This Week's Sermon: "The Writing on the Wall"

Acts 5:1 to 11

However, a man named Ananias, along with his wife Sapphira, sold a piece of property. 2 With his wife’s knowledge, he withheld some of the proceeds from the sale. He brought the rest and placed it in the care and under the authority of the apostles. 3 Peter asked, “Ananias, how is it that Satan has influenced you to lie to the Holy Spirit by withholding some of the proceeds from the sale of your land? 4 Wasn’t that property yours to keep? After you sold it, wasn’t the money yours to do with whatever you wanted? What made you think of such a thing? You haven’t lied to other people but to God!” 5 When Ananias heard these words, he dropped dead. Everyone who heard this conversation was terrified. 6 Some young men stood up, wrapped up his body, carried him out, and buried him. 7 About three hours later, his wife entered, but she didn’t know what had happened to her husband. 8 Peter asked her, “Tell me, did you and your husband receive this price for the field?” She responded, “Yes, that’s the amount.” 9 He replied, “How could you scheme with each other to challenge the Lord’s Spirit? Look! The feet of those who buried your husband are at the door. They will carry you out too.” 10 At that very moment, she dropped dead at his feet. When the young men entered and found her dead, they carried her out and buried her with her husband. 11 Trepidation and dread seized the whole church and all who heard what had happened. (Common English Bible)

“The Way: The Post Jesus, Pre Paul Church,” Week Eight

“They pedal.”

That was my dad’s repeated refrain to me every single morning that I got up at a ridiculously early hour every July to watch the Tour de France live on television (ridiculously early because of the time difference between Kansas City and France).  It didn’t matter what would be happening on the screen, the retort was always the same:

“They pedal.”

But then the race would move into the Alps or the Pyrenees, and the mountain climbs would separate the contenders from the pretenders:

“They pedal.”

Or the race could be only a few hundred yards from the finish line for the day, and the entire pack had broken into a mass breakneck sprint for first place:

“Oh, they’re pedaling faster.”  He was utterly nonplussed.  And this is a guy who is a big fan of soccer (wait…I’m a big fan of soccer too…)!

And I envy that utter lack of impression in a way, because I was completely and totally enthralled with the world of the sport: the team tactics that were difficult to see with an untrained eye, the drama of a mountain climb so difficult that it was classified as “beyond category,” and, of course, the myth and legend that surrounded the post cancer comeback of one Lance Armstrong, who in January of 2013 famously confessed on Oprah Winfrey’s television channel in an interview with her to using performance enhancing drugs to win his seven Tour de France titles, and to repeatedly bullying and slandering those who knew and threatened to expose his great secret.

And I remember just thinking, what this guy has withheld from the world is just staggering, solely because he ended up valuing his own myth and money more than the people who walked alongside him throughout the way.  And that is basically what happens here today, in the story of Ananias and Sapphira: two people who decide they value their things more than they value their relationships.

This is a sermon series that has been ongoing now for a while!  We began it several weeks ago for two reasons.  One is that the day of Pentecost (the day when the Holy Spirit comes down upon the remaining Apostles) fell on Sunday, June 8, this year, and oftentimes, when we preachers preach on Pentecost, we just do that one story about the Holy Spirit, but then we go on to something else, neglecting the many amazing stories that follow.  The other is that it’s summer, and summer is the season for action movies at the cinema, and (increasingly frequently) their sequels, which may or may not be as good as the original/worth attending at all/a blatant money grab by movie studios (depending on just how bad the sequel is!).  The Gospels have their own sequel in the New Testament: Acts of the Apostles, commonly referred to simply as Acts.  Acts is written by Luke (the writer of the Gospel which bears his name) precisely as a sequel in his two volume set of historical accountings of Christ’s ministry and the early church, and it is, to my way of thinking, far better than many of the sequels we are used to today!  So this is a sermon series meant to take us through a Biblical sequel to the Gospels in addition to picking up where the Pentecost story leaves off, and we began with the massive response to Peter’s first sermon: a conversion of 3,000 people, and today, we actually sort of rewind to the beginning of the series when Luke more or less restates an accounting that he also includes in Acts 2, after Peter’s sermon, about how the early church lived out the faith, which is how chapter 4 ended.  We begin the next chapter today with very much a contrasting tale to the wholehearted generosity of the church: the tale of Ananias and Sapphira.

By itself, this is a story that should cause each of us to recoil.  The punishment for giving to the church is death on the spot?  That’s one hell of a stewardship message if you’re bent on pasturing your church via fear, but that isn’t really what we’re about here.  A dollop of fear may be an inherent part of life, but part of Christianity is the great and sacred task of equipping all of us with boldness and courage in the face of fear.  In other words, it is okay, even inevitable, to be afraid, but we must always be able to respond to it.

So how do we respond to this story of summary execution for a husband and wife couple who withhold some of their assets from the New Testament church?  By taking the entire episode in its context.  If you remember last week’s passage that I preached on (and if not, you can just turn one chapter back in your Bibles!), the social contract was that members of the church, the ekklesia, would give all of their assets to the church so that it could be distributed out according to need.

Ananias and Sapphira, by withholding some of their cash, are saying, effectively, that they value their money more than they value their fellow people, their fellow Jesus followers.   The social contract they elected to follow meant little to them, and Peter consequently sees right through their charade.

