A Satire on the Domesticatin of God

Acts 2:1-21

        The prophet Joel wrote, “Your young men shall see visions and your old men will dream dreams.” I am certain most of you have never read the Book of Joel. It is one of the books of the Bible we unceremoniously call the “minor prophets”.  If something is important, why would we call it minor? Yet there it is, one of the last twelve books of the Bible, stuck between Hosea and Amos. It’s a wonder anyone ever reads it. We are all familiar with the great love Hosea had for Gomer. We all know Amos 5:24, “Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever flowing stream.” When we finish Hosea, why not  skip Joel, and go straight to the shepherd from Tekoa?  

        Truth is, we don’t know a lot about Joel. His name means, “The Lord is God”. He probably lived around 400 B.C.  This was after the Babylonian Exile and the Temple of Jerusalem had been reconstructed. The book itself is a response to an agricultural crisis, an invasion of locust. Old Testament prophets never explain a political or economic crisis using the indicators we have come to trust such as, the consumer price index, the interest rate, or the gross domestic product. Their language tended to bit more theological. If there was a crisis the prophets, from Isaiah to Malachi, usually declared the people were taking God for granted. They came to the Temple only on High Holidays. They prayed only for their personal needs.  They sang songs celebrating creation but seldom used words such as justice or righteousness.  Of course this WAS a primitive people from a primitive society that pretty much worshipped a primitive God. This primitive man named Joel declared the locust and the lack of attention the people gave God to be in direct correlation. If they wanted the locust to leave they had better get on their knees and pray. So this primitive people, who had not yet discovered the wonders of DDT, got on their knees and the crisis was averted. As quick as the locust had come, they were gone. And all the people celebrated before resuming their otherwise unassuming lives.

        But Joel was not finished. In fact he was just getting started. Reaching way back into his theological bag of tricks Joel promised the Day of the Lord, a threat that had been spoken of 5 centuries earlier but never experienced. Joel said, “God’s Spirit will be poured out on you. The day of the Lord is near. It will be both a terrible and glorious day. You will witness the power and justice of God. It will be beyond what you have ever imagined. Your youth will have visions and your elderly will dream dreams and the way of the Lord will be restored.”

        The people of Jerusalem got real excited. They headed back to the Temple. They canceled all the youth soccer games scheduled on the Sabbath and even declared no Saturday tee times before 1:00. People who stayed home from the synagogue had enough sense to hide and not do yard work until late in the afternoon. Fishing licenses carried bold letters that declared no fishing on the Sabbath. This primitive, superstitious people went absolutely crazy because of the dead locust on their sidewalks.  And a few youth and a few more elderly folks began to dream.

        This domestication of God, a process that started shortly after the death of the locust, began to gather steam. By the birth of Jesus, the ritualization of Judaism was less interested in faith and more interested food laws and clean utensils.  There was a scroll in each home titled, A Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior and it was followed religiously. Everything was done correctly. The religious elite prescribed what was kosher and what was not. A good rule of thumb was if you are not sure, it must be wrong. Fewer people dreamed, no one had visions, and God was really no longer needed.

        I was listening to a song by Patty Griffin recently. It was about an old dog that had been the family pet. When the dog was young and obedient she was the family’s best friend. She fetched, rolled over, and played dead on demand. But the dog started to get a little old and slowed down quite a bit. Instead of chasing the ball, the dog preferred to lay around the house.  So they took the dog out into the country and let her go. They loved the dog too much to watch it die.

        Once she was on her own, an amazing transition took place. The dog regained her strength and willingness to live. The family would take rides out in the country and the children swore they saw their old dog running along side the car. They stopped but the dog would head back into the brush and disappear. She had little desire to be anyone’s pet. The first line of the chorus is, “God is a wild old dog.”

        I had to listen to the song a couple of times before I realized what Patty was saying. At first I was shocked, and then delighted. If ever there was a song to be sung during the Pentecost season this should be the one.

        Pentecost is a holy declaration that God’s domestication is over. No more fetching the ball or being a convenient side show when things get dull. On Pentecost, God took a walk on the wild side. God’s Spirit blew into the upper chamber of the disciples hearts and they became dreamers. Dashing out into the streets they began to tell a story Jesus had been telling for three years. You can’t regulate God to only the kitchen and the bedroom. God wants to be part of your entire house. You can’t regulate God to one day out of the week. The One who created the other six days wants to do more than just rest. Perhaps most importantly, God will not be regulated by the desires and wishes of a few. The word of God is there for anyone with ears to hear.

        On Pentecost, folks from Mesopotamia, Judea, and Cappadocia understood the Word of the Lord. Folks from Egypt, Libya, and Rome understood the Way of the Lord. Arabs and Jews understood the Wonders of the Lord. Men, women, of all racial make-ups heard the Word. Rich and poor devoured the Word. No one was excluded and everyone was invited to respond to this God who would no longer be domesticated.

