Speaking Truth in an Op-ed World

I have begun to realize that we are living in an op-ed world. You know what the op-ed page is in the newspaper? It’s where the opinion columns show up, and I have to confess that it’s a section of the newspaper that I am addicted to. Just like about the only TV I watch these days are of political talking head pundits endlessly raking over the barely warm coals of a controversy that doesn’t amount to a hill of beans. I know their names – Chris Matthews, Joe Scarborough, Tom Friedman, Mark Styne – I know the field and I listen and read and I’m addicted.

Lately, though I have begun to think that there is something very shallow about my addiction. I mean, why do I believe that Tucker Carlson’s opinion is any more important than anybody else’s? I mean admire the endless hours these folks spend analyzing political news, but there is something missing. I believe that on many issues, even political issues, the most important voices may not belong to pundits at all. When I’m looking for truth I am just as likely to find it in a clam bed with Kenny Webb or in a painting by Thelma Peterson or in a poem by Mary Karr. I mean I’d sure rather spend time with those folks than I would with Bill O’Reilly. Because that’s what I’m hungry for – not someone who is going to give me the lay of the land from their partisan perspective, but someone who will speak truth from the perspective of a searcher. Don’t you want someone who will speak the truth to you? I guess that’s why I’m also addicted to philosophy.

About eleven years ago I went back to school. Somewhere in my later seminary days I got the bug and I thought about studying further. So I entered the Ph.D. program at UVA to get a degree in philosophical theology. Let me tell you that philosophical theology is a scary thing to get a degree in. Theology alone is bad enough, but when you throw in philosophy on top of theology, well, what you get is a combination that will give you a million-dollar vocabulary of big, long words and an area of expertise that will qualify you teach some of the most unpopular courses in seminary.

But some of us are called to that. We actually like to sit and discuss the meaning of life. We like to get in huge, raging arguments about how Hegel’s dialectic is nothing more than a revision of Augustine’s notion of fragmented time. We can’t believe that someone would actually take Descartes seriously in this day and age. And sometimes we wonder if the hokey pokey really is what it’s all about. That’s what philosophical theologians do, and that is some of what I did for a few years as I worked toward a Ph.D. that finally turned into another Master’s degree.

Which means that were I living in ancient Greece back in the time of the Apostle Paul, I would probably have been one of those folks hanging out at the Areopagus, the philosopher’s hill outside of Athens. The book of Acts describes the scene very well. Paul was travelling through Greece, you see, preaching about Christ. He’s been running into resistance at every step along the way because, you know, Paul is a troublemaker. When he goes with Silas to the synagogue in Thessalonika and tries to convince them that Jesus is the Messiah, they get some converts among their fellow Jews, but they also stir up a lynch mob and they have to be whisked out of town under cover. When the mob finds out Paul’s gone, they say, “This man is turning the world upside down! Saying Jesus is a king. Who ever heard of such?”

Paul and Silas start preaching at Beroea in the synagogue and things are going all right there until the Thessalonika folks hear where they’ve gone and they bring the lynch mob on over to Beroea, too. There are riots and threats and everyone is in an uproar. So they have to slip Paul out of town again and they say, “Now where can we send Paul where he won’t cause any trouble? I know, how about Athens? They’re all very philosophical down there and everybody knows that philosophers don’t riot. Let’s send him there.”

So that’s how Paul ends up in Athens, but he’s not happy with what he sees. He’s walking around town and sees idols here and altars there. There’s a shrine to Athena and Apollo and Ares and Zeus. There’s the Parthenon. Athens is your one-stop shop for religious life—kind of like the Wal-Mart of the gods. But nothing about Christ. So he goes to the synagogue, but he also goes to the marketplace and hangs with the philosophers because that’s where all the cool people in Athens hang out. In trendy coffee shops today, to be cool you have to dress in black and pierce your nose in thirteen places. In Athens, you go to the market and discuss the latest release from Epicureus. It’s one of the only place in the history of the world where it was hip to be a philosopher. This is why I would have been there. The Bible says they were hanging out in the market there, the Epicureans and the Stoics, and they were kind of intrigued by Paul. They don’t get all worked up by Paul like the folks in Thessalonika did. They just say, “What is this guy babbling on about? I can’t understand it so it must be good stuff. Let’s take him up to the Areopagus and find out what’s going on here.”

Now the Areopagus was the place to go for philosophical debate. You know how if you really want to know what’s going on in town you go to the beauty parlor or to Sonny’s barbershop? Well, in Athens if you really want some good philosophy talk, you go to the Areopagus. They get Paul up there and they say, “Would you please enlighten us as to the implications of your Jesus theory for ethical and eschatological exploration? We’re very interested to know what you’re talking about.” (That’s my loose translation.)

So Paul’s got center stage and he could cause a lot of trouble, but instead he talks like a philosopher. Paul is good at this, you know. In another places in the Bible he says, “To the Jews I became as a Jew, in order to win Jews. To those under the law I became as one under the law…so that I might win those under the law. To those outside the law I became as one outside the law so that I might win those outside the law. To the weak I became weak, so that I might win the weak. I have become all things to all people, that I might by all means save some.” [1 Co. 9:20-22, NRSV] Paul is becoming one of them and he starts out with some sarcasm that they don’t get.