And it is purely a charade, because in the end, all of this stuff we have belongs to God anyways.  Bible professor Paul Walaskay puts it perfectly:

The story should remind the reader that his or her “gift” to church, school, and charity already belongs to God.  God claims it all and God’s grace gives us an abundant allowance; even those who tithe keep 90 percent.  Yes, most of us work “by the sweat of our brow,” the hot sweat of physical labor or the cold sweat of anxiety keeping an enterprise viable.  And many of us mistakenly assume that the paycheck is compensation to us for our labors.  Rather, we are being compensated for God’s gracious gifts of life, energy, strength, intellect, creativity, and talent.  That paycheck is God’s.  We take out our living allowance, which is usually quite generous, and share (not “give”) the rest with those in need.  Lying about the source of our resources is self deceit and arrogance, and it puts “the Spirit of the Lord to the test” (verse 9)…the story of Ananias and Sapphira is a tale for our own time, and we dismiss it as an absurd curiosity to our individual and national peril.

It is especially to our peril that we ignore this tale because it is not the first time in Scripture that we will have heard this lesson, for there is a prelude to this entire episode in the Old Testament.  It comes from book of Daniel, the Israelite man who spent his prophetic career in exile, teaching in the court of the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II and then Nebuchadnezzar’s heir, Belshazzar.  And one night, Belshazzar throws a banquet for one thousand of his nobles, and he calls for the gold and silver goblets stolen from the Jewish temple when Jerusalem was sacked by Babylon.  It is another example of someone putting things before relationships: in this case, any relationship Belshazzar might have had with the one true God.

And Belshazzar only realizes this when the writing literally appears on his wall, reading MENE, MENE, TEKEL, PARSIN.  He summons Daniel to translate the writing, and Daniel, after rebuking Belshazzar, begins his translation, and in so doing interprets the word “tekel” to mean, “You have been weighed on the scales and been found lacking.”  Belshazzar was found to be lacking on the scales of God’s justice, and just like Ananias and Sapphira, he was put to death that very day: that night, as Daniel conveys, Belshazzar was murdered.

These twin stories can teach us a couple of things: firstly, never assume that you can simply get away with something that you know in your heart of hearts is wrong.  You will be amazed at what God sees and what eventually comes to light even for us humans to see.  And secondly, there does still come a point in time where God looks at what someone has purportedly done either by their own power (in the case of Belshazzar) or by God’s own power and in God’s own name (in the case of Ananias and Sapphira) and God does indeed eventually and resoundingly say, “NOT IN MY NAME!”

And I want to, have to, need to believe that God can and does still respond with justice to the evils we claim to do in His name.  And there are a great many evils that we have done, and are doing, in God’s holy name.

The conflict between Palestine and Israel isn’t just about land, it’s about THE Holy Land.

The conflict turned ethnic cleansing in Iraq isn’t just between ethnic groups, but between ISIS and Iraqi Christians.

And closer to home, even the so called “culture wars” that we insist on fighting rather than focusing on spreading the Gospel of the Prince of Peace.

We should expect the God in our Scriptures to oppose us, and so we instead build up these elaborate illusions of what God wants based on twisted, horrific interpretations of Scripture by men of evil intent, and we end up worshiping not the God, but the interpretation.  We end up worshiping the ways we justify our wrong deeds instead of worshiping the God who forgives us for them.

I have no doubt that Ananias and Sapphira probably had come up with justifications to themselves for why they did what they did.  I have no doubt Belshazzar did as well, although his might well have been, “I’m the freaking king!”  But one of the best rules of thumb I have ever found to live by is this: the more you have to justify something to yourself, the more likely it is that doing it is wrong.

Ananias and Sapphira had to know what they were doing was wrong.  They did it anyways.

It’s what we do all the time to one another as well.  At least until we stop, and realize what it is we are doing, and remember that God has not, does not, and never will call us to do wrong like that to  one another or to Him.  He will say to us, in the powerful and profound way that only He can, “NOT IN MY NAME!”  And so we in turn can do the same, and say the same, to the evil done around us: Not in my name!  

And today, in this moment, that message may be exactly what we and our world need.

May it be so.  Amen.

Rev. Eric Atcheson

Longview, Washington

August 10, 2014

Princes of the Church

Carrie and I live in a 2 bedroom, 2 bathroom apartment of a little over 1,000 square feet.  Even with the reality that our spare bedroom is still infested with boxes of books that have yet to be unpacked, there is still usually plenty of space for the both of us, even with the reality that I will often work from home one day out of my workweek (in fact, I'm sitting at our kitchen table as I type this).  And the apartment complex has plenty of the same perks that my old bachelor apartment complex had: a small fitness center, a pool, and a hot tub.  It's a nice place to live and we like it very much so far.

It does not, however, hold a candle to any of these digs.

Not one bit.

That CNN article, if I didn't know any better, would have come across as just another piece of real estate porn (admit it, we've all indulged in oohing and aahing over houses we'll never own), but each of the mansions photographed and listed there is occupied by a Roman Catholic bishop/archbishop and is owned by his diocese/archdiocese.

So, um, where do I sign up for that kind of a gig?

