This Week's Sermon: "We are His Offspring"

Acts 17:22-34

22 Paul stood up in the middle of the council on Mars Hill and said, “People of Athens, I see that you are very religious in every way. 23 As I was walking through town and carefully observing your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: ‘To an unknown God.’ What you worship as unknown, I now proclaim to you. 24 God, who made the world and everything in it, is Lord of heaven and earth. He doesn’t live in temples made with human hands. 25 Nor is God served by human hands, as though he needed something, since he is the one who gives life, breath, and everything else. 26 From one person God created every human nation to live on the whole earth, having determined their appointed times and the boundaries of their lands. 27 God made the nations so they would seek him, perhaps even reach out to him and find him. In fact, God isn’t far away from any of us. 28 In God we live, move, and exist. As some of your own poets said, ‘We are his offspring.’ 

 29 “Therefore, as God’s offspring, we have no need to imagine that the divine being is like a gold, silver, or stone image made by human skill and thought. 30 God overlooks ignorance of these things in times past, but now directs everyone everywhere to change their hearts and lives. 31 This is because God has set a day when he intends to judge the world justly by a man he has appointed. God has given proof of this to everyone by raising him from the dead.” 

32 When they heard about the resurrection from the dead, some began to ridicule Paul. However, others said, “We’ll hear from you about this again.” 33 At that, Paul left the council. 34 Some people joined him and came to believe, including Dionysius, a member of the council on Mars Hill, a woman named Damaris, and several others. (Common English Bible)

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

I grew up on the Sound of Music.  It didn’t matter that the movie came out a full twenty years before I was born, every year on New Year’s Eve, my family would sit down to watch it together, partly because the film is really long and it got us young’uns to pass the time as we tried valiantly to stay awake until midnight, but mostly because Anderson Cooper and Kathy Griffin on CNN hadn’t become a thing yet.

So the story of the von Trapps, the Austrian family portrayed in the film, was a BFD to me as a kid.  I may have been too young to have quite grasped the scope and depth just yet of Nazi Germany’s evil specter in Europe during the 1930s and 40s, but I could understand evil men coming to conscript a family’s patriarch and consigning his children to a terrible life without their home country.  Along with singing.

But that is why it meant much more than just a little bit to me to learn recently that just down in Portland, there is a singing quartet made up of four of Georg Johannes von Trapp’s great-grandchildren: Sofia, Amanda, Melanie, and August von Trapp.  They’re the grandchildren of Werner von Trapp (aka Kurt in the film), and they began performing together by singing the Austrian folk songs as kids that their grandfather had grown up with.

Now, singing together, touring together as their grandfather and siblings once did, they are carrying on a family tradition, much I suppose as we would with, say, a family recipe or cherished vacation destination.  It really is quite a profound tendency of ours to do, carrying on the traditions of our parents, and a lot of it I think has to do with what Paul is saying here, in Acts 17, to the Areopagus in Athens…not about his own parents, but about his ultimate parent, his parent in heaven.  And of that divine lineage, he argues, we are all His offspring.  We are all His offspring.

This is a sermon series that we are wrapping up, now that it is almost Lent (Ash Wednesday is finally almost here!), but we launched it to go along with the new year, and it has taken us up to this point we are at 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.  For a change of pace last week we arrived 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 this week, we end the series not with an ending sermon, but with an in-between sermon (for lack of a better term): Paul’s message to the Areopagus in Athens.

So Paul finds himself in a bit of an awkward circumstance: it turns out that the Areopagus (the assembly upon Mars Hill in Athens) basically is driven by the gawking and fawning over the newest, latest craze, and that current (forbidden, I might add) craze is Christianity…as opposed to, say, Tickle Me Elmo dolls and pogs when I was a kid, but hey, whether collectible cardboard circles or the Savior of humanity, we all want what other people have and we don’t.  As Luke writes in the verse immediately preceding where today’s passage picks up:

All Athenians as well as the foreigners who live in Athens used to spend their time doing nothing but talking about or listening to the newest thing. (CEB)

Except that instead of camping out in front of Best Buy or Toys R Us overnight for said newest thing, the Athenians do something maybe even more neurotic: they have Paul arrested so that he can be taken to the council at the Areopagus to tell them all about this newfangled fad called The Way.  And really, wouldn’t that make Christmas shopping for your family so much easier, so that instead of having to plan out weeks in advance how to obtain the right Furby, you could just have that Furby arrested and brought to you instead?

