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Pastor Eric Fjeldal's June 2011 Sunday Sermons
Pastor Eric's sermons are presented here in reverse chronological order...in other words, the most recent sermons are at the top of the list, working backwards through time.
June 26. "Rewards that Sustain and Ground."
Matthew 10: 40-42
Commenting on this morning’s passage, Emilie Townes writes:
In just a few short sentences of power and compassion, we are challenged to think
more deeply about what is meant by welcoming another. It is only after doing so
that we discover the reward that comes from the deep hospitality found in God’s
welcome of us. In today’s reading, our theological focus is on compassionate
welcome or hospitality as a form of service to Christ. Reviewing the list from
verses 40-42, we realize that this welcome can and should be performed by us at
any time and is not confined to large heroic acts by those eligible for sainthood.
The simple, basic acts of kindness we perform in genuine welcome of one another
are all God asks of us. We must look around us to see who is in need and then do
something about it.
Emilie Townes, Feasting on the Word, Year A, Vol. 3 pg. 188)
If we are not careful we can hear these words and begin to think we are doing it right; we are doing all God asks of us. Thinking this would be a mistake, for while we do many compassionate acts, many caring things as we help a neighbor in need, collect food for the food pantry, participate in Midnight Runs and all the rest, the issue of welcoming and hospitality calls us to take it one step further, one step deeper than many of us are comfortable with. This is so because welcoming and hospitality mean no longer keeping others at arm’s length. It means being vulnerable as we interact. It means taking the risk of rejection; giving with no guarantee of getting. It means seeking the good of the other above ourselves.
We have trouble doing this. Commenting on this trouble, Townes writes the following:
Our will to achieve caring relationships is within our grasp, yet all too often, if left
to our own devices, we fall short of creating and nurturing the genuine relationships
in which we develop into the people God calls us to be. Pride, ego, self-doubt, and
their kin keep us from connecting with each other except in self-interested ways.
(Feasting, pg. 190)
The challenge in overcoming this has to do with the notion of “reward.” Culturally we think of reward as gain, personal benefit, something that strokes us; even if it is only our feeling good about ourselves, or having others tell us they are grateful for our actions. Scripture reminds us that serving others is not about our being rewarded in this way. Truly reaching out and caring about another is not about who has status or power or the upper hand. It is not about doing “to” or “for” another. It is about being in ministry “with” regardless of who does or doesn’t have. It is about seeing the other as a child of God; a fellow sojourner in the faith. It is about recognizing that serving God means to:
use the time of your life to encourage the discouraged
to lift up the downtrodden to insist on dignity and justice for all
not because you’ll get a sugar-coated reward down the road
not because you can obligate the recipient of your service
not because it’s good for your reputation in the community
not because you can get people to accept you if you sacrifice for them
not because it’s a character building thing to do
not because you can then justify getting away with inhumanity
in other ways
not because you can boast that you are a righteous person
(although these reasons are frequently part of our motivation)
but because that is what life is for in the first place.
(William K. McElvaney, The Saving Possibility, Abingdon Press, pg. 91)
To truly live this, we need to trust more fully in God’s generous nature; not in terms of what we hope to get, but in terms of what we give. We will not see the wisdom in God’s call to hospitality until we are able to take what Kierkegaard called “a leap of faith.” Only then will our understanding of reward begin to change.
The nature of our relationships is that eventually we will be hurt. Human nature is such that we will eventually disappoint or hurt another and also be disappointed and hurt by another. It is inevitable, because as was mentioned earlier our motivations are never pure. This reality creates a paradox; do we give or hold back.
The nature of God is to call us to be compassionate amid the paradox.
Christian faith advocates compassionate welcome that encourages us to trust, to be open,
to share, to eschew manipulating others, and to live a way of life that is beyond personal
gain. Indeed, the elements of our compassionate welcome are found in the paradox of our
lives when human relationships of closeness, warmth, depth and durability are also tinged
with our alienation from each other. (Townes, Feasting, pg. 188)
Compassionate welcome means approaching each other through God. This is how we
recognize that genuine human relationships emerge from putting the grace-filled hospitality
of God’s love at the center of our lives and at the center of all our relationships. God’s hospitality teaches us that close, loving, enduring relationships are to be valued along with distant, occasional, and abrasive ones – as difficult as the latter ones may be. This lively,
and sometimes maddening, dynamic is the welcome Jesus speaks of in today’s passage.
Further, if we live into this welcome with each other, we will find the rich rewards of
discipleship found in God. (Townes, Feasting pg. 188, pg. 190)
The rewards of discipleship help change our understanding of “reward.” They help us understand why God calls us to genuinely welcome; to affirm that the issue is not whether or not love is met with love, for God calls us to look at life differently. This different way of looking allows us to discover what Christina Baldwin meant when she wrote: “To work in the world lovingly means that we are defining what we will be for, rather than reacting to what we are against.”
This changing understanding allows us to come to see and experience the reward we will not lose; the reward that can sustain and ground all our actions, and offer us a deeper understanding of and appreciation for how God’s love truly does bring a different kind of healing and hope.
