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A sermon preached on October 26, 2008 based upon Deuteronomy 34:1 – 8 and Matthew 22:34 – 40, entitled “Seeing in a Mirror, Dimly.”

There is a great deal of pathos in this morning’s Old Testament lesson. Moses has been God’s instrument in delivering the Hebrew people — the children of God — from their captivity to Pharaoh in Egypt. Together they have wandered through the wilderness for forty years, getting ready to enter into the promised land, a land said to be flowing with milk and honey. Moses ascends a mountain that allows him to see for the first time the promised land off in the distance.  In short order the children of God will reach their destination.  

But Moses will not go with them. He dies there, and is buried.  No explanation is given in the passage we heard why Moses doesn’t get to enter the land in which he so dearly desired to dwell. It just is — one of those things that is just plain sorrowful, and appropriately, for thirty full days, the Israelites don’t do anything but grieve, weeping for Moses and the fact that he won’t get to be with them in the promised land.

Earlier, in the book of Numbers, a failure on Moses’ part to show perfect trust in the Lord at one moment of his life is given as the reason why he doesn’t get to enter the promised land.  He is being punished.   To my ear this strikes me as a lame attempt inserted after the fact to explain why that which Moses has so longed for has been withheld for him.

There seems to be something inside us human beings that prefers to think that ultimately everything in life could be under our control — that if we could just be good enough, or smart enough, then we could make everything work out the way we desire, and we are willing to take on a burden of guilt in order to hang on to this belief. There is something inside us that would rather think we are being punished than to believe that we are so powerless at times to get the desire of our hearts. 

The truth of the matter is, however, that sometimes life isn’t fair, oftentimes we don’t get what we long for — there are times when life is downright tragic.

An ongoing marvel for me is Brother Harold Camping, the Bible teacher who every day at the age of 87 can be heard on the airways of the radio, and seen on his television cable channel. The format never changes. Either Brother Camping is lecturing about the Bible, or he is taking questions from callers about the Bible, explaining everything anybody wonders about in regard to this often confusing book.

He has some unusual view points. For one, he believes that we are living in what he calls “the post-Church age,” which means that Satan is presently running all the churches, and therefore believers should avoid church, and devote themselves instead to the study of the Bible, with, by implication, his direction, of course.

A couple of years back, Brother Camping declared that his careful study of the Bible had led him to predict the return of Jesus on a particular date. When the date he picked came and went, it didn’t seem to phase him much. This is complicated stuff, he implied, and there were a couple of obscure Bible references that he hadn’t quite gotten exactly right. No problem, he had clarified the points of contention, and now Brother Camping is quite certain that Jesus will return in the year 2011.

Brother Camping was originally trained as a civil engineer, which is based on the premise that if you just study the data hard enough, there is always an explanation, and that’s how he approaches the Bible. Study your Bible closely enough, and all the answers are there.

One reoccurring expression that Brother Camping uses over and over is “the true believer”. For Brother Camping there is a pretty sharp line drawn between “the true believer” and the “false believer.” True believers are destined for salvation, false believers for eternal damnation. His callers seem to share his preoccupation with this concept, which, I think, is what his appeal is all about — the desire to be counted among the true believers whom, if they just work hard enough at the Bible study, can solve all of the as-of -yet unsolved mysteries of life.

Bobby and I were listening to Brother Camping on the radio the other night driving back from Bobby’s soccer practice, fascinated by the remarkably monotonous quality of his never-varying delivery. We listened as he described how the “true believer” simply becomes stronger and stronger in their certainty that the Bible has all the answers.

A man called in to ask about a couple of passages where Jesus teaches about forgiveness. Brother Campy’s response was to say that human beings are sinful and prideful, and as such find forgiveness very difficult (which, with some qualifications I would agree with.) But he went on to say that once a person becomes a “true believer,” forgiveness is easy — you no longer feel any lingering animosity to someone who has wronged you. Your one desire now is that the person who wronged you will also become a child of God just like yourself.

Brother Camping doesn’t seem to go into any great depth with particular callers. Once he’s given the answer, in his mind it is time to move on. I wanted to hear the caller asking the forgiveness question go on to ask what seems like the obvious follow up question:

“Brother Camping, if I’m still haunted by fantasies of murdering my brother-in-law because of the money he stole from me, does that mean I’m not a ‘true believer,’ and therefore destined for the fires of hell?”

But to ask such a question would already identify the caller as exactly that. I kept finding myself thinking about the Emperor’s New Clothes.

The Bible, in my experience is a whole lot more appreciative of the difficulties involved in the life of faith. Like Moses, you can live a life with much courage and faith and still not get the deepest desires of your earthly life. Job suffers more than a man can be expected to endure, with no good explanation offered him, though his so-called friends feel compelled to try and explain it all to Job any way.

