Third Sunday after Pentecost, Year C

United Church of Christ Anniversary Sunday

June 26, 2022

2 Kings 2:1-3, 6-14; Galatians 5:13-26

Union-Congregational UCC

  Waupun, WI

"A For-Prophet Church"

“He picked up the mantle of Elijah that had fallen from him, and went back and stood on the bank of the Jordan.  He took the mantle of Elijah that had fallen from him, and struck the water, saying, ‘Where is the LORD, the God of Elijah’” (2 Kings 2:13-14)?  Do you ever wonder that—where is the God of Elijah?  It’s not quite the same question as “Where is God?” or even “Where is God in the midst of suffering?”  To ask “Where is the God of Elijah?” is to wonder, specifically, where is the God of the prophets, where is the source of the prophetic word?  Elisha asks this question, of course, because he finds himself as Elijah’s successor.  Elijah’s mantle represents pretty big prophetic shoes to fill.

Now whenever I use the words prophet or prophetic, I feel the need tugging at me to make sure everyone’s on the same page—a prophet is not a “fortune-teller.”  Being prophetic—in the biblical sense—does not mean being able to predict the future.  (It does happen to involve the future—usually God’s vision for it.)  To be a prophet is to proclaim God’s message.  And that can be in either word or deed.  Prophets are often seen as speaking truth to power.  To be prophetic, then, means to bring God’s word against the powerful.  A prophet upsets the apple cart.  A prophet points to the difference between God’s ways and the ways of humanity, insisting that God’s ways demand social and economic justice.  A prophetic word is usually challenging, and those comfortable with a conservative status quo are almost always the ones most offended by prophets.  That goes for Moses, that goes for Elijah, that goes for John the Baptist, that goes for Jesus, and that goes for Martin Luther King, Jr, to name just some of the most obvious examples.

At a General Synod many years ago—General Synod being the name of the national gathering of our denomination—I heard a featured preacher claim that she believes the United Church of Christ is the most prophetic church in the world.  It’s a bold claim.  Even now, it still causes me to pause and consider.  In that setting, she didn’t have to include in her sermon the historical reasoning behind the claim.  But I doubt that when we’re back in our local congregations’ settings, we see things the same way.  Let me ask all of you—have you ever thought of the United Church of Christ as prophetic?

Well, maybe we should.  Although officially, the anniversary we celebrate of the United Church of Christ this weekend goes back to only a merger occurring in 1957, we know that the roots of our predecessor traditions go back centuries more.  And that history is chock-full of prophetic acts.  We’ve heard of this history before, perhaps only occasionally, but it’s a history we should get to know well.  As our denomination continues to declare that “God is still speaking,” we know that the work of God’s Spirit does not end at the close of the New Testament.

The challenging unjust authority runs deep in the veins of the UCC, as when the Pilgrims brought Congregationalism to North America, refusing to acknowledge any monarch or bishop or Pope as Head of the Church, but only Christ.  This conviction would continue to play itself out politically when Samuel Adams and other Congregationalists served as leaders planning the Boston Tea Party at a meeting in Old South Church, refusing to accept the injustice of a militaristic multinational empire as sovereign.  Back in Germany, as cooperative-minded Lutheran and Reformed Christians sought to unite, they refused to allow older, anti-rational literalistic understandings of religion to hold authority over them, and so they birthed the gift of modern theology.

And so we have a history of loving God with heart and soul and mind, but we also have quite the history of loving others as ourselves—a history rife with a commitment to social justice, including civil liberties.  It was the Congregationalist strand that was the first in North America to condemn slavery publicly in 1700, and the first church to ordain an African American in 1785.  It was this same piece of our UCC heritage that worked for and secured the release of the Amistad captives, it was another Congregationalist—Harriet Beecher Stowe—who was blamed for contributing to the outbreak of the Civil War by writing Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and it was our own UCC national offices that led the efforts that achieved the federal ruling in 1959 that airwaves actually belong to the public.  (You see, by 1959, it was already clear that certain stations in the southern U.S. were blocking out news coverage of the growing Civil Rights Movement.  The urge to filter news to fit one’s own belief system was alive and well even back then.)  We’ll hear more about our religious tradition and race in American history next week, with special attention on the Amistad.

But these strands of the UCC—always on the cutting edge of loving neighbor, and therefore, standing (prophetically) for social justice—weren’t limited to race.  In 1853, those old Congregationalists ordained Antoinette Brown the first woman pastor since New Testament times.  In 1972—just three years after the Stonewall Riots launched the modern LGBTQ civil rights movement—the UCC ordained the first openly gay male pastor, Bill Johnson.  By the end of that decade, the UCC had also ordained the first openly lesbian woman minister, Anne Holmes.  A word about these decisions that too often gets forgotten—they were not some kind of decrees handed down from a national office.  They were local decisions, just as approval for ordination has always been in the UCC, meaning that these folks were approved by their local churches and recommended to their local Associations for ordination.  They went through the process and were found fit for ordained ministry.  Then, in 1985—again, let’s not forget how long ago that was—I think I had just finished kindergarten when the General Synod of the UCC proclaimed the national setting of the denomination to be Open and Affirming to gay, lesbian, and bisexual people.  Later, transgendered people were added to the statement.  And, since then, the General Synod reaffirmed UCC support for marriage equality—including same-gender marriage—in 2005.

Throughout history, none of these stands were popular with other good, religious folks—not abolitionism, not modern theology, not acknowledging and lifting the religious vocations of underrepresented people, not a revolution against the world’s imperial superpower.  These stands were not only unpopular, but they were also often dangerous.  Do you know what that reminds me of?  Something we heard just a little earlier:  Prophets are often seen as speaking truth to power.  To be prophetic, then, means to bring God’s word against the powerful.  A prophet upsets the apple cart.  A prophet points to the difference between God’s ways and the ways of humanity, insisting that God’s ways demand social and economic justice.  A prophetic word is usually challenging, and those comfortable with a conservative status quo are almost always the ones most offended by prophets.

