Posted by stpauls on July 31, 2011 under Sermons | 
Ross Bliss wrote and delivered this sermon on July 31, 2011.
Matthew 14: 13-21
Let’s talk about miracles.
It is safe to say that miracles were more readily accepted in the ancient world, and also in the world of the first century when this Gospel was written, than they are now.
It is also easy to interpret such ready acceptance as ignorance – by which we generally mean ignorance of all the scientific inquiry and other developments that later generations, like us, can call upon. They believed in miracle because they knew no better, and 2000 years later we know better.
Is this really true, and is it really so simple? We need to consider at least one underlying principle that shaped their understanding, which may be less influential for us.
In the modern mind, miracles and a host of other unexplainable phenomena are categorically supernatural. Many or even most people who believe in miracles today would agree with this categorization. This is actually part of the excitement. Miracles are amazing because they are beyond the laws of nature. Things not normally possible in our world: Super – Natural.
This presumes a lot about nature. Our concept of nature, and by extension of the world, developed over centuries, is of a self contained, consistent, and predictable and system.
This concept is actually nowhere expressed in the Hebrew Bible. The scriptures read and known by first century Jewish Christians, including the ones who wrote, compiled and redacted the New Testament Gospels did not define nature as a closed system which God had to interrupt in order to act.
They may have been acquainted with Hellenistic dualism and allegory, but they still believed in the primacy of creation:
That the world functions as it does simply because God wills it.
In such a world God may sometimes will something extraordinary, and that is always a sign or wonder to be celebrated, but it is not a violation or an interruption of any natural order, or anything called nature, or its laws.
So we might expect more frequent reporting of miracles in such a context. However, scholarly assertions that “miracles were everyday events in an age when every village had its own wonder worker”[i] are exaggerated.
There are records of exorcists and charismatic Jewish and pagan healers and wonder workers contemporary to Jesus. However, if you subject these to the same critical scrutiny as the Gospel miracles, and eliminate those who can reasonably be assessed as hucksters, the number of other miracle workers is relatively small, and the miracles attributed to them are comparatively limited in scope.
There are no known parallels in our sources to the sheer number or extent of miracles attributed to Jesus. Every strand of tradition about him attests miracles, including many sources that would have been hostile to him.
And to reflect further on the possible historicity of this particular story, the feeding of the multitudes is one of the few miracles to appear in all 4 Gospels. Including variant accounts of feeding the 4000, it appears 6 times.
Such repetition and emphasis could suggest evidence of at least some witnessed experience of very real and memorable impact.
The feeding of the multitudes miracle is also embedded in what looks like a sequence: the feeding / crossing the water / dispute with Pharisees / dispute among disciples. This would be consistent with and typical of historical reminiscence.
On the other hand, interesting and plausible rational explanations have also been offered for this miracle.
It has been suggested that a symbolic sacramental meal was shared in which only tiny amounts of available food were distributed and eaten. This would have been an eschatological act, anticipating and celebrating Christ’s victory through suffering, death, resurrection and the inevitable and ultimate messianic banquet.
Going further in this direction, maybe it was not an event, but a theological statement, symbolic of Christ’s life and purpose as a whole, and His abundant meeting of human need.
Or perhaps it was a simple lesson in sharing. Jesus and the disciples shared what little food they had, which shamed and compelled everyone present to do likewise, resulting in a great and unexpected feast.
I don’t propose to convince you one way or the other, about any particular belief about this story. We can at least be sure that something important happened, and perhaps most importantly, we can be even surer that we were meant to learn something from it.
One of the most magical things about scripture, is that almost any approach to it will render something of great value. These rational explanations are also rich in meaning, even complementing a miraculous interpretation. For example, a lesson in sharing moves us from being recipients, to participation in the miraculous provision.
Unpacking such threads could lead us to reflect on the themes of abundance, scarcity and sufficiency.
At the most basic level this story celebrates God’s abundance and shows us the potential available to us if we live from a place of abundance, rather than scarcity. This is certainly an endorsement of the virtues of generosity and of hope. But there are also darker layers that may teach us more about ourselves.
It is scarcity, or rather the belief in and fear of scarcity that lies behind much human folly, greed and cruelty.
Our mania for conquest, expressed individually in competition and conflict, and collectively in empire building and wars, aside from expressing some perverse need to dominate, is primarily a competition for resources.
