Paul – Page 10 – Salvaged Faith

Down to the River to Pray

Posted on May 4, 2010Leave a comment

The last few days have been simply overwhelming in my life. The first reason is that there is just a lot to do. My weekend was jam packed full of good church related things like a Holy Spirit filled training with leaders from my church and a beautiful celebration of marriage and excitement about renovations being made at the church. But there is also a lot of heaviness of heart that comes from my cousin being sick and searching for answers and my husband’s great-grandmother facing the end of her life and seeing pictures and hearing stories of my last hometown Nashville under water.

I opened up my worship planning book this afternoon trying to figure out what to preach on. For the past few weeks I have been following our churchwide bible study (although most days, I’m not sure people get the connection between the two) and this week the topic is the Household of God – the creation of God’s people who are sent to be witness to God’s love. It fits in okay with the whole Mother’s Day thing happening, but for some reason in the midst of all of my exhaustion and anxiety, it feels a little too schmaltzy.

Want further proof of my “unsettledness” – just listen to my dream last night. I was in an elevator with these two twenty something women who were gossipping and saying horrible stuff about other people and the elevator started to tip and we heard a snap and then went plummeting downwards – the elevator falling faster and faster and faster down the shaft with screams and shouts until I woke up.

So, when I opened up the book of Acts today, I found it kind of funny that Paul was dreaming too. A man stood pleading in his dream – COME HELP US! And in that plea, Paul felt the urgency of God’s calling and immediately the band of evangelists packed up their bags and made a long journey to Phillippi.

And they wandered around in the city for a few days, settling in, seeing what would arise, and finally on the Sabbath they went down to the river… “where we supposed there was a place of prayer.”

I read that phrase and my heart skipped a beat. Because there is a lot of praying happening by the river these days. I don’t know anything about Ancient Roman culture or why they guessed that people would be praying at the river, but I know today that praying happens at the river. I’m not sure what Paul and Luke and the others thought they might find there – but I know that if I were able to head over to the Cedar River here in Iowa or down to the Cumberland River in Tennessee, or even to the Mississippi River Delta and the coastlines of the Gulf of Mexico there would be a lot of praying going on.

COME HELP US! the vision came in Paul’s dream. And they got up and left and went down to the river to pray.

We could talk about the church gathered at the river and have the visions from Revelation in our minds… the faithful gathered at the river with their beautiful robes, but instead my mind is going to pictures of the church gathered at the river with sandbags and stories of hope and songs of peace and offerings of money for recovery. My mind is going to images of churches full of people who have just come from the river and are now stopping for a free meal and rest for their tired arms and legs. My mind is going to images of churches that have traveled hundreds of miles to come to the river and help rebuild.

And as we head down to the river to pray and help and listen and cry and share… as we are the family of God down by the riverside… maybe others will hear our stories of hope, like Lydia did. Maybe they will be moved by the good news and they will put down what they are doing and open their hearts to us and join us in this journey.

Everything is not alright today. And maybe my dream was just an indication of the helplessness that I feel as things fall apart. But if we go down to the river to pray with our brothers and our sisters and our mothers and our fathers we might just find the strength we need to keep going and the hope that we need to survive.

Strong in the Broken Places

Posted on July 5, 2009Leave a comment

All of us are gathered here this morning to celebrate. In fact – if we didn’t have something to celebrate, each of us would be inside our own churches or maybe even still in bed this morning. But no! We got up, we got dressed, we brought out the lawn chairs this morning because there is so much to celebrate we just couldn’t stay home! We just couldn’t stay quiet! Can I get an Amen! (AMEN!)

Isn’t it such a great day to get together and celebrate the fact that we suck? Yes you heard me right. We suck. We are not perfect. We can’t do it all. We are not the best, or the brightest, or the most talented. We don’t have the most money, or the biggest churches, or even… and I know I’m going out on a limb here… we probably don’t even have the most wonderful pastors in the entire world. We make mistakes… a lot of them… all of the time. We are a nation that is stressed out, frustrated by our jobs, worried about our families, just trying to make ends meet in a world that seems to be out to get us.

Now – I know that doesn’t sound like very good news. That doesn’t sound like a very good reason to celebrate either… but hang in there for just a second!!

Stanley Hauerwas, a theologian and ethicist at Duke University, has a rule that I think applies here. His rule is this: You always marry the wrong person. But that rule has a very important qualifier – the wrong person is the right person.

