What Putting Yourself Second Looks Like

If you have been following the Christian blogosphere lately, you probably know that the American branch of the prominent evangelical charity World Vision (whose site I have a permanent link to on my list of detours on the Project's sidebar--and full disclosure, I have been supporting World Vision financially for years and plan on continuing to do so) announced it would start allowing for the hiring of gays and lesbians in married relationships.  It made sense, considering that World Vision USA is headquartered in my home state of Washington, where same-sex marriage has been legal since the 2012 election, and World Vision employs Christians from a wide swath of denominations and traditions.

Then, just 48 hours later, they abruptly announced that they had reversed that decision.

What had happened in that short span of two days?

Conservative Christians across the denominational spectrum had a massive conniption, taking to social and traditional media platforms alike to condemn the decision.  Literally thousands of child sponsors contacted World Vision to tell them they would no longer be supporting those children.  And World Vision then reversed course quicker than you could say "WTF?"

I--and many other young Christians--felt profoundly disillusioned by how our colleagues and brethren had rushed to put the kibosh on this policy change.  It wasn't just that folks were opposed to World Vision hiring married gay employees, it was that it became blatantly clear that opposition to same-sex marriage ranked as a higher priority to these folks than, you know, feeding the hungry and clothing the naked--the sort of stuff Jesus actually tells us to do.

So when I read in the New York Times that World Vision admitted some of the sponsors called to ask, "Can I have my child back?" I wanted to scream.  Because if you are in a position to use a child's welfare as a bargaining chip to get what you want, you have no business acting like you are a persecuted minority.  You are using your class privilege to get your own way.

Considering that Jesus Himself as a dirt poor, homeless Israelite carpenter had little to no class privilege to speak of...that doesn't strike me as very Christ-like.

But you know what is?  An openly gay friend of mine whom I competed against many a time on the collegiate debate circuit wrote on my Facebook wall after I posted about this story, saying, verbatim, "That is DISGUSTING.  I'd rather the groups continued to discriminate against us than abandon children like that."

Chris's response absolutely floored me.  Even though both her and I believe discriminating against her is fundamentally wrong, she'd rather have to cope with that than see impoverished kids used in order to discriminate against her.  I was amazed and moved.

On top of that, Chris identifies as agnostic.  But by expressing a willingness to put the welfare of others before her own, she came across far more Christian and Christ-like to me than my brethren who did try to yank their child sponsorships...and then had the chutzpah to ask for them back only two days later.

Because she put herself second.

That is what being Christian looks like, friends.  Even if you don't identify as Christian.

So, here's the deal, fellow Christians: you do not get to complain about being a persecuted minority.  If anything, the fact that World Vision was so rapid and complete in its reversal says volumes about just how greatly your views are still catered to.  Who got persecuted in all of this are the children whom World Vision immeasurably helps out of poverty, because they had no say in your proactive decision to use them as human collateral.  Who got persecuted in all of this are the gay and lesbian Christians who want to be treated fairly in the Christian workplace.

You were not persecuted.  You were, and are, privileged.

And if nothing else, please, please recognize that privilege for what it is.  And next time, I beg of you, please don't use it at the expense of those who have less of it than you.

Your Savior--and mine--would probably approve.

Yours in Christ,
Eric

"This Week's Sermon: Friends Don't Let Friends Dress Up Their Pets"

Jonah 3:1-10

The Lord’s word came to Jonah a second time: 2 “Get up and go to Nineveh, that great city, and declare against it the proclamation that I am commanding you.” 3 And Jonah got up and went to Nineveh, according to the Lord’s word. (Now Nineveh was indeed an enormous city, a three days’ walk across.) 4 Jonah started into the city, walking one day, and he cried out, “Just forty days more and Nineveh will be overthrown!” 5 And the people of Nineveh believed God. They proclaimed a fast and put on mourning clothes, from the greatest of them to the least significant. 6 When word of it reached the king of Nineveh, he got up from his throne, stripped himself of his robe, covered himself with mourning clothes, and sat in ashes. 7 Then he announced, “In Nineveh, by decree of the king and his officials: Neither human nor animal, cattle nor flock, will taste anything! No grazing and no drinking water! 8 Let humans and animals alike put on mourning clothes, and let them call upon God forcefully! And let all persons stop their evil behavior and the violence that’s under their control!” 9 He thought, Who knows? God may see this and turn from his wrath, so that we might not perish.[a] 10 God saw what they were doing—that they had ceased their evil behavior. So God stopped planning to destroy them, and he didn’t do it. (Common English Bible)

“Friends Don’t Let Friends…A Lent Alongside Jonah,” Week Four

Our new knitting circle at FCC has been amazing—it has been attracting knitters of all ages to be able to just hang out at the church and practice their craft, and upon hearing the news that we had created a knitting circle here at church, my dear Carrie posted a news story from ABC Australia to my Facebook wall about what exactly we could devote ourselves to knitting: penguin sweaters.  No, not sweaters with penguins knitted on them.  Sweaters for actual penguins.  Here, I’ll let the folks at ABC tell you all about it:

The Penguin Foundation has a global callout for knitters to make pullovers for penguins in rehab.  Penguins caught in oil spills need the little jumpers to keep warm and to stop them from trying to clean the toxic oil off with their beaks.  The Penguin Foundation is based at Phillip Island, which is known for having a large penguin colony.

Knitter Lyn Blom is the receptionist at Phillip Island Nature Parks in Victoria and has knitted many penguin jumpers over the years.  (She) says it’s not just major oil spills that cause problems for local penguins.  “Fishermen might clean out a container or something while they’re at sea,” says Lyn.  “It’s a continuing problem,” she says.  “We probably get about 20 birds a year.”

One advantage of knitting a penguin sweater is that they are small.  “They’re very quick,” says Lyn.  The Penguin Foundation also distributes the jumpers to other wildlife rescue centers where needed.  While the Penguin Foundation’s website says it currently has a ‘good supply’ of the little jumpers, the organization also uses them in educational programs as well as selling them as a fundraising measure.

I suppose that if you are, in fact, going to dress up your pets after all, those pets should be penguins who have been affected by oil spills, and you should dress them humbly.  These are the animals with built-in tuxedos, after all—tuxedos ruined by our doing.  But that is more than can be said for the animals of Nineveh, who are given not pullovers, but sackcloth and ashes to wear!

Traditionally, the forty days prior to Easter Sunday make up a worship season called Lent, and those forty days correspond to the forty days that Jesus spent fasting and being tempted in the wilderness.  Lent is a season whose primary themes, then, are largely about denial of selfishness and repentance from our own past selfishness.  And really, there is no better story about selfishness in Scripture than that of the prophet Jonah.  Sure, you have individual stories about selfishness in Biblical heroes like Samson and David, but none of their stories involved getting belched out of a giant future sushi roll.  And really, selfishness is what defines Jonah, even more so than any other Biblical character.  He is the original prodigal, the original heir who renounces his Father hundreds of years before Jesus tells us His parable of the prodigal son in Luke 15.  So for Lent this year, we will be reading through, verse-by-verse, the entirety of the Jonah narrative.  It’s only four chapters long, so going verse-by-verse is definitely doable in a five-week series, and we’ll come out the other side on Palm Sunday and the beginning of the Passion narrative.

We kicked off the series two weeks ago with Jonah having declined God’s generous offer to go preach on His behalf to the Assyrians in Nineveh by fleeing in the exact opposite direction, to modern-day Spain.  In doing so, he boards a ship in the Mediterranean Sea bound for Tarshish, and when the ship gets caught in a storm, Jonah is chosen by lot to be the one responsible for the storm and he is unceremoniously chucked overboard, at which point God intervenes and brings forth a giant fish to keep Jonah from drowning.  In those three days and three nights he spends as sushi food, Jonah finally stops running and utters the prayer in Jonah 2, but that is far from the end of the story, as we discover today in Jonah 3!

Even though the most attention tends to be given to the first half of the Jonah narrative—the part about Jonah running from God and being swallowed by a fish—that part is literally only half of the story, as those two chapters give way to the episode depicted in the other two chapters of the story: of Jonah getting a mulligan from God, being called once more to preach in Nineveh, and actually going through with it!  And the results of his preaching are nothing short of incredible.

Jonah preaches the destruction of all of Nineveh (itself a huge city, requiring three days just to walk across) in 40 days—does that sound familiar at all to any of us who went to go see the film Noah over the weekend?  And like Noah, the nameless king of Nineveh takes the Word of God seriously and demands repentance not just from himself (by sitting in ashes—which, yes, probably looked as bizarre as it sounds) but from his subjects and their pets and herd animals.

