Faith – Page 10 – Where the Wind…

A Resounding Yes

Published on September 1, 2014April 7, 2017 by Adam Thomas2 Comments

Sermon for Sunday, August 31, 2014 || Proper 17A || Exodus 3:1-15

I’ll tell you all the truth: I’ve been struggling lately. The day the twins were born, about a month ago now, life took a dramatic turn. I knew this tectonic shift in life was going to happen, but I sure wasn’t prepared for it. At times over the past month, I have felt helpless. I have felt frantic. I have felt desperately inadequate. The learning curve for new parenthood is steep, and I’ve had to adjust my expectations about how fast I catch on. I’ve always been a quick study, but in this particular case, there’s no substitute for the exhausting daily grind of caring for the twins. I guess what I’m trying to say is that I knew it was going to be hard, but my definition of “hard” has never reached the superlative level of caring for multiple newborns.

Of course, there is joy, too. And love – so much love that it leaks from my tear ducts when I gaze upon their sleeping faces. But both joy and love often get buried under the weight of bone-wearying exhaustion, and at the end of the day or at the end of the night – and with newborns they are pretty much the same thing – all you can say is, “We survived.” And you’re too tired most of the time to appreciate that survival, in itself, is a pretty astounding gift.

In light of the last month, I read our passage from the Hebrew Scriptures this week with new eyes. I have read the story of Moses and the burning bush hundreds of times, but this time around new words shimmered for me. My feeling of desperate inadequacy led me to see the same feeling in Moses. Today’s story takes place on Mount Horeb, but let’s back up and see how Moses got there.

After growing up the adopted son of Pharaoh’s daughter, Moses was caught between two worlds, the life of privilege of the king’s house and the life of slavery of Moses’s family of origin. One day Moses visits the work camps and sees an Egyptian beating a Hebrew. While the book of Exodus skips Moses’s upbringing, we can easily conjure a scenario where he had no firsthand knowledge of the plight of his people before this. Sure he heard rumors, but they were easily dismissed by his Egyptian family. Then he sees for himself the rumors are true, and his sense of betrayal mingles with his sense of justice. Moses secretly kills the offending Egyptian. But such an act cannot stay secret for long, and when Pharaoh finds out, Moses flees.

Settling in the land of Midian, Moses meets his wife at a well (which is where everyone meets his spouse in the Hebrew Scriptures). Zipporah brings Moses home to her father, who takes him in and teaches him to be a shepherd. A long time passes, and Moses finds himself with the flock beyond the wilderness on the mountain. God calls to him from the burning bush and gives Moses the task of delivering God’s people from the hands of the Egyptians. And this is where Moses’s feeling of desperate inadequacy rises to the surface. He asks, “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh, and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?”

You can see where Moses is coming from. He’s been gone so long. Who would remember him? He wasn’t even raised among his own people. Who would accept him? Later, he mentions he’s not a very persuasive talker. Who would listen to him? All of these worries and fears boil under the surface of Moses’s question. But God stops Moses in his tracks.

And here we must pause for a moment for an aside. Whenever you read the Bible, I want you to pay especially close attention to how questions are answered. More often than not questions are not answered directly in scripture. When God in the Hebrew Scriptures and Jesus in the Gospel answer questions, they often answer the one they wish they had been asked, rather than the one that was asked. So – Bible study tip – pay special attention to how questions are answered.

So let’s turn this special attention to Moses’s question. Moses asks, “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh?” His feeling of deep inadequacy weighs the question down. But God lifts him back up with the answer. “I will be with you.”

This doesn’t answer the question Moses asked. “Who am I?” he pleads. And the response. “I will be with you.” The question God answered, the question God wished Moses had asked, was: “Will you be with me?” And the answer: a resounding “Yes.”

God’s answer to this question reverberates throughout the Bible. God shows Abraham the way through the desert to a new home. God comes to Elijah not in the storm but in the sound of sheer silence. God descends into the den of lions with Daniel. God gives Jesus a second name, Emmanuel, which means, “God with us.”

And so when I read the story of Moses and the burning bush in the light of my own desperate inadequacy this past month, I realize I have been asking the wrong question. Like Moses, I have been asking, “Who am I? Who am I that I should be able to accomplish the task of helping to care for these two precious lives?” But that’s not the question God is answering right now.

Instead, God has prompted me to ask the question God yearned for me to ask all along: not “Who am I” but “Will you be with me?” And God has answered that question with the same resounding “Yes” which God promised Moses. Yes, I am with you in the helping hands and loving hearts of the friends and family who have given countless hours of their time. Yes, I am with you when you breathe deeply in moments of serenity and when your patience stretches past the breaking point when the crying won’t stop. Yes, I am with you in the peace that comes from a few hours of treasured sleep. Yes, I am with…always.

The feeling of desperate inadequacy can paralyze us. Perhaps a challenge seems too big for us to even begin to grasp. Perhaps we’ve been down a certain road before and failed. Perhaps we’re facing something new and the fear of the unknown cripples us. Whatever the case, we can begin to move past our inadequacy or whatever else is holding us back by changing the question we ask of God. Rather than asking, “Who am I to take care of my aging parents”; or “Who am I to be able to find friends at my new school”; or “Who am I to make the slightest difference in a world full of pain”; rather than asking, “Who am I” ask the question God yearns for you to ask.

Ask, “Will you be with me?” And believe in the deepest core of your being that the answer to that question is always and will always be, “Yes.” When you hear that “Yes” resound in your core, you will begin to see with new eyes and reach out with less burdened arms and discover all the ways God is already using you to shine God’s light in this darkened world, no matter the inadequacy you feel.

I still feel inadequate when the twins start crying. I’m still exhausted most of the time. But we’re doing it. One day becomes the next, and that in itself is a gift, as is God prompting me to change the question I was asking, so that God could answer with a resounding “Yes.”

The Faith System

Published on August 18, 2014September 1, 2014 by Adam Thomas1 Comment

Sermon for Sunday, August 17, 2014 || Proper 15A || Matthew 10:21-28

Good morning! It’s good to be back after three weeks away. I know I’ve only been next door, but it seems like another world when newborns are filling all your waking (and the few sleeping) moments. I seriously thought about skipping this sermon entirely and just showing you baby pictures for the next ten minutes, but then I realized lemonade on the lawn might be a better venue for that. So, let’s get down to the sermon.

Having newborns in the house has a way of making you get back to basics. It’s not easy to care for them, but it is simple. Feed. Change. Soothe. Try to catch a few zz’s. Repeat. Likewise, today I’d like to get back to one of the basics of following Jesus Christ. I’m going to talk about faith – specifically about how faith works in our lives. Hopefully, at the end of this sermon we will all rejoice that, while faith seems like an abstract, ephemeral concept, faith is in truth the fuel that fires our lives.