Unlike brother Camping who believes that the truth is there to be found only if you are willing to obsess endlessly over the details of Scripture, Jesus recognized that it is easy to miss the forest for the trees. There are 613 different commandments in the Torah, and the dominant spirituality of his day involved an obsessive attempt at making sure you kept every single one of them, which, in the end, made it real easy to miss the Spirit of the Law.

As with last week’s Gospel story, in this week’s reading we are in the last week of Jesus’ earthly life. His adversaries are trying to trip him up with trick questions. This is another: ‘Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?’

If every commandment is essential, how do you answer a question like that? Offer one, and there will be a whole bunch of people ready to jump down your throat for the 612 commandments you didn’t mention.

But Jesus isn’t afraid to take the bait, though he doesn’t feel compelled to answer with only one commandment:

“‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.”’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.’’”

In the end, he said, it’s all about LOVE. Love itself is something of mystery — not something you can precisely define or explain. It involves both loving this mysterious God who doesn’t always make His or Her ways clear to us, and it involves loving ordinary, fallible human beings, who aren’t always easy to love.

Focus on these two commandments, and you can let go of the obsessive need to get all the details just right.

As I’ve mentioned before, all those years back I ended up a United Methodist pastor as opposed to some other denomination of pastor in large part for two rather unimpressive reasons:

One, my original church membership was in a United Methodist Church, and even though I hadn’t really been active in that church since I was about 13, the official membership I retained allowed me to get on with the ordination process.

And two, United Methodists didn’t require that their pastors study Hebrew and Greek, and I really stank at language study.

But as I learned more about the roots of the Methodist Church, I came to feel like it was the denomination I most would have wanted to be a part of, which isn’t to say that the United Methodist Church is a perfect institution, which it certainly isn’t.

In the end, LOVE was the primary concern for John Wesley, the founder of what became the Methodist Church. Faith is important, but faith without love isn’t worth beans.

For Wesley, once people become “believers”, embracing the gift of unconditional love given to them freely in Jesus, they embark in what is generally speaking a life-long journey in the process of what is called “sanctification.” For Wesley, sanctification was all about love — becoming loving with the same sort of heart and actions that Jesus lived out. Wesley believed in the possibility that a person could be fully sanctified — which means fully perfected in regard to being about nothing but love — in this life time. But he never claimed it for himself, and avoided claiming it for others as well. Wesley did, in fact, become more loving in time, as did the persons who came under the influence of his teachings, but to the end of his life, he remained very much an imperfect man, living by the mercy of God’s grace.

In Brother Camping’s teaching, once you become a believer you are already sanctified — already perfected in love, or else you never really were a “true believer” in the first place.

Of course, if you follow Brother Camping’s teachings and avoid contact with the imperfect-but-real human beings who inhabit local congregations, and if, as he suggests you spend all of your time with your nose in your Bible trying to figure it all out, you won’t get much opportunity to actually interact with other people, which in my experience is precisely where we discover how very challenging real love is.

Interestingly, John Wesley believed that for the vast majority of “believers” full sanctification — being perfected in love — does not occur until the moment of death itself.

That also makes sense to me. At the end of life, as we finally stand face to face before the brilliant light and perfect love of God, we’ll be able — if we’ve developed some familiarity with love and grace over the course of our life time — to finally let go of all the stuff inside us that gets in the way of letting God’s love flow through us without any kind of impediment.

In the meantime, we keep on as best we can, practicing the art of love. The best place to learn the art of love is with other imperfect people, who likewise can’t figure out why Moses didn’t get to live in the promised land, at least for a little while.

One of my lodestar scripture passages is the thirteenth chapter of 1Corinthians, known as “the love chapter,” and I want to finish this morning with the last three verses of this chapter:

“Now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.”

It is crunch time in the Gospel story we heard this morning. The day before was Palm Sunday. Jesus arrived in Jerusalem on where he went immediately to the Temple, the house of God, where he drove out the money changers and those who are selling the animals for sacrifice — the people profiting off the poor of the land in name of the holy God. In doing so Jesus has enraged the chief priests and the Pharisees who are entrenched in the system, and they are determined that he must die in order to maintain the status quo.

Their problem, however, is that the common people — the poor people — have gotten behind him, so they are afraid to arrest him, for fear that his arrest will trigger an uprising of the people against them. So the high priests and Pharisees are watching for an opportunity to do away with Jesus.

It is now day two of Jesus’ last week of life. He has returned to the temple where, for the time being, the money changers are afraid to enter, and he has welcomed in their place the poor people — the blind and the lame — people made in the very image of God, whose true image so often goes unrecognized in this world. In welcoming them into God’s house, he has restored to them their rightful place in God’s family.

