Monthly Archives: October 2011

31

Oct. ’11

Leading from a Cross

Matthew 23:1-12

We use the word “leader” in both secular and Christian settings. Christianized leadership is so different, however, that the task almost needs a different word.

Jesus’ teachings about leadership are the basis for the stark contrast. We look in particular to the words he spoke as he denounced Jewish religious leaders in his day.

One of these confrontations, found in the 23rd chapter of Matthew’s gospel, comes across as harsh, particularly when you consider that just a few breaths earlier Jesus had spoken of the need to root our actions in love. (I suppose there’s a side lesson here: Loving certain people can mean having the courage to point out where they go against God.)

“The scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses’ seat; therefore, do whatever they teach you and follow it; but do not do as they do, for they do not practice what they teach,” Jesus said.

He went on to point out the hypocrisy of these religious leaders, who were supposed to be working from sound understandings of Jewish scripture—writings filled with lessons about the importance of justice and mercy. Instead, he said, these leaders increased the burdens of the average Jew.

They also took great pleasure in the accouterments and honors that went with their positions. In a long diatribe, Jesus described them as legalistic nitpickers who had been entrusted with words of life but instead were better associated with death.

“All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and all who humble themselves will be exalted,” Jesus said.

Our savior also practiced what he taught, becoming the great example of humble leadership. His trip to the cross brought him to the ultimate low point, death; his resurrection led to great exaltation.

The implications for Christian leadership are enormous. Followers of Christ are people who should turn the very idea of leading upside-down. In a Christian context, leadership becomes sacrifice rather than gain. A Christian leader lives in the mud surrounding the pedestal.

And yes, there is a serious dearth of true Christian leadership in the Christian community today. There are good leaders among both the clergy and the laity. But both the United Methodist Church and the larger, universal church desperately need more.

I’ve never heard anyone in a congregation complain, “We’ve got more good leaders than we know how to use.”

It would help, I am sure, if we who are already leading were better at explaining the basic role of a leader in a Christian community. That way, people could more clearly understand whether they are called to a leadership role.

Right now, we define “leader” mostly by describing a particular function in the church, usually defined as service on a board or a committee. A job description really doesn’t tell us how to lead, though. It just describes what specific task needs to be done.

In 1984, Mennonite theologian John Howard Yoder interacted very closely with the New Testament to describe the four basic types of leaders in a Christian community. If you feel you’re equipped to fill one or more of these roles, you’re probably called to lead in the church in some way.

Yoder said good Christian leaders act as:

  • Agents of Direction. These people keep the vision of the kingdom of God before the people. They function like prophets, reminding others of the work God is doing in the world through Jesus Christ, work that ultimately restores creation to its holy state. They make sure the church remembers that it exists to help usher in this kingdom.
  • Agents of Memory. These leaders help the church remember what is in Scripture and what the traditions have been regarding interpretation of God’s word, particularly where these reminders are relevant to a particular issue before the church. They do this largely without judgment.
  • Agents of Linguistic Self Consciousness. In other words, people who are sensitive to how words are used. Think of these people as the cooler heads in the crowd, the peacemakers who calmly untangle what others are saying.
  • Agents of Order and Due Process. People who ensure the unity of the group even in the midst of conflict, encouraging participation by all.

Some people may react to this list of “agents” by saying, “But those are the things the pastor is supposed to do.” And therein, I suspect, lies a significant part of our leadership crisis.

Certainly, a pastor should have a good sense of how to function in all four roles. But at the same time, the pastor should know this in order to equip others to fulfill these roles. We’ve become too reliant on church “professionals.”

A healthy church is full of people so committed to the spiritual disciplines that Jesus’ teachings have shaped their heads and hearts for leadership. Once leading, they simply have to ask themselves a few questions now and then.

Am I making others’ lives easier? Am I willing to do this without fame, title or even acknowledgment? Am I one who learns even while leading? Do I ensure justice, mercy and faith spread because of what I do?

A leader who can answer “yes” to these questions is exhibiting Jesus-style leadership.

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24

Oct. ’11

The Heart of the Matter

Matthew 22:34-40

During October, we’ve been listening to what the Bible has to say about God’s law, given to us so we may better understand who God is.

We heard how poorly the Israelites responded to the law, despite the powerful revelation they received at Mount Sinai. And last Sunday, we explored how Jesus’ answer to a law-related question puts all of us in a quandary.

The law’s demand that we worship only God and let nothing come between us and God seems to be a hopelessly high hurdle. When faced with God’s high standards, humans throughout history have often chosen one of two options: throwing up their hands in despair and turning from God, or attempting a kind of hyper-obedience, trying to outdo others in observance of the law.