        And people began to dream. What seemed impossible became probable. Words like justice and righteousness reentered not only the vocabulary but the landscape of the human experiment. Suddenly, God became relevant.

        Now I’m not suggesting that God is only relevant when we declare God relevant, but I do believe we are guilty of relegating God to particular moments and the occasional crisis. We call on God when we need God. We worship God when it fits within our schedules. We like having God around, particularly in the later days of our lives. The problem becomes relegating and dreaming are seldom found in the same sentence.

        That’s why I love Pentecost. First, it is exclusively our day. If you go to Hallmark, you won’t find a single Pentecost Card. Second, it is our day to remember that once, in the midst of the ordinary, a wind blew into the lives of a people trapped by their lack of imagination. A flame ignited tongues and hearts swore allegiance to a timeless vision. Everyone who listened was captured by a wild old God’s liberating promise of grace.

And God, not shackled to any religion, ran free, inviting folks of all creeds and cultures to join in this glorious revolution.

       Imagine being transformed by God’s undomesticated breath.

                Imagine living God’s dream.

Imagine Pentecost,

Today.

Shackled

Acts 16:16-34

        When one reads Paul’s letter to the church at Philippi, one can see why this was Paul’s favorite church. The letter begins, “I thank God every time I remember you.”  It was in Philippi that Paul met Lydia.  She took Paul and Silas into her home and it is believed this is where the church in Philippi originated.  But the beginning of the church in Philippi was not without turmoil.  Our text this morning describes the way God works even in midst of our most difficult times. 

        Each time I come to this scripture I am amazed at how each of the components of the story are shackled to a force much greater than themselves.  Let’s start with the obvious.  Paul and Silas are shackled to God.  They had pronounced themselves servants of the most high.  When I read the stories of Paul I know that nothing short of God could have been his inspiration.  He didn’t start out being the “great missionary”.  Truth is he became a missionary because none of the Apostles in Jerusalem trusted him.  He had a hunger to preach the gospel but his own community knew him more as a persecutor than a preacher.  So Paul headed west to Asia Minor, Greece and Rome.  Each stop along the way he was an outsider trying to share the good news of Jesus Christ.  He was jailed, beaten, and dispatched from many towns.  But because Paul was shackled to the gospel, he continued to preach.

        The next character in our story was a slave shackled to her vision but even more so to her owner.  She had the gift of fortune telling, a talent which brought a great deal of money to those who owned her.  When she laid eyes on Paul and Silas she screamed, “These men are slaves of God.  They are proclaiming a way of salvation.”  When Paul first encountered this woman, he must have been greatly encouraged by her pronouncements.  Imagine walking into a town, unknown, desiring to gather a crowd so you could sell your product.  Where do you begin?  How do you get the word out?  Suddenly, out of no where, a local celebrity gives you the stamp of approval.  This woman’s word was gold.  She could see the future, and the future for Philippi was to be preached by these two strangers.  Her proclamation instantly raised an audience, making the way easier for the two missionaries.

        Throughout the week Paul and Silas continued to appear at the city square.  The fortune teller would make her daily pronouncement and the crowds would appear.  Only one day, Paul decided he wanted to go solo.  According to the scripture Paul became annoyed with the woman.  He spoke, not to the woman, but to the spirit that both empowered and shackled her and said, “I order you in the name of Christ to leave this woman.”  With that, her ability to tell the future was gone.  She was released from her demon, but not from her owners.   She was still shackled to men who suddenly lost their cash cow.  They were less than amused.  One moment she was the next best thing happening and the next she was completely useless.  Their BMW had turned into a Ford Pinto and they were not happy.  Rather than celebrate the resurrection of a soul, they demanded compensation for their loss.  They brought Paul and Silas before the local judge and charged the two missionaries with disturbing the peace and disrupting the local customs.  Paul and Silas were flogged and, you guessed it, shackled.  They were taken to the local jail and their feet fastened in stocks.  They meet the local jailer who, as it turns out, was more shackled than the prisoners being kept under his watch.

        In one of the truly great stories in the book of Acts, Paul and Silas decide to have a prayer meeting.  It made perfectly good sense.  They had a captive audience.  They began to pray and sing hymns to God.  As the prisoners began listening to Paul and Silas and they began to take an inventory of their lives. Unlike Paul and Silas they could hardly claim to be innocent.  They were shackled to their greed, their anger, their selfishness, their ungodliness or whatever it was that landed them in that jail.  As Paul and Silas began to pray, the Spirit of God manifested itself in that jail.  Prisoners, shackled to their own desires made a commitment to be shackled to God. 