To this end, not only does the king dress in sackcloth, but so too do the subjects and animals.  And, again, this should sound bizarre to us.  It should sound comical, because it is.  Imagine if it were, say, Ash Wednesday, and in addition to getting yourself ashed with the sign of the cross on your forehead, you brought in your cat to get ashed as well, so that they could show repentance for that time s/he shredded your favorite throw pillows.  This, of course, is a lie—we all know that cats are incapable of remorse.  And animals in general are incapable of theological angst the way the king of Nineveh is here.  That’s why friends don’t let friends dress up their pets—your pets don’t get why you’re having an existential crisis, so don’t foist it off on them in the form of a new doggie sweater.  Even if they shredded your favorite pillows, they don’t deserve that!

But if ever there were a moment to dress up your pets, the extreme gravity of saving lives would be it.  The little sweaters knitted for penguins literally save their lives by keeping them from succumbing to hypothermia, or from poisoning themselves with oil.  And the sackcloth and ashes imposed upon the animals of Nineveh literally saves them and their humans from divinely-wrought destruction (we aren’t told how said destruction would take place, but rest assured, our God is a creative God).  In the dressing of themselves and their pets, God sees the authenticity of Nineveh’s remorse, and true to form, He extends to them a second chance, just like He did for Jonah previously.  In this way, dressing up your pets would be both life-giving and life-saving.

That doesn’t mean it still wouldn’t be dorky and comical.  It was.  Audiences listening to the story of Jonah probably would have had a good chuckle right around this point in the story (laughing at the Word of God?!  Oh dear…maybe their pets should be ashed as well…).  But there is a definite method behind the apparent madness of the Nineveh king.  He may be a dope, but he knows the inning and he knows the score, and he is invested in saving his own people.

And just as it is true with this earthly king, so too do we discover that it is true with a divine king.  In spite of the urgency of Jonah’s sermon, God proves, in the end, to not want to destroy Nineveh.  That is perhaps the great takeaway from this chapter: God does not push the big red button if He can help it, even if we might think that it is time for Him to do exactly that.  As Old Testament scholar Johanna Bos writes about this passage, “Jonah may have entertained some small hope that when he cried his cry of overturning it would actually happen…Psychologically, it cannot be an easy burden to bear to predict doom which never happens, even though from an ethical point of view one should be glad.  It is a thankless job to preach the word and never see it come out the way one tells it.”

So what are we left with?  Between keeping God’s word as proclaimed by Jonah and extending grace to Nineveh and its inhabitants, God chooses grace.  Without a second thought.  Verse 10 is incredibly succinct and to-the-point on this: God saw what they were doing—that they had ceased their evil behavior.  So God stopped planning to destroy them, and He didn’t do it.  That’s it.  No agonizing over the decision, no writing out a pros-and-cons list, no consulting a magic-8 ball, no plucking petals off a flower (“I annihilate them…I annihilate them not…I annihilate them…”).  God sees our faith, and grace is immediately offered without hesitation or reservation.

Just don’t dress up your pets as a testimony to that faith, please.  Unless your pet is a penguin.  Who has been in an oil spill and needs a little penguin-sweater.  Then it’s okay.

But all of my asides here about the silliness of dressing up your pets—I have to admit, there is a larger point to all of them.  Sometimes, your faith will ask you to do things that other people might—and will—ridicule, even if you know that it is the right thing to do.  It’s remarkable, really: we as a species have never entirely graduated from Mean Girls in high school where you get mocked for not sitting at the cool kids’ table, when a faith that is centered around loving your neighbor as yourself would tell you to sit at the table with the kid whose Magic: The Gathering collection rivals your pastor’s own (there are two giant plastic tubs full of M:TG cards in my childhood bedroom.  Ask my mom, she’ll tell you).  We still prefer not standing up for people.

But faith in God doesn’t always call you to do what is convenient.  In fact, it seldom ever does.  It calls you to do what is right.  And so when that choice comes to you, as it does to us all, remember that Jonah never actually does what is convenient.  In this entire book, he never actually takes the easiest route out.  Yes, he runs from God, but he does so by crossing the sea—an incredibly dangerous enterprise back then.  He tries for an out, but it’s not the convenient way out.  While avoiding what is convenient, he does, at last, do what is right: he goes to Nineveh.

There, the king of Nineveh hears him.  And likewise avoids doing what is convenient.  He does what he believes to be right.  And a God who thrives on righteousness and authenticity sees this, and reacts immediately and accordingly in favor of grace.

By that grace, may it be so for you as well.  Amen.

Rev. Eric Atcheson
Longview, Washington

March 30, 2014

Letters from the Soul: This Month's Newsletter Column + Holy Week Preaching Schedule

April 2014: "UP AND AT 'EM!"

Dear Church,

Somehow in the arbitrary lottery that always occurs between parents who have to divvy up the parenting tasks, my dad drew the unenviable short straw of being the one responsible for waking me up for school every morning (that is, until he outsourced the job to an alarm clock once I was old enough to know how to operate one).

Some mornings, I'd be up bright-eyed and bushy-tailed half an hour before he'd come get me, but other mornings, I would be sleeping like the dead before coming to at the sound of his voice hollering at me, "TIME TO GET UP! UP AND AT 'EM!"

And thus began my love-hate relationship with waking up in the mornings. It may be unpleasant, but ultimately it is always for the better: it means a new day has begun, and I have been called by God to be a part of it.

More than any other day on the calendar, Easter Sunday represents God shouting to sleeping-like-the-dead us "TIME TO GET UP! UP AND AT 'EM!" On a historical level, God is saying this to a dead Jesus who then is resurrected. But on a theological level, God is saying that to us every time we feel tugged to go to church on Sunday morning, or called to do something wholly generous for someone else. God is telling the dead side of ourselves to come back to life and live as He yearns for us to.

Easter Sunday this year falls on April 20. It is the morning of all mornings when God happens upon us sleeping like the dead and rouses us to awaken, to hear His voice, and to be the faithful, loving people that we are called to be. How will you respond to God's voice rousing you on this Easter Sunday? My hope and prayer for each and every one of you is that you will find yourselves able to respond to that divine voice with new life, like Christ Himself on that fateful day nearly 2,000 years ago!

Happy Easter, my friends!

Yours in Christ,
Pastor Eric

Holy Week Sermons:

Palm Sunday (April 13): "Colt Surfing," Matthew 21:1-11
Maundy Thursday (April 17, 7pm): "Christ Before," Mark 14:17-25, Luke 22:39-53, John 18:28-19:5
Easter Sunday (April 20): "He Goes Ahead of You," Matthew 28:1-10

Pastor Eric will be off on Sunday, April 27.

Lenten Blog Post Series: The Myth that God Wants the Poor to be Poor

I had not arrived at an idea of something to add a spiritual practice for Lent--an idea that is increasingly more and more popular in the church, (until) this blog post series--something that I have not done since my "We Are Legion" week of blog posts nearly a year ago. One of the things that has become a great labor in my work (both with folks inside and outside of the church) is attempting to debunk some of the more harmful myths that exist about God and about the church. 

And so one of my Lenten practices, for this plus the following five weeks, is, in effect, asking for another fast for y'all--a fast from some of those hurtful myths that we tell ourselves (or allow other people to convince us of) about God. 

The week of March 9: The Myth that God Considers You Worthless
The week of March 16 The Myth that God Wants You to be Rich
The week of March 23: The Myth that God Wants the Poor to be Poor
The week of March 30: The Myth that God Helps Those Who Help Themselves
The week of April 6: The Myth that God Tells Us Exactly When Jesus is Coming Back
The week of April 13 (Holy Week): The Myth that God is Dead

Coincidentally, the inevitability of poverty is a topic that was brought up twice yesterday in the course of my workday--during the Bible study I teach at church on  Tuesday mornings, and by an acquaintance of mine as he talked to an ecumenical gathering about his ministry of providing low-barrier assistance for homeless persons (which is partly why I held off on posting this until today--I wanted to take a bit of time to think about all that was said).

In both cases, though, a single verse came out--and it is one that I hear quoted frequently, in some variation of, "Doesn't Jesus tell us that the poor will always be with us?"

And yes, He does.  Or, more accurately, He says it in John 12:8 to Judas Iscariot when Judas objects to the anointing of Jesus by Mary of Bethany with a spikenard ointment that, in Judas' words, was worth a year's wages (ie, 365 denarii, with one denarius representing the basic day's wage for an unskilled laborer).

Like just about any Biblical verse, though, it is important to put this saying of Jesus in context.  Firstly, bear in mind that He is saying this to Judas, who, John tells us in this story, stole from the common purse of the apostles.  Additionally, remember that the apostles themselves are, essentially, poor.  They gave up their livelihoods and permanent homes to become itinerant and follow Jesus.