Pastor Brian Volck heard that rule of Hauerwas’ and realized that our relationship with God could be described the same way. Volck writes, “We in the church Christ gathers are generally a nation of rebels, impudent and stubborn. We repeatedly go whoring after idols of status, security and national pride or, out of false humility (oh, I couldn’t possibly make a difference in that situation, we) fail to respond when we see members of the Body harm others and themselves. And – here’s the catch – the Creator of the Universe chooses us to be His people, sending us into the world unarmed, scarcely ready, flawed, dependent… In short, we are the wrong people for the job.”

But you know what? It’s precisely because we are the wrong people that we are such a perfect match for God’s plans.

In our scripture for this morning, we find Paul writing to the church in Corinth. Now, we may not know all of the circumstances, but it is safe to assume that the people in Corinth thought Paul might be the wrong person for the job as well!

Corinth was a city that was all about power and strength. They hosted athletic contests and games where competitors outdid one another in feats of strength. They were an economic power house being a huge harbor on the Mediterranean Sea. Power and success were worshipped in Corinth much as they are in the United States today – even among the Christians that Paul ministered to there. And Paul had impressed them with his letters, but something about Paul-in-person, turned them off. Two chapters before our reading today, we find one of these complaints quoted… “His letters are weighty and strong,” some Corinthian writes, “but his bodily presence is weak, and his speech contemptible.”

The people in Corinth much preferred the “superstars” who came into town after Paul left – the traveling circus of visions and wonders and contemporary music and dramatic preachers. Superstars who swept them up in an emotional fury and then left them begging for more! Superstars who were paid a pretty penny for their services.

Compared to these showmen, Paul seemed rather lame. He didn’t charge anything for sharing the word of God with them. He seemed to always be getting in trouble with the local governments. And he wasn’t that entertaining when he showed up either. He spent way too much time telling them what not to do, rather than making them feel good about themselves. We don’t know all of the details of the exchanges back and forth between Paul and the followers of Christ in Corinth, but there were some problems there.

So part of the reason that Paul is writing to the church is because he needs to defend himself a bit against the misguided theology of his opponents. With great sarcasm and irony, Paul writes to compare himself with these “superstar apostles” who have been visiting Corinth as of late.

You have no problem putting up with those fools, he writes, so let me tell you just how foolish I am. Instead of boasting of all of the things I can do like they are so prone to do, I’ll boast of my weaknesses! I am a fool for Christ. I’ve been beaten, imprisoned, shipwrecked, robbed, hungry, thirsty, and homeless – you can’t necessarily call that successful ministry by the world’s standards. Oh, I can match them, vision for vision if they want to talk about ecstatic experiences and revelations from God – but I’m not going to play that game. I will not boast of anything but my weakness and God’s power.

In fact, Paul writes, just to help me remember that I am weak but God is strong, I was given a thorn in my side – a permanent reminder in my life – that I am not perfect, that I don’t have it all together, but that God chooses to work through me anyways. I don’t have to be everything because God is everything and God’s power is made perfect in our weakness.

We may not be the right people for the job, but through God’s grace we are perfect for the job.

Paul is desperately trying to tell us some good news! News that is contradictory to the Corinthian view of power and to the ways of this world… it is because we are weak, that we are so strong in God. It is because we are flawed and imperfect that God’s grace has room to maneuver. It is when we get our overinflated egos out of the way that people can see Jesus Christ in our lives.

Throughout history, God has chosen the wrong people to be his servants. He chose Jacob the trickster, Moses the murderer, David the adulterer, Mary and Joseph, a poor unmarried couple to nurture the Christ Child, a whole band of disciples who got it wrong more times than they got it right. And God chose Paul – a persecutor of the church to be one of its greatest evangelists. In each and every single one of those partnerships – it was God’s power working through their lives, not any personal strength that they had.

Earnest Hemingway wrote that “Life breaks all of us, but some of us are strong in the broken places.” In the church, we might rephrase that to say that we are all fallen and broken people, but some of us turn our brokenness over to God and through God’s grace, we become strong in the broken places. God uses our hurts and our pains and our frustrations and our failings and makes something beautiful out of our lives.

This is a time for celebration. We come to celebrate this Independence Day holiday, and to celebrate the birthday of our community – and in the midst of that celebration there is a lot of boasting. But let us also remember to boast about our weaknesses. Let us also remember to boast about the places where our communities are broken. Let us remember a hospital that almost closed, and a river that threatened to overrun the town. Let us look through the pages of our history and never forget the times when only God’s grace got us through.

As we gather today around this table as the family of God, some of us are feeling quite broken. We may not speak of it, but we all know that it’s there. We need to remind one another that through God’s grace, we can become strong again; we can endure whatever hardships come our way.