What he actually says is, “I have noticed that you people are a very religious people.” Well, they are not religious people. They may have a lot of religious stuff hanging around, but it has not made them passionate about God or about their lives. At least the people in the synagogues cared enough about their faith to know that Paul was turning their world upside down. These folks were content to say, “Hmmm. How very interesting,” and let Paul go on his merry way. So, Paul is pulling their collective leg a little bit here.

He says, “I have noticed that you are very religious in every possible way, because as I’ve walked around I have seen shrines to all sorts of different gods. I even saw an altar to the Unknown God.” You see, the Athenians were trying to cover all of the bases and just in case they missed a god somewhere along the way, they had constructed an insurance altar. But this is the altar Paul is going to use to make his point.

“I have an important announcement for you, Athenian philosophers,” Paul says. “The Unknown God is the one I am proclaiming.” And then he proceeds to talk about how God is the one who created the heavens and the earth. This is a God who created all things out of one, who gave life and breath to everyone, who fixed the order of time and place, who created a means for people in the world to discover God. All of these things would have sounded very reasonable to these philosophers because that’s the kind of god they spent their time talking about. And Paul even quotes some of their own poets and philosophers as he talks. “Your people have said that it is in God that we live and move and have our being, right? They said, ‘We, too, are God’s offspring.’ Well, I am telling you that a God like that isn’t like an altar made of gold or silver. A God like that doesn’t need to worshiped with an idol or an image. A God like that doesn’t need anything we might have to offer.

“But if we are God’s children, then we are called to turn back towards the one who made us and God has given us the means to do that through a person whom God appointed to judge us all, a person raised from the dead, a person named Christ.”

The resurrection language turned off some of the philosophers but the rest of them nodded their heads and said, “Very good. We’ll talk about this more later on.” Because that’s what philosophers do. They plan for another session at the coffee shop. But some of them did a very un-philosopher-like thing. Some of them followed Paul. We have the names of two of them—a man named Dionysius the Areopagite and a woman named Damaris. I like to think that if I had been there, I would have followed Paul, too.

So what does this mean for the rest of the world which doesn’t like philosophy? What could this passage mean for us in an age where Tom Bodett from the Motel 6 commercials is the closest thing we’ve got to a public philosopher? What could it mean for people who couldn’t care less about the debate about whether the universe is one or many? Better yet, what could it mean for us, a people who sometimes treat our churches as if they are shrines to an unknown God?

Oh, there’s the rub. Because you see, I think that we are sometimes to content with an unknown God. We don’t have altars made of stone with an inscription to the unknown God, but some of us are content to lock God away in a church building and only go to visit that God on Easter and Christmas. Some of us are content to leave this God in church when we go out into the world and to let other gods direct our actions and our decisions about politics and behavior and caring for those in need. Some of us are content to read the words of Scripture and to proclaim that “Jesus is the Way, the Truth, and the Life” and then go out into the world and let Oprah Winfrey be our guiding voice on how to act.

What does God have to say about this? I don’t know. God’s up there in the Church or over there in that closed Bible, but there’s a political pundit on the TV, there’s Rush Limbaugh on the radio, there’s Simon Cowell on American Idol—they are offering me some models. Maybe I’ll listen to them.

We’ve got our own Unknown God, you know, and the sad thing for us is that it is the God of Jesus Christ! And so we can’t get our minds clear about how to live our lives, how to govern our cities, how to elect our officials, how to treat other people, how to manage our relationships, how to control our addictions, how to look for healing, how to hang on to hope, how to give as we ought to give, how to love as we ought to love, how to dream as we ought to dream, because we have forgotten the one who has given us life. We haven’t spent enough time in this Biblical story to let it be our story. We haven’t encountered the God who is closer to us that we are to ourselves. The greatest irony in our whole, God-forgetful world is that the God whom we say we so desperately want to meet--the God who gave us life, who breathed that life into us, who loved and nurtured us, and who calls us each by our own unique and irreplaceable name—this God is the one in whom we already live and move before we even realize it.

Oh, we’ve got an Unknown God all right, but this God is not unknown to us because God hasn’t revealed God’s own self to us yet. God has been revealed and it has happened in Jesus Christ. As Christians this is the story that we keep telling to remind ourselves of who we are. Jesus showed that the way to life was open to every person—not just the Jews, though it is for them—not just the Greeks, though it is for them, too—not just to the blacks, though it is for them—not just to the whites, though it is for them—not just to the Americans—not just to the Afghanis—not just to the Israelis—not just to the Palestinians—not just to the poor—not just to the forgotten—not just to the Hokies—not just to the Cavaliers—Jesus opened the door to knowing God to every person, tribe and race. That’s a message for us to proclaim in every language that we know. Whether our audience is a roomful of overly reflective philosophers or the newborn child at our side, we are called to reflect the God we know in Jesus Christ. You want truth in an op-ed world? This is where we look. This is where Paul calls us to look.

Have you been in a Christian bookstore lately? I was in one not long ago looking for a Bible and there were Bibles of every kind—leather-bound, hardback, and paperback---red, black, white and maroon—women’s, men’s, youth, and children—King James, New International and New Revised Standard Version—so many choices. But none of those Bibles, not a single one will transform a life unless it is opened and read and shared and loved. When Paul talked to the philosophers about their unknown god, he knew that his words alone would not change their lives and their minds. It was only when folks like Dionysius and Damaris decided to follow him that the journey was begun. It’s when people put their lives in motion as living witnesses to this God.