In other words: Judas is stealing from the poor--from the impoverished disciples.  And so Judas will indeed always have the poor with him, because he steals from them and prevents them from accumulating any sort of savings.

Additionally, Jesus does not say this in a vacuum--He immediately follows this saying up with a rejoinder: "but you will not always have me."  It is both a prophesy of His coming crucifixion and subsequent ascent into heaven and a commentary on the fleeting nature of mortal flesh.  Poverty, though, is systemic and inevitable for however long we have human economics of currency, barter, and supply and demand.

Finally, we would be doing ourselves a disservice to focus on John 12:8 at the expense of the many, many other verses in which Jesus--and the Scriptures entire--go to bat for the poor (there are too many to list individually here).  Truly, our Bible is a witness to and for the poor, and part of the good news of the Gospel is that the poor can look forward to a day when they will live in the Lord's favor (Luke 4:18-19).

Make no mistake: According to Scripture, neither God or Jesus want the poor to remain poor.  If anything, God demonstrated that He is on the side of the poor by ultimately coming to us in human form by way of poverty--being born in a barn to blue-collar parents.  God is on the side of the poor, and if you yourself live in material poverty, take heart: God may not promise you riches in this life (see the previous entry in this series about God wanting us to be rich, either), but God promises you rewards and treasures in heaven.  God's justice represents a reversal of fortunes when the poor will become rich and the rich will become poor (Luke 6), and God sees your poverty and promises you a better life with Him.

In the meanwhile, though, God has also tasked us all with the monumental quest of ensuring there are fewer impoverished persons who have only that divine promise to sustain them in their financial insecurity.  Let us continue that quest in His name with vigor.

Yours in Christ,
Eric

This Week's Sermon: "Friends Don't Let Friends Run From Their Fears"

Jonah 2:1-10

Jonah prayed to the Lord his God from the belly of the fish: 2 “I called out to the Lord in my distress, and he answered me. From the belly of the underworld[a] I cried out for help; you have heard my voice. 3 You had cast me into the depths in the heart of the seas, and the flood surrounds me. All your strong waves and rushing water passed over me. 4 So I said, ‘I have been driven away from your sight. Will I ever again look on your holy temple? 5 Waters have grasped me to the point of death; the deep surrounds me. Seaweed is wrapped around my head 6 at the base of the undersea[b] mountains. I have sunk down to the underworld; its bars held me with no end in sight. But you brought me out of the pit.’ 7 When my endurance[c] was weakening, I remembered the Lord, and my prayer came to you, to your holy temple. 8 Those deceived by worthless things lose their chance for mercy.[d] 9 But me, I will offer a sacrifice to you with a voice of thanks. That which I have promised, I will pay. Deliverance belongs to the Lord!” 10 Then the Lord spoke to the fish, and it vomited Jonah onto the dry land. (Common English Bible)

“Friends Don’t Let Friends…A Lent Alongside Jonah,” Week Three

The young woman—still a teenager, in fact, was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis at age 15, and you wouldn’t think it to watch her run.  She looks like any other athlete who is in fantastic shape…that is, until she crosses the finish line of her race.  As the New York Times writes:

…the smallest runner’s legs wobbled like rubber, and she flopped into her waiting coach’s arms.  She collapses every time she races.  (She) was found to have multiple sclerosis three years ago.  Defying most logic, she has gone on to become one of the fastest young distance runners in the country—one who cannot stay on her feet after crossing the finish line…

Because multiple sclerosis blocks nerve signals from (her) legs to her brain, particularly as her body temperature increases, she can move at steady speeds that cause other runners pain she cannot sense…but intense exercise can also trigger weakness and instability; as she goes numb in races, she can continue moving forward as if on autopilot, but any disruption, like stopping, makes her lose control.

At the finish of every race, she staggers and crumples.  Before momentum sends her flying to the ground, her coach braces to catch her, carrying her aside as her competitors finish and her parents swoop in to ice her legs.  Minutes later, sensation returns and she rises, ready for another change at forestalling a disease that one day may force her to trade the track for a wheelchair.  Multiple sclerosis has no cure.

Imagine literally running from the future of this disease that will one day cripple you by tossing it aside and running on despite the numbness.  Imagine running so hard and for so long that your body has no choice but to stagger and crumple at the end.  But also imagine that when you fall, there is somebody to catch that fall.  A coach.  A parent.  Or, for Jonah, a giant-ass fish.

Traditionally, the forty days prior to Easter Sunday make up a worship season called Lent, and those forty days correspond to the forty days that Jesus spent fasting and being tempted in the wilderness.  Lent is a season whose primary themes, then, are largely about denial of selfishness and repentance from our own past selfishness.  And really, there is no better story about selfishness in Scripture than that of the prophet Jonah.  Sure, you have individual stories about selfishness in Biblical heroes like Samson and David, but none of their stories involved getting belched out of a giant future sushi roll.  And really, selfishness is what defines Jonah, even more so than any other Biblical character.  He is the original prodigal, the original heir who renounces his Father hundreds of years before Jesus tells us His parable of the prodigal son in Luke 15.  So for Lent this year, we will be reading through, verse-by-verse, the entirety of the Jonah narrative.  It’s only four chapters long, so going verse-by-verse is definitely doable in a five-week series, and we’ll come out the other side all set for Palm Sunday and the beginning of the Passion narrative.  We kicked off the series two weeks ago with Jonah having declined God’s generous offer to go preach on His behalf to the Assyrians in Nineveh by fleeing in the exact opposite direction, to modern-day Spain.  In doing so, he boards a ship in the Mediterranean Sea bound for Tarshish, and when the ship gets caught in a storm, Jonah is chosen by lot to be the one responsible for the storm and he is unceremoniously chucked overboard, at which point God intervenes and brings forth a giant fish to keep Jonah from drowning.  In those three days and three nights he spends as sushi food, Jonah finally stops running and utters the prayer in Jonah 2.

Jonah’s prayer in this second chapter of his book actually reads much like a psalm, to the point that many translations actually put this entire chapter (save for verses 1 and 10) in verse rather than straight-up prose.  And there is a point to that—Jonah’s prayer is as much poetry as it is human-to-God communication.  In some ways, we might think it remarkable that Jonah is able to conjure up such vivid, flowery verbiage while stuck in the craw of a giant fish, but really, that should be the last thing that strains our credulity—we are, after all, discussing a man who survived for three days and three nights inside of said fish, becoming neither digested or dehydrated.  So Jonah’s ability to pray, regardless of the circumstances, may just be the thing that grounds us to reality in this otherwise larger-than-life Bible story.

And as well it should.  Jonah has largely taken it on the chin so far from everyone involved in this story—God, the sailors he traveled with, even me as I have been recounting and unpacking this story alongside you.  But there still had to be a reason God called Jonah in the first place!  You’ll recall that I spoke briefly in previous sermons about the positive qualities Jonah did bring to the table—his honesty, his determination, and so on—but plenty of people have those qualities in abundance but are not necessarily called to a preaching ministry.  Jonah is, and this prayer reminds us why.  Just as Jonah reaches the point where he realizes that he needs salvaging, so too are we meant to reach the point that there really is something amazing in this obstinate, rebellious man that is truly worth saving.  Jonah has a gift, and his time in the fish reminds us of that and perhaps reminds himself of that fundamental reality.

Yet no matter how gifted we are, we still cannot do it all alone.  Jonah could not flee from God alone—though not for lack of effort—so he enlisted the help of sailors who were willing to let him board their ship.  And simultaneously, he could not turn back to God alone.  He needed this fish to protect him from drowning when, as he prayed, his endurance had weakened—endurance necessary to re-summon his commitment to his divine Creator.  He needed to stop running, and when he did, just like for this young runner with M.S., there was somebody there to catch him.

The real problem arises, then, not when there is someone or something to catch you when you finally stop running from your fears—your fear of God, your fear of somebody else, your fear of yourself—it is when there is nobody to catch you.  It happened once to our young runner with M.S., at the national championship 5,000 meters, and it was an abject scene: she simply fell over at the finish line, laying prostrate as the announcers speculated as to whether or not she was having a seizure.  And it almost happens to Jonah.  And he finally, at long last, realizes it.

He stops running.  From God, from himself, from his fear of doing what it is that God wants.

And what God ultimately wants is simple, even if what we want is anything but.  As the Old Testament scholar Johanna Bos writes, “At its core, prayer is the intervention between a world bent on self-destruction and a God who is turned toward this world in love.”  Jonah has been bent on self-destruction from the beginning of this tale.  But God is bent wholly on love.  And yet somehow, Jonah fears this God to the point of running to the ends of the earth to evade Him.

This is why friends do not let friends run from their fears: because sometimes, those fears ultimately turn out to be really quite unfounded.  Friends don’t let friends run from their fears.  And friends don’t let friends run away from God out of such a fear.