Certainly, turning away doesn’t help. And because sinless perfection is not humanly possible, I’ve never understood how hyper-obedience is supposed to save anyone from the separation from God brought on by sin. I assume that practitioners of extreme legalism think that God will save the best of the bad, like a teacher grading a failing class on a curve so that a few students receive A’s.

There is a better way to understand how we are to relate to God under the law. In fact, that’s the whole point of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection. And by listening to Jesus and understanding his story, we can follow this path to reunion with God.

Matthew’s gospel records in chapter 22 a conversation between Jesus and a lawyer. (This lawyer also was a Pharisee, one of those groups that strove for hyper-obedience.) The lawyer tested Jesus by asking him, “Teacher, which commandment is the greatest?”

Jesus gave a highly orthodox answer, quoting the Shema,  a Jewish liturgical prayer rooted in Deuteronomy 6:4-9. “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind,” Jesus said. “This is the greatest and first commandment.”

He added that there is a second like it: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” quoting from Leviticus 19:18. “On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” In Luke’s version of this conversation, Jesus’ assertion is followed by the parable of the Good Samaritan, where we learn that we are to define even our traditional enemies as our neighbors, showing them mercy.

Jesus was affirming that nothing about the law had changed. After all, the law as given to Moses is a revelation of the unchanging God. But Jesus also was clarifying the law’s purpose: to teach humanity that love is the core behavior for those who follow God.

The need for obedience doesn’t go away; Jesus proved that later in Matthew when he was obedient to the point of going to the cross, even after asking God the Father, “Let this cup pass from me.”

Love, however, shapes everything, even our obedience. Jesus went to the cross to save us from the punishments we are due for our sins, out of love for all of creation.

Love as the primary driver behind everything we do sounds nice. I get visions of a television show from my childhood where a giraffe, a chipmunk and some other puppet critters sang, “What the world needs now, is love, sweet love … .”

We should never forget, however, that love complicates a religious life. Legalism is in some ways the easier path to choose, at least if you’re the kind of person who’s inclined to say, “Just tell me the rules so I can follow them.”

Love forces us to think, to analyze our actions, to check our motives.

I’ll give you the toughest example I know right now in the Christian community. It is what many simply call “the homosexual issue,” a catch-all phrase covering debates about the ordination of homosexuals, whether homosexuals should be able to marry each other, and whether pastors should bless such marriages.

Working from the Bible—which I take very seriously as being inspired and shaped by the Holy Spirit—I find it nearly impossible to justify homosexual acts. It is possible to contextualize the Old Testament prohibitions, something Christians do all the time with other Old Testament rules. But I cannot get around the first chapter of the New Testament’s Book of Romans.

Its author, the Apostle Paul, clearly understood the impact of God’s grace and love being poured out on the world through Jesus Christ. Paul still, however, deliberately linked homosexual acts (and several other sins) to a general turning away from God by humanity.

And yet, I am troubled by my own desire to say to homosexuals, “There’s the rule, get over it.”

I know followers of Christ who struggle with their homosexuality. I care for them. Love forces me to think beyond simple assertions, acknowledging the powerful feelings they live with day after day, their pain, their craving for acceptance and community.

I love God, I trust God’s Word, and I desperately want to better love my neighbors, but love sometimes leaves me a little stumped. All I can do is pray that the love that resulted in the cross and the resurrection will eventually provide complete answers.

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17

Oct. ’11

Silenced by the Lamb

Matthew 22:15-22

The danger in setting a trap, particularly one designed to kill, is that it can close on the hand putting it in place. You can watch one snap back on the Jewish leaders who tried to trap Jesus.

The trap to which I refer is a question in Matthew 22:15-22, one designed to make Jesus appear either a traitor to the emperor—a crime punishable by death—or a collaborator unworthy of his populist following.

To follow what’s happening here, we first have to understand where Jesus is in the gospel story. He has entered Jerusalem in a parody of a conqueror’s parade, riding a donkey instead of a stallion. He has cleansed the temple of the merchants exploiting poor worshipers.

He also has told a series of parables that are quite deliberate about insulting the Jewish leaders. He paints them as hypocrites who have ignored the will of God.

In short, Jesus is near the end of his ministry and headed toward the cross. Knowing this, he boldly makes a clear distinction between how the world is working and how God wants it to work. And the clarity of the message has made these leaders very, very angry.