As his adversaries come to Jesus there in the Temple, there is something strangely similar to the interactions we see today between the press and the presidential candidates, where the press try to find the clever question to ask that will trip the candidate up, force him to say something that will drive away one of his constituencies as he attempts to placate another.

It begins with flattery. “Teacher, we know that you are sincere, and teach the way of God in accordance with truth, and show deference to no one; for you do not regard people with partiality.” If butter wouldn’t melt in their mouths.

Their words sound friendly on the outside, when in fact they are the set up for the assassin’s knife. The question that follows is exceedingly clever, designed to do away with Jesus without really lifting a finger. “Tell us what you think. Is it lawful to pay taxes to the Emperor?”

If Jesus says no, he marks himself as an enemy of the Emperor, and the Roman soldiers will sweep down in seconds flat to arrest him, and in short order nail him to a cross. He’ll be done away without any obvious blood on their own hands.

If Jesus says yes, he will disappoint the common people who resent the domination of the Romans. Maybe he doesn’t get killed this way, but he loses his appeal, his political power.

Jesus recognizes their hypocrisy. The first thing he does is ask for a coin used to pay this tax. It is worth noting that Jesus does not have a coin in his possession. He isn’t one of those people who wouldn’t think of leaving home without a credit card, a debit card, a wad of cash in his pocket. Money doesn’t have that kind of hold over him.

They bring him a coin — one minted far away in Rome. He asks, “whose head is this, and whose title?” Everybody knows the answer. The coin bears the image and title of the Emperor Caesar, who claims for himself divinity. The coin is part of the system by which the Emperor maintains his control over the empire. By controlling the economy — by issuing the common currency — Rome controls the communal life. (It’s a lesson that recent events have reminded us of again: those who control the economy will hold the political power as well.) Buy into the system, and Caesar controls you. You may hate Caesar himself, but if you love his money, he still has you.

Jesus concludes by saying, “Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”

When I went off to college, I wasn’t sure what I believed, religiously speaking. I had been brought up in the church, but as I went through adolescence and the difficulties that go alone with that turbulent period of time, I became disillusioned with the Church, in which it was easy to spot hypocrisy. (Teenagers have this higher-sensitive-hypocrisy-radar, that can tell, as Jesus did that day, when someone is saying something they don’t truly believe.)

Spiritual journeys take all kinds of paths, and mine involved a theology course my sophomore year, where my brain was spoken to, making room for my heart to respond. I was introduced to a simple but profound idea, which was this: that in a certain sense everybody has a religious faith, (even those who swear they don’t) if you understand the object of a person’s faith to be that which concerns a person most in life — one’s ultimate concern.

Ask yourself, what do you care about above all else? When push comes to shove, what is it that motivates you — gets you out of bed in the morning? If you can identify the answer to this question, then you have identified your god.  It is the thing in your life before which you bow down, whether literally, or just figuratively.

Now this might sound like a new idea, but actually it is a very old idea. If you know the ten commandments handed down from God through Moses, then you know that the very first commandment is “You shall have no other gods before me.” Why is there a need for this as the very first commandment, if not for the habitual tendency of human beings to create idols to worship? Or as Jesus would later say, “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” (6:21)

Now there is no end to things that can take the place of gods in our lives. Another person can become a god for us. Our public image or reputation can take on the quality of a god.

The tax question the Pharisees asked Jesus, as well as the present economic crisis with all the fear and anxiety it has generated, calls our attention to how easily money (and all money represents for us) can become for us a god.

Earlier in Matthew’s Gospel, in the great Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said, “No one can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.” (6:24)If money is your god, not only will it place you in conflict with Caesar and the demands of taxation, it will also put you at odds with God as well. At best your alliances with Caesar and your attempts to make alliances with God will be temporary, driven by the perception that these alliances can for a time help you get closer to your real god — money.

If you think about all this, you realize that there is a huge potential here for hypocrisy. We can say, for instance that our god is the Lord Almighty, or our god is Jesus, but upon closer examination — more examination than we generally care to be put ourselves under — it turns out that our day-to-day lives are centered somewhere altogether different. (Our coins lie. More often than not, it is not God in whom we trust.)

Elsewhere in the Sermon on the Mount you will find these words from Jesus: “If anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also; and if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well; and if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile.” (5:39b – 41) I think that mostly we don’t really get these words. They sound like Jesus is telling us to be some kind of wimp. Actually, Jesus is talking about experiencing a kind of strength and freedom that we tend to know very little about. He’s talking about having no other God than the Holy God who made heaven and earth and loves all people and living things (including Roman soldiers and anybody else with whom we might come in conflict.)

If instead of the one true God our god is physical survival or our stuff, or our comfort, or knee jerk need to avoid pain, then when the Emperor’s soldier threatens to strike us on the cheek, or to take away our coat, or to force us to march for a mile, we will either cower for fear, or strike out in rage, why? Because the true god of our life has been threatened.

