A Sermon:: Who Are We?

                                                                   Who Are We?

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

April 24, 2016

Scripture: Acts 11:1-18

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

I’ve got to tell you something this morning. I’ve got to ask you some questions that have been weighing on me recently. They aren’t questions for me to answer, but I think they are questions for me to ask. Who are we? Why are we here? What are we supposed to be doing as the First Congregational Church of Maltby? Those are questions of identity. They are also questions of mission. They are really important questions. Identity really matters. Mission really matters. They matter to each one of us as individuals, and they matter to us as a church.

Identity and mission have always mattered to the larger church. Identity and mission were the major issues in the very early life of the Christian movement. In its earliest decades the biggest issue facing the young Christian movement was one of identity and mission. It was the issue of whether the gospel of Jesus Christ was for the Jews only or for both the Jews and the Gentiles. The question with which Christians wrestled was: Who are we? Are we a movement of and for Jews only, or are we a movement of and for everyone?

In our reading from Acts this morning we see the founders of the faith wrestling with that question and answering it. The answer they gave was: The movement of Jesus Christ and the grace of God are for everyone, not just for us Jews. They adopted the identity of a universal movement. They adopted the mission of spreading the good news of Jesus Christ beyond Israel to the whole world. For that decision I give thanks to God, for if they hadn’t done that we never would have heard of Jesus of Nazareth. So it’s a good thing for us that our earliest ancestors in the Christian faith answered the identity question the way they did.

A church’s identity, or its mission, which is really a different way of talking about the same thing, is as important in today’s world as it was in the days of Saints Peter and Paul. A church’s identity has several layers. I’m thinking here of Christian churches, and the most foundational identity of any Christian church is that it’s Christian. There are a lot of different ways in which people understand what it means to be Christian, and some of them are more faithful to Jesus Christ than others; but an identity as some kind of Christian is the most basic identity of any Christian church.

OK, we’re Christian; but I have to tell you that there’s a lot more to the question of our identity and our mission than that. A church usually has, and always needs to have, a more specific, a more precise identity and mission than that. Look at our passage from Acts again. There was no issue about both Peter and the other leaders of the Jerusalem church being Christian. Their issue was what being Christian meant with regard to mission in their specific time and place. It was the specific issue of the scope of the Christian that shaped their discussions and their disagreements, not whether or not they were followers of Jesus Christ.

Whether the Gospel is also for Gentiles is, of course, not our question. For us that is a question that our tradition answered a very long time ago. Yet the way we see the ancient pioneers of our faith wrestling with that question in the New Testament can still be instructive for us. Their issue was one of the relationship of the Christian movement to the world in which they lived. As they wrestled with the question of how to relate to the dominant Gentile world in which they lived different people among them came to different conclusions. Some thought that they needed to wall themselves off from that world. Some thought they needed to protect their Jewish identity from any dilution or, as they saw it, contamination. If you want to follow Jesus, become Jewish first, they said. Of course, very few Gentiles, especially the men, had any interest in becoming Jewish; but that was their problem, these Christian Judaizers said. Our movement is Jewish, and we’re going to keep it Jewish at all costs.

Others answered the question differently. In the book of Acts, though not in the authentic letters of Paul, it is Peter who first answers the question of the Christians’ relationship to the Gentiles differently. Peter, and Paul either after him or before him depending on which texts you read, saw that God’s grace extends to everyone, not just to the Jews. These Christian universalizers saw a great mission field among the Gentiles. They saw that many Gentiles were longing for a new and powerful way to connect with the one true God that Christianity offered. They saw the Holy Spirit alive and working among Gentiles as well as among Jews and said all right then. God is for everyone. The Gospel of Jesus Christ is for everyone. Thanks be to God!

Our world is of course very different from the world of Peter, Paul, and the other earliest Christians. Yet there are some interesting similarities between our context and theirs. Especially in this part of our country, Christianity is becoming a minority way among an atheist or at least agnostic majority. Some Christians want us to circle the wagons the way the first century Christian Judaizers did. They want to retreat to what they see as a better Christian past, to cling to what was, and to pretend that what is will just go away. Well, here’s the truth. What is never goes away. It changes. It evolves, but it doesn’t go away.

