Ash Wednesday 2018: "Lose the World, Gain the Heavens," Luke 4:1-13

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.” 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.” 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.” 12 Jesus answered, “It’s been said, Don’t test the Lord your God.” 13 After finishing every temptation, the devil departed from him until the next opportunity. (Common English Bible)

Ash Wednesday 2018

It has become a personal tradition by now, my sixth Ash Wednesday with you (it would be seven, but last year’s Ash Wednesday came while I was on sabbatical). In order to set the tone for a unique service that is often much more somber than our more celebratory praise worship services of Sunday morning, I read this short excerpt from the UCC pastor and author Lillian Daniel’s book This Odd and Wondrous Calling, as she recounts the experience of preaching her first-ever sermon as a seminary student performing the required field education internship that all Master of Divinity students must complete in order to earn their degree:

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.”

An annual scolding is a helpfully humorous way to describe Ash Wednesday—the first day of the church season of Lent and a day of penitence in which we confess to God our sins and seek forgiveness both from God and from those whom we have sinned against.

Lent lasts for forty days—from now until Good Friday, minus the Sundays—and that number is meant to parallel the forty days that Jesus spends fasting in the wilderness according to Matthew and Luke before being tested by Satan, which is Hebrew for “the Adversary.”

“The Adversary” is an apt label for the devil in this passage from Luke, for he verbally jousts back and forth with Jesus, tempting the Son of God with one thing after another before finally fleeing and thus permitting angels to tend to our Messiah.

The first of the devil’s temptations is simple enough: ask Jesus to turn stones into bread. As a common theme in these temptations, both the devil and Jesus quote Scripture back at one another, and together with the first temptation, it shows that even the most fundamental building blocks of physical and spiritual sustenance—bread and the Word of God—can be turned into weapons with which to do harm when put in the wrong hands. Jesus resists such weaponry, though, despite the starvation inherent in so long a fast.

The third of the devil’s three temptations involves Jesus throwing Himself off the highest point of the Jerusalem temple so that angels will catch Him and prevent Him from dying. To choose so central a point from which to jump makes the intent of the temptation clear, albeit unspoken in the text itself: people will see Jesus evade death through this divine intervention, and thus believe in Him as the Son of God. Yet Jesus, quoting Scripture, again demurs.

It is the second of these three temptations, the temptation to be given power over all the kingdoms and nations of the earth, that I want to talk about the most with you tonight.

I want to talk with you about it because it is perhaps the most relevant to ourselves in our own human condition. Yes, we crave food, but food is not by itself sinful—we are simply admonished as Jesus says, to not live on the food alone, and so we don’t.

Nor must we feel terribly tempted to leap from the highest point in town to prove our own divinity, because we each know that we are not the Messiah.

But being tempted by earthly power? That’s right up our alley, and always has been. Never mind the fact that, at its core, Christianity has always been a religion about surrender—the surrendering of complete divinity that becoming human entailed for Jesus and His surrender to the Roman Empire after the machinations that led to His crucifixion were put into motion.

That is not how we ourselves typically want to go. But it is the way of Jesus, and giving up what we must in order to follow that way is not a request, it is an expectation.

We fail to live up to that expectation, though, each time we put our desire for control and power over the wellbeing of another, be it another person, or another group of people, or even an entire nation. That tendency is but another form of selfishness, but a form that is not merely contained within our own thoughts and feelings that we otherwise keep only to ourselves.

This crass pursuit of transactional power—you give me influence, I give you influence—is increasingly what American Christianity has been associated with over the past couple of years. I say that quite confidently. We are known not for our pursuit of self-control and surrender, but by our pursuit of earthly power, control, and influence.

Just hours ago today, we saw one lethal consequence of pursuit of such earthly power and influence—although it is a consequence that we have seen on replay again and again since the Columbine High School shooting. The Parkland mass shooting in Florida is the latest in a long string of such attacks that, by pure happenstance, happen in a nation with some of the most lax gun laws in the industrialized world—laxness that exists because of the temporal power, control, and influence that groups like the NRA have over our political leaders.