I mentioned the poems of Mary Karr earlier as a place where I am finding truth these days. Mary Karr has had a fascinating life. She grew up in a very dysfunctional home with a father who abused her and a mother who tried to kill her. Recently she has become a Christian and her poetry reflects it.

In a poem called “Oratorio for the Unbecoming” she talks about how she had to overcome her own sense of dis-ease with her body and her self to hear how God sees her. The poem makes it sound as if God is unseen and unknown for most of her life. But then she discovered God within herself. “The heart is a mirror also, and in my chest I felt/ this tight bud of petals held a face:/ God, with his stare of a zillion suns.” And what did God tell her when she dared to listen? “He swears now/ this form is carved by him./ Have mercy, the soul/ singer says, and I say/ blessed be the air/ I breath these words with, for/ it makes a body wonder.” (from Sinners Welcome)

When we worship God with our minds we discover wonder. Opinion doesn’t cut it. Punditry doesn’t do it. Philosophy doesn’t take us far enough. The Unknown God becomes the known God when we put our lives in the service of Jesus Christ. Our journey towards God begins when we follow Christ into the world, serving and loving and inviting the people out there to discover the truth that we know through the story of Jesus—that the unknown god is none other than the God who made the universe including you and me. That’s a God worth knowing as much as God knows us. Thanks be to God.

Acts 17:22-31
Then, standing up in the middle of the Areopagus, Paul said, "Brothers and sisters of Athens, I see how very religious you are in every way possible. For in passing through the city and observing your altars, I also found a shrine, on which it was inscribed, 'To the Unknown God.' Now that Unknown One that you worship is the one I proclaim to you.
"The God who made the universe and everything that is in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not dwell in shrines built by human hands and does not need to be served by human hands, as if God needed anything, but rather he gives to all life and breath and everything. He made from one all the nations of humanity living upon all the face of the earth, fixing their appointed times and the boundaries of their dwelling place, so that they would seek out God and perhaps even grope their way toward God and stumble upon God, though really God is not far from every single one of us. For in God we live and move and are, just as some of your poets have said, 'For we too are his offspring.'
"Now since we are offspring of God, we should not suppose that this is a god made of silver, gold or precious stone, a thing crafted by human skill and a reflection of a human being, to be a likeness. Therefore while God overlooked the unknowingness of these times, now God commands all people everywhere to repent, because God has fixed a day on which to have the inhabited world judged in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed, bringing faith to all by the one resurrected from the dead."

Can We Handle Life?

One of my favorite people is Bill LeCato. Bill talks to me almost every morning. He probably talks to you, too, from WESR. When I hear Bill’s voice in the morning I know that all is right with the world.

Part of the reason I relate to Bill is that he is doing something that I did and loved once in my life. For a couple of years after college I was a disc jockey and news guy for WPED radio in Crozet, Virginia – “Spanning the nation with 3 powerful watts.” It was a great job and I really thought that I would be doing something like that my whole life. But God intervened and well, let’s just say I’m broadcasting in an entirely different way now.

Here was the toughest part of my transition, though: I really had to figure out what to do with my voice and I’m still working on it. Bill has got about the best radio voice I know of. It’s deep and warm and smooth – all the qualities that radio station owners love and that radio listeners want, too. And he uses it well. Bill LeCato makes every event he promotes sound like it’s going to a really wonderful time. He makes you want to go there. Bill could say, “The Wachapreague Fire Department is having its annual Scrapple and Seaweed Dinner down at the fairgrounds next Friday at 9 PM. Entertainment will be provided by the Tone Deaf Quartet. Come on out.”

Then I’d say, “You know, that sounds like something I’d like to go to. Hey, Suzanne, what are we doing Friday night?”

This was my problem – having used that radio voice to give life to everything, even those things that ought not to have life, it was very difficult for me to decide what to do with my voice when I became a minister…what to give my voice to. Because what preaching demands is that you only give voice to the truth. At the age of 24, when I went to seminary, I only had the faintest hint of what truth was. I knew God had called. I knew about Jesus. But I had only a vague sense of what more I had to say. And when I did hit the truth I had to let folks know, through the way that I spoke, that this news was of an entirely different order than anything else I might say. This news shatters the world as we know it. This news makes every other news trivial. This news is not about the superficial things we often say to one another. This news is about my soul and therefore about your soul.

How often have you had the urgency of knowing that there was a truth you had to share like that? To ask it more dramatically – when have you been in touch with a truth that you would give your life for? Most of the time we’re aware that our sense of truth is kind of muddied. It’s so shaded that we’re hesitant to spell truth with a capital ‘T’, much less stake our life on it.

I was at the Festival of Faith and Writing for the past three days in Grand Rapids, Michigan. If your idea of a great day is hanging out in lecture halls with poets and authors giving readings and lectures, (guilty), this is about the most stimulating place you can be. There were about 2,000 writers from all over the country and all over the world there.

Now, I’ll admit that we were an odd collection of folks. The thing about writers is that while they have these incredibly rich interior lives, they are not particularly good at people skills. That’s why they’re writers. You can say something provocative to them and they won’t respond verbally but instead they’ll pull out a notebook and write something down. They also read a lot, which makes walking difficult. I was avoiding people all through the conference who were walking across campus with their nose in a book. And they were trying to do the same for me.