Now why would we compete for resources, when our world clearly offers enough to go around? Though some parts of the world are hampered by poor agricultural conditions and other limitations, human deprivation is really a problem of distribution and the will to use the means at our disposal. There is and always has been utter abundance in creation.
What then is the problem? I believe we misunderstand abundance, when we see it not as God’s reliable bounty, but as our accumulation of that bounty. This inverts abundance so that it motivates a fear of scarcity.
It is actually this view of abundance as the pursuit of accumulation that creates scarcity in our world.
It really has little to do with resources. The real blocks to worldwide freedom from hunger and want are political and ultimately moral. This principle applies on every level, right down to the local and even the personal.
Threading through and rising above this tension between abundance and scarcity is a very important principle emphasized in both the Old and New Testaments – Sufficiency.
God provided manna in the desert, with explicit instructions to gather only for that day, trusting that tomorrow would be provided for. Attempts at deriving security through hoarding resulted in rotten manna. Provision for sustenance in the desert was utterly and reliably sufficient but didn’t allow for accumulation of resources.
There were leftovers after the multitudes were fed, perhaps to contrast the extravagance of the new covenant with the restrictions of the old, but not to legitimize the pursuit of accumulation.
God asks us to trust. As the lilies in the field attest, there is abundance in His sufficiency. There is also freedom in His sufficiency. Not only the obvious freedom from want, but also freedom from the futility and stress of a rat race bent on unnecessary accumulation, and from greed which can only lead to imbalance and injustice.
Sufficiency, in this sense, is actually one of the pillars of social and economic justice.
Though one can certainly read material promise into the covenant with Abraham, if we consider the context and scope of scripture, contrary to Prosperity theology, God’s abundance is not necessarily, or even primarily expressed materially. God’s extravagance is Love.
God’s love expressed through Christ was and is more than sufficient to counterbalance all the sins of mankind from the beginning and for all of time.
This is radical, sublime, abundance. Within this we are called to rest in God’s sufficiency, including in the practical aspects of life.
If we expect God’s abundance to bless the world, we have to understand and respond to how we are to be a part of that great and ceaseless outpouring. We contribute to abundance or scarcity in the world:
- By considering how entitlement and sufficiency relate to our goals in life.
- By our choices as consumers and stewards of creation.
- By our concept of giving what is already God’s.
- By our orientation as consumers or servants.
This means me, and this means you, and this means stewardship.
How we use resources and time.
What we do with what we have been given, to build God’s Kingdom, here and now.
Getting back to miracles:
A basic premise of our faith is that the universe is not just a random self generating and self perpetuating phenomena.
We recognize at the very least a sentience behind it all. An original self, without which or without whom, there could be only nothing.
Understood this way, creation itself is evidence of divine intention, placing the very existence of creation within the realm of the miraculous.
So instead of assuming that miracles happen outside the natural order, we could see everything as categorically miraculous, because everything is willed into existence by God.
All of it.
Every passing second.
And when we trust God:
Living into our baptismal calling as servants and stewards of creation
Willingly entrusting and pooling our energy and resources to do God’s work
Miracles can and do happen.
[i] Alan Richardson, Introduction to the Theology of the New Testament (London: SCM, 1958)
Posted by stpauls on July 24, 2011 under Sermons |
[This sermon was written by Presiding Priest Ruth Monette and delivered on July 24, 2011.]
I tend to read the news or watch it or hear it and let it wash over me. Sometimes a story catches me and holds me, but often I just let celebrity gossip, death, destruction, mayhem, stupid political wrangling, and impending economic doom wash over me. And that means sometimes I’m not aware of it accumulating. And yet I feel it. I feel it slowly until I just can’t seem to bear the weight of the world and I wonder why, why am I so sad? why am I so angry? why do I feel so hopeless?
Often in such moments I make a list. I like lists. I make them for all kinds of things – groceries, tasks to do, ideas to explore. But the lists I use to combat the weight of the world usually start off with the last four news stories I read. Or the most common subjects on my Twitter and Facebook feeds. Or whatever is most on my heart. So for instance, yesterday, I made a little list. It was like this:
- A family I know is coping with a loss that will profoundly shape the rest of their lives. Their grace in the face of this impossible thing is beautiful and heartbreaking.
- Amy Winehouse died because a musical gift and some success does not, can not overcome whatever was at the heart of her pain, whatever drove her addictions.
- Many of my friends are very, very hot. In temperature. As in, it is very hot where they live or are at the moment.