Folks, I am convinced that the Holy Spirit is calling us out into our mostly non-Christian world the same was the Holy Spirit called Peter and his associates out into the mostly non-Christian world so very long ago. God called them to mission in parts of their world that were very foreign to them, and they accepted the challenge. God calls us into the world too. About that I have absolutely no doubt. God calls us to mission in the world. Let’s take that as a given.

It’s a given, but just as the precise nature of God’s call was an issue for Peter and Paul, so the precise nature of God’s call is an issue for us. God’s call to us is an issue of identity and mission. It comes to us not as answers but as questions. Who are we? Why should we continue to exist as a church? What does God want us to be doing right here and right now? Those are immense questions, and they are immensely important to us as seek to live together into the future.

How would you answer those questions? Here’s how I’ve heard you answering them in the relatively short time that I’ve been with you. You self-identify as “friendly.” You see yourselves, correctly I think, as a friendly congregation. For the most part you like each other and get along relatively well, certainly better than you have at other times in your recent past. You think of yourselves as friendly to visitors, and for the most part I think that you are. Beyond that, you identify as an autonomous congregation. Some of you strongly identify as Congregationalists, and for you that mostly means being an autonomous congregation that values individual freedom of conscience. You certainly are autonomous. Isolated even. And you seem to respect each person’s right to her or his own opinions, sometimes to an extreme that isn’t necessarily all that healthy for the church as a whole. I think some of you also self-identify as a congregation that does some good work in the world, primarily for and through the Maltby Food Bank.

All of that is very well and good, but I want to ask you: Is it enough? My answer to that question is no, it isn’t enough. It isn’t enough for a couple of reasons. Your self-identity is mostly as a Congregationalist church. I’m a life-long Congregationalist too, but every expert out there today who has studied the matter will tell you that people just don’t care about denominational identity like they did fifty or sixty years ago. Denominational loyalty is mostly a think of the past. Identifying ourselves as Congregationalist before all else will not sustain this church into the future. That may not be news you want to hear, but it’s not my job to give you only news you want to hear. My job is to give you what I know to be the truth, and the truth is that no church today that identifies itself only by its denominational tradition will long survive.

If this church is to have a future it must have an identity beyond the one it already has. It must be committed to a mission in the world more than it is at the moment or has been in the past. It is my job first of all to put that truth before you. It is much less my job to answer the questions of identity and mission for you. Those answers are yours to discern. I have some ideas along those lines that I’m happy to share with you, but these questions are yours, not mine, to answer.

So I’ll just leave you with these questions: Who are we? More importantly, who is the Holy Spirit calling us to be? Why are we here? Why should we continue to exist? What difference do we make in the world? How is God calling us to live out the Gospel of Jesus Christ in our time and place? Great questions to be sure, and the answers aren’t necessarily easy to find. I pray that we can work together in the time ahead to find them. Amen.

Conservative and Liberal Christianity: What's the Difference?

Conservative and Progressive Christianity: What’s’ the Difference?

Recently in a conversation I was having with friends I said that some Christians with whom I work are more conservative than others. Someone asked me what I meant by conservative in that context. I frankly don’t remember what answer I gave, but that question is one of crucial importance in Christianity today. There are in fact two distinctly different kinds of Christianity alive in our world today. I call those two kinds of Christianity conservative Christianity and progressive Christianity. What I here call progressive Christianity is sometimes also called liberal Christianity. So I’ve been giving the matter some more thought. Here’s what I’ve come up with as characteristics of those two fundamentally different types of Christianity. In practice most Christians probably belong generally to one type of the other but hold some of these characteristics more lightly than they hold others. Many may not agree with all of my characterizations for either type of Christianity. Still, I am convinced that in broad outline these are major characteristics of two different kinds of Christianity that live in our world in our time.

Conservative Christianity

God is “the Supreme Being,” that is, is experienced as a particular thing or person like us except enormously bigger, wiser, and more powerful.

God is mostly if not exclusively imaged using male language. God is the Father but not the Mother. The only appropriate pronoun for God is “He.”

The primary function of the Christian faith is to get believers to heaven after they die.

Holding the proper Christian faith is the only way to be right with God and get to heaven after you die.