Let one another know of your struggles. Don’t be afraid to speak them out loud! Don’t feel like you have to pretend that everything is okay when it’s not… Because it is in those broken places in our lives that God does his best work. It is our faith in the midst of those broken places that gives us the foundation we need to stand on.

God’s grace was sufficient for Paul. God’s grace is sufficient for me – in spite of my weakness. God’s grace is sufficient for you… And God’s grace is sufficient for this nation and this world – no matter how broken, how unredeemable we may seem. Amen. And Amen.

Gotta Serve Somebody

Posted on June 29, 2008Leave a comment

Last week, we spent some time on Sunday morning asking about who we choose to serve. And as we did so, we focused on priorities… about what happens when you choose to place one thing at the forefront of your life. When you make one thing more important than all the rest.

And you know what? We are going to think about it again this morning. Because the question of “who we serve” is so much harder and more difficult than it looks. It is painful really to have to ask the question… to place one thing above another, to make those kinds of choices, because it means that some things in life – some things that we truly love – have to be placed second. Or third. Or stop becoming a part of our lives all together.

If last week we look at this question from the perspective of priorities, this week, the question comes at us from the perspective of love. What do you love more than anything?

What are you “in love” with more than anything?

I ask the question that way, because when we think about being in love with something – or someone – we forget how often our culture uses the language of servitude and slavery. Last night in fact, I was out to dinner with my brothers and my dad and after we finished eating my brother, Tony pulled out his phone and called his wife. Darren proceeded to kid him: “Boy, are you whipped!”

Oftentimes, you will hear someone talk about being “tied down” with someone – as in – not available, or even worse a spouse referred to as a “ball and chain” – or the thing they are imprisioned to!

Bob Dylan once sang a song called “Gotta Serve Somebody.” And the things we are slaves to are the things we love. As much as we love to talk about freedom here in the United States, the truth is, we are always, every day, serving someone or something. We are always, every day, slaves to something. Whether it is our jobs or our families or a certain value like freedom itself – we live our lives so that that thing determines all of our actions.

And for most of us, we serve that thing because we love it. Or we love what it will bring us. We love it so much that we would be willing to do ANYTHING for it.

If like Bob Dylan sang, we’re gonna have to serve somebody… or something – then I guess what Paul is really trying to ask us in today’s passage from Romans is: Why can’t that be God?

In the Book of Romans, Paul takes us on a trip from our old sinful lives, where we loved everything – ourselves, sin, the world, everything under the sun more than we loved God, and he is taking us to a new place where we choose to willingly submit ourselves to God’s will because he loved us, and because we love him. We stop being slaves to sin and we now becomes slaves of God – slaves of righteousness.

We don’t like that slave word. It makes us uncomfortable. We like to have choice. We like to have freedom. We want to have our own thoughts and actions and wills come into the picture. We want to soften the image up a bit with a word like “serving.” And for a while I thought that would work just fine. We could take the hard edge off. I mean, who doesn’t want to serve God?

But Paul specifically uses “slave” in this text for a reason. He does it because we really and truly have been slaves to sin. We have been stuck in patterns and lives that we didn’t want to live. And Christ broke free those chains and set us free… set us free to choose a new yoke. Set us free to choose a new master. Set us free so that we could make the decision and choose of ourselves who we would serve this day.

Because we’re gonna have to serve somebody.

Paul goes even farther and as a prime example of what it means to love God in this way turns to that father of our faith Abraham. And I think he does it to say that this whole following God thing isn’t easy. At all. We have lots of great stories to tell about Father Abraham… and this mornings reading from Genesis isn’t one of them. It is a painful story. It is difficult. And many times it leaves us with more doubt about God than faith. What kind of God would demand human sacrifice? What kind of father would willingly lead his own son up that mountain?

This is a story about love. And about loving two things. And about trying to choose and decide which is more important. And nothing about it is easy.

Isn’t that what Matthew has also been telling us for the past few weeks? That following God isn’t easy? Just last week we had that extremely difficult passage where we are told

“35For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; 36and one’s foes will be members of one’s own household. 37Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me; 38and whoever does not take up the cross and follow me is not worthy of me. 39Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.”

The week before that, we focused on being sent by God to the hurt and helpless of the world, but if we had kept reading that passage in Matthew we would have been told:

16“See, I am sending you out like sheep into the midst of wolves; so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves. 17Beware of them, for they will hand you over to councils and flog you in their synagogues; 18and you will be dragged before governors and kings because of me, as a testimony to them and the Gentiles… 21Brother will betray brother to death, and a father his child, and children will rise against parents and have them put to death; 22and you will be hated by all because of my name. But the one who endures to the end will be saved.