The question then becomes not is the United Church of Christ truly prophetic, but are we bold enough to follow Elisha’s lead?  For Elisha did not seek merely to continue Elijah’s work—he prayed to “’ inherit a double share of [the prophet’s] spirit’” (2:9).  Elisha hoped to be twice the prophet Elijah was—the same prophet who, as we heard last week, was being hunted down by the powers-that-be.

“He picked up the mantle of Elijah that had fallen from him, and went back and stood on the bank of the Jordan.  He took the mantle of Elijah that had fallen from him, and struck the water, saying, ‘Where is the LORD, the God of Elijah?’”

Do you ever wonder that?

Second Sunday after Pentecost

June 19, 2022

1 Kings 19:1-15; Galatians 3:23-29

Union-Congregational UCC

      Waupun, WI

"Is That Really All?"

Apologetics.  Hermeneutics.  Eschatology.  Sanctification.  Justification by grace through faith.  These are the kinds of terms folks who go to seminary learn about.  Maybe you recognize some of those words and phrases; maybe not.  But, in any case, they sure do sound like big words, don’t they?  This is how pastors learn what the Apocrypha is, and where the sacristy is.  It’s how we keep track of the differences between a litany, a liturgy, and a lectionary.  But as you’ve probably heard, “the devil’s in the details,” and so similarly, it’s the small words that can change entire ways of thinking and being.  Is the Kingdom of God “near” or “at hand”?  Are we saved by–or through–the “faith of Jesus Christ” or “faith in Jesus Christ”?  These are all different—and correct—ways to interpret the Greek of the New Testament and represent only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the enormous power of small words.

One such word that holds so much power in the grand scope of Christian thinking, discipleship, and church life is all.  All.  A-l-l.  No, this is not some commercial for laundry detergent.  In many ways, this small word encompasses the radical nature of Christianity, and history shows us that understanding its meaning is the central source of contention and conflict throughout Christian history.

Speaking of conflict in church history, we heard this morning from the apostle Paul’s Letter to the Galatians.  As you may have heard from me before, I absolutely love Paul’s Letter to the Galatians.  Why?  Because we get such a glimpse into the real human emotions behind those “big names” of first-generation Christianity that we read about in the Bible—people like Peter, James, John, Barnabas, Titus, Silas, and—of course—Paul himself, the one who wrote more of the New Testament than anybody else and whom scholars place as the most important figure, after Jesus, in founding the Christian faith.

And here’s some of what Paul writes to the Galatians in the first couple of chapters—much of which he means about those other big-name figures: “I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel…but there are some who are confusing you and want to pervert the gospel of Christ…let that one be accursed!”  (1:6-8).  And later on, when describing a meeting with this upper-level leadership, Paul writes, “But because of false believers secretly brought in…we did not submit to them even for a moment” (2:4-5).  Do you realize whom Paul is talking about meeting in these verses?  Peter and John and James.  He goes on, “And from those who were supposed to be acknowledged leaders (what they actually made no difference to me; God shows no partiality)—those leaders contributed nothing to me” (2:6).  And in case you’re not getting the picture about these early pillars of the church, Paul keeps going, “But when Cephas [another name for Peter] came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he stood self-condemned; for until certain people came from James, he used to eat with the Gentiles” (2:11-12).  “And the other Jews [Paul means Jewish-Christians] joined him in this hypocrisy, so that even Barnabas was led astray” (2:13).

What do you think of all that?  Did you realize these New Testament figures had such harsh language and disagreements with each other?  I think it’s clear from these verses and others that Paul is downright ticked off…yes, even at people like Peter and James and John.  Perhaps it’s not exactly how we were taught to envision the leaders of the New Testament church—arguing and bickering and name-calling.  (We wouldn’t even want that in the church today, right?)  On one level, there’s a lesson here that conflict has always existed within Christianity, even right here in the early church described in the Bible.  But, that’s not all; there’s an even larger lesson here.  That is, why is Paul—who wrote on more than one occasion of how the different members of the Body of Christ are called to work together—why is he so angry, at others in that same body, no less?  What is this conflict all about?

Just as this description of the church might sound familiar to us Christians today, so also might the conflict itself:  who’s in and who’s out?  Or another way to put it: do all really mean all?  But we’ll come back to that.  The major conflict of the early Christian movement requires understanding that those original generations of Christians identified first as Jewish.  Christianity was not a separate religion then, but a particular group within Judaism.  That means that the first Christians all observed the Jewish rituals, including dietary restrictions and male circumcision.  The strictest of the religious advised avoiding Gentiles (non-Jews) and saw them as potential polluters of the movement that sought to follow the Messiah.  When Gentiles began showing interest in this radical movement of transformation that proclaimed a victim of the Empire’s violence as the true sovereign of the world, it created some problems internally.

The immediate conflict lying behind the Letter to the Galatians started between James, Jesus’ brother on the one hand, who was recognized as the leader of the church in Jerusalem; and Paul on the other, who advocated full inclusion of all people—even Gentiles—into the Jesus Movement.  Let’s hear that again—full inclusion of all people.  Again, that’s all people.  (Peter, in Paul’s eyes—by the way—was a waffler; at one point agreeing with Paul on the mission to Gentiles, but then being persuaded by James and his faction to observe the traditional ways more strictly, thus more exclusive.)

