This Week's Sermon: "The Prophet's Lifespan"

Acts 7:48-53

48 However, the Most High doesn’t live in houses built by human hands. As the prophet says, 49 Heaven is my throne, and the earth is my footstool. ‘What kind of house will you build for me,’ says the Lord, ‘or where is my resting place? 50 Didn’t I make all these things with my own hand?’[l] 51 “You stubborn people! In your thoughts and hearing, you are like those who have had no part in God’s covenant! You continuously set yourself against the Holy Spirit, just like your ancestors did. 52 Was there a single prophet your ancestors didn’t harass? They even killed those who predicted the coming of the righteous one, and you’ve betrayed and murdered him! 53 You received the Law given by angels, but you haven’t kept it.” (Common English Bible)

“The Prophet’s Lifespan," Acts 7:48-53

“As One Having Authority: Sermons that Changed the World,” Week Four

The flight attendant had just about had it.  He had personal problems in the background he was dealing with, and he had unresolved mental health concerns to begin with, and an experience with preparing his airplane for departure ended up being the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back.  And so instead of continuing to prepare his outbound flight for takeoff, Steven Slater took the .A. phone, announced that he was completely over this almighty BS he was being subjected to, told JetBlue to go…you know…and then, in the words of what is apparently my favorite cultural reference for sermons, Office Space, he decided to take this job and shove it.  Popping the inflatable emergency slides that you and I are always briefed on at the start of any flight just in case that flight turns into a cruise, he grabbed a couple of beers, slid down the slide, and strode towards his freedom…and notoriety.

Now, today, that act got Steven Slater indicted for criminal mischief and reckless endangerment because, well, flight attendants are there for passenger safety and jumping ship, much by blowing one of the evacuation slides, is rather antithetical to that goal.  But all the way back in 33 or so CE, that act got a particularly devout Christian, also named Stephen, the death penalty.  Yet even if Stephen was going out of his way to piss off his listeners, it did not diminish the vital and sacred truth that he was proclaiming.

This is a sermon series that we are now in the middle of, now that it is February, but we launched it to go along with the new year, and it will take us up to Ash Wednesday a couple of weeks from now.  For a while now, I have wanted to talk to all of you about the meaning and significance of preaching, and this series allows me to do exactly that.  The title for this series comes from the assembled crowd’s reaction to Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount, where Matthew says that they were astounded that He taught them “as one having authority,” rather than as one of their temple authorities.  So…how do we teach one another as one having authority?  That is what we will be working on together, and each week for the next five weeks, we will be talking about one of the many significant sermons that are presented in the New Testament: the Sermon on the Mount, Stephen’s farewell speech before his martyrdom, Paul’s address to the Areopagus, and last week, Peter’s Pentecost sermon.  We have arrived at this point in the series after a pair of inaugural sermons by Jesus to kick off His own ministry: His sermon on Isaiah from Luke 4, and the previously referenced Sermon on the Mount from Matthew; then, we continue onto another inaugural sermon, this time from chief among Jesus’s disciples, Peter, on the occasion of the arrival of the Holy Spirit.  Today, though, we arrive at an ending sermon, the final words of Stephen’s impassioned defense before the Sanhedrin just prior to being sentenced and stoned to death by them.

And really, considering the penalty for heresy was death by anything ranging from being stretched upon the rack to being burned at the stake for 1,700 years or so of Christian history, maybe we shouldn’t be one to point fingers (I’m trying not to use the “throw stones” idiom here, for obvious reasons.  I do have a modicum of restraint, y’all).  Because at least in this singular respect, Stephen’s own execution is simply, brutally, and barbarically par for the course in the great fabric of human history: we tend to kill off those who disagree most profoundly with us.

Except that Stephen does everything short of demand the Sanhedrin to kill him.  His energetic soliloquy ends here with a series of insults that might not sound like insults to our modern ears, but that would have been extremely offensive to the first century Pharisaic ears of the Sanhedrin.

Stiff necked?  Uncircumcised?  Them’s fightin’ words, bucko.  Circumcision was what physically marked Israelite men as Israelites; it was a part of the covenant with God that stretched all the way back to Joshua and to Moses.  Israel spent its entire history fighting against “the uncircumcised,” be they Philistines or Assyrians, Edomites or Moabites.  By calling his accusers “uncircumcised,” Stephen is calling them enemies of Israel and, ultimately, of God.

But really, though, why shouldn’t they be called that?  A spade is a spade after all, and Stephen is quite right when he asks of the Sanhedrin, “Was there a single prophet your ancestors didn’t harass?”  They even killed many of the prophets, like Isaiah, whom tradition says King Manasseh had sawed in half, or Amos, whom one source says was killed by the son of one of his chief opponents, Amaziah.  In this singular way, Stephen is fulfilling one of the great traditions of the Israelite and Judean prophets, namely, having a horrifically short lifespan.

But we cannot focus only on Stephen’s invective, lest we miss the true message he is striving with every ounce of his being to convey here to the Sanhedrin and to us (which makes us a part of the Sanhedrin for the purposes of us being Stephen’s audience, but that frankly is rather appropriate, considering our own tendencies to be legalistic and high and mighty ourselves, each in our own ways).

And that message is, God doesn’t need us to live, God doesn’t need us to build a home; God loves us but God doesn’t need us.  Maybe that sounds a bit harsh on the ears; after all, we all long to be needed, but God was God long before we were created, and God will continue to be God long after we are all gone.  We are the ones dependent on God, not the other way around, which is sometimes how I think we try to frame things or act like things are.

Certainly that was the case for the temple authorities, who presented themselves as God’s mouthpieces, God’s necessary intermediaries to go between the unwashed masses (us) and a silent, invisible God cordoned off in the Holy of Holies deep within the Jerusalem temple.  The Sanhedrin may think God needs them, but the reality is, and will always be, the total opposite.

It is a job hazard endemic and perhaps innate to the clergy: we think that our insights and pronouncements about the divine are indispensable and that clearly, everybody should listen to us.  I’m not like that at all, no sir, but you may know a pastor who is like that.  Like me.  (Yes, I know I just said that I wasn’t like that, I tell myself that to sleep at night.)

But I also think it is something that unfortunately spills over into the laity, the non clergy, as well, where maybe you find yourself in situations or with people where you may act just a tad more right or righteous than you actually are in that moment.  It has the unfortunate tendency of closing off your ears to the voice of another person who maybe is saying something that you really need to hear right then, even if they are saying it while calling you “stiff necked” and “uncircumcised.”  (Unfortunately, I fear the 21^st century equivalents of these words would garner a solid R rating, and so I won’t use them here.  Use your imagination.)  It eventually becomes a question of what you are willing to value more highly: your pride or the betterment of God’s kingdom?

