Sermon: Sunday, May 19, 2013: Day of Pentecost

Texts: Acts 2:1-21  +  Psalm 104:24-34,35b  +  Romans 8:14-17  +  John 14:8-17,25-27

My god-daughter, Katie Russell, gives her testimony at Vanderbilt Divinity School’s baccalaureate service.

A little over a week ago, Kerry and I were in Nashville, Tennessee to see my eldest god-daughter, Katie Russell, graduate from seminary at Vanderbilt Divinity School.  You can imagine that for a preacher and pastor like myself, there’s a special pride in watching your godchild graduate from seminary.

The night before the actual graduation, at the baccalaureate service, I got the added pleasure of hearing Katie give her testimony before her colleagues and her faculty.  She was one of a handful of students invited to do so at this closing worship service for a cohort of newly minted pastors who were preparing to be sent out into the world.

As she opened her remarks she used a phrase that was repeated over and over during the weekend.  Referring to her soon-to-be alma mater she said, “here at the School of the Prophets we learned…” School of the Prophets, I soon learned, wasn’t just a compliment being paid by a student to her teachers, or a preacherly turn of phrase, it is part of that school’s self-concept.  Just as so many schools have Latin mottos (the University of Chicago’s is Crescat scientia; vita excolatur or “Let knowledge grow from more to more; and so be human life enriched;”  Harvard’s is more simply veritas, or “truth”), the Divinity School of Vanderbilt University names itself in its foundational documents dating back to the 1870s a Schola Prophetarum, a school of prophets.

It’s a name the school takes seriously.  Its mission statement names as one of the school’s primary goals that they will “prepare leaders who will be agents of social justice” who will be “forceful representatives of the faith and effective agents in working for a more just and human society that will help to alleviate the ills besetting individuals and groups.”  The graduation program had a full-page description of the Divinity School’s commitments that explicitly state its opposition to racism, sexism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, poverty, militarism and the destruction of the environment.

Still, there was something jarring about hearing a group of people refer to themselves so boldly as the “School of the Prophets.”  Maybe its my midwestern upbringing, but it just felt like bragging.  How could they be so bold?  Who died and named them prophets?

Well, as it turns out, Jesus did.

Growing up I thought a prophet was like a fortune-teller, a kind of biblical palm reader who could see the future.  It probably wasn’t until seminary that I myself was asked to really thoroughly read the prophetic books of the Hebrew scriptures, what we sometimes call the “Old” Testament.  The prophets of the bible sometimes spoke of future things, but just as often spoke to the present moment.  What made them prophets wasn’t that they told the future, but that they told the truth.  God’s truth.

Jesus — the one who lived, and died, and is rising in the world by the power of the Holy Spirit — says to his disciples shortly before his crucifixion,

“If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever. This is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, because he abides with you, and he will be in you. I have said these things to you while I am still with you. But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything, and remind you of all that I have said to you.” (John 14:15-17,25-26)

And, indeed, Jesus is a man of his word.  Throughout these fifty days since Easter morning we have been hearing the stories of the Acts of the Apostles.  We’ve been recalling to ourselves the legacy of a church born in the moment when the Holy Spirit was poured out on those first followers of Jesus, huddled together for safety in the face of a scary world, but filled with power and purpose and sent out for the sake of restoration of God’s good creation.

God’s Holy Spirit fills the church, just as Jesus said it would, and when it does, Peter, their first preacher, remembers the words of another prophet, Joel, who said,

“In those last days it will be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy…” (Acts 2:17a-b)

In that moment of the church’s birth, Peter acts as a prophet, telling God’s truth that the last days are here.  The new heaven and the new earth are breaking into the ones we have known for too long.  Salvation is for here and now.  It has already begun, and we who are flesh, we who are sons and daughters and heirs with Christ to the fortunes of God’s love are called to act, like the apostles.

Looking back at the Vanderbilt graduation, I can see that I was mistaken.  Or, I wasn’t hearing that phrase, “school of the prophets,” correctly.  My midwestern aversion to pretense was bristling against the notion that these people were calling themselves prophets, when all they were really claiming to be was a school.  Because, you see, by the power of the Holy Spirit, we have all been made prophets.

By the power of the Holy Spirit, we are all called to speak God’s truth to a world burdened by lies.  By the power of the Holy Spirit, we are all called to dream incredible dreams and given eyes to see a vision of a future reality breaking into the present moment, a vision that makes these “the last days.”

