Get Her Words Out

Recommendation Engines

Easter 4 2012

Family Of Christ Presbyterian Church, Greeley, CO

John 10:11-18

In the history of the church, this the fourth Sunday after Easter, is known as Good Shepherd Sunday, and the texts for today reflect that.

In addition to the gospel text we just heard, the Psalm for today is the twenty-third, which almost everyone is familiar with:

The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want

He makes me lie down in green pastures;

He leads me beside the still waters;

He restores my soul.

He leads me in right paths for his name’s sake.

The Psalm presents us with what I think is probably the most familiar image of the shepherd, the one who leads and protects the sheep, the shepherd as caring guardian.

But it’s the image from the Gospel text, the image of the shepherd as the one who knows the sheep that caught my attention for this morning.

What makes the good shepherd the good shepherd is that he truly knows his sheep and they truly know him.  In the same way that God the father knows Jesus, Jesus knows his sheep. And it is because he knows his sheep that he is willing to lay down his life for them.

It’s that knowledge of those he cares for that differentiates him from the hired hand. The hired hand won’t die for the sheep, the hired hand won’t put himself between the wolf and the sheep, but will run away and leave the sheep to snatched by the wolf.

I’ve heard recently an objection to referring to ministers with the title “pastor,” which means “shepherd,” because it implies that we are all sheep who are expected to blindly follow our leader.

But if we change our view of shepherd from being the one who leads us to being the one knows us and the one that we know, then I think that objection goes away.  We are no longer being lead, in spite of ourselves, but rather journeying together on a path that we have come to through mutual knowledge.

I love the feeling of being known. I love it when I go into Starbucks and they start making my Venti Soy Latte without my even having to ask for it.

I also love having friends that I can share inside jokes with, or know how I’m feeling by the tone of my voice or at a long distance by the tone of what I just wrote on Facebook.

It’s that feeling of connection that I picture when Jesus talks about knowing his sheep and his sheep knowing him.  The question is, are we who have been called to be part of his church going to be good shepherds for one another, or are we going to be the hired hands?

I’ve heard from a couple of people, including my mother, that they have no idea what the title of this sermon means. And you certainly would have been confused by the original thought I had for the title “The pros and cons of content based and collaborative recommendation engines in first century Palistine”

I didn’t go with that because I didn’t think it would fit in the bulletin.

What’s a recommendation engine? I hear you asking.  If you’ve ever spent any time on the internet, especially if you’ve ever done any shopping, you’ve run into recommendation engines, even if you didn’t know that’s what was happening.

How many of you have ever bought a book on Amazon?  You know how after you’ve added the book to your cart it will say something like, “people who bought this also bought these books” and show you a number of books that it thinks you might be interested in? That’s a recommendation engine.

If you watch a movie on Netflix, when you’re done it will suggest other movies that it thinks you might want to watch.  That’s a recommendation engine.

There are two basic kinds of recommendation engines, although most that you run into are hybrids of the two.

One type are the  content based recommendation engines, which look at the things that you’ve bought, watched or listened to, and try to find things that are similar. One of the most impressive of these is The Music Genome Project, which is associated with the Pandora music service.  Workers at the genome project study individual pieces of music and grade them against a list of 300 to 500 attributes, or genes. Genes are things like the gender of the lead singer, what instruments are featured or rhythmic structures. All of those genes combine to create a vector quantity that represents the song.

When you go to Pandora and pick a song that you like, Pandora’s computers look for other songs that have similar vectors and suggest them to you.

The other type of recommendation engine is collaborative.  Collaborative engines ask you to rate movies or books, they then compare how you have rated those items to how other people have rated them and suggest things to you based on what those others have rated.

Netflix has used a collaborative model through most of their existence.  In simplest terms, you rate ten movies on a one to five star basis, then Netflix’ computers look in their database for other users who have rated the same ten movies with a similar number of stars and looks for an eleventh movie that you haven’t rated, but which those others it found have rated highly and recommends it to you.

Recommendation engines are so valuable to e-commerce companies that in 2007 Netflix offered a million dollar prize to anyone who produce an algorithm that would outperform the one they were currently using by 10%.  The prize was claimed two years later by a team of scientists at AT&T.

“But so what?” I hear you asking. Well, it occurred to me that recommendation engines are e-commerce sites method of tricking you into thinking that you’re known.  They want you to feel like you feel when you walk into your favorite coffee place and they already know what you want. They want you to feel like a regular.

They want you to feel that because they understand that everyone wants to feel like they are known, like they are more than just a number.  They want you to think, “ooh, Amazon knows me so well,” or “I love Netflix, they’re always recommending great movies for me to watch”

Of course, the truth is that you are just a number to them; it’s all done with algorithms and sleight of hand. They are the hired hands.

Last week we had our Mission Rally where we introduced the three areas that the session has identified for the church to focus on: Welcoming Community, Immigrant Justice and Exploring Justice through the arts.

For the first two, at least, knowing and being known are vitally important and I would caution against our falling into the trap of using the church equivalent of recommendation engines.

One way we could be a welcoming community, a route that I think many larger churches use would be to have a set of surveys for people to fill out and a set of checklists to make sure that people get put in the with the right groups and that their interests are met and that their skills are properly used. Then all you have to do when someone new shows up is have them fill out the right forms and send them to the right groups and committees.

That’s a system that works to make sure that all the little square pegs get into the little square holes, but I’ve never been very good at being a square peg, and I think that a church using a system like that would keep me very busy, but I don’t know that I would feel like they really knew me.

I’m grateful that that is not the idea that the people who have been working on the welcoming community piece of our mission focus have latched onto.

