Lenten Book Review: Bread and Wine

(Prior to my going into full-time parish ministry, I wrote the occasional book review for other online writing projects, and I will be returning to that writing every now and again here, as I have kept my childhood passion of not only reading, but sharing with other people what I am reading.  I hope you enjoy these occasional reviews of books I have received and read, and I likewise hope that they may provide for you a slightly wider view of the work I do and the context within which I do it--a context created by writers, preachers, and wordsmiths of every stripe.  -E.A.)

"It is well known that Christ consistently used the expression "follower."  He never asks for admirers, worshipers, or adherents.  No, he calls disciples.  It is not adherents of a teaching but followers of a life Christ is looking for."

So begins the entry written by Soren Kierkegaard in Bread and Wine: Readings for Lent and Easter (Plough Publishing House, 2003).

Personally, the idea of a Lenten devotional book combines two things I am terrible at: keeping a consistent devotional practice, and giving up stuff for Lent (what can I say, my deadly sin of the seven is definitely gluttony).  And in this respect, I am very much the person Kierkegaard is writing to here.  I still try to keep myself at arm's length from the Resurrected Christ, to merely be a worshiper of His, or an adherent of His.  I may follow His teachings, but I do not always fully follow Him.

But the act of being devotional helps me to move past that.  And so there is very much a place for books like Bread and Wine in even my faith life.

This is a book that is very much a part of a particular genre: the compilation of writings from a variety of authors around a particular theme (or, in this case, five main themes: invitation, temptation, passion, crucifixion, and resurrection).  These sorts of books serve a very particular purpose: they achieve great breadth at the expense of depth.  Rather than read the entirety of someone's work, you read an excerpt from them centered around a relevant topic, then move on to the next excerpt by another author.  It exposes you to a variety of perspectives, but at the expense of plumbing the depths of what any one of those perspectives might have to say; for that, you are on your own...but at least you have been given something to whet your appetite first.

This variety, though, is a key strength to Bread & Wine.  The authors curated for this collection range from patron saints of Protestant orthodoxy like C.S. Lewis and Oswald Chambers to people who have spent their entire lives working for the folks in the margins, like John Dear and Mother Teresa.  Chronologically, the writings likewise span almost the proverbial gamut of Christianity, from Saint Augustine to present day writers like Dear and Barbara Brown Taylor.  And while these writers may well know more than you or I about the "appalling strangeness of the mercy of God" (thank you, Graham Greene!), they don't act like it.  To a person, the authors chosen for this book write in entirely accessible prose (or poetry, in the cases of Khalil Gibran, Christina Rossetti, and others), making this volume a valuable resource for clergy and laity alike.

We're now one full week into Lent, with Ash Wednesday having been precisely one Wednesday in the past.  If you are still looking for a Lenten practice to pick up not only for Lent but for Easter as well, so that you may find richness not only in the forty days of fasting but in the forty days of resurrection that follow, Bread and Wine is a good start.  It costs twenty bucks new on Amazon, and fourteen bucks or so used.

Yours in Christ,
Eric

Disclaimer: My copy of Bread and Wine came at no charge from the publisher; however, all opinions expressed here are entirely my own.

This Week's Sermon: "Monday"

Mark 11:12-19

12 The next day, after leaving Bethany, Jesus was hungry. 13 From far away, he noticed a fig tree in leaf, so he went to see if he could find anything on it. When he came to it, he found nothing except leaves, since it wasn’t the season for figs. 14 So he said to it, “No one will ever again eat your fruit!” His disciples heard this. 15 They came into Jerusalem. After entering the temple, he threw out those who were selling and buying there. He pushed over the tables used for currency exchange and the chairs of those who sold doves. 16 He didn’t allow anyone to carry anything through the temple. 17 He taught them, “Hasn’t it been written, My house will be called a house of prayer for all nations?[b] But you’ve turned it into a hideout for crooks.”[c] 18 The chief priests and legal experts heard this and tried to find a way to destroy him. They regarded him as dangerous because the whole crowd was enthralled at his teaching. 19 When it was evening, Jesus and his disciples went outside the city. (Common English Bible)

“The Last Week: Mark’s Retelling of the Passion,” Week One

Two hundred thousand dollars.