That influence, by the by, is in the interests not of people, but of material possessions—of guns. Guns have no heart, no soul; as we are continually reminded by their defenders, they don’t kill people. People kill people. But would the Christ who repeatedly exhorted His followers to forsake material possessions make a similar defense? The same Christ who told the rich young man who loved his possessions to sell them and then have treasure in heaven? Or would Christ champion the children, not the gun?

But that is not where the locus of political power is at present in our nation. And we are seduced by such powerful forces that promise us the means with which to not only obtain power but also to keep hold of it. Surrendering it tends not to be in our nature—as a nation, as a church, and as individuals. We not only want what we cannot have, we want what we already have—desperately.

Yet, if Christ is to be our eternal example, then our mandate is clear: to lose our worldly power if we must, but in so doing, to gain the heavens. For every single thing the devil offers Jesus is fleeting. Bread crumbles. A moment of drama is but a moment. And earthly power, over generations, always is handed over, whether by hook, by crook, or by the inevitable passage of time.

That is the common question asked by the temptations the devil presents to Jesus: are we willing to sacrifice eternity for what we want in the inherently fleeting present moment? And not what we *need* in the present—but, again, what we *want*.

The well-deserved knock against those of us in the church is that far, far too often—both lately and at many other times throughout our history—our answer to that question is absolutely, we are willing to sacrifice the heavens to gain the earth, not the other way around.

In so doing, we do harm to one another. We do harm to God. And we do harm to ourselves.

May we take this season of Lent, then, as a time to turn that harm into healing, in the hope and prayer that our renunciation of such harm, of such pursuit of fleeting power to forsake the heavens and their creator, ends with us, and that a new church, one surrounded by life and not by murder, and which heralds a world of goodness rather than violence, might yet be possible.

It is a dream I have.

May it be so. Amen.

Rev. Eric Atcheson

Longview, Washington 

February 14, 2018

This Week's Sermon: "Mother of Nations," Genesis 17:15-22

Genesis 17:15-22

God said to Abraham, “As for your wife Sarai, you will no longer call her Sarai. Her name will now be Sarah. 16 I will bless her and even give you a son from her. I will bless her so that she will become nations, and kings of peoples will come from her.” 17 Abraham fell on his face and laughed. He said to himself, Can a 100-year-old man become a father, or Sarah, a 90-year-old woman, have a child? 18 To God Abraham said, “If only you would accept Ishmael!”

19 But God said, “No, your wife Sarah will give birth to a son for you, and you will name him Isaac. I will set up my covenant with him and with his descendants after him as an enduring covenant. 20 As for Ishmael, I’ve heard your request. I will bless him and make him fertile and give him many, many descendants. He will be the ancestor of twelve tribal leaders, and I will make a great nation of him. 21 But I will set up my covenant with Isaac, who will be born to Sarah at this time next year.” 22 When God finished speaking to him, God ascended, leaving Abraham alone. (Common English Bible)

First Christian Church 90^th Anniversary

I still remember the garish yellow chairs. They were almost a punchline in the church plant I was raised in. Bright canary yellow and patently uncomfortable, they were so memorable an eyesore that for several years, the church would give them away as gag gifts to our graduating high school seniors.

But that is what I associated church with as a child. The bright yellow chairs that fit into a trailer that we took with us from one elementary school to another for the better part of a decade while the church went about the long and painstaking process of searching for a piece of land, saving up the funds for the down payment, hiring architects to design the church building, and then saving up to have that built.

Those memories make my love for a solid, historic home even stronger, because I know exactly what it is like to belong to a homeless church. Home matters.

It is easy to forget, because it was so long ago, that even our congregation did not originally have this historic building. It was planted in 1928 as a house church before worshiping temporarily at the Longview YMCA while architect George Macpherson was making the design that led to this structure being built in 1930 and 1931 on land that R.A. Long donated.