Instead, they have focused on building smaller communities, clusters, within the church where people will get to know the people in their group and eventually through the rotation of the membership of the clusters will get to know everyone in the church.

One goal of this knowing is to move our pastoral care efforts from emergency response to one where more quotidian needs are met. I know from personal experience that this church does very well caring for someone when they are hospitalized or grieving, but there are needs that fall into the gaps between those times that I hope the clusters will be able to address.

For the second focus, it’s important to note that we didn’t choose to focus on immigrant issues or immigrant charities, but we intentionally choose to use the phrase “immigrant justice”

What difference does that wording make? Well, if you’ve been paying any attention to this sermon you should be able to guess that the difference is in the knowing…

Charity is important, charity brings food to the hungry, services to the needy, but charity is what the hired hand does, charity requires very little growth or change on our part. Justice doesn’t start until we stop doing things for the other and start standing with them, it doesn’t start until we open ourselves up to the that they can change us and provide us with opportunities to grow. As long as they’re clients that we provide services for, as long as we think of ourselves as reaching down to help those others, justice won’t happen.

But when we enter into relationship with them, when they become our friends and we know them and they know us, then justice can begin.

One of the reasons that we have decided to start our immigrant justice focus by working on a community garden or orchard is the chance that it will give us to work alongside of the people, rather than for them.  I don’t think there’s a better way to get to know people than to work together with them on a common goal.

It’s not that the hired hand can’t do good work or that recommendation engines can’t lead us to interesting new discoveries, but if we’re to be good shepherds for one another, we need to go beyond just checklists and algorithms. We need to move toward being in right relationship, to move toward truly knowing one another.

Last Sunday, at the mission rally I hope we started down the path of becoming good shepherds for one another, I hope that the outcome of all that will be greater knowledge of one another and of our immigrant friends. 

Then, maybe, as good shepherds, we can lead each other to the still waters and walk together on the paths of righteousness for the Lord’s sake.

Amen.

On Being Other

For Family Of Christ PC(USA), Greeley, CO.

August 14, 2011

Isaiah 56:1-8

Matthew 15:21-28

 

It's interesting that these two texts came up in the lectionary on a Sunday that I was going to preach.  I've spent a good bit of time with both of them, although I have studied them for different reasons.

One, the Isaiah text, is a text that I have loved for very personal reasons.  Its oracle of radical inclusion, particularly of the inclusion of eunuchs is very important to me.

The time I spent with the Matthew text was less voluntary and personal. Part of the process of becoming a minister in the PC(USA) is a series of Ordination Exams.  The standard path through the exams starts in your first year of seminary with the multiple choice Bible Content Exam, the most straight forward of the exams.  In your third year you dig into the other four exams.  There are three sit-down, limited time exams, Worship and Sacraments, Theology, and Presbyterian Polity.  Each exam consists of three essay questions that you have three hours to answer.  On the exam weekend, you take them on Friday morning, Friday afternoon and Saturday morning.

Then at noon Saturday comes the beginning of the last of the exams, the Biblical Exegesis Exam. This is a take home, open book exam that you have until 10:00am Thursday morning to finish.  During those five days you do very little but study the text that has been assigned for the exam.

And guess what, this morning's Gospel text is the New Testament text that my Exegesis Ord was focused on.  I have a 16 page scholarly paper already written about the story of the Canaanite woman, so I'm good to go on the sermon, right? Well, let's take a look at a section on the use of the verb Apoluson, shall we?

Being There -- A Sermon for Easter 4a

John 10: 1-10

Acts 2: 42-47

For Family of Christ Presbyterian Church, Greeley, CO.  May 15, 2011

Now that you’ve heard the Acts’ text, I wonder if any of you are expecting to give you a sermon about how you need to rush out from here and sell all your goods and possessions and give the proceeds to any who have need.

Just go and sell your stuff, get rid of all you own.  Why not?  Especially if the billboards are to be believed and the world is going to end next Saturday.

Well, you can relax; I’m not here to preach that sermon.  There’s really no way to preach that sermon, at least not without a long period of preparation and care, by which time, I imagine, it might be redundant.

As one writer pointed out as I was researching this text, the unheard of level of communal sharing here was not a cause, but rather an effect.  It came about as a result of that community's earlier actions. “They devoted themselves to the Apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers”

You can relax, then, about my haranguing you to sell everything you own.

But then, what I am going to talk about might actually make some of us squirm just as much.

I’m going to sneak up on it though, in the hope of luring you in.  It can be a touchy subject and many people turn off and turn away just from hearing it named. Especially when they hear it named as something they are going to be asked to do.

“That’s something that ministers do, not people like me; ministers have special training, they know how,” they’ll say. Or, “I couldn’t do that; I’d just make things worse.”

Any guesses?

In the Gospel text, Jesus talks about the role of the good shepherd.  He goes into the sheepfold, “And the sheep hear his voice.  He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out.  When he’s brought out all his own, he goes ahead of them, and the sheep follow him because they know his voice.”

Jesus knew all about. . .I’m going to name it now, so brace yourselves. . .Pastoral Care.

There I said it, and no one has bolted for the door.

Naomi, Ruth and The Perry Fairy: A Drama in Three Acts

Preached at Family of Christ Presbyterian Church, Greeley Colorado, 10/10/10

A couple of weeks ago, Jenn, Nate and I were sitting at the picnic table out in front of the church talking about a bunch of things, including this month’s emphasis on world Christianity.  I was excited because World Christianity was one of the best classes I had in seminary and I am always anxious to share what I learned with others. Then they invited me to preach this Sunday and I had to figure out how to put all that excitement and information into a sermon.

This is what I came up with, “Naomi, Ruth and The Perry Fairy: A Drama in Three Acts.”

