judgment and grace – Page 4

God as Puppeteer or Quarterback?

October 6, 2015 by Steve Harsh, posted in Christian Discipleship, Faith and Values

An important question about the nature of God was raised in a Bible study I am in last night. We are studying Exodus 2 and came to the scene where Moses kills an Egyptian who is abusing one of the Hebrew slaves. The question raised was, “Did God want Moses to kill that Egyptian?” Some argued yes, because it was necessary for the rest of Moses’ preparation to be a leader. Others said there are numerous stories in the Hebrew Scriptures where God tells people to kill someone. (Note: those stories were all written by the victors/killers who were interpreting God’s will from their perspective and likely to justify their actions. Jesus preached and lived a very different Gospel.)

I reject the puppeteer model of God’s control of our lives, and I do not believe it was God’s intention for Moses or anyone to kill another human being – sort of goes against the 6th commandment don’t you think? Rather I think God is more like a quarterback who has to call audibles and change the play a lot when circumstances require it. God takes our mistakes and makes the best of them, using them to teach us. In Moses’ case his homicidal outburst was the vehicle God used to get him out into the wilderness where God could work on him and get him ready for the work ahead.

Leslie Weatherhead’s great little book, The Will of God (based on a series of sermons he preached in London during World War II) is one of the best discussions of this topic ever. Weatherhead describes three dimensions of God’s will – God’s intentional will – what God really wants to happen; God’s circumstantial will – what God makes of the situation when human free will changes the game plan; and God’s ultimate will – what the eventual outcome is. In Moses’ case God’s intentional will would be a peaceful resolution of the conflict Moses witnessed and liberation of the enslaved Hebrews; God’s circumstantial will or Plan B was to use Moses’ escape into the wilderness as a time of spiritual formation and preparation, and God’s ultimate will was to empower Moses once he was ready to lead the liberation of God’s people. The ultimate result is the same as the original intention; it just took a different path and about 40 years to happen.

It took that long because Moses wasn’t ready. I heard Rev. James Forbes preach on the Exodus many years ago and still appreciate his insight into that issue. Forbes said we know Moses’ wasn’t ready for leadership when he killed the Egyptian. He had the motivation; he was angry about the suffering of his people, but he let his anger consume him. What God needed was the compassion for those who suffer, the passion for liberation, the fire in the belly, but the maturity not to let that passion consume him. Forbes said that’s part of the significance of burning bush story in Exodus 3 where Moses finally hears God’s call. The bush was burning but it was not consumed.

When that happens, our will is in harmony with God’s playbook, and God’s ultimate will is done. No one knew that better than Jesus who prayed the prayer we all must pray, “Not my will but thy will be done.” Amen.

Finding Our Way Back to God: The Search for Meaning, Micah 6:1-8

October 4, 2015 by Steve Harsh, posted in Christian Discipleship, Faith and Politics, Faith and Values

Many years ago I overheard a dinner table conversation between my in-laws that stuck with me. This was back in the days before bucket seats and consoles with gear shifts and cup holders began dividing the front seats of cars like the Berlin wall. For those who don’t remember those good old days, the front seat was a bench seat and dating couples could snuggle up close to each other while driving. We didn’t need cell phones to be guilty of distracted driving. My in-laws had been married for many years at this point, and my mother-in-law was reminiscing about their dating days and how she used to sit over in the middle right next to her beloved. And she asked, “Why don’t we do that anymore?” Her husband got a mischievous grin on his face and said, “Well, I’m not the one who moved.”

As we consider how we find our way back to God the first thing we need to remember is that God isn’t the one who moved either. And our text from Micah addresses the question of how we make that journey.

We sometimes move away from God because we are searching for purpose and meaning for life in a scary confusing world. What is our passion, our purpose for living? What gets us out of bed in the morning saying? And how we answer that question is one of the keys to finding our way back to God when we feel lost and like running away.

The most familiar verse in the book of Micah is one attempt to wrestle with the search for the meaning of life and our relationship with God. Micah 6:8 says, “God has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God? That verse is Micah’s reply to the question raised two verses earlier – “With what shall I come before the LORD, and bow myself before God on high?” This is familiar format for an entrance litany as Jews prepare themselves for worship – asking what must we do to please God, to make ourselves worthy of God’s presence and blessing?

Part of our struggle when we feel removed from God is centered in that basic question – am I good enough? And when we feel like we are not, what does God do about that? When we mess up do we get what we deserve from God? I hope not. And if we feel like we don’t have a clear purpose for our lives or we are failing to achieve it, it’s hard to feel all warm and fuzzy about God.

What is your why for living? Unless we can answer that question we are just going through the motions in some kind of cosmic rat race, and that feeling of meaninglessness is not conducive to closeness with God.

Micah prophesied at the beginning of that time when Israel and Judah were in the deep trouble that eventually led to the Exile. The Assyrian empire was threatening their very existence; the rulers of Israel had put their trust in foreign alliances instead of in the ways of God, investing vast sums in armaments instead of taking care of their own citizens, going into crippling debt by borrowing from the Assyrians. Sound familiar?

Listen to how the NRSV introduces the book of Micah: “Micah offered a theological interpretation of the dizzying events near the end of the 8th century: the fall of Samaria, the expansion of Jerusalem fueled by emigrants from the north, and the international situation made unstable by an aggressive superpower, Assyria.” So this question about the meaning of life and what we must do to please God was not some idle Sunday School discussion topic for Micah – it was a matter of life and death, and it still is.

Micah begins chapter 6 with an Imperative – “Listen up people to what the Lord says.” He then portrays the situation of Israel being on trial for breaking her covenant relationship with God. Then follows a quick review of God’s salvation history with Israel. Micah begins with the seminal event in Israel’s history, how God chose Moses, Aaron and Miriam to lead the people out of slavery in Egypt. Secondly he highlights a much less familiar, at least to us, story of Balaam’s encounter with King Balak of Moab during the long wilderness journey of the Exodus, and wraps it up with a reference to two cities representing the crossing of the River Jordan, Shittim on the east side of the Jordan and Gilgal on the west in the Promised land.

If you’re like me, the exodus from Egypt and the crossing of the Jordan are familiar stories, but the Balaam and Balak reference, not so much. We’ll come back to it because it’s a really cool story, but for now let’s just say Micah uses it to remind the people of one of many times during the 40 years in the wilderness that God rescued the Israelites and helped them overcome obstacles and enemies that stood in their way to freedom and promise.
So with a God who has done all that for his people, people are asking why have things gone so sour? Their world is going to hell in a handbasket. They feel abandoned and alienated from this God who has been their deliverer and savior for centuries.

They need to remember, God isn’t the one who moved – God is faithful and just forever; so when we feel separated from God, the question is what do we need to do to get back next to God.

Micah responds by turning to the question of worthiness and atonement. Verse 6 says “With what shall I come before the Lord.” How can I find my way back to God? And then follows a litany of sacrifices that gets increasingly ridiculous – the best calves, 1000 rams, 10000 rivers of oil, and first born children. You see, the Jews are big on laws. We’re familiar with the top ten list from Mt. Sinai, but those tedious books of Leviticus and Numbers that we don’t often read spend a lot of time explaining the 10 commandments and trying to legislate specific rules and regulations for daily life in order to fulfill what God requires. There are 613 laws the Jews tried to live up to –- and they didn’t’ have any apps to keep track of those. So obviously, being the imperfect fallible human beings they were, they needed a way to make amends with God when they messed up, which was often.

And their system for getting back in God’s graces was offering sacrifices to God. These were ritualistic acts of worship, but as Micah and the other prophets point out, to attend church regularly and perform all the necessary rituals doesn’t mean squat if you go on living unjust, sinful lives the rest of the time.

So finally we get to verse 8 where Micah summarizes what the faithful life looks like in three short phrases – what does the Lord require? – do justice, love mercy or kindness, and walk humbly with God. That’s the way to a life of meaning and purpose, that’s the way back to God. It’s not just something we can do but encompasses who we are called to be. I heard a wonderful sermon once that took its theme from a Frank Sinatra song, “Strangers in the Night,” and in particular from the profound refrain to that song that just says, “do be do be do.” The preacher said if you change that phrase and take out the “be” all you have left is “do do.”

We are not human doings – we are human beings, and faithful living is a holistic process that encompasses all that we are, not just some segmented religious part of our life. Micah lists justice, mercy and humility, qualities that include active doing – working for justice, treating others with mercy and kindness as a way of being –not out of sense of duty or obligation, but simply because in a faithful, loyal relationship with God, we take on those qualities of being.