More than that, even.  Two hundred-ten to be precise.  At least.  All to game a book onto the New York Times bestseller list by using tricks of the trade to fool the safeties the NYT system has in place to prevent authors from simply buying their way onto bestseller lists.

And that money came from a church’s coffers, a church that, it was also found, did not distribute tithes meant for global missions to those missions, but instead kept those tithes for itself.

But no, this story is not from the 1980s and the heyday of Christian con men like Jim Bakker or Peter Popoff, this is from last year—2014—and from quite nearby, our Emerald City neighbor to the north: Seattle.

Mars Hill Church, planted in Seattle but with many satellite locations, shelled out that sum of money in order to get their pastor Mark Driscoll’s latest book onto said NYT bestseller list.  And, I know, it sounds like small church envy of a megachurch, but think about what that $210,000 could have done.  It is about 140% of our annual budget, and that kind of money really can and does change lives of people in need.

Yet we use our money for this.  And in Mars Hill’s case, it is no more; after this and a series of other scandals, Mark Driscoll resigned from the pulpit, and Mars Hill promptly announced it was shutting its doors on January 1 of this year.  To which I can only repeat what someone far wiser than me said on Twitter: if a church announces just weeks after its founding pastor resigns that it is shutting down, you can be reasonably confident that what was being worshipped there was not really Jesus.

And it is deeds like these, works like these, works that, as the letter of James says, God shall know our faith, that others outside the church associate the church with.  We have become, to them, the den of robbers that Jesus is trying to cleanse.  And they are 100% rooting for Jesus in this scenario.

Now that Lent, that 40-day fast in the wilderness alongside Jesus as He is tempted by the devil, has begun, so too does a new sermon series begin for us as well.  And we’ll be stretching out Holy Week—that seven-day span of time from Palm Sunday to Easter Sunday—by talking about each day in turn, starting with Monday (that way we can discuss Palm Sunday on, you know, Palm Sunday) before wrapping up with Easter Sunday itself on April 5.  For this sermon series, I am using as a template the book “The Last Week,” a commentary on the Gospel of Mark’s telling of Holy Week, co-written by Bible scholars John Dominic Crossan and Marcus Borg.  Professor Borg just passed away a few weeks ago, plus this book is one of a precious few on my list of “it truly changed my life” books, so this series has a lot of added meaning for me as well as, I hope, eventually for you too.

We begin with Monday, the day after Palm Sunday, after Jesus’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem, and here is part of what Borg and Crossan have to say about Monday’s events (of which only two Mark conveys to us, the fig tree incident and the cleansing of the temple):

What does it mean that Jesus has interrupted the temple’s perfectly legitimate sacrificial and fiscal activities?  It means that Jesus has shut down the temple.  But it is a symbolic rather than a literal “shutdown.”  It is a prophetic action that intends in macrocosm what it effects in microcosm…At this point, the Markan frames of fig tree and temple coalesce.  The tree was “shut down” for lack of the fruit Jesus demanded—and so was the temple.  In the case of the temple, it is not a cleansing, but a symbolic destruction, and the fig tree’s fate emphasizes that meaning.  But what is wrong with the temple to warrant such a symbolic destruction?  The answer must come from the word that follows the deed in this prophetic action…there is nothing wrong with prayer and sacrifice—they are commanded in the Torah.  That is not the problem.  But God is a God of justice and righteousness and when worship substitutes for justice, God rejects God’s temple—or, for us today, God’s church.

Now, I do strongly disagree with Borg and Crossan on one part of their interpretation: that any of this business in the temple was remotely legitimate.  Some of y’all may have heard this spiel from me before in Bible studies or Sunday School classes, so bear with me as I explain it for folks who haven’t had the distinct pleasure of hearing me drone on about this.

Old Testament law mandates the religious sacrifice of certain animals consecrated for that purpose; it is a practice that stretches all the way back to Cain and Abel, when Abel sacrifices to God his prized sheep.  Now, if you’re, say, making a pilgrimage to Jerusalem from one of the outer reaches of Israel, your animals may not make the journey as easy as you will, and in any case it makes you an attractive target for highwaymen, robbers, and thieves.  Or, like many, many common people, you may not be able to afford to raise an animal solely for the purpose of religious slaughter, even if your sacred text commands it.