But if our God is the one true God, we can look the soldier, or anyone else who threatens us in the eyes and say, “none of your threats hold any power over me.”

A sermon preached on October 5, 2008 based upon Exodus 20:1 – 4, 7 – 9, 12 – 20 and Philippians 3:4b – 14, entitled “What Paul Learned.”

The apostle Paul is a fascinating figure who is often referred to as the person other than Jesus who had the most to do with shaping Christianity. You may be familiar with his story, some of which he refers to in this morning’s reading from his letter.

Paul grew up with the name of Saul, and, in the language of today, from early on he traveled the optimal career path. He came from the best family, went to the best schools, networked with only the most honored people — his reputation was impeccable.  He was, as they say, headed places.

He knew, and practiced, the Law of God inside and out. He made a point of rooting out what he considered to be corrupting influences on the moral and spiritual purity of his people — specifically the rif raff who were going about teaching the abomination that Jesus of Nazareth, a back water preacher who died a shameful death on the cross, was the messiah of God. Saul found these people particularly despicable.

And then one day as he traveled on a road to a place called Damascus where he intended to root out some more of these Christian troublemakers, something happened that he would never have anticipated in a thousand years. He encountered a blaze of light that brought him to his knees and left him totally blind. He heard a voice say, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?”

He had no clue what the blaze of light was talking about, that is, until the voice identified himself: “I am Jesus who you are persecuting.”  The voice told him to proceed to the city of Damascus, where he would be told what to do. For three days he remained blind until some Christians came and showed compassion upon him, restoring his sight, and baptizing him in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, whereupon he received a new name to denote his new life in Christ: He would now be called “Paul.”

For about two years afterwards Paul did very little at all. Apparently the experience he had been through gave him more than enough to ponder. He emerged from his time of silence and solitude a passionate Jesus preacher.

Out of his own experience of Christ, Paul introduced a radical new idea to the Church:

That Christians did not need to keep the Torah in all its many detailed laws. It was not necessary, he declared to follow the strict dietary laws, or for men to be circumcised.

Love alone was the thing that mattered — that righteousness came not from keeping the Law — which he now saw was impossible. He had done as good job as anybody at keeping the Law, but in the pivotal moment of his life when he came into the presence of God’s glorious light in Christ, he had discovered that he was still full of darkness and sin. Righteousness belonged to God — and was not something that could be earned by working hard to follow the Law. The amazing thing that Paul discovered was that God freely bestows righteousness as a gift of grace upon anyone who responds with faith in Jesus, this peculiar savior who turned everything on its head.

So single handedly, Paul opened up the church to the Gentile world. Before Paul, it had been assumed that in order to be a Christian, you had to first be a Jew, following the dietary laws, circumcision — the whole 612 laws of the Torah. Paul spent the next decades of his life traveling all around the Mediterranean Sea starting churches.

His letters to these congregations make up a good part of our New Testament. Along the way Paul experienced a great deal of persecution because of what was viewed as his defection to the dark side. He suffered quite a bit, physically and emotionally, as a result of his conversion to Christ. “For his sake,” wrote Paul, “I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him…” 

His letters cover a lot — they are full of profound insights about faith and grace, as well as repeated encouragements to the early Christians to be all about love. But they also often have a slightly neurotic feel to them, because Paul was constantly finding himself in the uncomfortable position of having to defend himself from a distance against his critics who were intent on tearing down his work — specifically, instigating division in his churches. He alternates between lashing out in anger at these critics, and expressing embarrassment by the fact that he finds himself in the position of having to justify himself — which, in the end, he knows only God can do.

Listen, for instance, to these words Paul writes in his second letter to the Corinthian Church, where goes in more detail about what he experienced on the road to Damascus. He speaks awkwardly, in the third person, because of the unease he feels in his apparent boasting:

It is necessary to boast; nothing is to be gained by it, but I will go on to visions and revelations of the Lord. I know a person in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven–whether in the body or out of the body I do not know; God knows. And I know that such a person–whether in the body or out of the body I do not know; God knows– was caught up into Paradise and heard things that are not to be told, that no mortal is permitted to repeat. On behalf of such a one I will boast, but on my own behalf I will not boast, except of my weaknesses. But if I wish to boast, I will not be a fool, for I will be speaking the truth. But I refrain from it, so that no one may think better of me than what is seen in me or heard from me, even considering the exceptional character of the revelations. Therefore, to keep me from being too elated, a thorn was given me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to torment me, to keep me from being too elated. Three times I appealed to the Lord about this, that it would leave me, but he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness.” So, I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may dwell in me. Therefore I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities for the sake of Christ; for whenever I am weak, then I am strong.

(2 Corinthians 12)