Month: February 2020

Strict Discipline; 2.16.20; ICCM; Pastor Rebecca Ellenson

Once a long time ago, there was a devout man who thought he wanted to be a monk.  He asked to be accepted as a postulant in a Cistercian Order known for their severe asceticism. He followed the pattern of monastic life, including the manual labor, the seven hours of daily prayer, and even the discipline of strict silence.  After the first year he was invited to meet with the Abbot who reviewed his progress and asked him if he wanted to speak the two words he was allowed to say each year.  The man said, “Food Bad”.  With that the monk shuffled down the unheated stone hallways. The next year, when the Abbot asked him for his two-word comment the would-be monk said with a scowl, “Bed Hard!” The Abbot sent him back to his duties.  When the Abbot summoned him after another year and asked for his two words, he responded, “I Quit.”  “You might as well,” the Abbot replied, “Since you got here, all you’ve done is complain.” 

Christian monasticism originated in the third and fourth centuries, when a group of Christians now known as the desert fathers withdrew from the cities of the Roman Empire to the deserts of Syria and Egypt. They renounced their possessions, their social status, the prospect of marriage and family. They believed that money and their comfortable houses and their lives of general ease were interfering with their friendship with God. So they renounced all those things and went to the desert to fast and live quietly.

When they got there, they were distressed to find that although they had left all those things back in the city, they were now afflicted by thoughts about them–thoughts about loneliness, thoughts about love, thoughts about safety. They were haunted by memories of the fine meals and beautiful homes they had left in Alexandria and plagued by thoughts about how their fellow monk in the hut down the road had a better view and a more comfortable mat. The desert monks had escaped the things themselves, but they had not escaped their own imaginations. And so, they began to retrain their thoughts.

The pattern these desert monks developed for that retraining boils down to three steps – notice, quarantine, and replace. That is: before you can stop thinking a thought, first you must notice it. You must notice that you are indeed stuck in thoughts of anger or lust or envy or gloom. Then, the next step is to intentionally set the thought aside.

Let us say hypothetically that you are totally occupied by thinking about an adult child back home, or a grandchild who’s gone off the rails. It keeps you up at night, your stomach is churning, you roll the thoughts around in your head like marbles, “if only she would listen to me, what he needs to do is…, how can I get in touch with her?”

In this example – you might notice that you are imagining the worst case scenario, then having noticed, you might set the thought aside, maybe just for 10 minutes; you might say–“I’m just not going to think that thought right now, I can come back to it in a half hour if I want to, but for right now, I’m walking away from it.” Notice. Quarantine. And then – step 3 – replace the thought with a prayer. Disciplining of our imaginations is not undertaken simply for the sake of discipline. It is for the sake of truer self-knowledge, and of living more in reality instead of living in distraction, and all of that is in turn for the sake of creating space to attend to God

(This account of desert practice draws on, inter alia, Mary Margaret Funk, Thoughts Matter: The Practice of the Spiritual Life (Continuum, 1988), especially chapter one.)

“You have heard it said, ‘You shall not murder’…But I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgment.” “You have heard it said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery … in his heart”

Jesus sounds somewhat extreme here. What might it mean to take seriously the idea that your thoughts and emotions matter? What if your thoughts and emotions can themselves be sin?

Historical precedent suggests that when you take that notion seriously, you get ridiculed. It was 1976 when then-candidate Jimmy Carter agreed to an ill-fated interview with Playboy magazine.  After the umpteenth question about whether his firmly held Baptist religious convictions would unduly influence his policy decisions in the White House, Carter began opining about grace, and about sin, and he quoted this morning’s Gospel reading:

I try not to commit a deliberate sin. I recognize that I’m going to do it anyhow, because I’m human and I’m tempted. And Christ set some almost impossible standards for us. Christ said, ‘I tell you that anyone who looks on a woman with lust has in his heart already committed adultery.’ I’ve looked on a lot of women with lust. I’ve committed adultery in my heart many times. This is something that God recognizes I will do–and I have done it–and God forgives me for it.

Carter had a big lead before this interview, but when choice quotations leaked to the press, even before the interview was published, he dropped 15 points in the polls. Evangelicals and feminists were, for different reasons, horrified that Carter had spoken to Playboy in the first place, and everyone else, especially Northerners mocked him for his piety and his lame attempt to sound like he was connecting with the common man by admitting the lust in his heart.