But back to that claim from Paul.  How do we know that a full welcome was his belief?  One commentator describes it this way:  Paul “told the Jerusalem Christians that their welcome did not go far enough….  It was a new day.  Even these non-Jews were children of God with no strings attached.” According to Paul, “all the old categories they had followed all their lives were too confining.  What about ethnic or religious divisions, they asked?  Paul said no.  Surely, they said, socioeconomic forces must be taken into consideration.  Paul shook his head.  The Jew[ish Christians] persisted:  don’t tell us that gender differentiations don’t matter.  For a third time, Paul said no.”  As the commentator continues, “What followed was absolutely subversive.  ‘There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female, for all of you are one in Christ.’  They noted his emphasis on all.”

Does all really mean all?  We know as churches we have conflict; do we ever have conflict over these kinds of questions, questions regarding who’s welcome or not?  What would it mean if we took Paul’s claim and applied it to our own divisions today regarding who’s in, and who’s out, and consider how the church goes about its business with such inclusion in mind?  Could Paul have really been serious, that all are in?  If so, should that change anything about what we’re doing?

That commentator concludes, “Paul’s words to Galatia keep upsetting every generation: ‘There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male or female; for all of you are one in Christ.’”  That’s all.

Video Sermon from June 12, 2022

By: Rev. Kelsey Peterson Beebe

(can be printed upon request)

https://files.constantcontact.com/4fc4c9cb001/22458357-8219-4ed1-a680-0eaf23ca1d4f.pdf

Day of Pentecost, Year C

June 5, 2022

Genesis 11:1-9; Acts 2:1-21

Union-Congregational UCC

Waupun, WI

"Ancient Words & New Spirits"

“And suddenly from heaven, there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting” (Acts 2:2).  Such is how the Book of Acts describes the arrival of the Holy Spirit on that first Christian Pentecost, the origin story of the entire Christian Church.  As the passage goes on to describe, “And at this sound, the crowd gathered and was bewildered…” (2:6), and the people found themselves “[a]mazed and astonished” (2:7).  How disorienting that experience must have been; how confusing, how chaotic, how upsetting!  Again, as Acts explains, “All were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, ‘What does this mean?’  But others sneered and said, ‘They are filled with new wine” (2:12-13).

New wine.  The phrase comes to us carrying deep Christian imagery.  Of course, we might associate wine as one of the traditional elements of communion, which we’ll share later this morning (and that kind of renders moot Peter’s objection regarding who drinks wine at nine o’clock in the morning!  He even got the time right for today).  We might even recall Jesus turning water into wine or that passage about the problems with putting new wine into old wineskins.  But let’s not overlook the intent of the line as we have it here from Acts—it comes with a sneer.  The accusation of being filled with new wine means, for one thing, getting drunk on cheap wine.  But the connotations extend further beyond even class distinctions.  In the ancient world, antiquity itself was a virtue.  Having a long history of tradition was highly lauded as a value.  Leaders had to have a pedigree and honorable ancestry.  Make no mistake, invoking the phrase new wine was an insult, which fits right in with the sneer in that verse.

Values of history, tradition, insisting on doing things the way we’ve always done them…you know what that kind of reminds me of?  The church.  Right?  During a visioning session at a congregation, my spouse served in Missouri, a question was asked to the group regarding what the purpose of the church is.  One man—a former Council president—immediately raised his hand and answered that it served as a place to record family history and genealogy.  For him, that was perhaps the essential function of the church.  Such an answer, by the way, makes pastors want to smack our own foreheads, though we’ll do our best to hide it.  Yes, it’s true that church documents like baptismal, confirmation, and wedding certificates greatly assist those doing genealogical work.  But to name the primary purpose of the church as preserving the past really does just get it plain wrong.  What that better describes is a museum.

So we might also sneer at new wine.  We might also hear God’s promise to make all things new as a threat, an idea we heard about just recently.  We might also feel amazed, astonished, and perplexed when God’s new Spirit shows up, ripping through the gathered community, leaving a buzz of diverse vocal sounds in its wake.  We might feel that all the “newness” the Spirit brings means that everything that’s older, everything we’re used to, and all we know about our own identity gets thrown out.  And—let me share some good news with you—that’s not the case.

We heard the Pentecost story from Acts this morning after hearing that old story from Genesis of the Tower of Babel.  Theological interpretation often pairs these two stories up, because tradition has it that at Pentecost—when everyone could understand everyone else—the curse of Babel—when all human language was confused as part of God’s judgment of human pride—that curse got reversed.  But the idea that Pentecost reversed Babel has always struck me as a little off.  In the Tower of Babel story, humanity shares a single common language before God scatters all the people.  A couple of things about motivations in this passage should be noted.  First, pride’s a bit of a misleading misnomer in this story.  The people had become obsessed with building, with producing without regard for anything else.  Commentators hone in on the text’s description of brick and mortar because there’s another passage in our Old Testament that evokes a similar image: it is exactly the work with brick and mortar that Egyptian taskmasters demanded from the Hebrew slaves at the beginning of the Book of Exodus.  As a result, many interpreters now see God’s judgment in this passage as connected not to pride necessarily, but to the exploitation of labor, of being obsessed with bottom lines and results in no matter the non-monetary damage.  Human laborers are not cogs in some machine.

But there’s another detail here that also gets lost by convention.  God’s division of human speech into different languages is not a punishment because of what happened at Babel.  Unfortunately, translations often confuse the Hebrew (especially ironic here), but if we listen with the highest attention we hear a revealing admission in the fourth verse:  the people decide to embark on this building project, for "otherwise we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.’”  See, the people already knew what God intended.  Diversity is not a punishment for pride; rather diversity is the will of God.  The story testifies to human efforts to block it, to try to build structures against it, again at any cost.  (Building a structure trying to block God’s purpose for diversity—may be that part of the story doesn’t sound so long ago, after all.)