In the “trap” story, some unlikely partners emerge, bound by a sense that Jesus is a common threat to their positions. Some of them are disciples of the Pharisees, a strict, legalistic Jewish sect with significant political power; others are Herodians, highly secularized Jews who openly work with the Roman Empire as part of the puppet King Herod’s court.

After flattering Jesus, they ask him a straightforward question: “Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor, or not?”

By “lawful,” they mean “correct under Jewish law.” Paying taxes to the Empire raised all sorts of problems for Jews, the biggest being that taxes could be paid only with official Roman coins, all of which bore the image of a deified emperor. To many Jews, using such coins meant violating at least two commandments.

In response, Jesus asks for such a coin. (Underscoring the hypocrisy behind the test, someone apparently has one handy. The image of another “god” has been carried into the temple by a Jew!) Noting whose head is stamped on the coin, Jesus says, “Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”

Jesus’ questioners are “amazed” and slip away from the scene, Matthew tells us.

This text sometimes is preached as evidence that the state must exist alongside the church—that somehow Jesus predicted our need to pay both taxes and tithes. To go down that path is to miss the reasons for amazement, however.

Jesus first of all has shown great wisdom in sidestepping their trap, looking like neither a traitor nor a collaborator with his response. But more importantly, Jesus’ answer confronts those who hear it with what theologian Stanley Hauerwas calls an “insoluble problem.”

As followers of the living, redemptive God, can we really offer parts of ourselves to other powers that demand our allegiance? Even if those powers threaten us, should we not avoid what opposes God’s will?

It seems to me that if we are among the things that belong to God, then we need to give ourselves to God totally.

I know—easy to say, hard to do. Compromise just seems like part of life. I can give you a common example we see repeatedly in the Christian community.

I’m not one to argue that Sundays should somehow be jealously guarded by society. I don’t think the old “blue laws” that once forced the closure of shops and restaurants on Sunday were a good idea. No one should have Christian beliefs imposed on them.

But at the same time, I’m disturbed at how flippant Christians are becoming regarding Sundays, particularly when sports are involved. I hear this casualness about worship and fellowship voiced along these lines: “Well, we would have loved to be with y’all, but the big professional or college game/kids’ game/cheerleading competititon/practice/other sports event interfered.”

And I’m not talking about an occasional outing. It’s the excuse made weeks and months on end for being absent from Christian fellowship. The sporting world wants Sunday morning for its own; Christians acquiesce.

Christians, just say “no.” Enough of us remain that the sporting world will modify its schedules when we choose worship and fellowship instead.

To avoid despair in the face of Jesus’ challenge, we have to read Jesus’ temple test in the bigger picture of Matthew’s story. The Jewish leaders, in particular the Pharisees, do finally manage to trap Jesus, sending him to his death on a cross. There is no cleverness in the final trap they set. Anger trips the trigger; lies and betrayal serve as its jaws.

But God proves his supremacy, anyway. Nothing in this world, not even murderous evil, can overcome God’s plan to remake a broken world.

Thus, Christ’s resurrection from death; thus, resurrection and eternal life for those who follow Christ. And in the resurrection, Christ solves what seemed insoluble by setting all things under him, even the emperors of the world and their coliseums.

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10

Oct. ’11

Capturing God

Exodus 32:1-14

Last week, I talked about how God reintroduced himself to the Israelites as he gave them the Ten Commandments at Mount Sinai. It was a big, awe-inspiring introduction, shaking these people to the core.

Indeed, they expressed great fear of God to their leader, Moses, asking Moses to stand as mediator between them and the mighty God they had seen. They found God to be too much.

In Exodus 32, the story of these people and their reaction to God resumes. At this point, Moses had been on the fire- and smoke-shrouded mountain nearly 40 days, and the Israelites had given up on seeing their leader again.

Their solution, unfortunately, was to return to their former understanding of gods, little “g” gods, gods visibly before them in metal, wood or stone.

“Come, make gods for us, who shall go before us,” they told Aaron, Moses’ brother and the high priest. “As for this Moses, the man who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him.”

Aaron fashioned a calf idol from their gold jewelry, while at the same time trying to maintain some control of the unfolding disaster. After building an altar before the calf, he proclaimed, “Tomorrow shall be a festival to the Lord,” using language contradicting the people’s declared need for “gods.”

Big “G” God was not impressed by Aaron’s nuanced language or the revelry that followed. Ultimately, only Moses’ pleas before God saved the Israelites from annihilation.

The Israelites’ sin, a violation of the second commandment, was rooted in their earlier demonstrated inability to accept the magnitude of the eternal God they were called to worship. By making an idol, they sought to capture in some sort of manageable form the power that had led them out of Egypt.