Jesus is the Son of God who came to earth for the primary purpose of suffering and dying in order to pay the price of sin for humanity and thus to procure at least the possibility of God’s forgiveness of sin.

Humans secure their salvation by accepting Jesus Christ as their personal Lord and Savior.

The souls of humans who die with their sin forgiven spend eternity in a place of bliss known as heaven. These souls are recognizable as the humans they occupied during their physical life on earth.

All humans are sinners. The souls of humans who die with their sin unforgiven spend eternity of a place of unspeakable torment known as hell.

The Bible is the inerrant word of God that must be read and understood literally, that is, factually. There are no errors and no contradictions in the Bible. Because the Bible is divine and inerrant, any human science that contradicts something in the Bible must be wrong.

Sin is thought of primarily in the plural, that is, as sins. Sins are specific actions (and possibly even thoughts) that God has prohibited. They may also be the failure to do or believe things that God has commanded us to do or believe.

As a consequence of the previous two characterizations, anything that the Bible appears to prohibit is a sin and endangers a person’s salvation.

Morality is seen primarily in terms of sexual behavior. All sexual acts outside of a marriage between a man and a woman are sinful. All homosexual acts are particularly sinful. Same-gender marriage is an abomination. For some, divorce is impermissible.

Because God is male, human males are the ideal form of human existence. Women are inherently less than men. For some, women are therefore excluded from positions of leadership in the church and most particularly are excluded from ordination.

Charity for those in need is a virtue and should be practiced. However, since the primary concern of a person of faith is to get his or her soul to heaven after death, social justice, that is, work to transform human systems in order to overcome the sources of human need, is not strongly emphasized.

Violence is a permissible means of accomplishing just ends.

The United States of America is a Christian nation, and the government must be used to accomplish supposedly Christian ends, in particular, defeating the nation’s enemies and prohibiting abortion and the expansion of gay and transgender rights.

Progressive Christianity

Relates to God as personal but understands God in broader, less specific terms. God is not “a being,” not even the Supreme Being. Progressive Christianity uses terms for God like ultimate reality, being itself, the ground of being, ultimate truth. or just the Ultimate.

God is not male. Conservative Christianity may also acknowledge in theory that God is not male, but it still uses exclusively male terms for God. Progressive Christianity does not use male terms for God, or at least doesn’t exclusively use male terms for God. Feminine terms like Mother and feminine pronouns are as appropriate for God as are their male counterparts.

Christianity is a way of living this life more than it is a way of securing heaven in the next life.

Christianity is not the only true faith. All religions, including Christianity, seek to connect people with God. They can all do it to some extent, and they all do it imperfectly.

Jesus is the Son of God who came to earth to reveal God to humanity as fully as humanity is capable of receiving and understanding God. Jesus’ suffering and death are part of that revelation, but so are Jesus’ teachings and actions during his life on earth.

Humans cannot and do not procure their own salvation through their beliefs or actions. Salvation is for everyone, and it comes from God alone.

Progressive Christianity is agnostic about an afterlife. There may or may not be such a thing. Progressive Christianity is content to leave the afterlife, if any there be, up to God. Progressive Christianity doesn’t really believe in the reality of hell.

The Bible is the foundational book of the Christian faith, but it is neither written by God nor inerrant. It is a human product that reflects the beliefs and experiences of the people who wrote its various parts. It contains both errors and contradictions. The Bible is not a basis for denying the discoveries of science.

Sin is thought of more in the singular than in the plural. Sin is the status of living apart from God. That status leads humans to commit acts that are sinful, but those acts are a consequence of sin more than they are sin itself.

Because the Bible reflects the beliefs and experiences of its authors more than it reflects God, things that the Bible considers to be permissible may not be permissible at all (slavery for example); and things that the Bible prohibits may not be sinful at all (divorce in certain circumstances, for example).

Morality is much broader than sexual morality, although of course it includes sexual morality. Morality is about living with other humans and all of the earth compassionately. Human sexuality is a gift from God that we are to use responsibly but not merely by obeying any set of sexual rules. Homosexuality is neither more nor less sinful than heterosexuality. All persons should be afforded equal dignity and respect regardless of a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity. Same-gender marriage should be offered both by the church and by the state.