- Norway has lost nearly 100 people in an act of violence that targeted its youth and was driven by some kind of warped view of the world that can justify violence as a means to… well, anything.
- Impending economic doom stories (in the US or Greece or anywhere) make me fret about my future.
- It is 2011. We have a space station circling the planet but people are dying of starvation. Starvation. In a world with with space stations and iPads and $400 designer diaper bags. And if we can make space stations and iPads and afford $400 designer diaper bags, surely, surely we could feed all the children on this planet.
- It is 2011 and our cars can park themselves, but the Lower Mainland saw two fatal car accidents this weekend. Plus a really awful one in the Kootenays and a police-involved shooting on the Downtown Eastside.
The thing about this list is that while listing it all together makes me so much more conscious of all these sad and frustrating facts… it also makes me think… “oh, no wonder I would like very much to eat ice cream and lay on the couch and not engage the world.” Suddenly, I feel less like a lazy bum and more like a person caught in the midst of all the ways in which sin and death and hate and violence seep into our lives. My desire to do nothing is a kind of frozen reaction to being in the world with a twenty-four hour news cycle and the instant and constant feed of updates from friends about the momentous and trivial aspects of life.
Despite living in the first-century and not dealing with a constant flood of information from around the world, Saint Paul gets this. He gets that frozen feeling we sometimes have when faced with all that this life gives us – especially all its awfulness. And he articulates how God acts in the midst of that. “God, who searches the heart,” hears when the “Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words.” “Sighs too deep for words” is what the Spirit gives us when “we do not know how to pray as we ought.” When there are no words, when even attempting to form words feels like agony. God searches our hearts and knows our incomplete, unarticulated prayers.
In the context of the 8th chapter of the letter to Romans, this statement of the Spirit’s role in aiding us through our times of suffering belong to Paul’s larger argument. N.T. Wright suggests that Paul “is trying to explain why – if all that he has said about Christ and the Spirit is true – things are still so often painful and also why Christians can nevertheless be confident of God’s final victory and their final redemption,” (this and other quotes within this sermon from N.T. Wright, “The Letter to the Romans: Introduction, Commentary, and Reflections.” Pp. 393-770 in volume 10 of The New Interpreter’s Bible: A Commentary in Twelve Volumes. Edited by Leander E. Keck. Nashville: Abingdon, 2002.).
Essentially Paul is telling the Romans that the reason things remain so often painful is because God’s final redemption was only begun in Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection. The redemption of all creation remains incomplete. Thus the Christian life is “set within the still-to-be-redeemed world, on the one hand, and held within the powerful love of God, on the other.”
Paul is very serious about that powerful love of God. I joked earlier this week that I would get up here and preach to you nothing but Romans 8:39. Nothing separates us from the love of God. Period. End of sermon. Nothing else to say.
That’s not quite true. I know this because I am not the only preacher to have preached “God loves you” over and over. I am pretty sure that if you summarized every sermon former Archbishop of Cape Town, Desmond Tutu has ever delivered 90% of them boil down to “God loves you.” Which he would tell you with a twinkle in his eye and a joke he starts laughing at before he gives you the punchline.
You will hear sermon after sermon proclaiming “God loves you” because most of us don’t believe it. Oh, we might say we do. We might kinda believe it. But at our very core, deep inside — in that place which can do nothing more than sigh in prayer — there we are often suspicious.
In philosophy and by extension in theology and even biblical studies we might say that most of us, today, operate out of a “hermeneutics of suspicion.” A hermeneutic is a fancy word they teach you in seminary. It refers to the theory and practice of interpretation. A feminist hermeneutic looks for women’s perspectives in a text or situation; a hermeneutic rooted in liberation theology looks for where God’s activity frees the oppressed. A hermeneutic of suspicion assumes there’s always something more going on than what appears on the surface.
Some argue that today, many, maybe most of us assume a suspicious stance towards the world. We – raised on slick advertising and commercial product placements – are always looking for what you are selling. “There’s no such thing as a free lunch” has infested our thinking to the point where we doubt anyone’s generosity. We doubt motivations, assume selfishness in others.