One of the speakers was the novelist Mary Gordon. She gave the opening address on whether fiction could make people more moral. Her answer was ‘no’ because literature doesn’t get a predictable response out of people. It’s not direct enough for people to read a story and then know how to live. She talked about her disappointment when someone she met told her some terribly offensive thing and then found out who she was. “Oh, your book changed my life,” the stranger said. How disappointing! Of course, the same thing happens with sermons, too, but they are usually a little more direct. Or at least you can have somebody give a commission at the end of the service to interpret it.

Mary Gordon said it partly has to do with the nature of truth. The truth about something, she says, is often not clearly before us. It’s usually several truths combined. When we hear something that requires us to think about what’s true it’s combination of “the first thing we thought, its opposite, and something in between.” It’s complicated.

For Stephen this is definitely not the case. In the book of Acts we meet this early Christian, Stephen, and he is willing to go to the mat for a truth. Stephen is willing to pick a fight with the ruling religious council for a truth. Stephen is willing to die for Jesus and he does.

As a youth I really related to Stephen. I wanted to be as passionate as Stephen. I wanted to believe in something so much that I would stand up to the powers that be. I wanted to condemn those in authority and tell them how wrong they were. I wanted to be Stephen.

Hearing this story again now as an adult I think he’s obnoxious. Who did he think he was claiming all truth for his side alone? Surely there was another side. If we just had the recorded thoughts of the council I’m sure we’d see that they were not the evil people this passage makes them out to be. These are the things I wonder now as an adult who knows how dangerous religious zealots can be.

For Stephen, however, and for that early group of Christians who were just trying to be faithful to what Jesus and the Holy Spirit had done to them, they clung to this truth because it was life itself. The leaders couldn’t stand it. Partly because Stephen was accusing them of not enforcing the law they were supposed to be upholding and partly because Stephen was claiming that he was standing in the long line of God’s prophets and they were standing in the long line of those who rejected the prophets. At any rate they are furious at Stephen and the Bible says they were grinding their teeth.

That’s where the lectionary reading for today picks up. Stephen is facing this angry mob of religious leaders and suddenly he has a vision. For the whole chapter before this he has been telling the story of Israel’s history and how God has continued to speak to the people in each new generation and called them to something new, from Abraham leaving his home to travel to a new land, to Joseph going to Egypt and saving his family, to Moses leading the people out of slavery, to David and Solomon. That’s where Israel had been, but now Stephen has a vision of where God’s people were going. He looks up into the heavens and he sees the glory of God and Jesus standing at the right hand of God.

Now this language is so familiar to people who have grown up in the Church that we just gloss right over this. It’s like Stephen starts quoting the Apostle’s Creed. “I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son our Lord, who is seated at the right hand of God the Father Almighty and who shall come again to judge the quick and the dead.” But we forget what this image meant to the early Church and what it ought to mean to us.

It’s not just abstract language and a formulaic way of saying things. This was the vision that kept the persecuted Church alive in the midst of its darkest days. Not a therapeutic Christianity that talked about how Jesus is my best friend. Not a militant Christianity that talked about destruction. The image that the early Christians took with them was of God in glory and Jesus standing or seated at God’s right hand.

This goes beyond reason. It goes beyond history. The comfort that Stephen got when he faced the mob was a vision of God and Jesus. That’s what the universe hangs on. It’s the love of the Trinity. That’s it. And it is far more about beauty than it is about reason. There was no philosophical system on earth that could explain why a human being should be elevated to stand at God’s right hand. Only the beauty of the incarnation and the promise of the resurrection could do that.

This, of course, is too much for the crowd and when Stephen tells them about his vision they stop their ears so that they don’t have to hear this. They cry out in a loud voice and they run at Stephen and grab him and drag him out of the city. They take up stones and they start to pelt Stephen with the stones, but even while he’s being beaten to death by these stones, Stephen kneels. It doesn’t seem to be the stones that make him kneel, he just kneels. And his last act is to imitate Jesus. He prays that God will not hold the sin of his murderers against them. Even as he dies, he wants them to know the beauty that he sees. Even as they give in to the evil that consumes them, he knows what they can be in God’s eyes.

There’s one other character in this small story, though. He’s standing there as the crowd drags Stephen out for his execution. He’s watching with approval as they do the deed. They throw their cloaks at his feet – he’s the coat clerk for the first Christian martyrdom. It’s a young man who stands in for us. His name is Saul and later his name will be changed to Paul, the great apostle who will take the message of Jesus to the whole world.

He’s the one who gives me hope in this story. The crowds are too cruel and too possessed by their hatred for me to relate to. Stephen is too pious – I pray that I could respond as well to such a thing, but how many of us could? But Saul – there I see myself. Witnessing the word that the world can do to assault truth and beauty and heaven itself, but still harboring the possibility of change.

I know that I can be captivated by the violence and destruction and disappointment that the world metes out on a daily basis. I know that I can be prone to despair. But every so often the heavens will open to reveal something amazing about this world. Even though things are bad, God is in the heavens and Jesus is standing at God’s right hand – no longer confined to the cross, but awaiting the consummation of all things when those who can handle life will join him at a great feast. That’s what sustains us when the going gets tough.

Lisa Stevens has introduced me to a folksinger who has become one of my favorites. Ellis Paul is his name and he has a song called “Angel in Manhattan” in which he imagines what would happen if a visible angel showed up in New York City. He imagines the disbelief of all of the people and a hostile press conference in front of reporters. “What do you say to detractors who say you’re just some actor?” the reporters ask.