Political cartoonists had a field day. Instead of making him seem like an average Joe, the governor’s comments about lust and adultery actually reinforced people’s opinion that Carter was way too pious and way too priggish and took Jesus way too seriously – I mean, really, confessing that you have lustful thoughts as though it were a sin – a serious sin, on par with actually having an affair? Please.

Surely, we are not supposed to take these hyperbolic and demanding things Jesus is saying about murder and lust and false witness at face value. Surely it cannot be that thinking a mean thought about someone is the equivalent of murdering her. Surely our thoughts–the thoughts we keep to ourselves and never even speak of, much less act on—surely those thoughts are less important than our actions. And in addition to being less important than actions, surely also thoughts are less controllable than actions: I can prevent myself from sleeping with someone besides my spouse, but I can’t reasonably be held responsible for daydreaming about doing so.

Jesus, and Jimmy Carter – and I pair the two together in the least partisan way possible – Jesus and Jimmy Carter seem to suggest something different.

Underneath the specifics of murder and adultery and bearing false witness, Jesus seems to be suggesting that we are capable of disciplining our thoughts, at least as capable as we are of disciplining our bodies; and Jesus seems to be suggesting that what happens in our thoughts and imaginations matters.

Perhaps today’s Gospel passage is inviting each of us to give up a thought. Consider renouncing the anxiety about family members back home. Consider renouncing the jealous thoughts about the person with more health or wealth or whatever. Renounce those thoughts, because Jesus told us that they are the equivalent of murder and theft. Renounce them to make a different kind of space in your brain for God, for charity, for love, for whatever wonderful thing you might uncover when you set aside the anger and the anxiety and the envy.

I don’t know how this renouncing will work out for you, but I want you to try it before you toss it aside on the pile we all keep, that pile called “things Jesus says to do but we know no one possibly could.”

Our thoughts about our fears or anger are really just expressions of another underlying belief: that we are alone, that our lives are not enough, that we know best. Those thoughts – those alone thoughts, those isolate-from-my-neighbors thoughts – those thoughts are the opposite of Christianity because in the Christian faith we love one another and we have brothers and sisters and we don’t isolate ourselves. For Christians, the kind of isolation that follows from our fearful, self-pitying, self-justifying, or judgmental thinking is frankly just not allowed.

The hardest thing about Jesus’ words in today’s passage is not that they set a high standard, or that they feel moralistic. The hardest thing about these words is that they are simple – so simple as to feel threatening and strange. Jesus is simply telling us that it is not just our good deeds but even our thoughts that somehow contribute to the Kingdom of God. To think a loving thought is to bring about the Kingdom of God, and to think an angry thought is not.

This seems mysterious to me – It seems as mysterious as God sending Jesus to show us the way. It seems as mysterious as God reaching out and making a community from outsiders, as mysterious as the sending of the Spirit to teach us and lead us in holiness. It seems as mysterious as God feeding us the bread and cup, and making us his body, and giving us his peace. Amen.

Matthew 5: 13-20; “We are Salt and Light” ICCM; Pastor Rebecca Ellenson

Let us pray.  Most loving God, you show us yourself in the body—the body of Christ.  You show us yourself in Jesus, our brother, our friend, our servant, our savior.  We want to see you more clearly.  Most loving God, you show yourself to us in the body of Christ, it the flesh, in each other, and in ourselves.  You identify us as your body in the world.  We want to see ourselves more clearly, as Salt and Light.  Amen.

Who are we?  We answer that question in many ways.  When asked who I am I usually answer with my name or one of my roles. I am Rebecca, or I am a pastor, or Steve’s wife, or Cora and Kelsey and Peter’s mom. 

Today we look at one of the ways Jesus described his followers.  The bible uses a variety of images to describe us.  We are the Body of Christ. 

In today’s gospel Jesus was seated by the Sea of Galilee, teaching the crowds.  He was a body, flesh and blood, a man who knew and felt all that we are.  Jesus was certainly more than just the one who died on the cross though.  He was also the living, serving, teaching, laughing, loving, growing body—the friend of Mary and Martha, of James and John. 

And even that is not all.  He is also the risen body, the one who rose from death victorious and promises us that resurrection life too. The one who sent the Spirit to lead us into all knowledge.  When we say we are the Body of Christ we proclaim that we are connected to all of that.  We are joined to Christ in life and death and resurrection.  There is nothing that we experience that is far away from God. 