The Baptist pastor, evangelist, and Christian professor Tony Campolo had an interesting way of going about this sort of thing.  According to a 2003 profile of him in Christianity Today, Campolo used to begin his speeches in the 1980s by saying something like this: “I have three things I’d like to say today.  First, while you were sleeping last night, 30,000 kids died of starvation or of diseases related to malnutrition.  Second, most of you don’t give a shit.  What’s worse is that you’re more upset with the fact that I said shit than the fact that 30,000 kids died last night.”

Sometimes we need a little shit talk in our lives.  Sometimes we need a little shock value, even if (as we should) care that overnight, every night, 30,000 children of God leave us permanently for lack of daily bread.  We need a little bit of shock value to get us to care again.

And the church, well, we don't always do that.  Us preachers don't always do that.  Our sermons become tame, then  safe, then, dare I say it, boring.  We've ALL sat through a ridiculously boring sermon, right?  (Maybe it's this sermon.)

Stephen, shit talker that he is, tends to be remembered more for how he died: being the first in a long line of Christian martyrs.  But maybe, just maybe, he should be remembered even more for what he said en route to his death, in speaking truth to power, justice to oppression, and, in the end, forgiveness to evil.  As he died, he cried out, “Father, do not hold this sin against them.”

It is a prayer we long for for ourselves.  May God not hold our sins against us, whether we are the Stephen of Scripture who pissed off the Sanhedrin, or whether we are Stephen of JetBlue who pissed off the five oh.

Thankfully, through the divine mercy revealed through Jesus Christ, we know that God chooses not to.  God has chosen grace.  Time and again, God has chosen grace for us.

Let us choose grace, then, in return.  Grace enough for us, and grace enough for all. 

Thanks be to God.  Amen.

Rev. Eric Atcheson

Longview, Washington
February 8, 2015

A Movement of Infinity Within Itself: Faith for John's Community and for Today

I presented this paper to the annual gathering of the Northwest Association for Theological Discussion this past Tuesday as a part of a two hour long consideration of faith as it is presented in the Gospel of John, based on a treatise written by a Disciples professor at Northwest Christian University in Eugene, Oregon, Dr. Dennis Lindsay.  Hopefully it makes some modicum of sense to non academia readers as well.  Ever since I took a class in seminary solely on the Gospel and letters of John taught by my favorite professor there, a Dominican priest named Father Albert, I have found great meaning in John's unique take on the significance of Jesus as the Christ, and as such, this paper was (is) largely a labor of love.  I hope you find meaning in it as I have.  E.A.

“A Movement of Infinity within Itself: Faith for Both the Johannine Community & Today”

By Rev. Eric Atcheson

Respectfully submitted to the Northwest Association for Theological Discussion in response to “Believing in Jesus: A Johannine Theology of Faith” by Dr. Dennis Lindsay, February 2015

On the bookshelf in my office as I write these words is a book I brought with me when I served as an adult chaperone on a youth mission trip to Tijauana, Mexico, way back in my seminary days (yes, “way back,” whilst I’m at the ripe old age of 29).  Written by the amusing Jon Acuff, the volume is entitled, “Stuff Christians Like,” a play on Christian Lander’s earlier (and similarly amusing) book, “Stuff White People Like.”  And the book is simply a collection of odes and paeans to different things what Christians like—and like to do—such as complaining about not being “fed” at church, using “let me pray about it” as a euphemism for “no,” and using “faith like a child” as an escape pod from difficult theological discussions.

All of these examples have something in common: they utilize commonplace vocabulary to say something distinctly uncommon unless you belong to a particular brand of Christianity and are fluent in its unique and idiosyncratic dialect.  I tend to view these sorts of verbal encodings as an offshoot of how even the Bible uses its own Greek vocabulary in sometimes taking a particular koine, common, word or phrase and turning it completely on its head to mean something different to a person within the early Jesus movement, but that might mean nothing or even nonsense (like John of Patmos’s Revelation) to an outsider.

John the Evangelist (not to be confused with John of Patmos—for the sake of simplicity here, when I refer to John, I am referring to the otherwise anonymous primary writer of the Gospel of John) is a master of this adroit use of the Greek language.  Though his vocabulary and syntax are relatively straightforward compared to many other New Testament works, John skillfully weaves in double and alternate meanings to particular words and phrases, and, in cases like that of Nicodemus in John 3 (with Jesus’s use of anothen, or being “born again/above”), or the Samaritan woman in John 4 (with Jesus’s use of phgh, or “spring/fountain” as “living water”), even makes those double meanings a point of contention in Jesus’s teachings.

All of this is to say: in reading through Dr. Lindsay’s paper for both the first and second time, I was particularly struck not merely by his tally of John’s use of pisteuein but also of the noting of John’s deliberate eschewing of pistis, a detail I myself had failed to glean during my (admittedly rudimentary) Greek studies of John’s Gospel during my college and seminary days.  I agree that this choice must have been deliberate on John’s part (see above—John was clearly very deliberate about his word choices throughout his Gospel), but in attempting to put this exegetical reality within the larger context in which John’s Gospel was put to writing, I cannot help but believe that John’s use of pisteuein, insofar as it creates new meaning to John’s community, represents what Bible scholars Richard L. Rohrbaugh and Bruce J. Malina call “antilanguage.”

Dennis C. Duling provides an excellent and concise definition of antilanguage thusly in a passage on John’s language and writing style:

Antilanguage is a type of language used by groups who are “marginal” with respect to the larger society, which in the most general sense is Mediterranean society but in a more restricted sense is more traditional Israelite society.  The key in this case is the choice of believers to live in opposition to “this world” and “the Israelites” (NRSV: “the Jews”).  Their “antilanguage” is thus an expression of their “antisociety” stance.[1]

My underlying thesis for what follows is this: that this frequency of use and particular usage of pisteuein as highlighted and interpreted by Dr. Lindsay represents a word of the antilanguage that John—and the Johannine community—would have been fluent in, and that it remains firmly in the antilanguage lexicon today, not only by right of our own (perhaps less-than-accurate) translations of John’s Gospel but by our own misapplications of the Gospel in a Christ-centered faith even today.