        I am reminded of the story behind the song, “There’s a Sweet, Sweet Spirit in this Place.” The hymn was composed by Doris Mae Akers when she was the choir director of the Sky Pilot Church in Los Angeles.  As was the choir’s custom they would pray together before the service.  On that particular morning Akers asked them to pray again because she felt they had not prayed enough.  The choir began to pray with a renewed vigor.  The prayers began to fill up the whole room to the point that even though they were late for church, Akers was reluctant to stop.  She notified the pastor of the “prayer service” taking place outside of the sanctuary.  Finally Akers said to the choir, “I hate to leave this room and I know you hate to leave but you know we have to go to service. But there is such a sweet, sweet spirit in this place.”

        I believe that is what happened in the Philippi jail on that fateful night.  As Paul and Silas continued to pray, their fellow prisoners, observing these two men shackled to their faith, began to pray.  Suddenly in the midst of the prayer service an earthquake rocked the jail.  The walls collapsed, the doors were thrown wide open and miraculously no one was hurt.  Even more amazing was even though the shackles fell from each of the prisoners and they were free to escape, no one left.  Now, instead of being shackled by stocks, they were shackled by the “Sweet, sweet spirit of God.”   No one moved because they had no place better place to be.

        The jailer was not privy to this conversion experience.  He had gone to bed just like he went to bed every other night.  His jail was full but his jail was also escape proof, which was good because his very life depended on no one escaping.  Should there be a jail break, his punishment would range from life imprisonment to death. He went to bed confident that when he awoke everyone would be in their proper place.  Of course his jail had never experienced an earthquake.

When the earth stopped moving, the jailer grabbed a torch and ran to the back of the jail.  He saw the collapsed walls and the opened doors.  He heart sank as he remembered the punishment if anyone escaped.  He drew his sword, prepared to take his own life when Paul intervened, “Sir, don’t take your life.  We are all here.”     

Up to that point in the jailer’s life, he had derived all meaning from his profession.  He was as shackled to his job as Paul had been shackled to the stocks.  The jailer was utterly amazed.  He didn’t know Paul and Silas but he knows the other men.  Why hadn’t they escaped?  What were they doing in the midst of the rubble holding a prayer meeting?  Hadn’t their prayers been answered when the jail collapsed?  Men who days before had been miserable scum caring for no one but themselves sat in a circle lifting up each other in prayer.  These were cruel men who had done horrible things.  These were men whose lives were as twisted as the roads they had traveled. But now these were men whose eyes reflected the radiant light and whose lips sang songs of joy.  The jailer looked at the transformed inmates; he looked at Paul and Silas; then uttered a life changing sentence, “What must I do to be saved?”   

Make no mistake.   The jailer was not asking how he might get to heaven.  The jailer wanted to know how his immediate life might be radically transformed.  With the exception of Paul and Silas he knew every inmate in that jail.  What he saw that night was beyond human reason.  He did not know what Paul and Silas were offering, but whatever it was, he was buying.  He wanted to be saved from being shackled.  He wanted to be saved from his life.  He wanted to be saved from his profession, his oppression, his addiction or his emptiness.  We know nothing about this man except that night the jailer encountered what God’s sweet spirit had done to his prisoners and without question, he was ready to drink the Kool-Aid.

Paul took the man’s hands, he looked him square in the eye and he said, “Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ.” In other words, believe that Jesus died for you.  Believe that God resurrected Jesus for you.  Believe that Christ is in the process of saving you.  Believe that God will transform you, God will redeem you, God will make you part of God’s own story line.  Believe that your life is not the center of the universe but God’s purpose is.  Believe in Jesus and shackle yourself to life, rather than death.

I suspect we are all shackled to something.  The question is are we shackled to that which gives us life or are we shackled to something which is slowly eating away at our soul?  Are we shackled to a weight that drags us under, causing us to use every last ounce of our strength to gasp for air?  Or are we shackled to that which fills our lungs with expressions of joy.   I would like to think we come here each Sunday because we are shackled to a Sweet Holy Spirit. I would like to think, in this place, the Holy Spirit fill us with love and blessings.  I would like to believe when you come here you to be revived, lifted and prepared to confront the other gods that put their claim on you.  Like Dylan said, “You got to serve somebody.” Shackle yourself to the one who offers peace for your discontent, and comfort for your soul.  Shackle yourself to Jesus, and be free.               Amen.

"Let Not Your Heart Be Troubled"

John 14:25-29

        “My peace I give to you. I do not give peace as the world gives it. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.”

        One of the most difficult aspects of God’s word is it can be both frustrating and comforting at the same time.

        Last week-end I was working on the newsletter. Don’t be fooled by that statement. Jamie does most of the work and deserves all of the credit. I simply contribute a piece on the second page and, at Jamie’s insistence, write a whimsical reflection on health issues near the back.  While they are quite different I enjoy writing both. My “musings” are often topical, giving you a chance to get to know me a little better.

