Flowing Streams

The Politics of Death: The Mystery of Pontius Pilate’s Strange Behavior

John 18: 33-19: 16

Passion/Palm Sunday

St. Stephen Presbyterian Church

Fort Worth, TX

April 1, 2012

Rev. Dr. Fritz Ritsch, Preacher

The names are familiar, even if you are not a churchgoer at all: Pilate. Caiaphas. Jesus. The three main characters who comprise a First Century version of “Law and Order:” Jesus, the accused traitor, insurgent and potential rebellion leader. Caiaphas, high priest, arresting officer, and prosecuting attorney. And Pilate, Roman magistrate, judge. Read more →

Easter Massacres and Good Friday Accords

On Easter morning, March 30, 1997, newspapers reported that “a peaceful rally against government corruption in the plaza outside of the Parliament building in Phnom Penh, Cambodia was turned into a killing field by grenade hurling soldiers. The blasts, which killed 20 and wounded 117, were part of a calculated attack by troops loyal to Second Prime Minister Hun Sen, a former Khmer Rouge field commander.” Their target was democratic activist Sam Rainsy, who barely escaped with his life. (“U.S. Policy and the 1997 Easter Sunday Massacre in Cambodia,”By Al Santoli. Special To The U.S. Veteran Dispatch March/April/May/ 1997. )

One year later, on April 11, 1998, in Belfast, Northern Ireland, former US senator George Mitchell presided over the “Good Friday Accords,” which sought to end, once and for all, the strife between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland.
”This is a day we should treasure,” said Bertie Ahern, the Northern Ireland prime minister who worked with British prime minister Tony Blair to broker the deal. ”This is a new era of friendship and reconciliation.”
The settlement hoped “to end a conflict that had taken more than 3,000 lives since 1969 and had poisoned relations between Britain and Ireland for centuries.”
The Boston Globe reported that
As the two leaders finished their remarks and shook hands warmly, the    skies turned dark and a snow shower broke out — a climatic reminder that the settlement aimed at ending a centuries-old conflict between Christians was reached on Good Friday, the most solemn day on the Christian calendar, commemorating the death of Jesus Christ for their salvation. So emotional was the moment that some British and Irish journalists betrayed their objectivity and applauded. (“A Belfast Accord ‘New Beginning’ hailed; the next step; voters get say;” by Kevin Cullin, Boston Globe, 04/11/98)

Part of the human experience is this juxtaposition of seeming opposites, of incongruous and contradictory influences. A massacre on the day of resurrection; a peace accord on the day we commemorate Jesus’ execution. Life isn’t neat and tidy. We want faith to explain away contradictions, to give order to the disorder of our world and of our lives. But faith is as slippery and as contradictory as life itself.
Scholars generally believe that the original version of the Gospel of Mark ended at 16:8, where the women discover the empty tomb, are confronted by an angel, and flee, terrified. There was no resurrection appearance, only the promise of it. Later editors were uncomfortable with Mark’s untidy ending and tacked on resurrection appearances copied from the other gospels.
But Mark’s untidy ending is terrifying because it reveals the truth. At the moment the women discover the empty tomb, they discover that none of our choices are tidy choices.

Mark’s uncertain ending invites us to one of Peter Gomes’ “thin places”—a place where heaven and earth meet, a place of spiritual openness—a place of both possibility and peril. It is in these places of possibility and peril, places that defy our sense of orderliness, that God’s world and our world meet. Often it is a terrible place–an Easter massacre, or a September 11th. Often it is a place that looks hopeful, but has perilous implications—a Good Friday Accord, full of hope, but burdened by potential darkness.
If there is no resurrection, then death is always the victor. In fact, if Jesus is in the grave, then death is actually the arbiter of earthly order, and the hand that holds the sword is the hand that determines history. Rome always wins, and life remains in the hands of the powerful. There is neither justice nor hope.
But if there is a resurrection, the world is turned upside down. We realize that God’s grace is a kind of chaos, an interruption in the expected flow of life and history. It is unpredictable and untidy. It doesn’t tie up all the lose ends. In fact sometimes it confounds us by being a loose end itself, like the lose end of Mark, where we don’t exactly know and can’t exactly say precisely what happened.

Like the loose end that we experience in the dark night of the soul, when we wonder if God is even there. How can we ever be sure? But it’s true, anyway.