Throughout the New Testament, faith (and similar “fruits of the spirit”) is presented as in opposition to this world not merely by John but also by Paul[2] and by James, the brother of Jesus[3].  Considering the vehemence with which this world was in opposition to Christ Himself,  such sentiment is unsurprising, but the marginalized status of Jesus was a status inherited by His followers and, I would contend, especially so by His Johannine followers.  As Howard Clark Kee conveys, “The kinds of hostility the sect (the Johannine Community –E.A.) can expect are named in John 16: expulsion from the synagogues and martyrdom.”[4]  This sort of retro-interjection of such trauma is part of a pattern for John: he is indicating his sect “perhaps because of their increasingly vocal claims about Jesus’s divinity has been banished from fellowship in the synaoguge.  The expulsion was evidently traumatic for John, who responds by retrojecting the event back into the time of Jesus and insisting that his group is spiritually superior to their synagogue critics.”[5]

Ergo, even more so than the Christianity espoused by Paul or by James, the first-century Near Eastern world had little appetite for the Christianity practiced by John’s followers, and it shows in John’s Gospel and letters, not simply in that John and his community are isolated and alienated, but that in the midst of said isolation and alienation, he (and they) believe wholeheartedly in the spiritual superiority of their faith compared to their critics’ beliefs.  To John, then, the Judean critics and persecutors of Jesus lack not merely correct belief, they lack true faith as well.

What these circumstances have to do with faith, with pisteuein, or with antilanguage, is an important question in translating John.  Consider, for a moment, the primary alternative translation of pisteuein: not “faith,” but “belief,” or “to believe (in).”  Well-known and well-loved translations including both the King James Version and the New American Standard Bible will translate instances of pisteuein in the Gospel of John as “believing” rather than as, say, “having faith in.”[6]  Ultimately, and with the least amount of hubris possible that is inherent in a lone parish pastor attempting to correct a longstanding Bible translation, I would suggest this treatment of pisteuein to be antithetical to what John was endeavoring to communicate with his use of pisteuein as a possible example of antilanguage. 

Why?  Because there is a subtle but key distinction between belief and faith, which Dr. Lindsay points us toward simply and elegantly in his paper, at the top of page six: “Faith for John is thus both an identification with and an engagement with Christ in a relationship of servant to lord.”[7]

Belief, by contrast, merely implies intellectual assent.  One can choose to believe in Santa Claus, or in extraterrestrial life, but those beliefs need not dictate one’s moral decisions (at least, outside of the ever-elongating Christmas season or binge-watching sessions of Doctor Who).  Belief does not demand relationship, nor does it demand any engagement beyond a yes or no answer to the hypothesis being presently considered.

In other words, belief is, at its purest form, a sort of intellectual transaction or interaction.  Assent or negation is proffered in response to a stated value, fact, or reality.  Without attempting to denigrate the Hebrew Bible tradition in any way, I believe this is why Paul places such importance upon grace vis-à-vis the law.  One can assent to obey the law or not as one can even assent to obey a lord, but the belief in the law or in a lord (and by this I mean a lord in the feudal sense) does not justify a person, because that belief does not represent the change of nature that faith can achieve.

Ultimately, this difference between the two is likewise illuminated in Dr. Lindsay’s work: “Genuine faith enables vision (11:40)…It is thus unthinkable within the context of John’s Gospel to understand this faith/vision as anything other than the allegiance-yielding identification and engagement with Christ…”[8]  None of this is possible merely through holding a belief; it only becomes possible when that belief grows, like a sapling into a tree, into a fully blown faith that shapes and dictates a person’s life that allows them to “see,” as it were, God’s presence before them.

Yet we associate belief and sight nonetheless—after all, “seeing is believing.” For John’s community, though, seeing is wholly unnecessary to belief.  This is not only what Jesus teaches according to John[9], it is what was, in fact, physically necessary, because even if one were to believe that the Johannine community saw Jesus as an immortal figure who transcended time itself—after all, in John 8:58, Jesus exclaims, “Very truly, I tell you, before Abraham was, I am!”—His physical presence was still lacking from the world from the time of His ascension per the Gospel of Luke.  Jesus cannot be seen, and nor for that matter can God, a reality John concedes in his first letter.[10]

Rather, as that very same verse from 1 John goes on to teach, it is God who lives in us, invisible to us but whose love gets perfected in us over time.  With God’s love in us through Jesus Christ, we are able to have faith—and thus “see” the unseeable: the divine.  And so we remain “in” the divine.

All of this is acutely necessary to the Johannine community as it withstood marginalization and oppression, and it remains necessary to us today, even as we emphatically do not experience the same level of marginalization and oppression (despite vehement protestations to the contrary by some of our American Christian brethren).  The grandparent of Christian existentialism, who strove constantly to merge the notions of faith and experience, Soren Kierkegaard, once wrote, “He who loves God without faith reflects upon himself; he who loves God in faith reflects upon God.”[11]

In short: faith is what allows us to see God.  Perhaps this should not be so revolutionary a thought to us today, but in a first-century world of religion governed by law and by coercion more so than by faith or by grace, it almost certainly would be.  And in a 21^st-century world governed by consumerism and unchecked greed, the idea of seeing the unseeable rather than striving for the tangible worth of materialism is, in point of fact, still very much revolutionary.

It is difficult to over-emphasize just how great the importance is to John of our faith, our “seeing the unseeable.”  Per Rudolf Schnakenburg, “The one thing demanded of man (sic) is faith, this is the great Johannine formula for salvation: He who believes in the Son has eternal life.”[12]  Yet Schnakenburg cites arguably the most famous verse in Scripture—John 3:16—in such a way that 3:16’s use of pisteuein is once more translated as “believes in” rather than “has faith in.”  To this day, we are still using the two terms interchangeably in our translations of John when, with a plethora of Biblical translations available to English readers, we can afford the luxury of choosing precision.

Yet we do not always choose to in favor of the wording we have known and accepted for years—witness the still strong popularity of the relatively inaccurate King James Version translation.

The irony of this is that it does not have to be this way; translators have shown a willingness to correct potential inaccuracies of translations past, such as changing the translation of hoi ioudaioi from “the Jews” to “the Jewish leaders” (in the Common English Bible) or “the Judeans” (in the Complete Jewish Bible), and yet, we have continued to neglect to offer pisteuein the same treatment.

In this way, faith language remains a form of antilanguage for an antisociety, even as Christianity still remains, numerically at least, the most popular religion in the world.  Yet for as many—literally billions—of people who profess Christianity as their faith of choice, we still seem to possess a lack of more people who, in Dr. Lindsay’s words, are true to John’s Jesus, for “to remain in Jesus, therefore, is to produce the work(s) that Jesus does, just as Jesus’ remaining in the Father allows him to do the works of the Father.”[13]  We remain lacking in producing the works of Jesus to this day.