But before we get to act one, I should introduce you to our three characters:

First come the two that we met in the scripture reading, Naomi and her daughter-in-law, Ruth. But who is this mysterious third character, The Perry Fairy?

I could tell you that the Perry Fairy is a mystical creature that travels through the world, bring Christianity to new places and new people, and, in a way, it is.

My fellow students and I first learned about the Perry Fairy in our Eucharist and Church Mission class the second semester of our first year, and then returned to meet the Perry Fairy one more time in our World Christianity course the second semester of our final year.

What those classes had in common was a professor named Carlos Cardoza-Orlandi, who at the time was the World Christianity professor at Columbia.

I think Dr. Cardoza-Orlandi may be the best lecturer I have ever had, but there were moments when his accent made it difficult to decipher exactly what he was saying.

Perry Fairy is an example of that that stuck with us through the years, It’s simply the way that Dr. Cardoza-Orlandi pronounced the word, “periphery.” And when you take a class from him, you hear a lot about the periphery.

Now that you know the players, Naomi, Ruth and the periphery, let us begin our play.

Act I:  Transmission

Naomi didn’t set out to be a missionary, she didn’t leave her home, her family and her friends so that she could spread the good news or convert the heathens.

No, she went because her husband went, because there was a famine in Judah and they had heard there was work and food to be found on the plateau of Moab.

When I imagined a world Christianity class, I made the assumption that I think a lot of people would make, that it would be about different styles of worship and church life. We’d learn about what the church looks like in other places, how people in Africa, Asia, South America and other places order their lives and their worship.

Well, some of the class was about those kinds of things, but by far they were not the most important things that we studied and learned.

Much more important was learning about how Christianity got to those places, How it moves from the center out to our friend the periphery, that is to say, we studied mission.

What is the mission of the church?  Through the years, the answer to that question has come from the end of the Book of Matthew and Christ’s Great Commission:  “Go forth and make disciples of all nations.”

Through the centuries, the church has responded to that commission in different ways.  From the time of Constantine onward through the crusades and into the time of the Conquistadors in Latin America, it was done with military might.  The government and the church worked together to spread the Gospel at the end of sword and through the barrel of a gun.  Christendom ruled large swaths of the world.

But, starting with the Protestant Reformation, and continuing through the America Revolution and the Enlightenment, Christendom lost much of its power and the church’s way of responding to the Great Commission had to change.

Enter the missionary, The person who goes out, sent by a church to the heathens, to deepest, darkest Africa to show those people what they are doing wrong and get them onto the right path.

The missionary is an iconic image in our culture, from David Livingstone, of “Dr. Livingstone, I presume” fame to Rose Sayer, Katherine Hepburn’s character in the African Queen to countless missionary and cannibal jokes.

In World Christianity, we looked at how the missionary process has functioned and where it has gone wrong.

Until Faith Came

Psalm 42

Galatians 3:23-29

Sometimes, maybe even often, the problem with writing sermons is not having enough to say, but having too much to say.

It’s very tempting as a preacher to look at the texts and think, “ooh, I want to say this and this and this and this!” and to go galloping off in all directions until the congregation thinks, “where is she going with all this? What do all these things have in common?”

To use a gardening metaphor, since it’s that time of year, sermons grow like weeds, or better, like the dozens of little tree shoots that pop up in our garden each year.

Each spring, from some common root structure that we have yet to dig out, the beginnings of many little trees pop up in the cultivated parts of our garden surrounding and choking roses and irises alike.  (I suspect that, if I were a really serious gardener, this would be an embarrassing confession to make. Good thing I’m not a serious gardener)

For sermons, the scripture texts form the basic root structure which, as the preacher lives with them and reflects on them in the time leading to the preaching of the sermon send shoots and runners in many different directions, it’s the preacher’s job to prune them back, to cut them off until she finds the one that is right for this congregations on this Sunday.

The first shoot that I had to cut short for this week was the hardest, because it was the simplest, most obvious sermon to preach from the Galatians text, especially with this being Pride weekend.

I know that preachers across the country today are preaching about Paul’s proclamation of the end of human distinctions, “There is no longer Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male and female.” It’s the end of ethnic distinctions, class distinctions and gender distinctions.

Those preachers are exhorting their congregations to open their arms, their hearts and their churches to the other, to the stranger, to the foreigner. And in many cases, they are encouraging their listeners to welcome the lesbian, the gay, the bisexual and the transgendered.

Those are great and powerful sermons that I hope will open new welcoming vistas in the hearts of those who hear them.

But I had to nip that sermon off in the bud. Not because I didn’t want to write and proclaim that message, and not because I don’t think that it’s a vitally important message for the world today.

I had to cut that sermon off because I am not preaching to the whole world, or to some random church this morning.

I’m preaching here, to you, to Family of Christ Presbyterian Church; and the truth is, I don’t think FOC needs to hear that sermon.  If the number of people who are down at the pride parade this morning doesn’t prove that, then the amount of work we’ve done with Al Frente for the victims of the ICE raids certainly does.

That’s one reason, then, for cutting off a perfectly good sermon shoot, it’s just not what the congregation needs to hear.

As the great preacher and preaching professor Fred Craddock says, “you can’t preach from long distance.”

Something old, Somthing new

Family of Christ Presbyterian, September 27, 2009

Esther 7:1-6, 9-10; 9:20-22

Isaiah 56:1-8

Before I start, I feel like I should give a short summary of the plot of the book of Esther, for those of you who might need it.

Esther takes place during the time of the Jewish exile to Babylon.

The main characters of the story are the Persian king, Ahasuerus, who is  sometimes also identified as Xerxes; Vashti, the queen of Persia; Esther the beautiful young, orphaned Jewish woman; Mordecai, Esther’s cousin who has been caring for her and who works in the palace; and finally, the  bad guy, Haman, the prime minister.