Because, paradoxically and beautifully, sometimes we only arrive where we are meant to be when we finally stop running.  The final line of Jonah’s prayer is the most powerful for me: “For deliverance belongs to the Lord!”  And if it feels like thus far that I have been glossing over the individual details about the theology of the prayer, I haven’t.  But before we can recognize that deliverance does indeed belong to God, we must also recognize our own circumstances—whatever they may be—that cause us to “call out to the Lord in (our) distress,” as verse 2 puts it.

We have to stop running in our fears and our distresses.  And when we do, Jonah says, God will answer us.  Even as far down as from the depths of the underworld—and here, the Hebrew word Jonah uses is sheol, which can also be translated as the pit—God will answer.  No matter how deep the pit is dug, God in His Heaven still hears our cries.  God always hears our cries.

When we run, and cry out in exhaustion, God hears us.  And when we finally stop, and collapse, and cry out in pain, God hears us then too.  If anything, being in the belly of a giant fish puts yet another auditory barrier between Jonah and the world—not only is he underwater, beneath that which personified chaos to the ancient Israelites—the sea—but he is also submerged within a leviathan with no soul, no cognition beyond what the Lord speaks unto it.  Jonah is as cut off as any person could possibly be while still being very much among the living.

This is why, even though Jonah is presumably healthy and fit, he is in Sheol.  This is why he is in the land of the dead.  Because not physically but emotionally and spiritually, he is the closest living thing to that deadening stasis of utter separation from God and humanity alike.  Here, in the belly of the fish, he is about as close as one can be to hell in one’s earthly life.  Utterly alone, utterly forsaken, his only ally in the world being a thing that literally freaking ate him, Jonah at long last comes to his senses.  Finally he understands that deliverance comes from the Lord.

He stops running.  From God, from himself, from his fear of doing what it is that God wants.

What in your life do you need to stop running from?  What in your life do you need to start running towards?  Perhaps most importantly, what in your life can God help deliver you from?  Ours is a God of liberation from bondage, from the chains of poverty, from the oppression of enslavement, from the hurt of exclusion, from the paralysis of fear, from the pain of self-destruction, and ultimately from the clutches of Sheol—the hands of death itself, and far from that liberation being something that you should fear, it is something that God calls you to, like Jonah, no matter how far you have come and no matter how far you have gone.  Because just as God will always hear your cries, so too can we always hear God’s cries for us, whether here in the sanctuary or out in the world or in the depths of the sea, God’s voice still lingers.  

May it be so.  Amen.

Rev. Eric Atcheson

Longview, Washington

March 23, 2014

Lenten Blog Post Series: The Myth that God Wants You to be Rich

By way of (re-) introduction to this blog post series that I am writing here as a part of my Lenten spiritual practice, this is how I presented the series (and its planned outline) in the initial post last week:

I had not arrived at an idea of something to add a spiritual practice for Lent--an idea that is increasingly more and more popular in the church, (until) this blog post series--something that I have not done since my "We Are Legion" week of blog posts nearly a year ago.  One of the things that has become a great labor in my work (both with folks inside and outside of the church) is attempting to debunk some of the more harmful myths that exist about God and about the church.  And so one of my Lenten practices, for this plus the following five weeks, is, in effect, asking for another fast for y'all--a fast from some of those hurtful myths that we tell ourselves (or allow other people to convince us of) about God.

The week of March 9: The Myth that God Considers You Worthless

Today (the week of March 16): The Myth that God Wants You to be Rich

The week of March 23: The Myth that God Wants the Poor to be Poor

The week of March 30: The Myth that God Helps Those Who Help Themselves

The week of April 6: The Myth that God Tells Us Exactly When Jesus is Coming Back

The week of April 13 (Holy Week): The Myth that God is Dead

The idea that God wants you to be rich--that's a concept that usually goes by the name of prosperity theology or the prosperity gospel.  The underlying notion is that financial success is a blessing from God, and this notion is often accompanied by a call to give financially to the preacher/organization spreading this message as a means of helping to attain said financial success/divine blessing.

And yet, you do not need me to tell you that there are thousands, millions of faithful, humble, loving Christians across the country and around the world who are dirt broke.  They give of themselves in a wide variety of ways, even if the face value of those contributions may not be a lot, but, as Jesus said about the widow with the two coins in Mark 12, she gave all she had, all that she had to live on.  She gave greatly.  She gave until it hurt.  Because of this, she had given more than the people contributing vast sums to the temple treasury.  And meanwhile, someone could be the biggest jerk in the land and be absolutely loaded with wealth.  This fundamental reality ought to be enough to nip the prosperity gospel in the bud: faithful people can, and sometimes are, still poor, and hurtful people can, and sometimes are, still rich.

But it isn't doing that.  It hasn't.  And I have to believe that this is so because of the sentiment expressed in a tale about the famously atheist comedian W.C. Fields--when dying, he was found flipping through the pages of a Bible, and when asked why he, of all people, was doing that he responded, "I'm looking for a loophole."  We still look for a way out of our pursuit of both wealth and God's favor.

Prosperity theology represents that loophole for us to serve both God and wealth, even though Jesus explicitly tells us these are mutually exclusive allegiances (Matthew 6:24).  But with this prosperity belief, we could indulge our love for wealth without divine consequences.  Chalk it up to another way we have tried to outsmart God, going all the way back to the Garden of Eden when Adam and Eve decided (with the help of a certain reptilian friend) that they, too, could be as smart as God if they ate the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.

And in some ways, that is exactly it: we do know good from evil, even if we do not always (or sometimes seldom) follow that knowledge faithfully.  We want to be able to be justified in doing our evil things, in living out our selfishness, in not following Christ as we ought to.  We still want to be able to be greedy and live for ourselves, not live for others or for God, and in this way, a genuine transformation has not entirely occurred within us yet.

We like our money.  We like it more than we should.  And we like it in the face of what exactly Jesus does have to say about the rich: "But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation" (Luke 6:24), "How hard will it be for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God...It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God" (Mark 10:23, 25/Luke 18:24-25), and "Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth...for where your treasure is, there your heart will be also." (Matthew 6:19, 21)

If God wants you to be rich, then God does not necessarily want what, according to God, would be best for you.  Your place in God's embrace is far more important than riches.  And likewise, God considers you far more important than those riches.

May you feel called to live your life, then, according to what is important on a divine scope: love not of money, but of God and of each other.  For, again as Jesus teaches us, upon these two loves hangs the entirety of everything else.

Yours in Christ,
Eric

Some Thoughts on the Reported Impending Demise of the Granddaddy of Hate

(I haven't forgotten about our Lenten blog series--that weekly post is currently in the works and will go up tomorrow or Thursday. -E.A.)

In case you haven't heard the news reports that came out over the weekend: Fred Phelps Sr.--he of the Westboro Baptist Church, founder and patriarch of the thoroughly despicable "God Hates F*gs" cult of hatemongers--is a-knock, knock, knockin' on heaven's hell's door.

When I heard the news, I posted this to my Facebook page:

Hearing the news about the imminent death of Westboro Baptist Church's founding pastor Fred Phelps Sr. has caused me to really reflect on the message contained in my sermon today, simply because of the prescient timing with my current sermon series on Jonah. 

After all, Jonah does not want to preach God's word to a people he despises. So he runs from God. But after staying in the belly of a fish for three days, he realized how low he had sunk and he pleaded with God for deliverance from himself.

If ever there was a church pastor in dire need of spending a few days inside of a giant fish, it's Fred Phelps.

The reception of that off-the-cuff remark was meaningful enough for me to include it (with the wording slightly polished up) at the 11th hour in Sunday's sermon.  I would like to think that such a divine intervention would indeed produce a transforming change of heart and nature for this man, but the only ones who truly know if it would are Phelps himself and God.

And this is, in a couple of capacities, a personal story for me: I went to college and seminary with a number of gay and lesbian classmates whom I consider friends to this day.  But I was also raised in the virtual shadow of the WBC, geographically a mere hour's drive east from their headquarters in Topeka, Kansas.

The flip side of the coin is that in another way, it isn't as personal.  As a straight man, I am not the person most targeted by Phelps' hate and ire.  In fact, I am the type of person most likely to escape criticism of who I am from any church.  As I reflected about this with a friend yesterday over lunch, I will never have to face the possibility of having to decide whether or not to leave a congregation because that congregation refuses to recognize my pastoral authority on the basis of my gender or sexual preference.  I will never experience that kind of shunning.

But I have friends who have.  I have friends who will.  And theirs is the mercy that is needed in moments like these, not mine.  Because they have been wronged in ways that I never will.