Pope Francis is a fascinating example of what Micah describes here. The Pope is beloved by so many people because of his humility. He has rejected the usual pomposity of his office, traveling in a little Fiat, taking time to listen to a little girl trying to keep her immigrant parents in this country, spending time with the homeless, washing stinky feet. He walks the walk and because he does so he can also advocate for justice in the halls of Congress and get a standing ovation for the golden rule from a badly broken and partisan legislature.
Francis has been criticized for being too political, but that’s where justice has to happen, in the political arena where too often the rules that perpetuate poverty are passed by the powerful for the benefit of the powerful.

We sometimes use separation of church and state as an excuse for not getting our hands dirty in the messy business of politics, but that’s a misunderstanding of the first amendment to our constitution. It says, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” It doesn’t say religion can’t influence the making and implementation of the laws and policies we live by. In fact Micah and the prophets and Jesus are all very clear that God wants laws that are just and that part of the free exercise of our faith is to help make that happen.

Speaking of church and state, let’s go back to King Balak and Balaam for a moment. The whole story is in Numbers 22-24, and I’d encourage you to read it. It is no accident that Micah uses this story in this section about justice and mercy and humility. The short version of the story is that the Israelites are on their way through the wilderness on their way to the Promised Land and one of the many hostile territories they have to pass through is Moab. King Balak sees the vast number of these illegal immigrants heading into his country and orders the prophet Balaam to curse them and drive them away. (Sort of like building a big fence?) But Balaam consults a higher authority, and God tells him, don’t curse these people for they are blessed. In a humorous scene, when Balaam’s faith wavers a bit his faithful donkey sees God’s angel blocking their path when Balaam can’t see the angel, and the donkey prevents Balaam from giving in to King Balak.

Three times Balak pleads and begs with Balaam to curse the Hebrew people, trying to bribe him with great wealth and power, but Balaam holds fast and tells this powerful ruler that he must do and say only what God has told him. Instead of cursing the Israelites he blesses them and they continue on their way toward the Promised Land.
What does the Lord require of us? Balaam and his donkey’s kind of courage and steadfast faithfulness – refusing to give into unjust, unethical demands of the world, even when it would seem to benefit us to do so. And how do we do that? By walking humbly with God as our constant companion and spiritual guide.
Finding God’s meaning and purpose for most of us is not about one burning bush moment. It’s a journey not a destination. It’s about a total body of work, a life of working for justice for the least and lost, of being kind and merciful to everyone, and doing it all not to earn brownie points with God but to simply share God’s love with the world.
John Wesley famously said when he was kicked out of the Church of England, “The World is My Parish.” And he took his ministry to the streets and to the open fields where people who did not feel welcome and worthy in the church were looking for their purpose and trying to find their way back to God.

On this World Communion Sunday, when our world seems to be on the way to the same destruction that befell Samaria and Jerusalem, the Word from God is this: Listen up People, I have not moved, trust my ways. Do not be overwhelmed or despair. I know your sins and they have not driven me away and never will. Don’t worry about paying for your sins, that has already been done by Jesus Christ, and your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to be Christ-like in humble, merciful service, to work for justice in whatever part of my world you are in – I’m right here with you always.

Benediction: May God grant us the vision of Balaam’s donkey to see that God is not the one who has moved. God is on this journey with us to empower and lead us. By our own strength we cannot live just and merciful lives all the time, but if we humbly walk with God, he will show us the way. That is our purpose. Let’s go.

Prayer Inspired by Solomon’s Request, I Kings 3:9

August 13, 2015 by Steve Harsh, posted in Christian Discipleship, Faith and Values, Lectionary Texts

God, I bet you get tired of my whining and begging and calling it prayer. You don’t need a laundry list of all the things I think I need or deserve since you already know what I’m thinking, what I’m coveting, even when I wish you didn’t. We worry a lot these days about privacy and who has access to our information when we really should be more concerned about what you know about the secret desires of our hearts and minds.

Every time we pray you offer us the same deal the young King Solomon got – to ask for whatever we want. And if we ask for the right thing, the answer is guaranteed. But if we ask for wealth, status, power, comfort or other selfish rewards, no matter what the prosperity gospel advocates say, the answer will be ‘No, try again.’

Solomon could have written the great old hymn, “Be Thou My Vision.”* It says “Be thou my wisdom and thou my true word…. Riches I heed not nor man’s empty praise, Thou mine inheritance now and always.” Solomon doesn’t ask for riches or power, he asks for the wisdom to govern God’s people, “an understanding mind…able to discern between good and evil.” O how we need such wisdom in our troubled world today, O Lord!

God, you know that we need the real necessities of life. Help us to trust you to provide those while we seek after the truth that sets us free from our worries and cares and concerns. Don’t let us confuse knowledge with wisdom. This isn’t about education and degrees – but true insight and discernment. As you blessed Solomon because he humbly asked for wisdom, the prayer of our hearts is that you will also “Grant us wisdom, grant us courage for the living of these days.”** Amen and Amen.

*Old Irish hymn, translated by Mary E. Byrne, 1905 (original poem attributed to St. Dallan Forgaill, 530-598 C.E.)
** From “God of Grace and God of Glory,” by Harry Emerson Fosdick, 1930.

Freeway Theology

August 2, 2015 by Steve Harsh, posted in Christian Discipleship, Faith and Values

I saw this graffiti spray-painted on a freeway overpass several years ago, and my immediate thought was “I guess forever was longer than John expected!” After wondering how and why people hang over the side of an overpass and paint upside down, my next thought was “that’ll preach.” I’ve used it often in preaching class as an example of the kinds of ordinary observations in daily life that can have theological significance.

Jesus did that, of course, using mustard seeds, lost sheep and coins, yeast, candles, a valuable pearl, and even a hated Samaritan to weave parables that reveal truth about the nature of God that declarative sentences can’t illuminate in the same holistic way. Stories and images reach beyond the intellect and move us at a deeper emotional level.

John obviously fell out of love with whoever’s name was beneath that paint. It happens all the time in human relationships, but we cannot convert that unfortunate reality that sometimes leaves deep scars on the human psyche into what God’s relationship to us looks like. How unfortunate if we let false teachings about a wrathful, judgmental God scare us away from the only source of truly unconditional love there is.

We often hear Paul’s marvelous words about love read at weddings: 4 “Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant 5 or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; 6 it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. 7 It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. 8 Love never ends.” (I Corinthians 13). I try to warn starry-eyed couples that those words do not describe human love, no matter how strong that love is. Paul is writing about God’s love revealed to us in Christ, and it is the backup we can always turn to when we want to remove the tattoo of our beloved from our arm or spray paint over his or her name on the overpass.

God’s love is forever. It’s not a 5 year or 50000 or mile guarantee. It’s not even “till death do us part,” as great as that deep love is. There is no fine print in God’s covenant with us. We can break the contract or think we have by our own sinfulness or stupidity, but God won’t ever stop loving us, period. Like the prodigal son’s father, God waits patiently for us to come home, no matter how badly we’ve messed up our lives or how long we’ve been gone.

That message is repeated in a multitude of ways in the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament. Two of my favorites are: “Come now, let us argue it out, says the LORD: though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be like snow; though they are red like crimson, they shall become like wool.” (Isaiah 1:18). And “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. 9If we confess our sins, God is faithful and just will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” (I John 1:8-9)

That’s pretty straight forward and clear. Don’t let disappointments with human love confuse you about God’s love. With God, forever really means forever.

Critics Welcome? Amos 6:1a, 3-7

July 27, 2015 by Steve Harsh, posted in Christian Discipleship, Faith and Politics, Faith and Values

I was back at Northwest UMC this week for a sermon in a series called “From Tablet to Table.” The table metaphor for community reminded me of sitting at the kids’ table when my large extended family gathered for holiday feasts. Kids sat at card tables in the kitchen or living room while the adults got to fly first class in the dining room. I remember the first time I got invited to move up to the big table. I was scared to death I would screw up and spill my milk or break some rule of dining etiquette that I didn’t even know existed and get sent back down to the minors.

Who do we confine to the kids’ table when it comes to the faith community or other groups we belong to? People who are different? Certainly people who irritate us or just plain make us mad. The unspoken rule at many family gatherings is that there are two topics that are taboo – politics and religion–because those emotionally charged issues can start a family feud. That’s really unfortunate because those two subjects are so central and important to how we order our lives as individuals and as a society that we really need to have meaningful dialogue about them. Amos of course breaks both rules. He stops preaching and goes to meddling as soon as he opens his mouth to warn Israel about their sinful, unjust lifestyle.

