As I weep for the victims in Colorado I can’t help but wonder why we are surprised when the steady diet of violence we consume as entertainment spills over into real life and death. Centuries ago the Prince of Peace said, “Those who live by the sword will die by the sword.” As another dark night arose this week in Aurora the sad truth of that diagnosis of our human dis-ease became painfully obvious yet again. We are what we consume, and I pray we will learn to change our diet before too many others suffer. Please pray with me for comfort for those who suffer and mourn and for a new commitment to the ways of peace.
Tag: fear and faith
Unforgiveable? I Samuel 3:1-20
Are some sins so bad they are beyond forgiveness, even for God? I sure hope not, but in
I Samuel 3:14 God says, “Therefore I swear to the house of Eli that the iniquity of Eli’s house shall not be expiated by sacrifice or offering forever.” That’s the NRSV translation. Since “expiated” is not a household word, the NIV translation of that verse clarifies things a bit. The NIV says, “The guilt of Eli’s house will never be atoned for by sacrifice or offering.” At least that one leaves off the ominous “forever” of the NRSV. But don’t celebrate that verbiage too soon because both translations agree in verse 13 that this judgment is forever. No matter how it’s translated, this passage is bad news. Eli’s family is guilty of some heinous sin that they can never ever make amends for.
Inquiring minds want to know what the sin of Eli’s family is–in part to be sure that particular big no no is not on our rap sheet, but even more we want to know what this Scripture means about the very nature of the God we worship and want to trust with how we will spend eternity. Are some acts so evil that they are beyond the limits of an infinite God’s power to forgive?
We can all think of potential candidates for the unforgiveable list: genocide, child abuse, hate crimes, cruelty to animals, and murder might come to mind. Many of us have painful memories of things done to us or by us that stay with us so long they feel unforgiveable. But just because we mortals can’t forgive something doesn’t mean God can’t, does it? “The guilt of Eli’s house will never be atoned for” has a ring of finality to it, and with God there’s no higher court of appeal to turn to.
So what is this unforgiveable offense? I’ll summarize, but the details are found in I Samuel 2:11-17 if you want to read them for yourself. First, you need to know that Eli and his sons are priests in the temple at Shiloh. But we are told up front in 2:11 that Eli’s sons are “scoundrels” or “wicked men.” Their offense is that they violate their sacred priestly duties by taking for themselves the very best portions of meat which are meant to be sacrificed on the altar to God. Furthermore, they don’t even attempt to hide their wicked ways but boldly and openly demand the very choicest cuts of meat for themselves and even threaten to take those by force if anyone tries to stop them. Verse 17 concludes this section by saying, “Thus the sin of the young men was very great in the sight of the Lord; for they treated the offerings of the Lord with contempt.”
Sadly, in contemporary times it is easy to draw parallels here to clergy embezzlement of funds entrusted to them for feeding staving orphans or betraying sacred trust through sexual misconduct. It is a given that Christians and clergy in particular must not dodge those hard questions and constantly strive to understand and eliminate the suffering those unacceptable behaviors cause. But a broader question raised by this text is: are those unforgiveable sins? In our eyes? In God’s?
And to muddy the waters even further, for those of us who believe in the priesthood of all believers, the question becomes what offerings of the Lord do you and I treat with contempt? If all of creation is an offering of God to us and we are entrusted by God with all that we are and all we have, not as owners but as stewards, then how does our stewardship compare with that of Eli’s wicked unforgiveable sons? When we betray God’s trust and desecrate God’s creation with toxic waste, or pollute our bodies with carcinogenic junk food, or disobey God’s laws against killing, or violate the sacred vows we made at our marriage or our baptism, does God then say to us, “I swear to you that your sins shall not be atoned for by sacrifice or offering forever?”
The God I know and love does not pass such harsh judgment, and in most sermons and blog posts I would attempt to show why I believe that and bring some resolution to such a difficult question. And I will do that in another post, but not yet.
Sometimes we need to wrestle with the questions of our faith so the answers we find can be claimed as our own. So I’d like to ask you: What evidence do you find in Scripture and in life that speak to you about the nature of God and God’s relationship to human sin? If you were explaining this text to a new Christian or someone living in guilt and fear of an angry God, what would you say? I invite you to explore this for yourself or with friends and if you like share your thoughts by posting a comment.
Let’s dialogue a bit and next week I’ll share my thoughts on what I think the key to understanding this text might be.
