Big Feelings - Happiness

Transcript of a sermon preached by Pastor Shawn Coons on March 5, 2023

Good morning, friends. Here we are on week two of our Big Feelings series where we are taking a deeper look at our emotions, our emotions as gifts from God, and how we can honor that, and how we can understand our emotions in that way. We talked last week that every emotion has a story. And we like to think there are good emotions and bad emotions, but we wanted to reframe that a little bit in terms of there are challenging emotions, that are maybe emotions we welcome more, but all of our emotions they just happen. They are part of who we are as God's being and so we don't want to say that these emotions are bad, they shouldn't happen, we shouldn't feel them.

Every emotion has a story to tell, and when we feel an emotion, something important is happening, and we need to listen more carefully to that emotion. Too often we don't want to listen to the stories that our challenging emotions tell us. If we're sad, if we're angry, if we're scared, something bad is probably happening, and that's not something we want to focus on. But this morning we're talking about happiness, but I want to suggest that sometimes we don't want to listen to the stories that happiness is telling us, that happiness isn't always a welcome emotion or maybe as welcome as it should be.

I learned a new word, a new fear this morning, cherophobia, C-H-E-R-O phobia, which is an irrational fear of being happy, which made me wonder if there's a rational fear of being happy, I hope not. But it's about rejecting opportunities that could lead to positive life changes often due to the fear that something bad is going to happen. And so I want to ask you to assess yourself this morning. Are any of these statements true for you? I worry that if I feel good, something bad could happen.

Do you ever think, "I don't deserve to be happy. I'm too frightened, I'm too scared to let myself be happy." Do you often think that, "Well, disaster often follows good fortune." Or maybe you think, "I'm too old now to really be happy. When I was younger, I could feel that joy and happiness, but now just too old. Or maybe if I'm happy, if I'm in too good of mood, people are going to want things from me, they're going to expect things more from me. Or maybe everyone else around me, they're not happy so it'd be wrong for me to be happy too."

Now, maybe there's some truth to some of these statements or some cautions in there that we can listen to, but I think too often we are reluctant to be as happy as we could be. We are reluctant to be happier when we're happy. We're just worried, "Okay, everything's going right, now the other shoe's going to drop. Something bad's going to happen," and so we don't allow ourselves to really feel that happiness.

So this morning the first thing I want you to do is I want to give you permission to be happy. I want to give you permission to be really, really happy. I want you to give you permission to feel your happiness. But I'm going to say that permission actually doesn't really come for me, I'm just a messenger of that permission going to say God wants us to feel happiness. God created us to feel happiness, and maybe that doesn't sound like a very radical message, but I want to explore it a little bit, but we're going to do that through a particular passage in John chapter five starting with verse one. And this is a healing of Jesus as He comes up to Jerusalem.

After this, there was a festival of the Jews and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. Now, in Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate there is a pool called in Hebrew, Beth-Zatha, which has five porticoes and in these lay many invalids, blind, lame, and paralyzed. One man was there who had been ill for 38 years. And when Jesus saw him lying there and knew that he had been there a long time, he said to him, "Do you want to be made well?" And the sick man answered Him, "Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up and while I am making my way, someone else steps down ahead of me." Jesus said to him, "Stand up, take your mat and walk" and at once the man was made well. And he took up his mat and he began to walk. This is the Word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

All right, so let's talk a little bit about the setting of what's going on so we can understand this passage a little bit more. It says it's at the Sheep Gate, which is a particular gate in Jerusalem, particular area that we know kind of where it is. And in this area there were pools of water, think maybe cisterns, kind of bricked up pools not naturally occurring. Maybe there was a spring there at that time.

And supposedly every now and then the water would be stirred if you will, kind of roiled a little bit. Later manuscripts actually of this portion of John add a little explanation about the Lord troubling the water. If you have ever heard that song Wade in the Water, the Lord's going to trouble the water, that song is partly an illusion to this scripture. And when the water was troubled, it was thought that the first person down there, maybe the first people down there would be healed of whatever illness they were afflicted with.

And so people would gather here, they wait for the water to be troubled, and they try and make their way down. And so we had this person who had been there for 38 years, a man who had been there for 38 years, and who was afflicted, and sounds like he wasn't very mobile, and that was probably part of his affliction. He couldn't get down to the water in time. And Jesus comes along and asks him, "Do you want to be made well?" Do you want to be made well?

Let me ask you, how would you feel if you're suffering from something and someone comes up to you and says, "Hey, do you want to be made well?" How do you hear that question? We don't know what tone of voice. We don't know the particular emphasis Jesus put on it, but I can imagine that man in this situation, I can imagine me being asked that question and hearing kind of an accusation in that question hearing kind of one unspoken word. Do you really want to be made well?

Almost feeling accused like somehow my condition is my fault, like I'm not doing enough to be better, to make myself well. I don't think that's what Jesus is doing here. I don't absolutely think that's not what Jesus is doing here. We have other points in scripture where Jesus says people's affliction, people what they're suffering it's not their own fault, they didn't do anything to deserve this. But I can see how that question could be heard in that way.

So you would think that the man would answer, "Yes, I want to be made well," but maybe he's a little defensive at this point. Maybe he hears, "Why aren't you well?" And so he offers this explanation. He doesn't say, "Yes, I want to be made well." He says, "Well, I can't be made well because I can't get down to the water fast enough. I've got no one to bring me down there, and so this is why I'm here, and I've been here for 38 years, and this is probably where I'm going to be until I die."

He didn't hear Jesus' question, do you want to be made well? He heard what keeps you from being made well, not do you want to. Jesus was asking about his desire. Jesus was asking about his wants. What do you want? It reminded me when Carrie and I first moved here, we had a realtor, his name was Roger Howard. He's the brother of our retiring handyman we have here, brother of a former associate pastor here. Roger is a bubbly, just jovial person. And I remember we were visiting a one house and looking at it, and there was a neighbor next door, and Roger called the neighbor over. He was always talking to folks, and Roger said "Here, and he held up his hand, nothing in his hand. He's like, "I'm going to give you something."

This is a magic wand and he like mimed giving it to her, and she was like, "What's going on?" He's like, "This is a magic wand and you can change anything about this neighborhood you would like. What would you change?" Yeah, and it was Roger's way kind of learning a little bit more about the neighborhood, but it was like, "Here's your magic wand. You can have anything you want," and I feel like Jesus is saying here, "What do you want? You can have it."

Jesus says, "Imagine there are no barriers. What do you want? What do you desire? Do you want to be made well?" This is a good time to mention that this word well can also be translated as whole. Do you want to be made whole? Do you want to be made whole? Do you want to be made healthy? I'm going to suggest do you want to be made happy? What would you say if Jesus asked you this question? Do you want to be made well? Do you want to be made whole? Do you want to be made happy? Would your mind immediately jump to the reasons you can't? Mine kind of mind kind of does. I would like to, but.

It would be great to be happy but. I mean, and maybe, well, you don't even answer yes. Maybe, but I can't because. Jesus is asking, "Do you want to be made well? Do you want to be made whole? Do you want to be happy?" Jesus asked that of the man because he wanted the man to be whole. He wanted him to be healthy and happy. And God wants us to be whole, and healthy, and well, and happy.

There's a man in the Hindu tradition guru Paramahansa Yogananda who says, "Happiness is the greatest divine birthright. It is the buried treasure of the soul." This is a good time to mention that happiness is one of our emotions, and it happens, and we just can't choose to be happy. That would be wonderful if at any moment we could say I'm going to be happy right now, and we were. We can choose to do things that generally make us happy, but happiness, it happens. But we are all created as emotional beings. We are all created with the capacity for happiness. We are all created and there will be moments and times where we are happiness, where we are happy, and we feel happiness.

Not all the time, not to the exclusion of all the other emotions, but God has designed us to be happy. And so when happiness comes and it will and does, we need to embrace it. We need to listen to the story that happiness tells. We need to sit with happiness, and part of that is to embrace it, and not stop ourselves. Not say, "Okay, I'm feeling happiness, but I'm not sure I should or what." Just feel happy. Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up and while I'm making my way, someone else steps down ahead of me.

I think there's something key here. I have no one else to help me. Happiness so many times, if you think about it, the moments when we've been really happy, the moments when we are happy, how many of them involve other people? I'm willing to bet a whole lot of them. There was a study that was done, kind of a depressing study. It was people who had completed suicide and they looked at the writings, the notes they had left behind, and so much of their writing was that first person singular I, me. This is how I feel. This is my life. This is what's going on. And they didn't use a lot of we, they didn't use a lot of us.

Being with other people, sharing your happiness with other people, putting yourself in relationship and community. It allows us to be more happy. It allows us to sit with our happiness. Sometimes we also want to delay our happiness, I think. I ain't got time to be happy. Too much to do. Notice that Jesus asked, "Do you want to be made well?" And the man put Jesus off, didn't he? Jesus didn't wait though, did he? And the man said, "Well, I can't be well. I can't be whole ..." and Jesus said, "Not listening," and He made him well right then and there. He did not wait. Now was the time for that man to be whole. Now was the time for that man to be happy.

There were some Jewish leaders if we read on in this passage who were there. They didn't think now was the time for that man to be whole and healthy, and they didn't like what Jesus did. This was the sabbath. Not only did Jesus heal on the sabbath, which was seen as a form of work, which you weren't supposed to do. Then he says to this man, "Take your mat, stand up, walk away." And in some interpretations of what you could do on the sabbath, that was work. That act of picking up the mat and carrying somewhere was work.

Jeremiah 17 says, "Thus says the Lord for the sake of your lives, take care that you do not bear a burden on the sabbath day." Do not carry a burden out of your house on the sabbath. There are still some Orthodox Jews today who follow these strict rules I don't want to say strict rules, that makes it sounds bad. Who follow these laws, these gifts as they see it from God for honoring the sabbath. I was looking on TikTok the other day, and there was this TikTok about what does a Jew do if they're riding in an Uber and the sabbath begins?

And then in this tradition of Judaism, the rabbi said, "Well, here's what you do. You need to ask your Uber driver to carry your phone and your keys in your house for you because you're not supposed to carry that burden." That's what they're getting from Jeremiah. That's what these folks thought Jesus was telling this man to do to break the commandments of the sabbath. Like Jesus, you should have waited. You could have waited until the sabbath was over for this man to be happy, for this man to be whole. Jesus said no. He said the right time to be happy is now.

There's no reason to delay our wholeness, our healthiness, our happiness. Jesus did not wait for that man's happiness. Why do we sometimes want to put our happiness off? Finally, we tell ourselves, "Well, I can't feel happy right now because I'm still sad about this. Can't feel happy because I'm grieving the loss of a loved one." We tell ourselves we can't feel two emotions at the same time. We view happiness and sadness on a spectrum and we can be only at one point of the spectrum, like happiness is over here, here's the happy side, and sadness is over here.

Okay, well, I've recently lost a loved one, I am sad so I'm going to be sad, and there's no way I can be over there until I am done respecting this loss. And so when we are over here, we're like, "Oh my gosh, that means I don't feel sad anymore. I'm not grieving this person and that feels wrong, and that pulls us back." It's not a spectrum. You can feel two emotions at the same time. You can feel lots of emotions at the same time.

If you ever gathered for a funeral and enjoyed the time with family as they get together, you can grieve, and feel sad, and be happy at the same time. Allowing ourselves moments of happiness in times of profound or not so profound sadness, it doesn't lessen our loss. If you ever seen the movie Inside Out, that's one of the wonderful important lessons from that movie, and we're going to talk about that next week when we talk about sadness a little bit more.

So we've talked about, last week especially, sitting with our emotions, attending to our emotions, attending to our inner lives by naming them, and naming how they make us feel physically. And so I invite you to do that with happiness. The next time you're happy say I'm happy. Think it, articulating it and then say, "How does this make me feel? Oh wow, my jaw is unclenched for the first time in I don't know how long. My muscles, they're not tight. I'm bouncing a little bit. This is nice." Recognize that, embrace it.

It's easy to think when we say listen to our emotions, that we mean just the challenging ones, but we mean the welcome emotions as well. God's invitation to us is for us to sit with our happiness, name it, name it how it makes our body feel. And if you want to go a step further say, "Why am I happy? Maybe I should do that again" if it was something that caused you to be happy.

So let me just leave you with this simple once again message, God wants you to be whole. God wants you to be well and healthy, most of all, God wants you to be happy.

Big Feelings - Honoring and Understanding Our Emotions as Gifts from God

Transcript of a sermon given by Rev. Shawn Coons on February 26, 2023

We're beginning this morning a new sermon and worship series called Big Feelings. And it's about honoring and understanding our emotions, all of them, as gifts from God. Sometimes, maybe too often in our life, as busy Americans, and sometimes especially as mainline Protestant Christians, we don't value our emotions enough, we don't value our inner life enough. We're very much about doing, we're very much about producing, we're very much about working, keeping busy, but we're not always good on slowing down on just sitting, just being introspective and reflecting on what's going on around us, but maybe, more importantly, what's going around and on in inside of us. But that's not how we were created. Brad just read from Psalm 139, where God says we were intricately made, wonderfully made, and we are made as physical and spiritual and mental and emotional beings. All of those parts. We have emotions, we have lots of emotions, and every emotion has a story to tell us. I [inaudible 00:01:39] to think this morning as every emotion, each and every one of your emotions as a storyteller.