As prophets, all of us, we need schools and churches and so many other places where we can learn about the legacy of which we are inheritors.  We need Sunday School teachers and small group leaders, seminarians and people to lead the adult education hour.  We need parents and grandparents, aunts and uncles and godparents who will teach us and shape us as we grow into our prophetic callings.  We need community organizers and event planners to call us to action and to put us to use.  We need faithful servants who fill grocery bags and glean the leftover food waiting in fields both near and far.

Icon of the prophet Amos.

This is our school of the prophets, one of many God has built in the world, made of living stones.  We are its faculty and we are its students.  As we move out of the season of Easter and into the long summer of “ordinary time,” we’ll actually be reading the stories of the Hebrew prophets — Elijah and Elisha, Amos and Hosea, Isaiah and Jeremiah.  We’ll remember how God’s people have been called to tell God’s truth to every age, as we live into our own prophetic calling to act.

This call, the call to action, is daunting to be sure, but we are kept in the promise that we will be filled with the power and the presence of the one who has made us prophets: Jesus, God’s Beloved, rising in the world by the power of the Holy Spirit.

As we commence upon this journey, some of us joining this congregation today, others saying goodbye, all of us being sent for a greater purpose, I want to offer you these words — often attributed to Oscar Romero, but believe to have been written by the Roman Catholic bishop Kenneth Untener of Detroit:

It helps now and then to step back and take a long view. The kingdom is not only beyond our efforts, it is even beyond our vision.

We accomplish in our lifetime only a small fraction of the magnificent enterprise that is God’s work. Nothing we do is complete, which is another way of saying that the kingdom always lies beyond us.

No statement says all that could be said. No prayer fully expresses our faith. No confession brings perfection. No pastoral visit brings wholeness. No program accomplishes the Church’s mission. No set of goals and objectives includes everything.

This is what we are about: We plant the seeds that will one day grow. We water seeds already planted, knowing  that they hold future promise. We lay foundations that will need further development. We provide yeast that produces effects  far beyond our capabilities.

We cannot do everything, and there is a sense  of liberation in realizing that. This enables us to do something, and to do it well. It may be incomplete but it is a beginning, a step along the way, an opportunity for the Lord’s grace to enter and do the rest.

We may never see the end results, but that is the difference between the master builder and the worker. We are workers, not master builders; ministers, not messiahs.

We are prophets of a future not our own.

Amen.

 

Sermon: Sunday, February 3, 2013: Fourth Sunday after Epiphany

Texts: Jeremiah 1:4-10  +  Psalm 71:1-6  +  1 Corinthians 13:1-13  +  Luke 4:21-30

So, let’s quickly get caught up. If you weren’t here last week, here’s what you missed. Jesus, having returned from the wilderness where he was tempted by the devil for forty days, begins his public ministry with a preaching tour throughout Galilee. In no time at all he’s been noticed for his extraordinary preaching and teaching. Luke’s gospel says, “he begun to teach in their synagogues and was praised by everyone.” (Lk 4:15) Pay attention to that point: he was praised by everyone.

Having begun to make a name for himself, he returns to his hometown of Nazareth, “where he had been brought up,” (Lk 4:16) and he preaches what I called his “inaugural sermon.” Like any good inaugural address, Jesus drew on the authorizing power of ancient foundational documents — like our Constitution, but in his case, from the scroll of the prophet Isaiah. Jesus unrolls the scroll and finds the place where it was written:

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” (Luke 4:18-19)

I spoke last week about how familiar these words would have been to the people worshipping in the synagogue, how they might have been almost the equivalent of our own familiar trope,

“we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” (The Declaration of Independence, 1776)

Beautiful words from well-known and accepted sources of authority. Words used to inspire us individually and to create in us a sense of national identity. Words from the past assumed to be true in the present as well, and so Jesus ends his reading from the scroll of the prophet Isaiah with these words, “today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” (Lk 4:21)

When we look back, trying to figure out where the trouble began, I think this is one of those important turning points. Jesus preached a sermon based on the community’s foundational documents, one that recalled to them the ethical concerns of the God of Israel, the God who delivered them from the bondage of slavery in Egypt and brought them out of the Babylonian exile. The God of Israel was a God of good news — for the poor, for the captive, for the blind and for the oppressed. To a community of Jews living under the Roman occupation, this sounded like good news for them. So when Jesus concludes his reading by saying, “today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing,” I suppose they heard what they wanted to hear, a stirring sermon by a local celebrity with a popular message — that God was on their side, and things were going to change, here, now, today, starting with Jesus. Perhaps they heard him saying, “Yes, we can!”

