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#BLESSED!

2/17/2019

Sunday, February 17, 2019
First Congregational Church of Cheshire
© the Rev. Dr. James Campbell

Luke 6:17-26

He came down with them and stood on a level place, with a great crowd of his disciples and a great multitude of people from all Judea, Jerusalem, and the coast of Tyre and Sidon. They had come to hear him and to be healed of their diseases; and those who were troubled with unclean spirits were cured. And all in the crowd were trying to touch him, for power came out from him and healed all of them.

Then he looked up at his disciples and said: “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. “Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled. “Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh. “Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man. Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven; for that is what their ancestors did to the prophets. “But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation. “Woe to you who are full now, for you will be hungry. “Woe to you who are laughing now, for you will mourn and weep. “Woe to you when all speak well of you, for that is what their ancestors did to the false prophets.

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This past week I said to Marcos, “Sometimes it feels like we have lived here for a long time already.”  That’s another way to say that we feel at home. And the reason we feel at home is because of all of you.

Your welcome and hospitality were warm from the beginning.  You swept us off our feet during that candidating weekend.  We were nervous and full of hope and full of questions and doubts. That Friday night there was a cocktail reception with the leadership of the church, during which I was very careful about only having one drink.  On Saturday there was the all-church reception where we first met so many of you. And on Sunday, after the candidating sermon and vote, there was yet one more reception!

At one of those receptions, a very nice couple who shall remain nameless, introduced themselves and then said: “We have two questions for you.”  “OK,” I replied.  “First question: How committed are you to a one-hour worship service?”  And let me tell you, during a candidating weekend, how you answer that question can make all the difference!  But it was their other question that came to mind this week as I prepared the sermon.  They asked, “How committed are you to preaching from the lectionary?”  Now if you don’t know what it is, the lectionary is a three-year cycle of biblical readings for all the Sundays of the year that give one the breadth and scope of the entire biblical message.  We usually read only one passage on a Sunday, but there are actually four passages assigned to each Sunday.  And I am committed to preaching from the lectionary because it forces me to confront passages I might ordinarily avoid – like this passage from Luke!

The Beatitudes of Jesus are some of his most beloved words.  But when we think of the Beatitudes, we’re usually thinking of the ones recorded in the Gospel of Matthew.  “Blessed are the poor in spirit.  Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,” etc.  Matthew gives Jesus’s words a spiritualized gloss, making them a little easier to swallow. But Luke’s words are bitter pills that get stuck in the throat.

Luke is known for his editorial bias for the least, the last, and the lost.  And Luke proclaims that a new world order is coming in which traditional patterns of power and wealth and prestige will be overturned.  It’s not a message for the faint of heart.

The writer Annie Dillard, in her book Teaching a Stone to Talk, writes about atomic passages like this one.  She says: “…It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us to where we can never return.”[1]

Crash helmets, life preservers, seatbelts – it sounds a little dramatic until we really read these words: “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. “Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled. “Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh. “Blessed are you when people hate you… “But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation. “Woe to you who are full now, for you will be hungry. “Woe to you who are laughing now, for you will mourn and weep. “Woe to you when all speak well of you, for that is what their ancestors did to the false prophets.”

Now I read that and think: where’s my crash helmet?   I read that and think that Jesus might actually be talking about me. We are the richest people in the history of the world, and still we imagine that we don’t have enough.  We never lack for food, in fact we could push the plate back more often.  Our days are filled with friends and shopping and trips and adventures.  And we think of these things as our blessings.  In fact, we sometimes call them that.  And we announce to the world on our t-shirts and coffee mugs and knick-knacks that WE ARE BLESSED!  #BLESSED!

Now I will be the first to admit that I enjoy these things.  They make me feel fortunate. And I am.  But according to Jesus in the Gospel of Luke, possessions and position and power can blind us to our real need of God.  For people who have everything, Jesus is often the icing on the cake.  But he’s hardly the Bread of Life – that which sustains us body and soul.

So, you can see why I would have naturally avoided this passage.  It’s too close to home.  And it seems, at first, a blanket condemnation of the good life.  But is that really what it is?  To answer that question, one must remember a foundational principle of biblical interpretation.  Obscure or difficult passages are always read in the light of the whole revelation of Scripture.  And we know from other Gospels that some very rich folks also followed Jesus – including a group of rich women who financed much of Jesus’s ministry. So, I don’t think this passage is a call for us to divest ourselves of all our possessions.  But I do think it is a call to examine our perspective on our possessions.  And I think upon close examination, we might come to see that some of the things we think of as blessings are actually obstacles.