We’ve been reading from Paul’s letter to the Corinthians.  In chapter12, verses13-27 is the main place where he describes who we are using the image of Christ’s body.  It answers the question, who are we? with a collective answer.  We are part of the whole, we are part of the living changing organism that is the church.  Each part is important.  Not only are we connected to Christ, we are connected to each other and serve as little Christ’s to each other and together we, the church, serve as Christ to the world.  God is counting on us to be his body. 

Images are helpful.  They help us to understand things that mere words cannot.  In the sermon on the mount Jesus calls us the salt of the earth and the light of the world.  He says, This is what we are, not what we will be or what we are supposed to be.   It is what we are. 

Today these are common, ordinary, inexpensive items.  In Jesus’ day they were not common or ordinary or cheap. 

Salt is essential for life.  Without it our bodies stop functioning.  We are literally salt, blood and bodily fluids are salty.  So, this image tells us we are absolutely necessary.  The church is needed for the life and the health of the world, just as salt is needed for life.  Even in our modern sophisticated world, what is perhaps the most common treatment in a hospital—Intravenous saline?  

Salt was especially valuable in biblical times.  Today we buy it for a few cents, or get it for free in fast food stores.  We have so much that some of us limit our salt intake for health reasons.  But in Jesus’ day it was mined.  It was not as pure as it is today.  Salt was mined or derived from natural sources, like sea water.  Purified salt was so valuable, in fact, that it was used in many religious ceremonies.  It was used as currency.  People were often paid in salt—hence the word salary.

Last year Steve and I went to the city of Comala in the Mexican State of Colima for a few days.  There we bought sea salt, naturally harvested and prized for its excellent quality.  I thought salt was salt—I grew up on the Morton Salt, the one in the round box with the girl with an umbrella on it.  But I discovered that there’s salt, and then there’s SALT!  I gained a new appreciation for this image of who we are in Christ.

Salt is useful, as a preservative, a purifier, an antiseptic.  Jesus says we are salt, that which heals, cleanses, saves, preserves. 

Salt also, obviously, adds flavor.  If I pour salt in water, the two mingle together and the salt permeates the liquid.  Once it is added to food the food is changed and the salt cannot be removed or separated.   Salt adds flavor to the whole dish.  On the shelf in the kitchen it cannot affect a dish’s flavor.  It has to be added.  As salt, we can permeate the world and improve its character.

Light is everywhere these days.  At the flip of a switch or the striking of a match we can illumine our lives.  Not so in Jesus’ day.  Little lamps filled with costly oils gave the only produced light.  The sun and the moon and the stars were the only other source of light.  It’s hard to even imagine such a dark world.  Maybe we can experience that in some remote places, like the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, or the far reaches of the Quetico, or in the middle of the ocean, but today we have nearly the opposite experience.  Like salt, even a tiny bit of light can completely change its environment. 

Light gives hope; everything seems scarier in the dark.  Light can expose what we fear and make it manageable.  As the church we bring the light of hope to others.  Light makes things understandable.  As the people of God our presence can do the same for another.  Light can be beautiful, it can give sparkle, even to a rock.  We can bring out the sparkle in the world, exposing for others the beauty in them and around them.  Light gives safety.  When life is dangerous the church can offer a refuge and a safe place. 

Who are we?  We are the body of Christ.  We may feel fear or loneliness or a lack of purpose.  We may not feel worthy.  But Jesus says we are the salt of the earth and the light of the world.  He does not say we can be these things or that we should be.  We are.  We are valuable, useful, essential.  We add health, flavor, hope, beauty, and safety to the world.  We do not do this all by ourselves.  We do it as the community of God.  The Body whose members are all important parts of the whole. 

Let us pray.  You have named us and claimed us as Salt and Light.  Send us out like rays of light or grains of salt to bring you into all the world.  Amen.

What Does God Want?  2.2.20; ICCM; Pastor Rebecca Ellenson

One of my favorite classes in Seminary was called Old Testament Pericopes.  A pericope is a selected passage of scripture assigned to be read on one of the Sundays of the church year. Dr. Frank Benz taught the class. We were assigned a passage of the Hebrew Scriptures to translate for each class.  Dr. Benz taught us so much more than Hebrew verb forms. He taught us how to read the texts for preaching. 