And these insights have to bear for the passage from Acts.  In the Pentecost story, the people don’t return to using a single common language—in fact, the text is very clear on this point: “each one heard them speaking in the native language of each” (2:6) and “’ in our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power’” (2:11).  God’s will continues to seek diversity, but also understanding through that diversity.  See, the diversity of languages remains, but God’s Spirit brings the gift of understanding.  The former situation, then, is not reversed; rather it is transformed.

With such a situation in mind, it should come as no surprise, then, that when Peter stands up to respond to that sneer of new wine, he cites a prophet of the established tradition to help give meaning to this new thing, a prophet that had envisioned God doing new things like sons and daughters proclaiming God’s message, as well as the enslaved, “both men and women,” in short that God’s new thing always involves God pouring out the Spirit upon all flesh (2:17-18).

Again, God sends the Spirit to be poured out upon all flesh.  When God’s Spirit blows through and transforms our ministry, it feels like a new thing.  Because it feels new, we may not know where it leads.  And because it promises newness, we may grow anxious about what we’re challenged to leave behind.  But remember, God’s Spirit of newness does not ask us to dispense with our history or our identity, with our past or our heritage.  But God’s Spirit does come to transform God’s ministry (and it is God’s church, not our independent enterprise) in this place.  Let us, like those gathered when the day of Pentecost had come, find ourselves open to receiving God’s new Spirit that works transformation by adding to what God has already created us to be.  And let us make the connection between old and new and rise to speak this vision from God.  Amen.

Ascension Sunday, Year C

May 29, 2022

Acts 1:1-11; Acts 16:16-34

Union-Congregational UCC

Waupun, WI

"On Earth, As It Is in Heaven"

While our thoughts these days may be on graduations or even Memorial Day weekend and kicking off our summers, the scriptural story we started at the end of last November–believe it or not–isn’t quite finished with us yet.  Here we have the eleven disciples listening to the final words from the risen Christ as he begins to float up into heaven and become one with a cloud.  Then, like some scene taken straight out of a Mel Brooks movie, we’re told that two men in white robes show up, standing there, and say, “why do you stand looking up toward heaven?”  Or the way I envision this scene, they actually ask, “What are all you bozos staring at?”  Is this really how we conclude the Easter season?

Part of me thinks this line might be directed at us Christians today.  I’ve heard of too many folks who think the church is supposed to be an escape from the real world; that we talk about supposedly heavenly stuff in here, so you can get through the week out there.  If that’s what church was for, then there wouldn’t have been much reason for God’s incarnation in Jesus coming to earth in the first place.  We could have talked all about God in heaven without the real-world problems of injustice or oppression or violence, as in Jesus’ execution under an imperial power, but we think that’s kind of important to the story, don’t we?  The church is here on earth, for a reason, but we’ll get back to that.

This Sunday in the church year is always a strange one.  Besides being Ascension Sunday, it is also the last Sunday of Eastertide, but not yet Pentecost.  It’s got this “in-between” feel to it; we’re still supposed to be celebrating the risen Christ, but at this point in the lectionary, he’s not here anymore, and we aren’t really sure what we’re supposed to be celebrating, because the Spirit isn’t scheduled to descend until next Sunday.  Why does Jesus have to go up before the Spirit comes down, for the rest of us, at least?  And is Christ ascending supposed to be a good thing in that Jesus’ work on earth is finished (is it really?), or do we find some sadness here, because in the story Christ’s presence is not with the disciples at this time?  It is a strange tradition--this stuff about the Ascension--may be on second thought it would be easier to talk about everyone’s summer plans.  What are all us bozos staring at, indeed?

But I don’t want to let the Ascension off the hook, not quite yet.  If we read this stuff about ascending in the clouds and vanishing anywhere else, we might call it mythological.  (Of course, we could always use a reminder that myths need not be untrue.)  It seems to me that the function of the Book of the Acts of the Apostles--and especially the first two chapters--are to show a legitimate continuity between Jesus and the movement that became the church after Jesus’ death and Christ’s resurrection.  And naturally, this connection was expressed in the way ancient storytellers knew how--in mythical language; language that is true not because it tells a story in a straightforward, factual way, but because its meaning is true.  Again, what are all of us bozos staring up at the sky for?

In-between times–times of interim, literally–can be some of the most important moments in the life of faith.  These are moments of stopping, taking a look at where we are and where we’ve been, and wondering what the Spirit-filled church might look like moving forward.  There may be no better time for discernment than those times we find ourselves in-between.

Could there be a more apt description for graduates, by the way, especially if your next plans of life don’t get started until the fall?  Here you are on the brink of an entire in-between season, perhaps torn in all your thinking between reflecting on all that’s been, and all that will be.  The same goes for families of graduates.  For many, households are about to look and feel and sound very different, but perhaps there’s some time before that change becomes long-term, a time to consider, again, everything that has come before while reflecting on everything that may lay ahead for your graduates and your family.

But when it comes to thinking about church–what it is, what it is called to be, how it should function, for me, there’s just no getting around the apostle Paul, especially when reflecting on what the season in which we celebrate the Risen Body of Christ could mean as a whole: “For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the Body, though many, are one Body, so it is with Christ….  Now you are the Body of Christ and individually members of it” (1 Cor. 12:12, 27).  Even though we don’t physically see Jesus here with us, we remain connected to Christ.

Regardless of how we see the Ascension, the Spirit is promised.  However, we think of resurrection, we are the Body of Christ.  Christ is there, there, in you and in me, and here.  And as the Body of Christ, that means we keep doing the ministry of Christ; we keep doing the kind of stuff Jesus did.  That remains true no matter what the calendar says, and it means that we always continue to have work to do in God’s service, work here on earth, because as one New Testament scholar has commented:  “Heaven’s in great shape; the earth is where all the problems are.”