Scholars also suggest that this passage is not prescriptive: that is, it is not telling us how God ordained it all. Instead, this is a descriptive passage: it simply describes the world the way it is. It simply points out to us, in the starkest terms, the folly of our dependence upon riches.  And it is a description of how the poor, out of their need, are predisposed toward God.

But this passage also gives us a remedy for what ails us – the rich of the world.  And it is found in a seemingly innocuous detail about the setting.  Matthew calls this event the Sermon on the Mount. When Jesus delivers his Beatitudes in Matthew, he does so from the mountaintop, looking down at the people. But in Luke, this same event is known as the Sermon on the Plain.  Verse 17 says: “Jesus came down with them and stood on a level place.”

And I think that this detail is a good place to start to try to understand this difficult passage. The Kingdom of God is found on a level place.  The Reign of God that Jesus proclaimed in the Gospel of Luke is a place of radical equality and community, peace and plenty - not just for the few, but for all.

In a level place, the poor of the earth meet and mingle with the rich who have the food and the power and mechanisms to relieve that hunger.  And that’s how we’re most comfortable thinking about ministering to the poor – from the mountaintop of our privilege, reaching down.   But in a level place, it’s a two-way street because the poor also have something that we desperately need.  And I have seen, again and again, that the poor and the downtrodden and the abused and the forgotten  - those folks love God in a way that we only aspire to.  They love God because they know they need God.  Their riches do not deceive them into thinking that they are self-sufficient.  And so it is that in a level place, we both have what the other needs.  The rich can feed the poor and the poor can teach the rich. And everyone is transformed. And that is the Kingdom of God come upon this earth.

This church will grow and be transformed as we are transformed. And that transformation we call salvation happens on a level place: face to face, hand to hand, heart to heart with the very folks we’ve always assumed had nothing at all to give us.

[1]Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters (New York: Harper & Row, 1982), pp. 40-41.

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GOING DEEP

2/10/2019

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Sunday, February 10, 2019
First Congregational Church of Cheshire
© the Rev. Dr. James Campbell

Luke 5:1-11

Once while Jesus was standing beside the lake of Gennesaret, and the crowd was pressing in on him to hear the word of God, he saw two boats there at the shore of the lake; the fishermen had gone out of them and were washing their nets. He got into one of the boats, the one belonging to Simon, and asked him to put out a little way from the shore. Then he sat down and taught the crowds from the boat. When he had finished speaking, he said to Simon, “Put out into the deep water and let down your nets for a catch.” Simon answered, “Master, we have worked all night long but have caught nothing. Yet if you say so, I will let down the nets.” When they had done this, they caught so many fish that their nets were beginning to break. So they signaled their partners in the other boat to come and help them. And they came and filled both boats, so that they began to sink. But when Simon Peter saw it, he fell down at Jesus’ knees, saying, “Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!” For he and all who were with him were amazed at the catch of fish that they had taken; and so also were James and John, sons of Zebedee, who were partners with Simon. Then Jesus said to Simon, “Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching people.” When they had brought their boats to shore, they left everything and followed him.

Once upon a time there was a funny little man named Larry, who was a member of my father’s church.  And Larry had decided that I needed be toughened up.  You see, I was a sweet kid, but shy.  I preferred solitary pursuits to team efforts.  I could spend hours reading and drawing and getting lost in my imagination.  But for Larry, those were signs of weakness.  And so somehow, he convinced my parents that the cure to all that ailed me was a hunting trip.  And I was horrified.

One day soon thereafter, Larry picked me up at the crack of dawn. And he drove us deep into the woods.  There Larry taught me how to hold a gun.  He taught me some rudimentary gun safety.  And he taught me how to shoot.

I remember a lot about that day: what I was wearing; the kick of the gun; trying to stay upright when I shot. But what I remember most was how I felt when that squirrel fell from the tree.  I had hit my mark. And Larry was more excited than I had ever seen him.  But I was sick.  I was sick not from some kind of philosophical orientation about hunting. I was too young for that.  I was sick because what I had just done felt as foreign to me as anything I had ever done.  It was something forced on me; something out of character for me.  And when I got home I told my parents, in no uncertain terms for a 12 year old, that I wouldn’t ever do that again.

