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30th Sunday in Ordinary Time October 24, 2010

GRACE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH

Luke 18:9-14 Rev. Daniel Fultz

Worship 101

There are five characteristics of a healthy church. These are worship, the growing of disciples, connection, service, and inviting others. A healthy church is a place where Christians grow as disciples of our Savior Jesus Christ, where they are connected with each other, where they share their lives together, it is a community that serves the needs of those who face hardship in the community, where others are invited to become a part of this community of faith, and where the Triune God, Father, Son, and Holly Spirit is worshiped.

We do all these here at Grace. We are particularly good I think at being connected, of caring for one another especially in times of adversity. This may be what we do best. We also serve those in need and grow disciples throw our worship and education programs. That which we probably need to work the most on is being inviting. Now, by that I don’t mean welcoming. We are good at welcoming visitors, making them feel at home. Our ministry of hospitality to those who have been in the hospital or are grieving is very good I think. But being inviting is something different. A church that is inviting is one that reaches out into the community and calls others to inter into the joy of being a part of this congregation. Hospitality begins at the door; invitation goes out the door and into the world.

I would like to address each of these five characteristics of a healthy church and I plan to at some point, but today I would like to focus on one of these aspects – worship. It seems especially appropriate, on this day, as we gather here at Tracy Park, to consider what we have come here to do, and the manner in which we do it.

In our lesson today from Luke, Jesus tells us a parable about two men who have come to worship. One is a Pharisee and the other is a publican. To begin with we might want to take a look at who Pharisees and publicans were. Now notice I am saying “publicans” not “re-publicans” – they are something else altogether. Publicans were tax and toll collectors. They collected taxes for the hated Roman occupiers and were viewed as traitors to their country. There were many opportunities for fraud and theft which added to their ill repute. On top of all that, they were Jews who had contact with gentiles and were ritually unclean. Three strikes against them.

Now, what about Pharisees? In spite of the bad reputation they have among many Christians, they really were the good guys. They were devoted to their faith, their families, and their country. They practiced charity and hospitality. Basically they were Presbyterians. At their best they were us at our best. Jesus’ criticism of Pharisees was based not on how bad they were but on how they almost got it right; they were almost there. In this story Jesus holds them up as the good example, the ones you would expect to be right with God, and the publican as the one who you would expect to be un-redeemable. But then Jesus, as he so often does, turns the tables on us as he lifts up the hated publican, and criticizes the beloved Pharisee. They have both come to worship; what is it that makes one’s worship more acceptable to God than the other’s.

There is a lot of talk in church circles these days about worship. There are even those who refer to it as the worship wars. Some prefer one kind of music while others prefer another kind. Some like overhead projection and HD video screens while others don’t like them. Some pastors wear robs and stoles and preach from behind tall pulpits, while others wear open color shirts, that might not even be white. Some have communion at every service, while others celebrate the Lord’s Supper only quarterly, or only once a year. There are churches that have guitar bands complete with drums, orchestras, organs or pianos. Some worship with nothing but a piano or guitar, no choir and little more than a handful of people gathered. Some churches have lots of children and youth, with youth Sundays and children’s sermons, while others haven’t had anyone in their church under 50 in years. There are literally as many ways to worship as there are congregations gathered to worship God. Who’s right? What is the right way to worship God? Are we to worship God in tall steeple monuments, or the little brown church in the vale, or under a bridge in Waco where my niece and her family worship when they are not serving as missionaries in Kazakhstan, on the beach on Padre Island, or here this day in Tracy Park? What is the right way to worship God?

Our lesson today addresses that question. We are to worship God with humility. That really seems to be something that is hard to do. We have our own desires, our own favorite style of music, of preaching, of worship. We enjoy watching the kids come forward, or the youth show off what they learned at camp or in Sunday School. Oh, we might think we are humble, but are we? If we think we know how worship is supposed to be, is that being humble? If we demand that our tastes, our style, our preference be met, is that being humble.