One of the things that has been repeatedly impressed upon me--as a Christian, heterosexual male--by my friends of minority demographics was that when I strive to be an ally to people who are oppressed, I need to know when to use my status to speak up for them, and when to instead shut the hell up and get out of the way.

Honestly, I feel this inclination in no small degree when reflecting upon Phelps Sr.'s reported impending death.  If God wishes to forgive Phelps, that is God's affair, and my belief in God is such that if Phelps does indeed repent even after his death (I believe in repentance after death on the basis of several Scripture passages, namely John 12:47-50), then God will be prepared to offer that forgiveness.  I am also amazed and impressed by other folks who have been hurt by Phelps who are responding to this news with grace and magnanimity.

But if Phelps does not repent, then my belief is that he will indeed go to hell, which I define as complete separation of God.  This also means that Phelps may have been in hell before he even dies, because I have to believe he willfully separated himself from God's love a long, long time ago...although, if rumors are true, Phelps himself was excommunicated last year from the church he built because he began advocating for "kinder treatment of fellow church members."  If true, perhaps this represents the first tiny step towards true repentance and a true softening of his heart.

However, I still really hesitate to express any forgiveness of Phelps on my own, from own human perspective, because I fear that it would be so, so massively presumptuous for me to do so.  I am neither God nor among the people Phelps probably hurt the most.

Phelps may have cast a shadow over my childhood and my formation as a Christian, but I am not the lesbian teenager whose self-worth was brought into doubt by his hate.  I am not the gay youth in high school whose bullies might have felt validated by his crass use of homophobic slurs.  I am not the family of the fallen military hero who planned a funeral in abject fear of a WBC protest.

My forgiveness is not the forgiveness that Phelps must seek, nor is it the forgiveness that should be available to him.  The forgiveness his soul requires is the forgiveness of the gay men and women who have faced down bullying, suicide, homelessness, and shunning (as well as military veterans, whose increased risks of homelessness are well-documented) all because of an attitude that he and his ilk professed in the extreme: that God somehow disapproves of gay and lesbian people, which I have come to believe is nothing more than a destructive lie.

And for that great lie, if I am completely and very brutally honest with myself, I have to admit that I have no forgiveness to offer Fred Phelps Sr.

Purely from my own individual, spiritual perspective, I am ready to let him die unforgiven.

I am ready to let him go to hell, to be separated from the God he purported to preach on behalf of.

And may the souls he demonized in life be so close to God for all eternity as to wholly disprove his every lie and insult.

Yours in Christ,
Eric

This Week's Sermon: "Friends Don't Let Friends Blame the Fish"

Jonah 1:11-17

11 They said to him, “What will we do about you so that the sea will become calm around us?” (The sea was continuing to rage.) 12 He said to them, “Pick me up and hurl me into the sea! Then the sea will become calm around you. I know it’s my fault that this great storm has come upon you.” 13 The men rowed to reach dry land, but they couldn’t manage it because the sea continued to rage against them. 14 So they called on the Lord, saying, “Please, Lord, don’t let us perish on account of this man’s life, and don’t blame us for innocent blood! You are the Lord: whatever you want, you can do.” 15 Then they picked up Jonah and hurled him into the sea, and the sea ceased its raging. 16 The men worshipped the Lord with a profound reverence; they offered a sacrifice to the Lord and made solemn promises. 17 [a] Meanwhile, the Lord provided a great fish to swallow Jonah. Jonah was in the belly of the fish for three days and three nights. (Common English Bible)

“Friends Don’t Let Friends…A Lent Alongside Jonah,” Week Two

Four had suddenly become three.  The fish tank that sat in my childhood bedroom was suddenly bereft of one of its little swimming inhabitants—one of the two that belonged to my younger sister (whilst the other two were ostensibly mine).

My sister, who was maybe six at the time, was convinced that it was because of my fish had eaten her fish, and even at age six, she stood for no injustice.  “HE ATE BUTTONS!” she screamed in righteous indignation to our parents while I just sort of shrugged.  Yes, Buttons was missing, but who’s to say that it wasn’t all a magic trick, or that the little fishie Rapture had just occurred and my own miscreant fish had been left behind.  In MY mind, at least, there were a myriad of explanations to this seemingly open-and-shut case of maritime murder.

But in my first murder trial as an unlicensed, ten-year-old attorney, I lost, and my fish was sentenced to being returned to the pet store, which I am sure completely baffled the same poor goof who told us that the fish would all get along great together (which, in retrospect, is a pretty dumb question to ask a store clerk: I mean, they’re tiny little fish, not puppies).

But this meant that, over time, as we went through more and more pet fish, that this one fish of mine attained a status unto Elijah for me…you see, Elijah is the only Old Testament hero not to die (Enoch also doesn’t die, but he is simply attested to in the Genesis genealogies and that’s it); he gets driven up to heaven in a chariot of fire instead.  And so this fish became the only fish I ever owned to not eventually be flushed down the toilet, but to be driven off to heaven in a chariot of fire.  And by “heaven,” I mean the pet store.  And by “a chariot of fire,” I mean my parents’ 1995 Saturn station wagon.

Because that’s what happens when you blame the fish.  The poor fish gets completely set apart.

This is a new sermon series for a new church season: traditionally, the forty days prior to Easter Sunday make up a worship season called Lent, and those forty days correspond to the forty days that Jesus spent fasting and being tempted in the wilderness.  Lent is a season whose primary themes, then, are largely about denial of selfishness and repentance from our own past selfishness.  And really, there is no better story about selfishness in Scripture than that of the prophet Jonah.  Sure, you have individual stories about selfishness in Biblical heroes like Samson and David, but none of their stories involved getting belched out of a giant future sushi roll.  And really, selfishness is what defines Jonah, even more so than any other Biblical character.  He is the original prodigal, the original heir who renounces his Father hundreds of years before Jesus tells us His parable of the prodigal son in Luke 15.  So for Lent this year, we will be reading through, verse-by-verse, the entirety of the Jonah narrative.  It’s only four chapters long, so going verse-by-verse is definitely doable in a five-week series, and we’ll come out the other side all set for Palm Sunday and the beginning of the Passion narrative.  We kicked off this series last week by expositing Jonah’s predicament: God calls Jonah to preach in Nineveh, the Assyrian capital in modern-day northern Iraq.  Jonah says “I DON’T WANNA!” and runs in the opposite direction, towards Spain.  Along the way, he pays fare for a boat to take him the rest of the way, they run into a storm, and they ascertain by casting lots that Jonah is the one responsible, and that is where today’s Scripture passage picks up.

Now, as you could probably glean from the sermon’s title and the story I just told you, we’ll be focusing on the role of the giant fish here today, but there are a couple other potential misconceptions about this part of the story that I want to nip in the bud as well: firstly, this is, in case you missed last week, a story about Jonah and a fish, not Jonah and a whale.  After all, most whales are endangered, and I imagine God would not be so cruel as to risk one to a massive case of indigestion just to make a point.

More importantly, though, this is that also not a story about human sacrifice, even though Jonah tries to turn it into one with his demand to be thrown overboard.  The conscientious sailors eventually acquiesce to his patently self-destructive request, but not before collectively absolving themselves of this massive breach of maritime ethics in making someone walk the plank.

It would be easy to say they do this because it is okay in whichever moral and spiritual spheres these non-Israelite sailors live, but as the passage conveys, these sailors end up worshiping YHWH.  So that cannot be why they eventually cave to Jonah’s entreaties—in fact, Jonah, in whatever zealous selflessness inspires him to be thrown overboard, is completely misguided in this sacrificial urge because, that is, in fact, not what God wants.  And it never was.

In spite of what the story of Abraham and Isaac might lead you to believe—the one where God tells Abraham to sacrifice Isaac upon a Grillmaster, only to pop out and shout, “JK!  JK!  LOL!  ROFFLECOPTERS!” –human sacrifice has always been banned in Jewish law.  Leviticus 20:1-5 bans the practice of sacrificing one’s offspring to “Moloch,” a pagan god of the Ammonites, Phoenicians, and Canaans, whose cult demanded human sacrifice.  Since the covenant between YHWH and Israel is akin to a father-child relationship, you can see why human sacrifice would be banned—throughout the Old Testament, even God’s wrath still left room for resurrection.

And God leaves room for resurrection here, for Jonah, because I think contrary to popular belief, this giant fish that is sent is not sent as a means of punishing Jonah—it is sent as a means of protecting Jonah.  The sailors are not able to sail to land, meaning they are dumping Jonah out in the middle of the sea.  He will die of hypothermia or drown before anybody reaches him.

But God does.  Through the magical gigantic fish.  That swallows Jonah whole and somehow manages to keep him down for three days and three nights (and you’d think if God were truly omniscient, He’d have negotiated some sort of product placement deal with Tums/Mylanta/Pepto in here).  And while this three-days-and-three-nights business makes it awfully tempting for us to see in Jonah a foreshadowing of Jesus, I would hesitate to interpret this text that way.