Sometimes I wonder just how much of my life I’ve wasted trying to be something that I was not, trying to please others, trying to fit into a mold.  How much time have you wasted doing that?  How much time have you wasted believing you needed to be someone other than who you actually are?

From an early age, we all react to what our parents expect from us.  Then later we respond to the peer pressure of our classmates.  And then we try to be what our bosses want us to be; what our spouse wants us to be.  And then we come to church and hear about all that God wants us to be.  And the overarching message in those messages is that what whatever we already are is somehow not enough.

This deep feeling of inadequacy has a lot to do with the theory of Original Sin.  This theorybegins with the assumption that we are not enough and that we never really can be.  It is our sin, our shortcomings, more than anything else about us, that defines us in God’s eyes.  And while this theoryof Original Sin is deeply ingrained in the church, you might be surprised to learn that the church has not always universally believed it. Many early Christians did not believe it.  One of those was St. Irenaeus of Lyon, who was a second century bishop in France.  And Irenaeus, starting from a place of Original Blessing and not Original Sin, once famously declared that, “the glory of God is the human person fully alive” – YOU, fully alive.

The first time I ever read that, it was as if a bolt of lightning passed right through me.   Before that moment, I had never seriously considered that James Campbell, being most fully James somehow brought glory to God.  And my life and my understanding of what it means to follow Jesus have never, ever been the same since I read those words.

One day, Jesus was standing beside the Lake of Gennesaret, more commonly called the Sea of Galilee. And the crowd was pressing against him, implying that there were lots of folks listening to the sermon that day.  Needing some space, Jesus noticed some boats on the shore and got into one belonging to a man named Simon.  He asked Simon (who would one day become St. Peter) to row out a little onto the lake. In addition to giving Jesus some needed space, the water provided some natural amplification. Then, true to the custom we learned about a few weeks ago, Jesus sat down to teach.

When Jesus had finished speaking, he asked Simon to row out into the deep part of the lake and to let down his nets for a catch.  Now Simon and company had already been out on the lake all night, but had caught nothing. They had already washed their nets, which was a last step before going home to eat and rest.  This we know.  But what is not mentioned here, but is very significant for the story, is that many first century Jews had a fear of deep water.  For the Jewish mind of that time, the depths of the sea represented chaos or hell.  At its deepest, the Sea of Galilee was about 200 feet from the surface to the bottom – enough to make Simon pause when Jesus asked him to row out to the deep water.  And so he swallowed hard and protested: “Master, we have worked all night and caught nothing.  Yet if you say so, I will row out to the deep, and let down my nets one more time.”

We all know how this story ends. The fisherman, living in that pregnant moment between exhaustion and hope, let down their nets.  And when they pulled them in, they were so full of fish that the nets began to break.  And so, they called to their friends to bring their boats to help them.  But the catch was still so great that it threatened to sink all the boats – their terror of the deep close at hand. But somehow the boats did not sink.

Now what do I always say about the stories of the Bible?  These are our stories.  We are the characters in these tales, meaning that these ancient stories have contemporary and universal applications.  That is the power of the Bible – it tells a very human story about God.  So what does this story have to say to us, about us?

Well, first of all, notice where Jesus is in this tale.  He isn’t on the shore, shouting instructions to the ones doing the work.  He’s in the boat.  And he’s not in that boat like some serene divinity.  Think of Jesus helping them to lower those nets into the sea. Think of Jesus struggling with them to pull in that heavy haul of glistening fish.  Think of Jesus laughing with them as they realized the riches that now filled their boats.  And that makes this a Christmas story!  This is a story of “God with us” – God working and laughing and crying and struggling withus in the everydayness of our ordinary lives.

Second, notice that Jesus doesn’t ask Peter to be or do anything other that what he already is and does. They were fishermen, before they were anything else.  They had learned this skill from their fathers and grandfathers. It was in their blood.  It was natural to them.  And that smelly job, full of calloused hands and sun burned skin could be used for the glory of God.

So, what about you?  What’s your thing?  What is it that you know how to do so well that it seems second nature? And have you ever truly considered that this thing of yours could somehow bring in the Kingdom of God?