So, there is a serious market for the buying of sacrificial animals right on location, at the temple.  Except there is a hitch (isn’t there always when it comes to organized religion?); the law also prohibited the use of any currency other than the Israelite shekel, meaning that the Roman denarius, which was the coin of the realm because, well, New Testament Israel was a part of Rome’s empire.

So if people are being paid in denarii and spending on necessities in denarii, what happens when suddenly they are confronted with the need to buy something with shekels?  They have to go to a money exchange service, just like we do upon entering a foreign country.  And just like money exchange services today, the moneychangers of the Jerusalem temple charged a commission for this service.  Unlike our exchange services of today, though, the rates charged by the moneychangers back then were downright criminal, because they basically had a sanctioned monopoly over a reliably sizable clientele, thanks to those very same religious laws and mandates.  Think about it—if people are mandated by their religious law to sacrifice animals and they can’t use their money to buy the animals—they can only use your money, the shekel—then you can basically charge whatever you want and make quite a living ripping off well-meaning pilgrims and devout Israelites.

THAT is why Jesus says that the temple has become a “den of robbers.”  It quite literally has, in the purest sense of the term.  And so the time-honored ritual of the frocked fleecing their flocks for their precious earnings continued earnestly in Jerusalem.

Until—and even if it was just for a moment—this day, Monday, the day that Jesus does something that absolutely gets him on the Sanhedrin’s radar.  If yesterday’s Palm Sunday processional didn’t do it, you can bet your bottom shekel this definitely did.

But what does all of this have to do with the fig tree that Jesus condemns to fruitlessness?  Well…have you known many religious organizations that take advantage of their members to produce much in the way of true fruits of the spirit?  No, me neither.  Instead, what is often produced is—and it is a sad testament upon us that this term even exists—spiritual abuse.  And a great many people suffer from it; I have even heard stories of it from some of you about your previous churches.

Instead of uplifting and empowering believers as we ought, as we are called to do, we abuse and take advantage of them.  We use them up instead of building them up, and we spit them out instead of sending them out.

And that devastates me.  So let’s work on changing that.  Instead of having a new person walk into our building for the first time and feel put upon or judged, let’s make sure they leave having been impacted by being in the presence of God.  Let’s work on correcting the injustices we see when they happen, rather than helping cause them.

It isn’t enough to simply say that this is what Jesus would have done—it is, ultimately, in the end, what He died for as well, for it is this act before the temple that causes the Pharisees, scribes, and men of power to sit up and take notice of this carpenter from Galilee with a radical message from God.  That’s why I’m so over the WWJD stuff—what would Jesus do?  WWJD is incomplete, it needs an F at the end: what would Jesus die for?

Jesus died for this.  He died to fight injustice.  May our faith be such, then, that similarly others would be shaken from their own doldrums when they hear our words and see our deeds from our own faith as well.  Let us be just a bit dangerous to them as Jesus was.  Let us, in doing so, advance the latter’s kingdom, which, as we prayer, is forever and ever.

May it be so.  Amen.

Rev. Eric Atcheson

Longview, Washington

February 22, 2015

When "Personal Freedom" for Religious Objections Run Amok, Part II: You Set the Leg

If you hadn't seen my post from last week about a county marriage officiant refusing to marry an agnostic/atheist couple because they did not share his Christian beliefs, feel free to do so before diving into this latest big, steaming helping of jerkishness in the name of one Jesus of Nazareth.

A pediatrician in Michigan declined to treat the baby of a lesbian couple, sent some other hapless doctor out to deliver that awful news, and didn't even bother apologizing in any way (even verbally) until she got called out on it.

There is so much wrong with that scenario, I don't even know where to begin...

How about the fact that Dr. Vesna Roi didn't even have the guts to tell this couple, Krista and Jami, that she didn't feel she could be their baby's doctor, instead sending someone else to deliver the news?  That's just cowardice, plain and simple.  If you're going to be homophobic, the very least you can do to an increasingly tolerant and diverse world is own it.  Don't foist it on some poor, bystanding schlub to do the dirty work of telling a loving couple why their newborn won't be receiving medical care from the doctor who was recommended to them, that's not fair to the messenger.