We turn ninety this year. First Christian Church is older than Moses was when he went to Pharaoh to demand the release of the Hebrew slaves, we are older than the prophetess Anna when she blessed the newborn Christ in Luke 2, and we are now as old as Abraham’s wife Sarai when she was renamed Sarah by the Lord and told that she would bear a son and name him Isaac.

But the ninety-year-old Sarah would do even more than that. Even though Abraham disagrees here with God over the rejection of Abraham’s son with Hagar, Ishmael, God is still poised to make Sarah a mother of nations through her son, Isaac.

Abraham and Sarah don’t really know what to do at first with this pronouncement—after all, Sarah is ninety and has been barren up to this point, which is why Abraham had a son with Hagar to begin with—but that matters not to God. Whatever your age, God manages to find a purpose for you, and for each of us. And that age tends to come with it some truly astounding stories and impact.

That is something I have never stopped being grateful for as the pastor of a church with such a deep past. People visiting on Sundays for worship, or on a Saturday for a wedding, or even amid their tears for a funeral, will tell me about how they once attended children’s church here, or were baptized here, or were married here. They became regular, living reminders to me of the Holy Spirit’s presence not just across space, but across time.

It also makes it impossible to count the number of people who have been impacted or affected in a positive and beneficial way by the presence in Longview of First Christian Church over the past nine decades, but I would be willing to bet that such a number is in the tens of thousands.

That is a nation that this church is, in some sense, the mother of. We are a mother of nations.

And if we scoff at how this could really be the true scope and scale of our impact across time, it is likely because we ourselves cannot grasp just how great that impact has truly been.

From our home across from Lake Sacajawea here at 20^th Avenue and Kessler Boulevard, out into the mission field and the kingdom, have gone tens of thousands before us. From our home here today, we too shall issue forth to love and serve in the name of Jesus Christ, making ourselves a part of that selfsame nation, and children of that selfsame mother.

Abraham and Sarah responded to God’s call in their own way, just as we do now, just as we did reaching all the way back First Christian Church’s inception in 1928, and just as all churches do. I cannot say for absolute certainty that FCC never had some version of the garish yellow chairs as prank gifts in our past. But it would be pretty illuminating if we did!

Because such an artifact would add to the many we already have that lend tangible witness to how our congregation has changed and evolved over these nine decades. We have experienced the leadership of eight different settled senior pastors, and the three of whom who are here today represent a combined twenty-seven years of ministry here. We have gone from being a congregation with an all-male lay leadership to being a congregation with a majority-female lay leadership. We have experienced changes in in our worship music, in our choice of Bible translation, and so much more. And still additional important decisions on the direction of our congregation’s future lay ahead of us.

But what has not changed is the presence of God whom we worship, the God who has been revealed to us in Jesus Christ, and the God who guides us still today by the light of the Holy Spirit. That God has always been present here among us, and if we are a great church, it is only because we serve a great God.

May we continue to celebrate that divine greatness in our days and weeks to come together while I still remain your pastor, and may our affirmation of the great story and history of our congregation be a part of that celebration. May we forever give thanks to God for the mother of our own nation of sorts, of loved ones and neighbors, of friends and family: First Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) of Longview, Washington.

Thank you for being here today. Thank you for celebrating with us today. May God bless you.

Amen.

Rev. Eric Atcheson

Longview, Washington 

February 11, 2018

This Week's Sermon: "Out of Egypt, I Called My Son," Matthew 2:13-23

Matthew 2:13-23

When the magi had departed, an angel from the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, “Get up. Take the child and his mother and escape to Egypt. Stay there until I tell you, for Herod will soon search for the child in order to kill him.” 14 Joseph got up and, during the night, took the child and his mother to Egypt. 15 He stayed there until Herod died. This fulfilled what the Lord had spoken through the prophet: I have called my son out of Egypt.

