Outward Journey / Inward Journey

This is a repost.  Thx @ Mainstream Baptist.

One American political party has adopted “country first” as a campaign slogan. That same party is the party of political preference for the bulk of the evangelical community in our nation. I have been waiting for the significance of that statement to dawn on someone in the conservative evangelical community, but to date they seem to be blissfully unaware of the idolatrous overtones of their politics.

Christians are warned not to divide their loyalties. We put “God first” or else God is not God in our lives. Nothing in scripture authorizes God’s people to equate their loyalty to God with loyalty to their nation. There is much that forbids it. Jesus commands us to be singlemindedly devoted to God and his kingdom (Matt. 6:24-34). His kingdom is not of this world (John 18:36).

Christians should not even put “country second.” Discipleship requires that we share the same priorities as our Lord. If God so loved “the world” that he sent his only Son to die for it, and the Son was obedient unto death, then the good of the world as a whole deserves more concern from his disciples than the good of any single nation. At best, then, country only comes in third.

That’s not a message that most American evangelicals have ears to hear. They don’t have ears because they have no desire to pay attention to the genuine demands of discipleship. The thought of self-conscious self-sacrifice for the benefit of strangers is completely foreign to them. They’re looking for cheap grace. They only have ears for those who will tell them what they want to hear and who ask them to make sacrifices only for what is near and dear.

It would be hard for me to conceive of a more damning indictment of American evangelicalism if it weren’t for the research that indicates how widely evangelicals defend the government’s use of torture as an investigative technique.

Thnx @ Out of Ur for this one.

On Saturday, I spoke with a friend from Lampeter over the telephone.  I would consider him to be one of my best friends, and since I left Lampeter he and I have kept in fairly regular contact via phoneline.  When we were in Lampeter we spent a great deal of time together, and at various points we had planned to get civil unioned (so I could get a residence visa), start a business together, and move to New York together.  He is very intellegent and charismatic, and I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that my friendship with him is probably the most influential adult relationship that I’ve had — both intellectually and personally.

Several months ago he moved into a caravan without a landline or internet access, so contact has been limited to occassional emails.  I have felt the loss.  When he phoned on Saturday, the conversation was noticably awkward and pretty distant.  That pained me.  I’m now considering spending this year’s Christmas holiday in Wales to visit.  I’d like him to come over and visit New York, but money-wise that is not a possibility.

Perhaps I should have seen this coming.  He is in philosophy, is English, and now working under the table at a goat farm in rural Wales.  I’m in theology and preparing for the Christian ministry, soon at a seminary in New York City.

Is it inevitable that friendships without facetime drift apart and eventually end?  Or do divergent lifepaths eventually mean that friends will in time become so dissimilar that there’s not much to talk about?  I don’t know, but the price of a plane ticket seems like it’s worth it to find out.  I hope the answer is ‘no’.

Sermon for the 14th Sunday in Ordinary Time (6 July 2008), delivered at First Congregational United Church of Christ of Bloomer, Wisconsin.

What if I don’t make it to church on time?  What if I get sick and die?  What will happen to the kids?  What if I can’t pay my credit card bill, or my mortgage?  What if I lose my job?  What if there’s another terrorist attack, or what if the government becomes authoritarian and tries to take away our rights?  What if the DVD doesn’t play because of the scratch on the bottom?  What if I get E. Coli from eating bad tomatoes?  What if global warming means that Florida will be permanently flooded – how would I get my oranges?  What if my grades aren’t as good as I thought they would be? What if I worry too much?

For most, if not all of us, life is full of anxiety.  Some worries and concerns are well-founded, and some are rather silly.  Some are about big issues that are entirely outside of our control and some are about mundane, every-day matters.  Some worries are trivial and allayed by a moment’s reasoned thought, and others keep us awake at night.  Of worries, there seems to be no end.

One troublesome question, though, has plagued men and women for centuries. It’s one that has especially concerned Christians, and has the potential to cause more anxiety than any other, because it deals with eternal, not passable, matters.  It is a question that has concerned some of the greatest minds the world has ever seen, like Saint Augustine and Martin Luther, and it’s also a question that can be asked, with equal sincerity, by an alcoholic who’s boozed her life away. 