Nor is it fair (painfully obviously) to the baby.  Even if you believe that same-sex relations are sinful (which I don't, or, at least, not any more sinful than heterosexual relations are), the kid is completely innocent in all this.  You're denying care to a person not because of who they are but because of who their parents are, but guess what?  Who cares.  As Abby Bartlet put it to her husband in The West Wing (season 4's episode "Swiss Diplomacy), "Samuel Mudd set (John Wilkes) Booth's leg after he shot Lincoln.  Doctors are liable in this country if they don't treat the patient in front of them."

And when reminded that Mudd was tried and convicted for treason for setting the leg, she simply said, "That's the way it goes.  You set the leg."

Now, as the Fox Detroit article notes, doctors "can refuse treatment if it's incompatible with their personal, religious, or moral beliefs," per the American Medical Association.

I'm not a grammar expert, but it sure seems as though the pronoun "it" in that sentence is serving as a stand-in for treatment being refused, not a patient being refused.

In other words, if Krista and Jami had come to Dr. Roi and, say, wanted an abortion, Dr. Roi could, with every justification, decline to provide that service based on a personal religious belief that abortion is immoral.  What she should not be able to do is decline a medical service because she holds a personal religious belief that the patient (or the patient's parents, in this case) is immoral.

Because think of the standard that sets--any patient who does not meet an individual doctor's whimsical and arbitrary moral code can be denied treatment by that doctor.

Raise your hands if you think that actually serves the "first, do no harm" ethos of the Hippocratic oath.

What gets me in all of this is that if the roles were reversed here--if a gay or lesbian pediatrician refused treatment for a baby born to Christian parents--I am roughly 110% sure the sizeable Christian blogosphere would erupt in moral outrage on behalf of the parents.  As well they should, because I can't imagine how mortified I might feel were I in Krista and Jami's shoes and denied medical service for my (hypothetical) kid because I'm, say, a Christian, by a doctor who was recommended to me by a trusted source--in this case, the family's midwife.

But that means our moral outrage that we are so quick to reach for (I know, I'm like that too...) needs to be proffered to all victims of discrimination, not just Christian victims.  Because discrimination is Pharisaic in the purest sense of the term: it is using arbitrary legalism to define who is and who isn't a part of the chosen.

And in this case, discrimination runs afoul of the exact same passage from 1 Thessalonians I wrote about in the post about the marriage officiant in Virginia--this doctor in Michigan is likewise not doing her job, and in so doing being inhospitable to strangers.

In thinking we are upholding Scripture, we end up violating its commands in often profound ways.  Just like this.

So, I'm left saying the same thing again to another legalistic jerk of a Christian: do your effing job.  And if you can't, get into another line of work.  Because you're making it worse for the rest of us who are just trying to actually love as we ourselves would want to be loved.  Which is why I always feel the need to write these posts after reading about the hurt that GLBTQ people receive at the hands of Christians--I want to be able to say YOU ARE LOVED.

Because--again, I cannot stress this enough--it isn't rocket science.  We just act like it is.

Love God, love each other.

Period.

Full stop.

Got it?  Good.  Live it.

Yours in Christ,
Eric

This Year's Ash Wednesday Sermon: "Scripture's Power"

Luke 4:1-13

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

Ash Wednesday 2015

The British Royal Marine veteran died at only 70 years of age, but he was already in poor enough health that he had had to live in a care home, and because he no longer had any close family, it looked like at first that the only mourners at his graveside funeral would be the care home staff who had taken care of him all that time.

So the pastor performing the funeral put out a plea on Facebook, writing, in part:

In this day and age it is tragic enough that anyone has to leave this world with no one to mourn their passing, but this man was family and I am sure you will agree deserves a better send off.  If you can make it to the graveside for that time to pay your respects to a former brother in arms then please try to be there.

After getting in touch with the Royal Marines Association, when James McConnell’s graveside funeral was scheduled to begin in Hampshire, England, over 200 people—almost all of them strangers—had arrived to mourn the passing of a man whom they had never met.

Far from being inauthentic, though, it was, and it looked, incredibly authentic, the genuine article, and it was a remarkable use of social media—the same social media that is used to bully as well as to connect, to threaten as well as to comfort, it is a double-edged sword, as are most things in life.  What something will be often depends on the hands it is in…and the same holds true for Scripture, even if we may not want to admit that this is so about God’s Word.