When we negotiate our world in the role of “consumer” this hermeneutic of suspicion can be very useful; it even has its positive contributions to philosophy and biblical studies. But as N.T. Wright points out a hermeneutic of suspicion belongs in the world of sin and death which Paul warns us cannot free us. Paul tells us — at length and not always as directly as we might like — that the love of God is the only thing that can set us free. The “love of God is the deepest truth in the cosmos.” Wright continues “to trust this love is to open oneself neither to manipulation nor exploitation but to a richer and fuller humanness — suffering included — than one would ever know, and to a share in the loving liberation and remaking of the cosmos itself. The love of God, in other words, proposes a hermeneutic of trust: not a casual or shallow trust of any person or proposition that comes along, but a deep and hard-won trust, a knowing that is born of being loved and of loving in return” (N.T. Wright).
We are invited and called to participate in this love — to be loved by God and to love God in return. Christianity invites you to try on a “hermeneutic of trust.” When I was in seminary we used that language of “trying on” new ideas often. It was encouraged as a way of helping us explore ideas without rejected them just because they were new or different to us. The thing was sometimes while you were just “trying on” a way of thinking, an idea… it would seep into you, become yours when you weren’t looking. Without planning on it, my classmates became feminists and liberation theologians or more staunchly Anglican (which if you’re training to be a Unitarian is really not on your agenda).
You might find such a path of “trying on” a hermeneutic of trust as a way of letting it become a part of you. Sure, I’d like to believe that my proclaiming God’s love for you will let you trust that love. But the truth is some of us have to learn to trust. Some of us come to faith slowly and painfully. Some of us have to make lists of ways in which God is trustworthy to compare to our lists of doubts. Some of us as Christians grow in faith by a process of intentionally faking it until we make it, pretending we trust the love of God more than we really do. Operating as if we trust it until we do. And praying like mad that we aren’t wrong.
Saint Paul would not understand this. His experience – and it might be yours too – was of the love of God bowling him over, gripping him by the nape of the neck and not letting go. In Paul’s world, the “love of God calls across the dark intervals of meaning, reaches into the depths of human despair, embraces those who live in the shadow of death or the overly bright light of present life, challenges the rulers of the world and shows them up as a sham, looks at the present with clear faith and at the future with sure hope, overpowers all powers that might get in the way, fills the outer dimensions of the cosmos, and declares to the world that God is God, that Jesus the Messiah is the world’s true Lord, and that in him love has won the victory. This powerful, overmastering love grasps Paul, and sustains him in his praying, his preaching, his journeying, his writing, his pastoring, and his suffering, with the strong sense of the presence of the God who had loved him from the beginning and had put that love into action in Jesus.”
May it be so for you as well — true in an instant or learned over time. May you, like Saint Paul, be sustained by God’s deep love for you – so confident in His intimate care for you that you call Him Abba, so open to Her that She sighs with you in prayer when there are no words for your sorrow or joy, so propelled by the freedom and redemption wrought in the world that your every action proclaims the Kingdom of Heaven.
Amen.
Posted by stpauls on July 19, 2011 under Contributors, Webmaster Blog |
The World Harp Congress is coming to Vancouver and St. Paul’s July 24 – 30. While attendance at events at St. Paul’s are limited to Congress registrants only, you may wish to attend some of their public performances at other venues in downtown Vancouver.
A list of public events and their venues is listed on their website.
Harpist Charlene Wallace, a participant in the Congress, will be playing at St. Paul’s on Sunday, July 24 during the 11:00 a.m. service.
Posted by stpauls on July 17, 2011 under Sermons |
[This sermon was written by Presiding Priest Ruth Monette and delivered on July 17, 2011.]
We start this morning in Romans where we left off last week and I want to start this morning’s reflections with a point I made last week. Again we see Paul using the terms flesh and spirit as if they are opposites. And again, I say to you, Paul’s dualism between flesh and spirit is not as simple as “flesh, bad; spirit, good.” If I may be forgiven for putting words into Paul’s mouth – the relationship he seems to be setting up here more closely matches the idea of the Kingdom of God in place of the kingdoms of this world. Paul wants his readers – the early church in Rome; perhaps we would include ourselves – to place their hearts and minds on God’s kingdom, the realm of the Spirit (capital S) and not on the kingdoms of this world, concerned only with this life.
To build up those arguments and help the Romans understand the relationship they have come into with God, Paul gives some really lovely imagery this morning in the midst of his run-on sentences and spiralling arguments. Especially:
“When we cry, ‘Abba! Father!’ it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God…”
and
“We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labour pains until now.”
Both of those reflect Paul’s ability to take an idea and some language from his own traditions and weave it into the new argument he is building – being both affirming of the tradition and transforming it.