It’s a question that can be at the forefront of our minds, or one that can be found only in the deepest dark and musty recesses of the heart.  It’s a question that some people spend their entire lives asking, while many others ask it only shortly before they die.

The question is, ‘am I good enough for God?  Because I’ve done a lot of bad things.  I might have done a lot of good things, too, but do those really cover up the bad things?  How much trouble am I really in?’  People who believe in God instinctually know that God is all Good, with not a blemish of imperfection; so how can a person, tarnished by sin, appear before Him?

Now you might be thinking, ‘well, I think he’s wrong.  I do do a lot of good things.  I give money to the church.  I volunteer.  I love my family ferociously, and I helped at the church brat stand a couple of weeks ago.  Besides, the sins that I do commit – they’re pretty minor.  I only tell little lies to protect people.  I only gossip a bit.  I’ve never cheated on my wife or husband.  Surely God only rejects other people who do great big sins, like fly planes into buildings, or cheat on spouses, or steal things, or …’.  You can fill in the blank.

Or, you might be thinking, ‘well, I think human nature is basically good.  And since God’s good too, He’s just going to shrug off our sins and say it doesn’t matter.’

I’m going to have you pull out your Bibles – if you don’t have one, we can make some use out of the pew Bibles in front of you.  Go to Matthew’s Gospel, chapter five, verses 27 and 28.  That’s page 1455 in the pew Bibles.  This is Jesus talking.

“You have heard that it was said, ‘Do not commit adultery.’  But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.”

So Jesus is saying that the sin of adultery isn’t just the physical act – we also commit a sin when we just look at someone and want to sleep with them.  That’s a pretty high bar that Jesus set!

Next, we’re going to look back on the Old Testament, to the Tenth Commandment that God gave to Moses on Mount Sinai, in fact.  Look at the Book of Exodus, Chapter 20, verse 17.  That’s page 114.

You shall not covet your neighbor’s house.  You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his manservant or maidservant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.

So God forbids looking at something that belongs to someone else and thinking, ‘I want that!’, or ‘I want something just like that, or something even better!’  Who hasn’t thought those thoughts?

Who hasn’t committed adultery in their heart, like Jesus said?  For that matter, who hasn’t lied, or cheated, or gossiped, or cursed someone out, or succumbed to vanity, or broken some other Law of God?  I know I’ve done all of those things, and more!  And I strongly suspect that everyone here has broken one or another of God’s Laws and is in the same boat that I am.

Because in the third chapter of his Epistle to the Romans, the Apostle Paul writes,

            [A]ll have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.

And later in this letter, in Chapter Six, we find Paul writing that

            the wages of sin is death.

And he’s not talking just about death in this life; Paul’s writing about eternal death, an eternal death that’s caused by sin that everyone is guilty of.  So I think we can understand why that question, ‘am I good enough for God?’ causes so much anxiety and so much worry.

The title of my sermon today is ‘Bad News, Good News.’  And here’s the bad news, and it’s really, really bad news.  The answer to the question, ‘am I good enough for God?’ is that no, no you’re not.  You’ve sinned.  I’ve sinned, everybody’s sinned.  And God hates sin.

We live in a culture, in a society, which glorifies supposedly self-made people.  People who solve their own problems.  So the solution to the sin-and-death problem seems simple enough: to get saved, what you need to do is pull yourself up by the bootstraps, adjust your bra, sort yourself out, and stop sinning and be holy.

That’s what Pelagius thought; Pelagius was a British monk during the time of the Roman Empire, in the fourth and fifth centuries.  He thought, and taught, that men and women could find God without any help.  He thought that since God wants holy people, what we’ve got to do is just stop sinning, and we’ll be saved.  For Pelagius, we save ourselves.

How human a tendency is that.  After all, adults tend to think that we can solve all our problems by ourselves, and since we realize that we’ve created the problem through our own sinful actions, it’s only natural to think that we can solve the problem too.  Popular spirituality reinforces the idea: it’s not uncommon to hear sentiments along the lines of ‘well, so-and-so was such a good person, she or he must be in heaven.’