And Luke’s gospel says, “all spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth.” Again, pay attention to that point — he was praised by everyone — because it makes what happens next all the more bizarre, even shocking.

Luke has been so intentional in crafting this scene. In the short passage describing his return from the temptations in the wilderness we’ve heard, “he began to teach in their synagogues and was praised by everyone,” (v. 15) and “the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him,” (v. 20) and “all spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth” (v. 22). As a preacher I can tell you, it must have felt great being Jesus in that first act of his public ministry — going from synagogue to synagogue and being praised for his gracious words. I imagine Jesus must have been tempted, having accumulated such popularity so quickly, to just hold on to it. To keep the crowd’s affection.

Instead, he seems to squander it. As the crowd is marveling at his gracious words, Jesus launches into a tirade against all their expectations.

“He said to them, ‘Doubtless you will quote to me this proverb, “Doctor, cure yourself!” And you will say, “Do here also in your hometown the things that we have heard you did at Capernaum.”’ And he said, ‘Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in the prophet’s hometown. But the truth is, there were many widows in Israel in the time of Elijah, when the heaven was shut up three years and six months, and there was a severe famine over all the  land; yet Elijah was sent to none of them except to a widow at Zarephath in Sidon. There were also many lepers in Israel in the time of the prophet Elisha, and none of them was cleansed except Naaman the Syrian.” (vv. 23-27)

The historical and geographical references in his polemical assault on his hometown’s sensibilities can be confusing if you don’t know the stories of Elijah and Elisha found in 1st and 2nd Kings. The essence of what Jesus is saying here is,

“Look, I didn’t come home to make you proud of me. In fact, when I say that ‘today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing’ I’m not really talking about just you at all. I’m talking about the rest of the world as well. You remember that when Israel was afflicted with famine, God sent God’s prophet Elijah to a foreigner, a woman who received him and fed him and whom God blessed. You remember that when Israel was afflicted with illness, filled with lepers, God acted to heal a foreigner, Naaman, the commander of a foreign army.”

Can you see why the crowd turned on him? Do you understand why all the goodwill he’d built up early in his public ministry evaporated so quickly? It would be like a president, being sworn into office, gave an inaugural address in which she or he said,

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all human beings are created equal… and it’s for that reason that I’ve come here today to tell you as a nation that we can no longer use our economic and military power to shape  the world’s political geography to meet our economic ends. As your president, I pledge to you that we will dedicate ourselves to searching out and making real for people of every land and nation their unalienable rights to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. This will mean that we can no longer bomb them, or occupy them, or hold debt against them which was unfairly earned by those who first colonized and oppressed them, or withhold from them food and clean water and life-saving medications. As your president, I promise you that you will not be my first priority.

Can you imagine what the crowds on the mall in Washington, D.C. would do if the president-elect gave that inaugural address… much less the pundits who lurk in newsrooms and studios waiting to crucify leaders of every political persuasion?

That’s the inaugural address that Jesus gives. And, looking back at the entire 4th chapter of Luke’s gospel, we can see that the temptations didn’t end out in the wilderness. Those were the pre-tests, the trial run for the temptation that lay ahead. The real temptation would be to earn the love and the respect of the crowds, and to use that moral and political capital to do nothing. To utter sweet sounding words that made no difference.

Speaking of temptation, there is a real temptation on the part of preachers and their congregations to cast the people who climb into the pulpit on Sunday mornings as the Jesus figure on this Sunday. There is a real temptation for those of us who preach, and those of us who listen to preaching on a regular basis, to use this story as license to say all kinds of agitating and inflammatory things to our  congregations under the aegis of Jesus’ example. “Look,” the preacher says, “Jesus wasn’t afraid to give it to the crowds, and neither am I!”

But for the communities that first gathered around the gospels, for the community that gathered around the gospel of Luke, which flows into the stories of the Acts of the Apostles, they knew that when Jesus appeared in a story it was intended to be for them a sign of how they, as those who had been baptized into Christ, were called to be in the world.