Those two images of God as Abba and of creating groaning in labour pains reflect how Paul suggests we relate to God once we have Christ in our hearts and minds. So I would like to explore them a little.
First, there is the image of God as an adoptive parent, of Abba Father. Scholars note that the combination of those two words – the transliteration of the Aramaic Abba and the Greek translation of it – appear in ways that suggest Jesus might historically have called God Abba. And that doing so might have become a practice of his early followers. It is an intimate term – almost Daddy. From the perspective of an adoptive parent to be called “dad” (or “mum” as the case may be) is often a long-waited and deeply hoped for moment. And for many of the more than a thousand children waiting for adoption in BC, it can be a moment of incredible trust. Trust that this adult is really sticking around. Trust that this adult is going to be the parent that is longed for and needed.
When Paul – drawing on Jesus’ own words – describes our relationship with God as adopted children and Abba Father, he is inviting us to an intimate, compassionate relationship. I want to come back and say a few more things about this, but I want to do that in light of the second image I am lifting up from this morning’s snippet of Romans: creation groaning in labour pains, waiting for the birth of redemption.
Here, Paul implies God might be both creation giving birth to redemption and the midwife to creation as she gives birth. Certainly, Christians seem to be invited to stand by as witness and assistant in this process of redemption. The image, of course, calls to mind mothers – a nice parallel to God as Father just a few lines above.
In that way, both these images set us into a kind of parent/child relationship with God who is our Father and Mother, the one who through the Spirit adopts us into a new life and births us into a new life.
This parental language became widely used within the Church – so widely that from time to time we make the mistake of thinking that our language for God is God. Perhaps we would fall into that trap less if we only used similes and not so many metaphors when speaking of God. For the non-English geeks amongst you, that would mean we restricted ourselves to saying “God is like our father” instead of “God is our father.” Perhaps then we would be able to remember that no terms we use to speak of God will fully grasp or pin down the Divine.
Because the language of God as our Father has so permeated the church, we sometimes launch into without any background – we do it in liturgy all the time – our texts do it even more frequently than your clergy who will slid gender-neutral language in where our tradition still relies on Father. Partly we do this because no one metaphor is enough – we know we need more ways to speak of God, not fewer. Partly we do this because to hear God spoke of as Father can require some working through our of own complicated relationships with fathers. God is, of course, held up not as a carbon copy of any particular father, but as an ideal father. As a father whose love is unconditional, whose boundaries are clearly set, whose cheerleading for his children is matched with regular prods to be all that they can be – which may or may not be the kind of father an unhappy or fatherless child dreams of.
We don’t simply abandon the imagery of God as parent to us in part because – despite the complications – the image still speaks to us. It still offers us a glimpse of the relationship God is longing to have with us – a relationship of intimacy, of love. A relationship that empowers us to grow into our full selves.
The adoption community today talks often about openness in adoption. On one level they are advocating for a “no secrets” approach to adoption – honesty about how a child comes into a family. On a second level they are advocating for multiplied relationships, keeping kids in relationship with as many family members as are safe. This means that in many of today’s adoptions – especially ones facilitated by the Ministry of Children and Families – an adoptive parent gains not only a son or daughter but also that child’s grandparent, aunt, uncle, cousin, sometimes even a birth father or mother. Not all of those relationships will be maintained with visits and in-person contact, but even so… Adoptions today generally mean family trees and family reunions are larger and more complicated.
And more joyful. As we reflect on Paul’s invitation that we call God “Abba, Father” just as Jesus did, one of the realities we might take from that is that doing so invites us into a large, complicated family. Our cries join the cries of our brothers and sisters in faith – all of us seeking and receiving welcome to an intimate, compassionate relationship with God as Mother and Father who through the Spirit adopts us into new life and births us into new life.
Amen.
Posted by stpauls on under Bible Readings, Webmaster Blog |
Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43 ~ Gospel Reading for July 17, 2011
Jesus put before the crowd another parable: “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to someone who sowed good seed in his field; but while everybody was asleep, an enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and then went away. So when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared as well. And the slaves of the householder came and said to him, ‘Master, did you not sow good seed in your field? Where, then, did these weeds come from?’ He answered, ‘An enemy has done this.’ The slaves said to him, ‘Then do you want us to go and gather them?’ But he replied, ‘No; for in gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with them. Let both of them grow together until the harvest; and at harvest time I will tell the reapers, Collect the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn.’”
Then he left the crowds and went into the house. And his disciples approached him, saying, “Explain to us the parable of the weeds of the field.”