The angel responds, “The question is, ‘Do I believe in you?’” Of course the answer is that she does. God does. The chorus goes on, “Spread the news, I saw an angel fly from Manhattan in front of paparazzi, in front of television crews. And me I choose, I know a little faith wouldn’t harm me despite what they print in the New York Daily News. It was just another day/Like any other, other day/Like any day.” Any day, the world is a miraculous place filled with the presence of God.

You want the truth? I am convicted. I will not speak anything but the truth. And the truth is that something is terribly, terribly right with the universe and it sees the best in us. If only we could see the same. Thanks be to God.

Acts 7:55-60
Stephen was full of the Holy Spirit and he looked into the heavens and saw the glory of God and Jesus standing at the right hand of God. He said, "Look, I see the heavens opened up and the Son of Humanity standing at the right hand of God!"

But they cried out with a loud voice, clapped their ears shut and rushed against him as one. They took him out of the city and began to stone him. The witnesses threw their garments at the feet of a young man named Saul.

While we they were stoning Stephen, he called out, "Lord Jesus, receive my spirit." Then he knelt down and cried out with a loud voice, "Lord, do not let this sin stand against them." And with that he died.

When You've Got a Shepherd

One of the most disturbing stories I have ever read is by one of my favorite authors, Annie Dillard. I’ve got a lot of affection for Annie because she is partly responsible for my being in the ministry at all. It was a short story she wrote about weasels and how they grasp tenaciously to the jugular of their prey that made me realize that I wanted to live tenaciously. I wanted…I needed to give my life to something more than what I was doing at the time. Eventually that led to seminary.

But I didn’t come to talk about weasels today; I came to talk about a deer. Specifically, the deer that Annie Dillard writes about in a short story called The Deer at Providencia. Dillard is a naturalist and she is always looking at the world around her for insights into what life is all about and whether faith is a reliable guide. In this story she talks about taking a trip to the Amazon jungle with several other North Americans. They are visiting in a native village and enjoying the experience. They eat wonderful fish taken right from the river. They stay up late at night talking. In many ways it sounds like an idyllic setting – an invigorating retreat.

But in the middle of the village where they are staying there is a small deer tied to a tree. It has a rope around its neck and it is struggling to get free. As Dillard watches the deer puts one leg up through the noose that is holding it and falls to its side. Then another leg. Then another. So that now it has three legs stuck in the loop of rope around its neck. Some small boys go to free its legs, but it immediately goes back to pawing at its neck.

The deer is suffering horribly, so much so that the people travelling with her, who are men, watch Dillard to see her reaction. They think that maybe, she, as a woman, might be disturbed to see this. One man
says, “If it had been my wife, she wouldn’t have cared what was going on; she would have dropped everything right at that moment and gone in the village from here to there to there, she would not have stopped until that animal was out of its suffering one way or another. She couldn’t bear to see a creature in agony like that.”

But Dillard has a different understanding of suffering. She has come to terms with the fact that a certain amount of suffering will always be present with us. The fish that they ate was once a living creature. And this deer would also be eaten. In fact, the reason that it was tied to the tree was because the villagers had learned that when an animal struggled it released lactic acids that tenderized the resulting meat. Suffering, in many of Dillard’s stories, is something that remains a mystery, but it is a very present mystery.[i] You can’t really escape it and it’s not always clear what you’re supposed to do with it.

The First Letter of Peter will tell you what you’re supposed to do with it. He was writing to a community that knew a lot about suffering. As members of a minority religion in the Roman Empire, the early Christians enjoyed no special standing and were frequently the target of persecution. They were always held in suspicion. They had this disturbing way of talking about their founder, Jesus, as a King, which made other earthly kings nervous. They never quite knew how much loyalty they could expect from the Christians. Jesus was everything to them.

So there was the suffering that came from their marginal status, but this section of Peter that we read is even more specific. He is talking here to Christian slaves. That’s a disturbing thing. We don’t like to think of slavery being part of the Christian heritage, but slavery was a big part of the Roman culture. We’d like to think that Christians were working to overthrow slavery. But this passage makes it sound like the Christians accepted slavery as a natural, inevitable thing.

What’s radical about this passage, however, is that it addresses Christian slaves as fully worthy people who should be treated with dignity and respect. Unlike the society around them which treated slaves like dirt, the Christians treated them like brothers and sisters, fully part of Christ’s body, no matter their social standing.

But here’s the rub: Look what this passage asks the slaves to do. “Slaves, submit to your masters with all fear.” It grinds against our sensibilities to hear this, especially since we know how this passage got misused and abused by slaveholders in this country to justify the practice of slavery. We want to say, “No, this is not right. We should not stand for it. Like Annie Dillard’s story we imagine that if it had been us there, we wouldn’t have cared what was going on; we would have dropped everything right at that moment and would not have stopped until slavery was at an end. We couldn’t bear to see a creature in agony like that.”

Certainly we wouldn’t have done what the author of this letter does, which is to tell the slave to submit, even if the punishment is harsh. That’s like telling someone in an abusive relationship that they should put up with the punishment, isn’t it? How can we allow that suffering is ever right?

I think that impulse in us is right and it is planted in us by God. We do have an innate sense that the universe is not as it should be and is not as God intended it to be. We do want to combat suffering and alleviate it and fix what needs fixing. But First Peter has a different view of the world.