The book opens with the end of a 120 day long feast.  The king, very drunk, orders his queen Vashti to come down and show all of his drunk friends how beautiful his wife is.

Vashti, being a sensible woman, refused.  Unfortunately for her this meant that she had to be banished from the kingdom.

The king then begins a search for a new queen, and after a twelve month process, he chooses Esther.

Somewhere during that time, Mordecai uncovers a plot against the king, which makes him very popular with the king.

Every thing seems to be turning out just fine until Haman enters the picture.  Haman is a very proud man and very much enjoys the power that comes with his office as prime minister.

Haman even gives orders that when he goes riding through the town on his horse, everyone he passes has to bow down before him.

Well, Mordecai won’t bow to him, Mordecai won’t bow to anyone but God.  This annoys Haman so much that he decides not only to kill Mordecai, but to order the death of all the Jews in Persia.

Mordecai goes to Esther and asks her to speak to the king on behalf of the Jews, because she may be their only hope to save they’re lives.

Esther tells Mordecai that she can’t possibly do that, because no one could speak to the king without his permission, and to try to do so meant death.

But Mordecai reminds her that she’s going to be killed, too, and that maybe the whole reason she had become queen was to speak out at this time.

I suppose that I have to admit from the beginning that part of this sermon is recycled. I’m not recycling out of laziness, but because this sermon has been very important to me, but has never been quite right.

This all starts with a sermon on Isaiah for my Preacher and the Poet class in seminary.

It was an ok sermon, but it wasn’t quite what I wanted it to be.  Our professor Dr. Anna Carter –Florence called it “one of those great sermons you read in books” which may sound like a good thing, but coming from Anna, really, really wasn’t.

For Anna, preaching is always a very personal experience. In fact, shortly after I graduated, her book Preaching as Testimony was published.

For Anna, there wasn’t enough of me in the sermon, it was too sterile. I wasn’t testifying.

For me too, there was something missing, but I didn’t know what.  But since that time, I have kept wanting to go back to it and add something to it that would make it work better, make it more complete.

The Bible is an amazing thing.  Every time you go to it, every time you look in a different place, you find new ideas, new thoughts, new challenges to what you thought you knew.  And sometimes, it gives you answers to questions you didn’t even know how to ask.

I came into this week not intending to recycle something that I had used before, but rather wanting to write something new

So I diligently dug into the lectionary texts for this week, and had to eliminate one immediately, as it turned out that Dick preached on the gospel text about three weeks ago.

That left me with the Esther passage you just heard, Psalm 124, and the end of James, and I’ve never been very good with the Pastoral Epistisles.

From there I focused in on the Old Testament passages, trying to see where they would lead me.

What I found in the Esther passage was a story of great importance to the nation of Israel; at the end of the passage you hear the origins of the annual Jewish Celebration of Purim.

The Gospel of Prosperity

For Family of Christ Presbyterian Church, July 26, 2009

2 Kings 4:42-44

I’m going to break some rules in this sermon and let you in on some of the code words that ministers, seminarians and theologians use when talking to each other.  As with any field we have our own shorthand when we talk to each other so that we don’t have to keep going over the same things that each of us already know.

In the case of this sermon, I’d say something like “It’s about a communal gospel of prosperity against an individual one, you know, myth of scarcity, social gospel stuff.”

If I said that to any of my friends from seminary or to the any of the people in the ordination process that I spent last weekend with, they’d know exactly what I’m going to talk about.

In fact, I happened to bump into Steve at the library yesterday as I was getting ready to write this out, and when he asked what I was preaching about, that’s basically what I told him.  And he said, “Oh, that’s good Walter Brueggemann stuff.”

At least, then, I’m in good company with what I’m trying to say, although I don’t have much hope of saying it as well as Dr. Brueggemann might.

I think the best way to go here is to take those terms that I used and look at what they mean and how they relate to the texts before us today.

The first term I want to look at is the title of this sermon “The Gospel of Prosperity.”  Sure does sound good, doesn’t it?  And really, it could be a good thing, applied correctly, but, unfortunately, most of the time you hear it, it’s a horrible twisting of God’s good news to us.

There’s at least half-a-dozen religious networks on our satellite system at home, and I’d be willing to bet that if you turned almost any of them on and listened long enough, you’d hear what passes for the gospel of prosperity in America today.

It’s message is a very personal one, it says to you that if you just believe strongly enough, if you just pray hard enough, then God will bless you, God will shine his (and God is always, always a he on these channels) grace upon you and you will prosper, you’ll be, to coin a phrase, “Healthy, wealthy and wise.”

And what if you’re not rolling in the dough?  What if you or a loved one is fighting cancer or some other disease?  Well then, obviously, you’re not praying hard enough, you don’t believe strongly enough, you need to turn your life around, straighten up and fly right.  And you probably need to send a bigger contribution to whatever televangelist is telling you all this.

It’s an idea that permeates American culture, because it’s been around since the very beginnings of what would grow into our culture.

To a certain extent, the prosperity gospel grows out of the beliefs and understandings of the puritans who we remember every year on Thanksgiving. 

As we Presbyterians do today, the puritans looked back to Calvin as one of the originators of their faith.

One of the things that Calvin is most known, and most reviled for is his doctrine of Double Predestination. I don’t want to get into the endless arguments over double predestination, or the fact that by the end of his life even Calvin had backed off in his belief in it.

But it is important to bring up, because you can trace this American idea of your prosperity being a reflection of your godliness back to double predestination.

Double Predestination tells us that, since the beginning of time, God has had two lists, one with the names of all those who would be saved throughout all of history, those people are called the chosen.  The other list has the names of all the people who, throughout history, who will not be saved, they’re known as the reprobate.