I am fully cognizant of the implications of what it is I am suggesting in that previous paragraph: that even the faith of billions has yet been inadequate in remedying a great many of the world’s harms which Jesus indicts and calls upon us to remedy.  However, we in our human condition remain difficult to teach new forms and acts of pisteuein, of faith.  As Dr. Lindsay notes in his concluding paragraph, even as John’s concept of faith is rooted in the Septuagint[14], this is still “all new in John’s Gospel.”[15]  To no small extent, it remains new even today, or at the very least, under-practiced.

In concluding my remarks, I would draw once more from Kierkegaard: “Faith is the movement of infinity within itself, and it cannot be otherwise.  Everything previous is preparatory, preliminary, something which disappears as soon as the conviction arrives.  Otherwise, there would be no resting in a conviction, for then to have conviction would mean perpetually to repeat the reasons.”[16]  What John calls us to, perhaps above anything else, in His Gospel is to rest in the conviction that having faith in God as revealed through Jesus Christ will cause us to experience the fullness of God’s love for us.  As we experience that divine love by way of our human faith, we, in turn, strive to bring others into experiencing that selfsame divine love.  How we strive to do so, though, comes down to our production of not only the works of Jesus Christ, but our production of His words as well.  The religious language we use has always mattered, but with a wide Christian-oriented theological vocabulary to choose from in 21^st-century English, I hope and pray we would do well to think of how our own language sounds at its core—and how we might use it, along with every other ounce of our being, to bring forth the love of God to a hurting world that remains in desperate need of such love. 

In this way, may our own movement of infinity within itself continue on.

Rev. Eric Atcheson

Vancouver & Longview, Washington

January 2015

Works Cited

Dennis C. Duling, The New Testament: History, Literature, and Social Context, Thomson Wadsworth, 2003

Stephen L. Harris, The New Testament: A Student’s Introduction, Fifth Edition, McGraw-Hill, 2006

Howard C. Kee, Understanding the New Testament, Fifth Edition, Prentice Hall, 1993

Soren A. Kierkegaard, Provocations, edited by Charles E. Moore, Plough Publishing House, 2002

Dennis R. Lindsay, “Believing in Jesus: A Johannine Theology of Faith,” 2015

Rudolf Schnakenburg, New Testament Theology Today, translated by David Askew, Palm Publishers, 1963

---

[1] Dennis C. Duling, The New Testament: History, Literature, and Social Context, Thomson Wadsworth, 2003, 417.

[2] Galatians 5:16-17: “Live by the Spirit, I say, and do not gratify the desires of the flesh.  For what the flesh desires is opposed to the Spirit, and what the Spirit desires is opposed to the flesh; for these are opposed to each other, to prevent you from doing what you want.” (NRSV)

[3] James 3:14-15, 17: “But if you have bitter envy and selfish ambition in your hearts, do not be boastful and false to the truth.  Such wisdom does not come down from above, but is earthly, unspiritual, devilish…But the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without a trace of partiality or hypocrisy.” (NRSV)

[4] Howard C. Kee, Understanding the New Testament, Fifth Edition, Prentice Hall, 1993, 179.

[5] Stephen L. Harris, The New Testament: A Student’s Introduction, McGraw-Hill, 2006, 229.

[6] Eg, John 12:39: “…they could not believe…,” rather than, say, “they could not have faith in…”

[7] Dennis R. Lindsay, Believing in Jesus: A Johannine Theology of Faith, 6

[8] Ibid, 6-7

[9] John 20:29: “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to pisteusantes—believe.” (NRSV)

[10] 1 John 4:12: “No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and His love is perfected in us.” (NRSV)

[11] Soren A. Kierkegaard, Provocations, edited by Charles E. Moore, Plough Publishing House, 2002, 275.

[12] Rudolf Schnakenburg, New Testament Theology Today, translated by David Askey, Palm Publishers, 1963, 98

[13] Dennis R. Lindsay, Believing in Jesus: A Johannine Theology of Faith, 11-12

[14] I regret that I could not devote my response more towards the Hebrew roots of John’s pisteuein usage, but the brutal truth is that I am poorly equipped to exegete ancient Hebrew and would only do it a disservice.

[15] Ibid, 24

[16] Soren A. Kierkegaard, Provocations, edited by Charles E. Moore, Plough Publishing House, 2002, 270

Letters from the Soul: This Month's Newsletter Column & Lenten Sermon Series

February 2015: "Unassigned Seating"

Dear Church,

It has been a long winter already--and a cold one, at that, especially when our old, lumbering heater of many decades in the fellowship hall began to sputter and start this winter. The board has approved a bid for a new heating system for the fellowship hall, and it is scheduled to be installed this month. I am excited for this new, energy-efficient setup that will be good for both the earth and for our congregation's bottom line...less money spent on heating, after all, is more money that can be spent on building the kingdom and proclaiming the Gospel instead. 

Throughout our winter of inconsistent heating, we took a few Sundays where we met for fellowship time not in the hall, but throughout our classrooms in the main building. This necessitated a number of on-the-spot improvisations: moving serving tables around, taking chairs from one room to another, and the like.

But perhaps the impromptu change that I enjoyed the most was seeing everyone sitting at completely different tables during fellowship time by necessity, because the usual places we might take and sit down at every Sunday were not available. I saw lots of great conversations taking place despite this musical chairs treatment of our seating--or, rather, perhaps because of that musical chairs feeling. 

See, we often joke about having assigned pews that we sit in every Sunday, but that joke is funny because there is a germ of truth to it, and I think it extends over not just into worship but into fellowship time and the tables and chairs we take our places at then as well. The overall effect, then, is something akin to a high school cafeteria where the jocks have their table, and the computer techies have their table, and the band nerds (that'd be me) have their table.

That's high school, though. Not church. It shouldn't be church.

So it may sound trivial, but at heart, I do not think it is: when our new heaters are installed this month, let's try to take the lesson of having to change up our usual seating arrangements to heart and continue setting next to people we might not have normally sat next to before this winter.

Let's make a conscious and deliberate effort to reach out to ALL of our brothers and sisters in the church to get to know them better. ALL of you have some amazing stories to tell--I know this because you have shared them with me.

Now, I want you to be able to share them with everyone else as well.

And if nothing else, to return to the high school metaphor, think of it as switching up your assigned desks in the classroom to mess with your substitute teacher. Only instead of a subsitute teacher, you have me.

Hey, I never said it was a perfect metaphor!

Yours in Christ,
Pastor Eric

This Lent, we kick off (as always) with an Ash Wednesday (kick ash, see what I did there?!) service where I'll preach on that story of Jesus in the wilderness, and then we will begin a new sermon series just for Lent, one which recounts each day of Holy Week, one by one, culminating in Good Friday. The basis of this series is the book "The Last Week" by John Dominic Crossan and Marcus Borg, the latter of whom just passed away on January 21st. But this sermon series was much longer n the making, and I am excited to begin it with you on the 22nd!