We're going to read this morning, in our second lesson, from Ecclesiastes 3:1-8, and that's a familiar passage to many. But I want you to think about it in terms of emotions, and think about in terms of the variety of emotions, and when they come, bidden or not.

Ecclesiastes 3:1, "For everything there is a season, a time for every matter under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted; a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; a time to weep and a time to laugh; a time to mourn and a time to dance; a time to throw away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; a time to seek, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to throw away; a time to tear, and a time to sow; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; a time to love, and a time to hate; a time for war, and a time for peace." This is the word of the Lord, thanks be to God.

Ecclesiastes is a familiar verse to a lot of people, even outside of the faith from a few kind of key sections. We hear this, "A time to be born, a time to die," we may think of that song Turn! Turn! Turn! by The Byrds. We also get from Ecclesiastes, the phrase, "There's nothing new under the sun." But if you read Ecclesiastes, if you dig deep into it, it is a unique book of the Bible. It is a different book of the Bible. You get this message in the beginning of Ecclesiastes, all is vanity, that nothing really matters, that whatever you do in life, life is going to happen, bidden or not, and there's nothing we can do. We often hear these verses and we think, well, there's certain seasons where God has ordained certain things to happen, and if you just wait long enough, it'll turn around. That's not quite what this is saying. Oftentimes, if you read Ecclesiastes and you look at it, you think it's a depressing message. Well, life just happens and there's, there's nothing you can do about it.

Good things happen and bad things happen, and who knows when they're going to happen. But if we read it alongside the Book of Proverbs, you get a balance between two ways of looking at the world. The Book of Proverbs is all about if you follow God, if you honor wisdom, if you raise your children right, if you do X, Y, and Z, then all of these good things are going to happen to you. If you do certain things, your life is going to be wonderful. Ecclesiastes is kind of no matter what you do, sometimes good things happen and sometimes bad things happen, and who knows when and why. So if we take this balance between the two, we get, I would say, a more holistic view and realistic view of life. So when we read this from Ecclesiastes here, and it says, "There's a time to be born, a time to die, time to love, a time to hate." This is not God has ordained these seasons, that right now is a time to love, and guess what? Pretty soon is the time to hate. It's not like summer follows spring.

It's more descriptive than prescriptive, if you will. If you live long enough, there's going to be a time for love, if you live long enough, there's going to be a time for hate. If you live long enough, if you experience enough things, there's a time to seek and there's a time to lose. We don't know precisely when Ecclesiastes was written, we don't know exactly where it was written, but based on some detective work and looking at the language and its influences, we can say it was after the fall of Israel to the Babylonians, where they took a lot of their folks and removed them into exile, after this time of turmoil and upheaval. And then there was a lot of new influences coming in. So we know it was during a time of change, and good things happened and bad things happened.

And so the writer is basically saying, "I've lived long enough. I've seen that all things happen, and you know what? I can't always make sense. Sometimes I do the right things, and things don't work out. Sometimes I don't, and good things happen." I want to think about this in terms of emotions. Emotions happen. We don't get to control when we're happy and when we're sad, and when we're angry and when we're scared. Certainly there are things we can do that either seek to avoid certain emotions or seek after, but emotions happen to us, they come, and you live long enough, you're going to be sad and you're going to be angry and you're going to be happy and you're going to be fearful, sometimes all in the same day, sometimes all in the same hour. We are created as emotional beings, we have all of these emotions within us.

So the question is, what do we do with them? The question is, do we allow ourselves to feel them? Do we listen to the messages they are giving us? Do we listen to the stories each of our emotions is telling us? I want to start just with a definition of what an emotion is. Dr. Paul Ekman is one of the premier research, made the pioneer and scientific research into emotions. He started with facial expressions. And when you were happy, what facial expression did you make? And when you were sad? And he says that emotions are a process, a particular automatic appraisal influenced by our evolutionary and personal past in which we sense that something important to our welfare is occurring. And a set of psychological changes and emotional behaviors begins to deal with the situation. I want to highlight three important parts of this, and we're going to touch on each one of these. The first one we already kind of touched on, emotions are automatic.

They're not voluntary. We don't say, "Oh, I'm starting to feel angry, I'm going to stop." "I'm starting to feel sad. No, I don't have time to feel sad, I'm going to stop." Actually, I skipped over a part I was going to do earlier, but it ties in here so well. One of my favorite eighties movies is Predator. I don't know if you remember Arnold Schwarzenegger, jungle action movie. Well, Jesse 'The Body' Ventura, former governor of Minnesota, former professional wrestler, is in there, and at one time after a fight, he's bleeding on his arm and one of the guys says next to him, "You're bleeding." And he looks at him, says, "I ain't got time to bleed." Sometimes I feel we say, "I ain't got time to feel." "I don't have time to be sad today, I don't have time to be angry today." Coming back to this, emotions are automatic. We don't get to choose the emotions we feel. Second part of Ekman's definition here, something important to our welfare is occurring. We get emotions because our body senses that something important is happening right now and we need to pay attention.

There's that story the emotion is telling. What is it telling? Something important. It's got an important story to tell us, and then changes happen that begin to deal with the situation. The emotion brings about changes within our body, within our brain, to deal with this something important that the body senses is going on. So we know our emotions are automatic, we know they just happen, but we still say there are good emotions and there are bad emotions. And we know which ones are good and which ones are bad. What are the good emotions? Shout them out. Happy, joy. love, delight. Now, what are the bad emotions? Anger, pain, sadness, jealousy, disgust, embarrassment.

We label our emotions. Some are good, some are bad. We need to stop that. We absolutely need to stop saying these emotions are good, these emotions are bad. Now, we can certainly say some emotions are comfortable and some are uncomfortable, some are more challenging than others, but they are all our emotions, and they all have a story to tell about something important that is happening. There are no bad emotions. But we do that, we say, "I don't like this emotion. I don't want it, and it's a bad one. And so I'm going to bottle up. I'm just not going to feel. I'm not going to not feel sad anymore. I'm tired of feeling sad, I'm just going to put it away. Ain't got time to be sad today." And we bottle that up. How does that work? It doesn't work very well. So when I was, I think it was just out of college 'cause I remember the apartment I was in, so in my early twenties, and I got this kit for making your own root beer. And some of you can see where this is going already, can't you?

This is fun, I like root beer, I've never done this. And so I don't remember the exact process, but you bottle it up and then you let it ferment for a while. I don't know if I followed the directions correctly or not. So I bottled it up and it said keep it out of the light. And I had a little apartment kitchen and it had no windows, so I put them in a box in there, and I'm in the other room a while later, a couple of days later I think, and I'm watching TV and all of a sudden I hear this bang. And I hear glass and I hear liquid dripping. And I go in there and yeah, one of the bottles couldn't be contained. I'd bottled up too much yeast, or however the fermentation worked, and it exploded.

I cleaned it up, I went back in to watch the TV, bang, cleaned that one up. I got wise at this point, I got a big heavy-duty trash bag, put the rest in there and I said, "Surely they're not all going to." Yeah, surely they did. We can't do that with our emotions, else that's what's going to happen. We bottle up or say, "I'm not going to feel you." It doesn't go away, our emotions don't go away. Surely we feel better, maybe temporarily, but if we're taking that sadness and we're just pushing it down, as I say, "I'm not going to feel sadness," it's still sending messages to our body. If we're taking that anger and we're pushing down, "I'm not really going to feel my anger today," it's putting your body in this state, a fight or flight state, sending signals to your body, and that takes its toll, physically takes its toll on us when we don't listen to the story our emotions are telling us.

It would be nice if Ecclesiastes said, "For everything there's a season, a time for every matter under heaven, there's a time to be born, and a time to be born; and a time to love, and a time to love; and a time to laugh, and a time to laugh." But all of our emotions happen, all of our emotions come to us. That is the way we were created, emotional beings. Our bodies send us this message, something important is happening. Every emotion has a story to tell. So once again, let's stop judging our emotions. Some good, some bad. Heidi Goehmann wrote a book called Emotions & the Gospel and she writes, "Is it possible that emotions like sadness and angers are still gifts of the Creator? How would we process a broken world without tears? How would we respond to injustice without anger? How would we keep ourselves safe from harm without fear?" Every emotion has a purpose, every emotion has a story to tell.

Now, it is possible, and it happens more than we would like, that the stories our emotions tell us and their purpose get altered. If there's a significant trauma in our life where the emotions come and something is happening, and it says, "This is dangerous, you need to protect yourself," you need to whatever, and that emotion has that message, if that trauma is not dealt with or if that trauma is significant enough, you know what? That message stays with us. You have to protect yourself, you have to protect yourself, you have to beware, you have to be fearful. And sometimes that message gets altered, but still we need to listen, maybe more in those situations. We need to listen to the story that emotion is telling us, even if it's a story from years ago. One of the most loving things we can do is attend to ourselves. One of the most loving things in this world we can do is attend to our own wellbeing.

In the Book of Job, Job is afflicted with horrible things in his life, and he is grieving, and his friends come to be with Job. And I want to listen here to how Job's friends initially greet him. Now, when Job's three friends heard all of these troubles had come upon him, each of them set out from his home and they met together to go console and confront him, comfort him. And when they saw him from a distance, they did not recognize him, and they raised their voices and they wept aloud and they tore their robes, threw dust in the air upon their heads. They sat with him on the ground for seven days and seven nights, and no one spoke a word to him. For they saw that his suffering was very great. They saw that his suffering was great, so they sat with him for seven days in silence and solidarity. We need friends like that, and we need to be a friend like that to ourselves, to sit with ourselves, to sit with our emotions. That's what God calls us to do, to attend to our inner life.

Peter Scazzero wrote a book on a emotional leadership in the church, and he says that John Baptist went away from people and paid attention to his inner life, Jesus spent time in the desert, paid attention to his inner life, Paul took time away before his public ministry and paid attention to his inner life. We can't ignore inner life, it's a vital part of our faith. Loving God with all our soul, with all our heart, with all our mind, all of ourselves, it's the most loving thing we can do, for ourselves, for God, and for others. Pay attention to our inner life, make space and time just for being. This is going to be the theme of our series, listening to our emotions and the stories that they tell us. What does that mean?

Sometimes it just means simply naming the emotion, pausing for a moment and saying, "I'm feeling something. I'm feeling fear right now," "I'm feeling happiness," and if you want to take it a step further, "How does this make my body feel?" "I'm feeling sadness right now and it feels like there's just this rock in my chest," "I'm feeling anger right now, and whoa, my jaw is clenched and my fists are clenched." Naming the emotion, thinking about what it's feeling physically in your body, just doing these two things, science has shown is good for you, is healthy for you, helps us process. Every emotion has a story to tell, every emotion is sending a message to us. I want to close today just by reading a section of the book that we're doing a book discussion on in the next two weeks at 10 o'clock, I'd love to have you join us, This Here flesh. And I just want to read a story just from near the beginning of it. This is by Cole Arthur Riley, a younger African American woman.

When I was eight years old, before I could make sense of why I fled the other children on the playground, my hair began to turn gray. Coarse, white strands shriveled up on the crown of my head without an invitation, politely wrapping themselves around their black peers and strangling them in the night. It was an invasion, and the attention was agonizing. Every day, I'd sit squirming and rocking in my desk, head bowed like a monk, praying for my own invisibility. The gaze of Alex DeMarco at my back, he'd only pointed out a hair once, but the moment stuck to me. I asked my teacher if I could switch to the empty desk in the back row, knowing there I could exhale, she said no. By the time I turned 11, I would spend ages in front of the mirror parting my hair just right, so as little white as possible was visible. One night we were all going out and my family was waiting downstairs for me to finish parting. Eventually, my dad sent everyone to wait in the car, and came to the bottom of the stairs and called for me.

And when he asked how much longer I'd be, all of the shame that had crusted over my muscles from years of parting my hair combusted, and I threw a fit. I don't remember the details surrounding it, apart from a comb thrown against my brother's door. I mainly recall the episode by the memory of my father's face, which had a calm blankness, that only made my own body flailing and loud more of a spectacle. When my crying softened, I finally said, feeling more embarrassed than before, "I can't do this anymore," and then, with certainty, "I have to dye my hair." And my father's response, his face still lives in me, he calmly asked me to come down from the stairs and the low sound waves from his voice slid under my feet and flew me from the top stair to where he stood. And he tucked my head into his chest, he sewed a kiss into my hair, and just said, "Okay, honey, we can dye your hair."

I was so addled that my tears dried up and I didn't say another word, and he summoned my hair into a bun and we walked to the car together. The strange thing is we never did buy the hair dye, and in fact, I never asked about it again. And by the time I was in high school, the white began to go away all on its own.

Her father could have judged her anger as bad, could have said, "That's a bad emotion you are feeling," but he didn't. Could have judged her sadness as bad, "Oh, you don't need to be sad. It's just a little thing." But he didn't, he listened to the story that her emotions were telling, and that made all the difference. He loved her and so he listened. Friends, love yourselves and listen to the stories your emotions are telling you.