Lest this sound like jealousy or envy, I really hope that is not what is actually in my heart right now, because as a fellow preacher of the Gospel of a dirt poor, homeless, itinerant Jewish craftsman, it is difficult not to shudder at how some of the "princes of the church" are living.

(Full disclosure: The church building that my congregation owns and in which it meets, worships, and teaches looks like this.  And this.)

The difference, though, between a church building and a manse (a house for clergy) is that...well, as the sign out on our front lawn says, "Everyone Welcome."  Our big, Gothic revival church building is for everyone, no matter what your socio economic status may be.  Diocesan representatives are quoted in the CNN article as saying that the manses have multiple functions, including use for fundraisers, offices, and that sort of thing.  All of which is great, but that doesn't mean that the property is made open and available to the public at large like a sanctuary is.

And that makes all the difference in the world.  Consider the parable of the rich man and the beggar Lazarus from the Gospel of Luke.  Lazarus had to lay at the gate of the rich man's estate: he was not ever allowed inside.  And here is a church (or diocese, really) holding onto multimillion dollar estates in which the poor will never be allowed in because, let's face it, who throws a successful fundraiser by inviting the poor?

I love our church building: it is beautiful and historic, and it reminds me of the significance and weight of the trust that has been given to me by serving as pastor there.  But with God's help, I hope I never, ever live in a home that equals the sanctuary in scale and grandeur.  I pray that God will keep me humble, even though compared to how poverty and homelessness is often experienced, I know that in my heart of hearts that ship has already sailed.

There is one other dimension of the story that I would be remiss if I did not touch on: that several of these bishops and archbishops have nuns acting as household servants for them.  And considering the Roman Catholic Church's general hostility to the ordination of women, I cannot imagine that is a coincidence.  You can be ordained a priest with the knowledge that one day, you may be later consecrated a bishop.  But you can be made a nun only with the knowledge that one day, you may be cooking the bishop's lunch.

Combined with the American bishops' collected ham fistedness towards contraception and family planning, women's ordination, and their shabby treatment of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious...no wonder women aren't exactly lining up to become nuns the way they once were.

(And yes, I realize that there are a myriad of other causes for the decline in the recruitment of nuns, and that the number of men becoming priests has dried up as well.  But I can imagine there is some causation involved: the ordination of women has only been increasing in my own denomination, which has been ordaining women for decades now.  Nor is this, or should be, reflective of the Roman Catholic church rank and file religious...I was taught and ministered to at college and seminary by priests and nuns whom I think the world of to this day.)

To their immense credit, other Catholic archbishops have done away with the trappings of pomp and luxury with their homes, Boston's Fr. Sean O'Malley and Philadelphia's Fr. Charles Chaput chief among them.

And in case you're curious about how this all plays out for the rich man in Jesus's parable (spoiler alert! spoiler alert!), the rich man ends up in hell, begging Lazarus to relieve his suffering.  And Father Abraham, on Lazarus's behalf, declines.

That's not how this is all supposed to end for someone ministering and preaching and teaching in the name of Jesus Christ.  Not at all.

It's a harsh lesson of Jesus's, to be sure, but one that must be said, because by cosseting themselves off from this amazing, flawed, beautiful, messy world that God entrusted to us and to which we pastor, the bishops may well be living now in a hell of their own making.

Yours in Christ,
Eric

Mark Driscoll & Being "Half a Man," the Sequel

My midweek post responding to Mark Driscoll's online forum rants as "William Wallace II" garnered a fair amount (by my standards, anyways) of attention, and understandably so.  But given how much ink I and others have given this story, it is necessary to report and comment on the next step of this saga, which is that on Friday (which is my Sabbath), Driscoll released an apology for his William Wallace II diatribes, which I am reprinting here in its entirety (courtesy of The Christian Post):

In 2000, we had an un-moderated discussion board on the Mars Hill website," Driscoll said. "While the discussion board itself was a bad idea, my decision to attack critics who were posting there (I did so by posting under the character 'William Wallace II') was an even worse idea —indeed, it was plain wrong. I was wrong to respond to people the way I did, using the language I used, and I am sorry for it and remain embarrassed by it.

Consequently, I requested that the site be taken down shortly after it began some 14 years ago," he states. "I have not been silent about this matter or the wrongness of my behavior, writing about it in Confessions of a Reformission Rev (2006) as something I regretted and an example of a wrong I had learned from.

The content of my postings to that discussion board does not reflect how I feel, or how I would conduct myself today. Over the past 14 years I have changed, and, by God's grace, hope to continue to change. I also hope people I have offended and disappointed will forgive me.

There are a couple of things on my heart that I want to say about this apology: first, it's great that he made one.  This isn't one of those nonapology apologies (you know the "I'm sorry if anyone was offended" sorts of things we see all the time now).  Driscoll doesn't make excuses or point fingers, but rather is straightforward: "it was plain wrong."  Making an apology without asterisks or caveats needs to be applauded and encouraged.

But while there may not have been any excuses or caveats, it still wasn't as complete an apology as was likely needed.  I want to look at what it is he says he was wrong for doing: responding the way he did, using the language he used.

Certainly, both of those merited an apology.  Of that, there is no debate.

But the thing that (at least for me) was most bothersome and hurtful about his words wasn't the tone, but the substance, which was not apologized for: only the "way" it was delivered and the language that was used.  And that makes it an incomplete apology.