So Paul is under arrest when he begins his address, but he leaves afterwards of his own volition, meaning they must have freed him after his message.  Why would they do that?  Well, let’s dig into exactly what Paul is saying to them…and, by extension, to us.

Paul is a master at reaching audiences, even if he doesn’t always seem it by the grumpy and cantankerous prose in some of his letters (“I wish those who unsettled you would castrate themselves,” he writes to the Galatians regarding the debate over circumcision…le sigh).  And even though he has been seized and thus is under no small degree of duress, he does something incredibly respectful, something that I think would serve all of us well when talking to people of differing faiths than ours: he recognizes the devoted nature of the Athenians’ faith to their pagan gods.

In other words, he doesn’t lead off with “You’re wrong, and here’s why,” he leads off with, “I can see you have a great capacity for faith and I affirm that capacity.”  For Paul, having faith is so, so important, and if it is not faith in the God of Judeo-Christian tradition, well, at least Paul can work with that.

Paul can work with it because the Athenians still acknowledge that not all their gods are known, and so Paul tells them about this God that remained heretofore unknown to them: the God who made the earth and the heavens and all that is in them, who does not need a temple or a home built by human hands (where have we heard this before?  Remember Stephen from last week?), who created every nation, every peoples under the sun, all because God isn’t far away from any of us.

Even if your faith is in an unknown god, or a god not the God of Abraham, God still isn’t far away from you or me or anyone else.  There is no asterisk to Paul’s statement, no exceptions proferred.  The Athenians might not have Paul’s specific faith, but the faith they do have is rich and deep and can be oriented towards the God of Scripture.

It may not happen right away for all of the Athenians, though, as some of those present in the Areopagus begin to guffaw at Paul’s kookyboots notion that we are one day raised from the dead, but enough people do begin to believe that the seed has been planted: Dionysus and (this is important), a woman named Damaris.

How many women get named in the Bible?  Not many.  Even in the Gospels, the Samaritan woman at the well is unnamed.  The Syrophoenician woman who is the only person in Scripture to verbally joust with Jesus and not come out looking like a fool, she too is anonymous.  But many of the female believers are not.  There is Mary the mother of Jesus, Mary the mother of James, Mary Magdalene, Salome, Susanna, Phoebe the deacon in Rome, and here, in Athens, Damaris.

In Athens, historically women were as commodified and oppressed as they were in Old Testament marriage laws.  They were treated as property, and Athenian marriages often were not for love but for political or commercial reasons.  But in Jesus Christ, in the message of Paul proclaimed one day in the heart of Athens, a woman named Damaris finds liberation amidst the bondage, freedom amidst the slavery.

And her world is changed.  As is ours.  Because, as Paul says, as the Athenian poets of old said, as we still say, we are all His offspring.

So let us carry that lineage with us, passing it down from generation to generation, just as parents pass down their folk songs and their recipes, their singing and their joy, to us, their children.  I saw that kind of immortality in full display watching the von Trapps perform on Youtube (divine experiences on Youtube?  Really, pastor?  You whippersnapper, you), and I have every reason to believe that this kind of immortality has been promised to, and is possible for, each of you.

Take it.  Accept that gift.  And live in the knowledge that you are, and will forever be, a child of God just as Christ was the son of God; that you were born of God’s breath just as Christ was born of God’s substance.

Now go and live that life and identity out, in all that you do, in all that you say, in all that you are.

May it be so.  Amen.

Rev. Eric Atcheson
Longview, Washington

February 15, 2015

Some Thoughts on Atheism, Christianity, and Islam (By Way of Chapel Hill)

On Tuesday, we had an energetic debate over the proposed use of force against the Islamic State (ISIS) during the morning Bible study class I teach every week.  One of the things I pointed out in our discussion was how forcefully the Qur'an in fact condemns murder.  In sura 5, verse 32, it reads (in part):

If anyone slew a person - unless it be in retaliation for murder or for spreading mischief in the land - it would be as if he slew all mankind: and if anyone saved a life, it would be as if he saved the life of all humanity.