So, again, why are all of us bozos standing around looking up at the sky?

Sixth Sunday of Easter, Year C

Rural Life Sunday

May 22, 2022

Acts 16:9-15; Revelation 21:22-22:5

Union-Congregational UCC

Waupun, WI

"A Whole New World"

Is anyone here a fan of the not-that-long-ago sitcom, Everybody Loves Raymond?  Do you remember Marie, that quintessential nosey mother-in-law?  But more specifically, do you remember that running joke when Marie would complain and wave her arms in crisis because there was too much fruit in the house?  She was worried, of course, about the fruit going bad before there was time to eat it.  But, furthermore, do you remember what first sparked that problem of too much fruit in the show?  A gift of membership in a fruit-of-the-month club.  That’s what I think of when I hear that verse in this morning’s reading from Revelation describing, “On either side of the river is the tree of life, with [here it comes!] its twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each month” (22:2).  Marie Barone would have a fit!

But we shouldn’t laugh, because the Book of Revelation is no laughing matter.  It is, after all, about the end of the world.  How dare a preacher make light of such serious material.  We all know we shouldn’t joke about the end of the world; rather we should be afraid, shouldn’t we?  Isn’t Revelation a scary book with all kinds of beasts and monsters and its Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse?  What could be scarier than the end of the world?!

The truth is we don’t hear many sermons about Revelation in mainline churches, and the truth further reveals that the situation is not new.  By far, the Book of Revelation was the most controversial writing to make it into the New Testament, and the universal acceptance of its inclusion literally took centuries, and then it was questioned again at the time of the Reformation.  It is so full of strange symbols and numbers and mythical creatures, that it’s not exactly an easy-to-understand read.  In fact, I know one pastoral colleague who wouldn’t even answer questions about it from congregation members.  “You go and make sure you understand everything about the first 65 books of the Bible first,” he would explain, “and then we can bother talking about Revelation.”

But, we’re gonna talk about it a little this morning.  And I’ll even admit that much of the book uses scary imagery–that often gets wildly misinterpreted and misapplied by our siblings in Christ who do talk about it more than we do.  There are two things you ought to know about the Book of Revelation as a whole: 1) it’s not scary because it predicts the end of the world, and 2) it doesn’t really predict the end of the world.

So why do we find it scary?  And why does it use such graphic and violent imagery?  Like the rest of scripture, the Book of Revelation is very much a product of its time.  In this case, that time was near the end of the first century when some Christians were yearning for and imagining and envisioning what it might take and what it might look like for God to vanquish their mortal enemy.  And who was that mortal enemy?  Well, the same enemy who had killed John the Baptist, Jesus, Paul, Peter, and so many of the rest of them:  the Roman Empire, which gets coded as “Babylon” throughout Revelation.  That was a handy code because any Jewish-Christian who read the book (or heard it read) would understand immediately; Rome had destroyed the Second Jerusalem Temple, just as Babylon had destroyed the First.

We heard some references to the Jerusalem Temple in this morning’s reading, and, I think, they also point to the real reason why Revelation might be scary to some, why it might sound threatening.  The author–John of Patmos, probably not the same John of the gospels–“saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God” (21:22).  No temple?  That’s kind of a big deal.  You may remember that the Temple had previously been understood as the place where God actually dwelled.  Any vision of the fullness of God’s reign and presence must surely include the re-building of this holy sanctuary, right?  Apparently not.  But don’t God’s people need to maintain their institutions, their structures?  With God’s full self-present, human institutions tend to get in the way.  But doesn’t God’s promise to restore all things mean God will bring back our “Golden Age”?  No, that’s not the promise of God, and we have arrived at the true threat underlying the message of Revelation.

Last week, we heard again the famous vision of “a new heaven and a new earth” (21:1).  That is a new heaven and earth, by the way, not a return to the old.  To dissuade any who think I might be adding too fine a point, the rest of that verse also reads, “for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away.”  Here is where we tend to mishear something very important from scripture:  God promises to make all things new; God does not promise to bring back the old.  That God does a new thing means just that–God goes beyond all our old ways of doing things; a living God is not–and indeed cannot–be a god of the way we’ve always done things (which we tend to misremember anyway).  At its heart, the Book of Revelation–and in truth, much of scripture–looms as threatening because it reminds us in no uncertain terms that God is a God of transformation, of change, of new heavens and a new earth.  The God of the Exodus cannot be the same god of systemic injustice of any kind, and the God of the Resurrection cannot be a god of the ways that lead to death.  Therefore, the God who makes all things new is not a god of the status quo.  Under an Empire that thrives on conquest, exploitation, strife, division, and keeping all in their place, this kind of talk is dangerous.

But, nevertheless, this remains a God who makes all things new.  It is not a God who comes to destroy creation, but to transform and renew it.  Revelation is not really about the end of the world at all, it is merely about its “birth pangs” as the apostle Paul writes in one of his letters.  Revelation imagines the time when empire, oppression, and injustice have been overwhelmed by the power of God in what some New Testament scholars call “God’s great cosmic cleanup.”  Just as we might remember from the story of Noah and the rainbow, God does not will the destruction of Creation but instead seeks not only to preserve it but lead it to flourish against those forces–again to paraphrase the apostle Paul–that subject it to decay.  Revelation reminds us of what Paul tells us in his Letter to the Romans which in turn hearkens back to the truths we find in Genesis: God comes down on the side of Creation and justice and love and will not put up with any human institution that fails to honor them.  That’s what Revelation is actually all about.  And that can still be scary stuff to some.