I began my sermon by repeating a story I used two weeks ago at another church (see post from July 12, 2015). It was the one about a preacher being a real “pane.” The prophet Amos certainly qualifies as one who delivers painful words that afflict the comfortable. The prophets remind me of teachers and professors I had over the years that were demanding and critical–the ones who kept putting on my report cards in grade school that I “didn’t work up to my potential.” Or the homiletics professor who dared to flunk me on the first sermon I preached in class! They were not candidates for my favorite teacher of the year award. My knee jerk reaction to their criticism was anger and looking at the course catalogue to see if I could drop the course. Fortunately in most cases that was not an option, and with the benefit of many years of life experience I know now that those teachers were the ones from whom I learned the most because they challenged me with the truth.

My wife and I were eating at a super market recently that offers free food on Friday nights to entice shoppers into the store. As we were moving down the buffet line we saw one of the servers refilling a large salad bowl with his bare hands – no gloves, no tongs. Diana made a comment to him that he really shouldn’t be doing that with his hands. He reacted very defensively, as we often do when we know we are in the wrong, and his words as he dramatically dumped the entire bowl of spinach salad into the trash we very telling. He said, “Lady, this is free food. Either accept it graciously or refuse it graciously.” I was angry at his response; so the irony of what he said didn’t strike me until later. He talked about graciousness, but the way he accepted her criticism was anything but gracious.

Do we welcome and encourage dissent at our table and accept honest criticism with grace and gratitude, or are we more like the people who say, “My mind’s made up; don’t confuse me with the facts?”

Here’s the context for Amos’ criticism of Israel. Amos was the first of the classic Hebrew prophets. He doesn’t get top billing in our Bible because the creators of the canon apparently gave more weight to quantity than quality. The books of Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel all are much longer; so they are traditionally known as the Major Prophets, and Amos, Hosea, Jonah and others sit at the kids’ table as the Minor Prophets. But chronologically Amos was the first to voice concerns about the direction that his people were going. He lived in the first half of the 8th century BCE during the long and peaceful reign of Jeroboam II (788-747 BCE). This was the golden age of Israel, the height of territorial expansion and prosperity never again reached. My NRSV introduction to Amos contains a sentence describing the socio-economic situation that I had to read several times because I thought I was reading a current event headline. “Through manipulations of debt and credit, wealthy landowners amassed capital and estates at the expense of small farmers and robbed them of their inheritance and liberty.” Amos understood that situation all too well because he was a small farmer and herder from a little village in Judah.

This was the period after Israel had split into two kingdoms, Israel in the north, sometimes referred to as Samaria, and Judah in the south where Jerusalem was. Amos is from Judah, but he feels compelled by God to travel to Israel and warn them about their decadent opulence and immorality, their abuse of the Lord’s table. In one of the most famous lines he tells them God says, “I hate I despise your festivals and take no delight in your solemn assemblies… I will not listen to the melodies of your harps. But let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an overflowing stream” (5: 2).

To paraphrase the text from chapter 6, if Amos were at our table today, he would probably be saying something like this:

“1Alas for those who are at ease in Dublin,
and for those who feel secure on Mad River Mountain,
4 Alas for those who lie on sleep number beds,
and lounge on their recliners,
6 who drink wine from fine crystal,
and anoint themselves with the finest oils from Bath and Body Works,
but are not grieved over the ruin of America!
7 Therefore they shall now be the first to go into exile,
and the revelry of the loungers shall pass away.

Those are hard words to hear. How do you suppose Amos was received at the table? Not well. He tells us in chapter 7 about the reaction of Amaziah, chief priest of the royal sanctuary at Bethel. Amaziah says, “O seer, go, flee away to the land of Judah, earn your bread there, but never again prophesy at Bethel, for it is the king’s sanctuary, and it is a temple of the kingdom.” Notice that it is not God’s sanctuary, or God’s kingdom, but the king’s. That one sentence tells us all we need to know about what was rotten in Israel. Their priorities were 180 degrees out of whack. Amaziah doesn’t want to hear that so he says to Amos, “Shut up and go home – back down to kids’ table where we don’t have to deal with you.”

Amos went home, but he wasn’t exactly quiet. He wrote down his prophesies so we can still benefit from them 3000 years later if are willing to listen. You can’t silence the word of God by ignoring it. When Jesus was entering Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, the authorities told him to silence his crowd of supporters, and he said, “If they keep quiet, the stones will cry out.” (Luke 19:40)

Welcoming words of criticism is not easy or natural. When we go to a party or a dinner or church, most of us gravitate toward people we know and enjoy. We don’t usually seek out people who are different from us and certainly not people who irritate us or just plain make us mad. So if we are to have honest dialogue and benefit from criticism and diversity we have to intentionally invite people to the table who can bring those gifts.
I was fortunate to be part of two such intentionally diverse communities in my life. They didn’t help me as much as I wish they had since welcoming criticism graciously is still very hard for me. The first model of what communication scholars call cooperative critical inquiry that I was privileged to be a part of from 1989-2007 is the Interprofessional Commission of Ohio.

The ICO is an organization housed at The Ohio State University whose mission is to promote and teach interprofessional collaboration to students and practitioners in the helping professions. The model for accomplishing that goal is offer graduate level interdisciplinary courses in collaboration, ethics, and community organization that include students and faculty from a wide range of professions: law, medicine, nursing, allied health, education, social work, and theology. It also includes sponsoring continuing education conferences for practicing professionals in all those fields on a range of topics from Aids to Urban Sprawl and Smart Growth.
The content of those courses and conferences is important, but more significant is the fact that they are vehicles for bringing all of those individuals together around tables where they can share ideas and concerns and get to know each other in ways that would not otherwise happen. Misinformation and stereotypes about what other professions do and what they can bring to the table to help solve complex problems that are too much for any given profession to address alone are shared and lines of communication are opened.

Even further back in my past, when I was an undergraduate at Ohio State in the 1960’s, I lived in a rooming house sponsored by the Wesley Foundation, the United Methodist campus ministry. There were two houses actually, one for men and one for women, but they were not ordinary rooming houses. They were intentional living communities of about 20 residents each, and in order to live there you had to make two commitments. The first was to participate in a house meeting every Sunday evening facilitated by two pastors trained in group dynamics and conflict management. The agenda each week was to simply air any grievances and talk about any issues that were affecting life in the house so we could manage them before they became bigger issues.

The second commitment had to do with roommates. We changed roommates every quarter, and the process for doing that was to have each person submit a list of 2 or 3 people that he was having the most trouble relating to for whatever reason; and roommates for the next quarter were chosen from that list. It was an intentional way of effectively addressing problems and expanding our ability to relate to a variety of other people. It wasn’t a perfect system, but it was better than the way we usually deal with conflict by ignoring it until it gets too big to deal with.

People who live together and socialize get to know each other as people with common dreams, fears and problems. It’s probably too much to hope that the Trumps and McCains and Boehners and McConnels could all move into the White House and learn to live together, but it is true that part of the partisan problem in Washington is created by the fact that representatives and senators no longer live in the DC area with their families the way they did a generation or two ago. It is so easy to fly back home on weekends that many of them do that now, and the consequence is they do not socialize with each other across the aisle as they once did. Stereotypes and ideologies therefore are all they know about each other, and we see the results of that unfortunate situation which prevents dialogue and compromise to address critical problems.

Sharing dissenting opinions is a way of bringing hidden or taken-for-granted assumptions about life out into the open where they can be examined. We all tend to automatically do things the way we’ve always done them, and we assume that’s just the way it should be. But we change and life changes, and it’s good to bring those assumptions into awareness so they can be evaluated and either kept or changed. Prophets break open old ideas and prejudices that hold us back and limit our ability to learn and grow.

Prophets never win popularity contests. Galileo and Copernicus were thrown out of the church for proposing new and radical ideas about how the universe is put together. But they were right, and the old assumptions were wrong. We often feel like critics are judging us personally and have trouble separating our identity and worth from our behavior and ideas. God does not send Amos to Israel to judge or condemn but to warn the people that the consequences of their current behavior are going to lead to destruction. Those words are not easy to hear, especially for those who are comfortable and benefiting from the way things are.

We are facing major problems in our nation and world today that are not easy or simply solved. Climate change, fixing health care and social security, saving our education system, stopping the insanity of gun violence, dealing with immigration—all of those problems are going to require sacrifice on the part of us who have so the have nots are given a fair and just opportunity to live better lives. We don’t want to hear about sacrifices; so we keep kicking the can down the road and those chickens are going to come home to roost probably sooner than later. That’s what Amos was trying to tell Israel. They didn’t listen. Do we?

Genuine criticism is a gift to be embraced, not rejected, not just tolerated, but welcomed and invited to the table. It is a way to learn and grow and be challenged by different perspectives and experiences. And if it is shunned or ignored by sending the critic back to kids’ table, the consequences can be tragic.