God created men and women equally, both in the image and likeness of God. Therefore men and women are equal in all realms of human life, including the church. Excluding women from ordination and positions of leadership is sinful because it contradicts God’s action in creating men and women as equals.

Charity is a virtue and should be practiced. Social justice, that is, working to reform human practices and institutions that produce oppression and need, is also a requirement of Christian faith. Charity and social justice go together, and Christians are called to practice both.

Jesus taught and lived nonviolence. Therefore violence is to be avoided in all circumstances.

The United States is not a Christian nation. It’s founders were Deists or functionally secular men who looked to reason, not to faith, as the source of truth. It is not the government’s function to enforce any morality other than the minimum morality necessary to secure life for those living in a society. Government is not called to enforce any conception of supposedly Christian morality beyond that minimal standard. The government’s function is to secure public order and to structure the nation’s life in ways that benefit the people, especially the poor and oppressed.

I’m sure there are other differences between conservative and progressive Christianity that I have overlooked here. Please feel free to come up with your own criteria.

Sermon "Baa"

This is the sermon I gave at First Congregational Church of Maltby on Sunday, April 17, 2016.

Baa

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
April 17, 2016

Scripture:
Psalm 23 John 10:11-18

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

I think I’ve mentioned to some of you before that I once gave a sermon with the title Baa.” Since the scripture readings for this week deal once again with images of sheep and shepherds I went and found that old sermon. I gave it in May, 2003, so that’s getting to be a while ago. I want to talk again about those images of shepherd and sheep as it applies to us, and that sermon I gave so long ago isn’t bad. This sermon isn’t exactly that sermon, although I confess that a good deal of it comes pretty much word for word from that sermon. So here goes with a sermon about shepherds and sheep. I know I’ve said some of this before, but I haven’t said it to you; so I guess I can get away with reusing some of my old material here. Just between you and me, I’ve done it before here.

Christians talk a lot about sheep, or at least we talk a lot about shepherds, and a shepherd isn’t a shepherd without sheep. We just heard Psalm 23. It’s most everyone’s favorite psalm, and it’s possibly the favorite Bible passage for most Christians. It famously begins: "The Lord is my shepherd." The Lord in that line isn’t Jesus, it’s the Jewish God Yahweh, but that’s OK. It means God is our shepherd, and God is indeed that. The Gospel lesson we just heard has Jesus saying "I am the good shepherd." Jesus is such a good shepherd that he is willing to lay down his life for the sheep, that is, for us.

The Good Shepherd is a much loved image of Jesus in the church, and the church calls people who perform functions like mine here "pastors." Webster’s New World Dictionary defines "pastor" as "originally a shepherd, hence a clergyman...." Now, if my being the pastor means I’m a shepherd, then, it would seem, you all must be sheep. You in fact are often known as sheep. Once not long before I wrote that old sermon with the same title as this one, I was doing the New York Times crossword puzzle. One clue was "flock, so to speak." The answer was "laity". That’s you. You’re the flock. That is, you’re sheep. Moreover, if the Lord is my shepherd too, and he is, then I must be a sheep too. We must all be sheep. Right?

Now, although the church calls me pastor/shepherd, I don’t know much about sheep. I had a college roommate who grew up on a sheep ranch in Central Oregon. He knew a lot about sheep, and mostly what he told me about them is that they are very stupid animals. They are famous, or infamous, for the way they just follow wherever they are led unthinkingly and unquestioningly. I certainly have that image of sheep myself. Whenever I see people unquestioningly following a leader, whether it’s a church leader, a political leader, or any other leader without thinking things through for themselves, my response is often so say: "Baa!" Indeed, the dictionary gives one meaning of the word sheep as "a person who is meek, stupid, timid, defenseless, submissive, etc." Now, meek might be alright, as in "blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth." The rest of those things, however, are not how I think of myself and not how I think of you. So, if the Lord is our shepherd, are we really sheep? Do we want to be sheep? I mean, if being a Christian means being "stupid, timid, defenseless, submissive, etc.," I’d just as soon not be one, thank you very much.