And so, yes, with apologies to Marie Barone, in the new creation there will be all kinds of new fruit…and plants and creatures and diversity of life of every kind–far beyond anything we can imagine, because God so loves the whole world and cares for all creation to the point of taking on as God’s own the active work of renewing, of transforming, of blessing.

As God’s people, do we?

Fifth Sunday of Easter, Year C

May 15, 2022

Acts 11:1-18; Revelation 21:1-6

Union-Congregational UCC

Waupun, WI

"Stranger = Danger?"

Let me tell you, as a vegetarian, I usually get some grief when a passage from scripture pops up in the lectionary like the one we heard today from the Book of Acts.  Here, Peter explains a vision he’s received in which he is shown “’ four-footed animals, beasts of prey, reptiles, and birds of the air” (11:6).  As Peter explains, “’I also heard a voice saying to me, “Get up, Peter; kill and eat.”  But [Peter] replied, “By no means, Lord; for nothing profane or unclean has ever entered my mouth.”  But a second time the voice answered from heaven, “What God has made clean, you must not call profane.”  This happened three times’” (11:7-10), because, as we know from the scripture readings lately, major events regarding Peter always have to happen three times for him to get it.

Dreams have special meaning in scripture, as does repetition.  We appear to have both in this passage.  Now, the meaning of this vision makes sense only when we remember that Jesus and all the earliest Christians—including Peter—were Jewish, understood their discipleship as part of their Jewish identity, and in those first generations, still followed all the dietary restrictions in the Torah.  As the Jewish Torah is also part of our Bible, we can find precise instructions in Leviticus, such as which foods are clean (and acceptable to eat) and which are not.  So, when Peter is shown all these different kinds of animals—unclean creatures according to his religious tradition—and told to “Kill and eat,” it is an affirmation of something Jesus says in the gospels that declares all foods clean and therefore okay to eat.  Maybe you can see why this passage might challenge a vegetarian perspective.

But Peter realizes—again, after hearing the message three times—that this declaration isn’t really about food; or, rather, it isn’t just about food.  That in itself shouldn’t sound like a shocker to us.  In fact, anybody paying attention to the beginning of the story can already figure that out.  We read, “So when Peter went up to Jerusalem, the circumcised criticized him, saying, ‘Why did you go to uncircumcised men and eat with them?’” (11:2-3).  Or, how could you eat with those people?  It’s in response to that charge that Peter explains his dream, that same dream with its key line, “What God has made clean, you must not call profane.”  Note that the actual menu Peter shared with his uncircumcised friends is never mentioned.  Clearly, the issue is with whom Peter shared that meal, not what they ate.

So, for Peter, what did this “what-God-has-made-clean-you-must-not-call-profane” thing really deal with?  We can tell from Peter’s description almost immediately after his vision that the “’ Spirit told me to go with [some visitors who had just arrived] and not to make a distinction between them and us’” (11:12).

Not to make a distinction between them and us.  Well, that’s not how we like to operate, is it?  Most of the time, we’d instead make distinctions between them and us—wouldn’t we?  Isn’t that the primary way we see the world?  Oh, you know those Beaver Dam people…  Or how about that divide between 8:30 & 9:30 people?  You know how that other service is!  Or those East Coast Cultural Elites—they need some good ole’ Midwestern values…  In this story, Peter clearly understands that the instruction, “What God has made clean, you must not call profane” applies to people.  But how far out does our line go?  How far can we push our boundaries?  Or more importantly, how far does God in Christ call us to open our circles?

The apostle Paul famously writes to the Galatians, “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus” (3:28), but we tend to leave those categories at that.  Never mind the ethnic and religious implications of no longer being “Jew or Greek;” or the erosion of social and economic classes—yes, you better believe in that “social-justice” kind of way—when there is no slave or free; or even what it might mean as we continue to struggle with gender roles if “there is no…male and female.”  But is that it?  Is that as much as Paul intends or as Jesus calls us to challenge our human labels?

As Jesus explains in Matthew, “’ You have heard that it was said, “You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.”  But I say to you, Love your enemies…’” (5:43-44).  It’s hard to love enemies!  That means that to love as Jesus has loved includes loving Afghanis, Iraqis, and people from Beaver Dam.  Loving as Jesus loves means loving beyond just our families or just our communities or just the people who look like us or who agree with us or who have the same kind of hair like us or who dress like us or who sound like us.  It means loving beyond our religious boundaries, our cultural boundaries, and our national boundaries.

We hear from the Book of Revelation this morning “a loud voice…saying, ‘See, the home of God is among mortals.  [God] will dwell with them; they will be [God’s] peoples’” (21:3), and the best Greek manuscripts do indicate that this last word is plural—that is God’s peoples and not just God’s one people.  According to Revelation, that is the vision for God’s heaven on earth.  And so, may our love for the other be so great that we too can recognize and declare along with Peter, “’ If then God gave them,’” the Gentiles, the others; in Christian history, that means us, “’ If then God gave them the same gift that [God] gave us when we believed…who was I that I could hinder God?’” (Acts 11:17).

Once again, all means all.  Loving as Jesus invited us to love means loving all, even if we can find religious rules in our own scriptures telling us otherwise.  Our God is a living God, a Still speaking God that breaks down all barriers.  Who are we that we could hinder God?

Fourth Sunday of Easter, Year C

May 8, 2022

Acts 9:36-43; John 10:22-30

Union-Congregational UCC

Waupun, WI

"Just a Sheep?"