The real-world, present day question raised by this story isn’t, “what will the preacher say to us this morning to set us off the way Jesus set off the crowds in his hometown?” The real-world, present day questions raised by this story — I think — is, “what are we, the body of Christ, the presence of Christ raised from the dead, doing with the goodwill and respect we’ve built up in the world?” And, “how is our community imitating God’s call in Christ Jesus to announce that God’s promises of relief for the poor, release for the captives, new vision for those blinded by crippling world-views, and freedom for the oppressed are intended for everyone… especially those we are conditioned to think of as outsiders, foreigners, even enemies?” In the language of our own, American foundational documents, “what would it mean if we committed ourselves to Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness for all people, not just our people?”

The season of Epiphany, which will soon draw to a close as we prepare for the season of Lent, has consistently been about this: God’s light made manifest to the whole world. Jesus revealed as a different kind of king as wise people from distant lands come to pay homage at his birth. Jesus revealed in the waters of his baptism as God’s beloved child. Jesus power revealed at a wedding, where water and wine become signs of God’s love transforming the world. And here, in Nazareth, in his hometown where people thought they knew exactly who and what Jesus was, he is revealed as inheriting and proclaiming God’s eternal platform of mercy, peace, justice and love for all people.

People of God, you are the body of Christ for this world. In your baptisms you have entered this story — not as the angry crowd, but as the unexpected voice of God, confronting a world that thinks it knows what a Christian is, what a Christian cares about, who a Christian loves, how a Christian acts. You are inheritors of God’s eternal agenda for the world: mercy, peace, justice and love for all people. You have been doing good work for so long. The eyes of all are upon you, and your friends and neighbors, your church and your society marvel at your gracious words. The temptation is so clearly to play it safe. To say nothing offensive. To bless the status quo. To keep the focus of our concern on us and ours. The question hanging in the air before us this morning, and each time we gather as the church, is: what shall we say?

Amen.

Sermon: Sunday, January 27, 2013: Third Sunday after Epiphany

Texts:   Nehemiah 8:1-3, 5-6, 8-10  •

• Psalm 19  •
• 1 Corinthians 12:12-31a  •
• Luke 4:14-21

Official photographic portrait of US President Barack Obama (born 4 August 1961; assumed office 20 January 2009) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It’s been almost a week since the President’s Second Inaugural Address, and pundits are still talking about it.  Some are saying that the President is finally coming out as a liberal.  Some are saying the President’s agenda has been, and remains, staunchly centrist.  Some suspect that his words and his actions will not match up.

Whatever you think about President Obama’s Second Inaugural Address, one thing on which I think we can probably agree is that it can’t be easy, picking the words you will use to define your term as a public servant.  People watch and listen with close attention to try and gather signs about what kind of leader you intend to be, what kind of agenda you will pursue, and how it will effect them and those around them.

Leaders, standing in the gap between the world they have inherited and the world they hope to build, often turn to the past to find sources and resources to affirm and legitimize their agendas.  President Obama’s Second Inaugural Address began:

Each time we gather to inaugurate a President we bear witness to the enduring strength of our Constitution. We affirm the promise of our democracy. We recall that what binds this nation together is not the colors of our skin or the tenets of our faith or the origins of our names. What makes us exceptional — what makes us American — is our allegiance to an idea articulated in a declaration made more than two centuries ago:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

It is a carefully crafted piece of rhetoric.  He begins his remarks by invoking the Constitution, our nation’s foundational document, and by doing so the President suggests that whatever he says next should be understood in light of that document’s purposes and promises.  Then he says, “we recall” — again, placing whatever he says next in the past, as if it is already accomplished — “we recall that what binds this nation together is not the colors of our skin or the tenets of our faith or the origins of our names.”  In this era of diversity-awareness and multicultural education, that may sound like just one more bit of politically correct rhetoric, but I don’t think that’s true.

Because, in fact, it has always been an open question in the United States, and it remains so, whether or not we will imagine ourselves to be a people defined by something other than race, religion, or ancestry.  Indeed, our country’s history is the story of an unfolding identity.

Built with the forced labor of enslaved people.  Fueled by the unpaid and unrecognized contributions of women.  Always receiving new immigrants from every land, but struggling to integrate them without forced assimilation.  “American exceptionalism” has always been a hotly contested term.  Are we a land full of people who consider themselves exceptional by virtue of their race, gender, and national origin; or is there some other characteristic that makes us exceptional?  In his Second Inaugural Address, the President has reached back in time to our foundational documents and sifted through history to make the claim we need to hear here and now, that we are exceptional because of our conviction — however poorly executed — that we are each equal to one another, and that we are born with undeniable rights to life, freedom and self-determination.