To start this little discussion about faith, we need to clear up one minor issue. In the English language the word “faith” is a noun. This grammatical construction makes it normal for us to ask a question like “Do you have faith?” Faith here is the object of your possession: “Yes, I have faith.” This sounds like completely correct and acceptable English, right? The trouble is, while faith is a noun, it should be a verb. I should be able to say “I’m going faith-ing today” or “We faith-ed yesterday and we’re going to faith again tomorrow.” But those sentences sound really strange, don’t they? I wish they didn’t. The word “faith” is a noun but whenever you use it, I hope you will remember it should be a verb.

Here’s why. We can possess things like concert tickets and hiking boots, but such possessions just sit on the counter or in the closet until we need to use them. If we have faith in the same way we have concert tickets, then we run the risk of storing our faith in the kitchen cupboard until we think we need it. But faith doesn’t work like that. Faith cannot be stored up or hoarded. We might get into situations where we say, “If I just had a little more faith…” But this turns faith into a commodity, something we can trade for something else. That’s not how faith works.

Thinking of faith as a verb removes it from the kitchen cupboard and puts it in our actions. We cannot store up or hoard our actions like we can our possessions. Rather, each action tumbles into the next in a never-ending stream. The problem we run into here is that, since the word faith isn’t actually a verb, we have trouble imagining what faith as action looks like. You know exactly what I mean when I say, “I saw someone running on my walk to church this morning.” But you’d have difficulty conjuring up the image if I said, “I saw someone faith-ing on my walk to church this morning.”

Because of this difficulty, I’d like to invite you to imagine with me a reality that we don’t often think about. When God created animals, God gave us all sorts of biological systems that allow us to live. The respiratory system lets us breath, the circulatory system cycles our blood through our bodies, the digestive system turns food into nutrients. There’s the nervous system, the endocrine system, the lymphatic system and so on. But we were made in God’s image and likeness, which means we have one more system that other animals don’t have. We have a spiritual one to go along with all our biological ones. We have a faith system.

The faith system works a lot like our muscular system. We all have muscles. We need our muscles to do simple tasks like getting out of bed, standing up, even smiling. We also need our muscles to do more difficult tasks like running a marathon or lugging a couch to a third floor walkup. Exercising hones and strengthens our muscles, making them more durable and less likely to fatigue. But whether we exercise or not, our muscles still put in work day in and day out.

So, too, with our faith system. The faith system spurs us to seek out life-affirming relationships, to support one another in our daily walks with God, to reach out to those in need, to welcome anyone into our midst, and to share with them the good news of God’s love. The faith system also sustains us through dry, desolate periods, giving us enough endurance not to give up quite yet. Like our muscles, our faith can get weary and fatigued. But also like our muscles, we can exercise our faith to hone and strengthen it, to make it more a part of our actions and less a thing sitting on the shelf in the kitchen cupboard.

If we’re going to exercise our faith, then we should figure out exactly what we mean when we say the word. We’ve already said how faith is a noun that should be a verb. Faith then is the action that happens when we participate in our relationships with God. Faith borrows the best parts of trust, confidence, humility, and zeal and molds them into our response to God’s presence in our lives. From trust, our faith borrows the willingness to give ourselves over to the power of another. From confidence, our faith borrows the courage to take the leap into God’s waiting arms. From humility, our faith borrows the recognition that God (and not we ourselves) initiates the action that results in the giving of ourselves up to God. And from zeal, our faith borrows the passion actually to get going and do something.

In today’s Gospel lesson, the Canaanite woman actively engages her faith system. She trusts that Jesus can help her. She has courage actually to do something about that trust, even in the midst of the disciples’ and Jesus’ own dismissal of her. She shows humility when she kneels before Jesus, calls him “Lord,” and asks for help. And her passion erupts when she counters Jesus’ statement about the children’s food. All she needs is a crumb, she says, a scrap discarded to the floor. Jesus calls her faith “great.” But no matter how great our faith is, we each have a faith system that God gave us so we would be able to join God in relationship. The more we exercise our faith system – the more we act out our faith – the deeper can we go in our relationships with God.

Imagine if we exercised our faith in the same way we exercise our muscles. Going to the gym once doesn’t do much, but going every other day can work wonders on our bodies. God yearns for us to have this kind of dedication to our lives of faith. When we are serious about exercising our faith systems, we build time into every day to be in prayer with God. We start with faith and allow it to motivate all our other actions. We take part in the act of worship, both on Sunday mornings and in the moments of our days when our faith shows us special signs of God’s presence that our eyes alone might not see.

I invite you today to remember that faith is not a commodity or a possession. Faith is the active component of our relationships with God. Faith is a noun but in our lives let’s make it a verb.

—

* Art: detail from “Allegory of Faith” by Tintoretto (c. 1564)

Walk on Together

Published on June 30, 2014July 14, 2014 by Adam ThomasLeave a comment

Sermon for Sunday, June 29, 2014 || Proper 8A || Genesis 22:1-14

(I forgot to hit the button on my recording device this week, so it’s just text this time around.)

As I contemplate my impending fatherhood, the story of the binding of Isaac, which we read a few minutes ago, has taken on new meaning for me. I’ve always struggled with this story, and, if you’ve ever read or heard it, I’m sure you have, too. This reading from the Hebrew Scripture brings up so many questions: why would God ever test someone in such a barbaric way? How could God be so apparently abusive? How could Abraham even think about going through with it? If the angel hadn’t stopped him, would Abraham actually have killed his son? What would that prove?

We could spend this and many more sermons attempting to explain (and only succeeding in explaining away) such difficult questions. We could say that people experienced God differently back then, but that wouldn’t satisfy us. We could say that this story simply narrates the move from human to animal sacrifice, which, in future generations, distinguished the Israelites from many of their neighbors. This is a little better, but such academic aloofness doesn’t account for the tenderness of the relationship displayed between Abraham and Isaac. We could say so many things in order to feel okay about this story, but, despite the happy ending, something will still not sit right. Indeed, the Jewish rabbis have been struggling with the binding of Isaac for millennia; one sermon from me isn’t going to put a dent in that effort.

But I have to say something, so here goes. Often, when a story in the Bible makes us feel uncomfortable, we have a tendency to dismiss it: to flip the page, wipe the offending verses from our memory banks, and move on as if they never existed. However, if we take the time, like the Jewish rabbis, to struggle with the difficult passages instead of ignoring them, we can hear the Holy Spirit whispering good news to us, even in the midst of the struggle. I heard such a whisper of good news this week when I read the binding of Isaac over and over again in preparation for this sermon.

The whisper of good news started when, as I said, I began reading the story through the lens of my impending fatherhood. I expected to be horrified by Abraham’s action as I have been in the past; by the “I was only following orders” defense Abraham would have had to give Sarah when he got home, had he gone through with it. Strangely, this time around, the first time I’ve ever read this story after having spent hours staring at the ultrasound picture of my son’s face, I was not horrified.