Now, if you get that far – to imagine that your so-called ordinary skills can be used to advance God’s Reign in the world – don’t expect to be bored doing the same old, same old. Because God always calls us to more. God calls us out into the deep, where blessings lie hidden just beneath the surface.  Jesus asked Peter to row out into the middle of his fears.  And you know what?  Peter did not die!  He did not sink.  Instead, he was transformed into something called a fisher of people.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the future of our church.  I’ve been thinking about those pesky key indicators and what they say about this congregation’s slow decline over the last 15 years.  Those numbers are my deep place.  I look at them and sometimes feel afraid.  I feel out of my depth.  I wonder what you all expect of me.  I wonder what I expect of you.  And I wonder what God expects of us?  But pondering this passage makes me wonder: maybe all we need in this moment is to go deep; to use what we already know how to do, but in new and bolder and more faithful ways.

Chances are in the months and years to come, God will call First Church into some uncharted waters. God will call us to go deeper than we have before.  God will call us to confront our fears.

Because we might actually feel afraid as we try new things and let go of some old ones.  But Jesus says: “Fear not, for now you will fish for people, all kinds of marvelous people, as different and colorful and beautiful and as all the fish in the sea.”

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The Gospel of Disillusionment

2/3/2019

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First Congregational Church of Cheshire
Sunday, February 3, 2019
© the Rev. Dr. James Campbell

Luke 4:21-30

Then he began to say to them, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth. They said, “Is not this Joseph’s son?” He said to them, “Doubtless you will quote to me this proverb, ‘Doctor, cure yourself!’ And you will say, ‘Do here also in your hometown the things that we have heard you did at Capernaum.’” And he said, “Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in the prophet’s hometown. But the truth is, there were many widows in Israel in the time of Elijah, when the heaven was shut up three years and six months, and there was a severe famine over all the land; yet Elijah was sent to none of them except to a widow at Zarephath in Sidon. There were also many lepers in Israel in the time of the prophet Elisha, and none of them was cleansed except Naaman the Syrian.” When they heard this, all in the synagogue were filled with rage. They got up, drove him out of the town, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they might hurl him off the cliff. But he passed through the midst of them and went on his way.

The book of Job is one of the oldest books in our Bible.  But its message is contemporary.  It concerns the reality of human suffering and the resilience of faith, in the face of suffering.  Job has suffered some incredible losses: his whole family, with the exception of his wife, his health, and his fortune.  Yet Job refuses to relinquish his faith in God.  His wife, who has watched him suffer and suffered herself, is perplexed by his resolute faith. And so one day, at the end of her rope, she taunts him with these chilling words: “Do you still persist in your integrity, husband? Why don’t you just curse God, and die!”

I was 28 and in my first call. And I was living through what the mystics call “the dark night of the soul.”  Everything I had ever believed was suddenly up for grabs.  My house of faith was collapsing around me and I felt powerless to stop it. And because I had been taught that God could do anything, I was angry at God for seemingly doing nothing.  I was angry at all the unanswered questions about my life.  And I was so angry at the church.  And so, one night as I lay in bed, unable to sleep, I looked up at the ceiling and followed Job’s wife’s advice.  I cursed God with all the emotion and anger and despair that I actually felt.  I cursed God and then I rolled over and went to sleep.

I could not know it then, but what actually happened that night was the violent birthing of a profound spiritual transformation.  It was the demolition of all I thought I knew, and the beginning of the construction of something brand new.  My faith, once small and smug, would become expansive and inclusive and more grace-filled that I had ever dared to dream.

In Flannery O’Connor’s short story "Revelation," the character Ruby Turpin is sitting in the doctor’s waiting room, judging everyone around her. Ruby imagines herself to be superior, by more than a grade or two, to everyone there, especially to a poor, unkempt teenager seated across from her, reading a book. Ruby thinks it sad that the girl’s parents did not groom her more attractively. “Perish the thought of having a child as scowling as this one,” she thinks.

As for the child, named Mary Grace, she listens for a while as Ruby chatters out loud about the superiority of poor blacks over "white trash." Then, without warning, Mary Grace fixes her steely eyes on Ruby and hurls her book across the room. The book hits Ruby in the head and she falls to the floor with Mary Grace on top of her hissing into her ear, "Go back to hell where you came from, you old wart hog!"