        Those of you who have opened this month’s edition of Spreading the Word are aware my musings sometimes raise questions as well as blood pressure. My purpose is not to plow old, worn out ground but to encourage us to inject our faith and our understanding of the Biblical text into our conversations.

        When Jesus says, “My peace I leave you,” how are we to understand that difficult concept. When Jesus says, “Let not your heart be troubled,” I find myself confused my the very thought of not being troubled by bombs in Boston, drones in Pakistan, and the threat of violence all over the world.

        Monday morning, with thoughts of editing and rewriting on my brain, I pulled into the parking lot at 7:30. The Bible Study group had already begun to gather. Before we could begin my cell phone rang and I heard the trembling voice of Mary Gurr share that John had died early that morning. I got in the car and headed to Charlottesville. I had 35 minutes to prepare myself, to think of some words of comfort that I might share with Mary. You already know the words that occupied my soul. “Let not your heart be troubled. My peace I give to you.”

        Those of you who are biblical students are well aware of the context of the 14^th chapter of John.  It begins with a discourse in which Jesus explains the significance of what is about to happen.  He said, “I will leave, but I leave to prepare a place for you.”  Jesus predicts both his death and resurrection. He promises to come again and take us unto himself. All through his ministry Jesus insisted that we not worry about those things for which God was responsible. God is reliable because God is love. It is this love that compels God to act on our behalf, even in the midst of death itself.

        As I traveled to Charlottesville Monday, and as we will come this afternoon to celebrate John’s resurrection, it was and will be the assurance of Jesus’ words and Jesus’ promises for tomorrow that brings us comfort and eventually joy.

        But today, bombs ignited by hate, faith, patriotism, fear, anger, outrage, revenge and political reasoning still disrupt the peace we so desperately desire. Does John 14 offer a hope that might quell our trembling hearts?

        I have always believed that a separation of church and state does not mean a separation of ethics and theology. One cannot read Isaiah and Jeremiah without understanding justice to be the moral test of spirituality? One cannot read the gospels without being overwhelmed by the universal love of God.  One cannot cling to that love without wrestling with the undeniable demand of God that we love one another.

        How is that possible in this complex world in which we live? God calls us to forgive as well as love.  Some of you have come to me this week stating you can find no forgiveness for the men who ignited the bombs in Boston. Wouldn’t it be easier to be people of faith on the Sabbath and people of the world the other six days of the week?  Isn’t it easier to trust our leaders and not complicate the issues with our moral ambiguities? Isn’t part of patriotism trusting others to figure out these messy, complicated matters of life? 

Bill Coffin preached there are three types of patriots. Two are bad and the other is not only good, but critical for the moral fiber of our nation. Bad patriots are one, the uncritical lovers of their country and the two, loveless critics of their country. Real patriots are those who partake in a lover’s quarrel with their country, reflecting God’s eternal quarrel with the entire world.

Jesus said, “Let not your heart be troubled.”

My brain struggles, “How is that possible?”

Jesus continued, “My peace I bring.”

My soul complains, “Peace always seems a weary way off.”

        God pledges, “My peace, not the world’s peace, I give you.”

My heart questions, “What does that even mean?”

        And so the conversation continues. If you expected some great definitive words of wisdom I really have none.

But I believe, or at least I hope,

That God desires to be part of our conversation.

I believe, or at least I hope,

That the peace of God is not just about tomorrow.

I believe, or at least I hope,

That the peace of God is about this day and every day.

For to give up on peace is to give up on God.   

        Sometimes, all I can do is come to the table of our Lord. With a heart both bruised and burdened, I come to lift the bread and the cup, letting my fears intersect with God’s promises.

This is where I come to remember.

        This is where I come to hope,

                This is where I come to pray,

Lamb of God,

        Who takest way the sins of the world,

                Have mercy on me.

Lamb of God,

        Who takest away the sins of the world,

                Grant me your peace.

This is where I come to lift the bread,

        This is where I come to lift the cup,

                This is where I come to lift my heart,

                        This is where I come to remember                                                     The Prince of Peace,

                                        Not just the peace of tomorrow,

                                                But also for the peace of today.

I come to this table to remember I am loved;

        I come to remember I am forgiven;

                I come to remember

God’s forgiveness is more than a blessing.

                                It is a challenge.  

I come knowing Christ has taken the first step. I come knowing The Prince of Peace invites us to walk in his footsteps. It takes more than a troubled heart to bring about peace. We are called to will peace, suffer for peace, struggle for peace, and demand peace as if peace is God’s most cherished hope for humankind.

Come to the table and taste the promise of God’s grace.

Come to the table and taste the possibilities of God’s peace.

Come to the table troubled, yet trembling………. With hope.

                                                                                        Amen.