It may be confusing this morning to hear that the church has its own name for Mother's Day–the Festival of the Christian Home–but it wasn’t very long ago that the Fourth Sunday of Easter had its own special name apart from that; does anyone happen to know what it was?  Good Shepherd Sunday: the day we celebrate the depiction of Jesus as our Shepherd, and we remember that all of us are sheep, mere sheep, dumb sheep.  Well, maybe that’s not the message.  But the largest Christian group on campus where I went to college (before seminary) kinda liked that image.  They could easily be spotted around campus because they often wore these bright yellow T-shirts with bold, black lettering on the front that read simply, “Follower.”  That’s all it said—“Follower.”  Sounds almost like something out of a science fiction novel; just picture all these people walking around a university with their bright, yellow “Follower” T-shirts.  What made it even worse is the variety of Christianity their group followed.  It was a rather fundamentalist type that gave the T-shirts a chilling, cult-like feel.  Is this what being a sheep is all about?  Is that what following Christ is supposed to be like?

As we hear this morning, scripture certainly has a lot to say about being a sheep.  The 23^rd Psalm—the most famous of all psalms—declares the LORD as a shepherd who makes the psalmist lie down in green pastures.  God leads the psalmist beside still waters and restores the soul.  Even more, God leads us on the right paths for the sake of God’s name.  In John’s gospel today, Jesus tells some people that they are not among his flock, because his sheep know the sound of his voice (10:27).  But more than that, his sheep have “’ eternal life, and they will never perish” (10:28).  Well, sign me up.  It sounds like that flock has some good benefits.  How hard can it be to follow, anyway?

We have some farms in the area—before I go on, does anybody have any sheep?  Has anyone had experience handling sheep?  Can anyone explain how sheep are led?  I must be honest, I don’t have a lot of experience dealing with sheep outside a petting zoo or county fair.  But from what I’ve read, sheep get a bad rap for having poor eyesight.  Sure they don’t see well, but apparently, they have an excellent sense of hearing.  (This is how, of course, they hear their shepherd’s voice, as in the comparison Jesus makes with his followers.)  A lot of people seem to think that sheep are pretty dumb.  That is where we get the image of sheep mindlessly following a shepherd.  Why did those “Follower” T-shirts rub so many people the wrong way?  But this stereotype of the dumb sheep isn’t quite accurate.  From what I read, contrary to popular opinion, sheep are in fact quite intelligent.  I didn’t know that.  More than that, sheep cannot really be pushed or herded but must be led.  By the one shepherd, of course.

Believe it or not, our reading from Acts is also all about sheep.  Today we hear a story about Peter—one of the most prominent of the original sheep—learning more about what it means to be a sheep of Christ after Christ’s resurrection.  When you stop and think about it, that must have been a little trickier than before.  In essence, the sheep were being asked to follow a shepherd who was not even there physically.  Peter and the others could no longer afford to be “disciples,” but apostles whose ears are so attuned to the shepherd’s voice that they can hear it and follow whether they see the shepherd or not.  (Not all that different from being sheep in-between settled pastors.)  To be a Christian sheep after the Resurrection, or in a time of transition, means something very particular.

So what do Peter the sheep do?  Well, he travels to Joppa, and there encounters a woman named Tabitha, or Dorcas in Greek.  Dorcas had apparently died.  And Peter was able to raise her back to life.  The event sounds simple enough, but there are two very important things about this healing that tell us even more about being a sheep in Christ’s flock.

First, in the words of one pastor, “This was the first time [according to scripture] in the post-resurrection church that a disciple had exercised the authority of life over death in this way… Peter’s act made clear the fact that the resurrection of Christ had now been passed on to the apostles, and that the resurrection was now at work in the life of the earliest communities of believers.”  In other words, Peter was living out his calling as part of the Risen Body of Christ in that he accepted Christ’s ministry—the work of the shepherd—to be his own.  He followed the shepherd’s voice to continue Christ’s mission.  Christ was alive inside him.

Yet, there’s something more here reminding us what it looks like to be a sheep in Christ’s flock, and that’s Dorcas herself.  Although Dorcas was not a bishop or preacher or Council member (as far as we know), she was a sheep of the flock, but moreover, she also had been raised from death like the Good Shepherd himself had been.  Just as Peter found that he was able to continue the ministry of Christ, so did Dorcas share in the resurrection power of being part of Christ’s New Body.  And what kind of stuff did Dorcas do, anyway, like a sheep?  We’re told, “She was devoted to good works and acts of charity” (9:36).  More directly, she embodied the same compassion Jesus showed.  To use another pastor’s words again, “Compassion…is much more than kindness, far more radical than simply being nice.  It is fulfilling the requirements of a godly life as described by Micah:  doing justice, loving mercy, and walking humbly with God…. Dorcas became a symbol of resurrection life…because her simple acts of compassion and caring expressed, in a visible and tangible way, something of the incarnation and resurrection of Jesus Christ.”  Through Dorcas, Christ’s resurrection was again made real for those around her.  This is what it means to be a sheep in Christ’s flock.  This is what it means to follow Shepherd’s voice, even if we can’t physically see the Shepherd right now.

I’m still not a big fan of those bright yellow T-shirts.  I think it’s probably because they’re not clear about whom or what they’re following.  Serving as a sheep in this flock is no cakewalk because the shepherd’s voice we’re called to follow–the voice we’re called to trust to guide us into the future–leads us away from inaction and apathy into new life and movement.  Whenever we’re tempted to turn off our brains and stop discerning, to go along with the crowd or old ways without a thought, let us be mindful of what it means to follow Christ’s lead and listen for the voice of our good shepherd to do as Jesus did.  In that way, Christ’s resurrection is made real within us.