The rest of the Amos story illustrates that point. 30-40 years after Amos tried to warn Israel of the consequences of their unjust lifestyle, in 711 BCE, the armies of King Sennacherib of Assyria invaded Israel, conquered them and the Exile of God’s once proud people begins. Judah lasted 136 years longer, but they didn’t listen to the prophets either; and in 586 BCE Jerusalem fell, the temple was destroyed by the Babylonians, and the nation of Israel has never been the same again.

When God’s prophets speak uncomfortable words of truth, it pays to listen.

What Are We Full Of?, Jonah 3:1-5, 10

January 27, 2015 by Steve Harsh, posted in Christian Discipleship, Faith and Politics, Faith and Values, Lectionary Texts

This sermon was written for a Sunday emphasis on what it means to live a missional lifestyle, and our case study from Scripture is one of those negative examples of how not to do that. I asked my son once how it was that he is a better golfer, skier and basketball player than I am when I introduced him to all those sports. He smiled and replied, “Oh, I just watched you, Dad, and saw how not to do it.” I think he learned a lot of life lessons that way from me. And we can all benefit in the same way from the story of Jonah.

Before we get to Jonah, I want to tell you about a pastor who decided one day it would be good for his parishioners and his son to take the 5 year-old with him to visit a local retirement community. The little fellow was fascinated by all the new things he saw – walkers and canes and especially the power wheel chair when one of the residents took him for a ride down the hall. But he was most interested when he went into one room with his dad. Pointing in amazement at a set of dentures in a glass on the bedside table he said, “Dad, the tooth fairy is never gonna believe that!” Some things are hard to believe – and the story of Jonah is one such tale.

Ask most people what they know about Jonah, and you will get “Jonah and the whale” as their response. It’s a familiar story kids learn about in Sunday school, but it is much more than a big fish story (which is what the Hebrew says, not a “whale” per se) if we ask some basic questions, like what was Jonah doing in the water and why was he swallowed by the big fish? And please don’t get hung up on the feasibility of a grown man being swallowed by a fish. This is about theology, not biology.

Jonah is a very short story, only 3 pages, and it makes more sense if read in its entirety. So here’s the abridged version of the whole story to put it in context:
1. God calls Jonah and tells him to go on a mission to Nineveh.
2. Jonah doesn’t want to go and jumps on a ship headed for Tarshish (in the exact opposite direction) instead.
3. God is not pleased and causes a storm at sea, and when the sailors learn that Jonah is the reason for God’s displeasure, they throw Jonah overboard to save themselves.
4. God appoints a big fish to swallow Jonah. (Not to punish him, by the way, but to save him and give him time to reconsider God’s offer.)
5. After 3 days God has the fish spit Jonah out; and Jonah decides this time he’d better listen to God, heads for Nineveh and delivers God’s message that they should repent or else bad things are going to happen.
6. The people of Nineveh heed Jonah’s warning, repent of their sins, are forgiven and saved from God’s judgment on them. You’d think any preacher would be thrilled if thousands of people changed their lives based on one short sermon, right? Not Jonah.
7. Jonah pouts because he really wanted God to destroy the Ninevites, not save them.

So there’s a lot more going on here than Jonah and the fish. It’s a story about a refusal to say yes when God’s mission is very clear. The message from God to Jonah couldn’t be more straightforward and direct: The 2nd verse of chapter 1 says, “Go at once to Nineveh,” and those orders are repeated verbatim in our lesson for today. There is no failure to communicate here – just reluctance to obey. Frederick Buechner says, “Lying to God is like sawing the branch you’re sitting on. The better you do it, the harder you fall.” Saying “no” to God is pretty much the same thing; so why would Jonah even try? And why do we?

We all have different reasons and excuses for failing to live missional lives. To consider Jonah’s rationale for disobeying God requires a little history lesson. Nineveh was the capital of Babylon, a hated enemy of the Hebrew people that had overthrown Israel years before and carried many of their people off to Exile. So what Jonah was being asked to do was take a warning to the people of Nineveh so they could be forgiven and spared from God’s wrath. It may help us to identify with Jonah to know that Nineveh sat about where the modern city of Baghdad is today.

Put yourself in Jonah’s place. Fill in your own favorite enemies: Democrats, Tea Partiers, Islamic extremists, the religious right or left, your bitter athletic rivals, unethical business competitors, lawyers, former spouses – whoever it is that you would like to be the very last people God would forgive. That’s exactly who Jonah is being asked to save and why he dares to defy a direct order from God.

I have been blessed by hearing good preaching this month. Pastor Tom Slack started the New Year off right for me with a sermon on the prologue to John’s Gospel. What struck me that day was the verse that says “The word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth.” And just 2 verses later, “From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace.” I’ve been journaling and praying ever since about what it looks like for us, for me, to be full of grace and truth. Our other fine preacher, Mebane McMahon, added to the dialogue with her sermon the next week on the baptism of Christ and how we are all beloved children of God. She added another piece to the puzzle the next week’s sermon on the story of Eli and Samuel and how being beloved children means listening when God speaks.

In Jonah we have someone who doesn’t just fail to listen to God, he rebels and does the exact opposite of what God tells him to do. Why do we do that? It never turns out well. Reflecting on those January sermons my take on why Jonah and I and many of you fail to live a missional lifestyle is because of what we’re full of – or NOT full of. The Scriptures don’t tell us for sure why Jonah ran away. Chapter 1 says he tried to flee from the presence of the Lord. He needed to read Psalm 139 which asks the very question, “Where can I flee from God’s presence?” The answer is nowhere, because there is nowhere in all creation that God isn’t.

We aren’t told but we can imagine why Jonah does what he does. Maybe fear – he was being asked to go into enemy territory. Are there places or people God is asking us to be in mission that we are uncomfortable with or afraid to go? Maybe Anger – Jonah admits in the end of the story that he’s mad at God for forgiving his enemies. He says, “I knew you were a God of mercy who would repent and forgive these slime balls. They don’t deserve it.” (That’s a loose translation, by the way.) Are there people we don’t think deserve God’s grace and mercy? Do we hoard the good news of the Gospel – thinking if we share it there might not be enough for us?

It seems pretty clear to me that Jonah is full of anger or fear or vengeance or judgment, or some combination of those poisons. And that’s why he can’t obey God’s call. When we are full or even partially full of guilt, jealousy, doubt, insecurity, bitterness, pain, there’s no room for us to be full of grace and truth. Those negative feelings are like an anchor that keeps us stuck where we are and unable to go where God wants to send us.

It’s like this story about a blacksmith with a seemingly insurmountable problem. He just didn’t fit the macho stereotype of a blacksmith. He was strong and very good at his craft, but he was very, very short of stature. As a result, he was very unsuccessful in the dating game and was quite lonely. Until one day a beautiful young woman appeared in his blacksmith shop with a horse who had thrown a shoe. It was love at first sight for the smithy, and he could tell the feelings were mutual. So he took all the time he could and did the finest job he had ever done on shoeing a horse. As it was drawing time for his new love to leave, he desperately wanted to kiss her and could tell she would welcome that. But there was a big problem. She was a full head taller than he.

Just as he was about to give up yet again on romance, the blacksmith had a brilliant idea. He led the young woman by the hand to the corner of his shop and jumped up on the anvil where he had just hammered her horse’s shoe into perfect shape. Standing on the anvil, he was able to look into her beautiful brown eyes and kiss her.

The two of them fell madly in love and were inseparable for weeks and then months. Everyone in the village assumed they would soon announce their engagement to be married, and the young woman was waiting expectantly for her little beau to pop the big question. Instead, without warning, he announced to her one fine spring afternoon that he was going to have to end their courtship. She was devastated and confused. She asked him why? Didn’t he love her? Was it something she had done or said, or not done or not said? To each question he just shook his head until she was begging him to explain his sudden change of heart. Finally he said, “My dear, I do love you very much, but you see, dragging that darn anvil around everywhere we go is killing me!”

Like that anvil worry, fear, guilt, anger – whatever you are full of is an unnecessary burden that no longer needs to drag you down. And we don’t have to break up with God. Just get rid of the burden. We can give those things to God. That’s the truth that sets us free to say yes to God’s mission and purpose for our lives! No matter what our excuses have been none of us are beyond God’s redeeming love. If God can forgive the enemies of his chosen people who destroyed Jerusalem and carried God’s people off into Exile, then God can certainly forgive our reluctance to share our faith with the least and lost. And your Nineveh may not be as far away as you think. The person sitting next to you may need your support. Your mission may to someone in your own family or neighborhood or it may be somewhere further away.