Worship has much less to do with where we do it and what styles of everything we use, or what elements are used, by whom, and when. The really important part of worship is our hearts. What makes worship – worship is that we come to it with the love of God in our hearts. It is when we put ourselves aside and open up our hearts, our minds, our very lives to what God is saying to us.

Real vital alive worship is when we step far enough out of ourselves that we can step into the Holy. Let us pray:

Holy God, creator of all – creator of us – creator of me, I give you thanks that you made me, and that you have not given up on me. Here apart from those things that I have become so attached to I am aware of that attachment and seek to renew my attachment to you. I am sorry that I have come looking for that which pleases me, and I promise now to try, as best I can, with your help, to please you. I pray this in Jesus name. Amen.

29th Sunday in Ordinary Time October 17, 2010

GRACE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH

Jeremiah 31:27-34 Rev. Daniel Fultz

The Forgetfulness of God

The word for us today comes from God’s word the captives in Babylon through the prophet Jeremiah. In this prophetic word we hear of a new relationship, a new covenant that God has made with the people of Israel. This new covenant serves as a corrective to the covenants of Moses and David. We might want to make an important theological point here. I believe that God has not changed in God’s love for human beings but we seem to always be looking for the fine print so we can use the covenant to our advantage.

Back when I was teaching college I would pass out a syllabus on the first day of class. Along with outlining the course the syllabus laid out what was expected of each student in order to successfully complete the course. I soon learned that the students carefully went over the requirements with a fine tooth comb, looking for opportunities to sort circuit the process. Over time I fine tuned the syllabus in order to close as many of those loop holes as I could. Because of that experience perhaps, I read this section sort of like that.

First there is the covenant of Moses, that we also call the 10 commandment. This is, in a way, God’s syllabus for being God’s faithful people. This really makes life much easier. There is no confusion about what’s expected. Do not kill, do not steal, do not commit adultery, have no other gods, etc. Of course that really opened the door for the legal profession, as we began, like my students, to pick the commandments apart. What does kill mean? How much work can be done on the Sabbath? I wasn’t really coveting; I was just admiring my neighbor’s stuff.

Then came the Davidic covenant in which God promised to make the nation of Israel a great nation. It became an unconditional nationalistic covenant. People then began to abuse the idea that God would not abandon them – no matter what. We can do anything we want and God has to keep God’s end of the deal. Yes but, as they soon found out, that does not mean that God will not act to correct these wayward children. God will not be mocked. God is not our servant, we are God’s.

Now the people are in bondage in Babylon, carried off and all seems lost. And their complaint is that they are being punished for their ancestors breaking the covenant that was established through Moss. Furthermore, during the time leading up to this, for the most part, about all that God seems to worry about is the king. If the king is good then God seems to bless the people. If the king is bad then God punishes the people. This is what is meant when the people say, “The parents have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.” So this is the new syllabus, the new covenant that God gives to the people in exile. In it God takes the initiative to seek healing with God’s people. God rewrites the syllabus to say, no each person will be responsible for their own sin. In this new syllabus God promises the people will have a personal relationship with God, not second hand through kings and priests. And it is the law, the old covenant of Moses, that God will write in their hearts; new hearts that desire to follow God, not out of fear but out of thanksgiving and love. God will be our God, and we will be God’s people. No longer will we be depended on others to tell us what God wants from us, we will all seek to follow this God of love – not seeking loopholes in the syllabus, but walking humbly with our God in thanksgiving and in love.

And then there is the greatest promise I know in scripture, “for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.” How amazing. God chooses to forgive and forget. God chooses to let go of the hurt we have done to God, to not hold it against us, to delete it from God’s hard drive. God will not be burdened by old grievances. God will not be shackled by old grudges, but will instead – forget them. This is a difficult thing to do. Maybe it is too hard for us. If we could do it, it would set us free from an awful lot of suffering – but maybe it is enough for us to forgive. But it is not too hard for God.