You see suffering is not the worst thing that can happen to a person. Don’t get me wrong. It is terrible and the cruelty with which I see people treating one another breaks my heart. And the pain that I see in people’s lives because of chronic health problems and addictions and troubled relationships and bad choices is a source of grief and great mystery to me. But suffering is not the last word for Christians. In fact, when we suffer for doing good, we are following in the footsteps of Jesus, by whose wounds we are healed. Christians have a close association with suffering because it is built into our most sacred story. Our central symbol, the cross, is an instrument of pain and torture. We know a little about what suffering can do. But we also know a little about what a savior can do.

So the apostle here reminds us that Jesus walked this lonesome valley so that we could walk up the streets of glory together. The apostle tells us that Jesus was nailed to a cross though he was not wounded by sin and so we should live upright lives, whether it brings suffering or not. The main thing for Christians is a life with Jesus – in this world and the next. God can redo the suffering. God can transform it. God can bring some people alive even when they are walking through the valley of the shadow of death, and we’ve seen it happen with people in our congregation who shone the brightest even as they were going through immense pain. I’ve heard the stories about Steve Tankard, who came late to love but powerfully. We saw it in Barbara. God doesn’t let suffering and death have the last word.

But it is still a stumbling block. There are those who just can’t get their minds around why, if God is good and powerful…if God is, that the world should contain such dark shadows. Some days that’s me. You have to wonder at times why the innocent suffer.

Bart Ehrman is the chair of the religious studies department at the University of North Carolina and the author of a new book called, “God’s Problem – How the Bible Fails to Answer our Most Important Question – Why We Suffer.” (Now that’s a title!) Ehrman grew up as a very faithful, fundamentalist Christian. He studied the Bible for many years and loved it. But as the title of his new book suggests, he has recently lost his faith because he feels it cannot answer his most basic question. “For many people who inhabit this planet,” he says, “life is a cesspool of misery and suffering. I came to a point where I simply could not believe that there is a good and kindly disposed Ruler who is in charge of it.”[ii]

I don’t want to minimize Ehrman’s struggle because I think many people believe the same thing. I have been there with him in the dark. A few weeks ago, I went through the Holocaust Museum in D.C. for the first time and it was overwhelming. I sat in the chapel at the end of the exhibit and thought to myself, “How can I go out and preach the good news again knowing about Auschwitz? How can I proclaim God’s goodness any more?”

But I did get up and come out and go forward and here’s why – even in the concentration camps there was humanity. We do a great disservice to those who suffered and died if we think of them only as victims. It is one thing to note that suffering exists but it is something else entirely to say that a person’s whole life is nothing more than a cesspool of misery. When we say that we have allowed suffering to define a person’s entire existence. God knows that we are more than that.

The other problem I have with Ehrman’s argument is that it offers us such a reduced God. For the world to be a place in which bad things didn’t happen to good people and where unnecessary suffering were precluded, we would have to be like infants – constantly protected from anything that might upset our cocoon. God would have to be a great cosmic sugar daddy who had only goodies for everyone and who would not let anyone suffer a bruise or a bump. That’s not the kind of God I want or the kind of world I want to live in. This world is fierce and vast and beautiful and devastating and God is everywhere within, playing in light and shadow and appearing in the lowest of lows but also in the highest of highs.

This is why the critics are wrong when they say that Christians are weak and that they cannot handle the complexity of the world. Do you remember a few years ago when Jesse Ventura was governor of Minnesota? He said that, “Organized religion is a sham and a crutch for weak-minded people who need strength in numbers.”[iii] He thought churches were places where people go to put their fingers in their ears and to sing loudly so that they can’t hear the problems in the world.

But it takes a real man to face the world as it is and to declare that God has not abandoned us. It takes a real man to face taunts and abuses for following God’s lead. It takes a real man to look death in the face and say, “You have no power here.” It takes a real man to place himself into the hands of those who would make him suffer. It takes a real man to drag a cross to Calvary, to stretch out his arms and to die for the sins of the whole world. But guess what? Jesus was a real man. And because of Jesus, we now look forward to the day when all the broken pieces of this life and this world…all the sufferings and things that just don’t make sense…will be gathered up and made whole.

Here’s the best news of all. We may have lots of questions. We may doubt like Thomas and stumble like Peter. We may wonder why we are walking in the shadow of suffering. But in the midst of our suffering God is trying to lead us back home. In fact, we have been straying like sheep, but God is returning us to the shepherd and guardian of our souls. That’s the language from First Peter. And who is the great shepherd of the sheep? This same Jesus who was led off like a lamb to the slaughter.

We don’t have many images for shepherds these days. That role is not nearly as prominent as it once was. But somebody in the time of the early church would have had very specific images of shepherds. The shepherd is one who lives with his sheep and knows them intimately. The shepherd is one who guides and directs the sheep in the path. The shepherd is one who lays down his life for the sheep. To be the ward of Christ the shepherd is to know that we walk with someone who knows all there is to know about suffering and who laughs at its pretensions to greatness. When we know this Christ, suffering takes its rightful place as one more thing that cannot overcome the love for us that God has in Jesus Christ. It was Paul who said in the letter to the Romans that neither life, nor death, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present , nor things to come, nor anything else in all creation can separate us from the love of God in Jesus Christ [Rom 8:38-39].

So suffering will remain with us and will still be as mystifying and confounding as ever. But Christ remains with us until the end of the age and challenges all those who would falter in the face of suffering to discover something powerfully new in his death and resurrection the possibility of new life. Thanks be to God.