I wasn’t. Instead of seeing the brutality of the test, I saw the tenderness of the relationship between father and son in a pair of verses that I’ve never noticed before. On the third day, Abraham and his son Isaac leave their servants and pack animals and continue on alone. Here the narrator tells us, “So the two of them walked on together.” As they make their way up the mountain, Isaac stops and questions his father. Abraham answers, and then again the narrator tells us, “So the two of the walked on together.” Father and son, together: Keeping each other from stumbling as they hike up the mountain; feeling each other’s warmth; walking hand in hand, perhaps.

Of course, the sad irony of this walking up the mountain together is that Abraham is preparing to walk down alone. Or is he? And this is where a new question arises, a question that links Abraham’s deep relationship with Isaac to Abraham’s deep relationship with God. The question is this: Is Abraham lying?

In between those two tender bits of narration (“So the two of them walked on together”) Isaac asks the whereabouts of the lamb for the burnt offering. And Abraham responds: “God himself will provide the lamb for a burnt offering, my son.”

So, is Abraham lying to Isaac here? Is Abraham just telling Isaac what the boy needs to hear to keep him going, to keep him pliant? Or does Abraham actually believe what he is saying to his son? Does Abraham believe that God will, indeed, provide a way out of this mess?

I think the answer falls somewhere in between. A cynical person would call his response a lie. But I think Abraham is speaking out of his hope, out of the deepest conviction of his heart that he will not need to go through with it, that the promise God made to him years earlier will continue to hold, the promise that countless generations will spring from his son Isaac. No, Abraham isn’t lying: he’s speaking the only truth he’s ever known. From the day Abraham stepped out into the desert all those years ago, God has provided, even when Abraham’s impatience or fear kept him from seeing God’s provision.

But for us the phrase, “God will provide,” has, sadly, reached sound byte status. We hear the words and say, “Yeah, sure,” and then go about our business. And we fail to attribute to God’s provision both the miniscule and the monumental blessings in our lives. For all the struggle our story today causes, the binding of Isaac also invites us to hear again the good news that God does, indeed, provide, and God gives us the eyes to notice God’s provision.

It all starts with the word “provide”: in Hebrew this is literally the word “see” or “perceive.” So when Abraham says to Isaac, “God will provide,” we can loosely translate it as, “We shall see what God is up to.” This understanding of God’s provision presupposes that God is already active wherever we are going, that God has already shown up when we arrive. We enter a story already in progress, so to speak.

Notice what Abraham says three times in our passage today: “Here I am.” With these words, Abraham makes himself available, opens himself up, orients himself towards the stimulus of his response. “Here I am,” is the verbal equivalent of a posture of openness and reception. By saying, “Here I am,” Abraham signals his desire to see what God is up to, to see how God is providing in the current situation.

We believe that a piece of God’s very nature is that of provider. And we have the opportunity to participate in God’s provision by training ourselves to see the many and varied ways God is moving in our lives. When Abraham tells Isaac that God will provide, Abraham is reminding himself what he believes, what he has relied on his whole life. God’s provision has not always fit Abraham’s timetable, and Abraham has not always done the best job trusting, but, one way or another, God has provided.

When we look back at the trajectories of our lives, we often see coincidences that cannot be explained; or relationships that have stood the test of time; or burdens we didn’t think we could bear, but did. This is evidence of God providing. But so are the deep, calming breath when the baby is screaming her head off; and your mother’s embrace after a hard day at school; and the desire to help someone in need; and all of the little things that never make headlines, that we won’t remember when we look back at the trajectories of our lives.

Since we won’t remember the small blessings once they’ve sunk down into the depths of memory, God invites us to appreciate today’s provision today. We pray, “Give us this day our daily bread,” for the same reason Abraham told Isaac that God will provide: so that our eyes will be open to the blessings of this life, so that a day never goes by when we don’t notice God’s presence in something, no matter how small.

I know the story of the binding of Isaac is hard to hear and uncomfortable to process. Even so, through it the Holy Spirit has good news to whisper into our hearts. Today, the good news is that God provides and we participate in that provision when we say, “Here I am.” As we move through our daily journeys, sustained by our daily bread, each of us has the opportunity to walk hand in hand with God, to go forth and see what God is up to. So take joy in trusting that when our stories are written in the book of life, the narrator will say, “So the two of them walked on together.”

—

Art: Detail from “Abraham and Isaac” by Rembrandt (1645)
Thanks to Kathryn Schifferdecker’s article on Workingpreacher.org for the Hebrew relationship between seeing and providing.

Shattered Certainty

Published on March 17, 2014March 31, 2014 by Adam Thomas1 Comment

Sermon for Sunday, March 16, 2014 || Lent 2A || John 3:1-17

Full disclosure: the chapter of the Gospel I just read to you easily makes my Top 5 list of favorite passages of scripture. Nicodemus is my favorite recurring character in the entire Bible. Even the name of my website – wherethewind.com – has its roots in this chapter. I love John 3; I’ve read these words many hundreds of times over the years. I barely needed to look at the Gospel book while reading just now, because these words have carved out a space within me. I know them by heart. I knew what they said before I even sat down to work on this sermon. I was certain of their content; just as certain of their content as Nicodemus is of his knowledge at the outset of his conversation with Jesus.

But such certainty comes with a price. Such certainty is dangerous. The moment I declare I am certain about what this wonderful story says is the same moment I stop looking for new wisdom within it. The moment Nicodemus says, “We know,” at the beginning of the conversation is the same moment he signals to Jesus he has no desire to listen to Jesus’ teaching. For his part, Jesus hears this “We know” and starts rolling up his sleeves. He has his work cut out for him. As their conversation progresses, Jesus shatters Nicodemus’ certainty and replaces it with a tentative, yet ardent, curiosity – an uncertainty that will lead to new ideas, new growth, and new life, an uncertainty that will lead Nicodemus from darkness to light and deliver him to the foot of the cross.

Like Nicodemus, we all crave certainty. It’s biological. Our ancestors moved from hunting and gathering to farming and homesteading because the latter was so much more predictable. We follow the same instinct when we allow the salesperson to tack on the three-year warranty when we buy new electronics. And who hasn’t gotten annoyed at the meteorologist who was certain it wasn’t going to rain the day of the big game?

We crave certainty. But each of us learns sooner or later that nothing in life is certain. The crops of our ancestors surely suffered droughts. The computer sometimes breaks the day after the warranty expires. And there’s a reason there’s an expression: “As variable as the weather.”

We crave certainty, and yet we live with uncertainty each day of our lives. What then should our prayer be? Should we pray for more certainty? Or should we pray for peace amidst uncertainty? Judging by Jesus’ side of today’s Gospel story, he invites us to walk hand-in-hand with him into the ambiguity of the uncertain, only to discover there truer, brighter, and more abundant life.

But let’s get back to our friend Nicodemus. As a Pharisee and leader of the Jewish council, Nicodemus would have been something of a judge or arbiter for his people. Rather than asking questions, Nicodemus would have been used to answering them. Rather than embracing uncertainty, Nicodemus would have seen it as his duty to project an air of certainty about everything, for the noble cause of keeping public morale high in the midst of foreign occupation, if for nothing else.