Like the loose end we experience when we go through doubt and depression and uncertainty about ourselves and the world. Are we really adequate? Do we really measure up in God’s sight? The answer is, of course not. But God loves us anyway.

God’s grace is a kind of chaos, but it is the chaos of hope.

The Sermon I Preached After Last Year’s NEXT Church Conference

The Presbyterian Church “NEXT church” conference is in Dallas at the end of this month. I found last year’s first NEXT con inspiring and educational. This is the sermon I preached on my return. It was Transfiguration Sunday.

 The Vision Glorious

1 Peter 1: 16-21

March 7, 2011

St. Stephen Presbyterian Church

Fort Worth, TX

Rev. Dr. Fritz Ritsch, Preacher

 This past weekend I attended the “Next Church” conference in Indianapolis. I always feel l have to explain that this isn’t the “Next Church” as in, “What’s the next church I’m going to be pastor of?” I’m not going anywhere. No, it’s “Next Church” as in, “What is the next church we, as a denomination, are becoming?” The conference brought pastors, elders, and seminarians together to discuss the future of the PCUSA. It was exciting but also sobering. I’ll start with why we are asking the question in the first place.

The PCUSA and denominational Christianity in general, appear to be at a crossroads. Our authority is no longer taken for granted. Indeed, the authority of the Christian message seems to be universally questioned. Both the church’s message and the forms we use to convey that message seem quaint and outdated, or worse, oppressive and exclusive. We seem both unwilling and unable to change with the times. Are we a dinosaur? Jurassic Church, hopelessly outdated and unable to survive the speeding, earth-shattering impact of the comet of change that’s transforming the world around us?

We need a miracle—but we’re rationalists, we don’t believe in miracles. So it’s up to us. The Jurassic church will save itself! It will self-evolve to adapt to the changing world. We’ll restructure and update our message so that it’s palatable for a New Age. Since we can’t count on God to perform the miracle needed to save the church, we’ll perform the miracle ourselves. Jurassic church the dinosaur will self-evolve into Cenozoic Church the mammal! From big, awkward and brain the size of a walnut to cute, furry, and cuddly! Then everyone will love us again and come running back to church!

 Good luck with that.

 This isn’t the first time the comet has come blazing into our uncomplicated dinosaur paradise threatening the church’s apocalypse. The very same thing happened to the church in 90 AD or so, the time of the writing of the Second Letter of Peter. The destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple had forced Christianity out from Judea and into the cosmopolitan, eclectic polyglot Greco-Roman world with it’s lose morals and cafeteria-style approach to religion. It was a world where any religion that promoted responsibility, humility and self-sacrifice was pronounced dead on arrival. Any religion that claimed that its god was the exclusive, one-and-only God would be laughed out of the room. It was a materialistic, high-speed, “this-worldly” world. Religion needed to know its place, and its place was clearly to serve human desires, not– perish forbid!–to suggest that humans serve God’s desires.

Right away leaders emerged telling the church it had to adapt or die. Then, as now, the temptation was strong to self-evolve from a clunky Jurassic dinosaur religion to a sleek, streamlined Cenozoic mammal religion that could survive in its new environment because it didn’t present a threat.

The time seemed perfect for the change. By 90 AD, all the old leadership was dead; Second Peter itself is written to be “last will and testament” of the Apostle Peter on his deathbed. Once he’s dead, that’s it. The bleary-eyed old generation was gone and the visionary new generation could step up with their new ideas and clean out the Jurassic parts of the faith. After all, anybody could tell you that ideas like the death and resurrection, the Lordship of Jesus, the Godhood of Christ, servant leadership and the Second Coming would never be able to survive in the modern, fast-paced world of the Second century!

 But Peter goes to his deathbed not bleary-eyed at all. “We did not pass on to you cleverly devised myths,” he tells his troubled fellow dinosaurs. “We were eyewitnesses to His majesty.” “We ourselves heard the voice come from heaven,” “This is my Son, my Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”

 On the mountain of Transfiguration, Peter, James and John saw their friend Jesus transfigured into the Ruler of the World, the Judge of humanity, the Redeemer of Creation and all its Creatures. It was Jesus not as a great man, like other great men; not as a visionary leader like other visionary leaders; not as the founder of a movement like other founders of movements; it was Jesus as the glorified Son of God, the ruler of the Universe, the Lord of Life. It was a lifting of the veil between this world and the real world.