Be open to surprises about where God leads you to discover your mission. In 1997 Bill Gates thought he was on a mission to bring computers to people in developing countries until he visited Africa and saw firsthand the abject poverty and the ravages of malaria and tuberculosis. He realized there were far more critical needs there than internet connectivity. He found a new mission and he and his wife Melinda started their foundation which has for 17 years donated millions of dollars to build hospitals and schools for impoverished people all over the world.

When wrestling with a call to a new mission, remember that it’s natural to feel nervous and fearful whenever we try something new and different. They call it moving out of your comfort zone – because it is! Susan Jeffers has written a very helpful book called Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway. That’s easier said than done, but very good advice. I saw some good advice on Facebook recently about working out early in the morning before your brain realizes what you’re doing. In a similar vein, I’ve also found that it helps me when tackling a new challenge to do it quickly before I have time to realize I’m afraid.

So what does Jonah do after his mission in Nineveh is over? We don’t know. At the end of the story he’s pouting, caring more about a dead gourd plant that had been shading him from the sun than 120,000 people in Nineveh. Like many Biblical stories, the ending of the story is left up to us. That’s because more important than an old fish story from long ago is your story and mine, and the next chapter of those stories is waiting to be written.

My wife and I were participants in a very intense personal growth seminar a few years ago, and something there stirred up some anger in me which I directed at one of the workshop leaders. She listened to me rant awhile, and then she said very quietly to me, “You know, Steve, you don’t have to be angry. It’s a choice.” It was one of the best Aha moments of my life – to realize for that I don’t have to be controlled by my emotions. I can choose to respond differently. Is that easy? Of course not. My wife can tell you I still have a long way to go in changing that 60 year-old habit. But old dogs can learn new tricks; it just takes us awhile. We can change and allow ourselves to be filled with grace and truth that empowers us to live the mission God has for us – whatever that is.

Let me share something that has worked for me lately. When facing a challenging situation I try to remember to pause and ask, “How would I respond to this situation if I were filled with grace and truth?” It’s a form of “faking it till you make it,” a small way of practicing a missional lifestyle; and if I keep trying, with God’s help, to live AS IF I am full of grace and truth, that lifestyle will eventually become a new habit.

What are you full of? If you don’t like the answer to that question, the good news is you don’t have to spend time in a fish’s belly to turn your life around. All you have to do is say yes every day to the one who is Grace and Truth.

[Originally preached at Northwest United Methodist Church, Columbus, Ohio, January 25, 2015]

The Journey from Bah to Aha

December 7, 2014December 7, 2014 by Steve Harsh, posted in Christian Discipleship, Faith and Values

I am not a fan of the way we Americans do Christmas. Most everything about this season bugs me, as in Bah Hum-bug! How do I hate it? Let me count the ways: Black Thanksgiving week consumer mania, Christmas lights that mysteriously become tangled and dysfunctional while tucked in their storage boxes, frozen fingers putting said lights up outdoors, and temporary outbursts of December charity to quiet guilty consciences for another year so we can ignore the injustices in our society that keep people trapped in poverty, just to name a few.

I used to think my negativity about the Holidays was because my employment for most of my adult life required a lot of extra effort in November and December. I worked my way through college working for a florist and put in many long hours from before Thanksgiving until Christmas Eve preparing, selling, and delivering floral finery for festive occasions. And then I jumped out of the frying pan into the fire of being a pastor – writing sermons, planning worship services, caroling parties, collecting donations for those in need, visiting the homebound. Non-stop activity for the entire Advent season leaves little time or energy for doing all the “normal” things people do at home and with family and friends. The last church I served we had Christmas Eve services at 4, 7, 9, and 11, and by the time I crawled into bed early Christmas morning any Christmas spirit I had was pretty well spent. In fact, just writing that paragraph makes me want to go take a long winter’s nap!

There are of course many rewards to the Christian observances of Christmas, and I don’t mean to belittle those. Seeing the joy in a mother’s eyes when we made it possible for her family to have food and gifts for Christmas, sharing carols or communion with a nursing home patient, or singing “Silent Night” with my church family all holding lighted candles at midnight on Christmas Eve are priceless experiences.

2014 is my first year of full retirement from pastoral ministry, and what I’ve discovered is that it wasn’t my various holiday-intensive jobs that made me Grinchy. I still don’t like the way we do Christmas, and that realization helped me come to an Aha moment as I sat in worship on the 2nd Sunday of Advent this year. The sermon by Rev. Tom Slack was based on Mark 1 and stressed the urgency of John the Baptist’s call for repentance in preparation for the imminent appearance of the Christ. To repent means to turn around, to change the way I’m going, and when I applied that to my Ebeneezer Scrooge approach to Christmas I realized, as anyone else could have told me, that my attitude is a choice. I can continue to be a moaning and groaning critic of all the things that are wrong with the way we do Christmas, or I can do as Gandhi suggests and “Be the change I want to see in the world.”

The serenity prayer came to mind and as usual is very good advice. It asks God for “the serenity to accept the things I cannot change.” I can’t change the way other people choose to spend their time or money at Christmas, and if I could, complaining and criticizing is never the most effective way to persuade anyone to change. Secondly, that prayer asks for “the courage to change the things I can.” The only thing I really can change directly is me and my attitude, and that is far more likely to affect others either positively or negatively than any words ever will. As someone once said, “What you do speaks so loudly I can’t hear what you say,” or as St. Francis put it, “Preach the Gospel at all times and when necessary use words.”

How I relate to others one-on-one, be in a homeless stranger or family and friends, those I love most, or how I treat harried sales clerks and UPS drivers and restaurant servers who are just trying to scratch out a living is a powerful example of either Christ-like compassion or Grinchy grouchiness – and both are contagious. God not only loves a cheerful giver, God knows any other giving is not generosity at all.

Is turning an attitude around easy to do? Not for me. I need a guiding star or Rudolph with his red nose to guide me through the fog of clever marketing and the frustrations of crowded calendars and freeways and malls. Rudolph goes down in history for rescuing Christmas. That’s not my goal. I simply want to do my small part to share the Good News of God’s unconditional love for us by the way I choose to live in spite of and because of the holy busyness of this season.

Everyone in the Christmas story makes individual choices that are critical to the outcome. Some of those choices are blatantly selfish and evil. Caesar Augustus decrees that a poor peasant girl in the final days of her pregnancy must make a dangerous journey to Bethlehem and deliver her precious infant in a barn. Herod’s insecurity drives him to order the murder of innocent children. But those choices from people in power aren’t the choices we celebrate. An overwhelmed innkeeper provides the best shelter he has when there is no room in the inn. A frightened Mary says “yes” to God’s plan for her when she could have ignored or laughed at the audacity of that angelic announcement. And her amazing fiancé loves her enough to trust her unbelievable explanation of how she came to be pregnant. These are all simple individual choices that changed the course of human history.

Mark’s Gospel doesn’t waste any time with genealogies and background stories. John the Baptist and a grown up Jesus both burst on the scene in chapter one demanding that we repent and believe the Gospel. They call me to follow Jesus no matter how busy or frustrated I am or what fantastic doorbuster bargains Walmart and Amazon are dangling in front of me. They remind me that my job is not to judge how others celebrate the birth of Christ. God or Santa can decide who’s naughty or nice. My job is to know what I can control (me) and be the best star-following disciple I can be.

Human and Divine Collaboration, Judges 4:1-7

November 19, 2014November 19, 2014 by Steve Harsh, posted in Christian Discipleship, Faith and Values, Lectionary Texts

I preached this sermon at Northwest UMC on November 16, 2014

As is often the case in the biblical narrative, in Judges 4 Israel is in deep do do, and this time even deeper than usual. The enemy threatening Israel this time is not Kent State or Indiana. The Canaanites are not some distant enemy as previous foes in the era of the judges have been – these are next door neighbors, and they are armed as no foe of Israel’s has ever been armed before – with 900 chariots of iron. Those chariots indicate a big change historically as humankind is moving from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age. There were benefits to those changes, but it also meant people had bigger and better ways to kill each other.

In the midst of all that change there is a predictable pattern to this story that readers of earlier chapters of Judges have seen before. 1. Ehud, the former judge has died. The judges were a series of leaders of Israel during the period before the monarchy was established. They were prophets, spokespeople for God, and when a vacuum in that leadership occurred with Ehud’s death Israel again goes astray. It’s a classic ‘when the cats away the mice will play’ scenario. The text tells us simply that Israel did evil, which leads to step two in the pattern. 2. Bad things happen. The text says “God sold them into the hand of King Jabin of Canaan.” I don’t believe God is a puppeteer who directly causes bad things to punish wayward people; we have freedom of choice. But I do believe there is a natural order to things that results in painful consequences when we are unfaithful to God’s will.