This different healing and hope will allow us to hear today’s scripture and respond in a different way than our culture does. A response that hears
Christ has no body now, but ours.
No hands, no feet on earth, but ours.
Ours are the eyes through which Christ looks compassion into the world.
Ours are the feet with which Christ walks to do good.
Ours are the hands with which Christ blesses the world.
(paraphrase Teresa of Avila)
as an opportunity to serve God and know God and give thanks for the opportunity to genuinely welcome. We will do this, not because we have it all figured out, but because we have some understanding of what is meant by “the simple acts of kindness we perform in genuine welcome of one another are all that God asks of us. (Townes) For while we cannot all do great things; we can all do small things with great love. (Mother Teresa). Amen.
June 9. "The Pentecost Experience."
Acts 2 (portions of)
The Pentecost story always reminds me of three truths if you will. The first is, God speaks to us in our own native language; which is not the language of our wants, but the language of our need. Second, Pentecost is not an event; it is a happening, which means it is not something to be remembered, but rather something to be experienced. Third, if we are willing to listen we can hear God’s voice amid all the other voices in our lives, and if we are willing to listen to that voice, it will change the way we see life and the world.
The problem is we generally are not encouraged to be reminded of these truths. Instead we are encouraged to believe these three things. The first is that God speaks in the language of our wants and we are to make sure these wants are satisfied. Secondly, we are encouraged to believe Pentecost is an event that happened once with its sole purpose being to affirm the status quo. Thirdly that God’s voice is the same as the world’s voice and that this voice affirms what we are already doing. We may not outwardly or consciously recognize that this is what we believe, but the way we live and the things we pursue tell a different story. In some ways it is a story of struggle; a story of our wanting to be more faithful, but not knowing how to go about it.
This struggle manifests itself in many of the things I talked about last Sunday; how it is we give in to a world that is in many ways hostile to real faithfulness. It is a world that encourages us to not take our faith too seriously; especially if it involves sacrifice and service or making one’s commitment to God a priority. I don’t mean to imply that we have made our peace with this. My defining it as a struggle is intentional. It is an affirmation or belief that we want it to be different, but that we really don’t know what to do to make it different.
I don’t think “doing” is what we need to be about because sometimes our doing gets in the way. It prevents us from being in God’s presence. It makes it difficult for us to hear God; to trust and believe that God is truly working in our lives. What do I mean by hearing God? Fredrick Buechner describes it this way.
There are all kinds of different voices calling you to all different kinds of work,
and the challenge is to find out which is the voice of God rather than of society.
By and large a good rule for finding out is this: the kind of work God calls you to,
is the kind of work that you need to do and that the world needs to have done. The
place God calls you to, is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep
hunger meet. (Wishful Thinking, pg. 95)
I believe the Holy Spirit helps us hear. The problem is I am not sure we understand the working of the Holy Spirit. This is so because:
Many Christians have become accustomed to thinking of the Holy Spirit as more of a
Hawaiian breeze than a Chicago gale. (This morning’s) important passage (hopefully
reminds us) that the Spirit does not always arrive as a still, small voice or a faint stirring
in the heart. The Holy Spirit’s power is not always subtle, fragile or polite.
No matter how you look at it, Acts 2 shows a big God with a big word at work expanding out into a big world.
(Jana Childers, Feasting on the Word, Year A, Vol. 3 pg. 17)
The questions for us are: Do we believe this? Are we willing to trust in this? What would it look like?
How do we open ourselves so that the flame of God that is within us can be stirred?
I think the answer comes in broadening our understanding. It comes in exposing ourselves to a different awareness. It is one that in many ways runs contrary to our culture; as we are reminded the Holy Spirit is about more than warm feelings. It is a call to be in community and the world, working for peace, justice, mercy and reconciliation, as we seek to serve not our interests, but God’s interests, which means the interests of all as we work in community. As David Bender writes:
(W)e cheapen the Spirit and her gifts if we reduce them to dwelling exclusively within the individual. This Spirit that swept through the house gifted more than those disciples at
Pentecost and the disciples with whom we minister today. That Spirit has been loosed
into the world, and its creative and life-giving power is now the gift of families and
communities, of churches, and of nations. The relevant question becomes not just “How
will I respond to these party gifts of the Spirit?’ but “How will we respond to these gifts?
(David Bender, Feasting on the Word, Year A, Vol. 3 pg.18)
Before we can respond we have to experience. Before we can experience we have to be open. We have to be willing to hear, not what we want to hear, what we need to hear. In order to do this we need to be honest and admit that we struggle, in part because we are so used to “making it happen” that we close ourselves off to the possibility that God is also making it happen.
The writer of Acts affirms the many ways God is working; God pours out God’s Spirit, the Holy Spirit upon all flesh. As a result, sons and daughters prophesy, young see visions, old dream dreams; not because of what we do, but because of what God does.
The message is clear, when we begin to recognize and trust that this is so:
It is then that we begin to stir into flame the gift of God that is within us.
It is then that we begin to be lead by the voice of God rather than the voice of society.
“A Pentecost Litany”
L: Therefore, I urge you to stir into flame the gift of God that is within you…
P: For God did not give us the spirit of timidity, but of power and love and
wisdom.