Embracing Progressive Christianity - The Environment

Transcript of sermon preached by Rev. Shawn Coons on February 12, 2023

Come with me on a journey here a little bit. I want you to imagine the scene. We are in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, but we're high above. We're looking kind of down on it from a little bit. And you can see it's a calm day. It's a sunny day, can feel the breeze, smells of the ocean. And as you look down, there is something just under the surface of the water, it seems to be breaking the surface of the water.

And it's a pod of whales. And now as we zoom in a little bit on these creatures, we can see they're breaking to the surface to take a breath, and then they dive down deep just a little under the surface. And we're going to zoom in again to see around the whales. And the water looks a little cloudy there.

There's all sorts of small little things in it. And you can see that it's krill, the food that whale eat, small little crustaceans. And they just open their big mouth and take them in by the hundreds, by the thousands to sustain themselves. But as we zoom in on the krill, we can see there are other little particles and little things around.

And what we're seeing is hundreds of thousands, millions of little tiny nano-particles in what they're called of plastic. And so we stick with this view. The whale opens its mouth and inhales, big gulp of water, the krill come in and all these nano-particles of plastic come in. And now our camera goes like Jonah inside the whale.

And what we see in here is the digestive system of a whale, but we also see more plastic. Those garbage bags or those bags we get at the grocery store. Old fishing nets and fishing mines sometimes referred to as ghost gear. The equivalent of a garbage truck of plastic gets put into the ocean each day, eight tons of plastic end up in the oceans each year.

At this rate in another 20 years, it's estimated that there will be more plastic in the ocean than there will be fish in the ocean. So we pull back from our scene in the Atlantic Ocean and we go to the coast, the coast of the United States, eastern coast along South Carolina. And we kind of zoom in there and we see where the ocean meets the coast in this area.

There's a lot of marshes around. And we see an African American woman dressed colorfully, almost regally. Her name is Queen Quet of the Gullah Geechee people, the Gullah Geechee people are descendants of slaves brought to America that have lived on the coasts of North Carolina down to Florida for generations.

This is their land traditionally, but it's being threatened. The waters rise, development happens that takes up some of the marsh land where the flooding used to go and abate so it wouldn't go further inland. There have been offers by the government to buy out these folks, have them go somewhere safe or have them leave the land that they have been on for generations.

Queen Quet asks, why is there no interest in buying out the hotels? Why is there no interest in buying out the resorts, locating them somewhere safer? We're in our final week of embracing progressive Christianity, understanding what it is and what it means to be a progressive Christian. And this morning we're talking about the environment and the focus that progressive Christians and many others have in caring for creation and working for environmental health.

I wanted to begin with these stories this morning because oftentimes we can kind of abstract environmental harm and environmental issues. But really what it comes down two in terms of advocating for our environmental justice is loving and protecting our neighbors.

It's a fulfillment of that great commandment, love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, and soul, and love your neighbors as yourselves, whether they are our human neighbors or whether they are our animal neighbors. And to be fair, this is an area that many Christians, many people and many churches and maybe our own included, have not emphasized as strongly as they should.

Statistically speaking, the older we get, the more right-leaning we get, the less likely we are to be concerned about environmental destruction. At this day and age, almost everyone can agree that there is global warming. We only look at the charts to see that temperature is rising over the years, over the decades. But then we start to differ.

There's a consensus among scientists over 80%, sometimes they'll say over 90% of climate scientists say that this warming is human made, that it's harmful and that we can do something about it. Global temperatures, as I've said, we can see have gone up. Here's a chart showing over since 1880, the steep rise that they've had. And coinciding with this carbon dioxide has spiked up incredibly in the last recent history.

You can see this is a timescale of 400,000 years that have [inaudible 00:06:54] almost all that time it was steady until just recently. And you put these side by side and we can see that the rise in carbon dioxide, the rise in the temperatures, they are together. They're happening at the same time.

But I'm not here this morning to lecture about global warming, I'm not here this morning to go into the science and make the case for it. Instead, I want to shift our focus. What does it mean for us as Christians? What does it mean when progressive Christians make these issues a forefront of their faith?

We talked last week when we talked about politics, that as Christians, we are political. We don't shy away from politics, but our faith doesn't lead us to partisanship. There's no one candidate, there's no one party that represents God. We also said partisan neutrality does not mean moral neutrality.

Environmental destruction is a moral issue. It is about loving our neighbor. It is a faith issue. We heard a moment ago, Stephanie read from Genesis chapter one. And some people have said that in Genesis chapter one, specifically in verse 28, we get the first ethical commandment found in all the Bible where God says, "Be fruitful and multiply.

Fill the earth and subdue it. Have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth." The first ethical commandment we get in scripture. Now on first reading, especially as we hear these words in English, we can say, okay, subdue. Dominion sounds a lot like dominate.

It's like, okay, we're in charge. We're the boss. We have the earth to do with whatever we want. God put us in charge, yeah. But if we look in the Hebrew at these words, there's a different sense of them. There are words, one of them is a word, the dominion word is a word like a shepherd has dominion over their flock. And a shepherd cares for their flock.

A shepherd protects their flock. This isn't have at it. This isn't all right, here's your play things. The earth is yours to do what you will. It is God saying to us, "You are in charge of creation. Care for it as I would care for it. You are my steward," if you will. We talk about stewardship in the church a lot. And usually we mean money. We are stewards of creation.

We are stewards of the earth. We are stewards of the water, of the air, of the animals, of the land. "Care for it as I would," says God. And we haven't. We've failed. We've sinned. So the question is, how can we do better? And as Christians, why should we do better? Why do we emphasize this? So let's turn to our second scripture lesson this morning. Deuteronomy chapter six. And we're going to start with verse one and go through verse nine.

Now this is the commandment, "The statues and statutes and the ordinances that the Lord God your, the Lord your God charged me to teach you, to observe in the land that you are about to cross into and occupy so that you and your children and your children's children may fear the Lord your God all the days of your life and keep all his decrees and his commandments that I'm commanding you, so that your days may be long.

Here therefore, oh, Israel, observe them diligently so that it may go well with you so that you may multiply greatly in a land flowing with milk and honey as the Lord, the God of your ancestors has promised you. Here, O Israel, the Lord is our God. The Lord alone.

And you shall love the Lord your God with all your hearts and with all your soul and with all your might. Keep these words that I'm commanding you today in your heart. Recite them to your children. Talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise. Bind them as a sign on your hand, fix them as an emblem on your forehead.

Write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates." This is the word of the Lord. [inaudible 00:11:43] So after wandering in the wilderness for 40 years, after coming out of Egypt, the Hebrew people, they're on border of coming into Israel, of coming in to take this land God has given to them. And God says, "Wait. Before you go here, listen to what I've said.

I've given you a lot of guidelines and the rules and the law and the wilderness. Listen to it. Remember it. Remember what I have taught you." And why does God say to do that? God says it several times here in this passage, but also multiple times in other parts of scripture. Why is Israel supposed to do that? So that it may go well with you, but not just for you, for your children and for your children's children.

Just as in Genesis, the people of Israel are not given the land of Israel for themselves. It's not here. This is yours, do with it what you will. It's hold it in trust for me. Hold it as a steward so your children may live here and do well. So your children's children may live here and do well. Once again, we are stewards of what God has given us. We are stewards for our children, we are stewards for our children's children.

There's a saying, and it's been attributed to a number of people said throughout the decades, we do not inherit the earth from our ancestors. We borrow it from our children. From the beginning, literally in the beginning, we have been charged to be stewards of creation, stewards of creation for us, for all people, for our children, for all of creation. And when we see this multiple places in scripture in the 10 Commandments, we're given a day of rest, a Sabbath.

And if you remember, it's a sabbath for you. No one should do work on that seventh day, not you, not your slaves, not your animals are included in that. In Leviticus, every seven years, the Israelites are instructed to let the land go fallow, give the land rest.

It's a sabbath for the land. Taking care of the animals, taking care of the land is good. It's good for the land, it's good for the animals, but it turns out it's good for us as well. You remember that saying, you take care of the people that take care of you? You take care of the land, you take care of the animals that take care of you.

Once again, we have not done this. We have not done this as well as we should. We have sinned in becoming consumers rather than stewards. A consumer sees what they have been given as merely for their own use. A steward sees what they have been given as something in their trust and something in their charge to hold, to care for for somebody else, for the good of others.

And as Christians, we are never called to be merely consumers. This applies to many areas of life. We have embodied this at Fairview, moving from consumers to stewards. I see it in the 10, almost now, 11 years that I've been here in how this church has operated. When I first came here, there was a lot of people doing a lot of good work, but sometimes we kind of leaned back and we relied a little bit too much on others.

And there was a video I used to show a couple times in a sermon and I said, "Are we on a cruise ship or are we on a battleship?" On a cruise ship, you ask, "Oh, what's the activities that are playing for me today?" You pay your fee and you get people to wait on you, and you just kind of kick back and let others do the work. On a battleship, we're all together, we're all the crew, we're all working towards a common mission.

Over the years, I have seen this congregation just embrace that mission of being stewards and not consumers, of everyone pitching in and everyone doing their part. And there is a wonderful spirit and a camaraderie here. And I am just amazed at how everyone serves here. You have become even more than you were before, stewards of this church rather than consumers. And it's incredibly heartening. That's what we need to do as we approach the environment, as we approach all areas of life.

And I think sometimes if you're like me, I will admit, here's my confession this morning. I am not as passionate about environmental issues as I am about other issues. This has never been kind of my area and my cause. And as I reflect on that and as I talk to some others who feel similar, it's such a big issue, and it's complex and it's abstract and it's kind of indirect.

We don't see the direct effects of global warming. It affects this weather system, which it affects this here and goes here. I was thinking about racial justice with the George Floyd video. With the Tyre Nichols video. There is no George Floyd video for environmental destruction, for global harm.

And so sometimes it just may not feel as pressing. Or maybe sometimes it's too big. So what do we do? Well, there are small steps we can do, but frankly, even if you and I, if we all recycle, if we all get solar panels on our house, that's a step. But it's going to take big changes as well. Big changes from government, big changes from corporation, from corporations.

So there's our call to be politically active again, be active with our wallets. But I don't want to skip over doing the small things because I think that's important, especially as we talk about changing kind of our own hearts and changing our own practices. I realize as I was doing the sermon, this is the first time I've ever preached directly on the environment in any church I've served.

20 years of ministry and I've never done this sermon before. And that's too long, that's on me. I have been in my practice as more of a consumer than a steward, and that's on me as well. So what do we do? What do change? Well, I want to challenge you to embrace one small step. And maybe together we can kind of move in this direction.

My small step, I usually have a case of bottled water up in my office and I drink it throughout the week. I drink it on Sunday morning. I'm finishing off my last case that's up there right now. I've got a brand new water bottle that I'm not going to do plastic water bottles. It's a small thing. It's not going to revolutionize things, but it's something for me to do. And so I challenge you.

What is one thing that you can embrace, one thing you can do? And it may not be easy, I forgot my water bottle this morning. Carrie had to bring it to me. But it's a step, it's a small step. I'm trying. If you want some ideas, you'll see here on the screen a few websites. You can go back. I want to say I put these in the bulletin, but I can't remember if I did. Maybe I didn't. I was going to.

But you can go back on the Facebook video and find these links. Snap a picture of it. Now they're just some ideas, just some ways that we can make a difference. So let me leave you with this. What kind of world do we want to leave? What kind of world do we want to leave for our children, for our children's children?

Do we want to leave a world where 50 years from now, 2070 water levels, maybe four to five inches higher? Air temperature, four degrees. Higher barrier reefs, which are already being threatened, half or more of them gone. Plastics, more plastic in the ocean than there are fish. We can do something collectively, we can do something. What kind of world do we want to leave? What kind of stewards will we be? Let us pray.

Embracing Progressive Christianity - Politics

Transcript of a sermon preached by Rev. Shawn Coons on February 5, 2023

So here we are on week four, almost done with our series, Embracing Progressive Christianity. And we're on to how progressive Christianity is very active and doesn't shy away from the political sphere. Once again, this is not unique to progressive Christianity. Many other Christian traditions also have their faith lead them into the political sphere. But the approach of progressive Christians can be a little bit different.

But the question that we begin with in terms of our faith leading us into the political realms is why? Why don't we keep that separation between church and state? Politics never enter the church, and the church never enters politics. It begins with a simple reality which you are all well aware of, and that's that our world is not as it should be. In our world there is violence, in our world there is poverty and racism and oppression and injustice and sexism and homophobia and transphobia and environmental destruction. And the world shouldn't be like this. I think everyone at some level knows that.

As Christians, we take the position that the answer to that is not simply just pray that God fixes it. Just stay in our home, stay in our churches and pray. God, there's so many ills in the world, please come down and make everything right. That's not a bad prayer, but it doesn't stop there. Sometimes we even take the attitude, some Christians take the attitude as, Well, you know what really matters is heaven. What really matters is the next life. There's this bumper sticker, this saying, This world is not my home. And some Christians will take that so far as to say that we don't really need to be concerned about the problems of the earth because the earth is temporary. And what are any problems that we face here on the earth compared to an eternity in heaven, an eternity with God.