February 22: “Monday,” Mark 11:12-19
March 1: “Tuesday,” Mark 12:35-44
March 8: “Wednesday,” Mark 14:1-9
March 15: "Thursday," Mark 14:12-25
March 22: "Friday," Mark 15:22-38 
March 29: "Palm Sunday," Mark 1:1-11
April 2: Maundy Thursday service, 7:00 pm

This Week's Sermon: "The Prophecy's Fulfillment"

Acts 2:14-21

14 Peter stood with the other eleven apostles. He raised his voice and declared, “Judeans and everyone living in Jerusalem! Know this! Listen carefully to my words! 15 These people aren’t drunk, as you suspect; after all, it’s only nine o’clock in the morning! 16 Rather, this is what was spoken through the prophet Joel: 

17 In the last days, God says, I will pour out my Spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy. Your young will see visions. Your elders will dream dreams. 18 Even upon my servants, men and women, I will pour out my Spirit in those days, and they will prophesy. 19 I will cause wonders to occur in the heavens above and signs on the earth below, blood and fire and a cloud of smoke. 20 The sun will be changed into darkness, and the moon will be changed into blood, before the great and spectacular day of the Lord comes. 21 And everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.  (Common English Bible)

“The Prophecy's Fulfillment," Acts 2:14-21

"As One Having Authority: Sermons that Changed the World,” Week Three

My maternal family side’s grandfather is quite a character.  He has basically spent his entire life on the road, traipsing across the country in one Ford truck after another.  He stores all his things in a collection of banana boxes, and even claims that his desk is a door with the knob removed, set on six banana boxes: three on each side.

He also loves sushi, and so whenever he would come to town, we would go out to my favorite sushi place and proceed to debate about theology over pieces of nigiri and endless Sapporos.  See, he is heavily influenced by the line of television preaches spouting ridiculous apocalypticism scenarios like Jack Van Impe and John Hagee, and I am a normal person.  So we don’t always see eye to eye on it, and he has even sent me a couple of catalogs from Jack Van Impe ministries offering me, among other things, an instructional videotape that I can leave behind for my heathen relatives after I get raptured, or an instruction pamphlet on how to avoid having my forehead barcoded by the Antichrist, because apparently the Antichrist wants us all to look like on sale merch at Target.

In general, my attitude towards eschatology (that’s the fancy seminary word for ‘how we think the world will end’) is identical to that of this lovely little book, the Pocket Guide to the Apocalypse.  It writes, in its section on the history of our whole endeavor of predicting the world’s end:

The Catholic Church goes on the offensive with the Fifth Lateran Council, which issues a decree on preaching and prophecy directed at clerics who receive and promote direct revelation from God.  Specifically, good Christians are prohibited from predicting in their sermons “any fixed time of future evils, of Antichrist’s coming, or the day of Last Judgment.”

Not everyone gets the memo.

Here are a couple of my personal favorites of the literally dozens of preachers since who I want to ask, in my best Office Space voice, “Did you get the memo?”  But these chaps clearly didn't, even though there clearly was a problem at play, because usually, institutions don't prohibit something that isn't already a problem.

A Franciscan monk by the name of Tomasso Campanella predicts the sun will collide with the earth.  Which is a good thing, he says, because it will burn all our sins away and usher in the reign of the Messiah.  Tomasso was no scientist, though, so he tries to enlist none other than Galileo to help him do some calculations.  Galileo calculates that Tomasso is a few gases short of a flaming sphere and refuses to get involved.  A good thing, because the church ships Tomasso off to the pokey for being a heretic.

Here’s another, from the slightly more recent year of 1993:

Faith healer and slayer in the spirit Benny Hinn says the Rapture is nigh, so get ready.  Except for you homosexuals.  You’re not going anywhere until 1994, when God will personally destroy you.

Go away, Benny.

What does all of this have to do with Peter’s Pentecost sermon?  Well, in a way, Peter is really just another mover in this cottage industry of thinking you know exactly when Jesus is a comin’ back.

This is a sermon series that we are now in the middle of, now that it is February, but we launched it to go along with the new year, and it will take us up to Ash Wednesday a couple of weeks from now.  For a while now, I have wanted to talk to all of you about the meaning and significance of preaching, and this series allows me to do exactly that.  The title for this series comes from the assembled crowd’s reaction to Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount, where Matthew says that they were astounded that He taught them “as one having authority,” rather than as one of their temple authorities.  So…how do we teach one another as one having authority?  That is what we will be working on together, and each week for the next five weeks, we will be talking about one of the many significant sermons that are presented in the New Testament: the Sermon on the Mount, Stephen’s farewell speech before his martyrdom, Paul’s address to the Areopagus, and today, Peter’s Pentecost sermon.  We have arrived at this point in the series after a pair of inaugural sermons by Jesus to kick off His own ministry: His sermon on Isaiah from Luke 4, and the previously referenced Sermon on the Mount from Matthew.  But today, we continue onto another inaugural sermon, this time from chief among Jesus’s disciples, Peter, on the occasion of the arrival of the Holy Spirit and subsequent accusation from standers by that he and the other followers of Jesus are “filled with the new wine.”

As Peter would reply, no, they are not “filled with the new wine,” because, after all, it is only 9:00 am.  But then Peter launches into his first full blown sermon, one that begins with this recitation of a prophecy from the second chapter of Joel, one of the twelve “minor” (because they wrote short books as opposed to long treatises like Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel) prophets, whom we actually know very little about, in truth.

But this prophecy of Joel’s gets repeated by Peter, and it is easy to see why.  The very first verse he cites is, “I will pour out my spirit on all people.”  And that is exactly what has just happened with the arrival of the Holy Spirit: it caused each person to speak in their own native tongue rather than in Greek, the lingua franca of the time (much like how English is today in many areas of the world), meaning that all sorts of people were present for this outpouring of the spirit.

The hitch is, though, that the words before that are, “In the last days…”

It indicates that Peter, like probably a great many of the earliest Christians (including Paul, at least early on in his career as an apostle), believed that he was living in those last days.  He believed that Jesus would return within his lifetime.

Except that Jesus didn’t.  We know that now.  But Peter did not, at least then, although much later, one of his two letters in Scripture does acknowledge that a day with the Lord is like a thousand years, so that may well have been his own admission that, like Paul, he had to adjust his expectations as his career wound on.