See, Jesus, while certainly reluctant at moments (especially Gethsemane), is still ultimately subservient to God.  Jonah really is not.  Jonah does have some admirable qualities that I mentioned last week—he is clearly honest to a fault, and abundantly  blessed with determination—but someone who is ready, able, and willing to surrender himself to God he is emphatically not—at least, not yet.

And so while Jesus is in part a prophet—in addition to being Messiah, rabbi, the Christ, and so on—Jonah is really more, as Yale’s John Collins puts it, something of an anti-prophet.

Which means that while Jonah might be prepared to offer himself up in sacrifice to God, he is not, in fact, spiritually mature enough to realize that this is not what God really wants.  God does not want human sacrifice; if He did, it would have been simple enough to just let Jonah drown.

To return to the Jesus metaphor, it would have been simple enough to just let Jesus remain dead.

But in either case, it wasn’t.  It isn’t.  With God, it is never as simple as dying.  There always remains a second chance at living.  Even the eventually-willing-to-throw-Jonah-overboard sailors realize this.  They worship God upon seeing that they have been saved from the storm.

And in this way, the sailors and Jonah are figuratively in the same boat, even if literally they no longer are.  They are protected from the elements by a God who still watches over them.

There is another possibility to all of this, though: that Jonah is so determined to escape God that he will sacrifice anything, including his life, to achieve that ends.  Through this lens, Jonah’s willingness to be chucked overboard is not a magnanimous gesture towards some good-natured sailors he befriended, it is a final act of defiance against his Creator.  And the sailors’ initial reluctance to throw him overboard reads not as an intervention of moral scruples but as a determination to see this man live long enough for God to take justice upon him Himself.

If that sounds like me just getting up here and saying, “Ta da!  Everything I just told you about this Scripture passage is a lie,” I promise you it isn’t.  Because as we will see next week, after Jonah has had his three days and three nights to think about things in the maw of a giant future piece of sushi, Jonah realizes that he does need the sort of deliverance that only God can provide—deliverance not simply from the elements, from a storm at sea, but deliverance from oneself.  Deliverance from our worst impulses, deepest prejudices, and destructive tendencies.

That is why there is no point in blaming the fish here.  There is no justice to be had in pointing any fingers at it, because as a divine instrument, it serves not as a weapon with which to destroy, but as a tool with which to rebuild.  And that has worth even to this day.

As I was putting the final touches on this sermon over the weekend, I read the news that Fred Phelps Sr., the founding pastor of Westboro Baptist Church (the “God Hates F*gs” people who picket funerals), is on the brink of death himself at the age of 84.  I was raised a mere hour’s drive from the Westboro Baptist Church in eastern Kansas, and it was not uncommon for some hate-motivated stunt of his ilk to make the papers or the evening news in my hometown.

His reported demise perfectly coincides with the message I am trying to convey here.  Jonah too does not want to minister in God’s name to a people he despises.  So he runs from God.  But after three days and three nights within the giant fish, Jonah realizes how low he has sunk, and he pleads with God for deliverance from his darkest self.

If ever there were a pastor in dire need of a few days inside of a giant fish, it’s Fred Phelps.  But that salvation from our darker selves is a salvation we all need, whether we know it yet or not.

May it be so.  Amen.

Rev. Eric Atcheson
Longview, Washington

March 16, 2014

The Myth that...Blog Post Series

This is something that came to me as I was considering my relative lack of Lenten practices this year.  I am practicing a fast, as I do for every Lent (this year, I am fasting from bacon, burgers, and deli meats--partly for health reasons in addition to spiritual reasons), but I had not arrived at an idea of something to add a spiritual practice for Lent--an idea that is increasingly more and more popular in the church.

And this "something" that came to me is a blog post series--something that I have not done since my "We Are Legion" week of blog posts nearly a year ago.  One of the things that has become a great labor in my work (both with folks inside and outside of the church) is attempting to debunk some of the more harmful myths that exist about God and about the church.  And so one of my Lenten practices, for this plus the following five weeks, is, in effect, asking for another fast for y'all--a fast from some of those hurtful myths that we tell ourselves (or allow other people to convince us of) about God.

This is what the outline of this blog series looks like at present:

Today (the week of March 9): The Myth that God Considers You Worthless

The week of March 16: The Myth that God Wants You to be Rich

The week of March 23: The Myth that God Wants the Poor to be Poor

The week of March 30: The Myth that God Helps Those Who Help Themselves

The week of April 6: The Myth that God Tells Us Exactly When Jesus is Coming Back

The week of April 13 (Holy Week): The Myth that God is Dead

I begin the series today with perhaps the most important one, simply because I cannot tell you how many times I have spoken to ex-Christians who tell me that the church they once belonged to ended up doing serious damage to their self-esteem because of this belief that they really don't matter to God or that God considers them worthless.  From Rachel Held Evans, who calls this sort of thinking "pond-scum theology" in her memoir Evolving in Monkey Town:

At the heart of pond-scum theology is the premise that human beings have no intrinsic value or claim to salvation because their sin nature makes them so thoroughly disgusting and offensive to God that He is under no obligation to pay them any mind...Pond-scum theology made sense in my head, but it never made sense in my heart.  I knew that I was broken, that I was capable of great evil and tragically prone to sin, but deep down, at the very center of my being, I felt as though I still mattered to God...To believe that people are inherently worthless to God strips the incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection of all their meaning and power.  It makes Jesus look like a fool for dying for us...  (emphasis mine)

It makes Jesus look like a fool for dying for us.

I would go even further than what it makes Jesus look like: it makes God look like a manipulative narcissist for, in one breath, demanding our worship and praise as His redeemed children (Psalm 51:15-17) but in the next somehow revealing that we have no inherent worth.  Why, then would God so crave the praises of a people whom He has absolutely no regard for?

It is a question for which I have no answer, and to which I believe there is no satisfactory answer.  If we are completely unworthy of God's attention and affection, I cannot imagine that anything we do would be worthy to God either because of its source (us).

To be clear, this is not me saying that we get more on God's good side based solely on what we do--sola gratia (the doctrine of "by grace alone") dictates that God's grace to us is freely and unconditionally offered; there is nothing we can do to earn it.  I could be the American version of Mother Teresa, but that doesn't get me an extra side helping of salvation.

But here's the thing: I have come to believe that this grace is freely offered to us precisely because God is invested in us as the crowning achievement of the Genesis creation.

It is why God sent to us the Son in the first place.  It is why Jesus walked this earth.  It is why Jesus spoke, broke bread, performed miracles, and ultimately died on this earth.  If God simply decided to write us off as thoroughly disgusting and worthless, why would He even bother with us through Jesus?

In other words, if God had no regard for us at all, then the mission of Jesus is rendered entirely moot.  It would, as Rachel argues, make Jesus look like a fool for dying for us.  It makes His dying for us utterly without meaning.

I would end by simply pointing to one of my favorite chapters in Scripture, which I based my Lenten sermon series on last year: Luke 15.  It is a triad of parables about how God--through Jesus--is invested in everybody.  Jesus may have a flock of 99 sheep, but He says that He will still always search after the one who is lost.  He may have a stock of 9 coins, but He will not stop searching the floor for the tenth.

Rest assured--those efforts by a restless and persistent God are done precisely because you matter.  Probably more than you or I could ever know.

God loves you.  God always has.  God always will.

And so it is up to you to return that unbounded love.