1 Peter 2:18-25
Slaves, submit to your masters with all fear, not only to the good and gentle but also to the crooked. For it is a credit to you if, being conscious of God, you endure pain while suffering unjustly. What credit is there is enduring a beating if you have sinned? But if you are doing loving things and endure suffering this finds favor with God.
You were called for this: that Christ suffered on your behalf, leaving you an example, so that you could follow in his footsteps. He did not commit sin and no treachery was found in his mouth. He was reviled but did not hurl the insults back. He suffered but did not threaten. He gave himself over to the upright judge. He offered our sins in his body on the cross so that we might die to sin and live for righteousness; by his wounds you have been healed. You were going astray like sheep but you have been returned to the shepherd and bishop of your souls.

[i] Annie Dillard, “A Deer in Providencia,” Teaching a Stone to Talk, [Harper Perennial: New York, 1982].
[ii] Excerpt from God’s Probem by Bart Ehrmanm, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=19096131.
[iii] Jesse Ventura in an interview with Playboy magazine, November 1999, quoted at http://www.positiveatheism.org/hist/quotes/quote-v.htm

Following Jesus as a United Methodist

So Fred the painter got a bid to paint a church in his home town, but even though it was God’s house, Fred decided to do what he always did. He thinned his paint right down with turpentine so that it would go further and he could make a little more money off the church. He was painting right along and got near the very end of the project. He was standing on the ladder on a bright, sunny afternoon.

Suddenly there was a huge clap of thunder that knocked Fred off his ladder and on to the ground. Then, out of nowhere, a cloud opened up and rain started pouring down on the church. The thinned paint started running off the side of the building and down into puddles on the ground.

Fred knew that it was a sign from God. So he got on his knees and started praying, “God, I know what I did was wrong. Forgive me. What should I do?”

A loud voice came from heaven and said, “Repaint! Repaint! And thin no more.”

I want to talk for a little while this morning about what it means to repent. I want to go back and look at the Bible stories for this morning. I want to talk about what it means to be United Methodist. And most importantly, this morning, I want to tell the truth. Can you handle the truth? Let’s see what we can do together this morning.

Repentance is one of those things that you just can’t escape if you read the Bible. Biblical characters are always telling people to repent. When King Solomon dedicated the Temple in Jerusalem he talked about how the people of Israel, even if they got dragged off as captives to a foreign land could repent and God would forgive them. John the Baptist, when he came out into the wilderness preaching told the people, “Repent! For the kingdom of God has come near.” Jesus, when he began his ministry after being baptized by John said, “Repent! For the kingdom of God has come near.” Then today, in the scripture from Acts, we hear it again. Peter tells the people, “Repent! And be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins.” Repentance must be a pretty important thing because each of these figures is beginning a new phase in the life of God’s people by calling them to repent.

But I’ll bet when we think about the word “repent” we get some pretty specific images in mind. We think of loud preachers on street corners with bullhorns and signs. We think of hellfire and damnation sermons. We think of signs on the front of churches that say “Turn or Burn.” Is that what you think of when you hear this call to repent?

What is it that we are supposed to hear when the good news tells us to repent? It’s not about fear. From my reading of the scriptures, and particularly the passage from Acts that we have for today, it’s about facing the truth.

The “Turn or Burn” sign has something right about it. Repentance is about turning. At its heart the word “repentance” means to turn around. It means to stop walking away from God and to turn back toward God.

Peter knew something about turning around. Peter was the disciple who had sworn to Jesus that he would not abandon him, even if he had to die with him. But only hours later Peter was the one who turned his back on Jesus when he was confronted in the courtyard. “Surely you were with him, too?” they asked. “I do not know him,” Peter said. Three times he said it. Peter knew something about turning his back on God.

But something happened to Peter. Something happened to those other disciples who were gathered with him on Pentecost. The wind blew. Tongues of fire danced. The Spirit descended and all heaven broke loose in Jerusalem. And now, there was Peter preaching to the crowd and confronting them with truth…calling them to turn around.

“Let all Israel know without a doubt,” Peter said, “that God made him Lord and Christ – this Jesus whom you crucified.” It was an uncompromising message. He told them straight out – all of them – that they bore responsibility for Jesus’ death. But he also told them straight out who Jesus was – the Lord and Christ. They knew this because the old prophecies were being fulfilled. They knew this because Jesus had been raised from the dead. They knew this because the Holy Spirit was roaring through the land. They knew that Jesus was Christ because the world was being turned upside down.

So the people who had watched Jesus die on the cross…who pierced him in the side, were pierced to the heart themselves and they say to the disciples, “What should we do?”

Peter says very simply – “Repent and be baptized, each one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ.”

Repent. Turn around. Wake up and smell the coffee. Take a hard look in the mirror. Get a clue. Face the music. Face the truth. And the truth is that we are sinners in need of a savior but Jesus is that savior.

You see, repentance is the result of a real confrontation. It happens when we are confronted with the depth of the world’s woundedness and our own failures. Repentance happens when we can see the truth that those things we call bad habits are actually critical flaws that lead us and others away from God.