HEARING AND BEING THE VOICE OF GOD: Genesis 1:1-5; Psalm 29; Acts 19:1-7; Mark 1:4-11
There’s a famous line in the movie “Cool Hand Luke” where a frustrated prison guard tells the prisoner, Luke, “What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate.” It’s a great line but not quite true. The problem is not communication; Luke heard the message, he just chose to ignore what the prison guard wanted him to do. I wonder if we have a similar communication problem with God. The lectionary texts for January 8th are all about communication, in particular about the power of the voice of God. Literally from Day One (Gen. 1:1-5) to the Baptism of Jesus (Mark 1:4-11) to Paul’s ministry in Ephesus (Acts 19:1-7), God speaks and big things happen. And the Psalm for this Baptism of the Lord Sunday, Psalm 29, speaks directly about the power of “Voice of the Lord” seven times in 11 verses and by implication several other times.
Communication scholars describe Speech-Act theory as the phenomenon by which language has the power to create or change reality. Anyone who has ever stood before a clergy person or a justice of the peace and said two little words, “I do,” knows very well that their lives are forever changed from that moment forward. “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me” is a little ditty most of us learned at an early age. The problem is it isn’t true. Words have power to hurt and heal. Most bullying begins with name calling and naming our political or personal enemies in ways that depersonalize and demonize them is the first step toward justifying abusive and unkind treatment that can ultimately lead to violence and death.
The words we use are a matter of life and death, of light and darkness. Psalm 29 contains a whole litany of things that the voice of God can do: thunder, break cedars, fire, shake the wilderness, whirl oaks, strip forests and cause floods. This must be where the insurance companies get their justification for excluding from coverage (read the fine print) natural disasters as “Acts of God.”
I am more interested in what these texts say about the power of God’s voice to transform human lives than I am the cause of natural disasters. Genesis 1 tells us God spoke light into darkness, and that speech act is far more important symbolically than the on-going debate between creationism and evolution. The darkness God expelled on day 1 of creation is wonderful, but a more relevant question is “what has God done for us lately?” There are still far too many black holes of darkness in our world and our hearts today that need the light of God’s powerful voice of truth.
I love this parable by an anonymous author:
A pilgrim asks a wise one about the moment when we can tell darkness from the dawn. “Is it when I can tell the difference between a sheep and a goat?” she asks. “No.”
“Then is it when I can tell the difference between a peach and a pomegranate?”
“No,” says the elder. “When you can look into another’s eyes and say, ‘you are my brother, you are sister,’ that is the dawn. Until then, there is only darkness.”
Both the Mark 1 text and Acts 19 deal with hearing God’s voice through the sacramental act of baptism. Both texts tell us that John the Baptist preached and performed a baptism of repentance and belief in Jesus as the anointed one who came after John. Mark doesn’t address the perplexing question of why Jesus needed a baptism of repentance because that’s not the point of that text, and not the full meaning of baptism. Repentance is a critical first step in transformation, but only a prelude to what an anointed, spirit-led disciple can do. When Paul asks the Christians in Ephesus “Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you became believers?” they reply, “No, we have not even heard that there is a Holy Spirit.” So Paul proceeds to fix that problem but in doing so creates a theological dilemma for us. Paul baptizes those Ephesians a second time. To this day rebaptism is a controversial issue among Christians of different persuasions, along with what kind of baptism counts, how it’s done, at what age, by whom, etc.
Our different opinions on such matters can sometime be humorous. One person, when asked if he believed in infant baptism replied, “Believe in it! I’ve seen it.” Or when my children were young and we were visiting a Baptist church where my daughter was playing in a piano recital. After the recital our son went up to explore the chancel area and came back to excitedly report, “Dad, they have a Jacuzzi up there!”
Let’s put the debates about sprinkling or pouring or immersing aside for now and focus on one key point of the Acts text and Mark’s account of Jesus’ baptism– what the power of the Holy Spirit does to transform lives. It’s not the water or how or when it’s applied that matters, it’s the voice of God and whether we hear it. Jesus’ public ministry begins from the moment he hears the voice of God saying “You are my son….” The question is have we heard God say, “you are my daughter, you are my son, and with you I am pleased?”
Gospel interpreters sometime wonder if Jesus was the only one who heard God’s voice there beside the Jordan. Given God’s propensity to speak in parables and metaphors and in “a still small voice” (I Kgs 19:12), I’d bet he was. And so would Fred Craddock, I believe, who loves to say that when it came to his call to ministry it would have been so much easier if God had called him in a voice loud enough that his friends and relatives could have heard it too.