L: Stir us again into flame.
P: Light fires in us that purify our hearts, sustain our beliefs and strengthen
our convictions.
L: Light fires that burn against injustice, apathy and neglect.
P: Light fires that melt our hardness, open our hearts and heal our divisions.
L: Now God is the Spirit.
P: And where the Spirit of God is, there is freedom.
L: God gives us freedom.
P: Freedom to live and act in the Spirit.
L: Freedom to see beyond the letter of the law.
P: Freedom to seek a sensitive response.
L: Freedom to see pain and respond with healing.
P: Freedom to see want and respond out of our abundance.
L: Freedom to see hunger and starvation and respond with our bread.
P: Freedom to see injustice and oppression and respond with our anger.
L: Freedom to see death and respond with life.
P: Freedom to give and not count the cost.
L: Grant us the power of your Spirit, that we may bear witness for you.
P: Grant us the power that crumbles barriers and overcomes suspicion.
L: That conquers fear and overwhelms hatred.
P: That we may indeed be witnesses, away to the ends of the earth.
L: Therefore, I urge you to stir into flame the gift of God that is within you…
P: For God did not give us a Spirit of timidity, but of power and love and
wisdom.
June 5. "Continuing the Journey."
John 17: 1-11
We opened today’s service by singing about God’s faithfulness. If we are not careful we can confuse God’s faithfulness with reward or success as the world defines reward and success. This happens when we live our lives believing:
If I work hard, I will succeed. If I live a good life, I will be rewarded. If I pray
hard enough, work hard enough, live a regulated life, God will help me, guide
me and work life in my favor.
(Joan Chittister, Scarred by Struggle, Transformed by Hope, pg. 8)
Believing this is a mistake because while Jesus’ prayer asking God to protect the faithful is answered, this protection is not a shield from life’s trials and tribulations. It is much, much more; for as William Sloane Coffin said, God gives us minimum protection, maximum support. We come to know this support when we truly know God, not in a passive way but an active way. Nancy J. Ramsey describes such knowing this way.
‘Knowing’ describes a powerful, active, confessional and intimately relational claim
on our lives. Knowing God is an experience that draws believers into a reality in which
the new order that will be shaped eternally by God’s vision for love and justice and
service can also be realized in relationships and communities now. Knowing God
will be evident in our obedience to love, the singular commandment of the Gospel.
(Nancy J. Ramsey, Feasting on the Word, Year A, Vol.2 pg.540)
Maximum support is what allows us to remain faithful in a hostile world. While our world is not hostile to Christianity in the sense of our needing to worry about being executed for our faith, there is still a hostility that we encounter; a cultural hostility. We live in a culture that worships appearance, achievement and affluence and emphasizes the need to be successful. Such worship and emphasis puts us at odds with a triune God; a God who calls us to be lovingly faithful above all else.
This hostility is best exhibited through all the ways we are encouraged to not take the call to obedient love and faithfulness seriously. We give in to the hostility when we choose to regularly be other places on Sunday morning than here worshipping God and learning more about our faith. In effect we are allowing those other activities to be more important. We also give in to the hostility when we are reluctant to talk about the role our faith plays in our lives, or about how our faith influences our choices and decisions, because such talk makes people uncomfortable.
We give in to this hostility when we allow the world to define for us what success is; what beauty is; what importance looks like. We give in when we believe that as long as we have what we want, life is good; when we believe we don’t need to be concerned with those who are not as fortunate as we are, the poor, the disenfranchised, the destitute, many of whom work just as hard if not harder than we do. They are simply not as fortunate.
We give in to this hostility when we isolate and discriminate; when we live our lives focusing only on the insiders; when we don’t say “no” to exclusion and the mocking of others. We give in when we turn a blind eye to those who mistreat and abuse, or worse yet when we worship and cheer for those who cheat, lie and deceive.
It is obvious that the list of examples is long and that such a list makes us uncomfortable. I say this because each of us has at some time lived like we don’t “know” God; don’t know how to embrace the “maximum support” offered us and that we are called to offer to others.
Today we welcome eight confirmands into membership. They are making a conscious decision to become part of this community of faith. If you ask them, they will say that they believe they know a great deal about God and faith. The truth is they know very little. I say this not as a reflection on them, but rather as a statement about the complexity of faith and faithfulness. The truth is each of us needs to know God more fully and completely so that we may continue to recognize how the same God who was “there to hear our borning cry” continues to journey with us every step of the way.
To continue this faith journey we need to affirm the hope found in these words:
Lord, we ain’t what we want to be;
we ain’t what we ought to be
we ain’t what we are going to be;
but thank God we ain’t what we was.
(Source unknown)
Jesus prayed asking God to protect those who choose to follow him. God responded by offering maximum support to all people.
When we practice our faith we discover that in every way possible faithfulness brings its own reward. While God does not work life in our favor, if we pray, seek to be faithful in doing God’s work and live a regulated life, we will discover the ways God helps and guides us. God does this not because we have earned it, but because when we choose to follow God, we discover just how present God’s love, wisdom, grace and mercy are.