And yet there is no denying that our tradition has made the image of shepherd and sheep one of its central metaphors for the Christian life. Now, that image may be part of our tradition, but I have always thought that we need to be prepared to reject those parts of our tradition that we find to be unfaithful to the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and there are lots of those things. I do not believe, however, that we should ever reject something that has been important to our tradition lightly, without careful and prayerful consideration. So let’s take a closer look at that ovine imagery that the tradition seems to love so well and see if we can find a way to look at it that has meaning for us.

Our reading this morning from the Gospel of John gives us a good starting place for doing that. The really good part of this passage is contained in the very first verse: “I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.” This passage is why Sunday School rooms around the world are decorated with pictures of Jesus with little lambs. Jesus here goes on to say that unlike a sheep tender who is merely a “hired hand,” the true shepherd cares for his sheep so much that he will even give up his own life to save the sheep. Being a shepherd in the Christian sense, then, means caring so much for the people of God that one will even sacrifice one’s own life if that is necessary to protect God’s people from harm. That, the Christian tradition says, is precisely what Jesus did for us. If we approach the sheep metaphor from the side of the shepherd rather than from the side of the sheep, then, we do indeed find a valuable, valid image. It is an image of Christian love and compassion, an image of self-giving love for the good of the people of God.

Well, OK. But both Psalm 23 and our passage from John make us the sheep not the shepherd. It’s all very well for God to be our shepherd in the sense of our passage from John, but that side of the image doesn’t really deal with us as sheep. It still leaves us as those “stupid, timid, defenseless, submissive, etc.,” creatures that we don’t want to be and don’t think that we are. Or does it? Let’s take another look.

What does it mean for us that our Good Shepherd would even lay down his life for us? It means lots of things. We start with the fact that there is more to being a sheep than being a dumb follower. Sheep are creatures who are cared for by the shepherd. They are fed, watered, given shelter when needed and protected from predators. At least in the Biblical imagery of the shepherd reflected in our Scripture passages this morning the sheep are so dear, so beloved, that a good shepherd will guard the sheep as his dearest treasure. He will even risk his life to protect them if that is what it takes. The sheep are such precious creatures that no sacrifice by the shepherd is too great to protect the precious flock. Just so, this image tells us, our Good Shepherd guards us as His dearest treasure. We are Christ’s sheep because he cares for us. He protects us and makes us to know that ultimately, in the end, no matter what happens, we are safe with Him. We are safe with Him because he will do whatever it takes, up to and including sacrificing his own life, to keep us ultimately safe. To be the sheep of the Good Shepherd means to be the dearly beloved of God. In that sense I am perfectly happy to be one of God’s sheep.

I’m happy to be one of God’s sheep in this sense, but here’s the thing. Such love as our Good Shepherd has for us requires a response. We cannot, or at least we should not, simply accept the love the Good Shepherd offers us without responding as He would have us respond. The response to which we are called is to live as God’s sheep. That doesn’t mean be mindless followers of some church leader, or of some book, or of some tradition, although much in the history of the church might lead you to believe that that is what it means. Rather, it means that we should indeed live like people whom God the Good Shepherd loves beyond measure, people of infinite worth for whom Christ made the ultimate sacrifice. That means we should treat both ourselves and all other people, indeed all of God’s creation, as creatures of infinite worth because we all are the reason our Good Shepherd laid down His life. Living the Christian life means treating others as Christ treats us, that is, as creatures of infinite worth. It means being tender and forgiving, patient and accepting, with and toward everyone, including ourselves and especially people we find hard to love that way, because that is how God treats us. It means seeing ourselves as part of the flock, that is, as part of God’s vast creation apart and separate from which we cannot survive. It means knowing that we do not live by and for ourselves but with and for God’s world. It means knowing that the most fully human life is the life of the Good Shepherd, that is, a life of self-fulfillment in self-giving love for the others of the flock. That is our call as Christians.

So there are a couple of sides of the image of us as God’s sheep. It means God cares for us infinitely, but it also means that we are called to care for people and all of creation the way God does. That’s far from easy of course, but God has never limited God’s call to God’s people to things that are easy. We are cared for and we are called to care. That’s one important way in which God is our shepherd and we are God’s sheep.