There's a simple logic to that that maybe sounds good and comforting at some point, especially if you're wondering if the problems of the world will ever be solved. Or, the problems of the world will be too much, to take comfort in eternity without those problems sounds really good. The trick is the Bible, and the God witness to in the Bible, and Jesus in the Bible, is full of concern for this world. For the poor, for the hungry, for the oppressed, for the sick, for the grieving. Jesus didn't ignore the problems of this world in favor of heaven, in favor of the next life. So neither should we.

For progressive Christians and other Christians addressing the problems of the world is our responsibility, both as Christians and as citizens. And we acknowledge that there are things that we are called to do as individuals, actions we are called to take. But we also acknowledge that governments and institutions have a role, a big role, an important role, in solving the problems of the world, in taking care of people and addressing the evils that are around. Not that governments are the only solution or sometimes even the best solution, but without government action, without government reform, sometimes these solutions will always be incomplete. And in fact, there are times where governments can be part of the problem. And as Christians and as citizens, we're called to work for reform.

Now we see this in scripture. We heard it just a moment ago in our scripture lesson from Amos. God often in the Old Testament uses the prophet, speaks through the prophets, to address the kings, to address the nation of Israel and say, You're not taking care of [inaudible 00:04:48] people. I don't care how well you worship, God says. I don't care about your solemn assemblies. I don't care about your offerings. If justice isn't flowing to everyone, if righteousness isn't in part, if you're not taking care of the widows and the poor and the orphan, doesn't matter how you worship me, let justice flow like mighty waters, Amos says. God's laws in scripture are given to protect all people, but especially the oppressed; especially the poor, the widows, the orphans, the foreigners.

And so we start this morning by beginning with the premise that God cares about injustice in the world. And God wants to take care of all those who suffer from injustice. God calls us, as Christians, as the body of Christ, to help those people in their circumstances. To work for changes, whether that's political or otherwise, that address these needs. So with this dual call in mind as Christians, as citizens to God, to political action, I want to turn to our scripture lesson this morning. And we're going to read from Mark chapter 12, starting with verse 13. And this is going to help us answer the question, Okay, well we're called to bring our faith into the political world, but how do we do that?

Mark 12, starting with verse 13. Then they sent to him, some Pharisees and some Herodians to trap him. In what, He said. And they came and said to him, Teacher, we know that you are sincere and show deference to no one. For you do not regard people with partiality. But teach the way of God in accordance with truth. Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor or not? Should we pay them or should we not? But knowing their hypocrisy, Jesus said to them, Why are you putting me to the test? Bring me a denarius and let me see it. And they brought one. And then he said to them, Whose head is this and whose title? They answered, The emperor's. And Jesus said to them, Give to the emperor the things that are the emperor's and to God, the things that are God's. And they were utterly amazed at him. This is the word of the Lord.

So I like in this story how they butter them up at the beginning. Jesus, you're sincere. You show no harsh reality. You teach the way of God in accordance with the truth. And if you're Jesus at that point you're like, Okay, what's coming? Because something is coming, and it is. They're trying to trap him. Trying to give him that impossible question that has no right answer, because that they can catch him. No matter how he answers it one way or the other, they're going to get him. They ask him the question, Should we pay taxes to the emperor? To Rome, to the Roman Empire? Should we as Jewish people under Roman occupation, should we pay those taxes? If he says no, all right, it's off to the Romans. Jesus is inciting rebellion. He's speaking against Rome. If he says yes, now he is out of favor with the Jewish people. Oh, we're supposed to pay our taxes to the occupiers, to the people who have conquered us. You must not sympathize with your Jewish people.

So Jesus doesn't fall for the trap. Instead, he lays a trap of his own, so to speak, although it's a trap based in the truth of the matter. And he says, Bring me denarius. A denarius is a coin at that time, a Roman coin. It's about the pay for an average day's labor. And he says, Whose image is on it? And it's the emperor, like this coin we have up here. That's the emperor there. And I think if I remember this coin, it says something along the lines of, Son of the divine, Caesar Augustus. He says, Okay, here's this coin. It's got Caesar's picture on it. And then we get this phrase, and many of us know the King James version, Render unto Caesar, what is Caesar render unto God? What is God? Caesar can have everything that is his and God can have everything that is God's.

The trick is, these are good Jewish folks. They know their scripture. And so when Jesus brings this coin, it says, Whose image is on it? Well, Caesars, that's obvious. But these Jewish folks, they know their scripture and they think, Okay, the coin is made in the image of Caesar, but what is made in the image of God? And they're going to go back to Genesis and they're going to say, People, you and I, humanity is made in the image of God. So if we give to Caesar what is in Caesar's image, then we give to God what is in God's image. And that is us, our humanity, all that we say and do.

And so this is going to be our starting point here for how we practice our politics as Christians. There are things that belong to God and there are things that belong to Caesar. As progressive Christians, we embrace the American ideal of the separation of church and state. We don't believe that the state should promote, the government should promote any one religion, should promote Christianity above any religion, should promote any other religion. We are against the Christian nationalism that says, Well, our country was founded to be a Christian country and the government should make sure it stays a Christian country. Should mandate certain Christian practices, or preference certain Christian practices over others. Neither should the state interfere with the church. We feel that we should be free to practice our religion how we see fit and how we choose as long as it's not harming anyone else.

But this isn't to say that our faith doesn't influence our politics. Give to God what is God, give to Caesar what is Caesar's. We do it in such a way that our highest allegiance is to God, and not to the government and not to a particular candidate and not to a particular party. We like to say, as Christians, we are political, but our faith does not make us partisan. There is no one party, there is no one candidate, there is no one platform that is a substitute for God's will and how God would have us act in the world. Our politics should conform to the gospel, not the other way around.

If we read scripture, if we read the Bible, if we practice our faith and we find that Jesus and God supports every one of our political positions, we should wonder about that. I think it's Anne Lamont, I want to say, who said, If it turns out God hates all the same people we hate, that's not right. Bishop Michael Curry says, Partisan neutrality though does not equal moral neutrality. Sometimes we as Christians can say, Well, we don't want to be partisan. And we take that to mean that we shouldn't act, we shouldn't live out our faith. God has values that come through in scripture, and we should be living those and seeking to achieve those politically wherever that leads us.

One of the best examples is we can point to in our history is the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. This was led in large part by churchgoers, by clergy, by their wives. Black clergy, especially. We know of Martin Luther King Jr's religious background. We know the imagery he used to embrace the struggle for racial justice. He talked about the Promised Land. And the Civil Rights Movements they met and they organized in churches. They sang hymns and they sang spirituals at protests and on freedom rides. And as I have learned more about American Christianity and its culpability in white supremacy over the years, it makes sense some way that the only way to ever overcome the racism, the white supremacy, that was part of our land and laws, was through the church. Because the church, the white Christian church, had a hand in supporting and forming that racism in our country.

Our involvement in politics as Christians is complex, but we cannot shy away from it. When we act politically as Christians; when we vote, it's not simply a political act. It is a moral act and it is an expression of our faith. It's an act that expresses love for neighbor and love for the stranger. It's an act that expresses how strongly we believe in God's call to love, to compassion, to justice. Our beliefs are shown oftentimes more strongly in our actions than they are in our words.

So I just want to leave you this morning with this idea that how we act as Christians, whether that's out in the world at work, at school, in the voting booth, in the Capitol, how we act in the world shows what we believe even more than what we say and what we profess. Give to Caesar what is Caesar's, give to God what is God's.

Embracing Progressive Christianity - Other Faiths

Transcription of the sermon given by Rev. Shawn Coons on January 29, 2023

Week three of embracing progressive Christianity. And we've talked about what is progressive Christianity, how does it differ from maybe some other traditions of Christianity? We've used different kind of metaphors. One word that I want to emphasize today is that progressive Christianity really embraces and acknowledges is “limits,” that we are limited as people in our understanding of God. We are limited in our ability to understand God, and that God's revelation to us, how God is known and the ways God communicates with us and has communicated with God's people is also limited. It's not an open book where every secret of the universe, every secret about who God is and how God operates in the world is out there if we can just find it. We acknowledge there are limits to our understanding and our information we have about God.

If you remember First Corinthians chapter 13, mostly what we remember for the passage is love is patient, love is kind, the beautiful imagery of Paul's chapter on love. But he also says in there, "For now we see in a mirror dimly. Now I only know in part," acknowledging that that limitation we have of our ability to fully know God. The way we've expressed that about embracing progressive Christianity is to use the metaphor of windows where there are certain windows and you can only see so much out of a window, right? And some windows are clear, and some windows are big, and some are distorted, but each view through a window has its limits.

This is important to remember as we go into today's topic. When we as Christians talk about other faiths, especially as progressive Christians, we need to remember this idea of limits and we need to talk about limits. This is kind of our approach to other faiths. It's kind of, well, we know what we know, and we can be confident in that. But we also don't know what we don't know, and we need to acknowledge and have that in front of us as well. This is a very Presbyterian idea to say, "Well, there are certain things we know, and let's be confident in what we know. There are certain things we don't know, and let's hold that loosely and say, okay, there's mystery out there. There's more than we can know. There's new light to be shined."

In 2002, the Presbyterian church put out a study paper about salvation, about other faiths. And it's long. It's a good read, but it's long. It was called Hope in the Lord Jesus Christ. And I want to read one paragraph for you that kind of talks about this we know what we know, we don't know what we don't know, and we hold them together.

"Jesus Christ is the only savior and Lord and all people ever are called to place their faith, hope and love in him. No one is saved by virtue of inherent goodness or admirable living. For by grace, you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing. It is the gift of God. No one is saved apart from God's gracious redemption in Jesus Christ. That's what we know. Yet we do not presume to limit the sovereign freedom of God our Savior, who desires everyone to be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth. Thus, we neither restrict the grace of God to those who profess explicit faith in Christ, nor assume that all people are saved regardless of faith. Grace, love and communion belong to God and are not ours to determine."

So what do we as Christians know? We know that Jesus is Lord and Savior. We know that we are saved by grace alone. We heard Kathy read that from Ephesians a moment ago. Grace is a gift from God, not something we earn, not something we work for. It is a gift. It is completely on God's part. Not through works, not through right belief, not through anything of our own doing. All right, so what don't we know? We don't know the extent or how God's grace is given. If it is a gift from God, God can give that grace to anyone regardless of anything that they do or anything that they are. We don't know how the saving acts of Jesus work with people who aren't Christians.

Thus, we neither restrict the grace of God to those who profess explicit faith in Christ, nor assume that all people are saved regardless of faith. Grace, love and communion belong to God and are not ours to determine. I want us to pause here for a moment and notice something. Often, usually, when we as Christians start to talk about other faiths and how do we view other faiths, the conversation quickly goes, as I've led it today, into a question. Who is saved and who is not saved? And I'm not sure that's a great thing that we so quickly go to this idea of salvation, and we go this quickly idea of who's saved, who's not saved when we talk about Christianity, when we talk about other faiths. That being said, we need to address it because that's naturally kind of where we go. So we're going to talk about that this morning.

But first, we're going to read our morning scripture. And this is going to be from Matthew, chapter 15, starting with verse 21. And we're looking at this scripture this morning because Jesus is interacting here with someone of another faith. We have a Canaanite woman. The Canaanites, were a specific people, but at this point in the history of Israel, Canaanite also kind of generally refers to people who lived there but weren't Jewish. So kind of by definition, Canaanite is someone of another faith than Jesus.

Matthew, chapter 15, starting with verse 21. "Jesus left that place and went away to the district of Tyre and Sidon. And just then, a Canaanite woman from that region came out and started shouting, 'Have mercy on me Lord, Son of David. My daughter is tormented by a demon.' But he did not answer her at all. And his disciples came and urged him, saying, 'Send her away for she keeps shouting after us.' He answered, 'I was sent only to the lost sheep of the House of Israel.' But she came and knelt before him saying, 'Lord, help me.' And he answered, "It is not fair to take the children's food and throw it to the dogs.' She said, 'Yes Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master's table.' And then Jesus answered her, 'Woman, great is your faith. Let it be done for you as you wish.' And her daughter was healed instantly." This is the Word of the Lord God.

There's a lot that happens in this passage. And there's a lot we could talk about, especially as it relates to progressive Christianity. But let's first, let's be clear at what happens here. This Canaanite woman, this non-Jewish woman, has a sick daughter. And as any good mother would do, she wants desperately for her daughter to be healed. She wants her daughter to be helped. And I'm guessing at this point, she's tried many ways and probably failed. And so she makes a scene. She makes a ruckus. She shouts to get Jesus' attention. And Jesus ignores her, just doesn't even acknowledge her. The disciples are annoyed by her. Jesus isn't taking care of this. So the disciples go to Jesus and say, "Hey, can we get rid of her? Can you get rid of her? She's loud, she's annoying, she's causing a scene."