The story seems ancient and disconnected from us, with its talk of “gods” as people dance around a golden idol in the middle of a desert. But the sin of trying to reduce God, to capture and keep God in a manageable and comfortable form, is prevalent today.

The most obvious example I see is when we attempt to make God like us. We define him through a human lens, thinking that what we feel must be what God feels and what we desire must be what God desires.

I also see us committing this sin when we try to force God into a particular human ideology, claiming God resides in a particular political party or movement. This can result in serious perversions of the revelation of God in the Bible. Remember, the Nazis had “Gott Mit Uns” (God With Us) stamped on their belt buckles as they committed some of the great atrocities of the 20th century.

I have yet to find a political party that fully represents God’s will for a nation. God’s will still is best revealed through the study of the Bible, and Christians should fully understand how God is revealed there before aligning themselves with the platforms of political groups.

There also is that easy-to-commit sin of trying to put God in a box, in particular, a storage box, where he can be taken out when needed. Self-reliant people like this strategy: “I’ll take care of myself and turn to God if it seems I suddenly cannot.”

When we try to reduce God in such ways, we resist God’s efforts to grow us into the beings he would have us be. When we make God small, there seems to be no need for change.

Christians must constantly keep in mind that there is more to God than what we can see even in Jesus, God among us in flesh. To make himself more understandable, God did voluntarily limit himself in some ways to take on human flesh. (Matthew 24:36 is one of the better examples of this principle.)

But this choice did not actually shrink God’s eternal nature. It just made the eternal nature approachable.

Had the Israelites waited patiently and sought to grow into the mystery before them, those last couple of days at Mount Sinai might not have ended in so much violence and disease, the punishments that fell on the people. I cannot even guess at the glory they might have continued to experience.

With a much greater revelation before us—the revelation of the loving, sacrificial Christ—I pray we can continue to grow in our understanding of God and our imitation of what we see.

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03

Oct. ’11

God Speaks

Exodus 20:1-21

The church I pastor, Cassidy United Methodist in Kingsport, has a preschool program. It is my job (and my joy, I’ve discovered) to lead chapel for three-year-olds on Tuesdays and four-year-olds on Wednesdays.

Preparing for this 10 or 15 minutes of teaching time really takes some thought, however. It was intimidating to suddenly realize, I am being asked to formally introduce these children to God.

Certainly, some of them had heard of God from their parents, but it also quickly became obvious that many of them were hearing about God’s attributes for the first time. And as I am trying to explain God to little people who are only beginning to learn their colors and letters, I have to keep our chapel time really simple and straightforward.

I’ve had my chapel experiences in mind as I’ve been preparing to preach on Exodus 20:1-21, the account of God revealing himself to the Israelites by way of the Ten Commandments. In many ways, it was as if God’s chosen people were in preschool, discovering the attributes of God for the first time.

Indeed, the Israelites were a people who had forgotten who their God was during centuries of captivity in Egypt. The God who spoke to them from atop Mount Sinai was a mysterious stranger, a great being who had freed them from Egyptian slavery and led them into the desert for reasons not immediately clear.

God kept his reintroduction to the Israelites simple and straightforward, leading preschool chapel on a scale I could never hope to achieve. There were signs to inspire awe, mostly in the form of thick smoke and fire on the mountain. There was a repeating trumpet blast. There was an audible voice like thunder.

And then there was The Lesson, spoken directly by God. Four of the commandments tell us how to relate to God, honoring the Creator’s unique, perfect holiness. Here, God set himself apart, identifying himself as The One, the source of everything else.
The other six commandments serve as a starting point for how to treat each other. Implicit in them is the idea that we each are God’s creation, and that we should treat each other as such.

I am fascinated by the Israelites’ response to the lesson. The phrase “cringing fear” comes to mind. Moses, they said, you talk to God–we’ll listen to you. “But do not let God speak to us, or we will die.”

They were, of course, living at least 1,300 years before the advent of Jesus, who gave us the advanced course on the nature of God. They were seeing God’s love only indirectly, first learning respect and obedience for a being beyond imagination.Thank God for Jesus, who as God among us made our Creator more easily understood as accessible and loving.

But we never want to forget how big God is, how awe-inspiring he is, how incomprehensible the full nature of an eternal Creator should be. It is proper to tremble at God’s holy majesty while at the same time feeling God is our friend.

As Moses told the Israelites: “Do not be afraid; for God has come only to test you and to put the fear of him upon you so that you do not sin.”
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