He answered, “The one who sows the good seed is the Son of Man; the field is the world, and the good seed are the children of the kingdom; the weeds are the children of the evil one, and the enemy who sowed them is the devil; the harvest is the end of the age, and the reapers are angels. Just as the weeds are collected and burned up with fire, so will it be at the end of the age. The Son of Man will send his angels, and they will collect out of his kingdom all causes of sin and all evildoers, and they will throw them into the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father. Let anyone with ears listen!”
Posted by stpauls on July 10, 2011 under Sermons |
[This sermon was written by Presiding Priest Ruth Monette and delivered on July 10, 2011.]
I used to think that Paul’s letters would have been improved if only he’d had access to a word processor. In particular, I used to think that he could have made excellent use of the “cut and paste” features and perhaps the inserting of new ideas into the midst of older ones and also the delete key. Most especially, the delete key. Among their other challenges, Paul’s letters often seemed to me to feature arguments that happened by circling round and round the point, getting closer and closer but taking the scenic route.
British New Testament scholar and retired Bishop of Durham, N. T. Wright suggests that what I tend to find an annoying “bug” in the program is in fact a “feature” (see N.T. Wright, “The Letter to the Romans: Introduction, Commentary, and Reflections.” Pp. 393-770 in volume 10 of The New Interpreter’s Bible: A Commentary in Twelve Volumes. Edited by Leander E. Keck. Nashville: Abingdon, 2002.) Wright suggests that Paul’s writing – at least in Romans – is deeply, deeply intentional. He describes Paul’s arguments as symphonic – he’s building line by line with “themes stated and developed, recapitulated in different keys, anticipated and echoed” like a composer writing a symphony, note by note, section by section, letting themes weave in and out. It’s a beautiful image. And it makes me appreciate Paul’s arguments in a new way. It does not, however, make understanding the content of Paul’s letters more straightforward or less complicated or easier to understand. For on top of our normal work of translating Scripture from its own cultural context to our own, even N. T. Wright admits that from time to time Paul skips a link in his logical arguments. Furthermore, Paul is pulling and reshaping his own Israelite tradition in light of his experience with Christ which means that we need to translate Greco-Roman culture and Israelite culture to understand what Paul is trying to tell us.
In the case of the 8th chapter of Romans, Paul is summarizing an argument he’s been building all through this letter: Jesus’ resurrection completes the work of the Torah, doing what it – through no fault of the Law itself – had been unable to do in restoring justice and defeating sin. He is concerned to show how sending Jesus the Christ continues God’s faithfulness to the people – fulfilling the covenants made to the patriarchs. To that end, “Paul has taken some of the central Jewish language about the way in which Israel’s God is known in action, saving and leading Israel to the promised inheritance and has reused it dramatically of Christ and the Spirit.”
He associates the Law with the flesh and flesh with sin, but he is carefully not saying that the Law is sinful. Rather he is trying to say the opposite – that the Law was a good and holy gift from God but which human sinfulness and the weakness of the flesh made incapable of fulfilling its purposes in bringing about God’s justice for the whole world. So it is, according to Paul, that Jesus’ Resurrection intercedes for humanity on behalf of the Law, thus affirming the covenant between God and God’s people and renewing it with radically new elements. We also need to acknowledge that understanding Paul in his own context is only part of the challenge when it comes to our own approach to this Scripture. We also need to admit that when we encounter Paul’s language about the flesh and the spirit in lines like “to set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace” we also have to deal with two thousand years of baggage about the dualism of flesh and spirit. N. T. Wright believes that in Paul’s thinking “the weakness of the ‘flesh’ is not weakness of the physicality of human nature (which was God-given and will be reaffirmed in the resurrection), but in the present rebellious and corruptible state of humankind, within which sin had made its dwelling.” So despite the language of “flesh,” it is not the body itself that Paul is condemning, but the sin which has taken residence amongst humanity.
The church, and Christians, has, however, sometimes has merged the two with disastrous results. So I find it necessary to remind you that the Incarnation – and as Wright points out – the Resurrection affirm the body. Your body is a good and holy thing. Just as it is. The task of Christian life is not to perfect the spirit so that the body can be overcome and discarded. God made you in the flesh and loves you in the flesh and will save you in the flesh.