And then Jesus says to the disciples, "I'm only here for the Jewish people. I'm only here for the lost sheep of the House of Israel, not for this Canaanite woman." We don't want to hear that as Christians. That's not our image of Jesus. So he says this not to the woman, says it to his disciples. But nevertheless, she persists. And Jesus, after she goes to him and says, "Lord, help me," she makes him acknowledge her, Jesus then says no, and he calls her a dog, basically. Some people say is a racial slur of the time. It's not fair to take the children's food and throw it to the dog, the children being the lost children of Israel. She still persists. She verbally spars with him using that metaphor, not protesting the name he's called her. She says, "Yeah, but even the dogs, they eat the crumbs from the master's table." And then Jesus says, "Great is your faith." And he heals her daughter, just like that.

This is a problematic passage for many people. If you really read it and you really kind of dig into it and understand what's going on, Jesus is not acting very Christlike in this point. We see Jesus making mistakes. We see Jesus making bad mistakes. We see Jesus maybe even learning and being corrected by this woman, this non-Jewish woman. For many Christians, if you understand the passage this way, and I don't see another way to understand it, that's hard to reconcile with a certain image of Jesus. There's this image of Jesus, well, Jesus is fully God. Jesus is fully divine. Jesus didn't make mistakes. Jesus didn't commit sins. Jesus never learned. He was fully God, and God doesn't do any of those things.

But as progressive Christians, we remember Jesus was also fully human. And as human beings, we have limits. We have gaps in our knowledge. We make mistakes, big ones, and we need to learn throughout our lives. So if Jesus is fully human, wouldn't he embrace and be part of those as well? Now, we could go more into that, but let's notice how Jesus interacted with this woman because that's what we're talking about today. We're talking about other faiths. How did Jesus interact with this woman of another faith? Well, at first, he does it poorly, I would say. But then he comes around, right? And he praises her for her faith. Notice what he doesn't do, though. Notice what he doesn't do. There's no talk of being saved. There's no talk of salvation. There is no talk of repentance. There is no talk of conversion.

Jesus seems not to be concerned that she's not Jewish. Jesus doesn't seem to care much that she's of a different faith other than that's not he's here for. He doesn't try to say, "Let me quote you some scripture. Let me tell you about the God of Judaism. Let's see if we can get you away from your Canaanite beliefs." He's not concerned that she's not Jewish. That doesn't stop him from healing her daughter, and then he lets her go on her way with her beliefs intact and unchallenged. I would go on to say in the whole of scripture, certainly in Jesus' ministry, but even in the whole of scripture, there's very little emphasis on converting people of other faiths to Judaism or then Christianity. The harshest judgment in scripture, the talk of hell, the talk of punishment, are all directed at people who are already following God, already following Jesus. Not people of other faiths.

But somewhere in Christian history, somewhere especially in Western Christian history, we developed this notion that God wants us to go out and find people of other faiths and save them, convert them. Say, "Your beliefs are wrong. Our beliefs are right. You need to believe what we need to believe, or horrible things are going to happen to you." But that's not the message of scripture.

There are scriptures that suggest this. Let's not deny that or downplay that. The Great Commission in Matthew, "Go out into all the world baptizing in my name." Yes, that has that sense. But in the whole of scripture, the harshest words, the harshest punishments, are for those who are already following God and don't live up to it. So what about being saved? Let's get back to that. We've talked around it, we've talked about it. Our typical understanding of salvation, the kind of Western Christianity, especially American Western Christianity, is being saved means at some point in your life, you've invited Jesus to be your Lord and Savior. Maybe you've said a prayer at that point, and at that moment you are saved, and your status goes from the not saved column to the saved column. And now you have a ticket to heaven and you won't go to hell.

There are scriptures that support that. But the trick is there's a lot of different scriptures on salvation. There are a lot of different windows on salvation, and they each provide a little bit different view. I can't go into it in its entirety. I did this for a sermon a couple years ago. But I have here this page of probably 15 or so different scriptures, and I've got salvation divided up into categories. Sometimes scripture says, we're saved through repentance. Zacchaeus, if you remember him, the wee little man, he repented. 2 Corinthians 7, "Godly grief produces a repentance that leads to salvation."

At other parts, faith is the qualifier for being saved. In Romans, in Thessalonians, in Luke, in John, "Everyone who believes in him may not perish." "Sir, what must I do to be saved?" in Acts. They answer, "Believe in the Lord Jesus." So it's that faith, it's that belief in some parts of scripture. Then there is you're saved by works. We know James, first and foremost. "What good is it, my brothers, if you say you have faith, but do not have works? Can faith save you?" Well, according to the earlier scriptures, yes, but now it seems to be more emphasized on works. And then we have our scripture from this morning that says, it's grace. It's not your belief because that's something you do. It's not your works. That's something you do. It's grace. It's purely a gift from God.

Then we have a few other scriptures. One scripture, 1 Timothy says, "Women will be saved through childbearing provided they continue in their faith and love and holiness." So there's a combination of childbirth saving you and faith. And then sometimes you're saved by being baptized. And then there's a few random verses. "How hard it will be, Jesus says, for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God." So if you want to enter the kingdom of God, you can't be a wealthy person. So maybe salvation is dependent on how much money you have. Matthew, chapter 18, "Unless you become like children of God, you won't enter the kingdom of heaven." So maybe entering heaven has to do with how childlike we are.

All of these provide a window onto how God works in the world. All these provide a window into this thing we call salvation. And so if we try and wrap this word salvation with one little simple definition, it just doesn't honor all of scripture. So we hold all these intention and we say, "Well, we know what we know, and there's a lot of things maybe we don't know." And so we cling to that loosely as well. So how do we proceed not being able to kind of discern exactly what salvation is, exactly who was saved, exactly who is not saved? We know what we know. We don't know what we don't know. And here's how I've illustrated this. And I know I've told this story here before and I'm going to tell it again. Eventually if I stay here long enough, you're going to be able to tell it on my behalf.

When I met Carrie, her parents, Richard and Nancy, were living in Ashland, Kentucky. Ashland, Kentucky is where Ohio and West Virginia and Kentucky meet. It's in kind of the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. And it's very curvy, mountainous. There's very few straight roads there. It's a smaller town. And we got married there. And so I needed to know how to get from Carrie's parents' house to the church where Carrie's dad was the pastor, and we were getting married. And I knew about one way to get there. And it was go down here, take a right, wind around here, maybe go past the hospital. It was confusing. But eventually I learned it. And every now and then, Carrie would say, "You know there's a faster way? You know there's a better way?" And I would say, "I'm sure there is, but I don't know it. This is the way I know, so this is the way I'm going to go."

I want to say that is our attitude we should have about our faith. As a Christian, I know that way to God. That is the way that I know, and I'm going to practice it. And if someone wants to ask me, what do you think about spirituality? What do you think about faith? I'm going to tell them the way that I know. But in the same breath, I'm going to say, "You know what? There may be other ways. And heck, there may even be better ways. But I don't know those ways. I'm not going to limit them and say they don't exist. But those are the ways I know. So let me tell you about the way that I do know." So that's what I want to leave you with this morning. Don't be afraid to share about the path that you know, the path that you walk. But respectfully remember that God is God, and God's grace is expansive, and there may be other paths that we don't know of as well.

Embracing Progressive Christianity - The Bible

Sermon given by Rev. Shawn Coons on January 22, 2023

Last week we started our series on embracing progressive Christianity, and we discussed a little bit about why do we have to label our Christianity? And we said, yes, we are all Christians and we all have some common unity. But since the beginning of Christian history, we have interpreted Jesus' teachings in different ways and that it can actually help us to articulate, and sometimes when appropriate, use labels to talk about our similarities and our differences.

We talked a little bit about what is progressive Christianity, and we used one major metaphor of windows. We talked about how God is beyond our sight, God is beyond our comprehension. But God and God's graciousness has been revealed to us in a number of ways. And we have windows onto God, windows onto the divine, and it shows us just a little bit of God, each window does, or some more than others. Just like different windows show us different views, different windows in our faith, whether they come from the Bible, whether they come from our own spirituality, whether they come from church tradition, give us a little bit more of a view of God. Some windows are better than others and some may be even a little distorted, but they all can be helpful and we honor the views of all of those windows.

We talked about the Bible as one of those windows, actually a collection of windows. The different passages and different parts of the Bible provide insight, provide a view of God and we can see different things. And sometimes some Bible passages are more helpful than others, but we don't throw out any part of the Bible. We don't throw out any passage of the Bible just because we don't like that view.

Today we're going to talk a little bit more in depth about how we approach the Bible, how progressive Christianity approaches the Bible, and we're going to do that by looking at one particular window, if you will, one particular passage. Second Samuel starting with chapter six, verse one, and this is in Israel's early history when David was king. And we're reading about transporting the Ark of the Covenant, a very holy relic for the Israelites back into Jerusalem.

David again gathered all the chosen men of Israel, 30,000. David and all the people with him set out and went from Baale-Judah to bring up from there the Ark of God, which is called by the name of the Lord of hosts who is enthroned on the cherubim. They carry the Ark of God on a new cart and brought it out of the house of Abinadab, which was on the hill. Uzzah and Ahio, the sons of Abinadab, were driving the new cart with the Ark of God and Ahio went in front of the Ark and David and all the House of Israel dancing before the Lord with all their might with songs and liars and harps and tambourines and casted nets and symbols.

When they came to the threshing floor of Nacon, Uzzah reached out his hand to the Ark of God and took hold of it for the oxen, shook it. The anger of the Lord was kindled against Uzzah, and God struck him there because he reached out his hand to the Ark and he died there beside the Ark of God. David was angry because the Lord had burst forth with an outburst upon Uzzah." So that place is called Perez-uzzah to this day.

I'm willing to place a small bet that you are not familiar with Uzzah, the son of Abinadab, that this is not a Sunday school story you grew up hearing. This is Uzzah's only mention in all of scripture. And so it's understandable if this is an unfamiliar story, if we didn't know that God killed Uzzah because he reached out and touched the Ark of the Covenant, because he tried to steady it.

Let's go into a little bit more detail. What is the Ark of the Covenant? At this point in Jewish history, there were no temple. There were really weren't synagogues. There weren't established places that people gathered for religious purposes. And so the Ark of the Covenant was all that the Hebrew people had as a physical symbol of where God dwelled. And the Ark of the Covenant was made just shortly after the Hebrew people left Egypt and there are very detailed instructions for how it was to be created, so much so that we can kind of render what it would look like.

This was an important thing for the Hebrew people. This was, important isn't even the right word, sacred for the people of Israel. In some ways they believe God's presence, dwelt in and among the Ark in a unique way. And so this was a very important day, bringing the Ark of the Covenant into Jerusalem. And this was quite a procession. We heard there were 30,000 of the chosen men. There would've been others besides those chosen men as well, and they're dancing and they're singing and they're playing all these instruments. There's another part of scripture that says every six paces they stopped to sacrifice a cow or an oxen. So it did not move very quickly either. This was a really big deal.

Uzzah and his brother, Ahio are in charge of leading this team of oxen, leading the Ark on this cart, pulling it along the road into Jerusalem. There were not paved roads at this point. There were well worn roads, but they're not going to be exactly smooth and they're going to be some sections that are bumpier than other. And they come across one of these sections, and out of concern for the Ark, this holy relic of the Israelites. When it's bumpy and the Ark looks like it's maybe going to fall off, Uzzah reaches out his hand to steady it, a very natural thing to do, very protective thing to do, and as he does, God strikes him dead.

Why? I mean, what do we do with that? There are several answers that scholars have offered throughout the centuries. A traditional answer is under the category of holiness. That there is a holiness about the Ark that is the holiness of God. God is holy in such a way that God can't stand impurities. It's like a physical impossibility for impurity to be in the presence of God. And Uzzah was not ritually prepared to interact with the Ark. And so it wasn't that so much that God chose to kill him that, but that the holiness killed him at that moment.

Another explanation is that Uzzah should have known that God would protect the Ark, that the Ark needed no protection from mortal hands and Uzzah's reaching out shows Uzzah's, lack of faith, lack of trust in God.

I don't know about you, but I'm not happy with either of those answers or the variations that show up there. It does not sit right with me. Why would God kill someone for lack of faith or lack of trust? If that is the case, please don't stand too close to me on certain days. God doesn't find someone who's struggling and doubting and punish them for that. There are plenty of other places in scripture where God honors people's doubt and struggles. The Bible's full of these stories. Moses doubted God. Miriam doubted God, Abraham and Sarah the disciples. Jesus even has a moment or two of questioning God. So what about this holiness thing? Well, if it's like anti-matter and matter kind of, if you're in that sci-fi Star Trek world and the two can't meet otherwise they annihilate each other. I don't think God is a property like that. Where sin is one physical substance and God is another physical substance, and when they come together in any way, shape or form, there's this reaction and there's obliteration.

How do we make sense of this today? And I think this is where we're going to come back to the Bible as a collection of windows, as different passages of scripture, different accounts of scripture, different books of the Bible even show us a certain window of God, a certain view on God of how the people at that time viewed God and how God was revealing God's self to them. So we ask ourselves if this is a window of view on God and it only shows part of the picture, but we honor nonetheless, what can we see through this window? What can we honor through this window?