And so let us indeed say "Baa!" Let us indeed be God’s sheep. Because God loves us, God does not want us to be "stupid, timid, defenseless, submissive, etc." That isn’t what being God’s sheep means. Because God loves us we are called to be whole, fully developed people in body, heart, spirit, and mind, that is, to be the creatures God intends us to be. We are called to strive as we are able to treat ourselves and everyone else as the Good Shepherd treats us. We aren’t, after all, the sheep of just anyone. We are the sheep of the Good Shepherd. So let’s be sheep. Let’s be really good sheep, OK?. Baa!. Amen.

Yes, Lord? Sermon

Yes, Lord?

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

April 10, 2016

Scripture: Acts 9:1-6; John 21:1-19

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! In the church it’s still Easter. Out in the world Easter has come and gone. The plastic baskets full of plastic grass and chocolate bunnies are mostly gone from the stores. That’s fine. Those things aren’t what Easter is about in any event. Here it’s still Easter, and today we heard two scripture accounts of encounters some of the early giants of the faith had with the risen Christ. One of those, the one about Peter and other disciples on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, which John for inexplicable reasons calls by it Roman name the Sea of Tiberius, occurs not long after Jesus’ death and resurrection. The other, the one about Paul’s road to Damascus experience, occurs later; but it’s still about an encounter someone had with Jesus after Jesus’ death. The Revised Common Lectionary that I use put these two readings together for today, and as I read them last week I wondered if these two seemingly very different stories have anything in common, if there is some common theme in them that might be worth talking to you about. Somewhat to my surprise I found one, and that’s what I do want to talk to you about this morning.

What do these stories have in common other than that the risen Christ appears in both of them? One thing they have in common, I think, is that in both of them the risen Christ asks someone a question. He asks Paul, called by his Aramaic name Saul in this story, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” He asks Peter three times, called here by his Aramaic name Simon, “Simon, son of John, do you love me?” In both cases Jesus is, I think, actually asking the people he questions something rather deeper than the actual question he puts to them. He’s not just asking for information. He’s actually calling on these men to do something. On one level he’s asking Paul to stop persecuting Christ’s followers. He’s asking Peter to confess his love for Jesus.

Yet I think there’s more to these questions then even that. These questions imply a call from the risen Christ to Paul and to Peter. Jesus wants a lot more than information from them. What he wants, what he’s calling them to, is repentance. Now, to understand what I mean by saying that what the risen Christ wants from Paul and Peter is repentance we obviously need to know what repentance means, and that’s perhaps a more difficult question than you might expect. See, in popular usage repentance has come to mean essentially to regret something, to feel sorry about something we’ve done. We can even hear it meaning something like beat up on ourselves because we did something wrong.

That is not what repentance means in the language of faith. Rather, repentance is having a change of heart. It isn’t feeling sorry, although we may feel sorry about something of which we are repenting. It is turning your life around. When Jesus says repent and believe the good news, as he does at the very beginning of the Gospel of Mark for example, he doesn’t mean feel bad. He doesn’t mean beat up on yourself. He means something a lot harder and a lot more fruitful than that. He means turn your life around. Turn from the ways you have been living to new, transformed ways. Turn from the ways of the world to the ways of God. Stop doing what is wrong not because you feel bad about doing what is wrong but just because it’s wrong. Start doing what is right, and for Jesus that means essentially start living the life of the Kingdom of God now, in this life, in this sinful world.

That’s what the risen Christ asked of both Peter and Paul. They responded in faith, which is a pretty good thing because if they hadn’t we probably would never have heard of Jesus. So Christ’s call to them and their response is important to us to be sure, but here’s something just as important, or maybe even more important to us. Christ questioned Peter and Paul, but Christ questions us too. He probably isn’t asking us why we’re persecuting him like he asked Paul, because I don’t think we’re doing that. He may be asking us if we love him, like he asked Peter. One thing I’m sure of. He’s asking us to repent. He’s asking us to turn our lives around. I know he’s asking that because he always asks that of everyone, since none of us lives the Kingdom life perfectly.