The Church, in its wisdom, condemned Pelagius’ teachings as heresy, and I’m going to tell you two reasons why his idea that we can save ourselves is very misleading.

If we were to seriously hold that idea, we have to ask the question, ‘why the Cross?’  Why was it necessary for Jesus to die?  If the Cross was just an object lesson to show us how to pull our own selves up and get better, anyone could have done that.  But Jesus was far from being anyone; we believe that he was true God cloaked in flesh.  So it seems monstrous that he would be killed, unless his death was for something, affecting a real change in our legal status.  In Mark’s Gospel, Jesus says that it’s not healthy people that need a physician, but those who are sick.  ‘I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.’

And during his time here, he didn’t hang out with the Pharisees, the people who tried to follow every law down to the letter.  He spent his time with women of ill-repute, rebels, and agents of the occupying foreign enemy.  So in the context of the Christian story, if we can sort ourselves out, that climatic part about Jesus’ and death, don’t really make any sense.

The other problem is the one that Paul is writing about in our New Testament lesson.  I’m going to read the passage again.

I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.  Now if I do what I do not want, I agree that the law is good.  But in fact it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me.  For I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it.  For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.  Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me.

So I find it to be a law that when I want to do what is good, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind, making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?  Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!

‘I see in my members another law at war, […] making me captive to the law of sin.’  Can’t that be borne out of our own experience?  We can try and try and try to give up sinning, but those very efforts are tainted by sinful motives.  The law is so onerous, and we are so weak.  Perhaps the best objection to Pelagius telling us to shape up and save yourself is that simply, we can’t.  We see the ‘Good News’ in the last two sentences of this passage: ‘Who will rescue me from this body of death?  Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!’

We cannot save ourselves and the ‘Good News’ is that taking on flesh, Christ made common cause with us, in death washed away our sins, and in rising from the grave, he defeated them.  Through God’s grace we are saved, and not by our own works.  How then, shall we live?  A couple of weeks ago I read Paul’s rhetorical question: ‘should we continue in sin so that grace may abound?’  Absolutely not!

Pelagius was right about one thing: God does want us to be a holy people.  For that reason, God gave us Himself in the Holy Spirit to enable us to live lives more acceptable to  Him, even if we cannot, in this life, take away the stain of original sin.  When we grow in our spiritual lives as Christians by living in the light of our Baptisms and in Christ’s spiritual presence in Holy Communion, when we live our lives more in the light of the Cross, then sin loses its luster.  We ourselves become dead to it.  The first step, though, is to trust God for our salvation, and hand all our sins, and our anxieties over to Him.  Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord.

I invite you to take some time to pray to God and confess to Him your sins.  We have the enormous privilege of being able to lay our guilt at the foot of the Cross.  Put them there, thanking Jesus for the work he did there so that we would not be found guilty.

[…]

Lord, we confess that we are sinners in need of your grace.  Forgive us our pride when we think that if we are just a little bit better, we won’t have need of Christ’s work on the Cross.  Thank you for your work, your death, and your victory over death.  Thank you for your Holy Spirit, and make us into a holy people which honors you.  Amen.

This via catholicanarchy:

Yes, happy 4th of July! According to the calendar of the Church, July 4th’s real significance is that it is the feast day of St. Elizabeth of Portugal (1271-1336), a patron Saint of peacemakers.

The sad fact, however, is that if you were to attend Mass on this day, the chances of your priest mentioning this feast are slim to none. Instead, you are likely to participate in a Eucharist which has been transformed into a syncretistic ritual of american civil religion. Thank God that, despite the sectarian tendencies of the american Church, the transnational Church calls us Catholics to be a peculiar people who mark time differently than the rest of the world, and the rest of our nation.

St. Elizabeth, pray for us, that we american Catholics may truly take our place in the one, transnational Body of Christ that resists the dismemberment caused by our tendency to cling to national allegiances. And on the day that the rest of the united states celebrates its foundational myth of violence and the sacrifices of soldiering which parody the Cross, let us be ever more formed by the words of Jesus in the Gospel reading for July 4th: “Go and learn the meaning of the words, I desire mercy, not sacrifice.”