And yet, there’s something about Jesus that penetrates Nicodemus’ certainty. After all, this Pharisee undertakes a scandalous nighttime journey to rendezvous with such an upstart rabble-rouser as Jesus, who has just recently made a spectacle of himself in driving the moneychangers and animal sellers out of the temple with a whip. But Nicodemus comes just the same. Something compels him to come. Even the desire to see Jesus must have made a small chink in Nicodemus’s certainty.

But when he arrives, his programming kicks in, and he projects that ingrained air of certainty. Even though he calls Jesus “teacher” twice in his opening statement, he proceeds to try to teach Jesus something: “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God; for no one can do these signs that you do apart from the presence of God.”

Right away, Jesus attacks Nicodemus’s certainty. He might as well have said, “You know, do you?” What he actually says is this: “Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.” Well, that’s sort of what he says, because the same words might mean this: “No one can see the kingdom of God without being born again.”

In this response Jesus reaches for intentional ambiguity in order to start breaking Nicodemus out of his certainty. Jesus’ words could mean either thing, and I think that’s just the way Jesus wants it. His ambiguity achieves just the result he’s hoping for: Nicodemus asks not one, but two questions! If you’re certain you don’t ask questions. Perhaps there’s hope for this fellow yet, I imagine Jesus thinking.

And so Jesus feeds him more ambiguity: “The wind blows where it chooses and you hear the sound of it but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes.” Not only do we not know from whence comes the wind, but even Jesus’ choice of word – wind – could mean breath or even Spirit. Jesus pulls Nicodemus deeper and deeper into delicious ambiguity, and disused synapses begin to fire in Nicodemus brain. When Jesus is finished, there’s a new fire in Nicodemus’s eyes as he asks the most sincere and uncertain question in the entire Gospel: “How can these things be?”

In one short conversation, Jesus shatters Nicodemus’s unrealistic and leaden certainty and replaces it with the true and natural uncertainty of life. When next we meet Nicodemus he is testing out his newfound uncertainty. He takes a risk in speaking out against members of the council, who want to break their own rules to put Jesus to death. He doesn’t quite declare himself as a follower yet, but he’s on his way. The third and final time we see Nicodemus, he is standing in the broad light of day helping Joseph of Arimathea take Jesus from the cross and bury him in the tomb. In that moment, nothing is certain. Nothing is sure. Because their Lord has died. And yet they serve him anyway.

From his first appearance to his last, Nicodemus models the life of faith. He sheds the armor of certainty when he meets Jesus and pulls on the armor of faith – for certainty, not doubt, is the opposite of faith.

We crave certainty, but in this life we will never achieve it. Jesus knows this, and so he offers us something even better than certainty. He offers us the gift of himself. A good friend of mine once defined “peace” as the “deep and abiding presence of God.” This is the gift Jesus offers us – his abiding presence, his peace, a peace that thrives in the midst of shattered certainty.

When you feel the uncertainty of life threatening to overwhelm you – what the Book of Common Prayer calls the “changes and chances” of this life – I pray you might remember Jesus teaching Nicodemus to embrace such uncertainty because in such uncertainty we discover our faith. And when we discover our faith we also find the promises of God for our lives – the promise that the deep and abiding peace of Christ will always and forever be traveling with us along the way.

*Image — Nicodemus and Jesus, sketch by Rembrandt

5 Years: The County Fair

Published on June 10, 2013 by Adam Thomas1 Comment

This June is the 5th anniversary of Wherethewind.com, and we are celebrating by looking back at some of the best of the last five years of this website. Today we have a post from the first couple months of the blog. I was at a county fair in West Virginia with a couple of friends and the following encounter happened. (Originally posted August 12, 2008)

The smells of sweat and fried dough hung in the air, mixing with the burned oil of the tractor pull. He was sitting with hands clasped, wearing a plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up and a challenge on his deeply lined, leathery face. She was standing, looking all the world like a Grant Wood painting, and thrusting matchbook-sized pamphlets into the hands of passersby. I walked by out of reach, but I couldn’t help looking at the booth, one of many at the county fair. “How sure are you of going to heaven? Are you 50% 75% 100% sure?” read the banner. My friend wondered aloud about how one arrives at a 75% surety of heaven. I chuckled, but I was unable to keep walking by the booth. On the table, a wooden contraption with three small doors read: “Do you know the three things God CANNOT do?”

I stopped. The Grant Wood painting saw my furrowed brow and handed me a pamphlet. It looked like a doll’s magazine. A smiley face decorated the cover along with the words: “Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior?” I closed my hand around the pamphlet and pointed to the three doors. I tried to keep the incredulity out of my voice, but I failed miserably: “So, what are the three things God can’t do?” I said.

She opened the first door: “God CANNOT lie.” She opened the second door: “God CANNOT change.” She opened the third door: “God CANNOT let people into heaven who have not been born again.”

We talked for fifteen minutes. I told them I did not disagree with the first door, but that I preferred to state the sentiment in positive terms: “God always tell the truth” or “God is trustworthy and faithful.” I said that a “lie” is the absence of the “truth,” and that I’d rather talk about God’s goodness shown in God’s truthfulness than to try to hook people with the trappings of sensationalism. After five minutes, the man commented that I was very intelligent. I took that as a compliment, but I have a sneaking suspicion it was not meant as such.

As our conversation continued, I realized we weren’t conversing. We were sparring. I’ve never had a taste for theological pugilism, but I was already three rounds deep, so I kept jabbing and blocking. I’ve had this same conversation with county fair proselytizers, but never as an ordained person. After the man commented on my intelligence, he asked me what I did. I said, “I’m a priest.” Without another word, he thrust another pamphlet in my hand. It was about how Roman Catholics aren’t real Christians and are going to hell.The same thought kept jumping to the front of my mind: “People like these, no matter how pure and ardent their intentions, make my job harder.”

It didn’t matter that I wasn’t a Roman Catholic. It didn’t matter that I agreed with the man and woman several times during our bout. The only thing that mattered was that I didn’t buy into the way they framed the Christian faith–as a bottom-line venture whose only goal is to “save souls” by following the instructions in the smiley-face doll-sized magazine. Surely, there’s more than that. Surely, the abundance of what God has done and is doing is more important than a “what’s behind door number 3″ marketing scheme concerned with what God CANNOT do.

As I walked away, I wondered what had been accomplished during our boxing match. In the Gospel according to Matthew, Jesus says that when two or three are gathered in his name, he will be in the midst of them. Were we gathered “in his name” or in our own names, intent on KOing the other’s theological stance? Was Jesus there? Was I 50% 75% 100% sure of his presence? Looking back, Jesus was there, but he was not in my corner and he was not in their corner. He was there trying to get us to leave the ring.