Now, frankly, cussing doesn't offend me (although I realize it does for many other people), save for swear words that also function as sexist/racist/ethnic/homophobic/etc. slurs.  Mark Driscoll wants to throw words like 'damn' and 'ass' around like party favors in his Internet posting?  I really and truly could not possibly care less.  And if I cared at all, it would make me a giant hypocrite.

But making slurs towards women (and especially women pastors) and gay and lesbian people goes beyond tone, it speaks to a mentality that a person has, which in my experience tends to almost always be the result of one of two things: ignorance (ie, they really don't understand how what they are saying is offensive) or prejudice.

I know that's a loaded word, prejudice, and so I want to break it down before we continue: literally, its a compounding of the prefix "pre" (meaning before or prior) and judicial or judicious, meaning an exercise of judgment.  Often, we say someone is "prejudiced" in terms of being, say, racist or xenophobic, but literally what the word means is someone who judges before they should.  It means that someone has, essentially, rushed to judgment.

And that sentiment perfectly encapsulates Driscoll's William Wallace II words.  He is quick to judge, say, women pastors (by telling them to "quit (their) job and repent"), men like me who are in egalitarian marriages (for being "half a man") and gays and lesbians (the "damn freaks" comment, among others), but how well did he (or does he, for that matter) know folks in any of those demographics?  More to the point, how well did he know their hearts and the souls and their faith in God?

Now, for the record, that applies to me as well.  Like I said earlier in the week, I've never met Mark Driscoll.  All I have to go on is what he says and does publicly.  But that public record is by now so loaded with terrible things that he has said or done and then apologized for (like blaming Ted Haggard's wife for Haggard's own infidelity, plagiarizing content in one of his books, and appropriating literally hundreds of thousands of dollars of church funds to get his latest book on the New York Times bestseller list, among other things) that it is pretty easy to get an at least somewhat informed opinion on the guy's ministry.

And when these words are 14 years old (and controversies like the Haggard quotes are nearly eight years old), it is difficult to characterize any such opinions as rushed.  And it is difficult to think that an apology alone is sufficient to achieve true reconciliation.

I have to admit that there is an awfully big part of me that wants to see Mark Driscoll get his comeuppance that is so richly due to him, but that is where I have to be reminded to reach for grace and pray for him instead (as one of my wisest mentors pointed out to me privately after my midweek post, and for the record, exhorting me to pray for Driscoll is exactly the sort of accountability I need and that, thank God, my mentors provide).  And I want to, I really do, if for no other reason than Scripture tells us to, but also because there are a lot of other people who are most likely pretty great whose livelihoods are at stake here, especially since Mars Hill has already gone through one round of staff layoffs this summer.

And then there is that complete, utter, inescapable need to focus on grace.  And while extending grace and forgiveness is a Biblical imperative ("How many times must I forgive my neighbor? As many as seven times? "Not seven times, but seventy times seven," replied Jesus), accountability has to be a dimension of this as well, especially for a pastor of a church with such a strong reputation for the use of church discipline with its own members.

In 2012, it was reported (in the link immediately above) that for a sexual indiscretion with a woman who was not his fiancee, a Mars Hill member was asked to sign a contract demanding that, among other things, he write out a comprehensive list of all of his emotional and sexual sins as part of a "sexual and emotional history with women" that he was to share with his local pastor.

So...will Mark Driscoll be asked to sign a church discipline contract of any kind, or be asked to write out a comprehensive list of all of his sins as a pastor that he will then share with whoever is meant to keep him accountable at Mars Hill?  (That job, by the way, is an extremely murky one ever since the sacking of a couple of its governing elders in 2007.)

While this might sound gratuitous of me to suggest, I'm quite serious, because speaking as another parish pastor who responsible for the vast majority of preaching and teaching in his congregation: we should not ever be held to a lower standard than our flocks.  That is absolutely not okay.  And if it is, then we need to go find ourselves other gigs far away from the church, immediately, because we have forgotten what we are supposed to be about here as a church.

So is Driscoll really serious when he says "I also hope people I have offended and disappointed will forgive me" purely on the basis of his apology?  Because believe me when I say this as a writer (of sorts): words are cheap.  Prove that you're sorry by your actions.  Driscoll's words of apology, by this point in time, carry a value of near nil to me.

And make no mistake: true repentance is what needs to happen here...not only because it is Scriptural, but because, overwhelmingly, those who have been hurt at Mars Hill or by Driscoll would rather see repentance and the beginning of true accountability rather than outright punishment, and this is profoundly to their credit as Christians and as human beings.

But least so far, his lengthy track record of apologizing and then doing something else he has to apologize for again doesn't give me much to hang my proverbial hat on that he actually is repentant.

Fool me once, shame on you.

