile in our own land.

The the hills looks the same. The streets, the houses look familiar. But a different language is being spoken. Different gods are being worshiped. Life is moving at a pace and with rhythms that jar us to the bone.

From the membership figures of mainline denominations, to the absence of calls from our church’s leaders for peace and compassion, to the increasing distance between life as it is described in the churches on Broadway and life as it is lived on Water Street, a hundred different clues point us to what I believe is an inescapable fact of our lives in the United Methodist Church today: we are a church in exile.

Living in exile isn’t only painful. It’s also strange. It’s a new place for us. And we have no idea how to do it.

Whenever I gather with other pastors and there is a book table, I pay close attention to the titles of the books and I watch my colleagues. Cokesbury, our denomination’s publishing house, has a pretty good idea of what they can sell to pastors. Let me tell you that books that ask us to think deeply and carefully about where we are are pretty rare. The books that might help us to read the Bible in such a way as to give us some insight and hope are almost non-existent. My colleagues don’t go for those, anyway.

They go for the how-to books. They go to the congregational self-help section. This is where the books that tout the latest technique or serve up the program du jour are found. My colleagues are very busy and they are moving fast, but—if you (and they) will pardon my painting with a broad brush—they have very little idea of where they are going or why. They want a technique they can use or a checklist they can work through with the certainty that they will get the desired results if only they follow the program. The trouble is, they don’t recognize that we are living in Babylon.

Living in Babylon, we are soaking up Babylonian values and habits without even noticing. Peer behind the language of “making disciples of Jesus Christ” and all too often I suspect that what we’re really talking about are customers. We talk about stewardship, but all too often I suspect that what we’re really talking about is increasing income. The church, we say, should be run like a business. Several years ago I heard Bishop Peter Storey, who was Nelson Mandela’s chaplain when Mandela was in prison, say to a class of people being ordained as United Methodist clergy in Ames: “You are not being ordained to serve as the managers of the local franchise of the United Methodist Church, Inc.”³ But for far too much of the time that is precisely what we are being asked to do.

We despair that anything or anyone will ever overcome the Babylonians. But we can hardly be blamed for this. We have no prophets except for the poets and we don’t have time for poets. So we have to turn to our ancient poets and prophets, like Jeremiah.

Here’s what was happening: The cream of Jerusalem society had been exiled to Babylon. They, too, were trying to find their way through a landscape that was unfamiliar. They didn’t know what they were doing, either. Some prophets in Babylon—Ahab son of Kolaiah, Zedekiah son of Maaseiah, and Shemaiah of Nehelam—were telling the exiles that all they had to do was to rise up in arms against their captors and God would liberate them and bring them home. The exile was only a test of their faith and it would soon be over. I think that this message was also born of despair: they could not beat the Babylonians, so at least they would go out in a blaze of glory.

So Jeremiah wrote them a letter, and this is what he said: “Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease.”

Unpack your bags. Settle in for the long haul. That was Jeremiah’s message. They have no right to give their identity away. They have no right to cease to exist. They have no right to become Babylonians. Instead, they are to insure the survival of their community. That means having a place to live, even if they can’t call it home. That means have food to eat, even if it’s not the food they ate at home. That means making sure that there is a next generation and one after that so that their children can learn what it means to be Jews, learn it well enough to be able to teach their own children. They have a mission and it is not theirs to accept or reject. Despair is not authorized. Despair is an indulgence to which they have no right. What do you do when you can no longer carry on? You carry on.

But that’s not all. “Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile,” writes Jeremiah, “and pray to Yahweh on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.” That’s what it says in our translation. But I’m afraid that we are likely to hear “welfare” in strictly material terms, since that’s the way that Babylon or any other quid pro quo culture thinks about welfare. But the word being translated is shalom. “Seek the shalom of the city where I have sent you into exile...”

shalom can be translated a number of ways. Mostly, the NRSV translates it mostly as “peace,” but sometimes as “welfare” or “well-being.” Shalom is the state of being in right relationship, a state in which people are at peace with each other and treat each other justly. When a community has shalom, it enjoys the fruits of peace, a state of well-being that is enjoyed by all its members. When a community lives in shalom, it is unthinkable to stand by and watch a house burn down because its owner has failed to pay an annual fee.

So if the first rule about exile is the rule about carrying on, the second rule is this: there is no separate shalom. The Jewish community—or the church for that matter—cannot enjoy shalom unless Babylon enjoys it, too. That’s not welfare as Babylon understands it, but covenant peace, justice and well-being as God’s people understand it. The call of the exiled community is not to shun Babylonian culture, nor to violently overthrow it, but instead to resist and convert it. The call of the exiled community is to transform that part of the world in which it finds itself.

We don’t know what we’re doing. The how-to books are pretty much useless, written as they are to avoid acknowledging exile rather than to discern how to live in exile faithfully. Like the exiled Jews, we’re not allowed to fade away into the community. Nor are we to overthrow the community in anger and violence. No, we are to transform the community, embracing what is acceptable, changing what we can change, and resisting what we can neither accept nor alter.

We don’t know for sure how to do that. We’re bound to make mistakes. That’s the beauty of not knowing what we’re doing. We have permission to get it wrong, maybe even a lot. What we don’t have is permission not to try. So, just like the Jewish community in Babylon, we’ll try a lot of things, and some of them will work. We’ll try to figure out why and then we’ll adjust a little and try some more. And, also like the Jewish community in Babylon, we may find that this place of exile is the most productive and creative place we have ever been.

Yes, “build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease. But seek the shalom of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to Yahweh on its behalf, for in its shalom you will find your shalom.”

1 MSNBC.com. "No Pay, No Spray: Firefighters Let Home Burn: Tennessee House in Ashes after Homeowner 'Forgot' to Pay $75 Fee " http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39516346/ns/us_news-life/#.

2 Adrienne Rich, “And Now,” Dark Fields of the Republic: Poems 1991-1995 (New York & London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1995), 31.

3 Storey, Peter. "Re-Evangelizing the Church to Its Prophetic Ministry." 2005.

©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.