Now, Calvin himself would tell you that there is no way for us to know whose names are on which list, but the puritans thought they had it figured out:  Obviously, they thought, God is going to look on those who are chosen with more favor than he (again God was always a he for them) would on those who were reprobate, and that you would be able to see that additional favor in the way their lives played out.  If John was successful in his business, they just knew it was because he was one of the chosen, and if poor old Samuel just couldn’t seem to make ends meet, well it wasn’t going to get any better for him in the afterlife.

That simple, if misguided idea, has stayed with us in America for almost 500 years.  Most often, I don’t think it’s even associated with religion anymore, we just know that success is evidence of virtue and failure is evidence of some moral failing.

That’s why in this supposedly Christian nation, we have so many people who think of themselves as moral and Christian fighting against programs to feed the hungry and to provide healthcare to those who can’t afford it.  Because they know, probably without even being able to articulate it, that at least part of the reason those people are hungry is some moral failing on their part, and if those others were really good people, then they’d have health insurance and wouldn’t be asking us for help.

The gospel of prosperity when preached at an individual level then can be very destructive to society and to the individual.

I will always remember, and some of you may have heard me tell the story before, the first time I kept the pager as an Intern Chaplain at Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta.

A teenage girl who had been accidentally shot in the head by her brother, was brought into the emergency room where, despite the doctors’ and nurses’ best efforts to save her, it was determined that she was brain dead.

Grady and I assume all other hospitals have a protocol for determining if someone is brain dead and can be taken off of life support.  At Grady, they were required to wait at least seven hours and have a second, independent team repeat all of the tests before the final determination was made.

What that meant for chaplains at Grady was that we often ended up sitting with families during those seven hours of limbo, when pretty much everybody on the hospital side knew that the patient was already dead, but when the family is still clinging to the thinnest reed of hope that maybe their loved one will be different.

It was during that time that I was called down to one of the family rooms near the ER to sit with the mother of this teenage girl.  The mother was a student, studying to be a medical technician and had been called out of class to come to the hospital, and several of her classmates had come with her.

When I entered the room, one of the classmates was telling the mother, “you just have to get right with God, if you get right with God, then there’s no way he’ll take Bethany away from you.”  I was almost dumbstruck, because I already knew that Bethany was gone, and if her mother took that advice to heart, what was she going to be left with when turned out that God had taken her daughter away.  She was either going to blame God, or blame herself, and neither one of those things would be very healthy.

It’s the damage that it can do on an individual and societal level that makes most liberal theologians cringe when they hear the phrase “Gospel of Prosperity”

But after reading today’s texts, I’d like to propose that it’s not the idea of God bringing about prosperity that is the problem, the problem is when we apply that idea to the individual and not to the community.

But before we go there, I want to move onto another term, the “myth of scarcity.”

Since Steve brought him up earlier, let me introduce you to the first Walter that’s going to appear in this in this sermon, (There’ll be two)

Walter Brueggemann is an Old Testament Scholar and theologian, professor emeritus at my seminary and a very prolific author.  Anyone who has heard Dr. Brueggemann speak more than a couple of times has heard him speak of the myth of scarcity and how the Bible speaks again and again against it in what he calls the “Liturgy of Abundance”

The myth of scarcity tells us that there’s not enough, that if someone else has a little bit that means we have less.

The myth of scarcity tells us limited time only, get it while you can don’t miss out, only 5,000 available.

The myth of scarcity tells us that we can’t afford to feed the hungry, because we’ve got to protect what we have, we can’t just give it away.  And when you add in the gospel of prosperity idea of the moral failings of those people, then we really can’t afford to be giving them our money and our food.

The myth of scarcity is also at the heart of the same sex marriage debate, if we allow more, different people to get married, then my marriage will mean less, because there’s only so much meaning out there available for marriages.

And, I think the myth of scarcity is there in Presbyterian Church’s debate over ordaining LGBT people.  I think there’s at least a little feeling that if we let more people in, then somehow there’s going to be less grace and blessing available for the rest of us.

In one corner then, we have the prosperity gospel and the myth of scarcity.

In the other corner we’re going to have our two Walters.

First, already introduced is Dr. Brueggemann and his Liturgy of Abundance.

Let’s let him take it from here:

The Bible starts out with a liturgy of abundance. Genesis I is a song of praise for God's generosity. It tells how well the world is ordered. It keeps saying, "It is good, it is good, it is good, it is very good." It declares that God blesses -- that is, endows with vitality -- the plants and the animals and the fish and the birds and humankind. And it pictures the creator as saying, "Be fruitful and multiply." In an orgy of fruitfulness, everything in its kind is to multiply the overflowing goodness that pours from God's creator spirit. And as you know, the creation ends in Sabbath. God is so overrun with fruitfulness that God says, "I've got to take a break from all this. I've got to get out of the office."

And in today’s psalm we hear:

The Lord upholds all who are falling and raises up all who are bowed down…The Lord is near to all who call on him, to all who call on him in truth.

The Bible again and again tells us about the about God’s abundance, about how God always has more to give and that there’s enough for all.

In both our feeding stories today, there’s not only enough for everyone, there’s more than enough, they have leftovers, in the gospel story twelve baskets full of leftovers. Now that’s abundance!

But the important thing to note in these lessons is that the abundance is not for individuals, there’s no discussion of whether the people being fed are worthy, or anything else about them, other than they were there and they were hungry.

The other Walter in our corner has a similarly difficult name, Rauschenbusch.