• He said, the first thing is always to pray for God to open the text to us, to guide our minds and to be with us as we study.
• Next, read the text, silently, then aloud, then in another translation or a bible story book.  
• Then for those of us in Seminary the next step was to make a translation of the text from the Hebrew—paying special attention to the key words, any irregularities or unusual words. 
• Context comes next—identify what time period it was written in—what was happening then, who wrote it, in what style—is it poetry, wisdom literature, prophecy, or is it a story?
• Only after that part of the study could we turn to what others wrote about the text. 
• At last we were to reflect on it, what might God have been saying to the original writer, his audience, What about other hearers of the text?  How would Jesus or Paul have understood a text by Micah from the 8^th Century BC?  What might God be saying to me now, to my congregation? 
• And finally we were to pray again—thanking God for the opportunity to learn. 

Today’s text from the prophet Micah was one of those pericopes in Dr. Benz’s class.  The Old Testament is difficult for many people to study. It can be overwhelming to bridge the cultural gap of 2800 years.  But, it’s worth the effort.  Today’s text speaks a word of blessing to the people of Micah’s time even as he recounts the many blessings of God throughout their past.  Long before the time that the prophet Micah lived, God made a covenant with the people –a sort of contract for a permanent relationship.  Simply put it went like this– I will be your God and you will be my people.  Or put another way– I am the Lord your God, you shall have no other God’s before me.  God promised to provide all they needed and more.  The role of the people was to worship God and accept God’s gifts. 

God was faithful to the covenant– God brought them out of Egypt, freed them from slavery, sent leaders and prophets, blessed them when they deserved curses, gave them safe passage through deserts and against attacking enemies.  “Remember all of that” God says through the prophet Micah, “and know the saving acts of the Lord.”  

God is NOT saying…see all I have done for you…shame on you for forgetting…boy, oh, boy, do you ever owe me now!

With God there is no tallying up.  Micah lists all the blessings granted to the people in order to show that God’s love knows no end.  God’s love will never stop.  God is saying–come back to me so I can love you some more! 

Micah’s message is written in a specific pattern.  It is a metaphor of sorts.  This passage is staged as a sort of court case between God and the people.  In this lawsuit God is the one who has been cheated on, wronged.  Yet it is God who calls the partner back, not to get a payback or to punish but to love some more.

It is hard for anyone to imagine such love.  We live under covenants of our own, even if we don’t call them covenants.  Marriage is one of the best examples.  On a wedding day promises are made to live in good relationship, to share and give and love through whatever comes.  The promises reflect the ideal arrangement.  Even in the best marriages though, the love is not perfect or pure. 

The parent/child relationship is another sort of covenant.  If we have children, we take on the responsibility of loving and caring for them.  But, no matter how good the intentions, no parent can love perfectly.  As children we are born into a relationship over which we have no control.  We can accept the love given us.  We can respond with our own love.  But no child loves perfectly either.  It is hard to imagine such unconditional love.

The imaginary defendant in today’s pericope cannot imagine the depth or length of God’s love.  Instead of hearing God’s words as an invitation back into God’s loving care, as an offer of more free gifts, the defendant expects punishment and asks what penalty will be demanded for faithlessness. 

The defendant starts modestly enough.  How about a burnt offering, a calf, perhaps.  No, it must be more?  It’s kind of like—how badly did I screw up?  Do I have to get flowers and chocolate?  How about a thousand rams, or ten thousand rivers of oil?  That would still not be enough?  What about my firstborn child? In ancient times other nations offered child sacrifices.  Is that what you require from your faithless covenant partner?  All the questions hold the message: nothing I can offer will be enough so what do you want from me? 

How easy it is to turn the marvelous grace of God into a list of dos and don’ts, the invitation to blessing into a challenge for good works. The response from the prophet, the one who brought this whole courtroom scene to order is to bang the gavel and say. “God has told you what is good, O mortal, and what God requires of you– do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with your God.  Those are three ways of saying–keep the covenant–be God’s people–trust God’s love and live in that grace.  Just open yourself to God’s love.  That’s all.  Live touched and transformed by grace day after day and let that lead you to live a life of blessing.

Today’s text is a recap of what God wants for us—It’s like one of those things we should be sure to focus on because it so beautifully summarizes the story of God and God’s people.  God reaches out, calls us by name, invites us into covenant, and then fixes our messes when we fall away, over and over again…  We don’t earn our way into God’s grace by sacrifices- we live in God’s grace by humbly aligning ourselves with justice, kindness.