Consider the parallels between the public inauguration of our President, observed earlier this week, and the events recorded in Luke’s gospel that we’ve read this morning.  Jesus, having been tested in the wilderness, has returned to Galilee and has begun to preach in the synagogues where his message has been well received.  So he returns home, to the place where he grew up, Nazareth.  On the sabbath, as the congregation gathered for worship, Jesus stood up to read — assuming the role of a teacher and preacher — and he reaches back in time to one of the community’s foundational texts, the book of Isaiah.

The book of Isaiah, written to comfort a community in exile, was the perfect choice to read to the Jews during a time of Roman occupation.  It was scripture that spoke to their circumstances.  It was a document whose purposes and promises seemed crafted for people just like them, people hungry for hope and longing for freedom.  Think about the way those of us born and raised in the United States hear the words, “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”  It’s like a mantra.  We know these words by heart.  They are a part of our national identity.  That’s how these words might have sounded to the Jews in Jesus’ hometown of Nazareth, “good news to the poor… release to the captives… sight to the blind… the oppressed go free.”  Familiar words of comfort for people grown accustomed to the status quo.

Then Jesus does something to change the meaning of those words.  As he finishes reading from this ancient, foundational document, and the people look to him to see what will happen next, Jesus reinterprets its meaning, saying,

“Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

These words, drawn from our foundational document, scripture, are not simply words of comfort.  They are not just assurances of God’s favor.  They aren’t even promises that God will someday act to free God’s people.  These words from the past mean something for the present.  Something for us, here and now.  That’s what Jesus seems to be saying to the people.

Imagine, for centuries people had been reading these words from Isaiah

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me…”

and yet they had assumed the “me” being referred to was someone else, someone yet to come, someone in the future, or maybe someone in the past.  But, definitely, someone else.  Good news, release, recovery, freedom — those were all in someone else’s hands.

But Jesus takes words drenched with time and wrings new meaning out of them for the present moment.  These goods, God’s promises, aren’t meant for other people some other time, they are meant for all people, here and now, and it starts with me.

In his book, Healing the Heart of Democracy, Parker Palmer — an author many of us here at St. Luke’s have read together in small groups — writes about the challenges facing our nation and its democracy today.  He writes,

If American democracy fails, the ultimate cause will not be a foreign invasion or the power of big money or the greed and dishonesty of some elected officials or a military coup or the internal communist/socialist/fascist takeover that keeps some Americans awake at night.  It will happen because we — you and I — became so fearful of each other, of our differences and of the future, that we unraveled the civic community on which democracy depends, losing our power to resist all that threatens it and call it back to its highest form.

I love what Parker is saying here, because it convicts me.  When I bemoan the state of American politics and public life, I have my favorite targets.  I love to complain about the power of big money and corporate lobbyists shaping the national conversation about issues from gun control to health care.  I can heap all kinds of scorn on elected officials and their failure to act to preserve the common good.  These are easy conversations, since they perpetuate the lie that all power resides with someone else.  I can be right, without having to do anything about it.

And this is where I think we too often resemble the good people of Nazareth in today’s gospel.  They came to church hoping to hear a good sermon from one of their hometown heroes made good on the preaching circuit.  They expected to hear something from Isaiah, or another of their people’s foundational prophets.  They presumed the message would be what the message had always been, that they were God’s people, that God loved them and was coming to liberate them, someday.

But Jesus said something different.  In his inaugural address to the people who knew him best, Jesus took ancient words of promise and made the bold proclamation that those promises were meant for here and now.  He issued a call to action, saying “today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

As we’ll hear next week, when the scriptures pick up right where this week’s story leaves off, this doesn’t go over very well.  Already we can imagine why.  It’s one thing to accommodate yourself to the structures of injustice and comfort yourself with the hope that things will one day change.  It’s another matter altogether to be called into the struggle to bring the world into alignment with God’s vision for creation and community.

But that’s what this is.  Jesus’ inaugural address is a summons.  He has chosen his words carefully, and for effect.  He has spoken them in public and now he will act on them.  His term is just beginning, but we already know how it will end.  People will be drawn out of complacency and accommodation to be part of a movement that is changing the world, still.  It is good news for the poor.  It is release for the captives.  It is new vision for those who need a new worldview.  It is freedom for the oppressed.  It is here.  It is now.  It is happening.

Are you with us?