Faith-ing

Published on June 3, 2013June 24, 2013 by Adam Thomas2 Comments

Sermon for Sunday, June 2, 2013 || Proper 4C || Luke 7:1-10

Here’s a common situation in this day and age. For one reason or another – say, you’ve got to figure out how many packages of plastic cups to get for a party – you find yourself needing to do long division. Your phone’s battery is dead, so the calculator app is gone too. You flip over your shopping list and put pen to paper, and then you stop and realize that you have no idea how to do long division. You learned in fourth grade, but (wow) was that a long time ago. Has anyone else had that experience?

So, if basic math escapes us sometimes because we haven’t thought about it in a long time, I’d hazard a guess that we sometimes also lose sight of the basics of being followers of Jesus Christ.

Today, I’d like to get back to the basics. I’m going to talk about faith – specifically about how faith works in our lives. Hopefully, at the end of this sermon we will all rejoice that, while faith seems like an abstract, ephemeral concept, faith is in truth the fuel that fires our lives.

Thinking of faith as a verb removes it from the kitchen cupboard and puts it in our actions. We cannot store up or hoard our actions like we can our possessions. Rather, each action tumbles into the next in a never-ending stream. The problem we run into here is that, since the word faith isn’t actually a verb, we have trouble imagining what faith as action looks like. You know exactly what I mean when I say, “I saw someone running on my way to church this morning.” But you’d have difficulty conjuring up the image if I said, “I saw someone faith-ing on my way to church this morning.”

The faith system works a lot like our muscular system. We all have muscles (yes, even scrawny guys like me). We need our muscles to do simple tasks like getting out of bed, standing up, even smiling. We also need our muscles to do more difficult tasks like running a marathon or lugging a couch to a third floor walkup. Exercising hones and strengthens our muscles, making them more durable and less likely to fatigue. But whether we exercise or not, our muscles still put in work day in and day out.

If we’re going to exercise our faith, then we should figure out exactly what we mean when we say the word. We’ve already said how faith is a noun that should be a verb. Faith then is the action that happens when we participate in our relationships with God. Faith borrows the best parts of trust, confidence, and humility and molds them into our response to God’s presence in our lives. From trust, our faith borrows the willingness to give ourselves over to the power of another. From confidence, our faith borrows the courage to take the leap into God’s waiting arms. And from humility, our faith borrows the recognition that God (and not we ourselves) initiates the action that results in the giving ourselves up to God.

In today’s Gospel lesson, the Roman centurion actively engages his faith system. He trusts that Jesus can help him. He has courage actually to do something about that trust. And he shows his humility when he sends friends to Jesus to tell him he need not come all the way to the house to heal the slave. The centurion displays such strong faith that even Jesus is amazed. But no matter how strong or how weak our faith is, we each have a faith system that God gave us so we would be able to join God in relationship. The more we exercise our faith system – the more we act out our faith – the deeper can we go in our relationships with God.

I invite you today to remember that faith is a noun but should be a verb. Faith is not a commodity or a possession. Faith is the active component of our relationships with God. God loves us and we love God. What could be better than cultivating that love everyday? What could be better than exercising our faith system so that we resonate deeper and deeper with God’s movement in our lives?

Antagonists

Published on July 16, 2012 by Adam Thomas1 Comment

(Sermon for Sunday, July 15, 2012 || Proper 10B || Mark 6:14-29)

Today’s Gospel reading gives us an entire story about one of the antagonists of the Gospel. Antagonist. This is a tricky word because often in current culture “antagonist” is simply synonymous with villain, enemy, or bad guy. Famous antagonists – a Jeopardy category, perhaps? Darth Vader. Javert. Lex Luthor. Vader wears black, breathes heavily, and uses the “Dark Side” of the Force – definitely a villain. Javert hunts for a man whose crime doesn’t warrant such obsessive and destructive investigation – a perfect enemy for Jean Valjean. And in the first Superman movie, Lex Luthor attempts to destroy California in order to raise his land’s property value – total bad guy.

But dismissing these fellows as mere villains ignores their roles as the antagonists of their respective stories. A good antagonist doesn’t simply serve as the proverbial immovable object against which the hero’s unstoppable force must contend. A well-drawn antagonist helps reveal the good things about the protagonist. Often, facets of the main character remain in shadow until a skeptical or adversarial or malevolent character brings them to the light. Lex Luthor’s greed stands in contrast with Superman’s selflessness and so on and so forth.

The antagonist in our story today falls into the same Jeopardy category as Vader, Javert, and Lex Luthor. He is none other than King Herod, to whom Mark dedicates a precious fifteen verses of his short account of the Gospel. If you thought today’s reading felt a bit weird and out of place, then you’re not alone. The Gospel writer Matthew greatly abridges the tale, and Luke and John give the story a miss entirely. But Mark, who usually barrels his narrative ahead at a breakneck speed, oddly stops for a massive chunk of Chapter 6 and treats us to a banquet with one of the bad guys. So, my question is, “Why?”

Well, I think that Mark is a good storyteller, and good storytellers understand what antagonists are for. If antagonists exist to shed light on the good things about the protagonist, then we can ask ourselves, “What does Herod teach us about Jesus?” The easy answer is without Jesus, innocent people get beheaded at dinner. But I think we can go a little deeper than that. Jesus’ absence in this passage is truly conspicuous. Indeed, if the Gospel of Mark were cut up into a season-long television series, the actor playing Jesus would get this episode off. But still, I’m pretty excited because for one week, we get to look at the story from the other side. We get to see the actions of the bad guy and contrast them with the actions of the good guy. And boy, do we have some contrasts to make.

What Mark gives us is really a flashback to an earlier event. Herod thinks that Jesus is John the Baptist come back from the dead, which is bad news for our bad guy because Herod wound up signing John’s death sentence in the first place. Mark tells the tale of why Herod found himself in such a predicament.

The story begins at dinner. And at dinner is where we make our first contrast between the good guy and the bad. This isn’t just any dinner, either. This is Herod’s birthday dinner, and when you’re a puppet king of the Roman Empire – a lackey, really – you don’t have much power beyond spending your citizens hard-earned tax dollars on extravagant banquets for you and your friends. Mark describes these friends in detail: Herod’s guests are “his courtiers and officers and the leaders of Galilee.” Not a bad turnout for the red carpet. You can see them in your mind’s eye, right? There they are reclining at table and congratulating each other for being part of such an impressive coterie.

Of course, if Jesus had been hosting such a banquet, whom would he have invited? That’s right: the outcasts, the sinners, the tax collectors – those people who wouldn’t have a chance in a million years to be on Herod’s guest list. The very people at Herod’s banquet are more than likely the ones who excoriate Jesus for eating with the unwashed poor, the street urchins usually labeled as “bad.” And yet, we know who the good guy in this story is.

So the who’s who of society arrives for Herod’s birthday, and his little daughter dances for the assembly. Her acclaim is so great that Herod swears to her, “Whatever you ask me, I will give you, even half of my kingdom.” With the girl’s conniving mother in the background, we know this cannot go well. Swearing an oath was a big deal back then, akin to a legal contract today, but with more honor at stake. And swearing a blind oath was like writing a blank check.