Once Peter had seen the Transfigured Lord of Life, the present reality of the world as it is could never satisfy him. This world wasn’t the be-all and end-all. All the riches and blessings of this world, all of its definitions of success and failure, all of its pretensions of constant progress toward some kind of perfection–all of that was, as the Apostle Paul would have said, “rubbish compared to the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus as Lord.”

 Once the veil had been lifted, Peter believed in miracles. Miracles of both a personal and a more cosmic nature. Once, before he’d seen Jesus transfigured, Peter had asked exactly how many times must I forgive my brother—seven times? And Jesus had replied, No seventy times seven, meaning you must ALWAYS forgive your brother. And Peter had thought that was crazy, nobody could do that.

 But now he’d looked beyond the veil and seen an impossible world, an impossible world that had invaded THIS world, a miracle made flesh in his friend and mentor Jesus—and so he didn’t believe forgiving his brother was impossible. It would be a miracle if Peter could forgive his brother—but after the Transfiguration, Peter believed in miracles.

 It’d be a miracle if any human being could learn how to love his enemies—but Peter believed in miracles. It’d be a miracle if any part of human society could be constructed on the notion that “the last shall be first, and the first shall be last”—but Peter believed in miracles.

 And it would be a miracle if the church could survive the apocalyptic reality of sudden, cataclysmic change—but Peter believed in miracles.

 Do we believe in miracles? Because that’s what’s needed to save the church in this new age.  A miracle.

 But that’s nothing new. It’s ALWAYS been a miracle that the church has survived, and occasionally even thrived, in a world so contrary to the reality we profess. Oh, sure, we’ve committed sins the process. Sometimes we’ve attempted to ensure our survival by compromising our beliefs, our core values, by consciously attempting to self-evolve from dinosaur to mammal. It’s like a T-Rex putting on a rabbit fur coat and trying to deliver Easter eggs. It’s the ridiculous doing the absurd, it’s often grotesque or even horrific, and it doesn’t fool anybody.

Despite all this, the true church, those who hold fast to the Lordship of Christ, still survives and the Kingdom of God still bears fruit. It’s not because the church did good strategic planning or laid out a good five-year plan. It’s because of the grace of God. It’s a miracle.

 We are called to believe in a miracle. The glorified Jesus of the transfiguration is the King. He is the judge and redeemer of humanity and the cosmos. We need to reclaim our confidence in His Lordship.

 I know I’m making some people uncomfortable saying that. We live in a pluralistic society and we all want to get along, to have respect for a diversity of views. And we should. Also, we have a lot of folks in this church who are struggling with important questions of faith, and the last thing I want to do is squelch that. That’s part of the character and uniqueness of St. Stephen.

 But a refusal to assert the authority of the Gospel we preach is a HUGE contributor to the problem the Presbyterian Church is now facing. The traditional Presbyterian “style” has always been, “Let’s do good works and work for the betterment of the world, but let’s not say we’re doing it in the name of Jesus—that’s arrogant.” But that’s not bearing witness. 

Many of us were moved at the conference this weekend when a young seminarian who looked like Allen Ginsberg in a Rasta get-up went to the microphone and said, “I don’t do social justice and work with the homeless and do outreach to the poor because I’m a good person or a good citizen. I do social justice and outreach because I love and serve Jesus Christ as my Lord.” 

That’s witnessing. And that’s what it means to claim that Jesus is Lord. Jesus’ standards are love, compassion, bold outreach to the least of these, generosity, the last shall be first, giving of yourself for the sake of others, forgiveness and reconciliation, loving your enemies. Jesus stands for the Tikkun Olam, God’s active, compassionate healing of our broken world.

 To assert that Jesus is Lord is to say YOU BELIEVE THAT GOD STANDS FOR THOSE THINGS. That mercy, compassion, justice and forgiveness bear the authority of God as TRUTH and power of God TO CHANGE THE WORLD.

 I am not ashamed to proclaim that Gospel. I am not ashamed to say that such a God is my God, and that the Lord who stands for those things is my Lord.

The irony is that if the Jurassic Church weren’t so busy saving itself from the impending crisis, it’d realize that the world longs to believe that mercy, compassion, justice and forgiveness bear the authority of God as TRUTH and power of God TO CHANGE THE WORLD. They’d come running to church if that’s what we showed them in our life as a community. Running!