Walter Rauschenbusch was born in upstate New York in 1861, the son of a conservative German preacher who taught at the Rochester Theological Seminary.  He grew up to reject most of the doctrines his father taught him and to be one of the founders of what became known as the Social Gospel, the final term that I wanted to define today.

According to one source:

The Social Gospel was an early 20th century Protestant Christian movement which placed its emphasis on the application of Christian principles to society's problems. Until this time, most Protestant ministers did not do much to address any of the growing problems of industrial society.

The Social Gospel was about carrying the good news of the Bible not just to individuals but to the whole society. According to Garry Dorrien, a professor at Union Theological Seminary in New York:

The social gospel made a novel, radical and far-reaching contribution to Christianity and society by claiming that Christianity has a mission to transform the structures of society in the direction of equality, freedom and community.  If there was such a thing a social structure, redemption had to be reconceptualized to take account of it; salvation had to be personal and social to be saving . . .[Rauschenbusch] always qualified the idealism in another way: that the commonwealth of God is the very life and word of the Lord Jesus and that it must be struggled for even though it cannot be fully attained:  “We shall never have a perfect social life, yet we must seek it with faith…. At best there is always an approximation to a perfect social order. The kingdom of God is always but coming.  But every approximation to it is worthwhile.” That was the radical core of the social gospel.

That radical core lives on to this very day in the Constitution of the Presbyterian Church (USA), in G-1.0200, we list of the Great Ends of the Church, which date back to 1910:

The proclamation of the gospel for the salvation of humankind; the shelter, nurture, and spiritual fellowship of the children of God; the maintenance of divine worship; the preservation of truth; the promotion of social righteousness; and the exhibition of the Kingdom of Heaven to the world.

So there are all our players, on one side we have the gospel of prosperity and the myth of scarcity, on the other is the liturgy of abundance and the social gospel.

In the middle lie our two stories about feeding crowds.

I think the stories tell us, without a doubt, that we must reject the myth of scarcity.  It just cannot possibly fit into these stories.

But, I think there is a way to bring the gospel of prosperity into the mix. We just have to learn that the gospel of prosperity is not about individuals, it is about communities, it is about societies.

We need to put our trust into God, as Elisha and Jesus did in these stories, not in the hope that God will reward us if we do, or in the fear that we will suffer if we do not.

No, we need to put our trust in God in the sure knowledge that there is abundance for all, that there will be plenty for all of us if we unclench our fists and let go of the fear that if I share with others, if I don’t hang on to everything I have, then there won’t be enough.

The call of today’s stories comes in three parts:

We need to show the faithful stewardship of the young boy and the man from Baal-shalisha

We need to trust in the abundant grace of God, as did Elisha and Jesus,

And we need to remember that we are all part of the needy crowd, who gather around to taste the almost unbelievably plentiful grace of God.

When we can do these things, we will know a true, communal gospel of prosperity and that will be good news indeed.

Amen

 

Storybooks

Preached at St Paul Presbyterian, Aurora, Colorado, May 24, 2009

Text:  Psalm 1

As I was just telling the children, I love stories.  All my life, while moving through sixteen different states, through many schools and jobs, they have been my constant companions and the place where some of my best friends lived.

And not just books, but movies and TV also.  I’ve already seen the new Star Trek movies three times and Nancy will tell you that I’ve thought way too much about it.

I saw the first Star Wars, what we now know as “Episode IV” 13 times…

The summer it opened, I was 12 and it was the last summer that I could get in the child price:  $1.25.  Since that summer I’m sure that I’ve seen it more than a hundred more times.  I know that movie backwards and forwards.  From “There’ll be no escape for the princess this time” to “You’re all clear kid, now let’s blow this thing and go home!”  I know that movie.

Since that summer, I’ve learned much more, I know about the last of the V-8 Interceptors and that “if you want out of here, you talk to me.”  I know that “it’s 106 miles to Chicago, we’ve got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it’s dark and we’re wearing sunglasses.”

I’ve learned important life lessons like:  “never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line,” That “when someone asks if you’re a god, you say yes” and that if anyone ever asks “are you Sarah Conner?” you say no.

“I think that this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship,” that “you just put your lips together an blow,” “we’re not in Kansas, anymore.”

I know that “Death is her gift,” that “they got the mustard out” and that “I’m pretty sure I said ‘no interruptions’”

I know that “A day may come when the courage of men fails, when we forsake our friends and break all bonds of fellowship, but it is not this day.” And that “If nothing we do matters... then all that matters is what we do.”

I know all about “the Knights Who Say ‘Ni,’” and sometimes I think “of the immortal words of Socrates, when he said, ‘I drank what?’”  I know that “I never wanted to do this…I wanted to be a lumberjack.” And most of all, I know that “no one expects the Spanish Inquisition.”

Then there’s the Bible and all the amazing stories in there, just think about the stories that we’re perched between this Sunday, with the Ascension of the Lord last week and Pentecost coming next week. But there are so many more, the familiar like Sampson and Delilah, David and Goliath or the Nativity, and the lesser known like Jephthah’s Daughter and “Shamgar, son of Anath, who killed 600 Philistines with an ox goad, he too delivered Israel.”

I love all those stories; they have taught me, inspired me and guided me through my whole life. For me, the great Good News of the Bible is contained in the great, timeless stories that it tells.
So I was not all that thrilled with this morning’s Psalm when it told me that the secret to a happy, full life to study the law.

I mean, have you read the law?  Page after page of exacting descriptions of how to build the tabernacle, then page after page of exacting descriptions of how the tabernacle was built.

Then there are all the rules about what’s clean and what’s not clean and what you have to do to make yourself clean if for some reason you ended up not clean.

And really, when you think about it, isn’t when we focus on the law that we get into the most trouble?  When was the last time you heard someone arguing about David and Goliath?  No, if you hear two people arguing about religion, it’s a pretty safe bet that they’re arguing about some part of the law.