16 When Herod knew the magi had fooled him, he grew very angry. He sent soldiers to kill all the children in Bethlehem and in all the surrounding territory who were two years old and younger, according to the time that he had learned from the magi. 17 This fulfilled the word spoken through Jeremiah the prophet: 18 A voice was heard in Ramah, weeping and much grieving. Rachel weeping for her children, and she did not want to be comforted, because they were no more.

19 After King Herod died, an angel from the Lord appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt. 20 “Get up,” the angel said, “and take the child and his mother and go to the land of Israel. Those who were trying to kill the child are dead.” 21 Joseph got up, took the child and his mother, and went to the land of Israel. 22 But when he heard that Archelaus ruled over Judea in place of his father Herod, Joseph was afraid to go there. Having been warned in a dream, he went to the area of Galilee. 23 He settled in a city called Nazareth so that what was spoken through the prophets might be fulfilled: He will be called a Nazarene. (Common English Bible)

“From Slave State to Refuge: Ancient Egypt and Contemporary America,” Week Four

Almost two years ago, I got up here on a Sunday morning, like I almost always do, to give to you my message for the week. It was April 24, the day set aside for remembrance of the Armenian Genocide, which my mother’s family fled by immigrating to the United States as olive-skinned, non-English-speaking refugees.

They did so after my great-grandfather’s brother, Madiros, was summarily executed in one of the initial waves of purges in the genocide. Arriving at the family home demanding the rest of our family, Ottoman soldiers then executed Madiros’s wife Esther. Madiros’s father, my great-great grandfather Sarkis, committed suicide out of grief just two days later.

My great-grandfather Krikor immigrated to the United States, bereft of his father and one of his brothers. He and his wife, my great-grandmother Satenig, use fake passports to cross the border, and then eventually settle down in Detroit and raise two daughters and one son, my great-uncle Albert. Albert would go on to serve the Marines in 1945, toward the end of World War II, and that summer, he was KIA on Okinawa. According to family legend, my great-grandpa Krikor never smiled between the death of his son and the birth of his first grandchild, my mother, nine years later.

It was the loud voice in Ramah, of Rachel refusing to be comforted because her children were no more. Krikor could not be comforted, because his child was no more.

That’s who my family is. A family that came out of a tiny country in West Asia, but was so American that it gave its only son to the most titanic conflict the world has ever seen. Out of Armenia, my family was called, and out of America, my great-uncle was called to live and to die in the service.

What worlds do we call our children out of, and then into? And what can we do to make those worlds new?

This has been both a new sermon series and a new year for us. This series began on the day after a very special holiday on the liturgical calendar. January 6 is Epiphany, the day that tradition says the Magi finally arrived to present Jesus with their gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Epiphany is the beginning of a very violent, very sorrowful chapter of Matthew’s Gospel that entails the massacre of all the infant boys in Bethlehem on orders of the Israelite king Herod the Great (who was, in turn, a vassal of the Roman emperor Augustus). To prevent Jesus from meeting that same fate, Mary and Joseph flee to Egypt and remain there until Herod is dead, at which point they safely return to Israel.

The Holy Family’s flight into Egypt is what fundamentally informs this new sermon series, which will last the entire month of January, because it is a flight that we should be increasingly familiar with by dint of the news cycles circulating around the immigration debate taking place in our country. As we’ll see in later installments of this series, Egypt holds a terrifying legacy of slavery and displacement for ancient Israel. Yet in the moment, it acts as a refuge for Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.

There is an obvious parallel for us in the United States today. For instance, how can we be a place of safety and refuge for, say, the courageous people in Iran protesting their regime today, if we have also banned them from entering our country?

We began this series with the Epiphany story itself in Matthew 2:1-12, and then we dug into the person who is the Hebrew Bible parallel to the Epiphany story: Moses. Last week, we arrived at a passage from Isaiah 31 that recalls Egypt as a place of false promises, and today, we end the series by returning to Matthew 2 to continue on the ghastly track that his Epiphany story places us upon.