When there is a lack of leadership and vision, as Proverbs tells us, the people of God perish. And when we are in trouble we come to phase 3 in the pattern, we cry out to God to save us. And (4) God raises up a new leader or leaders who help save the day.

When I first looked at this lectionary passage my first reaction was to look elsewhere for a text – especially when I read the rest of Chapter 4 which is full of more twists and turns than a Cedar Point roller coaster. But then as I thought about Ebola and ISIS and some of the other messes our world is in I realized this pattern is still with us today. When we forget God’s ways we face seemingly insurmountable problems. What do we do when that happens? It seems to me we need to do two things: (1) we need to admit we’ve got a problem, and (2) we need to ask for help from other people and from God.

When our granddaughter Kaitlyn was a baby her parents taught her some very simple baby sign language. Most of the signs were pretty obvious – like one for “I’m hungry,” or “no more,” but my favorite was the one for “I don’t know.” There’s a ton of stuff a one-year old doesn’t know, and they aren’t hung up on pretending they know things they don’t. So I would play a game asking Kaitlyn questions I knew she would not be able to answer, and she would laugh and do the sign for “I don’t know.” Why is it that as we get older we are reluctant to ask for directions or to ask for help with some question or project that is beyond our scope of experience or expertise? Judges tells us that King Jabin had oppressed the Israelites cruelly for 20 years before they realized they better ask God for help!

Rugged individualists that we are, and this may be more of a male problem, I admit, we often add time and stress to a job by our reluctance to simply admit, “I don’t know.” One of my favorite stories about that kind of attitude is described in this letter from a man writing to his insurance company to explain an insurance claim:

“I am writing in response to your request for more information concerning block #11 on the insurance form which asks for “cause of injuries” wherein I put “trying to do the job alone”. You said you need more information, so I trust the following will be sufficient.

I am a bricklayer by trade and on the day of the injuries, I was working alone laying bricks around the top of a four story building when I realized that I had about 500 pounds of bricks left over. Rather than carry the bricks down by hand, I decided to put them into a barrel and lower them by a pulley which was fastened to the top of the building. I secured the end of the rope at ground level and went up to the top of the building and loaded the bricks into the barrel and swung the barrel out with the bricks in it. I then went down and untied the rope, holding it securely to insure the slow descent of the barrel.

As you will note on block #6 of the insurance form, I weigh 145 pounds. Due to my shock at being jerked off the ground so swiftly, I lost my presence of mind and forgot to let go of the rope. Between the second and third floors, I met the barrel coming down. This accounts for the bruises and lacerations on my upper body.
Regaining my presence of mind, I held tightly to the rope and proceeded rapidly up the side of the building, not stopping until my right hand was jammed in the pulley. This accounts for the broken thumb.

Despite the pain, I retained my presence of mind and held tightly on to the rope. At approximately the same time, however, the barrel of bricks hit the ground and the bottom fell out of the barrel. Devoid of the weight of the bricks, the barrel now weighted about 50 pounds. I again refer you to block #6 and my weight.

As you would guess I began a rapid descent. In the vicinity of the second floor, I met the barrel coming up. This explains the injuries to my legs and lower body. Slowed only slightly, I continued my descent landing on the pile of bricks. Fortunately, my back was only sprained and the internal injuries were minimal.

I am sorry to report, however, that at this point, I finally lost my presence of mind and let go of the rope, and as you can imagine, the empty barrel crashed down on me.

I trust this answers your concern. Please know that I am finished “trying to do the job alone”.

Back to our Scripture: Deborah appears as the next Judge of Israel, and she is the one to whom the Israelites finally turn to for advice. She summons a general named Barak – did you catch that? I’m not making that up, that’s what it says in verse 6. So no matter what your political preferences, don’t get hung up on his name. Barak is just one of God’s agents in this drama. Deborah gives him explicit directions on how to confront the Canaanites, who, where, when, how, and promises him that God will deliver Jabin into his hands.

If the story ends there it would be sort of like a very predictable Hallmark movie. Sure, God wins, God always wins, with or without our cooperation; but whom God uses and what happens along the way raises some surprising and difficult questions. In the verses immediately after Deborah guarantees Barak a victory, he says a curious thing, Barak said to her, “If you will go with me, I will go; but if you will not go with me, I will not go.” And Deborah said, “I will surely go with you; nevertheless, the road on which you are going will not lead to your glory, for the LORD will sell Sisera (Jabin’s Commanding General) into the hand of a woman.” (Judges 4:8-9)

If someone guaranteed you success at a difficult task that would save your people and make you a great hero or heroine, wouldn’t you do it? Barak’s refusal to go without Deborah raises questions the story doesn’t answer. Is he insecure about his own leadership ability? Is he lacking in faith that God will truly prevail against this powerful enemy? We don’t know, and Deborah’s reply only adds to the intrigue. She says, OK I’ll go, but you aren’t going to get the glory – a woman is.

In the sexist world of that time, that could be a real put down. A real leader wouldn’t need help and certainly not from a woman. But as a judge, Deborah is God’s representative –maybe Barak just wants her along as assurance of god’s presence. We don’t know. We also may think we know that Deborah is tooting her own horn, assuming she is the woman in question who will get the glory for this victory. Don’t jump to that conclusion too quickly.

The battle with Sisera’s army is waged and it’s like Pharaoh’s army at the Red sea – no contest. Verse 16 says, “All the army of Sisera fell by the sword; no one was left.” But here comes the next twist in this tale – one person did escape we are told. Sisera jumped down from his iron chariot and fled on foot, He seeks refuge in the tent of a non-Israelite woman named Jael, who is the wife of an ally of King Jabin.

Warning, here’s where the story gets a bit R-rated but not in the way you may be thinking. Neither Sisera nor Jael have romance in mind. He is just looking for a safe place to hide, and Jael, even though she is not an Israelite, welcomes him according to the customs of hospitality for strangers we find in Hebrew Scriptures. She shelters him, covers him with a rug, and gives him a drink of milk. And then when he falls asleep she turns on him in a most inhospitable and brutally murders him by driving a tent peg into his temple.

What are we followers of the Prince of Peace supposed to do with that gory detail? As my granddaughter would say, “I don’t know.” But at least one mystery is solved – Jael shows Barak what she has done, and we realize that she is the woman into whose hands Sisera has been delivered, not Deborah. But the bigger mystery of why Jael did what she did is left unanswered. Barak and Deborah just sing a victory song and give thanks to God for delivering them from their enemy. And we the readers are left to wrestle with the moral dilemma of whether the ends justify the means, even when God has ordained the victory.

The ambiguity is because the Bible is not an answer book. It is an interactive narrative of God’s actions in human history. Issues are raised in Scripture that are uncertain and complicated because life is complex. God’s middle name is ambiguity because there is always something mysterious about God’s nature that will forever be beyond the grasp of our finite minds. In our human condition we will always see in a mirror dimly.

But having said that there are some lessons we can draw from this curious story. This is a story about human and divine collaboration. Deborah, Barak and Jael all three play critical roles in this story, but none of the three can claim total credit for the victory. All of them contributed and the whole was greater than the sum of its parts. Harry Truman once said, “We can accomplish great things if no one is worried about who gets the credit,” and that’s what happens here. Like any team effort, the contributions of every player are necessary for success. Imagine the scientific and international collaboration it took to land a spacecraft on a comet 300 million miles away!

A second take away from this story is that God uses unexpected actors to accomplish God’s goals. And not just in this story. God is very consistent. No matter whom God taps to carry the ball at any given time – uneducated fishermen, tax collectors and prostitutes, adulterous kings or sneaky self-centered rascals like Jacob – God wins. When God sends a redeemer to deliver Israel from the exile in Babylon, God doesn’t choose an Israelite – but Cyrus, King of Persia, as in modern day Iran! And the ultimate redeemer – because we know the story so well we forget what a surprise that peasant kid born in a barn was.

God wins – always – but that does not eliminate the need for human responsibility and accountability. We can’t just sit back and wait for God to take care of us. Deborah promises Barak the victory, but he still has to round up his troops and confront the enemy. God’s ultimate victory is a given. The question is when that victory comes will we be among those on God’s side. If we want to be part of the victory we have to do our part.

To be sure that happens we need to be open to God’s leaders from unexpected places. Like Deborah, a female leader, heretofore unheard of in the Hebrew Scriptures where Noah and Moses and the patriarchs are always the prime actors. Judges is a book full of strong women, and sometimes, like men, they make mistakes or behave in questionable ways, like Delilah or Jael in this story. But the point is that God can use us all if we are willing to trust and obey what we believe God is calling us to do as best we can discern.