The question for us to discern is just what that question, that call to repentance, means to us more specifically. I suspect that there are several facets to Christ’s call to us. Are there things in our personal lives of which we need to repent? Perhaps addictive behavior. Perhaps unjust or unloving relationships with people in our families. Perhaps disregard of how our actions affect others. He’s also asking: Are there things in our life as a church of which we need to repent? Judgment where we should be extending grace perhaps. Or un-Christian narrowmindedness toward certain classes of people. Or maybe just inertia or inaction when we should be taking Christ’s Gospel of grace into our world.

I’m not going to try to answer those questions today. I don’t have time, and besides, those questions are not just or even not primarily for me to answer. They are for us to answer both individually and together as a community of faith. One thing I know for sure. Christ is asking. Christ is calling. Peter and Paul answered Yes Lord. Will we? Amen.

Easter Sermon 2016

This is the sermon I gave at our main Easter service, March 27, 2016.

Just the Gardener

An Easter Meditation

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

March 27, 2016

Scripture: John 20:1-18

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer.

Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! It the most joyous proclamation of the Christian faith. It is the most joyous proclamation that there ever was or ever could be. It is the foundational proclamation of the Christian faith. Without Christ’s glorious Resurrection there would be no Christian faith. If Jesus had only died as he did, brutally executed by the Romans as a threat to public order, we’d never have heard of him. If he’d only died with nothing more his followers would have disbanded and gone home, disillusioned perhaps or at least gravely disappointed, but certainly not inspired to proclaim the empty tomb and continue his teachings. Jesus’ Resurrection is certainly the most amazing thing that has ever happened to any human being. I mean, dead people don’t just get up and walk out of the grave, only Jesus did. Jesus rose to eternal life, eternal life for him and eternal life for us. Easter is simply amazing. Easter is simply impossible, it just happened, that’s all. Christ is risen! Christ is risen indeed!

All of which leads me to ask: If Jesus’ Resurrection is so amazing, why do the Gospels make it sound so ordinary? I mean, they really do, or at least most of them do. Take Mark, the oldest Gospel, for example. In that account three women go to Jesus’ tomb and don’t find Jesus’ body there. Instead they find a figure that Mark just calls a young man. That young man tells them quite matter-of-factly that Jesus isn’t there, he has risen. That’s really all there is Mark’s account. No real drama. No fireworks. Just a man stating a fact as though there were nothing to it. Luke makes it a bit more dramatic, and Matthew, in his typical fashion, makes it a bit more dramatic still. He has an earthquake greet the women at the tomb and a man whose appearance was like lightning. Still, all that man does is tell the women quite matter-of-factly that Jesus has risen. Matthew likes his dramatic details, but all they do is dress up a pretty bland story. The tomb is empty and some figure of other tells the women who find the empty tomb that Jesus has risen.

Then there’s John’s version that we just heard. First in that account Mary Magdalene finds the stone rolled away from the front of Jesus’ tomb. She assumes that something quite ordinary has happened. She tells Peter and another disciple that someone has removed Jesus’ body from the tomb and she doesn’t know what whoever that was has done with it. Peter and the other disciple confirm that Jesus’ tomb is empty. Then they just shrug their shoulders and go home. Mary stands outside the tomb crying. Two angels ask her why she’s crying, and she says it’s because someone has taken Jesus’ body but she knows not where.

Then Mary turns around. She sees what she takes to be something perfectly ordinary. There’s a man standing there. He must have looked perfectly ordinary, for Mary just assumes that he’s the gardener and that he must be the one who for some reason has taken Jesus’ body out of its tomb. Now, that person whom Mary takes to be the gardener turns out to be the risen Christ; but apparently there’s nothing about him that tells Mary that he’s anything other than an ordinary man, not at first at least. If there were, how could she think that he was simply the gardener? I mean, of course there’s nothing wrong with being a gardener; but gardeners look pretty much like the rest of us except perhaps for soiled knees and maybe dirt under their fingernails. John doesn’t tell us that the risen Christ had soiled knees and dirt under his fingernails, but maybe he did. In any event there’s nothing extraordinary about the figure Mary sees. To her, at first, he’s just the gardener. He’s just another man. To her, at first, he’s perfectly ordinary.