Yours in Christ,
Eric

This Week's Sermon: "The Ekklesia"

Acts 4:32 to 37

The community of believers was one in heart and mind. None of them would say, “This is mine!” about any of their possessions, but held everything in common. 33 The apostles continued to bear powerful witness to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and an abundance of grace was at work among them all. 34 There were no needy persons among them. Those who owned properties or houses would sell them, bring the proceeds from the sales, 35 and place them in the care and under the authority of the apostles. Then it was distributed to anyone who was in need. 36 Joseph, whom the apostles nicknamed Barnabas (that is, “one who encourages”), was a Levite from Cyprus. 37 He owned a field, sold it, brought the money, and placed it in the care and under the authority of the apostles. (Common English Bible)

“The Way: The Post Jesus, Pre Paul Church,” Week Seven

The Gap which overlooks the harbor of Sydney, Australia is not a clothing store…it is a series of cliffs that, if you look for it on Google images, is absolutely gorgeous; from a distance, you can see the layers of rock that have formed over millions of years of geologic creation, and the tops of the cliffs are covered in green and trees, and, of course, it is right on the Pacific Ocean.

With all of that beauty, naturally, folks will strive to build homes there.  But with the sheer height that the cliffs afford, folks also come there to, sadly, try to end their lives as well.  And that is where one resident of the Gap, a fellow by the name of Don Ritchie, comes in.  As the journalist Paul Loebe writes:

A local, Don Ritchie, has lived in a house adjacent to “the Gap” for over 40 years and has been deemed a hero.  He is responsible for saving hundreds of people over the years since he first moved there.  Both he and his wife were aware of the reputation of the Gap prior to moving into their house, (and) the main window to Ritchie’s house faces directly to the jumping point for where people jump.  Whenever Ritchie sees someone who lingers too long at the spot, he rushes over to them and invites them over to his house for tea.

His coaxing does not always work, and he has even witnessed people jump being the last person they speak to, but for all his effort over the years, he has been awarded a place in the Order of Australia and a bravery medal.

But what makes this not as much a feel good story for me but a story that really and truly convicts me is the detail that follows:

The government has been looking into installing cameras and high railings but it has stalled due to the enormous cost ($2.1 million American).

If you divide that $2.1 million cost by the 160 lives this one man has saved over the years (that is, over the operational lifetime of a high railing fence), you get a sum of a little over $13,000.  And if you divide the $2.1 million price tag by the 50 people every year he is unable to save, you get a sum of $42,000.

$42,000 is my annual salary and housing stipend here at First Christian.  To the dollar.  And that’s what it would cost, per suicide victim in one year, to ensure there were no more victims of the Gap.

A total giving of my resources, one hundred percent of them, would at least account for one person’s life saved this year, and total giving is the model that is in fact proscribed by the New Testament church ere in Acts 4, because that way, resources can be given in accordance to need: and the preservation of life, I think both now and then, would have been seen as one of the greatest needs of all.

This is a sermon series that has been ongoing now for a while!  We began it several weeks ago for two reasons.  One is that the day of Pentecost (the day when the Holy Spirit comes down upon the remaining Apostles) fell on Sunday, June 8, this year, and oftentimes, when we preachers preach on Pentecost, we just do that one story about the Holy Spirit, but then we go on to something else, neglecting the many amazing stories that follow.  The other is that it’s summer, and summer is the season for action movies at the cinema, and (increasingly frequently) their sequels, which may or may not be as good as the original/worth attending at all/a blatant money grab by movie studios (depending on just how bad the sequel is!).  The Gospels have their own sequel in the New Testament: Acts of the Apostles, commonly referred to simply as Acts.  Acts is written by Luke (the writer of the Gospel which bears his name) precisely as a sequel in his two volume set of historical accountings of Christ’s ministry and the early church, and it is, to my way of thinking, far better than many of the sequels we are used to today!  So this is a sermon series meant to take us through a Biblical sequel to the Gospels in addition to picking up where the Pentecost story leaves off, and we began with the massive response to Peter’s first sermon: a conversion of 3,000 people, and today, we actually sort of rewind to the beginning of the series when Luke more or less restates an accounting that he also includes in Acts 2, after Peter’s sermon, about how the early church lived out the faith.

And on its face, this is a passage that should challenge us greatly, because it is just about as much of a polar opposite of what Western, American Christianity does today.  Because of the influence of our nation’s Founding Fathers, the Enlightenment, and a variety of other philosophical influences, we are a nation built upon the altar of individual property.  And so what the early church practices here: the pooling of all resources and then the distribution of them to each according to need, would be anathema to all of us here, in 21^st century America.

And I do not use that word ‘anathema’ lightly, even though I am fully aware that I am calling the Bible anathema to our present context.  Because honestly, sometimes Scripture has to be, needs to be, must be, outright heretical to our way of life for it to be doing its job.  (Uh oh, the pastor just referred to the Bible as heretical…better slip out now before the brimstone starts raining down…)

Scripture must always be challenging us, and at the point it stops challenging us, either we have stopped following it or Jesus has come back as promised and filled in all the gaps for us.  And seeing as how the latter has yet to happen, I’m fairly confident in doubling down on the possibility that the former is what ends up happening.

What does that say about us as a church, as a people, as a community?  Well…the short answer is that we like to follow the stuff in Scripture that is easy for us to follow.  For instance, honestly, it’s pretty straightforward for a heterosexual person to conform to the Levitical laws against same sex intimacy.  And if you’re a man, well, you needn’t worry about Paul’s commands for women to remain silent in church, because there is absolutely zero chance of you breaking that prohibition.