So, with my love of stories and my, let’s just say, ambivalence toward studying the law, am I destined to sit in the “seat of the scoffers?”  I really would rather be a “tree who bears its fruit in season, and whose leaves don’t wither.”

Do I need to give up on my beloved stories and knuckle down to study all those laws?  Maybe.
But then again, maybe not.

The physicist Steven Hawking tells the story of how, when he was writing his book A Brief History of Time his publisher gave him the rule of thumb that for every equation he put into the book, he could count on loosing half of the books potential readership.  He took that advice to heart, and in the end only included one equation in the book, deciding that it was important enough that it was worth the potential drop in purchasers.

During the course of seminary, preachers and ministers learn a similar rule of thumb, that for every Hebrew or Greek word that we put into the sermon and try to explain, we risk putting half of the congregation to sleep.

But just as Dr. Hawking felt that he just had to include that one equation in his book, consequences be damned, there is one word from today’s Psalm that I just have to dig into, so if you see the person to your left or right start to fade out, could you do me a favor and give them a little bit of a nudge to wake them up?

I’m not too worried, though, because the word I’m going to talk about is at least one that I think most of you will have heard before, and one that you may even think that you already know pretty well.
It’s used twice in today’s Psalm, and both times I would say that it is translated incorrectly even though the way it is translated will match what most of you probably think the word means.

Not surprisingly, it’s the word that is translated into English as law, but in the Hebrew it’s Torah
You will almost always see Torah translated as “law” and I guess it’s not correct for me to say that “law” s an incorrect translation, because the torah does include the law, but the problem is that it’s a terribly, terribly limiting way to translate a word that means so much more.

The root of the word Torah is in a Hebrew verb that means, “he teaches,” the particular form of the of the verb translates roughly as “that which he teaches” or “that which he causes to be learned.”  Or most simply, “teaching.” 

I think, therefore, that a better translation of the second verse would be “but their delight in the teaching of the Lord, and on what he teaches they meditate day and night”

When translated that way, it encompasses so much more than just a list of rules and commandments, it’s also the stories that surround those laws and in the oral traditions that through the centuries have grown up around those stories and laws.

Think about the five books that are usually included in the Torah, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy.  Those books do contain long lists of rules and regulations, they also contain many of the best known and best loved stories of the Bible.

Think about all that’s in there, from Adam and Eve, to Noah, to Abraham and Sarah, Jacob and Esau, Joseph and his fancy coat, the Tower of Babel, and of course, Moses and the Flight from Egypt.

All those stories give context to the rules.  When we read all those laws and instructions we need to remember the context of the covenant between God and Abraham, when we look at the Ten Commandments, we need to remember the whole story of Moses and the Exodus.

What happens when we don’t?  Well, we can see one example, in the passage from Acts that was read earlier.

I’ve been amusing myself this week by thinking of this passage as the minutes of the very first Session meeting.

Jesus has ascended, the Spirit hasn’t come yet, and so what could be better than to have a committee meeting?

Peter calls them to order and explains the agenda, that they need to elect a new elder, I mean disciple, so that they can have the right number as required by the rules.

Then they proceed to nominations and then determine the choice by the rolling of dice.  Mathias is the winner.

Let me tell you every thing we know about Mathias…

…

Mathias won that roll of the dice.  That’s it.  We never hear another word about Mathias.

Now, we now don’t know that Mathias was a bad apostle, we just know that he was an unremarkable one. Which is damning with faint praise if I ever heard it.

And maybe, just maybe, if Peter and the rest of them had been more interested in letting the story continue and waiting for the Spirit to come as Jesus had promised than in making sure that they had the right number of people on their team, they might have ended up making a better choice.

And maybe, when we go to make our decisions, we need to have more room for the stories and not just look to the laws.

Is studying the law a bad thing?  No.

What’s bad is focusing on the law at the expense of the stories that give the law context and heart.
When the time comes to stand for judgment and join the congregation of the righteous I hope to be able to say that I have loved all of the Torah.

And to quote another favorite story, “may the same be said for all of us!”

Amen.

The Joy of The Routine

A short homily for a seven am Wednesday Lent chapel chapel service

Text:  John 5: 1-18

What is it about us, anyway?

How is it that we an take the most joyful, the most wonderful gift and turn it into a duty, turn it into a job?
I love to drive.  Whether it’s across town to Target or across country to Atlanta, I love to drive.  I don’t know exactly why.

Maybe it’s the feeling of being in control of something.

Maybe it’s the freedom of being able to go anywhere I want.

Maybe it’s the chance to listen to my music, as loudly as I want.

Whatever the reason, it’s something that has been a joy and a privilege in my life.

But recently there’s been a change in my life.

My nice, easy, part-time, work-from-home job became a full-time, work-from-the-office-in-downtown-Denver job, which means that each morning at about 6:15 I get in my truck and drive 30 miles down to Brighton where I catch an RTD bus for the rest of the trip in.  Then in the evening, I catch the bus back to Brighton, get back into my truck and drive 30 miles back home, arriving right about twelve hours after I left.

It wouldn’t be very hard to imagine that after a few months of this routine, driving, one of the great joys in my life might become little more than a chore.

It’s going to be up to me to strive to remember the things that I love about driving and not let them fade into the background.

By now I’m sure you’re wondering, “What does your love of driving have to do with Jesus healing that guy?”

Well I’ll tell you:  Not much at all.

But I do think it has a lot to do with other things that happen in the text.

A miracle happens.  There’s not much fanfare, but a miracle happens nonetheless.  There are Jews at the temple who witness the result of the miracle, a lame man who has been laying on his mat hoping to be made well for thirty-eight years is walking around carrying his mat.  That’s pretty impressive.