How can it be that someone who just got up and walked out of his tomb can seem so ordinary? More importantly, why would God choose to have the risen Christ appear so ordinary to the first people who encounter him? I mean, God could have appeared in the risen Christ like Christ appears in so much Christian iconography: cosmic, immense, stern, surrounded by angels, appearing as judge of the world and everyone in it. Maybe with lightning in his hands, or coming out of his head. There could have been choirs of angels proclaiming the Resurrection, like Luke says there were proclaiming Jesus’ birth. The earth could have been trembling under his divine feet. There could have been a solar eclipse or a new star brighter than the sun sitting above his head. I’m sure a good Hollywood director could come up with a lot of other miraculous, awe-inspiring things that could have been going on for his special effects people to put on film. Yet God didn’t do any of that. No, God in the person of the risen Christ appeared as someone Mary Magdalene took to be just a gardener, a perfectly ordinary man.

You know, I don’t think God ever does anything for no reason. I think that if we perceive God doing something in the world there must be a reason for it. And when God does something in the world there must be some lesson in it for us. It must have some significance. It must tell us something about God and about the world. It must tell us something about how God relates to the world. So what message would God be trying to send us by having Godself in the form of the risen Christ appear as someone so ordinary that one of Jesus’ closest followers, Mary Magdalene, just took him to be the gardener? Well, during Jesus’ lifetime on earth he was forever turning the world’s expectations on their heads. Welcome the prodigal home without question. Praise the hated Samaritan and criticize the honored temple authorities. Pay those who worked one hour as much as those who worked twelve. Dine with people the world calls sinners and tells us to shun. Say the poor and the peacemakers are blessed, not the rich and the war makers the world so honors. In almost everything Jesus said and did he turned the world’s expectations upside down and showed us that God’s ways are very, very different from the world’s ways.

So why wouldn’t Jesus continue his revolutionary teaching and living in his new form as the risen Christ? Well, he would; and he did. See, what would the world expect of a man who was also the Son of God who rose from the dead? Those fireworks I said above were mostly missing from the Gospel’s stories of the Resurrection. We’d expect thunder and lightning. We’d expect earthquakes. We’d expect hosts of angels proclaiming God’s triumph over death. We’d expect sky rockets and firecrackers. We’d expect a great big show. We’d expect power and glory. We’d expect a Cecil B. DeMille movie. That’s what the world would expect, wouldn’t it? Sure seems to me like it would.

God and Jesus Christ of course knew that that’s what the world would expect, so they did exactly the opposite. They had the risen Christ appear as someone Mary Magdalene took to be a gardener. He rose with essentially no special effects. He rose with no fanfare, indeed with no human witnesses to the actual event of his rising. He rose looking perfectly ordinary. He rose looking like an ordinary working person, a man of and from the people, a man of no remarkable appearance or affect. He rose as a gardener. Only after Mary had seen him as a gardener did he reveal to her that he was actually the risen Christ.

Folks, there is a great lesson here for us. We so want to look for God in the spectacular. We want Jesus to return with all the power and fireworks that weren’t there when he rose from the grave. We don’t expect Christ to come to us looking like a gardener. Maybe we especially don’t expect that today because so many people in our context who work at gardening are Latinos, people so many Americans look down on and are suspicious of. We don’t expect it. We probably don’t want it. But there it is, right in the Gospel of John. The risen Christ looked like a gardener.

See, God is telling us something really important in that part of the Resurrection story. God calls us to look for God in the ordinary, the mundane, the unimpressive. God calls us to look for God among the poor, the rejected, the outcast. I confess that I haven’t done it myself, but I have colleagues who do a lot of work among the homeless in Seattle. They say that the presence of Christ is very real among those unfortunate souls. That’s where we should look for God among us, among those Christ came specially to save, the poor, the downtrodden, the scorned, the despised, the rejected, the excluded. That’s where we are to look. That’s where we will find God.

Christ rose from the grave. Yes, he did. That we believe. That we know. That we confess. And when he did he looked like a gardener. Not like a prince. Not like a king. Not like an angel. Like a gardener. God is in the midst of us in our ordinary, unexciting, everyday lives. God is present with us in those lives bringing us grace, peace, and salvation. To find God don’t look up as much as you look across and within. Find God where you live. Find God in how you live. Find God in your gardener. That’s what Mary Magdalene did, and it’s what Easter calls us to do too. Christ is risen! He is risen indeed. Thanks be to God. Amen.