We liberal, sophisticated Christians are often afraid of the emotion associated with Pentecostal Christianity. But we dare not let that fear make us miss the positive power of the voice, breath, and spirit of God to transform lives. Jesus is transformed into the Messiah at his baptism and empowered by the voice of God to resist every temptation that Satan can throw at him in the wilderness. God’s voice enables Jesus to find his voice to speak truth and salvation as God’s messenger. We don’t know where Jesus was hanging out till he was 30, but we do know that at this pivotal moment Jesus emerges to “shout from the housetops what the Spirit has told him in a whisper” (Matt. 10:27). By the power of God’s voice he is inspired to go public with his ministry with a passion that enabled him to set his face toward Jerusalem’s cross and never look back, even when his closest friends try their best to persuade him to renounce his calling and take an easier route.
And here’s the important point so don’t miss it– it’s not just Jesus who is transformed and empowered by the voice of God. In the text from Acts 19 we see how the ordinary folks in Ephesus are also changed into God’s messengers. “The Holy Spirit came upon them, and they spoke in tongues and prophesied” (19:7). Those are loaded terms that may need clarification. Speaking in tongues for many of us conjures up images of ecstatic nonsense speech that is unfamiliar and incomprehensible. But what if we interpret tongues to mean that these people were on fire for God and spoke with passion about their faith in ways that people of many different cultures and ethnic groups could understand, as they did on the day of Pentecost (Acts 2)? Acts 19 also tells us these new baptizees “prophesied,” another term that can have negative connotations if we take prophesying to mean what psychics who advertise on late night TV do. Biblical prophets are not fortune tellers or crystal ball gazers. A biblical prophet is simply someone who speaks for God. They are those who know God’s truth and are emboldened by God’s presence in their lives to proclaim good news to a world starving for some.
The world needs people in every walk of life who have heard the voice of God and are willing not only to talk that talk but to walk God’s walk. To do that takes incredible courage and faith in a world where people of faith are often aliens in a strange land. To have the courage of our convictions means that all of us, clergy and laity alike are called to witness to our faith by word and action, even when we know the dangers and risks involved in speaking an uncomfortable truth – in love. The risks of that kind of truth are exemplified quite simply in the fact that the Greek word for “witness” is also the word for “martyr.”
All baptized Christians are called to be witnesses and prophets for God, and the enormity of that calling means we all need to be anointed by God’s spirit. We cannot hope to fulfill the ministry we are baptized into without the power of God’s spirit to guide and direct us. God knows we all need a baptism of repentance, but we also need the power of the Holy Spirit to move us from repentance and forgiveness to become proactive messengers who dare to become the voice of God that transforms lives and the world.
Advent Drama: Mary’s journey from fear to faith
Note: This is the second of a series of brief dramas for lighting the candles of Advent written for Jerome UMC.
Interviewer: On this second Sunday of Advent we continue our journey toward Christmas. Last Sunday we heard about Zechariah’s transition from doubt to hope, and we lit the first Advent candle representing Hope. [he/she lights the candle]
Today we turn our attention to Faith, and our guest from biblical times is a woman of tremendous Faith, Mary the mother of Jesus.
[Mary enters in biblical costume]
Interviewer: Welcome Mary. Please share with us how you felt when you first learned you were to be the mother of God’s Son.
Mary: I was totally shocked when an angel showed up out of nowhere and told me I was to be the mother of the Messiah! Me! A poor young woman engaged to a carpenter. Why would God choose us to raise his son? I was scared to death!
Interviewer: So you and Joseph were engaged but not married yet?
Mary: That’s right, and you can’t imagine what my family and the townspeople would say about that. And what could I tell Joseph? He’d never believe God was the father of my baby! Nobody would. Joseph would assume I had been unfaithful to him. That was considered adultery, and the punishment for that was death by stoning! I was really scared!
Interviewer: I can’t imagine how terrified you must have been. How did you ever handle it?
Mary: It was really strange. The angel told me that God was with me. He said, “Nothing is impossible with God,” and being a devout Jewish girl, I knew this was true. My faith came over me and calmed my fear. I suddenly just knew that I could trust God completely. And from a place deep inside me I said, “I am the Lord’s servant. May it be to me as you have said.”
Interviewer: All of us are called to be such faithful servants who know that with God all things are possible. [Mary lights candle as Interviewer speaks] As we light the second Candle of Advent may it light the way on our journey from fear to faith.