No one ever said this following God stuff was going to be easy. And the thing is, if we don’t whole-heartedly give ourselves, 110% into his care, we won’t have the strength, the courage, the power of the Holy Spirit within us to endure to the end. If we let our own selfish thoughts, our own loves, everything else that pulls on us and drags us back down into that pit of sin have a voice, then we won’t make it. So we give ourselves fully and totally over to God and trust that He will get us through. We trust that God loves us and knows what is best for us. We hold fast to the truth that our lives are in the palm of God’s hand.

We gotta serve somebody… why not let it be God?

And that takes us back to Abraham. Abraham who truly loved and cherished his son. Who loved his son, not just because he was the promised heir and the future of his line. But because this was the joy of Sarah’s own heart and a gift from God. And probably because of his dimples and his curly hair… I always picture Isaac with dimples and curly hair.

Abraham loved Isaac. But Abraham also loved and served the Lord. Abraham who was practically a king in his own right with herds and flocks and land and a trained army at his command. Abraham who had no want for any money or power. Abraham had to serve somebody too. And he could serve himself. He could choose to align himself with others and serve them. He could serve his wealth. But he didn’t. He chose to love and serve the Lord.

And then God does this terrible, terrible thing. God tests Abraham. God says: Put ME first. Above everything else. Even above this precious gift of a child that you love so much. Take him, take your son, your only son, the only person who really matters to you, that one person that you love so much, and take him up to Mount Moriah and offer him as a burnt offering.

Maybe what I find terrifying about this story is that Abraham doesn’t say a word in response! He doesn’t cry out! He doesn’t protest! He just gets up extra early the next day and goes!

I have trouble with this story. I’m not a parent yet, but I cannot even imagine entertaining the possibility of such an act. It is horrifying. It is awful. The only way that I can even begin to wrap my head around such an idea is that Abraham did it because he loved his Son, but he loved and trusted God more. He not only loved God, but he put his life and his son’s life in God’s hands. He gave himself 110% over to God.

And the reason I know this is that when Abraham and Isaac were making their lonely way up that mountain, with the wood strapped to Isaac’s back, with the torch and flame being carried in Abraham’s hand and Isaac looked around and asked where the lamb was, Abraham didn’t flinch. He didn’t panic. He didn’t doubt. He looked his son right in the eye and he said “God will provide.”

He knew that whatever end God had in mind was the best. Whatever end God had in mind could bring no harm. Whatever end God had in mind would come to pass if Abraham followed and listened and obeyed.

That doesn’t make the story any less horrific. Isaac was bound, lying on the altar and Abraham had his knife raised in the air before God stopped him. It was only at the last possible nano-second that a ram appeared. The story isn’t easy. It isn’t nice and tidy. It’s kind of crap actually. It is not the kind of reading that we want to claim as being a part of our faith. It’s not something that we ever want to experience, or want anyone else to ever have to experience. The trouble with this passage is that it means “even when God says crazy, unimaginable, horrible things, you need to listen to him.”

Because you gotta serve somebody.

I think we can hold this passage as a part of our message today with a few caveats. 1) When we choose to serve God, we don’t do it on our own… but we do it in community. And so there are other people around us who can help us to tell whether or not God is really speaking and whether we should act. Faithful people who can tell us whether or not we are ourselves crazy. 2) Abraham had a happy ending in this story. His son was spared. But there are many people all across this world who chose to follow God and who suffer for it. Who lose their lives or whose families are in danger. And things don’t always work out to be such a happy ending. But they do so, because as individuals and as families, they trust that their lives are in the palm of God’s hands.

Whatever we make of this passage, we can say without a doubt that no one can ever question who Abraham chose to serve. That is why Paul calls Abraham a righteous man. He trusted with his whole self the God whom he chose to serve. He loved God and put his life in God’s hands. He believed that the end God had in store…

And by saying that, I don’t believe that the end that Abraham was seeking justified his means. No, I think that when we talk about our journey of faith, the ends and the means are really the same. The only way that we get to experience that wonderful, beautiful end that Paul talks about – of life with God and of freedom to serve God through Christ is by accepting that it is a gift and not something we earn, and by living our lives every day in that reality. Or as the Psalmist says, “I trusted in your steadfast love; my heart shall rejoice in your salvation.” I trusted that you loved me first and so I was able to love you. I trusted in your promise and gave myself over to you, and so every day your love and your grace flows through my body and allows me to serve you ever more. We have the choices to love and serve God freely… because we know that God loves us. Amen and Amen.