Before we go further, I want to name a truth, a truth about biblical interpretation for progressive Christians, and actually not just progressive Christians but many Christians across other traditions. We don't always take every story in the Bible, every word in the Bible as 100% accurate, 100% historically accurate. We don't believe that the Bible is the dictated words of God. That God said to someone or God said to a number of people, “write this down word for word. Don't change a thing. These are my exact words. This is exactly how everything happened.”

When we say the Word of God in our tradition and we use a capital W, Word of God, we mean Jesus. We heard Richard read just a moment ago from John chapter one, "In the beginning was the word and the word was God, and the word was with God." There's some Greek going on there and interaction with some Greek philosophy of the day. But when we say Word of God and we capitalize that word, we mean Jesus Christ. That Jesus Christ is the ultimate revelation to us of who God is, that if we want to know most clearly who God is, we look to Jesus. Now, that's tricky because our best understanding of Jesus comes through the Bible, and so sometimes we will say word of God with a lowercase w and we'll be talking about the Bible, but we don't mean in progressive Christianity that it is the dictated, 100% accurate, perfect, without error word of God, but it still shows us the window. It's the best window we have on God. It is the best collection of windows we have on Jesus.

If you've studied the Bible, you realize these windows on God, the various parts of the Bible, they don't always agree with one another. There aren't huge discrepancies, but there are some things, Amy-Jill Levine puts it this way, "In some churches today there's a problem. People are hesitant to voice questions, to say, this doesn't quite cohere. In Matthew and Mark and Luke, the Last Supper's a Passover meal, but in the Gospel of John, it's not, did something go wrong? What about, did Jesus cleanse a temple at the beginning of his ministry? That's in John, or did he do it at the beginning of the passion like in Matthew and Mark? Or maybe he did it twice and it didn't take the first time."

It's true. The Gospel of John has the cleansing the temple three years before Matthew and Mark have it. We can use this. We can do two things. We can do one thing and say, well, which one is right and which one is wrong, and I need to find the right one. Or we can say, you know what? The author of the Gospel of John put that event in Jesus life in his narrative at this point for a reason. I wonder why he did that. The author of the other gospels, they put it at the end of Jesus ministry, say, I wonder why they did that. Let's look at the narrative truth, even if it's not the historical truth. Let's look at the narrative truth and say, why did whomever put this in the Bible, put this story together? Why did they do that? What does that tell us about their understanding of God?

The Jewish people told the story of Uzzah, the son of Abinadab who was killed by God for touching the Ark. We can affirm that we don't think God would do that, but at the same time we can say, well, I wonder why they told this story. I wonder what truth they are trying to share. I wonder why they found it so important to record it. First, pass it on told orally, and then writing it down as part of their holy scriptures.

Now we can continue to use this tricky word “true”, what is true. We can ask if a passage may not be historically true, but is there narrative truth? Can we believe that God did not kill Uzzah for lack of faith? Can we affirm maybe even that God did not kill Uzzah, period, but also affirm that this story shows us a holy truth about the nature of God, something beyond us, something other than human? Can we affirm a view through this window that shows us a powerful God, a God beyond our comprehension, deserving of our awe?

For me, when I start to ask questions like this, there's a voice in my head because of how I was raised in the faith in a little bit different tradition, there's this voice that says, "Shawn, does that mean the Bible isn't true?"

There's a wonderful quote I want to read you here from William Placher suggesting that maybe “is the Bible true” isn't the question we should ask, but maybe “can we trust the Bible?” Placher writes, "Trust provides a good category for thinking about the special attitude Christians take to the Bible. When we trust people, we recognize their jokes as jokes, their metaphors as metaphors, their fishing stories for the tall tales that they are. We also recognize the things they say that really matter, that they won't lead us astray. So it is with the Bible, with all the qualifications duly noted, we can still think that as a guide to Christian faith and life, the Bible won't lead us fundamentally astray. Turning the question, is the Bible true to a question of trust is faithful to the Bible itself. For the Hebrew word we translate as truth carries that connotation of trustworthiness, steadiness, faithfulness, the true person in Hebrew is the one you can trust. So is the true book as well."

The trustworthiness of the Bible relies not on the specific words in scripture, not on the historical details of the story. It relies on the character of God. We trust the Bible because we trust God. So then, it is fair to ask, okay, well, which scriptures are trustworthy? Which passages are jokes and metaphors? And which one can we say, okay, maybe that didn't happen exactly the way? I'm just going to brush through these, but I'll reference where I can find some guidelines for interpreting scriptures from a book I come back to over and over again, probably maybe more than any book that I have in my ministry called Christian Doctrine by Shirley Guthrie. And Dr. Guthrie leaves us with these kind of guidelines.

Scripture is to be in interpreted in light of its own purpose. It's a book of faith. It's a book about God. We don't read the Bible to learn astronomy or biology or economics or philosophy, we read it to learn about God and faith. Scripture finds its fullest expression in the person and works of Jesus. If we read conflicts or tensions or contradictions in the Bible, we look to the life, to the death, to the resurrection of Jesus for clarity. The witness of Christ is the lens that helps us see the rest of scripture clearly.

The Bible is best read in a community. We certainly want to read the Bible in our own personal lives, but not just that, we understand God's words best when we hear other voices helping us interpret.

All of the Bible, all of what we take from the Bible should reflect the rule of love. Love your God and love your neighbor. A trustworthy interpretation of scripture will never promote hatred or anything else but love towards everyone in every situation. And as best we can, we need to understand the time and the place and the context of where scripture was written. Those are those windows into God and into God's people.

So maybe a little bit of homework for you in closing. Maybe sometime today, maybe sometime this week, find 10 to 20 minutes, go somewhere we can relax and not be disturbed. Pick up a Bible and just read from it a little bit. You can read just to a random spot, I would suggest maybe being a little more intentional. Start with one of the gospels or some of the Psalms, maybe a favorite story or passage you have. But just spend some time with reading the Bible. Reading and studying the Bible opens windows into how we view God, it opens windows into our own lives where the spirit can work within us. So I invite you this week and going forward to let God work through you in this way.

Embracing Progressive Christianity - Intro

Sermon given by Rev. Shawn Coons on January 15, 2023

We are beginning a new sermon and worship series this week called Embracing Progressive Christianity. Immediately with the title there are a couple questions that are fair to ask. First, what is progressive Christianity? Second, why embrace it? We're going to cover both of those this morning in this intro. Then for the following several weeks we'll dive into specific areas of what different parts of faith, different parts of our Christian walk look like with progressive Christianity.

But the first question I want to tackle is actually the second question I just asked. Why do we embrace progressive Christianity, or why do we have to label our Christianity at all? We live in a time, many will say, of increasing dividedness, of increasing polarization. There are many ways that we divide ourselves and there are many camps that we put ourselves in, whether that's political, values, religion, even sports.

There are just so many ways we divide ourselves these days. It's a fair question to say, why can't we just be Christian? Why do we have to say I'm this kind of Christian, or I am that kind of Christian? Well, we’ve always done that. In the history of Christianity, when Jesus first started teaching and he had just a couple disciples, maybe there was a unity among them, but I'm willing to bet even then maybe Peter said, "Well, I kind of see what Jesus is saying this way." One of the other disciples, "Well, I kind of think about it this way." Certainly if we go to Paul's letters, and Paul's letters in the New Testament are the earliest New Testament writings we have, we see that Christians had already started to divide themselves.

Paul writes, "I have heard that some of you follow this teaching. I have heard that there's a group of you who understand the Lord's supper to be this way." We see early on in Christian tradition and Christian history, there are different ways of understanding the teachings of Jesus. There are different denominations, there are different traditions. There are all sorts of different churches these days.

When we say we're going to articulate what it means to be a progressive Christian, we are not creating a division, we are not creating something that didn't exist before. We are articulating what this particular group of Christians may believe. Even within progressive Christianity, there will be different opinions.

I'll go one step further and I will say that this is helpful and not divisive. It is helpful when we can respectfully articulate who we are and what we believe.  Whether you're a progressive Christian, whether you're evangelical Christian, whether you're an evangelical progressive Christians (they exist). Whether you're Muslim, Buddhist, atheist, for us to have a respectful dialogue,
“I believe this and I understand spirituality this way.”

“Well, I understand it this way.”

Even if we disagree, if I learn about you and you learn about me, we're not dividing ourselves. We're coming to understand one another. I think about this in this way. Our family recently took a trip to Ethiopia just a couple weeks ago. It's a different country and they do a lot of things differently than we do. We could have pretended those differences didn't exist. But we didn’t.

We would say to our guide, "Solomon, I'm noticing this and this is the way you do it here in Ethiopia. Well we do it this way in America." He's like, "Oh, that's interesting." We talk about those differences and he would learn about America and we would learn about Ethiopia. So articulating the differences didn't create them, instead it brought us closer together.

I hope maybe I've given you at least some leaning into why it's good to talk about what we believe and sometimes even to label what we believe. So now let's jump to what is progressive Christianity? First and foremost, we want to emphasize the Christianity piece. Progressive Christianity is Christian. At its center is Jesus Christ. At its center is Jesus Christ the Son of God. We follow his example, we follow his teachings and we see those most clearly in scripture in the Bible, the Bible for progressive Christians - for most Christians, I hope all Christians is central. It is authoritative, but progressive Christianity will also say God continues to reveal to us.

God didn't stop when the Bible stopped. God continues to work through the Spirit. God continues to work in many ways, speaking to us, speaking to others, speaking through the church. I want to show an example of this, of how God goes beyond scripture using today's scripture passage. We're going to read from Matthew 5:17-20, 38:44

As you listen to the scripture today, listen for Jesus going beyond scripture. For him, relying on scripture, using that as a base, as a foundation, but then adding a new revelation to it.

Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets. I have come not to abolish, but to fulfill. For truly, I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter, not one stroke of a letter will pass from the law until all is accomplished. Therefore, whoever breaks one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven. But whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.

You have heard that it was said an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. But I say to you, do not resist an evil doer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also. If anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well. If anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile. Give to everyone who begs from you and do not refuse anyone who wants to borrow from you. You have heard that it was said, "You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy." But I say to you, "Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you."

“You have heard it said, but I tell you,” Jesus begins this passage by saying, "I'm not here to get rid of the laws. Get rid of the scripture that we as Jewish people find holy. Not here to give or to get rid of what God has given us. I'm here to fulfill it.” But then Jesus goes on. "You have heard it said, but I tell you."

In essence, Jesus is saying, “You've heard it said. This is what God gave us back in Israel, back a number of centuries ago when we were wandering the desert. This is the law that we get us when we were first settling in this land and getting started. This is what God told us in this time and place, and it was a gift from God and it worked. It did what it was supposed to in that time and place, but now it's different. We're moving forward, so we hold that scripture and we add to it and we sometimes even go beyond it.”

Jesus acknowledged the value. Jesus acknowledged the truth of what had been given by God before. But in the same breath, Jesus says, "We're also ready for an additional truth, for a new truth." You have heard it was said, "An eye for an eye, tooth for tooth." That's in scripture, that's in our Old Testament. “But I say to you, do not resist an evil doer. Turn the other cheek. Go the second mile.” Progressive Christianity takes this approach that Jesus takes here with biblical accounts, with biblical passages.

It doesn't pit them against each other. It doesn't say, "Okay, here's one thing in scripture. Here's another thing in scripture. Which one is right? Which one is better? Let's listen only to that one and let's get rid of the other one. Forget it ever existed.” It honors the truth of God's word given to God's people for the time and place it was given. It honors why did God give this to God’s people? Why did God say this? What purpose did it honor?

But it also asks the question does it serve the same purpose today? Sometimes the answer is yes, it does. Sometimes the answer is, well, it functions a little bit differently today and we need to honor that. It takes each of these moments in scripture, each of the passages of scripture and uses them as a window onto God, as a window onto God's purposes. Progressive Christianity understands biblical accounts and passages, church tradition, the world, our own experiences, all as windows upon God and God’s world.

Different windows are going to provide different views. Let's think about literal windows right now. You can have a really big window and you can see a lot out of it. You can have a really small window and not see as much. I'm looking in our sanctuary right now. I can see here in the back and I can see out across the street through the windows on the door. I can't see through that opaque window right there to the street there. Those windows provide different views. Some windows are big, some are small. That is how we view different passages of scripture. That is how we view different teachings of church tradition.

They all provide us a window on God. They all help us see God a little more clearly, but some more clearly than others and some might even be a little distorted or colored. The Bible is a collection of windows, and it's not that one is not a window, and the other is. It's that they show different views and together taking them both into account, we can see God more clearly. For some people though, for some Christians, the Bible isn't so much windows on God, as a glass box that we peer into. Everything that we need to know about God and everything we need to know about humanity is in this glass box of the Bible. If we just look enough, if we just can see enough, then it's there and it's all clear-cut. It's all black and white. It's all the answers we ever are going to need can be found in scripture. It all makes sense together. It's not different windows, it's one clear picture.