Of course, if Jesus had watched the little girl’s ballet, what would he have done? Joyfully praised her for her creative expression, no doubt, but he sure wouldn’t have sworn an oath. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says, “Do not swear at all… Let your word be ‘Yes, Yes’ or ‘No, No’; anything more than this comes from the evil one.” In other words, there’s no need to swear an oath; just be trustworthy all the time and you won’t need to make guarantees.

And still, we have one more contrast to make – the biggest one yet between the good guy and the bad. On her mother’s prompting, the girl asks for John the Baptist’s head on a platter. Herod is deeply grieved, Mark tells us, but apparently not too deeply grieved because he goes through with his oath anyway. In order to save his honor, his pride, his standing in society, Herod has an innocent man killed.

Of course, when Jesus was in a similar situation, what did he do? When he could have saved himself from public humiliation, scorn, pain, and death, what did he do? He gave himself up willingly. He gave no regard to his own honor and pride, but emptied himself and humbly chose the road that led to the cross. Society mocked him, the empire killed him, and yet he won in the end, and yet he won in the end when God raised him from the dead on the third day.

Our antagonist today, foolhardy and power-drunk King Herod, shows us the other side of the story, the shadow side, the side that exists in the darkness when the light of the world is offstage. He prizes his standing, his honor, and his pride above all else, even to the point of committing homicide.

I don’t know about you, but I suspect that all too often I place myself on the wrong side of the story. I look at myself in the mirror, and I wonder when the good guy decided to take the episode off and let the bad guy take center stage. I ignore Jesus’ dinner guests because they are so much easier to ignore than to include. I swear oaths to myself about how I will live my life, and then I fail to live up to them. I let my pride stand in the way of doing the right thing. If you’re anything like me, then we all occupy the antagonist’s role in our own lives far too much of the time.

But the good news is this: even when we occupy the bad guy’s role in our own stories, there is always and forever someone occupying the role of the good guy. Our protagonist is Jesus Christ, and as any good guy would, he calls us to come to him, to shed ourselves of our antagonism, and to live our lives as his followers. When we confess our sins in a few minutes, when we once again give up to God our villainy, we will be ready to recognize Jesus as the protagonist of our stories. And as he nourishes us with his Body and Blood at his dinner banquet, we will be strengthened to go out as the good guys and serve the world in his name.

High Noon

Published on March 4, 2012March 8, 2012 by Adam Thomas1 Comment

(Sermon for Sunday, March 4, 2012 || Lent 2B || Mark 8:31-38 )

I’m sure we’ve all watched this scene unfold in a film, a Western, perhaps starring John Wayne or Gary Cooper. The sheriff checks the rounds in his six-shooter, puts on his Stetson and shiny, star-shaped badge, and walks bowlegged out of his tin-roofed station. His spurs clink as he walks, and his shoes kick up the dust of the main street running through town. At the same time, the batwing doors of the saloon swing outward, and the gun-slinging outlaw swaggers down the steps into the street. The outlaw wears a black bandana and black chaps and keeps his Colt .45 slung low in his hip, the better to draw quickly. They face each other at high noon out on the street. They are alone, though the whole town is watching from windows and roofs. A tumbleweed skitters across the road between them. There are no shadows. And the sheriff says, “This town ain’t big enough for the both of us.”

With these words, the sheriff gives the outlaw the chance to turn himself in or to leave town before the inevitable shootout. But the shootout is inevitable for two reasons: first, the movie-going public would be disappointed in a Western without a shootout; and second, the outlaw’s very nature and personality won’t let him go quietly. If today’s Gospel reading were staged as a Western, you and I would be cast as the outlaw. And a Stetson-wearing Jesus would be the sheriff, who says to us, “This town ain’t big enough for the both of us.”

But Jesus wouldn’t be talking about a town. He would be talking about us, about our souls, about our lives. “This life ain’t big enough for the both of us” is the Western film version of what Jesus actually says: “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the Gospel, will save it.”

With these words, Jesus gives us the same choice that the sheriff gives the outlaw. We can surrender ourselves to Christ or we can fight in an attempt to keep control of our lives. We cannot, however, do both.

At first glance, the second option seems quite appealing. Who wouldn’t want to remain in control of his or her own life? Is that not the American dream – self-determination, self-preservation, pulling oneself up by one’s own bootstraps? Do we Americans not prize the entrepreneur, the independent thinker, the individual who defies the odds to become someone? Of course we do. In and of themselves, these things are not bad. But they can lead us down some wrong paths.

Let’s take self-preservation, for example. As infants, this is the only thought in our little brains. We cry whenever we perceive that something is being withheld that will help us thrive. We are incapable of taking care of ourselves on our own, so we induce through love and tears others to take care of us. At this stage of our life, self-preservation is not a choice. Keeping ourselves going is a hardwired imperative of our biology. As we grow up and become more self-sustaining, the affinity for self-preservation that we displayed as infants stays with us. The biological imperative keeps us seeking things that will help us survive.

Again, this is not a bad thing at all. The problems begin when the “self” we are trying to preserve starts wandering away from those life-giving things that helped us thrive as infants. Some of those life-giving things – such as family and love – can remain throughout our lives, but other, life-taking things can crowd them out. In middle school, we define ourselves based on the insecure input of our peers and the warped input of the consumer culture. In young adult life, we define ourselves based on our (never quite good enough) physical attractiveness to prospective mates. In adult life, we define ourselves based on our work and our need to be comfortable.

When these definitions lead us down life-taking paths, we humans have a tendency to follow such paths to the extreme. We become addicted to alcohol or drugs or gambling or video games. We pursue what marketing experts define as success. We take on the lone wolf persona, ignoring the welfare of others because we perceive that we are not faring well enough ourselves. Pretty soon, the selves that we have become look so very little like the selves that God created us to be.

The farther down the life-taking paths we go, the deeper the need to preserve these false selves becomes. We know no other way to live. We have no idea what another path would like, and the unknown is the scariest reality of all. So we cling hard. We preserve these so-called lives. And we become outlaws in our own bodies, betrayers of the abundant life that God desires for each of us.

To these outlaws, Jesus says, “This life ain’t big enough for the both of us.” But instead of drawing his six-shooter like the sheriff, Jesus unbuckles his holster and lets the belt drop into the dust. He spreads his arms wide and starts walking toward us. We keep our hands on the hilts of our guns, too bewildered by his behavior to draw and start firing. When he reaches us, he takes the gun from our belts, empties the bullets, and pulls the bandana away from our faces. Then, with his arms once again outstretched as on a cross, he beckons us to him. He calls to us to take one step toward him, one step down a new life-giving path, one step that will find us close enough for his arms to embrace us.

And in that embrace, our need to preserve those false selves starts fighting. But our gun is in the dust. Our arms are pinned to our sides. The only thing left to us is to surrender those false selves into Christ’s care and to begin to let Christ’s life replace the half-lives we were leading. In the embrace, Jesus leans close and whispers, “If you want to become my follower, deny yourself and follow me.”