The truth is that our harsh words to others DO have a lasting consequence. The truth is that gossip IS damaging to the body of Christ. The truth is that pornography on the Internet DOES degrade human dignity and pervert God’s intentions for the gift of sexuality. The truth is that the coarseness of our culture and the breakdown of our families WILL lead to injured children and long-term hurt. The truth is that we CAN buy ourselves into perdition by accumulating stuff and storing up treasures that we can’t take with us. The truth is that, contrary to Gordon Gecko’s infamous words, greed is NOT good. The truth is that the silence of good people in the face of injustice IS a sin against humanity. The truth is that I AM my brother’s keeper and my sister’s keeper. The truth is that I CAN’T earn salvation by my own merit…that I WILL fall short of the glory of God…that the world does NOT have my best interest at heart…that my identity must be somewhere else or I am most to be pitied. The truth is that if I am going to move forward there must be some other place to look for who I am and that place is in Jesus Christ.

This is why the gospel is such a radical thing. It tells us the truth about who we are meant to be. The Greek word for repentance is metanoia and it literally means “a change of mind.” But that’s not a change like, “I could have done this, but I changed my mind.” It’s a change like, “I once was like this, but now my mind is transformed.” Repentance convicts of what we have become and how far we have fallen short of God. Repentance holds up a mirror so that we can see what sin has done to us – we who were made in the very image of God. But most importantly repentance turns us around so that we can see Jesus and understand what true humanity looks like. This is the message Peter proclaims to the people in Jerusalem in the story from Acts today. This is the message that we are called to proclaim in our day.

I said I was going to say a word about what it means to be a United Methodist. I’m going to be talking about that some more over the next couple of weeks because we are coming up on a very big event for our denomination and I want us to be in prayer for the United Methodist Church. On April 23rd, just a little over two weeks from now, United Methodists from all over the world will be gathering in Fort Worth for our General Conference. It only happens once every four years. About 1,000 delegates, lay and clergy, 30 of them from Virginia, will be going there to write our Book of Discipline, which is the book that organizes our church and establishes our doctrines and standards.

It’s not an easy time. While the United Methodist Church is growing very fast in some parts of the world, like the Philippines and the Congo, in other places, like Europe and the United States, it is not. We can look at other denominations like the Episcopalians and the Presbyterians and see that we have some of the same issues. We are divided on some social issues. We have a real shortage of young clergy and lay leadership. And in many parts of the country we have stopped reproducing. It’s not just that United Methodists aren’t having as many children as we used to – it’s also that we have stopped baptizing new adult United Methodists and starting new churches.

The hardest thing that the General Conference will have to do is to tell the truth. The hardest thing it will have to do is to call the church to repentance. It will need to say that our primary allegiance is not to something called the United Methodist Church but to the body of Christ. It will have to say that our mission is not to perpetuate a denominational structure but to make new disciples. It will have to point out the fact that we are not here to serve an organization plan but to transform the world. It will have to give pride of place to the poor and the outcast and the forgotten. It will have to confess that this church that we love is not a permanent establishment, but a temporary arrangement and that the United Methodist Church is only useful and should only survive if it is serving God’s kingdom and helping others to know that God is with them.

One reason I have a lot of hope for United Methodists is because our theology is so rich. John Wesley left us a great legacy for talking about salvation and the way that God calls us to life. He talked about repentance a lot. He talked about sin. But he also talked about grace and the many ways that it operates in our lives, surrounding us, converting us, justifying us and making us whole and holy. We can handle the truth about who we are because of the reality of God’s grace – giving us what we cannot earn and could not give ourselves.

There’s another example of truth-telling in our scripture readings today. It comes from Luke’s gospel and it tells about Jesus walking down the road to Emmaus with a couple of the disciples following his resurrection. He just shows up while the two of them are walking away from Jerusalem and they don’t recognize him. When he asks a question about what they are talking about, they treat him like he’s clueless. “Are you the only person in Jerusalem who doesn’t know what’s been going on?” they ask him. Surely this stranger must have heard about the crowds, the crucifixion, the high drama of the empty tomb.

Soon, though, Jesus has taken the initiative and he begins to explain to them, as they are walking along, how consistent all of this was with what God had told the people would happen. He talks about the scriptures from Moses on and relates them to their lives and to this man whose loss they are grieving. It’s just a walk among companions.

At the end of the day the disciples stop off at the house where they are going to stay and it looks as if the stranger is going to go on, but they urge him to stay with them. They are intrigued by what he has to say. It’s just a meal among friends. It’s just a table with food. It’s just bread. It’s just bread until…

The stranger takes the bread and blesses it and breaks it and gives it to them. Then it’s not just bread. And this is not just a stranger. It’s not just a meal. It’s Jesus and it’s a sacrament and the world is not going to be the same. Truth has been told.

You see repentance doesn’t come separated from grace. A new world opens up when we can see who we truly are and when we’re connected to brothers and sisters. Peter tells the truth to the crowd in Jerusalem and 3,000 souls are baptized. The truth hurts, but it’s a good hurt – a searing hurt – a cleansing hurt. And on the other side is a God who loves us and is waiting for us at a table to share a meal. Thanks be to God.

Acts 2:14a, 36-41
Then Peter stood up with the eleven, lifted up his voice and declared to them…”Therefore let all Israel know without doubt that God made him Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified.”
Hearing this they were pierced to the heart, and they said to Peter and the rest of the apostles, “What should we do, brothers?”
Peter said to them, “Repent and be baptized, each of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. Because the promise is for you and your children and all those who are far away, for all those that the Lord our God is calling.”
With many other arguments he testified and urged them, saying, “Save yourselves from this distorted generation.”
So those who accepted his message were baptized and that day about three thousand souls were added.