And that’s the final lesson learned here. Human collaboration and shared leadership is necessary and sorely needed in our day. To say the least I am skeptical but still praying for collaboration and compromise to break out in Washington D.C. instead of the partisan bickering and backstabbing that accomplishes nothing. To achieve that dream more than human collaboration is needed. Collaboration with the will of God that supersedes human pettiness and selfishness is required if we are to face the complex issues our nation and world must confront.

We need leaders with vision who speak the will of God. Who are those leaders today? Look in the mirror, it might be you! Pray and really listen to what God is asking you to do to make a difference. We spend so much of our prayer time telling God things God already knows instead of listening for what God wants us to know.

When we take time to listen to God, even in the midst of all life’s challenges we can embrace the mystery of God wrapped in faithful assurance of the ultimate outcome. We can dwell in God’s peace that passes human understanding that enables us to act faithfully without knowing the details of what happens in short run because we do know who holds the future.

Life is like a game of tag. When God taps us and says “You’re it!” we can say like Barak, “Yes, Lord, I’ll go, but you have to go with me.” And God will.

Let Justice and Righteousness Flow

October 28, 2014October 31, 2014 by Steve Harsh, posted in Christian Discipleship, Faith and Politics, Faith and Values, Lectionary Texts

Many advocates of church growth argue that politics and controversial social justice issues should be kept out of church pulpits and classrooms because they will produce conflict and drive prospective church members away. The resulting prosperity gospel/cheap grace messages may indeed increase attendance in the short run. Praise services that resemble rock concerts more than worship services entertain attendees and may produce a feeling of spiritual euphoria, but do they also challenge participants to examine their lives, confess their sins, individual and corporate, and deepen their faith in ways that address human need in relevant and effective ways? That seems to me a question the Jesus I know would want us to ask ourselves regularly.

Those who argue that political and social issues don’t belong in church simply have not taken seriously the Hebrew prophets, the liberation history of God’s people from slavery and political oppression, nor Jesus’ own confrontation of the powers and principalities of Rome and the established religious authorities of his day.
A clergy colleague of mine told me recently about his experience at a 50th high school reunion in a wealthy suburban neighborhood. Asked to offer a prayer before the reunion dinner, he took the opportunity to reflect briefly on how much the world had changed since he and his classmates had graduated. Among other things he pointed out that the total population of the world has doubled in the last half century. So far so good, but then as they say he stopped preaching and went to meddling. He said, “That means there are a lot more poor people in the world that we who have been blessed with a good life and good education need to be concerned about.” While some of his classmates appreciated that observation, many others were upset and expressed anger that he had spoiled their celebration by asking them to think about unpleasant things.

I don’t know what my friend said in reply, but here’s what the Hebrew prophet Amos says God would say to them: “I hate, I despise your festivals, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies. Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them; and the offerings of well-being of your fatted animals I will not look upon. Take away from me the noise of your songs; I will not listen to the melody of your harps. But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an everflowing stream.” (Amos 5:21-24).

The Hebrew word for justice is “mishpat,” a much more inclusive term than what we often mean by our English use of the word “justice.” We have departments of justice, and we talk about justice being served or people getting their just desserts, all of which are about retributive justice or retribution, i.e. getting even for a wrong that has been committed against a person or society. The Judeo-Christian concept of justice, however, is also about distributive justice, meaning a fair and equitable distribution of life’s necessities to all of God’s children. Those necessities include not just material items required for survival, but basic human rights. It is both kinds of justice that human nature at its best strives for in memorable words to live by like “liberty and justice for all” in our U.S. pledge of allegiance and in Jesus’ Golden Rule encouraging us to “do unto others as we would have them do unto us.” (Matthew 7:12).

Like all important matters, concern for justice requires balance. Many years ago I heard Bishop Peter Storey from South Africa preach a sermon on the need for a balanced approach to theology and how we do church. His advice is even more relevant 30 years later. The image he used that has stuck with me all these years was of a bird with one wing. He said that a church that emphasizes either evangelism or the social gospel to the exclusion of the other is like a bird with one wing that simply goes around in circles.

As main line churches decline in membership at a frightening rate there is understandable concern for the survival of the church. But concern must not be allowed to grow into panic that clouds judgment. Desperate people do desperate things, and far too many desperate churches and church leaders water down the gospel to the point of irrelevance in an ill-advised attempt to survive and “grow.” My mother used to say that the church is only one generation from extinction, and while there is some wisdom to that observation, Amos reminds us that God is more concerned about the quality of our faithfulness to God’s will than the quantity of church members or the size of our church buildings or budgets.

Church growth advocates will argue correctly that the Gospel needs to be proclaimed to the vast numbers of people in our nation and world who have not heard or have not responded to it, but it is the whole Gospel that is needed, not the one-winged bird of either extreme in the theological debate between liberal and conservatives within the church. All of us, regardless of our theological or political convictions need a personal relationship with God that casts out our fears in whatever form they take. That’s the assurance of personal salvation for all eternity offered in Christ’s death and resurrection. It is also the first meaning of the cross and the foundation of Christian faith upon which the rest of the household of faith must be built. But the foundation of a house is not a whole house, just a necessary first step in a much larger process.

Assurance of eternal life is such a powerful promise that the temptation to embrace that gift and stop there on our faith journey is very strong. The desire for heavenly peace alone is the false hope and danger that Amos points out for those who are eagerly awaiting “the day of the Lord.” In a classic “be careful what you wish for” warning, Amos offers these ominous words: “Alas for you who desire the day of the Lord! Why do you want the day of the Lord? It is darkness, not light; as if someone fled from a lion, and was met by a bear; or went into the house and rested a hand against the wall, and was bitten by a snake.” (5:18-19).

Why such harsh condemnation? Read the earlier chapters of Amos to understand why Amos believes God has lost all patience with Israel and other nations for their disobedience to God’s will and especially their unjust treatment of the poor. Is Amos exaggerating to get Israel’s attention? Is he like an exasperated parent who loves a wayward child so much and fears for his/her well-being so deeply that emotions overflow?

Context is always critical in Scriptural interpretation. The Hebrew understanding of the nature of God in the 8th century BCE was far more legalistic and judgmental than the God of grace Jesus proclaims 800 years later. But let us not be lulled into a cheap grace sense of complacency by an overreliance on God’s mercy. I am as grateful as anyone that the God revealed in the New Testament grades on a curve, but that doesn’t change the fact that the Gospel makes very serious demands on anyone who wants to follow Jesus.

Amos warning that a just and righteous life is expected of us is not discounted by Jesus in the least. Jesus invites any disciple to “take up a cross and follow me” (Luke 14:27). The cross of the resurrection is also the cross of sacrifice and service on behalf of God’s kingdom and God’s children here and now. (The examples of what this looks like in Jesus’ teachings are too numerous to mention here, but would certainly include the difficult standards of loving one’s enemies (Mt. 5:43, Lk. 6:27), turning the other cheek (Mt. 5:39), forgiving 70 x7 (Mt. 18:22), “what you do to the least of these you do unto me. (Mt. 25:45), and if someone demands your coat, give him your cloak as well (Mt. 5:40).

Righteousness is the other quality demanded by God in Amos 5:24. Righteousness means being in a right relationship with God and all creation. That’s raising the bar very high. In fact none of us gets there. Even Jesus says, “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God” (Mk. 10:18 & Romans 3:10). So if Jesus can’t even meet that standard, what hope is there for the likes of you and me? Are we asked to do the impossible? That would be an unjust request, and we do not serve an unjust God. It’s also why we all stand in the need of grace. But what it absolutely does not mean is that we throw up our hands and give up. Our own human limitations are not an excuse for ignoring the hard parts of the Gospel but a reminder that we can and must do better than we are doing when justice and righteousness are but a trickle instead of an everflowing stream.

We Americans live in the richest nation in the history of the world and in one where 10% of the people control 75% of wealth. No one but the 10% could possibly consider that just. President Kennedy once said, “When we make peaceful revolution impossible we make violent revolution inevitable.” We are seeing rumblings of such revolution today in the streets of Hong Kong. Students of history know about labor riots inspired by injustice in our own country in the 1890s (Google the Haymarket riot or the Pullman strike, or Coxey’s Army). Our economic history is like a roller coaster of bust and boom cycles because we fail repeatedly to learn the lessons Amos was warning us about 3000 years ago.

Someone smarter than I will have to figure out the economic and political details, but what I do know is that as long as the driving values of our lives are comfort and prosperity and not justice and righteousness, we’d better not be longing for the day of the Lord/judgment day/the second coming.