For example, some Christians will look at Genesis chapter one and Genesis chapter two, the creation story or some would say the creation stories. In Genesis chapter one that's in the beginning. God said, "Let there be light." And there was light. That was the first day. On the second day, God says, "Oh, separate the water from the land." Now we have land and it goes through six days of creation. Eventually there's animals and birds and things that swim. On the sixth day, God makes humans, male and female. No mention of Adam and Eve by name at this point.

Then we get to Genesis chapter two, and it's a different order to creation. The very first thing that is made is Adam. Then all sorts of animals and creatures to find a companion for Adam. Finally, Eve is made at the end of this story. It's a different order of creation. Some Christians will say, actually, it's not a different order. They'll, in my opinion, perform some mental gymnastics to reconcile the two stories. Say it's just two accounts of the exact same story.  They’ll say it happened literally like that in six 24-hour days about 6000 years ago.

For progressive Christians, many Christians will look at these stories and say they're poetry, they're fables. Not in the sense that they're untrue, but they're not meant to teach us like a textbook how the world is created. They're meant to show us truth about God and humanity. They're both windows and they show different views of God and God's world. We can't necessarily reconcile them and we can't make them into one consistent story, but that's okay.

Progressive Christianity is comfortable with multiple images, multiple understandings of God, including ones that cannot be easily reconciled. Sometimes the easiest example is this division we make, it's not quite a fair division, but I'm going to use it. We say there's God in the Old Testament, and God in the Old Testament is angry. God in the Old Testament wants Israel to wipe out all their enemies. God fights on behalf of Israel. God kills people and armies in the Old Testament.

In the New Testament, God is loving. We hear, turn the other cheek, love your enemies, forgive. We don't see the angry God in the New Testament. We don't see the loving God in the Old Testament. That's not true. I can show you examples the other way, but let's stick with that for the moment. Even if that were true, progressive Christianity says, okay, let's use each on a window and go about God and not try and put one against the other. Is God either an angry God or a loving God? Let's see what each one tells us about God and the time that God revealed these stories and accounts for us. Let's hold them up together. Seeing what each window tells us, even if it brings up more questions, even if we can't answer those questions.

There's a story told by Jaroslav Pelikan of a rabbi who's challenged by one of his students. His student says, "Why is it rabbi that you Rabbis so often put your teachings in the form of a question?" To which the Rabbi replies, "So what's wrong with the question?"

Frustrating, but that's where we are as Christians sometimes. It's not that we don't want the answers to questions. It's not that progressive Christians don't want all our questions answered. Often we do, of course we do. But we realize that may not come and we realize that's okay. We realize it's still okay to ask and name the questions.

As we go forward in this series, that's the one most important thing I want you to hold in your mind about progressive Christianity is these windows into God. We don't think that if we just look through the right window, we will see and know everything there is about God. We keep looking through different windows and keep describing and naming the view we see through each window, even if they look different to us. Even if we can't reconcile two different views, we don't throw one out versus the other.

Progressive Christianity does this with other windows on the world. The easiest example is science. Progressive Christianity says that science can teach us things about the world and how the world works, that our faith may not be able to.  We will honor science and what it can teach and what it can provide. It's another window on the world. Other areas of expertise, mental health, for example. We'll honor mental health professionals, physical health professionals.

We take this concept of windows, especially windows on the divine, into our understanding of other faiths. Progressive Christianity honors other faiths. We have limited views of windows on the divine, and it's possible that other faiths have their windows on the divine too. Maybe looking through their windows, we can learn some things about our Christian faith. This is not the same as saying all religions are the same. This is not the same as saying, we all have our own paths to God and they're all equally valid and they're the same.

As a Christian, I find that offensive. If I was here talking with a Muslim or a Buddhist, I would guess many of them would find that offensive too. Each of our faiths, each of our religions has distinct values and aspects of it that make it beautiful and unique. To say and equate that all religions are just the same, dishonors all religions.

Two final points, and we're going to build on these in Sundays to come. Progressive Christianity lifts up biblical values of peace and justice, care for the environment and inclusion. These are the themes that are going to be stressed heavily by progressive Christians. Along with those values of peace and care for the environment and inclusion, a lot of those are based in action, as much as they are in belief.

Progressive Christianity definitely is a lived faith. It's not just about what we intellectually ascent to. It's not just about a correct set of doctrines and beliefs. Progressive Christianity is heavily invested in what does your faith lead you to do? How does your faith lead you to show God's love in the world? How does your faith lead you to care for the world God has provided? How does your faith lead you to include all of God's children?

I hope you will join us on the next four Sundays as we continue to explore these topics. Specifically, we'll talk about progressive Christianity, salvation and other faiths. We'll talk about the environment, we'll talk about inclusion, we'll talk about progressive Christianity and politics, and we'll talk about progressive Christianity and the Bible. I look forward to learning more alongside you.

How Do You Vote Your Faith? - Week 2

October 25, 2020

Voting is a moral act that shapes the lives and well-being of the people in our nation and potentially around the world.  We talked about this last week as we worked to understand that as Christians we are called to seek God’s will in all areas of life. We are called to love, have compassion, and seek justice and safety for all people, and one way of doing this is through our vote and our political activity.

I think Christians from many traditions and perspectives can agree that our faith should influence our politics.  But where we may start to disagree is when our faith calls us to act, how we are called to act, on which issues, which position, and which candidate.  For churches, often the rule of thumb has been that the church should stay out of politics unless it involves something that we can all agree on.  Maybe we shouldn’t involve our faith in the controversial, hot-button issues, but stick with things that we can all agree on, like ending hunger.  So we choose to be political only when it’s safe, and it doesn’t cause waves.

But I’m not so sure this is the right approach.  If we wait to act on an important issue until everybody agrees on it, is there much point in acting?  Isn’t the point of speaking out to make a statement that can help guide and lead people?   Shouldn’t our faith guide us to be shapers of public opinion rather than followers?

Let me bring this morning’s second reading into this conversation.  We’ll be reading a passage from Luke 4:14-30.  This is near the beginning of Jesus’s ministry as it is recorded in Luke.  Jesus has just started teaching, preaching, and working some miracles in a few cities.  Then he comes to Nazareth, his hometown.

When Jesus came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, he went to the synagogue on the sabbath day, as was his custom. He stood up to read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written:

‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.’

 And he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. Then he began to say to them, ‘Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.’ All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth. They said, ‘Is not this Joseph’s son?’ He said to them, ‘Doubtless you will quote to me this proverb, “Doctor, cure yourself!” And you will say, “Do here also in your home town the things that we have heard you did at Capernaum.” ’

 And he said, ‘Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in the prophet’s home town. But the truth is, there were many widows in Israel in the time of Elijah, when the heaven was shut up for three years and six months, and there was a severe famine over all the land; yet Elijah was sent to none of them except to a widow at Zarephath in Sidon. There were also many lepers in Israel in the time of the prophet Elisha, and none of them was cleansed except Naaman the Syrian.’

 When they heard this, all in the synagogue were filled with rage. They got up, drove him out of the town, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they might hurl him off the cliff. But he passed through the midst of them and went on his way.

 You’ve heard the expression “and the crowd turned on him.” This passage is a stark example of that.  Jesus is reading and teaching in the synagogue and at first the passage says they were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth. That’s pretty impressive, but a short time later his words filled them with rage, and they tried to throw him off a cliff.  I’ve had some bad sermons in my 20 years of ministry, and I’ve made some people angry on occasion, but thankfully I’ve never had an angry mob turn on me to throw me off a cliff.

 There’s a very quick turnaround in the crowd’s attitude towards Jesus. For anyone who has ever given a speech or a talk that hasn’t gone over well, you know when it’s not working by seeing the reactions of your audience.  I imagine Jesus first saw a couple raised eyebrows, “What are you talking about Jesus?”  Then probably some scowls, maybe a couple loaded glances between people in the crowd.  And I’m guessing eventually it became audible: People shouting out “Enough!’ or “Shut up!”

But what did he do or say that got that reaction? Why did they get angry? There are a couple of possibilities. It might have been what he said. He read from the book of Isaiah proclaiming release to the captives, sight to the blind, letting the oppressed go free, and proclaiming the year of Jubliee – when debts are forgiven.  Captives in prison were often put in jail because of debts they owed but couldn’t repay.  Maybe the crowd didn’t like the idea of debts being forgiven without being repaid.  Maybe they wanted to hear more about themselves and less about the poor and the captives.

It’s also possible that they got angry because they heard Jesus was performing signs and miracles in other towns, but for whatever reason, he refused to do so here in his hometown.  Then there are the two Old Testament stories he referenced where the prophets Elijah and Elisha worked miracles for foreigners instead of for Jews.  Was Jesus saying, “I may be Jewish, but I’m here for the outsiders, not just us Jews?”

Whatever the specific reason for their anger and rage, it probably had something to do with Jesus disappointing them.  He didn’t say or do what they expected him to say or do.  They went to hear Jesus expecting him to validate their expectations, to agree with them, to confirm their beliefs, but that’s not what happened.

One lesson we can take from this in regards to faith and politics is that God, the Bible, our faith – they aren’t always going to conform to our politics. Put another way, (pic 1 - gospel) the gospel will not always confirm your positions or politics, if it does then it’s not the gospel.  There is a saying about the Bible, “Sometimes it comforts the disturbed. Sometimes it disturbs the comfortable.  (end pic 1) There are times in our lives, circumstances we are in, where we are the disturbed in need of comfort, but there are other moments when we are the comfortable in need of disturbing.  For white America this summer’s Black Lives Matters protest and movement was one of those times where many of us were far too comfortable and needed disturbing.  If the protests were not comforting to us and we turned to scripture for comfort, a true reading of the Bible would not bring us the easy comfort desired. Instead we might be disturbed to find we had ignored the Bible’s call to stand up for and stand with the marginalized and the oppressed.  Our faith should have been a call to action not a pacifier to soothe us.

Given this, there are questions that you need to ask of yourself. “What are you going to do when the gospel doesn’t tell you what you want to hear?”  What are you going to do when your beliefs, your personal politics, is not supported in scripture.  Are you going to listen?  Are you going to think about it, learn about it, pray about it?  Or are you going to look for the nearest cliff?  If we aren’t willing to be disturbed sometimes then we better find a new faith.

As Christians, God disturbs us from comfort sometimes.  And…there are also times when we are called to be the ones doing the disturbing.  That’s what Jesus did in today’s passage. He disturbed that crowd something fierce.  David Lose, professor at Luther seminary writes this about this passage:

You see, it really is all Jesus’ fault – he goes and does the one thing you’re never supposed to do, even to strangers, let alone to friends and neighbors: He tells them the truth, the truth about their pettiness and prejudice, their fear and shame, their willingness, even eagerness, to get ahead at any cost, even at the expense of another. And so, they want him gone in the most permanent of ways.

And let’s face it; that’s pretty much the way it usually is. Because this text, and Luke’s whole gospel for that matter, isn’t about Jews or Romans, it isn’t about Nazarenes or Jerusalemites. No, it’s about every race and nationality, about all the crowds of every time and place who, when they meet one who tells them the truth about themselves, will go to almost any length to silence the messenger. For from the prophets of Israel to our own prophet, Martin Luther King, Jr., it’s not just the keepers of the dream that get rejected, beaten, and shot, but the tellers of the truth as well.

Martin Luther King Jr. was a teller of truth, Jesus was a teller of truth, we are called to be tellers of truth, even if it’s not a popular truth, even if it disturbs people.  I wonder - if someone isn’t trying to hurl us off a cliff every now and then, are we really living the gospel and speaking the truth, or are we just after our own comfort, like the people in Nazareth?  We know what happened to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., when his faith led him to stand for justice and equality for Black Americans, but he wasn’t alone. 

(pic 2 – statue) This statue, entitled “Three Ministers Kneeling,” is in a park in Birmingham, AL.  It depicts the moment when three ministers, John Thomas Porter, Nelson H. Smith and Alfred D. King, kneeled to the ground to pray when confronted by Public Safety Commissioner Bull Connor and the Birmingham police.  The ministers and others were there to protest the jailing of civil rights leaders including Martin Luther King Jr.  By kneeling, they took a stand as Christians.  With the help of their faith, they disturbed the peace, because justice needed to be done.

Now we should never set out simply to make people angry, just to disturb people, it should always be for a purpose.  We speak out and sometimes act up when other means of advocating for change aren’t working.  Our passage today begins with Jesus following the customs and traditions of the day.  It was the sabbath, and Jewish men were expected to go to synagogue, expected to read from the scriptures when asked to.  They were expected to stand to read and sit to teach or comment. Jesus did all these things, he got along with people…until he didn’t. And when he didn’t, it was because the matter at hand needed to be addressed, even if it was difficult or made people angry. 

There is a time and a place where our faith calls us to stand up, speak out, take to the streets, or call a congressperson.  The hard part is knowing when we are called to do so.  The highest governing body in the Presbyterian Church is the General Assembly, made up of hundreds of ministers and church members from across the country,  In 1958 the General Assembly met and affirmed a statement on the need for the church to speak out and confront difficult issues, and when it is necessary to do so.