Are the Jews excited?  Are the Jews amazed? Not so much.  What they are is annoyed that the miracle happened on the wrong day.  They’re so annoyed they want to kill the person responsible.

They were so caught up in the rituals and rules of the Sabbath, that they completely lost sight of the fact that the Sabbath is one of God’s greatest gifts to us.  The Sabbath is Good News!  It’s God saying to us “I got it.  I’ll take care of things today, rest from worry, rest from fear.”

Or as Jesus says in another gospel, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.”

God gave the Jews the Sabbath as a gift, a day to rest, a day to change their focus from work and toil, to the Lord and to their fellow man.  The Sabbath could have been their greatest joy and privilege. And what did the Jews do with their gift?  They made it a day about rules and rituals, “you can do this, you can’t do that, do everything right or you’ll be in big trouble.”

God gave us not just the Sabbath, but also the gift of his son Jesus Christ, that we celebrate through Lent and through the Eucharist.

 On Sundays, our Sabbath, we get the joy of gathering as a community to worship God.  In Lent, we are privileged to reflect on the journey of our Lord and in Communion we receive the gift of what Calvin called the real presence of God.

What do we do with these joys, privileges and gifts?

On Sundays we whine, “do I have to go to church?” or we complain when church runs too long.

During Lent, we focus on what we give up and on the length of our journeys.

And in Communion we try not to celebrate it too often, so it doesn’t become “too routine” and when we do
celebrate we take the smallest possible piece of bread, the barest taste of wine and we blind ourselves to the unlimited grace of God.

So this morning, in the middle of Lent, as we gather around the table, I invite you to remember that God’s grace abounds and that there can still be joy in the routine.

Charge

At the beginning of December, my friend Laura Kuster was ordained and then installed at two small churches in rural New Mexico.  She asked me to give the Charge to the Congregation at the two installation services.  As opposed to my normal process, I went without a manuscript, mainly because I didn't finish until right that moment. Here is what I reconstructed after the fact:

At seminary, in between teaching us about the Bible, Greek, Hebrew, Theology, Pastoral Care and Christian Education, they teach us a little about how to write sermons.

What I learned was, when it came time to write a sermon, I’ll a journal like this and just write and write and write. I’ll write in church, I’ll write at Starbucks, I’ll write wherever I have a chance. Eventually I’ll come up with a beginning, a middle and an end, not necessarily in that order, but a beginning a middle and an end.

When I get to that point, I rush home, sit down at my computer and type them up into a neat manuscript before they get away.

When Laura asked me to write this charge, I started out the same way. I grabbed my journal and I wrote and I wrote and I wrote.

And I wrote and I wrote and I wrote and eventually I came up with . . . three beginnings and an end.

So if this seems a little disorganized and disjointed, that’s why.

Because I’ve never written a charge before, the first place I started was to contact some preacher friends and get them to send me samples of what they had done.

What I learned from that was that I’m supposed to tell you about how he needs his time off, how you haven’t hired his wife, and how his kids are just kids and need to be held to the same standards as other kids.

I was going to go from there to congratulate you on calling someone who, in another time and place, would not have even been considered.

But I also wanted to talk to you about the different ways our society treats men and women and married and single people.

The truth is that a man coming into this position would be granted a certain amount of authority simply because he’s a man.  Laura needs that authority and she shouldn’t have to ask for it.

Married people have the advantage of all kinds of built in excuses to get away, “I have to pick up the kids,” “Dinner is almost ready.”

But a single person doesn’t have those excuses, and it is very easy to think, “she doesn’t have any one waiting for her at home, so it’s no big deal if she stays an extra couple of hours.” Or “it’s no big deal if Laura is here all night.”

That was a good beginning, but it wasn’t going to get me where I wanted to go, so I went back and started again.

This time, being the big Presbyterian geek that I am, I went back to my favorite book, The Book of Order and specifically to the part where it reminds us that Ministers of Word and Sacrament differ from every body else “in function only.”

All of the praying, laying on of hands and all nine sermons this weekend have not changed the fact that Laura is a human being like any of us and like any of us, Laura is going to make mistakes.

We believe in our tradition in the “priesthood of all believers,” and that means that Laura is not on her own, but you are all in it with her and you need to work with her and support her when she makes those mistakes.

That was a good beginning, but again, it wasn’t going to get me to where I wanted to go, so I had to start again.

This time I thought I would start with a more casual, personal approach, and tell you about Laura who I met in seminary and who has stood beside me in some of the hardest moments in my life.

I was going to borrow a phrase from poker and tell you that Laura is “all in.” I know that because Laura is “all in” in everything that she does, school, work, friendship.

Now that’s a wonderful gift, but it is a gift that can be very easily squandered and snuffed out.
It can be squandered not through any malice, but because when someone is so willing to give, it because far too easy for people to ask for “just a little bit more” and eventually, there’s nothing left to give.

So I was going to talk to you about boundaries and about not only allowing Laura to take time off, but encouraging her to.

And I was going to tell you that when she does take a day off, you need to let it really be a day off. If you have an emergency, call her, she wants to hear from you, but if you have a question about the docket for the next session meeting, it can wait.

And that was a good start, but it didn’t get me to what I really wanted to say to you.

That one thing is simple, it’s not eloquent or elegant, but it is the charge that I want to give you today:

This is Laura, my best friend, whom I love, and I need you to take of her.

Grant her the authority of this office, while allowing the mistakes that all of us humans are bound to make.

Hold her tight when she needs to be held, and give her room when she needs to get away.

So that’s my charge to you as brothers and sisters in Christ:

Take care of my friend.