We’ve discussed in past sermons within this series how Matthew situates his second chapter adjacently to the Exodus narrative. For Matthew, Jesus acts as a direct successor to Moses, and just as Moses had to be rescued from a mass infanticide by his mother, so too did Jesus have to be rescued from a mass infanticide by His parents.

Yet the verse from Matthew from which this message draws its title actually has its roots in one of the so-called “minor” prophets of the Hebrew Bible: Hosea, in 11:1. Matthew hearkens back to this particular verse, as he often does with snippets of Hebrew Bible prophetic literature throughout his Gospel, as supporting evidence for his contention that Jesus is the new Moses and thus a reinterpretation of Hebrew Bible scripture and tradition. Matthew does this three times in just the eleven verses of this passage, referring to Hosea here as well as explicitly to Jeremiah’s prophecy of Rachel mourning in Ramah. And again, this matters to Matthew because of the new Moses he sees Jesus as.

And that suits us fine until that “reinterpretation” of Jesus as the new Moses becomes Jesus as the “replacement” for Moses, and we begin erasing Jesus’s fundamental Jewishness with our own Christianity.

Or until we begin erasing the identity of, say, the Dreamers as Americans with our own beliefs of what Americans should look like, which may or may not actually comport to the inclusive ideals of Christianity. Or the identity of the Indonesian Christians who are literally taking sanctuary in churches to avoid ICE deportation raids that they fear would lead to their persecution for being Christian.

Out of America, then, what children shall God call? And in America, what children shall Rachel mourn and lament for because they are no more, deported off to parts and places unknown to us?

This must be a component of the ongoing transition of the United States from slave state to refuge and sanctuary. If we are to be a place for people who are fleeing oppression, persecution, and violence, we cannot be that which further compounds such sin.

So what welcome are we prepared to give to people for whom their lives are of the essence such that they fear they cannot simply throw themselves upon the mercy of our often arbitrary immigration system? Are we prepared to allow in a family fleeing violence in their hometown the way that ancient Egypt allows in the Holy Family, or are we not?

I realize that I have probably spent the last three weeks making at least some of you a little (or potentially) a lot uncomfortable. I make no apologies for that. Jesus did not come to earth to make us comfortable, or to teach us comfortable things. I am utterly convinced that He would not be content, or satisfied with, a church dedicated to being polite and chewing with your mouth closed.

We didn’t need for God to become flesh as our Messiah just to say that. It’s selling Christ’s mission short, and it’s selling God short for thinking we needed so drastic a step just to be taught things so surface-level and relatively trivial.

Depth can make us uncomfortable, though. Pressure increases the deeper you go—not just emotionally or spiritually, but quite literally if you are in water. Pressure increases as depth increases. In order to go deeper and deeper into the ocean depths, humans require all sorts of specialized equipment and technology.

But deeply we must go into these questions of welcome and hospitality, just as deeply the Holy Family went into Egypt to flee a murderous Herod the Great, and deeply they plunged right back into Israel once Herod had died, to Nazareth where they would raise this child, both to avoid Herod’s heir to the throne and so that, as Matthew says at the end of this passage and chapter, “He may be called a Nazarene.”

I make no claims to it being easy to take such a plunge into the deep, such a leap of faith, such a walk into the unknown. But I will say this: at this point in time in Matthew’s Gospel, the entirety of Jesus’s public ministry is yet to come. The rest of His story was not yet written at the time of the Holy Family’s flight into Egypt.

But we know now that His story was, and is, written—in the pages of our Bibles, across the contours of our hearts, and in the divine recesses of our souls. How we elect to act upon those words that have been written to us, for us, and upon us is up to us, and us alone.

So, as I have continued to exhort us all throughout this sermon series—and will continue to exhort you to in my remaining two-plus months as your pastor—may we choose wisely. May we choose compassion. And, ultimately, may we choose well in the sight of God, as God would have us do—not merely as we would have ourselves do.

May it be so. Amen.

  

Rev. Eric Atcheson

Longview, Washington 

January 28, 2018