(pic 3 – GA) The General Assembly “affirms its conviction that neither the Church as the body of Christ, nor Christians as individuals, can be neutral or indifferent toward evil in the world; affirms its responsibility to speak on social and moral issues for the encouragement and instruction of the Church and its members, seeking earnestly both to know the mind of Christ and to speak always in humility and love; reminds the churches that their duty is not only to encourage and train their members in daily obedience to God’s will, but corporately to reveal God’s grace in places of suffering and need, to resist the forces that tyrannize, and to support the forces that restore the dignity of all men as the children of God, for only so is the gospel most fully proclaimed; . . .” (1958 Statement – PC(USA), p. 537). (end pic 3)

This statement gives us guidance and help for understanding when it is important to stand up and speak out.  If staying silent means being indifferent or neutral to evil, then it’s not a time to be silent.  When the values of our faith - love, compassion, justice and safety for all - when those values provide guidance on social and moral issues, then we should speak humbly and offer that guidance.  If political action can be taken to address suffering and need, especially of the most marginalized, then it is our time to act.  The church is called to be at work to support forces that restore the dignity of all and resists forces that tyrannize.

Forces that tyrannize.  In the mid 1930’s in Germany the Nazi Power and Adolf Hitler were on the rise.  Their government pressured the churches to “aryanize” there congregations by expel any of their members of suspected Jewish ancestry. Churches were also pressured to accept what was called, “the Fuhrer Principle,” which, stated simply said: Hitler is Germany and Germany is Hitler. Hitler alone can save Germany and whatever he does is right and successful.  The Fuhrer Principle even went as far as to say that Hitler has a divine blessing from God.

Many Christian churches in Germany went along with this, but some churches led by theologian Karl Barth, pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and others did not.  They wrote The Barmen Declaration which rejected any claim of leadership of the church other than God and Jesus.  The Barmen Declaration spoke against those German churches that yielded to and even endorsed Hitler’s plans which were clearly against all that Christ stood for.  Bonhoeffer and others who wrote and endorsed the Barmen Declaration, stood up and stood against Hitler and the Nazi party.  For that, they were imprisoned and executed in concentration camps.

Today, our lives are not in peril if we speak out, but we are still called to take a stand for the dignity of all people, and like the Barmen Declaration we reject calls to put our ultimate faith and hope in any candidate or party, especially if they claim they are the only one who can save us.  Our ultimate hope lies in Jesus.

Election day is nine days away.  I ask you to be in prayer for our country, in prayer for all its elected leaders and candidates for office, in prayer for us as citizens.  And when you vote, I pray that your vote will be an act of faith. Expressing all that God wants for our country and for our world.

Let us pray: God, we thank you for the freedoms we have in our country, including the freedom to determine who will govern us.  Guide us and help us discern how to serve you in all areas of our life.  In your name we pray, Amen.

How Do You Vote Your Faith? Week 1

Sixteen days from now is election day.  Millions of Americans have already voted by mail and by early voting.  There are stories of polling places all across the country where people are waiting hours in line to cast their vote.  Here in Indianapolis over 50,000 voters have already cast their votes by mail or in person. I saw a video on the Indy Star website of the downtown polling location.  The camera started at the front of the City-County building and took several minutes to follow the line back hundreds of people and several blocks until it reached the end.  Thankfully, next Saturday, the 24th, several more early voting locations will open.  You can visit vote.indy.gov/early-voting to learn more.

Every presidential election is important, but for many this year’s election seems even more crucial and momentous.  We are electing the president for the next four year, but there are many other offices on the ballot. U.S. Senators and Representatives, state legislatures, governors, and mayors.  We are in the middle of a deadly pandemic that has killed hundreds of thousands of Americans. Many people’s financial and employment situations are tenuous at best.  This election also takes place amidst a time of great division in our country, where people can’t even agree on basic facts and everyday reality.

Anxiety about the election is very high right now.

Given how much the election is dominating our thoughts right now and looming over much of society, it makes sense that we talk about it as a church and as Christians.  What is the role of the church in an election?  What is the role of a Christian during an election?  Or as the title of this message says, “How Do You Vote Your Faith?”

Some people believe that religion and politics should be separate.  But politicians on all sides of the aisle are very explicit about bringing faith into the election. Trump has declared that he has saved Christianity, has gone out of his way to be seen with religious leaders, and had a controversial photo op in front of a church in Washington D.C. holding a Bible.  Joe Biden’s campaign has emphasized Biden’s Catholic faith and practices. Each night of both Democratic and Republican conventions included opening prayers as part of the program.

Candidates have brought their faith into politics, but we only have to turn to the Bible to see that the scriptures themselves are not silent about politics, and neither was Jesus.

We’ll be hearing from Jesus in our second reading this morning, which comes from Mark 12:13-17.  This passage is one of three similar passages that all take place in the Temple, where certain religious and community leaders of the day try to trick Jesus into saying something damaging to his movement by presenting him with situations with no easy answers.

Then they sent to [Jesus] some Pharisees and some Herodians to trap him in what he said. And they came and said to him, ‘Teacher, we know that you are sincere, and show deference to no one; for you do not regard people with partiality, but teach the way of God in accordance with truth. Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor, or not? Should we pay them, or should we not?’ But knowing their hypocrisy, he said to them, ‘Why are you putting me to the test? Bring me a denarius and let me see it.’ And they brought one. Then he said to them, ‘Whose head is this, and whose title?’ They answered, ‘The emperor’s.’ Jesus said to them, ‘Give to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.’ And they were utterly amazed at him.

It was an impossible question: “Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor or not?”  Now when they said “lawful” they didn’t mean according to civil law, Roman law.  They meant according to Jewish law.  “Does God want us to pay taxes to the Romans?”  They were basically asking him, “To whom should our allegiance be, to God or to Caesar?”

If Jesus says, “Yes. We should pay taxes,” then they can get him into trouble with some of his followers.  There were some groups within 1st century Judaism that thought paying taxes broke Jewish law, specifically two of the ten commandments forbidding worship of other gods and making idols.  The coins, as we see later in the passage, had the graven image of Caesar on it. Often the coins had inscriptions that attributed some form of divinity to Caesar.  We don’t know which exact coin Jesus was shown in this passage, but this is a coin of similar value from the 1st century. On it is inscribed the image of Caesar Tiberius on one side and his wife, Livia, on the other – depicted as the goddess Pax.  Inscribed on Caesar’s side is, “Caesar Augustus Tiberius, son of the Divine Augustus.”  So Some Jews believed that paying taxes with these kind of coins was the same as worshipping other gods.

If Jesus says that taxes should be paid, he could be alienating part of his followers.  To use a modern political analogy it’s like trying to get Joe Biden on record saying that he won’t support the Green New Deal or universal healthcare, because if he doesn’t support those he may alienate potential voters.

Well, what if Jesus just says that Jews shouldn’t pay taxes to Rome?  Well, then he gets in trouble with Rome, right?  He’s advocating sedition!  There’s no good answer. They are going to use his words against him either way.  What is Jesus to do?

Well, like many great teachers, he doesn’t give a simple yes or no. Instead he asks to see a denarius, a common coin.  He asks whose image is on it, and when they answer, “Caesar,” he says a phrase that we are now familiar with, “Give to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”

And in my opinion, this is one of the clearest statements that Jesus gives about the relationship of the church to government, the relationship of faith to politics.  “Give to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”  With this statement Jesus declares that there are things that are the jurisdiction, the responsibility of the government, but there are also things that are the jurisdiction, the responsibility of God, and as people of faith we have responsibilities to both.

Although it’s interesting to note that Jesus doesn’t specify what things belong to Caesar and what things belong to God…or does he?  Let’s take a closer look.  Jesus says that the coin, which bears the image of Caesar belongs to Caesar, so then it makes sense that those things that bear the image of God belong to God.  That could be confusing because Judaism explicitly forbids making images of God.  There are no coins, no currency that are printed with God’s image.  Where do we find God’s image?  Where do we find God’s image?

Then God said, ‘Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.’ So God created humankind in God’s image, in the image of God they were created; male and female God created them.

“In the image of God they were created.” Caesar may get all the coins, but humanity belongs to God.  There are things that are Caesar’s and there are things that are God’s.  This is one of the tenants of our faith when it comes to how we deal with politics. Our Presbyterian tradition has affirmed that the church and the government each have their roles and appropriate functions, and we would do well not to confuse them.  But our highest allegiance is not to our government, not to a flag, not to our nation, but to God. 

What functions belong to the government and what functions belong to the church?  Our tradition teaches us that the government makes laws and enforces them.  It is not up to the church to determine what is legal and what is not, even if we’d like something to be a law.  Blue laws are a good example.  Not too long ago many cities and states had laws against businesses being open on Sunday, because Sunday was the Christian sabbath – a day for worship and honoring God.  That may seem like a good thing, and it is to many Christians. But the Christian church should not be part of making laws that force people who aren’t Christian to follow Christian teachings. No church should be able to do that.  How would we feel if businesses were closed from Friday evening until Saturday evening to observe the Jewish Shabbat?

In a similar fashion the government shouldn’t make laws restricting the practicing of Christian faith, or any other faith.  There are countries around the world that forbid wearing religious clothing or symbols, or symbols or clothing from certain religions.  Our tradition says that that is the government overstepping its role and moving into things that belong to God. 

Of course, these matters aren’t so simple sometimes.  There are times when the government has good reason to restrict the practice of religion.  We are living in one of these times right now.  It is appropriate for the government to restrict in-person worship services in the time of a pandemic, as they restrict other gatherings of people.  And there are times when the church, and individual Christians, should be trying to shape laws or advocating for particular issues.

As Presbyterians we do draw a clear line at not endorsing, supporting, or opposing candidates for elected office.  One reason for this is that to do so would be violating the requirements we have as a tax-exempt religious organization, but we do it for a more important reason as well.  If the church becomes partisan - simply attaching itself to one political party or another, then we have traded God’s guidance and will for a party platform.  There is no one party, or single candidate, that speaks for God.

But that being said, Bishop Michael Curry, who is the Presiding Bishop in the Episcopal church, shared some powerful words in a sermon he gave on the role of the church and Christians in the time of an election. He said that “Partisan neutrality does not equal moral neutrality.” 

Partisan neutrality does not equal moral neutrality.  (end pic 4) Bishop Curry goes on to say that an election, especially for president, is a contest of ideas about how to shape the future of a nation, and to some degree that future of the world.  It is a contest of moral values and their relationship to public policy.  Think about it; the results of an election will shape the lives and well-being of millions of people.  That means that voting, that means that your vote, is an act of moral agency.  It matters who we elect to make and enforce our laws.

When we vote, when we advocate for public policy and specific legislation, we are acting on our faith.  Christian faith teaches love, justice, and compassion. Jesus calls us to seek the good and the welfare of all people, even the stranger, and even our enemies.  And sometimes, often, we can’t love our neighbor or love the stranger, without advocating for just and compassionate laws and lawmakers on their behalf.

Several years ago, Matthew Tully wrote an Indy Star article on School 93 and the new principal there, Nicole Fama.  He wrote about the first day of school and one child in particular.  Tully wrote:

On Monday morning, a first-grader walked into the building and got a hello from Fama, who noticed that the boy’s new basketball shoes were on the wrong feet. “Sweetie,” she said, “let’s fix your shoes.” He did and walked away, toward his classroom, not saying a word. A minute later, though, he was back. And now he was sobbing.

“I want to go back home,” he said, tears streaming. “I want to see my mom.”

For the next several minutes, Fama brought the boy back from his sadness. She assigned him to be her helper, giving him her iPhone to watch, even letting him read text messages for her. She asked him to walk a kindergartener to class at one point and later told him about her two dogs. It’s all about building relationships and trust, she said later.

Within minutes, the student was calm and sharing his story. Here it is: This 7-year-old boy, on the first day of school, got up by himself, got dressed by himself, looked for something to eat by himself, and then walked to school. By himself. All without seeing his mom or another adult.

“Can you imagine?” Fama asked.

I can’t.  That story breaks my heart and brings tears to my eyes each time I read it.  But do you know what’s going to help the first-grader, and other students like him?  It’s not enough if we volunteer our time in schools like his.  It’s not enough to support great programs like our REAL reading program at School 43.  What is going to help him and the hundreds of thousands of children in similar situations is your vote as an act of faith and a moral act.  Your vote that supports lawmakers and laws that work to help those in need. Your vote that supports lawmakers willing to acknowledge and address the racism that has been part of our society and government for centuries.  Your vote that helps to create laws that enable accessible jobs that pay a living wage, so single moms don’t have to work two jobs to barely have enough money for rent.

What is the role of a Christian during an election? What is the role of the church?  It certainly isn’t to “stay out of politics,” because voting isn’t simply a political act, it’s a moral act, and it’s an act that expresses our love for neighbor and stranger.  It is an act that expresses how strongly we believe in God’s call to love, compassion, and justice.  Beliefs are shown more strongly in actions than they are in words, and what we do in the voting booth shows what we really believe.

Last Hours - Week 1 (March 1) - The Last Supper

Last Hours - The Third Supper

Pastor Shawn Coons