Years ago I remember skeptics challenging people of faith by asking a puzzle that they thought was quite clever. They would ask, “If God can do anything, can God make a rock so big that God can not lift it?” Then they would smirk as if they had posed an impossible situation, thereby proving to their satisfaction that God does not exist. It is of course just a semantic argument based on the limitations of language, not the limitations of God. But to me, the real issue is here in this text about a forgetful God. Can God do anything? Yes, of course. Can God remember anything? Yes, of course. Can God then forget our sin? The answer illustrates that God can indeed do what defies human logic and ability to understand. Can God forget our sin? Yes, of course. Thanks be to God.

As we read this I feel we should take note of one more element. This passage is written in the future tense. God will do these things. For Christians it is easy to jump to the conclusion that in Jesus Christ this new time has been fulfilled. But, if we are honest with ourselves I think we have to acknowledge that the law of God has not been written on every heart, and that not everyone knows God. This is a promise that is yet to be fully fulfilled. Maybe it is reserved to our lives with God in eternity. Maybe it is reserved for the second coming of Christ. Maybe it is to be in that New Jerusalem that John describes, the city comes down from heaven where there is no temple and “no need for sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God it is light, and its lamp is the Lamb.” (see Rev. 21: 22-23.)

And that to me is the good news. This promise is not for some distant time in the past, for a generation long passed away. This promise is for them and for us, and for generation yet unborn. Even though the darkness seems so dark, and the chaos so ever present, that is not the last word. We are remembered by God. God does not hold a grudge. God seeks us to be God’s people. God is reaching out, not just to kings and prophets and people we have never meet. God is reaching out to us in love, calling us to come home. Amen.

28th Sunday in Ordinary Time October 10, 2010

GRACE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH

Jeremiah 29:1, 4-7 Rev. Daniel Fultz

Making the Best of a Bad Situation

Upon learning that his punishment is to be exile, Romeo Montague, in Shakespeare’s famous play complains: “Ha, banishment! Be merciful, say 'death;'

for exile hath more terror in his look, much more than death: do not say 'banishment.' … But purgatory, torture, hell itself. Hence-banished is banish'd from the world, and world's exile is death: then banished, is death mis-term'd: calling death banishment, Thou cutt'st my head off with a golden axe, and smilest upon the stroke that murders me.”

Romeo is being a little overly dramatic, as teenagers often are. Still, to be exiled, banished, is a horrible thing. Sent away from home, from all that is familiar; all that is assuring, comforting, life giving - and thrust into the company of your enemies. In many ways it must feel worse than death.

One of the people convicted of conspiring to assassinate Abraham Lincoln was Dr. Samuel Mudd. Mudd was a small tobacco plantation owner in southern Maryland, about 30 miles S.E. of Washington DC where he owned slaves. In fact, he defended the institution of slavery as being divinely ordained. Although he professed his innocence in the Lincoln affair there was evidence to the contrary and he was spared the death penalty by a single vote of the nine – man panel of military court judges. He was sentenced to life in prison at Fort Jefferson, on an Island a few miles west of Key West, Florida. Shortly after he arrived the garrison at the fort was replaced by the 82nd United States Colored Infantry. Soon after that he tried to escape. He was put in solitary confinement for three months and was sent to work in the carpentry shop rather than the infirmary. At this point he surely must have felt that he had been exiled to another world. Everything he believed in was lost and he was in the hands of his enemies.

This was a little like what it must have been for the Jews, sent off into captivity in Babylon. They were the leaders, the theologians of a religion that taught them that they were favored among nations and that God would protect them from their evil enemies. Now they have lost everything and are carried of f to a foreign land in the hands of their enemies. Every morning they awake to strange sights and sounds, strange people, speaking a strange tongue, worshiping strange gods, living in another culture altogether; forced into a new status and a new way of life.