That isn’t something we particularly relish, though: adjusting our expectations of God, or of Jesus.  We want and need God to be God, and for Christ to be Christ, and of course they are, but sometimes they are not the type of God or type of Messiah we want them to be.  We may want them to take care of our every need, we may want them to smite our enemies, we may want them to give us a pony for Christmas, but none of those things are apt to happen, or ever happen.

Instead, we have to abide by God’s expectations for us, not the other way around.

That might be one of the toughest things for us to do as Christians, and as people.  We are baptized into the faith, we are told that God loves us, and then we are handed this book of amazing stories of how God worked in the lives of people long ago and we think to ourselves, “Why can’t that be me?”

Except that it is still us.  God still works in your life, that I promise you.  My job, I guess, is to help you to see it if you are worried that you cannot.

For Peter, there is no doubt.  God is at work in his life.  And for many believers around the world and through time, there was and is no doubt, God continues to remain at work in their lives as well.

But maybe God isn’t working, and doesn’t work, at the stuff we always ask Him to, or expect Him to.  And that is okay.  It really is.  Even if Peter’s prophecy changed the world not just in the fact that 3,000 people chose to convert and the New Testament church was birthed, but in him also setting the precedent for scads of later preachers thinking they also knew when the end of days was upon them.

But it’s the former, the reaching of 3,000 people, which should stay with us, because that is what we are still called to do: not to worry about God’s future, but to tend to one another’s present.  God can take care of Himself.  We, though, must take care of each other, always.

So was Joel’s prophecy fulfilled in the end?  Absolutely, but that doesn’t mean it meant the end times were nigh, anymore than it means the end times might be nigh today.  Prophecies can be fulfilled anytime, anywhere through God’s providence, and those prophecies can be big or small.

All we have to do is not expect it of God, and allow God to do what God does best: be Himself. 

And we shall follow Him.

So when the next time someone, be they a televangelist or a neighbor, a firebreather or a tin foil hat wearer, tells you that God’s prophecy for the end of the world is at hand, that is all you need to know.  We shall follow God.

Regardless of the timetable we may try to set for God.

Because true faith, real faith, authentic faith, in the end, knows no such thing. 

Thanks be to God.  Amen.

Rev. Eric Atcheson
Longview, Washington
February 1, 2015

(original image from speakupmovement.org)

Something Arrived in Today's Mail

I'm an 11 year old wizard, and my letter from Hogwarts just arrived.

If by "11 year old wizard," you mean "29 year old pastor," and by "Hogwarts," you mean "Seattle University."

This is one of those announcements of the greatest kind.  Presuming the pieces of the financial aid puzzle all fall into place, I will be matriculating into the Doctor of Ministry program of Seattle University's School of Theology and Ministry, beginning this July.

This will not take me away much from my current ministry; the D.Min. (pronounced, basically, "demon," an irony which was most certainly not lost on my church's board of directors) has for decades now been a degree designed specifically for working pastors because it is, like its M.Div. sibling, a practical degree.  Or, at least, it is meant to be...the M.Div. wasn't always for me (see my most immediate previous post).

But I'm hoping that this D.Min. program (and I chose it in part because of its strength and focus in the area of developing pastoral leadership skills) will remedy some of that, a week or two of intensive classes at a time, over the course of the next three or four years.

It varies dramatically from the Ph.D. in that way.  The D.Min. is a degree meant to be completed on a part time schedule, and so it lacks some of the components of a Ph.D.  I don't have to take comprehensive exams, for one.  And our dissertation, like a Ph.D.'s, is hyper focused on one particular thing, but that thing in our case tends to be our parishes, or a particular mechanism of our denominations, or the like, whereas the Ph.D.'s is an original academic contribution to their field (which, when that field is as heavily researched as, say, Biblical Studies, makes the effort of trying to come up with something both original and academically sound to say seem particularly hellish).

Which means that the D.Min. suffers from a diminished reputation in some (mostly academic) circles.  Which is fine, really; I'm not at all interested in being called "doctor," except maybe by my anesthesiologist wife for the laughs (I already have plans to order address labels as "Real Dr. and Fake Dr. Atcheson").

And had I wanted to teach at a university or seminary full time, I would get a Ph.D., but as it is, those professorships are almost ridiculously few and far between as those very same seminaries and universities continue to move away from the model of tenure track professors to hiring more and more non tenure track instructors and part time adjuncts for obscenely low pay (I'm not kidding, either.  I may make less than a public schoolteacher, but a lot of college adjuncts have the Ph.D. that I don't and never will, and their average salary is literally half my modest wages.  What our postsecondary school system is doing to its adjuncts is criminal in every sense of the term).

But I digress.  Adjunct pay is a soapbox for another post.  All of this is to say, I don't need a Ph.D. for the work I love doing, so I won't try to pursue one.  But I also knew when I graduated seminary that I wasn't done learning; in fact, I withdrew from Santa Clara University's Jesuit School of Theology one week prior to classes starting for their Master of Theology degree in order to come to the congregation I am at now.

So I suppose that I am trading one Jesuit school for another, but hey, I had to read Ignatius of Loyola in college and enjoyed him, so why not?  I'm ready to continue learning.  And hopefully, I always will be, for God always has something new to teach me.  Of that I am certain.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to Ollivander's to buy myself a wand.

Yours in Christ,
Eric

Annual General Meetings: Why Sometimes I Wish I had Scrooge McDuck as a Congregant

Look.

I get it.

Love of money is the root of all sorts of evil.  Jesus Himself said it.

I don't think I love money.  But I know I need it.  My landlord won't accept free Bible lessons to pay the rent.

So I need money to live.  We all do.

Including churches.  Which means we have to budget that money in order to be accountable and transparent to the people who generously give us their money as sacrificial offerings to God.

So, like a lot of congregations, we passed a yearly budget at our annual general meeting yesterday.  And, like a lot of congregations, our budget for the year has a pretty big deficit to it.  I won't say how big, but suffice it to say you could fit a camel through it easier than through the eye of a needle.

This year's budget, like the past three, included no raise in my own pay either, if for no other reason than I know full well that my loving little congregation cannot afford it.  We live in a town that has been beaten senseless by the loss of manufacturing jobs over the past two decades, and now the majority of us here are suffering.  And they look the church for help.

But it means that our church is suffering, too.  When I came here in 2011, I didn't realize just how much deferred maintenance I was inheriting, or how desperate and acute need existed in the neighborhood for basic necessities like heat and water.  You wouldn't think it to look at the stretch of street my church is on, but everyone here was, and is, hurting.