And so we deny the false selves that we have become, the small, scared people who stubbornly walked down the wrong paths. We lose the half-life we had because we stopped trying to save this old life. And instead, we take on Christ’s life. We step into the life of Christ as Paul says to the Galatians: “I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.”

As Christ lives in us, there is no room for the old life to hold sway. This life just ain’t big enough for the both of them. But Christ’s life is big enough to encompass and redeem the old life. The new paths we tread don’t start out new, but as the old, life-taking paths we followed. We just travel them in the opposite direction. And as we journey back up the life-taking path, Christ gives us the opportunity to repair and reconcile with those we’ve hurt and to reject and abandon the system that defines self with stuff. As Christ’s life takes hold in us, we find that this new life is worth preserving, and not only preserving, but rejoicing in and sharing with others.

Surrendering our outlaw lives and living Christ’s life is not easy. That’s why Jesus uses the imagery of the cross – not just because of his own impending execution, but because the cross is a symbol for suffering. Living Christ’s life means sharing in the suffering of the world, and also working to change the world to alleviate some of the suffering. But the good news is this. When we no longer live to preserve our false selves, but allow Christ to live in us, then we are never alone. We never have to face the joys and sorrows of this life alone. We never have to encounter suffering alone. The shootout ended without a shot fired. Our false selves are dead. And Christ is alive in us.

Be Silent, and Come out of Him

Published on January 29, 2012 by Adam ThomasLeave a comment

(Sermon for Sunday, January 29, 2012 || Epiphany 4B || Mark 1:21-28 )

I don’t know about you, but if I were the unclean spirit in today’s Gospel reading, I probably would have kept a lower profile. I would have lain low, kept my mouth shut, perhaps donned a pair of those Groucho Marx glasses with the big eyebrows and moustache. Then, after Jesus left the synagogue, I would have slunk home, incessantly cackling and cajoling, coercing and enticing, whispering, persuading, coaxing, craving, swaying, squeezing, luring. I would have slunk home, still embedded within my “patient,” as C.S. Lewis’s Screwtape calls you delicious people. I mean, us delicious people. I mean, us people.

*shakes head vigorously*

What I’m trying to say is this unclean spirit doesn’t seem to have much of a sense of self-preservation. If the unclean spirit knew that Jesus was “the Holy One of God,” and therefore had plenty of authority to command said spirit, then why did the spirit make a peep? And not just a peep, but a scene? And not just a scene, but a scene in the synagogue, which would be like the event taking place right now during this service. As I said before, I probably would have kept a lower profile.

However, maybe I’m not giving the unclean spirit enough credit for trying. Perhaps, this thing afflicting the guy in the synagogue did attempt to keep his lips zipped. Perhaps, the unclean spirit knew that Jesus would make the spirit’s existence rather uncomfortable if Jesus caught wind of the afflicting presence. And perhaps, the spirit just couldn’t help but cry out when Jesus was nearby.

The unclean spirit is caught in Jesus’ gravitational field. Like a satellite in a degraded orbit falling to earth, the spirit succumbs to Jesus’ gravity and reveals itself. The gravity – the authority – of Jesus’ presence compels the unclean spirit to cry out. And by this same authority, Jesus pulls the spirit from the man with the words: “Be silent, and come out of him!”

Now, I know that dismissing this kind of Biblical story is easy in our day and age. We look to psychology for a comfortable, modern lens with which to interpret unclean spirits. Demonic possession belongs to horror films and to currently popular fantasy worlds populated with vampires, zombies and werewolves. But for all the science and science fiction that we can use to explain away stories like today’s Gospel, the fact of the matter remains that Jesus took this man, who was afflicted by spiritual uncleanness, and made him well. The thought of unclean spirits may make you uncomfortable – sure makes me uncomfortable. But the reality of Jesus standing near and cleansing the filth within replaces my discomfort with wonder and awe and thanksgiving.

“Be silent, and come out of him!” says Jesus. He says this to the unclean spirit within the man at the synagogue, and he says this to the unclean spirits within us at St. Stephen’s church. Our afflictions may not look like the ones depicted in Renaissance frescos or horror film special effects, but that doesn’t make our unclean spirits any less real or damaging to our walks with God and one another. The question is: do we want to stand close enough to Jesus for his gravity to act on our uncleanness?

Whenever I ask myself this question, an overwhelming sense of lethargy strikes me out of nowhere. The status quo may not be perfect or even ideal, but I’ve gotten along well enough so far, I tell myself. May as well stay the course. “If it’s only somewhat broke, don’t fix it!” But honestly, this lethargy doesn’t strike out of nowhere. The lethargy comes from the unclean parts of me that want to be left well enough alone. I hear a voice within that sounds like mine, but I know deep down this voice is not the one I should listen to. The voice coaxes me back: back to bed, back to sleep, back away from the Holy One of God, whose gravity is always seeking to pull me to a closer orbit.

To this voice, Jesus says, “Be silent, and come out of him.” For me this voice belongs to pride and self-sufficiency and self-importance. Jesus calls the owner of this voice to leave me so that I can follow Jesus more closely. That’s mine. I wonder what your unclean voice is coaxing and coercing from you?

Perhaps, yours tells you that if you do just enough to get by, everything will work out. Your life might not be great, but your life will be easy, and that’s good, right? You don’t study for the test because you know you can scrape a C-minus, and that’s good enough. You don’t practice the piano piece because you can hit most of the notes most of the time, and that’s good enough. “Good enough, good enough” says the voice, which belongs to the indolent drifter within you, the slacker who’d rather just play video games all day. To this unclean spirit, Jesus says, “I never promised life would be easy, but I did promise life would be abundant, not just good enough. Be silent, and come out of him.”

Perhaps, your unclean voice tells you that working all those extra hours shows your dedication, and you never think to ask, “Dedication to what?” You stay late at the office most nights and the tonnage of missed dinners and little league games and ballet recitals piles up around you. You burned out a year ago, but you’re still plugging away because you’re no quitter. “You’re giving your family a better life, no matter if you’re not around,” says the voice, which belongs to the petrified consumer within you. To this unclean spirit, Jesus says, “Your relationships are more important than your money. Be silent, and come out of him.”

Perhaps, your unclean voice tells you that you are unattractive, unlovable, and doomed to a lonely existence; or that you should just shut yourself in your house so others won’t see that the years are taking their toll on your faculties; or that your challenges are too insignificant to ask others for help; or that others will laugh at whatever you say; or that whatever you do, nothing will be enough for God or anyone else to love you. To each and every one of these unclean spirits, Jesus says, “Be silent, and come out of him.”

These unclean spirits are familiar to us. They are comfortable, even though they demean and debase and shackle us. The overwhelming feeling of lethargy happens when they sense that we are moving nearer to Jesus Christ, when we are circling at a closer orbit. The unclean spirits feel the pull of his gravity, and they try to escape, to keep us for themselves. But they can never escape, because we were made not for them, but for God. And the Holy One of God has the authority, the mercy, and the grace to cleanse us.