Yours in Christ,
Eric

This Week's Sermon: "Friends Don't Let Friends Play the Lottery"

Jonah 1:1-10

The Lord’s word came to Jonah, Amittai’s son: 2 “Get up and go to Nineveh, that great city, and cry out against it, for their evil has come to my attention.” 3 So Jonah got up—to flee to Tarshish from the Lord! He went down to Joppa and found a ship headed for Tarshish. He paid the fare and went aboard to go with them to Tarshish, away from the Lord. 4 But the Lord hurled a great wind upon the sea, so that there was a great storm on the sea; the ship looked like it might be broken to pieces. 5 The sailors were terrified, and each one cried out to his god. They hurled the cargo that was in the ship into the sea to make it lighter. Now Jonah had gone down into the hold of the vessel to lie down and was deep in sleep. 6 The ship’s officer came and said to him, “How can you possibly be sleeping so deeply? Get up! Call on your god! Perhaps the god will give some thought to us so that we won’t perish.” 7 Meanwhile, the sailors said to each other, “Come on, let’s cast lots so that we might learn who is to blame for this evil that’s happening to us.” They cast lots, and the lot fell on Jonah. 8 So they said to him, “Tell us, since you’re the cause of this evil happening to us: What do you do and where are you from? What’s your country and of what people are you?” 9 He said to them, “I’m a Hebrew. I worship the Lord, the God of heaven—who made the sea and the dry land.” 10 Then the men were terrified and said to him, “What have you done?” (The men knew that Jonah was fleeing from the Lord, because he had told them.) (Common English Bible)

“Friends Don’t Let Friends…A Lent Alongside Jonah,” Week One

The Reverend Adam Hamilton is the senior pastor of the largest United Methodist congregation in the country, coincidentally in my hometown metropolitan area of Kansas City.  In his 2009 book Enough: Discovering Joy Through Simplicity and Generosity, he recounts his experience with that dreaded home equity loan market upon which a chunk of the blame of the Great Recession (and still torpid job economy) was heaped.  He writes, in part:

The last few years have seen a boom in home equity loans,, which allow us to withdraw the money from what is, for most of us, our single largest savings account—removing the equity from our home and spending it.  So instead of paying down the mortgages on our homes, many of us choose to withdraw the equity for home improvements or other purchases.  Recently, I received an offer from my mortgage lender to loan me more than I paid for my house eight years ago—and my house is not close to being paid off.  That’s a lot of extra cash I could spend on anything I wanted.  No new appraisal.  No closing costs.  No need to show bank statements or verify other assets.  No paycheck stubs or proof of income required.  I was told I could take out all the equity in my home—and quite a bit more.  If I actually took out this loan, you would have to visit me in jail because the amount of money they offered was more than I could reasonably pay back.

It’s these kinds of offers that feed our desire to have it now and pay later.

What Pastor Adam is describing here really is another form of legalized gambling, not unlike blackjack or roulette.  You’re pushing all-in on a bet that you may not be able to back up completely…which is why you see so many people with gambling addictions lose everything.  And this almost happens to Jonah because of two great and terrible gambles he makes here now.

This is a new sermon series for a new church season: traditionally, the forty days prior to Easter Sunday make up a worship season called Lent, and those forty days correspond to the forty days that Jesus spent fasting and being tempted in the wilderness.  Lent is a season whose primary themes, then, are largely about denial of selfishness and repentance from our own past selfishness.  And really, there is no better story about selfishness in Scripture than that of the prophet Jonah.  Sure, you have individual stories about selfishness in Biblical heroes like Samson and David, but none of their stories involved getting belched out of a giant future sushi roll.  And really, selfishness is what defines Jonah, even more so than any other Biblical character.  He is the original prodigal, the original heir who renounces his Father hundreds of years before Jesus tells us His parable of the prodigal son in Luke 15.  So for Lent this year, we will be reading through, verse-by-verse, the entirety of the Jonah narrative.  It’s only four chapters long, so going verse-by-verse is definitely doable in a five-week series, and we’ll come out the other side all set for Palm Sunday and the beginning of the Passion narrative.

We open with Jonah, who, no matter what other kookyboots things happen to him, is a historical figure—2 Kings 14:25 attests to a prophet named Jonah, son of Amittai, from Gath-Hepher.

But unlike every other prophetic book in the Old Testament—Isaiah, Jeremiah, you name it—Jonah’s book is not primarily a compilation of prophesies and oracles, but rather, it is a story, and a story that really is about much more than his getting swallowed up by a giant fish (NOT a whale—as one of my commentators put it, that was Pinocchio.  Can you imagine Jonah saying, “I want to be a real prophet?”).

No, of course not, because right now, Jonah does not want to be a real prophet.  He wants to be anything but a prophet if it means avoiding having to go to Nineveh in Assyria.  So he sets out in the complete opposite direction—Tarshish was most likely in modern-day Spain, and Nineveh in Assyria would have been in modern-day northern Iraq, on the Tigris River.  And Israel sits in the middle.  To try to put that in our context, it would be as though Jonah lived here, in Longview, got the call from God to go preach in New York City, and instead boarded Delta’s very next nonstop flight from Portland to Tokyo.  That is about the size of Jonah’s disobedience here.

And so that is the first major gamble (of two) that Jonah takes in these opening ten verses.  He gambles, essentially, that he can outrun God.  After all, if YHWH is really only the God of Israel, once you’re far away from Israel, you should be golden, right?

Of course it does not work out that way.  And there was no possible way for it to, since YHWH is, in turn, God not only of the Israelites but of the Gentiles as well.  But these Gentile sailors do not realize it yet, so when a storm hits, they each prayed out to their own God.  And I love what Yale University’s John Collins says about the sailors: “Ecumenical to a fault, they urge Jonah also to pray to his god.”  I would say that “urge” is a bit of an understatement, because somehow Jonah has managed to conk out during this storm, and the sailors have to go and wake him…and as the ship’s captain points out, if Jonah is sleeping through something like this, you know it has to be a pretty deep sleep.  So the task of waking Jonah up was probably a serious team effort.

Once Jonah is awake, though, he takes his second major gamble.  None of the ecumenical sailors can figure out what is causing the storm (after all, meteorology had not yet been studied, and if it was storming, it was because some Ba’al or Asherath up there was ticked off at you…or, as Collins delightfully puts it once more, “this cacophony of prayer fails to produce the desired result!”), so they decide to cast lots to decide whose fault it is.  Essentially, they play the lottery, except instead of winning millions of dollars, you get to become the scapegoat.

Of course, Jonah “wins” the lottery.  And the gambles he made—trying to escape God, doing so by hopping aboard a ship during a time when seafaring was still very much a dangerous occupation—all come back to bite him.  The sailors demand of him, “What have you done?!”

Now, if you ever think of anyone who has lost everything in a gamble—maybe gambling as we think of it today in a casino, but also in a boneheaded business venture or in some sort of a scam, you are liable to react the exact same way to them when they—and you—discover that everything has been lost: What have you done?!  How have you put yourself at risk like this?!

That is why friends don’t—or shouldn’t, at any rate—let friends play the lottery.  It is almost always a losing proposition.  And here, Jonah, only ten verses in, is already taking it on the chin.

But that is not the only takeaway from this initial exposition of Jonah’s story, or, at least, it is only the surface-level takeaway.  Jonah has put himself at risk because of something that should be very familiar to all of us: his selfishness.  He does not want to do what God asks—in fact, he decides to do the exact opposite of what God asks because, as we’ll come to discover, he simply does not want to do it.  At all.

And if you think of God, sitting in His throne in Heaven and looking down on earth, the first words out of His mouth are probably something along the lines of, “Story of my life, mate.”

Adam and Eve do not want to do what God tells them to do—to not eat of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.  So they end up doing it anyways.

Cain does not want to do what God tells him to do—to not be envious of his brother Abel.  He murders Abel anyways.

Lot’s wife does not want to do what God tells her to do—to not look back on Sodom and Gomorrah being destroyed.  She does, and she gets turned into a giant pile of table seasoning.

And that’s just the first half of the book of Genesis.  The entirety of Scripture is, in many ways, written on a timeline of us selfishly only doing what we want to do, not what God calls us to do.

Part of the whole purpose of Lent’s existence, of marking and celebrating Jesus’ time in the wilderness, is precisely to try to jolt us out of the rut of what we want to do as opposed to what God calls us to do.  Like us, Jonah hasn’t gotten the memo yet.  But he will, if you tune back in for next week, and the week after!  But we still can hold out hope for getting the memo too (If I just could insert Office Space joke about TPS reports here…That would be greaaaaaaat).

Our selfishness is what can cause us to take those gambles, like Jonah’s, that are ultimately and epically self-destructive.  We either hoard our wealth or gamble it away.  We decide that the equity in our homes would be better off as cash in our pockets.  We throw away so much that is still usable and salvageable, and then complain about how we are out of resources.

And then, to top it all off, we—again, just like Jonah— in another gamble, run away from the consequences of actions.  Or, at least, we try to.  But they still have a way of catching up to us.

The thing this…God has a way of always catching up to us as well.  No matter how far down the path of the prodigal we follow—and for Jonah, as perhaps the original prodigal, that is quite a ways—God will still make His presence known.  God will still hurl the winds, God will still throw the waves, God will still move the mountains and seas that He created in order to get our attention, because no matter our messes, no matter our mistakes, to God, we are still salvageable.

Such are the ways of a God who absolutely refuses to fully give up on us.  

May it be so.  Amen.