In is to these people that the word of God comes by Jeremiah who writes, “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 welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.” (v.6-7)

The word there that the NRSV (and the RSV, your pew Bibles) translates as welfare is shalom. Shalom means peace, but it means a lot more than the absence of conflict. It means completeness, wholeness, being what God created you to be. It means harmony with God, with creation, with one another, and with yourself. It is when everything works together, everything fits. It is what we all want in our lives, even if we don’t know what it is our how to get it. Here, God tells those who have lost everything, who have been caste into the pit of despair, who find themselves in what must have been the opposite of shalom, that to find shalom they must seek the shalom of the city/ the place/ the culture in which they now find themselves. For it is in the shalom of that place that they will find their shalom.

How difficult this must have been for the Jews to hear. Set down your grudge. Set aside your resentment, and walk away from what you thought was holy, and embrace the good of your enemies.

In what ways do we find ourselves in a strange world? My grandmother was born in 1895 in Northern Virginia. She grew up in a time and place very different from today. She died in 1977. She never experienced much of what we take for granted today. I used to go visit her once a week and she would fix me supper. (She was the greatest cook that every lived – they standard by which all are compared.) After supper we would watch ‘The Walton’s’ TV show. It was set not far from where she grew up and in a time in which she was a young woman. As I watched that show with her I got a glimpse of what her life had been like. By 1977 things had changed a great deal, not as much as they have in my lifetime however. Think of all the changes the next generation will see. I hope they are good changes – but whatever they are, they like my grandmother, and like you and I, must make peace/ shalom with this new world we find ourselves in. I’m not suggesting that you have to follow every new trend that comes down the pike, but I am suggesting that when we resent the changes that are already among us, when we keep our heads and our hearts in a place that no longer exists, we rob ourselves of the blessings that God has in store for us, and we rob God of our being what God has made us to be. Seek the shalom of the place in life where God has put you, pray for that place, for it is in God’s blessing of that place that you will be blessed.

Before long, yellow fever struck Fort Jefferson and the infirmary doctor died. Mudd was asked to work in the infirmary, which he did and was responsible for saving many lives. As a result of his heroism the soldiers at the fort (remember who those soldiers were) wrote a petition to President Johnson sawing that he undoubtedly saved many lives. Later he was pardoned, he returned to his home, fathered five more of his nine children, and lived a prosperous life. I don’t know if he found shalom, but we can clearly see, I think, that he did not let anger, resentment, and fear destroy him as it easily could have, but in seeking the welfare even of his captors, he found release and prosperity for himself.

In what ways are you an exile from your home land? Are there ways in which your own anger and resentment break the peace in your family, in your church, community, or in your dealings with others? Are there hurts in your life that are just too great, just too deep to let go? What is your exile? What will it take for you to be released? “Seek the shalom of the city where I have sent you into exile,” says the Lord, “and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its shalom you will find your shalom.”

Amen.

World Communion Sunday October 3, 2010

GRACE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH

Luke 17:5-10 Rev. Daniel Fultz

Servants of a Servant Lord

These two short passages from Luke make us uneasy; they cause us to squirm in our seats. At first glance, if we read these words as scripture is often read, in a tone of criticism and condemnation, we hear first that our faith is less than that of a mustard seed, for if it were even that small we too could do miraculous things. And then, as if we are not already feeling bad enough about ourselves, Jesus seems to be holding up as exemplary the institution of slavery and calling us “worthless slaves.” Not very encouraging. Not very hopeful or uplifting, is it?

So, let’s take another look at this reading and see if we cannot find some good news in here somewhere for us. First let us look at the context of the story. Jesus has just told the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, how the rich man arrogantly mistreated poor Lazarus. Then he begins to teach about how the followers of Jesus are a community. (It is helpful here to remember that Luke is not writing this gospel like a newspaper reporter recording the events as they occur, but rather is writing to the church 40 years or more after the resurrection. Before then everyone thought that Jesus would return any time, so what was the point of writing this down?) So, this community, the church, must be careful how we treat each other. We must encourage each other, guide one another in following Christ, and forgive one another. Even if a “brother or sister sins against you seven times, and repents you must forgive them.” Better to be tossed into the sea than to cause a brother or sister to stumble. It is to this command to forgive that the apostles ask for increased faith.