First things first: I was in fact required to read the Qur'an for one of the classes I took in seminary on Jewish and Islamic holy texts, and I am very glad that I was required to read it.  If I am expected (by others or by myself) to have an opinion about something, it needs to be an informed opinion.  It always stuns me, though it probably shouldn't, how many times I hear someone spout a hurtful opinion about Islam and then when I ask them if they have read the Qur'an, they respond with some version of, "No way I'd read that!"

Christians, how would you feel about someone criticizing our religion if they have never read the Bible, or if they have only read a few verses such as these completely out of context:

"If the city does not negotiate peacefully with you but makes war against you, you may attack it. 13 The Lord your God will hand it over to you; you must kill all the city’s males with the sword. 14 However, you can take for yourselves the women, the children, the animals, and all that is in the city—all its plunder. You can then enjoy your enemies’ plunder, which the Lord your God has given you. 15 That’s what you must do to all the cities that are located far away from you—specifically, those cities that don’t belong to these nations here. 16 But in the case of any of the cities of these peoples—the ones the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance—you must not spare any living thing."  -Deuteronomy 20:12-15

You know how the Qur'an says at one point to slay infidels?  Well, the Bible--the same Bible that says 'thou shalt not murder'--also says to kill everything in a city that God has given us.

How would you feel if someone decided the Bible was an abomination based on that one passage, never mind all the times it says to love your neighbor and to give to those in need?  If you'd feel pretty chaffed at that, well, think about how it must be being a Muslim today.

That's the difference between Christianity and Islam in the public sphere today.  We Christians have a much easier time excusing or--more frequently--ignoring the awful verses in our sacred Scriptures, while Muslims are made to apologize for theirs on a constant basis.

I don't believe in the Qur'an as the word of God, but that doesn't mean it is the source of evil that so many Americans seem to think that it is.  And if Christians think that our God is calling them to do sins like this in harassing and bullying American Muslims, they are both sorely mistaken and likely divinely condemned.

But it isn't just Christians.  I do plenty of disowning and apologizing for the crackpots in my own faith, and it is high time that atheists started doing so as well, especially after the murder of three Muslims in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where my wife went to both college and medical school as a student at UNC, by an avowed atheist.

Richard Dawkins, the patron saint of the anti-theist strain of atheism, took to Twitter to say "How could any decent person NOT condemn the vile murder of three young US Muslims in Chapel Hill?"

Well...any decent person likewise condemns religious violence of all sorts, whether they are religious or not.  But when we religious people condemn religious violence, we get met with rude and cruel replies of how we are perpetuating a violent system through our faith and that if we were really sorry, we'd quit religion and become good little atheists like, say, Dawkins, who, among other things, trivializes the trauma of being date raped, so clearly not all atheists are capable of producing a moral compass purely on their own.

But that's low hanging fruit, and Dawkins has rightly been torn apart by critics far smarter and more eloquent than I for that particular bit of egregiousness.  But after the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris, when Muslim gunmen slaughtered members of the Charlie Hebdo magazine staff, Dawkins helpfully chirped, "Some useful idiot will claim it had nothing to do with religion."

I now await Dawkins serving his role as a useful idiot in claiming that the murder of these three young Muslims had nothing to do with religion either.

For Christians, though, this needs to be a wake-up call as well: we are throwing in our lot with amoral, ungodly jerks like Dawkins whenever we criticize Islam, and we ought to know better.  Atheism isn't the universal bogeyman of all evil any more than Christianity or Islam is, and the prejudices Americans seem to have against atheism (see the New Republic article linked above) are surely misplaced, but at least our faith teaches us to be (in theory) humble enough to examine ourselves and admit when we're wrong.

And if atheism isn't prepared to do likewise, it can dispense with any and all pretense of being morally rich enough to compete on the same plane of ideas and dialogue as any of the world's major religions that it either dismisses or derides.

Your move, Richard.

Yours in Christ,
Eric

When We Let The "Religious Freedom" Exemption Run Amok, This Is What Happens

The common refrain I have heard from a lot of my (mostly evangelical) Christian brethren regarding debates over marriage equality and access to contraception has been that the religious freedom of Christians to refuse these services needs to be protected by the government.