Rev. Eric Atcheson

Longview, Washington

March 9, 2014

Ash Wednesday Sermon: "Until the Opportune Time"

Luke 4:1-13

Jesus returned from the Jordan River full of the Holy Spirit, and was led by the Spirit into the wilderness. 2 There he was tempted for forty days by the devil. He ate nothing during those days and afterward Jesus was starving. 3 The devil said to him, “Since you are God’s Son, command this stone to become a loaf of bread.” 4 Jesus replied, “It’s written, People won’t live only by bread.”[a] 5 Next the devil led him to a high place and showed him in a single instant all the kingdoms of the world. 6 The devil said, “I will give you this whole domain and the glory of all these kingdoms. It’s been entrusted to me and I can give it to anyone I want. 7 Therefore, if you will worship me, it will all be yours.” 8 Jesus answered, “It’s written, You will worship the Lord your God and serve only him.”[b] 9 The devil brought him into Jerusalem and stood him at the highest point of the temple. He said to him, “Since you are God’s Son, throw yourself down from here; 10 for it’s written: He will command his angels concerning you, to protect you 11 and they will take you up in their hands so that you won’t hit your foot on a stone.[c]” 12 Jesus answered, “It’s been said, Don’t test the Lord your God.”[d] 13 After finishing every temptation, the devil departed from him until the next opportunity. (Common English Bible)

Ash Wednesday 2014

The print on the outside of the envelope was impeccably legible: “To be opened by Taylor Smith on April 13, 2023 only!”  But then underneath that, written in far tinier script, were the words “unless said otherwise.”

Taylor was a 12-year-old girl writing a letter to her 22-year-old self in the spring of 2013, and by the end of this past January, she was dead, succumbing suddenly to a bout of pneumonia.  And her parents, deciding that need did in fact dictate otherwise, opened up her letter.  What they found amazed them, and this is just one tiny excerpt of it:

I was in Cranks, Kentucky, for my first mission trip.  I’ve only been back for six days!  Speaking of, how’s your relationship with God?  Have you prayed, worshiped, read the Bible, or gone to serve the Lord recently?  If not, get up and do it now!  I don’t care what point in our life we’re in right now, do it!  He was mocked, beaten, tortured, and crucified for you!  A sinless man, who never did you or any other person wrong!

I love that last line.  Who never did you or any other person wrong.  And that’s a winning streak that began as early as in the story we just heard, of Him resisting the temptations of Lucifer.

I use this story at the beginning of my Ash Wednesday sermon every year here (at least, so far), because it is such a good one for setting the right balance in mood and tenor for a service like this; I simply cannot ever not pass up a repeat telling of this story.  The Reverend Lillian Daniel, an immensely talented pastor in the United Church of Christ, writes in a book on pastoral ministry that she co-authored, called “This Odd and Wondrous Calling,” about her experience as a pastoral intern at a parish while in seminary.  She writes:

I remember sitting at the back of the sanctuary, reviewing my notes for my very first seminary-intern sermon.  It was to be a mighty word from god that would correct all the hypocrisy, greed, and faithlessness of the local church that was, nonetheless, supporting my education as they had supported that of so many others.  As I mustered my courage to sock it to them, I overheard one woman lean across her walker and whisper loudly to her pew mate, “Ah, our new intern is preaching.  I see it’s time for our annual scolding.”  Later, I would pastor a church near that very divinity school, and hear for myself a few “annual scoldings.”

Now, we have no seminary intern here to deliver us our annual scoldings—you just have me!  And it would be all too easy to dismiss Ash Wednesday as the day when the parish pastor administers said annual scolding, but it would be exactly that: easy.  Too easy.  Ash Wednesday is not really about me scolding you so much as it is about taking on a sort of renewed baptism: just as we hold baptism to be an outward sign of the inward reality of a redeemed soul, so too do we hold ashes as an outward sign of the inward reality of a repentant soul.  Today is about taking a day—not even a day, but merely an hour—of our time to acknowledge our repentance.  And in contrast to our hour here together tonight, Jesus spends forty days, alone, in the wilderness. 

Well, not entirely alone.  He has a fasting buddy who goes by many names—Beelzebub, Lucifer, Satan, the Devil—that guy.  And said fasting buddy of course turns out to be the worst accountability partner possible, because it isn’t just that he tempts Jesus—it is that he does so repeatedly.  You won’t be tempted by bread?  Okay, how about by political power?  Lather, rinse, and repeat.  And that is often true to how temptation often works today, too, right?  Maybe the first time you are able to say no, to resist, but bit by bit your resolve is worn down until you give in to whatever or whoever is tempting you.  Sure, you might feel comfortable not wanting to do something with someone, be it drugs or drinking to excess or any number of things, but the more you get asked, the more your “no” looks conspicuous.

And so too, then, does Jesus’ “no” to Satan look more and more conspicuous—more and more worthy of our attention—because it is repeated.  And here’s the crucial thing: that “no” is not simply isolated to these forty days.  Luke is very clear about how he ends this passage: “When the devil had finished every test, he departed from (Jesus) until an opportune time.”  That is perhaps the most difficult truth about resisting temptation: it is never, ever over.  It can always return, and it often will.

That means it was never over for Jesus, either.  He probably faced temptations of varying sorts and types throughout His ministry, and certainly so at Gethsemane, which is where some traditions say Satan made his grand re-entrance to tempt Jesus with thoughts of backing out at the 11^th hour from what He knew must ultimately happen.  Either way, though, this is partly what makes Jesus so great: it wasn’t that temptation simply never followed Him around, but that it did and He was able to overcome and transcend it.

But there is something to the idea that Jesus was likewise tempted by Satan at Gethsemane prior to His arrest and crucifixion.  For one, it bookmarks Jesus’ entire ministry: it begins and ends with Jesus’ “no” to Satan.  But both the wilderness and Gethsemane also most likely represent Jesus at His weakest: when He has gone so many days alone while fasting, and again when He is about to die.  And that is so, so often the opportune moment for temptation to return.

One of the most important parts, then, about resisting and overcoming temptation is to recognize those moments when you yourself are at your weakest—whenever those moments might be.  After a big argument with your spouse or significant other.  Maybe after being laid off from a job.  Or simply when your stress level has hit its maximum.  Whenever those moments are, knowing that they are the moments when you are weak is so, so vital.  Acknowledging your own weakness in that moment can paradoxically make you stronger—it can make you more able to see through that moment of weakness and move on to the next.  It’s a little like the twelve-step maxim of recognizing your own powerlessness…only then can you begin to move forward.

Jesus, though, is not powerless, and that is precisely the point of Satan’s temptations.  As New Testament scholar Sharon Ringe puts it, “None of the tests proposed by the devil…would have had Jesus do anything inherently harmful or evil, and in each case good could result from what the devil proposed.”  A hungry appetite could be sated by bread.  A world given to Jesus’ authority would surely beat the authority of Caesar or even our own politicians.  And angels catching Jesus out of thin air could have done wonders for the faith of any who saw it happen.

So what’s the big deal, then?  It’s that we would have to go to any such lengths to justify giving into temptation.  It is a great rule of thumb for life in general: the more you have to justify something to yourself, or to someone else, or to God, the higher the chances are that you probably should do whatever it is you are trying to justify.  But once we surrender our power to those things we ought not do, we are cutting temptation’s power off at its very source: our ability to convince ourselves that what we do is okay after all, that it is different for us, we’re special, we’re not like all the other awful sinners out there.

Here’s the thing, though: we are exactly like all the other awful sinners out there.  That’s the whole point of us needing redemption.  Maybe we think that some of us need it more than others, but that does not mean that any one of us does not need it.  We all need it, period.  And we can wait until what we think is the opportune time to reach for that redemption, or we can reach for it here.  Now.

A little girl writes a letter to herself, and for her, the opportune time to open it is ten years from now.  But now, for her grieving parents, the opportune time to open it has already arrived.

A Messiah wanders out into the wilderness by Himself, and while for Him it might be an opportune time to center Himself, it instead proves to be an opportune time for the devil.

What, then, in your life, is the opportune time?  When does temptation always seem to seek you out the most?  I just talked about your weakest moments, but those are by no means the only moments.  Evil sees all of our moments, and evil can rule over any of them that we let it.

Until the opportune time.  Not for evil, but for us.  Until the opportune time when we are able to stand firm, when we are able to be strong, when we are able to look the devil in the eye as Jesus does and say to him, “Do not put me to the test!” 

Until the opportune time…when you can recognize your own frailty, your own weakness, your own inability to always do as Jesus did, to “never do you or any other person wrong,” and resolve that at least for this moment in time, you will be Christ-like. 

At least for this moment in time, you will resist evil. 

At least for this moment in time, you will overcome temptation.

And at least for this moment in time, you will transcend your own mere weakness.

That is why you—me—all of us are here tonight.  We are here in search of our opportune time to be the Christians—the little Christs—that God calls us to be.  May that opportune time come to you, and quickly, and often, for as long as you continue to believe.  

May it be so.  Amen.

Rev. Eric Atcheson

Longview, Washington

March 5, 2014