And I am rather entirely unequipped to change that reality.  Which means maybe I am paid what I should be paid, which isn't a ton, but it also leads to this particular reality of many an annual general meeting elsewhere, which the Presbyterian pastor/writer/speaker, and a patron saint of the Theophilus Project, Carol Howard Merrit captures fantastically:

The personnel chair gets up and informs the gathering that the pastor is already at the minimum salary, and there is no way to cut the salary any more. Unless, of course, the pastor goes to part time, for instance. The pastor begins looking to see if there is an insurrection brewing. 

The budget passes, with a reluctant majority. The pastor sweats as the whispers continue. No one knows how they’re going to keep their pastor. The pastor becomes very anxious, but doesn't know how to respond, because the minister has not done anything wrong. There has even been growth and vitality in the last years. But that still can't make up for the last couple decades of decline or keep people alive. The pastor has mouths to feed and loans to pay. The message is clear. The church will not be able to afford their leadership for long. It's hard to focus on ministry, so the pastor begins putting energy and effort into looking for another call. 

The problem is that there are so many churches in this same position, a call to a stable congregation is becoming more rare. There are some really cushy positions. In fact, the income inequities are quite startling—even on the same church staff. But those positions are getting fewer.

So what do we do? Do we go the way of attrition? Do we allow pastors to be starved out, until we all get jobs as baristas? Should churches all hire lay pastors? Then what’s the role of our seminaries? Will we close them down? What about our historic commitment to theological education? Do we just turn our backs on our historic commitments? Is there another way out of this?

Now, this isn't quite my own situation: I'm not looking for another call, and there is no insurrection brewing.  But the "there has been growth and vitality in the last years but that still can't make up for the last couple decades of decline or keep people alive" bit?  100% hits the nail on the head.  As does the reality that I don't know for how much longer my dear congregation can afford me at my (modest) full-time wages.

This isn't to air dirty laundry because I don't think there is any shame in this, or, at least, there shouldn't be.  It isn't like my congregation is a kid who has blown its allowance on Funyuns and Pokemon cards.  It's that the church was built to be a much bigger thing than it currently is, and a much wealthier thing than it currently is, and that people who through no fault of their own have lost out on higher-paying jobs or on any job altogether cannot afford this church as it currently exists.

It's not that we don't have Scrooge McDucks anymore, people who could obsessively tuck away their savings.  It's that we have so, so many folks who have nothing to tuck away at all.

And we don't know what to do about that.  Carol wrote that church planting wasn't even mentioned in her seminary education, not even one class on starting a new church; I would go one further and say that fundraising, property stewardship, and the other nuts-and-bolts types of things that are inherent in running any nonprofit organization, including a church, are not mentioned either, much less taught.  For instance, I was taught nothing about online giving and stewardship, even though increasing amounts of commerce and charity take place online, and even though many, many young people (myself included) do not regularly carry cash or checks on them.  But we are still teaching our pastors from an outdated perspective that is firmly planted in the era of collection plates and donation boxes.

I talked about this some with my regional minister today, even.  I've said it before here, but I'll say it again: I can tell you about the theology of rutabagas during the Council of Nicea, and maybe even come up with a haiku about it, but I went into this gig completely ill-equipped for the practicalities that I imagine the vast majority of solo pastors like me face.

And it is genuinely difficult for me to not feel resentful of that sometimes.  I spent three years and thousands of dollars on that education.  Not only are we not paying our pastors adequately, we are not educating them adequately.  We are asking them to give years of their lives and incredible sacrifices of their resources for a credential that falls short.

Which is why I'm not sure the way that Carol is that the answer lies within the resources possessed by our denominational bodies, because they are the ones who are (usually) the ones providing the inadequate educations our seminaries are offering.  And maybe that is the bottom-up-rather-than-top-down Disciple of Christ denominational partisan in me talking.  But I think the answer is going to have to come from us.  Our denominational bodies may have the funds, but our regions don't necessarily--just last year, the neighboring Disciples region of Southern Idaho dissolved and was absorbed by several neighboring regions because, in part, of an acute lack of resources and of a lack of a base of congregations to draw resources from.

In other words, if our congregations cannot help prop up our denominational infrastructures, maybe our denominational bodies are going to go the same way that we are.  As are our seminaries.

I said in my sermon yesterday that perhaps we get the prayer we deserve.  Well, maybe we get the levels of giving that we deserve as well.

Except that increasingly, those levels of giving do not allow for us to abide by Paul's dictum that those who preach the Gospel should earn their living by the Gospel.

And that problem is always going to grow if our individual congregations, pastors, and seminaries do not change, regardless of how much Scrooge McDuck gold our denominations are sitting on.  That I'm willing to bet on.

But not too much, because I still can't offer my landlord free Bible lessons to pay my rent.

Yours in Christ,
Eric

(Scrooge McDuck image source: Gawker Media)

This Week's Sermon: "The Mountaintop"

Matthew 6:7-15

7 “When you pray, don’t pour out a flood of empty words, as the Gentiles do. They think that by saying many words they’ll be heard. 8 Don’t be like them, because your Father knows what you need before you ask. 9 Pray like this: 

 Our Father who is in heaven, uphold the holiness of your name. 10 Bring in your kingdom so that your will is done on earth as it’s done in heaven. 11 Give us the bread we need for today. 12 Forgive us for the ways we have wronged you, just as we also forgive those who have wronged us. 13 And don’t lead us into temptation, but rescue us from the evil one. 

 14 “If you forgive others their sins, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. 15 But if you don’t forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your sins." (Common English Bible)

“The Mountaintop,” Matthew 6:7-15

“As One Having Authority: Sermons that Changed the World,” Week Two

The words are about as desperate as they sound out of context as in context: “Help!  Help!  I’ll become a monk!”

They are the words that a law student uttered as he was riding home on horseback in the midst of a thunderstorm when a bolt of lightning struck the ground right next to him.  Unlike most of us who probably have bargained with God at some point in the throes of shock and fear, the law student kept his word and became an Augustinian monk.  His father was furious—to him, it was as though his errant son was taking his highly-regarded legal education and setting it on fire—but there was no stopping this young chap.

And thus was created Martin Luther, the religious teacher and reformer and forefather of Protestant Christianity, rather than Martin Luther, the ambulance-chasing lawyer (or whatever the equivalent of ambulances were back then…stretcher-bearer chaser?  Say that ten times fast).

All because he saw as an authentic prayer what we might have seen merely as an utterance of panic.  Where we might have seen only a want to survive, Luther saw the genuine article, a spiritual calling.  And that is what prayer can do.  It is, truthfully, what it should do.  It should pave the way for those higher callings we are meant to engage in, those high callings to social justice and care and compassion that we talked about last week.  Prayer fuels all of that, and so it is appropriate that we turn today to a sermon whose core is all about prayer: the Sermon on the Mount.