You know, you’d think that we Reformed folk would be somewhat innoculated from the nationalism-as-religion bug, what with our emphasis on God’s sovereignty, which makes American booyahism look like a sickly imitation of the real thing.  And yet, I saw last night that the (nominally RCA-affiliated) Chrystal Cathedral’s ‘Hour of Power’ program (don’t get me started on so-called ‘television churches’ — that’s a whole ‘nother post) is advertising that ‘the world’s largest indoor American flag’ being raised in their ’sanctuary’ during a ‘worship service’.  This makes me wonder what, exactly, is being worshipped.  How sad that people are being misled by the great civil religion lie.  St. Elizabeth, pray for us!

The Romanist collect for today:

Father of peace and love, you gave St. Elizabeth the gift of reconciling enemies. By the help of her prayers give us the courage to work for peace among men, that we may be called the sons of God. We ask this through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Amen!

I realised that there were several blogs that I don’t read anymore on the blogroll, and several others that I do read that weren’t listed.  So I updated it.  You might be interested in checking it out — but probably not.

And what is the object of my love?  I asked the earth and it said: ‘It is not I.’  I asked all that is in it; they made the same confession.  I asked the sea, the deeps the living creatures that creep, and they responded: ‘We are not your God, look beyond us.’  I asked the breezes which blow and the entire air with its inhabitants said: ‘Anaximenes was mistaken; I am not God.’  I asked heaven, sun, moon, and stars; they said: ‘Nor are we the God whom you seek.’  And I said to all these things in my external environment: ‘Tell me of my God who you are not, tell me something about him.’  And with a great voice they cried out: ‘He made us’.  My question was the attention I gave to them, and their response was their beauty.

-Augustine of Hippo (397) Confesssons, Book X, vi (9a).  Trans. by Henry Chadwick (1991).  Oxford Univ. Press, New York, 183.

With the mind and intellect which you have given them, they [philosophers] investigate these matters [measuring the constellations, tracing the paths of the stars].  They have found out much.  Many years beforehand they have predicted eclipses of sun and moon, foretelling the day, the hour, and whether total or partial.  And their calculation has not been wrong.  It has turned out just as they predicted.  They have put the rules which they discovered into books which are read to this day.  On this basis prediction can be made of the year, the month of the year, the day of the month, the hour of the day, and what proportion of light will be eclipsed in the case of either sun or moon; and it happens exactly as predicted.  People who have no understanding of these things are amazed and stupefied.  Those who know are exultant and are admired.  Their irreligious pride makes them withdraw from you and eclipse your great light from reaching themselves.  They can foresee a future eclipse of the sun, but do not perceive their own eclipse of the present.  For they do not in a religious spirit investigate the source of the intelligence with which they research into these matters.  Moreover, when they do discover that you are their Maker, they do not give themselves to you so that they may preserve what you have made.  They do not slay in sacrifice to you what they have made themselves to be.  They do not kill their own pride like high-flying birds, their curiosity like ‘fishes of the sea’ and their sexual indulgence like ‘the beasts of the field’, so that you, God, who are a devouring fire, may consume their mortal concerns and recreate them for immortality.

-Augustine of Hippo (397) Confesssons, Book V, i (4).  Trans. by Henry Chadwick (1991).  Oxford Univ. Press, New York, 74.

Another community course, taught by the same person who led the ‘Goddess pilgrimage’:

What would happen [...] if we esteemed her even half as much as our forebearers did?

I will venture an answer: we would be breaking covenant with the One True God shown to us in Jesus Christ?

I’ll wash your mouth out with soap,
get rid of all the dirty false-god names,
not so much as a whisper of those names again.
(from Hosea, Ch. 2, The Message).

That it may be so, Lord!

Again, click on the thumbnail for the full image.

A pilgrimage to the Holy Land?  Maybe to the heartlands of the Reformation?  No, that would be far too orthodox.  From the United Theological Seminary, an apparently Christian seminary affiliated with the UCC: a ‘Pilgrimage to the Lands of the Goddess’, an event open to the community.  From the Spring 2008 issue of Lumen, the catalogue of community programs, your CUE donations hard at work (click for full-sized image):