But giving everything you own to the church and allowing it to distribute what you own not as you see fit but as they all see fit?  Well, hold on there for just a cotton picking minute, because that sounds an awful lot like communism!

Well, if the (red) shirt fits (also, insert a joke here if you'd like from Clue about communism as a red herring)…yes, what is being described here with the very early church is, well, a commune.  Only instead of sitting around in a drum circle smoking the peace pipe and growing hemp, they proclaimed Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior.

So, does that make it okay?  Does it make it okay for a church...well, not just any church, but the Biblical church, to engage in a model that we clearly have moved past, if not outright rejected?

The entire problem with that question, of course, is the premise that the Biblical church needs our permission to live out its faith.  If anything, it needs to be the other way around: are we comfortable in asking the Biblical church if it is okay that we have strayed so far from their model that an expected tithe isn’t 100 percent, but only 10 percent?  Or where resources are allocated not on the basis of need but on the basis of the annual budget?

Let me put it a different way: the Biblical church was profoundly countercultural and remains profoundly countercultural to this day, because I don’t think we can scare to countenance actually running our church the way the ekklesia in Acts of the Apostles is run.

That’s a funny Greek word, by the way: ekklesia.  It literally means “the assembly,” after the governing assembly of Athens during the Classical era of ancient Greece.  But between Classical Greece and New Testament Israel, the term took on an even more profound meaning as the name for a congregation, an “assembly” of believers.  And an assembly, by definition, is, well, assembled.  It is put together.  And the ekklesia, the assembly, of the Biblical church was assembled by people and all that they both spiritually and materially had to offer.

And if you assemble an assembly with less, do not be surprised when that assembly is not all that you wanted or expected it to be.

On its face, that sounds more like something that would come out of a stewardship sermon, and y’all probably know by now that that’s not really my forte. But I am talking about a wider sense of stewardship here: a stewardship to humanity itself.  Humanity is our assembly.  Humanity is our ekklesia.  And we are called by God to give all, to give our all, on its behalf.

That also entails us giving all to God by accepting His calling for us.  And we are just as bad at that as we are at giving all to one another…and we’ll get to that a bit more with next week’s sermon, but we talk a lot about the need to surrender everything to God, and then selfishly hold something, or an awful lot of somethings, back for ourselves.  We say in one breath, “everything belongs to God,” and in the very next breath to someone else, “Hey, that’s mine!”

I realize you may be thinking, “Well, why can’t something belong to both me and God?”  It can.  But guess who gets dibs on how that thing, whatever it may be, ultimately gets used?  It ain’t you.  And that’s where our selfishness comes into play.  That’s where our greed and self centeredness comes into play.  We want to put our interests ahead of God’s interests, and honestly, I think those two interests are aligned a whole heck of a lot less frequently than we let ourselves believe.

But every so often, they do align.  A retired man in Australia finds a home he wants to live in, and God uses him as a vessel of love to save the lives of literally dozens of dozens of people by sacrificing his home, his privacy, and his day to day life in the name of saving theirs, but his government cannot or will not sacrifice funds to save even more lives that he alone was unable to.

And that’s the difference that we’re talking about here, that Luke is talking about in Acts 4.  It isn’t enough to simply give, you give until the need has been met.  Giving a starving person a lone potato chip doesn’t do one bit of good.  God calls us to more.  God demands of us more.  And He has every right to, because that is what His church has done literally for millennia.  Let us not lose sight of that tradition now.  Especially now.  

May it be so.  Amen.

Rev. Eric Atcheson
Longview, Washington

August 3, 2014

Learn Sermon Writing From the Pros

(...or, at least, from this pro. Cue mental sequence of that parking garage scene from Ferris Bueller's Day Off:

"Relax...You guys have nothing to worry about, I'm a professional."

"A professional what?")

Also, this isn't so much a "tips and tricks" post so much as a "step by step process" post...a step by step process that has been finely honed and tested with the writing of three years' worth of sermons (and two years' worth of sermons before that as a part time student associate pastor).  I can confidently say that I have narrowed down my sermon writing process to 14 easy to follow steps, and that I am ready to share them with you:

Step 1: Pray. Every good sermon is rooted in two things: Scripture and prayer.  This I firmly believe.

Step 2: Study the passage you're preaching on that week.  This step obviously doesn't apply if your style is to pick a sermon topic and then shoehorn a miasma of different Bible verses out of context in to fit it.  Wait, that sounded judgey of me.  Hey, it's your world, I just live here.

Step 3: Bring into the mix the opinions of people smarter than you, like commentators, Bible professors, and totally wicked awesome bloggers. *ahem*

Step 4: Scour Internet news websites, various human interest story outlets, and your decrepit collection of Chicken Soup for the Soul books for a totally wicked awesome story to launch your sermon from (personally, I love using real life stories as springboards for my messages, rather than as illustrations of my message...after all, if worship of God isn't about real life, then why do we bother?).

Step 5: While doing step 4, get derailed by the breaking news that some ignoramus of a pastor said something colossally offensive and stupid.  Obsess about it and about any implications it has for your fellow Christians, and then write about it on your blog (you DO have a blog, right?).

Step 6: Realize that after you finished writing about it on your blog that you still have a sermon to write as well.  Properly shame yourself for allowing your devotion to homiletical greatness to be derailed by your devotion to your silly little blog.