COMMIT TO COMMIT, Exodus 20: 14, Matthew 5: 27-30

August 13, 2014 by Steve Harsh, posted in Christian Discipleship, Faith and Values

Note: The sermon that follows was part of a series on the 10 Commandments, “Stone Tablets in a Wireless World.”

“You Shall Not Commit Adultery.” Some of you are thinking, “Finally, we’ve gotten to a commandment I haven’t broken.” And some of you carry a heavy burden of guilt or anger at yourself or someone else who has failed to live up to commandment number 7. I have good news and bad news for us all because this commandment is about much more for all of us than sexual fidelity.

I got an email two months ago asking me if I was available to preach one part of a series called “Stone Tablets in a Wireless World.” I love to preach and my calendar was open; so I said sure. Lesson learned – before making a commitment be sure you fully understand what you are committing to do.

I didn’t bother to ask which commandment since it was several weeks away. Fast forward to mid-June when the series began. I got out my calendar and started counting the Sundays until August 3 and arrived at the conclusion that I would be preaching on number 7,”You Shall Not Steal.” When I emailed our pastor to confirm that conclusion, her reply was a classic. She said, “No, we will be skipping one Sunday in July to do a mission report. I have you scheduled for adultery on August 3.” I assured my wife she had nothing to fear – I might be scheduled for adultery on August 3 but after preaching three times in one morning, the only attraction a bed would have for me is a nap.

Everyone chuckles when I tell them I’m preaching on Adultery, but this is serious business. As with the sixth commandment, this one is short and very unambiguous. “You shall not commit adultery.” And, as with “You shall not murder,” Jesus ups the ante in the Sermon on the Mount with one of those things we just wish he hadn’t said when he gets to adultery.

Matthew 5:27: “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ 28 But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart.”
And then it gets worse —

“If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away; it is better for you to lose one of your members than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. 30 And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away; it is better for you to lose one of your members than for your whole body to go into hell.” Wow! If we enforced that one literally we’d have a world full of blind folks with no hands!

A young boy in Sunday school was asked to recite the 10 commandments. When he got to number 7, he said, “Thou shall not commit adulthood.” Part of the problem with obedience or lack thereof when it comes to the commandments is a refusal to commit adulthood. We are all a bit like Peter Pan, the boy who refuses to grow up.

St. Paul’s beautiful words about love in I Corinthians 13 are by far the most quoted scripture at weddings, and that chapter includes the line, “When I became an adult I put away childish things.” Faithful maturity means committing adulthood, but that commitment has to be renewed on a daily or sometimes hourly basis, as Paul himself points out in Romans 7: “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.” Anybody relate to that if you’ve ever resolved to go on a diet or start an exercise program?

The two scriptures we read today make it sound so simple. Just don’t do it, and Jesus says the way to not do it is to not even think about it. Would Jesus say that if he lived in our wireless world? We’ve heard a lot recently about a “sexualized culture” in the OSU marching band. Big surprise! We live in a hyper-sexualized culture that uses sex to sell everything from Pontiacs to popsicles. Early Christian monks hid in monasteries to avoid worldly and sexual temptation, but there is nowhere to hide from the realities of human sexuality in a wireless world.

And the cast of characters in the Hebrew Scriptures, where the commandments reside, don’t help much. Sister Joan Chittister in her book, The Ten Commandments: Laws of the Heart, starts her discussion of adultery this way. “The problem with this commandment is that no one in the Hebrew Scriptures seems to keep it.” Solomon had 700 wives and 300 concubines. Jacob married both Leah and her sister Rachel, David knocked off one of his generals, Uriah, to try and cover up his affair with Uriah’s wife, Bathsheba. When Abram and Sarai were too impatient to wait on God’s promised son, they took matters into their own hands and Abram took Sarai’s servant Hagar, and she became the mother of his first son.

Yes, that’s ancient history, but to understand why we must take this commandment seriously today we have to make some sense of this seemingly blatant contradiction between what the scriptures say and the behavior of our spiritual ancestors. To oversimplify, at least part of the answer is that the biblical narrative is set in a sexist, patriarchal world where women were property. Having lots of wives and children were signs of prosperity and a future for society. There were no DNA tests to determine paternity and the lineage of one’s offspring determined inheritance; so the sexual faithfulness of a woman was critical to the whole socio-economic structure of the society. This commandment for Moses and Solomon was not about adultery as we know it but about respecting the property of others.

Marriage in biblical times was not based on ‘love’ as we think of it. The great musical “Fiddler on the Roof” makes that point in a humorous but very profound way. As Tevye’s and Golde’s daughters repeatedly challenge the sexist ways of their culture, loveable old Tevye begins to evaluate those traditions as well. In one memorable scene he surprises his wife of 25 years with this question: “Golde, do you love me?” And her response is classic. She says, “Do I what?”

So how do we understand and apply this commandment against adultery in our very different wireless world? The key is that it is all about commitment. Even though marriage in Jacob and Leah and Rachel’s day was totally different than ours, the common denominator is commitment to a set of responsibilities and obligations to each other which have to be taken seriously and kept to insure family and cultural stability.

An anonymous author has defined commitment this way: “Commitment is staying loyal to what you said you were going to do long after the mood you said it in has left.” Commitment is especially important in our transient world that moves at warp speed. We are a people deeply in need of stability. Extended families are over-extended or non-existent. When I grew up all of my grandparents, aunts and uncles and cousins lived within a 20 mile radius. My mother didn’t need a cell phone to keep track of me. If I got in trouble she heard about it from her mom or one of her sisters before I got home!

Not so today when families are spread out all over the country. The village it takes to raise kids is gone. The support system for caring for the elderly at a time when the number of people in their 80’s and 90’s is growing exponentially is history, and the pressure all that puts on the nuclear family can cause a nuclear meltdown.
Those we love need the assurance that we take our commitments to them very seriously no matter what happens. Not because God says so or someone else said so. We have to be faithful to our commitments because we said so.

Marriage is a prime example of commitment because the promises we make are so huge. The words are so familiar they flow off the tongues of starry-eyed brides and grooms too easily. To love another person for better or worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness in health, till death do us part. This is not a 5 year or 50000 mile guarantee. You don’t become a free agent when the contract expires. It’s for keeps.

I saw these words spray painted on a freeway overpass a few years ago: “John loves so and so forever.” I don’t know the name of the beloved because it had been painted over. Apparently “forever” turned out to be longer than John expected. And forever has gotten longer. When the average life expectancy was 40 or 50 till death do us part was a lot shorter than it is today. Caring for someone in sickness and health requires a whole lot more commitment when a spouse suffering from dementia no longer knows your name or is dying by inches from ALS or cancer.

“Commitment is staying loyal to what you said you were going to do long after the mood you said it in has left.” Even on days when you don’t like each other very much. Love is not a feeling you fall into and out of. Love is a choice, a commitment. Is it humanly possible to love like that always? No. That kind of unconditional love is from God and we are merely promising to imitate it. God doesn’t say “I will love you if you do this or don’t do that. God says I love you period.” That’s commitment, and it’s what faithfulness in marriage or any relationship requires.

So what happens when we fail to live up to that high standard? When we break our promises and commitments or are even tempted to? Do we pluck out our eyes and cut off our hands? Or go on a long guilt trip to nowhere?
No, there’s another adultery story in chapter 8 of John’s gospel that shows us a better way.

“The scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in adultery; and making her stand before all of them, 4 they said to him, “Teacher, this woman was caught in the very act of committing adultery. 5 Now in the law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?” 6 They said this to test him, so that they might have some charge to bring against him. Jesus bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground. 7 When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, “Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” 8 And once again he bent down and wrote on the ground. 9 When they heard it, they went away, one by one, beginning with the elders; and Jesus was left alone with the woman standing before him. 10 Jesus straightened up and said to her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?” 11 She said, “No one, sir.” And Jesus said, “Neither do I condemn you. Go your way, and from now on do not sin again.”

Have you ever wondered what Jesus wrote on the ground during that confrontation? No one knows of course. No one had a cell phone to take a picture of it. But from what Jesus has said to me on the numerous occasions when I’ve flunked the commitment test, I think he simply wrote one word, and that word is “Grace.” Grace for the woman. Grace for her self-righteous accusers, And Amazing Grace for you and me if we admit our sin and recommit to God’s way of faithful love.

[Originally preached August 3, 2014 at Northwest United Methodist Church, Columbus, Ohio]

Steve Harsh, Ph.D., M.Div.
Writer, Teacher, Pastor
My Blog: http://peacefullyharsh.com

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