Justice is one of the key words in this passage.  It is a central theme of biblical life. Justice is identified with the very nature of God.  It is a transformative virtue that restores community while balancing personal and common good.  In our Modern Western Culture we tend to think of Justice more in terms of judgements, laws, punishment for wrongdoing, or vindication for victims.  Justice in the conventional wisdom of the world is when people get what they’ve got coming to them.  Fairness.  But that’s just a tiny bit of what the Hebrew word means. 

In the Old Testament there are three basic types of justice—Commutative justice—which focuses on the relationships of people within a community.  The law wasn’t separated from the community—justice had to work for all the people.  The second kind of justice is distributive justice—which ensured the equitable distribution of resources, goods, benefits and burdens.  There is no justice without sharing—without equity, without mutual suffering and benefit.  And finally, the third understanding is what we call social justice—the work of justice that means systems of oppression need to change. 

What does the Lord require—that we do justice.  It can seem daunting—How do we know where to start?  Well, we can start by asking how Jesus did justice.  What did he say in the gospel—he announces what it is to be blessed—to live in God’s kingdom. He’s not telling people to be blessed, he’s saying they are already.  He pronounces a blessing to all the people who have come to hear him. His blessing invites them to think differently about the way the world works because of what he says.

This was a new teaching. In the ancient world, just like today, many people believed strongly in cause and effect. They believed that if they were good people who followed God’s commandments, worked hard, and tried to do their best in all circumstances, then God would reward them with good health, food to eat, stable jobs, happy families, and prosperity. Likewise, they believed that God punished the sinful with illness, poverty, imprisonment, blindness, divorce, and other personal tragedy. Many believed that God even punished entire sinful populations through war, famine, droughts, and other disasters.

If a man was sick, or mourning, or poor in spirit, or starving, or persecuted, it was his own fault for sinning. A woman who suffered did so as the consequence of her own bad behavior because suffering was understood as punishment for sin.

But Jesus flips things on their head.  It doesn’t work like that in the kingdom of God. Jesus blesses everyone who had gathered, no matter who they were and no matter what they had done. God’s blessing in Christ is not just for the righteous ones. God’s blessing is not just for certain religious groups, or certain genders, or certain sexual orientations, or certain cultural or racial groups. God’s blessing is not just for those who are pure, who go to church and give to charities and treat people with kindness. And God’s blessing is not evidenced by a big bank account or a fancy title or a luxury home.

In this new kingdom that Jesus is showing us, God blesses the saints and sinners alike. Jesus offers a blessing on the poor in wallet and the poor in spirit. He blesses the blind, the lame, the imprisoned, the outcast. He blesses the leper and the prostitute. He blesses the murderer and the thief and the adulterer. He blesses the Jews and the Gentiles.  Today who would he bless? the Muslims and the Hindus, the Buddhists and the Ba’hai, the Mexicans and the Canadians, the Syrians and the Russians, the people of Ghana and Brazil. In Christ, God’s blessing does not discriminate. God’s blessing is for all. God’s blessing is for you. God’s blessing is for me.

That’s good news, don’t you think?  It’s commutative and distributive and social justice.  It means that no matter who you are or what you have done, you are blessed and you are welcomed into God’s family, and there is nothing you can do, ever, to lose God’s love, affirmation, and blessing.

Blessed is our identity, blessed is our condition, blessed is who we are because of God’s saving love shown in Jesus Christ.  So in this first teaching for his followers, his disciples, in his first teaching for you and for me, Jesus is telling us as clearly as he can that these people—”look around you,” he says to his disciples—these people in the crowd that gathered that day near the shores of the Galilean lake—these people who drive loud razors under your window at night, these people who whose political views differ from ours, these people who are in jail for dealing drugs, these people who got pregnant out of wedlock and now want an abortion, these people who are members of a gang, these people who are members of a white supremacist group, these people who sit in judgment, these people who carry guns, these people who are crazy feminists, these people who are pro-life, these people who are pro-choice. . .well, you get the idea. Jesus his telling his disciples that ALL THESE PEOPLE are blessed.

And we who call ourselves disciples, followers of Jesus Christ, get to not just understand this, but we get to live it out by our words and our actions. What does the Lord require—to do justice, to love kindness to walk humbly with God.  We are blessed and we can be a blessing to others.