Step 7: Once you have achieved said realization, sit yourself down (chain yourself, if necessary) and begin writing great words of holy wisdom on the blank canvas that is your copy of Microsoft Word.

Step 7a: A reminder that step 7 can be even more pressurized by scheduling yourself to officiate a wedding or a funeral that week, so that way you have TWO different messages to consider!

Step 8: Remind yourself that you are proclaiming not just anything, but the Word, the Logos, of the one and eternal God as revealed by His Son, Jesus Christ, and that therefore all the material you created in steps 1 through 7 is totally subpar and therefore useless.

Step 9: Begin shaking your head, kneading your temples, and crying softly to yourself.  If Step 9 is taking place after normal working hours, it is appropriate to fix yourself a drink or three at this time.

Step 10: Question your entire sense of vocation, calling, and very existence.  Pretty straightforward step, amirite?

Step 11: Pick your lush self up, spiritually dust yourself off, put on your homiletical hiking boots, and climb a mountain called "THIS WEEK'S SERMON."

Step 12: Pause mid hike to write this blog post that you are currently reading instead.

Step 13: Realize that you really need more prayer.  Repeat step 1 as necessary.

Step 14: If you're a senior or solo pastor: rinse, lather, and repeat for next week.  If you're an associate pastor, congratulations!  You're off the hook until the next time your senior pastor decides to let you out of your cage for the paying audience.

And in case it needed to be said...hopefully it doesn't, but you never know: everything I wrote after about step 4 or so was written thoroughly in jest.  Said steps also are totally NOT a reflection of the week of writing (or attempts at writing) I have had.  No sir, not at all.

Wait, I think my nose just grew...damn...hey, maybe that can go into the sermon...

Yours in Christ,
Eric

According to Mark Driscoll, I am "half a man"

Subtitled: ...and I am damn proud of it.

So, I wrote last week about the sensitivity surrounding a pastor's salary.  In it, I disclosed that my gross (before taxes) annual salary is $42,000/year, a slight notch below the current median for clergy at $43,800/year.

What on earth does this have to do with controversial Mars Hill pastor/fellow Washingtonian/Christian shock jock/virulent sexist and homophobe Mark Driscoll?  (Yes, the same guy who called yoga demonic, asked for stories about effeminate male worship leaders, and blamed Pastor Ted Haggard's wife for her husband's infidelity.) Well...I married an unbelievably smart, capable woman who, as it so happens, is a medical doctor, and thus stands to make a multiple of my humble pastor's income when she becomes an attending physician.

Not only would she be contributing to the saving of lives and betterment of physical health and the prolonging of peoples' lifespans, because that in and of itself would be more than enough to call her vocation a noble work, but Carrie's profession would also contribute tremendously to our financial security as a family and all that it entails: paying off our debt, buying a house, saving for retirement, and so on.

But, according to Driscoll (and those who agree with him, of whom there are many), Carrie and I should throw all of that away because my masculinity cannot abide being threatened by a woman whose earning potential exceeds mine.

A series of internet posts from the year 2000 by Driscoll (under the screen name of William Wallace II, a screen name he confirms in one of his books) have recently surfaced, including one that is a list of definitions of his favorite terms, including the term "half a man," which he puts thusly:

half a man - any man who takes a wife and does not serve as the financial and spiritual head of his home but believes the relationship is 50/50 and she should make half the money and do half of his job at home pitch a tent club - men who allow their wives to nag them so incessantly that they want to sleep on the roof of their own home

Now, aside from the obvious syntax errors (hey, this is the Internet after all...what, you expect me to capitalize every proper noun in my Facebook messages?  Because I don't), I want to nip this in the bud: yes, these words are from 14 years ago, and 14 years ago, I was, well, 14 years old.  And God knows I said some stupid, offensive, idiotic things then.

But Driscoll wasn't 14 years old.  He was in his early thirties...older than I am right now.  So, yes, these are from a while ago, but this isn't some moronic pubescent boy saying these things, this is a grown man and Christian pastor saying stuff like this:

I speak harshly because I speak to men. A woman might not understand that. I also do not answer to women. So your questions will be ignored. I would however, recommend to you a few versed to memorize: I Timothy 2:11-15 I Corinthians 14:33-35.To learn them, ask your father or husband. If you have neither, ask your pastor. If she is a female, find another church. If you are the pastor, quit your job and repent.

And this:

Can I be a gay Christian?...every man knows you can't build anything with bolts and bolts. Damn freaks. And the pastel cashmere wearing sensible haircut clean shaven loafer wearing minivan driving suburban sympathizers contend "But they really really love each other." I love dogs, but I don't stick my tongue in their mouth and lobby congress for a tax deductible union. "But we need to be nice." What the hell for? A man is free to knock boots with any sad hairy lump of clay desperate enough to climb in the sheets and prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that total depravity is an understatement, but what the hell you want from me? Should we form some form of homo Promise Keepers so we can all climb into a stadium and hug each other and cry like damn junior high girls watching Dawson's Creek. I'd tell you to kiss my ass, but I'm afraid you'd take me up on it.

(All Driscoll quotes/rants/bizarre, hurtful ramblings are courtesy of the Christian bloggers Rachel Held Evans and Matthew Paul Turner.)