And, okay, fine.  The pastor of a not-for-profit congregation should be able to choose whose weddings they officiate (as long as those weddings are of consenting, monogamous adults).  But if a pastor is running a wedding chapel for profit, that's a different kettle of fish because now we're talking about regulating commerce, and the Supreme Court has typically (until very recently) taken a pretty wide interpretation of what constitutes commerce.  Same goes for a pharmacy employee who objects to the use of birth control.  You don't like dispensing particular prescribed medications, either don't go into that field or do your job, all of it.

And if we're talking about a county officiant denying a couple a marriage license because that couple is made up of an agnostic and an atheist, then let's have a serious conversation about doing your job.

Because that is exactly what has happened over in Franklin County, Virginia, where a couple of that description was told they had no right to be married by a court-appointed officiant.  And once again, I'm left smacking my palm to my forehead out of what another mean-spirited, legalistic jerk has done in the name of Jesus Christ.

Incredibly, this officiant, Bud Roth, refused to marry Tamar Courtney and Morgan Strong at the county courthouse, even though he is a court-appointed official.  He insisted on marrying them at his church.  Even though that in and of itself constitutes a completely out-of-bounds condition (he's appointed by the court, not by the church.  By the same token, I am ordained by the church, not by the court, so I would never insist on a courthouse wedding to any couple who approached me), but despite the egregious nature of this request, Tamar and Morgan agreed.

But that wasn't enough.  After asking Tamar and Morgan about their religious affiliation, Bud Roth refused to perform the ceremony altogether.  Even though there is nothing in Virginia statutory law that requires a particular profession of religious faith in order to be married in the commonwealth.  Even though any such insistence by a government-appointed officiant (ie, Roth) would constitute a violation of the Establishment Clause prohibiting government preference for a particular exercise of religion (in this case, professing a faith in the Abrahamic God).

And even more incredibly, the judge responsible for appointing Roth, Judge William Alexander (who has since apparently retired), saw nothing wrong with Roth's conduct, even though Roth committed, in my mind as a professional pastor, two extraordinary instances of professional misconduct: insisting on an inappropriate venue and then refusing service on inappropriate grounds.  Judge Alexander's rationale was that there was another court-appointed officiant, and that officiant could have performed the marriage.

Fortunately, this other officiant has indeed married them (reports are the couple was legally married yesterday and will be having a larger ceremony with family and friends in June).  But what if this other officiant had also objected?  What if this other officiant had a family crisis or health emergency or was otherwise indisposed?  Tamar and Morgan would have been denied their rights by their county government on the basis of their religious faith, which is in my mind no different--and equally reprehensible--as denying them rights on the basis of their gender or their race.

That is why--and I do not say this lightly--Franklin County needs to revoke Bud Roth's credentials as a wedding officiant.  He has no business presiding over weddings on behalf of the state if he is going to bring his own agenda to what should be one of the happiest days of any person's life.  His job is to perform weddings for any couples in Franklin County who meet the relevant legal requirements to be married.  And he has communicated via this couple that he is unwilling to perform the entirety of what his job entails.

I don't care what line of work you're in, being unwilling to do your job is a fireable offense for ridiculously, blatantly, painfully obvious reasons.

In 1 Thessalonians 4, Paul exhorts the congregation in Thessaly to "aim to live quietly, mind your own business, and and earn your living...That way, you'll behave appropriately toward outsiders and you won't be in need." (CEB)

Bud Roth would do well to heed Paul's instructions, because right now, he is doing exactly zero of those things: he didn't mind his own business in demanding to know a couple's religious affiliation as a condition for marriage, he wasn't living quietly in insisting on the venue of the ceremony, and he wasn't earning his living by refusing a couple a right they had the legal entitlement to receive.

And as this couple was not Christians themselves, Bud Roth wasn't behaving appropriately toward outsiders, either.  Which means to me that he is in fact in need, in a deep spiritual need to understand exactly what God and the state are requiring of him.

And with that, I can drop this off as the latest entry in the sadly always-thickening file of "legalistic, gnat-straining-but-camel-swallowing jerks I've had to disown."

Love God and love people as you want to be loved, y'all.  On these hang the entirety of the law and the prophets.

It's not freaking rocket science.  We just act like it is.

Yours in Christ,
Eric

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)