When you give in to the unclean spirit within you, the enticing voice that speaks of lethargy or apathy or anger or fear, listen also for a second voice, the voice of Jesus Christ speaking from the depths of your soul. His is the voice of freedom from the filth that keeps us from living into the fullness that God desires for each of us. His is the voice filled with the gravity and authority of the Holy One of God. His is the voice that cries out: “Be silent, and come out of him.”

First Words

Published on October 17, 2011 by Adam Thomas1 Comment

(Sermon for Sunday, October 16, 2011 || Proper 24A || 1 Thessalonians 1:1-10 )

Adam age 2 — Any spherical object! (that's me at age 2)

Did your parents ever tell you about the first word you ever spoke? More than likely, your first word was “Da,” which is short for, “Daddy, go get Mommy so I can have lunch.” Perhaps, your first word was “Ma,” though this is unlikely, considering the “M” sound is much more difficult to make than the “D” sound. Perhaps, your first word was “No,” which you probably heard your parents say many, many times when they asked each other if the other had slept last night. My first word was “ball.” And thus began a lifetime of me kicking, catching, and throwing any spherical object I could get my hands on.

Christianity has some first words, as well; at least, they’re the first words that we still have a record of today. They aren’t as hesitant or half-formed as are the first words of infants. Rather, they spring from the pages of the New Testament with remarkable (even uncanny) clarity, vitality, and comprehensiveness. We heard these words a few minutes ago when we listened to the first ten verses of Paul’s First Letter to the Thessalonians.

Now, before we get to some of Christianity’s first words, we need to clear up one spot of potential confusion and talk for just a minute about the similarities between Thessalonica in 50 AD and the United States in 2011. First, the potential confusion.

If you pull up the Bible on your smartphone, you will notice two things: number 1, the New Testament begins with the Gospel according to Matthew; and number 2, Paul’s First Letter to the Thessalonians is actually eighth on Paul’s depth chart, not first. So how could these ten verses from First Thessalonians possibly be the oldest recorded words in Christian history?

For starters, the folks who put together the New Testament put the four accounts of the Gospel up front because the rest of the pieces didn’t make a lot of sense without first hearing the story of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection. But the people who wrote the Gospel didn’t start doing so until probably 15 to 20 years after Paul wrote to the Thessalonians. As for Paul’s depth chart (and this is a little strange) – his letters are actually in order by length, from longest to shortest, and First Thessalonians is one of the shorter letters. But if the New Testament were ordered chronologically by when the texts were written, our reading from Paul today would be on Page 1. Okay, confusion averted? Great. Let’s keep going.

Our modern moment shares several things in common with mid-first century Thessalonica, the community to which Paul writes the first words of Christianity. Like the modern United States, Thessalonica was a diverse, cosmopolitan place, with a plurality of religions and cultures all rubbing shoulders. As the capital of the region of Macedonia, there were plenty of things to do, not unlike the glut of stimulation that assaults us at every turn. And the Thessalonians had not received the good news of Jesus Christ before Paul arrived, just as people in modern America have lost contact with this great story of the Gospel.

To these people in Thessalonica and to us here on the Interwebs, Paul sends these first words. He, of course, had no idea we would consider them the first words of Christianity, which lends a special kind of authenticity to his message. These are words written to people who hadn’t read Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John. These are words written to people who lived in a society that knew very little about this faith that Paul brought with him. As such, these are words that can serve us as we practice sharing our faith, as the Thessalonians did, with people outside the walls of this church.

In these first ten verses of the first text of Christianity, there are six words in particular that shimmer for me: grace, peace, faith, love, hope, and joy. Notice how Paul uses each of these special words: “Grace to you and peace,” he writes. “We always give thanks to God for all of you and mention you in our prayers, constantly remembering before our God and Father your work of faith and labor of love and steadfastness of hope in our Lord Jesus Christ…You became imitators of us and of the Lord, for in spite of persecution you received the word with joy inspired by the Holy Spirit.”

These words are special because each has a meaning outside the church and a greater meaning inside the church. The secular understanding of these words can give followers of Christ like you and me a place to establish common ground as we share with others how God is present in our lives.

Let’s quickly look at each of these words to see how we can expand the secular definition to fit into the greater reality of following Jesus Christ.

“Grace” is a perfectly lovely word. We use this word to describe ballet dancers because they move with poise and precision. They throw their bodies into the air trusting that they will land on their feet, and if they don’t they get back up quickly and keep dancing. How easily can we take this understanding of grace and elevate the grace of the dancer to the Grace of God, this grace that picks us up when we fall and teaches us to find beauty in everything.*

We hear the word “peace” when conflict ends and “peacekeepers” enter the recently warring region to monitor the new situation. We use this word to describe a calm ocean after a storm or an infant who has finally dropped off to sleep. We can expand this to the Peace of God, which takes situations of conflict and infuses them with possibilities for unity, justice, and new beginnings.

“Faith” is the trickiest word on this list because all human attempts at “faithfulness” fall short. We put our trust in banks, in governments, in products, in each other, and sooner or later we are always let down. But when we expand the definition of faith to include the Faith of God, we find the one example in all of creation that will never fail. How wonderful to tell someone about this kind of faith!

“Love” is tricky, too, because we use the word in so many different circumstances, from our shoes to our spouses. But when we find that most authentic use of the word, when the word “love” springs unbidden from our lips and doesn’t describe an emotion but a state of being, a state that we entered unwittingly and never want to leave – then we begin to see the edge of the extraordinary Love of God. And we can celebrate that love with each other.

“Hope” is about the future. All people have used this word to talk about what they dream for the days and years ahead. I hope to have children and to teach them to play soccer. These human hopes are safe hopes, the kind that we can see in our mind’s eye five or ten years down the road. This understanding of hope elevates to the Hope of God when God releases us from the boundaries of the merely possible and shows us the realms of glory that exist far beyond our sight. And then we have a greater hope in which our everyday hopes can dwell.

Finally, we talk about “joy” most often when we have “enjoyed” a dinner party or a new film or a ballgame. We mean that we had a good time and might want to come over again. What we don’t realize is that this “joy” we feel is more than happiness. The Joy of God is a feeling of wholeness, of completion that comes when we discover that we are exactly the people who God created us to be.

Each of these words, these first words that Paul used when he wrote to the Thessalonians makes sense outside the context of the Christian faith. But within the greater reality of following Jesus Christ, these words shimmer with new facets of meaning.

I invite you this week to take these first words of Paul and try them out for yourself. Pray with this question in your heart: how has God encountered you when you have had an experience of grace, peace, faith, love, hope, or joy? Then find someone from within your own faith community and try out these words. Practice sharing with one another before you go out and share your Christian life with those outside your church.

Like the first words of an infant, our first attempts in sharing the first words of our faith will be halting. They will be hesitant. They will be half-formed. But they will be ours. And God will take them, shape them, and elevate them into God’s own words.

Note

*I wrote “Grace…teaches us to find beauty in everything” and then realized that I stole those words from U2. Thanks, fellas.