I use this story at the beginning of my Ash Wednesday sermon every year here (at least, so far—four Ash Wednesdays and counting).  Because it is such a good story for setting the right balance in mood and in tenor for this type of service, I simply cannot ever pass up a repeating telling of it.  The Reverend Lillian Daniel, a pastor in the United Church of Christ denomination, writes in a book on pastoral ministry that she coauthored, this vignette about her experience as a pastoral intern at a particular parish during her seminary education.  She writes, in part:

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

Now, you lot have no seminary intern here to deliver unto us our annual scoldings—you are stuck with me!  (Oh dear.)  And it would be all too easy to dismiss Ash Wednesday as the day when the parish pastor administers said annual scolding, but it would be exactly that: easy.  Far too easy.

Ash Wednesday isn’t really about me scolding you so much as it is about taking on a sort of renewed baptism: just as we hold baptism to be an outward sign of the inward reality of a redeemed soul, so too do we hold ashes as an outward sign of the inward reality of a repentant soul.  Today is about taking a day—not even a day, really, just this one hour of the day—of our time to acknowledge our repentance before God.

We don’t necessarily enjoy doing that, though.  Repentance is hard, just think of all the times in your life you have probably said sorry to someone and not meant it (beginning all the way back in preschool or kindergarten when your teachers made you apologize for stuff that you clearly were unashamed for, like stealing play-doh and throwing crackers at Archibald, the class doofus).

But sincerity is an absolute must when it comes to all things spiritual, because God has no appetite for fakery, no patience with facades, and no need to trifle with insincerity.  Far from it, our season of repentance on the church calendar—Lent—commemorates a profoundly authentic and genuine duel between Christ and the Tempter.

Jesus and the devil do not bother with trying to hide their agendas, both know exactly what the other is there to do.  Jesus, to fast, pray, and endure trial on God’s behalf, and Satan, to negate all of what I just said.

How Satan does this, though, is what should scare us: he uses Scripture.  He quotes verses out of the Hebrew Bible to tempt Jesus, and Jesus, in turn, quotes Scripture back to him in rebuttal.  It is like when you argue with your kooky relative who believes some real tin-foil hat sort of things about Scripture...you're each citing the same book, with the same authority, but for completely different purposes.

That's what is going on here.  It is basically impossible to find a pair of beings with more diametrically opposed natures and aims, which ought to tell you that Scripture can be as good or as bad as the person interpreting it.  Which might be our biggest problem today as Christians, our biggest sin.  We don’t follow the Word, we follow our interpretation of the Word.  We put our interpretation of it—the interpretation that conveniently ignores all the stuff we don’t like, such as, say, selling everything and giving the proceeds to the poor—ahead of the actual Word itself.

In that way, we are, in essence, breaking the first of the Ten Commandments; we are putting another God—the God of our interpretation of the Bible—ahead of God Himself.  And our having done so is responsible for so much wrong and evil in the world: violence over religious differences, prejudice towards people we have never met, and a misplacement of spiritual priorities in our own personal lives, where we value trivial crap like gossip and jealousy over the weightier matters, Jesus calls them, of justice, mercy, and faith.

That is what some 200-odd strangers in England chose, that day, when they convened together to say farewell to a complete cipher, a man they wouldn’t have known from Adam.  They chose the weightier matters.  They chose mercy and faith.

So what we choose, every day, to use Scripture as matters.  We can use it as a means to tempt with, as the devil does here, or as a hammer to destroy with, or as a tool to build with…which is what Jesus strives for here, to build the kingdom as He always is.  Which is, of course, what we are meant to do as well, always.

But we tend to lean more towards Satan’s line of reasoning, to use Scripture for our ends rather than God’s ends, to use it to hit people over the head with than to save their lives with.

Ash Wednesday is a day…for us, the day, of repentance.  And repentance always begins in God’s presence.  Let us take this moment in time to begin our own repentance for wronging both God and his children in all the ways we  have, in all the ways we know how, by using His Word to justify our wrongdoings.

And in so doing, may that very same Word restore is into life and light everlasting, into the salvations that we were always meant to inherit, and into a world in which the devil, just as it is here in Luke 4, does not get the final word.

May it be so.  Amen.

Rev. Eric Atcheson

Longview, Washington

Ash Wednesday 2015

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