Third Sunday of Easter, Year C

May 1, 2022

Galatians 1:13-17; John 21:1-19

Union-Congregational UCC

Waupun, WI

"A Holy Breakfast"

They say that breakfast is the most important meal of the day, and I agree that it’s definitely one of my three favorites.  It’s really hard, I think, to beat a good breakfast.  The eggs.  The bacon or sausage.  The toast or biscuits.  The fish and bread.  The fish and bread?  Fish and bread don’t sound like your traditional breakfast foods!  And yet, these foods are what Jesus offers in this morning’s reading—as he does many other times throughout the gospels—but this time, for breakfast.  Evidently, Jesus knew something about nutrition and wanted to make sure the disciples made time for some breakfast.  As they say, you are what you eat.

Okay, well maybe the purpose of this meal wasn’t exactly to emphasize the importance of breakfast, but I think Jesus does have a special purpose here as he gathers a group of his disciples around a charcoal fire, grilling fish.  The charcoal fire is not just some background detail.  The gospel writer makes sure to include a charcoal fire in this scene for a reason.  Just a few chapters ago in this same Gospel of John, it was also around such a flame that Simon Peter denied that he knew Jesus three times on the night of Jesus’ arrest (18:17-18).  As we may remember, after Peter’s third denial, we don’t really hear much from him until Easter morning.  The gospel tradition has us believe that—along with almost all the rest of the male disciples—he fled. 

Despite all his rashness and bold declarations, he fled.  Jesus stood before Pilate without his “Rock,” because his rock had fled.  The man whom tradition has considered the leader of the band of the Twelve was nowhere to be found while Jesus suffered on a Roman cross because he had run away afraid.  When the chips were down, when the powers-that-be came for the One who had made such a ruckus in the Temple, Peter abandoned the cause.

Much has been written and preached about the incredible guilt and shame Simon Peter must have felt after that rooster crowed, as he and the other disciples hid in fear, and I can only imagine that such a description fits.  With the last chance Peter had to defend his friend and teacher, he denied him three times.  That’s quite a sting to live with.  Of course, as we know, that night would prove to be far from Peter’s last chance to live and act out his faith, and in this morning’s gospel reading, Jesus asks him three times—for each of the three denials—“’ do you love me?’” (21:15-17).  Jesus’ instructions along with these questions are very interesting, and point again right to what loving Jesus is—or should be—all about, what remains the true essence of the Christian faith, but there’s something else here that should not go unnoticed.

The charcoal fire on which Jesus grills fish indeed reminds us of the events of that night Jesus was arrested, and because of that, there is another connection between this morning breakfast scene and that dark night of betrayal, desertion, and arrest.  The meal.  We know that night as Maundy Thursday, and the event from that night we remember most often is the Supper.  John’s Gospel tells us, “Jesus came and took the bread and gave it to them…” (21:13).  That’s this morning’s passage I’m quoting, by the way, “and [he] did the same with the fish.”  In case we missed it, that’s communion language again.  Yes, I know it’s not the Last Supper, but the basic claim we as Christians make about Holy Communion—that Christ is somehow present at the Table—clearly includes this passage in which, “Jesus came and took the bread and gave it to them, and did the same with the fish.”  Not the Last Supper, but maybe a First Breakfast?

As Jesus so loved to use his meal-sharing as teaching moments—a chief purpose of communion itself—neither does this morning’s breakfast passage lack in this category.  And here we look again to the conversation between Jesus and Simon Peter that occurs, according to the text, “When they had finished breakfast” (21:15).  The purpose of Jesus’ questions is not only to grill Simon Peter for his denials like Jesus had grilled the fish.  There is a lesson in Jesus’ words; every time that Simon Peter affirms his love for Jesus, Jesus responds back with instructions—instructions that are at the very heart of faithful Christian living.  Respectively, Jesus says, “’ Feed my lambs’” (21:15), “’ Tend my sheep’” (21:16), and “’ Feed my sheep” (21:17).  In this setting, one of the last stories we have of Jesus talking with his closest friends and associates, that’s what he tells their apparent leader:  Take care of others.

He doesn’t say, “Condemn others in my name.”  He doesn’t say, “Focus all your energy on yourselves.”  He doesn’t tell his closest followers to “just keep doing things the way they’ve always been done.”  He says nothing about who’s going to heaven or hell, he offers no exact creed that should be said each Sunday, and he offers no words on the right ways to think or believe…except to take care of others.  And he says it three times!

Try to imagine the fullness of this scene.  The Good Shepherd has just served breakfast—with himself as host—using words to remind his followers of the promise of the Last Supper, that by ingesting, by taking into your own body a part of Christ’s body, you partake of that same Body of Christ; you are made a part of it.  You are made one with this executed criminal; you are made one with the oppressed; you are made one with all who suffer.  You are made one with God.  So, as this Good Shepherd—the Host—has just fed you, he tells you—again, as members now of Christ’s Body (you are what you eat, after all)—to go and take care of the sheep, to go and feed others as you have been fed.  You and I and all of us are empowered to serve as shepherds together and do the taking care of, because—as we are reminded in our partaking of the Body—Christ dwells inside each of us; we are all called to shepherd, drawing upon the variety of gifts given to all of us.

What is remarkable in this story is that Jesus spends no time scolding Simon Peter for his denial, but instead uses this communion breakfast to teach him and all of Christ’s disciples this message.  If we spend too much time focusing on the guilt or shame of our own failures, we miss the message.  If we linger too long in the ritual and simply remain feasting on the bread and fish—trying to replace discipleship with ceremony—we will miss the message.  To love Christ is not to become embroiled in any of these things as the source of our identity, but to love Christ more than these means to take care of others.  It really is as simple as that.

In reality, we need to answer this question more than three times.  In fact, we need to answer it every day we seek to follow Jesus, every time we see suffering, every moment we witness injustice, every opportunity to speak up for the oppressed, every instance we find ourselves immobile, wrapped in our own guilt.  So, let me ask you just once more for today, do we love Christ more than these?