This, says O’Connor, is the violent, shocked beginning of Ruby’s redemption, the catalyst for her repentance and her heavenly vision. O’Connor reminds us that revelation often begins when a large book hits you on the head.(William Willimon, The Christian Century, 2004)

And that, it seems to me, is the Gospel truth. The most significant spiritual experiences I have ever had began in pain or anger or fear or disillusionment.  They were not the bright memories of a kind Sunday School teacher, or a wonderful sermon I once heard, or sublime music in worship.  More often than not, transformation begins in a dark place.  It is “The Gospel of Disillusionment.”  And it’s not something we’re not keen to talk about it in the church, for fear it will scare people off.  Why are we afraid of that, since disillusionment is a universal human experience? Renowned preacher Barbara Brown Taylor writes: “Disillusionment is, literally, the loss of an illusion – about ourselves, about the world, about God – and while it is almost always a painful thing, it is never a bad thing, to lose the lies we have mistaken for the truth.”

And that is the subtext of the Gospel lesson today: the pain of losing the lies we have mistaken for the truth.  The story this week picks up where we left off last week.  Jesus has just preached his inaugural sermon.  And Luke says that those who heard him were amazed at his gracious words. This was a moment of light and celebration and promise.  The people were proud of him, and by extension, they were proud of themselves. After all, they had helped to raise this Jesus.  Their village life had formed this Jesus. They, perhaps better than anyone else, understood this Jesus.  They were insiders, or so they thought.

Everything was going along so nicely until Jesus took a verbal wrecking ball to their self-satisfied self-understanding.  Or as Flannery O’Connor might say, Jesus threw a large book at their heads.  And he did that to save them.

“No prophet is accepted in the prophet’s hometown,” declared Jesus in an apparent non sequitur.  And then he told some stories to prove his point and to demonstrate just how out of touch they were with the way God works the world.

Their common, beginning assumption was that they were the chosen people of God. And they knew that Jesus had recently done some mighty works in a town called Capernaum, which was a Gentile stronghold.  And if Jesus did mighty works for unclean outsiders - surely he would do even more for them, since they were insiders.

So Jesus told them two stories, taken from Scripture, that contradicted their assumption of privilege.  And when he did, they were outraged.  To be displaced from a place of privilege makes all of us angry.

Jesus said: “In the time of Elijah, there were lots of widows in the land of Israel.”  (Now we pause here to remember that widows in that time were completely dependent upon male relatives to care for them.  If not, they faced potential starvation or forced prostitution.)  --But, Jesus continued, of all the widows in the land, God sent the prophet Elijah to a widow at Zarephath, a foreigner, not part of the covenant people.  And here, I imagine, there was the first uncomfortable and ominous silence from the crowd.

Likewise, Jesus continued, in the time of the prophet Elisha, the land of Israel was filled with lepers: unclean, untouchable.  But of all the lepers in the land in need of healing, God sent the prophet to Naman, the Syrian, another outsider and unclean, a pagan and a foreigner.

Well, this was just too much for the comfortable, church-going folk of Nazareth.  Their compliments suddenly turned to rage, such rage that a mob surrounded Jesus and drove him to the brow of the hill upon which Nazareth is built.  They had every intention to throw him off and then, if he survived the fall, to stone him to death.  This was a punishment for blasphemy, implying that what Jesus had said struck at the very heart of their religious self-understanding.

Now it’s easy to judge them, but I think that their rage was completely understandable.  They felt threatened.  Their place in society was no longer secure.  And so they did what we do: they fought back and tried to eliminate the threat.

So what was Jesus up to that day? Was he just being a provocateur? Was he just being a rabble-rousing prophet?  Or did he actually love these hometown folks?  Did he love them enough to refuse to leave them where they were?

Luke ends the story with the angry mob. But knowing us humans, I bet you that that was not the end of the story.  I bet that not all of them remained angry.  Some of them went home, and after they smoothed their ruffled feathers, were actually haunted by what Jesus said.  They too had this nagging suspicion that maybe the love of God was broader than the religious boundaries they loved.  Others of them had no doubt broken the law of God, and they too felt like outsiders or were treated like outsiders.  Some of them were hiding sicknesses or secrets that would one day exclude them from the community.  And for those people, these words hurled like a book across a room, were the painful start of a new beginning.

Job, we are told, survived his ordeal and had all of his fortunes restored. Ruby, we are told, left that doctor’s office that day with a sore head, but the beginnings of a changed heart. And I woke up the next morning, surprised to still be alive – but here I am, a different man than I was.

The Gospel of Jesus saves us. But the work of salvation is not for the feint of heart.  Before anything else, there is the wrecking ball of the truth.  But after the dust settles, there is the construction of something brand new: beautiful and beyond compare.

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#BLESSED!

GOING DEEP

The Gospel of Disillusionment

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