That is the funny thing about faith. We are always thinking about it as thought it were something that we posses, that we can wield like a sword or a hammer in the accomplishment of our will. Another way we view faith is as if it were some kind of currency, some credit in a celestial bank account that if we have enough we can purchase favors from God. “If you have enough faith, God will heal you. If you have enough faith God will protect you. If you have enough faith…” We do the same thing with prayer. If we pray right, is we say the right thing, believe hard enough, God will do what we ask. It is not our faith or our prayers that work miracles, it is the one in whom we put our faith, the one to whom we prayer.

Now, let’s turn off the negative and condemning tone and listen again to how Jesus answers them. “Oh, you don’t need more faith, just a tiny bit will do. Even faith the size of a mustard seed can accomplish the impossible. It is not the size of the faith that matters but that the faith is in God and not in yourselves.” For the question is not really the amount of faith but in whom the faith rests, in God.

Matthew remembers a similar time when Jesus, in another context, talks about the faith of a mustard seed moving mountains, in this story it is a Mulberry tree, a particularly tenacious tree with deep roots that resists being removed. Faith/trust placed in God can result in the most tenacious difficulty being removed and tossed into the sea. Here, as opposed to just a few verses earlier, it is not the unforgiving and errant disciple that is tossed in the sea, but it is the ‘tenacious difficulty,’ the mulberry tree, that is the lack of forgiveness, that is cast away forever in the depth of the sea.

Therefore my friends, do not despair, and do not give up. The faith you have, no matter how small is more than enough, for it is not your faith that saves you, but the one in whom you put your faith, and that one is sure and worthy of our trust.

That leads us to the second part, the parable of the ‘worthless slave.’ Is Jesus telling us that the horrid practice of human bondage is justified in the eyes of God? Certainly not. In all its forms, Jesus makes it clear that all persons are precious and of great value to God. Remember, this section is on the importance of the community.

Also, without justifying any system that empowers some at the expense of others, it is important to also remember that our image of slavery comes from the 18th and 19th centuries in the Americas where the institution of slavery hit an all time low. Slaves were seen as property by virtue of their race. They were treated as sub-human with no rights and no protections. In the time of Jesus it was very different, a slave might be so because of a dept, and once that dept was repaid the slave would be set free. The slave also was recognized as a person under the law and had some protection and some rights. Even so, that is in no way to justify the system.

Here Jesus is simply taking a system that is well known to his audience, and to the audience of Luke, and pointing out that we should remember who is in charge and who is not. Who is working for whom? At first Jesus draws us in as the slave owner, but later he reveals that we are the ‘worthless slave’ or possibly better translated ‘humble servant,’ just doing what we are told.

How ironic this story sounds when heard from our resurrected Lord. For it is Jesus who is the Lord of all. It is we who are the humble servants, but it was he who first served us. It was he who, as Paul tells us in Phillipians2:8 “humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death – even death on a cross.”

This humble one, this Servant Lord, encourages us, even as he calls us to encourage one another, to put out faith, as tenuous and trembling as it may be, in God, who alone is worthy of our faith and trust. Jesus encourages us to remember that all is in God’s hands, not in ours. And that, in God’s hands, wonderful things do happen: The institution of slavery, in much of the world is abolished – though it still plagues thousands around the world. Polio has been virtually eradicated. Apartheid has fallen. In much of the world women have been released from demeaning status. Rights for workers are protected. Diseases that once wiped out generations have been all but conquered. In many, many ways, all over the world tenacious mulberry trees have been planted in the sea.

Today, as we hear this gospel afresh, on this World Communion Sunday, it is timely for us to consider the scope of Christ’s call to community. Our brother and sister can no longer be considered only as those in our family, town or even nation. Our community extents to the corners of the earth, and our call to encouragement and forgiveness is exceeded only by the power of the one in whom we put our trust. To the one God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, be all honor and glory, now and forever. Amen.