When Paul says “To set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace” he is saying that when we focus on the Law to provide our salvation we will fail. We can only find our way to life and peace through the Spirit, not the Law. As Christians living thousands of years after Paul, few of us have ever been “under the Law” the way his audience in Rome had been before their conversion to Christianity. We have not attempted to keep all the Laws and the teachings of the prophets. We do not keep kosher dietary laws or observe a strict Sabbath.
However, if we are willing to draw some inexact parallels we might recognize our own versions of “the Law” which we have created as imperfect paths to salvation. Part of the inexactness is the distinction between what we have created in attempting to bring about our own salvation and what God provided to the Israelites as a path to salvation – however if we agree with Paul that the Law, after all, can not lead to salvation without the Spirit, then we can at least see how we continue to build a tension between those things we THINK will save us and the Spirit of God’s saving grace superabounding in Christ’s Resurrection.
Our culture is filled with opportunities to perfect ourselves – from finding the perfect career to owning the perfect house, from being the perfect weight to having the perfect attitude. And someone will sell you the plan to get there. Perhaps our culture’s greatest burden is its deep-seated belief that we can buy our own salvation, that ingenuity and capital can get us anywhere we want to go.
There is also another trap here for us as Christians – not only must we watch for the hubris of believing we can save ourselves, we must also watch for the legalism that Paul once embodied and now, having encountered Christ, argues against. One of the ways in which the Law becomes death-dealing rather than life-giving is when we narrow our focus to just the Law. We have seen this in Christian circles where we become more focused on an aspect of right living than on the big picture of Christ’s resurrection. It can be tempting to always point that finger out to others, but we would be wise to question if we have done so as well.
So the lessons we might take from Paul’s letter to the Romans today – or at least this snippet from that letter – is that we will only find our salvation if we “set the mind on the Spirit.” Paul is clear: salvation belongs to the realm of the Spirit because it is a gift to us from the Spirit of God. We are called to trust that “the Spirit of the one who raised Jesus from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through his Spirit that dwells in you.”
Amen
Posted by stpauls on under Bible Readings, Webmaster Blog |
Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23 ~ Gospel Reading for July 10, 2011
Jesus went out of the house and sat beside the sea. Such great crowds gathered around him that he got into a boat and sat there, while the whole crowd stood on the beach. And he told them many things in parables, saying:
“Listen! A sower went out to sow. And as he sowed, some seeds fell on the path, and the birds came and ate them up. Other seeds fell on rocky ground, where they did not have much soil, and they sprang up quickly, since they had no depth of soil. But when the sun rose, they were scorched; and since they had no root, they withered away. Other seeds fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked them. Other seeds fell on good soil and brought forth grain, some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty. Let anyone with ears listen!
“Hear then the parable of the sower. When anyone hears the word of the kingdom and does not understand it, the evil one comes and snatches away what is sown in the heart; this is what was sown on the path. As for what was sown on rocky ground, this is the one who hears the word and immediately receives it with joy; yet such a person has no root, but endures only for a while, and when trouble or persecution arises on account of the word, that person immediately falls away. As for what was sown among thorns, this is the one who hears the word, but the cares of the world and the lure of wealth choke the word, and it yields nothing. But as for what was sown on good soil, this is the one who hears the word and understands it, who indeed bears fruit and yields, in one case a hundredfold, in another sixty, and in another thirty.”
Posted by stpauls on July 3, 2011 under Sermons |
[This sermon was written by Presiding Priest Ruth Monette and delivered on July 3, 2011.]
“Feed my sheep. If you love me, feed my sheep.” It is one of Jesus’ most direct, obvious, practical commands to Peter and the other disciples. It’s one we Christians have continued to do in the centuries that have passed since then. This congregation of St. Paul’s does it literally and practically through the food bank distribution. Metaphorically, this congregation feeds souls through worship and the labyrinth and Education for Ministry among other things. “Feed my sheep” is the kind of command that you would think we could all agree on – no matter our preferences for worship style, theological leaning, or ethnic background. Feed my sheep.
But even as early as the earliest Christian communities, we know that they disagreed. Who are the sheep? What should we feed them? We know about these disagreements because two of the factions are associated with the two saints whose martyrdoms we commemorate this morning: Saint Peter and Saint Paul.
Peter we see in the lessons: a disciple, beloved of Jesus, the one who is named Peter because “upon this rock, I will build my church.” Peter, like Jesus and the other disciples, was a Jew. We know – because there’s a story in the Acts of the Apostles – that in the early years after the Resurrection, Peter advocated that all followers of Jesus must be followers of Judaism, as it was practised then. We also know, that at least once, Peter had a vision that challenged the notion that Christians had to follow the dietary restrictions of ancient Judaism.