This is a new sermon series to go along with the new year, and it will take us all the way up to Ash Wednesday, which marks the beginning of the church season of Lent.  For a while now, I have wanted to talk to all of you about the meaning and significance of preaching, and this series allows me to do exactly that.  The title for this series comes from the assembled crowd’s reaction to Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount, where Matthew says that they were astounded that He taught them as “one having authority,” rather than one of their temple authorities.  So…how do we teach one another as one having authority?  That’s what we’ll be working on together, and each week for the next five weeks, we will be talking about one of the many significant sermons that are given in the New Testament: the Sermon on the Mount, Peter’s Pentecost sermon, Stephen’s farewell speech before his martyrdom, and Paul’s address to the Areopagus.  We began this series by looking at Jesus’s first sermon in His ministry as documented by Luke in his Gospel, and it was appropriate that we did so on the weekend of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day because this resounding call for justice from Isaiah 61 that Jesus preaches on was King’s message as well, and today, we move, as I said, to the Sermon on the Mount, which Matthew holds as Jesus’s inaugural sermon rather than the sermon on Isaiah 61 in the Nazareth synagogue which Luke documents.

Nevertheless, whichever one came first, the chicken sermon or the egg sermon (so to speak), both messages were profoundly important for setting the tone for everything else that was to follow in Jesus’s earthly ministry.  They both encapsulate, in their own ways, what this whole Christianity thing is all about—or, at least, what it was meant to be about and should still be about.

Now, first things first—does it matter at all where Jesus is preaching the Sermon on the Mount?

Absolutely, it does.  It evokes the image of Moses, ascending Mount Sinai to receive the law (beginning with the Ten Commandments) from God, and so in turn does Jesus ascend to interpret the law that Moses once received.  Not only that, though, but as Father Albert, my favorite Bible professor from seminary taught, the Sermon on the Mount itself is shaped like a mountain—perfectly symmetrical from a beginning-and-end perspective, with each end (chapter 5 and chapter 7 of Matthew) climbing to a particular point as the sermon’s peak.  And that peak is this passage wherein Jesus teaches us the Lord’s Prayer, atop the mountain.

This mountaintop, ultimately, is all about trying to get closer to God.  It is why the primeval ancients built the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11; since they believed that God lived in the skies (personally, I believe God lives in maple syrup, but nobody else seems to subscribe to that extremely well-grounded hypothesis), then they would try to reach the skies themselves and thus be close to God and be like gods themselves.  That didn’t turn out so well for them.

The same sort of thing, in fact, happens while Moses is up on Sinai, which is what—as I just said—Jesus is emulating here.  When Moses comes down from the mountaintop with the tablets inscribed with the Ten Commandments (or the Fifteen Commandments, if you believe Mel Brooks in his “History of the World, Part I”), he discovers that the Israelites have taken to worshipping the golden calf, because that puts God (or rather, their idol of a god) closer to them and in their midst, and Moses smashes the tablets in fury.  This doesn’t turn out so well, either.

But hey, third time’s a charm, right?  Except that the Lord’s Prayer isn’t really a third time, it’s a first time, a first attempt; there isn’t anything else quite like it.  It’s unique, a one-off.  Certainly, there are other prayers and identical sentiments expressed elsewhere at varying points within Scripture, but only here are they encapsulated so simply and so elegantly and, ultimately, so accessibly into a single prayer that it can be learned and recited even as a young child.

And really, that is what prayer is for, in the end.  It is to be accessible to us, and for us to begin to pick up on as early as possible, because it is what fuels everything else.  All the other stuff I talked about last week: working for equality for all people, striving for social justice, performing individual acts of charity and goodness, all of those, ALL of them, are fueled ultimately by prayer, by an act of us trying to bring ourselves closer to God as a spiritual practice.  Prayer enables all of that.

It does this because prayer, at its core form, though it often comes down, as Christian writer Anne Lamott says, to either “Please, please please,” or “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” prayer at its core form is an expression of faith in a being mightier and greater and far more encompassing than our little feeble selves could ever be.  It is the reversal of the sentiment behind the creation of the Tower of Babel, or of the golden calf at Sinai: it is the ultimate concession that we are not gods, that we will never be as God is, and for us to see and recognize and appreciate God’s movement in our lives, we need to be able to pray to God about it first.

That is something that I have, if I am completely honest with you, often struggled with.  Prayer sometimes feels like it saps energy from me rather than giving me energy, and as a result, I end up slowly chiseling away at my own stores of faith.  It is a terrible condition to have when your job means that you are (understandably) expected to pray on command at family dinners and the like, and when I do find myself in a moment when I do not know how to pray or what to pray for, I have to remember that Jesus already taught me how to pray and what to pray for.

So I try to make whatever prayer I am saying within the same contours of the Lord’s Prayer.

And it seems to work, if I simply try to ask God for the things Jesus instructs us to ask God for, the things that Jesus says it is okay to ask God for.  My mom just posted this article to her Facebook page this morning, so this is a late insert, but what the hell: apparently, 1 of 4 Americans think that God will have a direct hand in determining who wins the Super Bowl.  I guess what is reassuring is that the other 3 of 4 folks don’t, but still.  I get that we all want the Seahawks to go back-to-back here, but “give us this day another Super Bowl title” isn’t exactly a faithful translation of Matthew 6:11.

But if this is what we expect of God and of divine intervention by God, maybe we get the prayer we deserve.  I know I just self-flagellated publicly over my own prayer shortcomings, so I am a proud hypocrite here, but I feel this every time I hear a Christian—even a pastor—pray a prayer that sounds like, “Father, we just want to just say to you, Father, just that you, Father, just, just, just.”  It’s such an insidious thing that the perennially funny Christian writer Jon Acuff satirized it on his humor blog, “Stuff Christians Like.”

Me, I honestly kind of want to put my fingers in my ears when I hear that particular prayer.  That’s not a prayer, that’s what Jesus calls babbling on and on.

So maybe we get the prayer we deserve.  But we shouldn’t.  Or, rather, we shouldn’t settle for that.  Because God sent Jesus with a message of how to pray as we ought, to pray a prayer worthy of our faith., of a faith that, like these sermons, can still change the world.

So let us settle for that instead.  Let us settle for praying as Jesus taught us.  Nothing more, nothing less.

Because in the end, there truly is nothing less than that.

Thanks be to God.  Amen.

Rev. Eric Atcheson

Longview, Washington

January 25, 2015

(original image via speakupmovement.org)