(Also, sorry for the double parenthetical pause in my post here.  Carrie called me away to ask me to help her with folding the laundry.  Because I want to pull my considerable weight in this marriage, I agreed.)

Anyways, why on earth does it matter what some jackass of a pastor said on the Internets 14 years ago?  Surely we have proverbially bigger fish to fry right now, what with Israelis and Palestinians killing each other in Gaza and pro Russian terrorists shooting down civilian commercial jetliners?

Why, indeed?  Well...I quote my wife/not a help meet/equally yoked partner (yes, the very same person who has led me down that slippery slope towards Satan as a theologian) on this one, verbatim: "I think what allows people to get away with that kind of BS is the absence of other voices."

So, I want to add my voice (and, as I have noticed, a great many other folks do as well, to their immense credit) to that void: my egalitarian marriage does not make me half a man.  I am secure enough in my masculinity that I don't need some other blowhard telling me how to live out that masculinity.

That doesn't make me "pussified."  That makes me a man.

And my being a man goes hand in hand with looking out for the best interests of my household: and those best interests align, spiritually and materially, with my wife pursuing her own career and advancement.  Considering that the Bible features female judges, prophets, deaconesses, and followers of Jesus, I cannot imagine that to be a bad thing for anyone who chooses that path.  Anyone.

I'll put that sentiment another way: one of the best men I know is my Grandpa George.  He's approaching 90, but still has his faculties intact, and he has used those faculties to, among other things: be a lifelong hunter, fisherman, and woodsman; a World War II veteran who fought in the Pacific theater; and the father of three pretty amazing offspring, one of whom is my dad.  But he also delights in the traditionally female role of cooking because he went to culinary school and is a damn good chef.  His wife, my step grandmother Mary Lou, owns her own business, an arts and crafts gallery in the next town over from them.  And he actually volunteers his time a couple of days a week to work for her.  He is an amazing listener, a judicious dispenser of advice, and a gentle patriarch.

By Driscoll's standards, the latter material would disqualify my Grampy from manly manliness.  But in mine eyes, he is the gold standard of what it means to be a man.  Because of ALL of it.

All of this, I have to confess to you, is coming out in a jumbled blur by this point, and part of that reason is that this stuff is intensely personal to me (if you hadn't already noticed, with how openly I am talking about my marriage and my family).

The funny thing is, from one angle it shouldn't be personal for me.  At all.  Mark Driscoll and I have never met, he never did anything directly to me, and here I am, railing against him as though he pissed in my cornflakes this morning.

The other angle, though, is that maybe it shouldn't be personal for me, but you can bet your bottom dollar that it is personal for somebody else who might be reading this blog.  And I want to be able to speak to them and their experience.  Part of privilege is shutting the hell up about something that doesn't necessarily impact you directly, but I don't get to wrap myself in a (masculine) privilege blankie this time.  Even if Driscoll's inane, clearly insecure rants don't impact me directly, there are many other souls who probably are more impacted than I am, and impacted in ways that are hurtful, destructive, or just plain painful.

And if that is the case for you, then it is to you that this post is dedicated.

Because ultimately, that which makes someone a man comes not from societal expectations, or from peer pressure, or even from popular opinion.  It comes solely and exclusively from the identity that God Almighty has implanted in you as you were knitted together and fearfully and wonderfully made by divine hands.

And if that divinely planted identity calls you a man, then congratulations, you are a man.  Nothing a fellow man says or harangues or bloviates can change that immutable, incredible, inescapable reality.

Love in God from "half a man" who cares about you and believes in you...

Yours in Christ,
Eric

Letters from the Soul: This Month's Newsletter Column

August 2014: “Ask What You Can Do for the Church” 

Dear Church,

Though we most often associate the month of November with the presidency of John F. Kennedy (because that is when his presidency, and his life, ended in his assassination), it was actually during this month, August, when his name was made. On August 2, 1943, Kennedy’s PT 109 was rammed by a Japanese destroyer and Kennedy became a war hero.

When asked much later how he became such a hero, he answered: “It was involuntary. They sunk my boat.” JFK had a talent for memorable lines like that, and one of my favorites remains his famous line from his inaugural address: “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.”

I love it because not only does it appeal to the virtue of serving in the national interests, but because it is so easily applicable in a church setting as well. Ask not what your church can do for you, but ask what you can do for your church. Now that’s something worth striving for!

Unfortunately, a lot of churches don’t in the model of church membership we have today, which ministry expert Thom Rainier encapsulates quite well: “We have turned church membership into country club membership. You pay your dues and you are entitled to certain benefits.”

Thom goes on to say that the country club model of church membership is not Scriptural…indeed, the New Testament church, as we have seen in our current sermon series on Acts, functioned almost as a commune where everyone donated everything they had, 100 percent.

But what a lot of ministry experts also note is that churches that are more prone to decline tend to be churches with that “country club membership” mentality that Thom notes, because that can overtake the outward focused mentality that all churches need to have in order to spread the Gospel. After all, Jesus Christ came to this earth not to be served as its king, but to serve as its king.

Let us spend our time here not expecting to be served as church members, but to serve as church members. And so I invite you to ask yourself, what you can do for the church, for the entire body of Christ that is striving to build His kingdom?

Yours in Christ,
Pastor Eric