Paul, we learn from his own letters, thought Peter was too closed-minded, still too committed to keeping this growing movement of Christianity a sect of Judaism. Paul, the Apostle, the planter of many churches, the prolific letter writer was a Roman as well as a Jew. His experience of conversion to following Christ seems to have made him ready to reject many aspects of Jewish life and practice.
Paul’s letters are our primary source for information on the conflict between Peter, as the head of the church in Jerusalem, and Paul, the possibly-self-appointed head of the church in Rome. If you’ve ever been stuck between two friends arguing, you know that this means we don’t have an objective description of their disagreement.
But it seems to be, at the core of it, about who the sheep are and what we should feed them. Peter believed that the sheep were first and foremost the Jews to whom Jesus had come, fulfilling prophesies of a Messiah and so everything the early church was feeding them (teaching and agape meals and so forth) should fit into that Jewish worldview. Paul, on the other hand, thought the sheep were all peoples – Gentile or Jew, slave or free, women and men and that the key thing the early church had to offer as food was Jesus: his teachings and the practice of the Eucharist with fewer concerns about following the Torah’s laws. In many ways, you’d be right if that description sounds like Paul won the argument. Partly, we have more of his side of it – if Peter wrote letters defending his position, they have been lost. Partly the two factions shifted as Christianity and ancient Judaism grew apart.
But you might also have heard in that description something that sounds very, very contemporary. There are ways in which we could frame many of our ongoing debates and disagreements within Christianity as about who the sheep are and what we should feed them. Should our first concern be for existing believers or for those outside the Christian faith? Should our teachings conform to a narrow interpretation of Scripture or incorporate the best learning from all fields of study?
Should we develop and provide resources to meet the spiritual needs of people whose practical needs are well-meet through their own resources or should we dedicate our time, talents, and treasures to the most disenfranchised in our societies? Should we focus on the mission field in our own neighbourhoods or seek to relieve suffering among our brothers and sisters overseas? Who are the sheep? What should we feed them?
Sometimes, when a story like that of the relationship between Saint Peter and Saint Paul focuses me to confront it, I find myself deeply depressed that Christians have been having the same arguments for 2000 years. Surely we should have figured this out already! Surely we should know who are sheep are and what the very best nutritional plan for optimum health is; we should know what to feed those sheep. This should be easy.
But it isn’t quite so easy. And it never has been. Maybe I’m quite odd, but I find that comforting. There is nothing particularly wrong with us 21st century Christians. We’re having debates and challenges because the church has always debated and challenged – has always questioned: are we feeding all the sheep? Should we be feeding some other sheep? Is what we have to feed these sheep enough? Can we make it be enough? Will be the best we can give?
The answers aren’t static because we’re not static. Peter and Paul built up a church and a way of living under imperial rule, while undergoing persecutions, and often disagreeing with each other. We seek to build up disciples of Christ and encourage a way of life in a constitutional monarchy and parliamentary democracy and globalized capitalist economy — while undergoing a shifting cultural role and often disagreeing with each other.
The command from Jesus: “Feed my sheep” still rings for us, but who gets defined as the sheep and what diet we select… Really, it’s a good thing that we haven’t let that become static.
Saints Peter and Paul are united in this shared feast day commemorating their martyrdom since tradition has it they were both killed for their faith in Rome during the same year. As you’ve probably picked up, it seems to me that at least one of the lessons we could take from the lives of these saints is that our differences are normal, that having differences has always been a part of church life. This does not necessarily make them easier to navigate. It does mean that we navigate our differences with whole cloud of saints — including those who disagreed in life, now united in “the paschal victory of Christ.” I hope standing in the stream of such history makes us attentive to how tightly we bind our identities to whatever factions exist in our time and place. While there are divisions which we may not be able to heal in this life, we have faith in God’s ability to reconcile all things. I hope standing in the shadows of saints such as Peter and Paul makes us attentive to the basics of Jesus’ command: “Feed my sheep.” Which sheep? The ones you can. The ones you are called to. The ones in front of you. The ones whose lives are linked to yours. The ones who need to be fed. With what? With what you have. With the food you can share. With the faith you can share. With the bread and wine of this communion table.
I pray that each of us can answer, “Yes, Lord” when we, like Peter, are asked “Do you love me? Feed my sheep.”
Amen.