 But they don’t hear it or see it, because we’ve stopped believing in it ourselves.

 It would have been impossible, of course, for dinosaurs to self-evolve into mammals. And our attempts to save the church are likewise grounded in impossibility. One of the speakers at the conference compared the “Next Church” to a child that we bring to baptism. In the Presbyterian Church, we bring a child to baptism and commit that child into God’s hands. We assert that God’s grace to her precedes her ability to respond to it. We promise to raise her in the faith. We commit to serve as God’s family to shape her life as a disciple of Christ.

 But we don’t map out her future. We don’t lay out a schedule for who she’s going to be when she grows up into an adult. We can’t predict or control that. That’s between her and God. What we do is provide the environment and the opportunity for God to shape her into who she is going to become.

 As First John says, “Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: When Jesus is revealed, we will be like Him, for we will see Him as He is” (1 John 3: 2). We don’t know what we are becoming, but we know what we are: we are children of God. And so we know we can trust God with what we are becoming.

 That is the faith God calls us to—ultimately the faith we’re supposed to always have—the faith that everything is in God’s hands. Us, the world, the church—everything.

 If, like Peter, we keep the vision of the transfigured Christ, the King of Glory, before us, especially in the darkest times, then we’ll know the future is never in doubt.

The Church Come of Age

  By Rev. Fritz Ritsch, D. Min., Pastor, St. Stephen Presbyterian Church, Fort Worth, Texas

There was a moment at the NEXT Church Conference in Dallas that made my jaw set   and  my stomach clench. Read more →

Don’t Leave–Transfiguration Sunday

2 Kings 2: 1-12

Mark 9: 2-9

Rev. Dr. Fritz Ritsch, Preacher

When I started as pastor of a small church some time ago, I wanted to kick off with an officer’s retreat that dealt with some of the issues that the congregation had left over from when the previous pastor left. I had a conversation with the Christian educator, who’d been there several years and was quite sharp. He explained to me that people were extremely angry and felt betrayed that the previous pastor had left them. We agreed that a Biblical look at betrayal and abandonment would be a good start. Read more →

Timeline: Bonhoeffer and Church-Based Attempts to Resist Hitler, 1933-39

This is the timeline we’ll be using in The Northminster Sunday School Class, Sunday, Feb. 20, when we’re discussing Bonhoeffer’s attempt at Church-Based Resistance. Read more →

Ash Wednesday: the beginning of Lent

by Mark Scott, Music Minister

The Lenten season extends over a forty-six day period beginning Ash Wednesday and ending on Saturday evening prior to Easter Day.  However, the six Sundays in Lent are not actually a part of Lent (thus they are styled Sundays IN Lent rather than Sundays OF Lent) making the actual number of days in Lent 40.  The date of Ash Wednesday is determined by the date of Easter.  This year, Ash Wednesday is February 22. Read more →

Big Tent?

Former PC(USA) moderator and prolific blogger Bruce Reyes-Chow has started a petition drive called “There is more than one version of Christianity!” His point is that there is a great deal of diversity the Christian family. Christians need to be more tolerant of one another and the media and culture need to recognize Christian diversity, too. Read more →

Secret Agenda: Mark 1: 40-45

Rev. Dr. Fritz Ritsch, Preacher
February 12, 2012

St. Stephen Presbyterian Church
Fort Worth, TX

Our friend Sharon Curry, who went in December to serve as a missionary in the South Sudan, had to be evacuated almost as soon as she arrived because of ethnic violence. She has been frustrated by this, obviously—not only because she has been interrupted in the mission work she intended to do, but even more because she’s been in her placement in Akobo just long enough to get to know people. Now she is in a major city, Malakal, far from the fighting, hearing second-hand how overwhelmed her friend the local doctor is, and how all the families she’d just gotten to know are experiencing deaths and hiding in the forest, afraid to go to the hospital for fear that they’ll be killed by guerilla fighters. Read more →

“The Lord is Trying to Do Something Grand Through Us…Therefore We, God’s Servants, Arise and Build”

Our unofficial church historian, Cathy Corder, has unearthed some fascinating documents from the early days of St. Stephen. Most interesting are those that detail the process our predecessor church, Broadway Presbyterian, went through in deciding to move from its location across from present Broadway Baptist to this site. Read more →