Sermons

Who is This Really About?

Who is This Really About?

Rev. Dr. Fritz Ritsch, Preacher

May 7, 2012

When Margaret and I were visiting in Israel several years ago, our guide was Lee, a brilliant, vibrant lady in her seventies who was originally from Chicago and seemed to have boundless energy. Lee’s day job was as a social worker helping assimilate Jews migrating to Israel under the aliyah, Israel’s “law of return.” The law of return means that Israel will accept anyone into their country as a citizen who can make any legitimate claim to be Jewish, whether racial, religious, or cultural.

Lee’s area of expertise was also one of the most difficult of the aliyah. She was integrating immigrants from Beta Israel, the term that is used for Ethiopian Jews. Though world Judaism is surprisingly diverse, comprising languages and ethnicities and skin colors of all sorts, Ethiopian Jews have run into prejudice because of their black skin. They’ve also had problems because people question their right to claim to be Jewish. For one thing, they have been largely cut off from world Judaism, and as a result some of their practices and beliefs seem alien and strange. Secondly, they arrive poor and often uneducated, and thus in need of support from the Israeli social safety net.

But for another, there are questions about their origin. The origin of Ethiopian Judaism, or the falasha as they call themselves, is lost in antiquity. Some claim that the Queen of Sheba, the famous consort of King Solomon, bore a son by Solomon who brought Judaism to Ethiopia. That would place their founding as far back as the 9th century BC, but that’s unlikely. Another theory places the rise of Ethiopian Judaism after the fall of the Second Temple, half a century after the death of Jesus. A third places it later still.

All this means that anyone with a puritanical or racist streak in Israel can find the falasha an easy target. Lee’s job was to make sure that the absolute mandate of the aliyah succeeded. As far as she was concerned, the falasha, Beta Israel, were Jews, no matter how anyone else defined Judaism, and they have a right to live in the Jewish homeland.

“This is about who Israel is, and who we will be,” she told us at one point.

There’s some scholarly confusion about who the Ethiopian eunuch is. And to give you an idea of the perils and frustrations of writing a sermon, I went into this one with a pretty clear idea that I would be talking about a eunuch, a victim of a barbaric practice of genital mutilation that was quite common in the ancient world. Often the slaves of rulers and the powerful were mutilated so that they could serve without threat to women in their charge, and without any family connections that might tie them into the complex political machinations going on around them. In many cases this mutilation happened when they were very young. Often eunuchs could rise to positions of great authority, as is the case of this Ethiopian eunuch, who served the Candace, or queen of Ethiopia.

So I was thinking, this poor Ethiopian eunuch! What a horrible life he’s been through! And my whole sermon was going to start from, “Woe be to the poor Ethiopian eunuch!”

Then I discovered that actually he might not be a eunuch at all! See, by the time of Jesus, “eunuch” had become a term for anyone who served a powerful person in an official capacity. It’s like the term nurse, which once meant a woman nursing a baby, but now can mean a male health care provider.

And actually it doesn’t add up that he would be a physical eunuch. A physical eunuch would have been unclean. He wouldn’t have been allowed in the temple. He would have known that. It would have been pointless for the man to have travelled all that way only to be turned away at the door.

Nonetheless, Luke, the author of Acts, wants us to understand that the Ethiopian eunuch is a fringe character. He places the conversion of the eunuch in between the conversion of Samaritans and the conversion of Cornelius, the Italian centurion. Samaritans were considered really fringe Jews. Cornelius is the first “official” Gentile convert. So the eunuch is something worse than a fringe Jew but not quite a righteous Gentile–a man from a faraway, mysterious country, who may be a Jew or may not be, who may be a eunuch or may not be, who is totally unlike anyone that has been evangelized before. When he arrived in Jerusalem, would he have been greeted as a celebrity, because he was so unusual, or viewed with suspicion, for the same reason? And if he was a true eunuch, did the priests sneer and laugh, or recoil in horror? Did he get to enter the Temple grounds or was he, like the modern falasha, discriminated against, perhaps even relegated to the fringes as a pretender?

What we don’t know about him seems far more loaded than what we do know. Who is this man? But the Holy Spirit seems to think that converting the Ethiopian eunuch says a lot about what Christianity is to become.

The Spirit whisks the apostle Philip to the side of the eunuch’s chariot just as the man is reading the Book of Isaiah, Chapter 53, one the great “suffering servant” passages of Isaiah. The eunuch is so grateful to have Philip’s help in interpreting this scripture, he invites Philip to sit in his luxurious chariot with him. And whatever else we don’t know about the Ethiopian eunuch, we now know this: the man is what we call today a seeker, somebody who longs to know God, whose heart is thirsty to discover who God is in the world. In that culture, as in ours today, there were plenty of seekers. As do seekers today, they often practiced what’s called “cafeteria style” religion–they’d take a little bit of this and a little bit of that and come up with a belief system that worked for them. But they are always longing for more. They’re always aware of what some have called “the God-shaped hole.”

He is a seeker, and the Holy Spirit has sought him out. In a kind of Divine aliyah, God has sought out the lost eunuch and said, “I don’t care how much on the fringe you are, Jesus Christ is your home. You belong to here, by my side. You belong to Christ.”

The passage that perplexes the eunuch is perplexing to many of us. “As a sheep before the shearers is dumb, so he opened not his mouth… In his humiliation justice was denied him…” This is one of five “suffering servant” passages that we Christians ascribe to Christ, but that Jews ascribe to Israel itself. The idea is that this servant is suffering for the sake of the sins of the world and by his suffering, the world will be saved.

If the Ethiopian was indeed a physical eunuch, this passage might have resonated with him in a powerful way. He would have been mutilated as child of ten or eleven, forced to live a life of servitude in which he ultimately rose to the top, but always with the awareness of what he’d lost. If he was a physical eunuch he would have found himself turned away from the Temple, viewed as a sexual deviant, a scarred half-human unwelcome by God; so to read that someone in the bible felt and was treated as he was would have moved him profoundly.

But what if he wasn’t a real eunuch? What if he was just a really rich guy who’d always had a good life?

Well, let’s not engage in class warfare here. Rich successful people suffer. Everyone suffers. Everyone has need. Maybe it’s physical or social, but it’s also spiritual, emotional, and mental. The servant passages move us because they meet us where we are. Here’s a servant of God, suffering. Why would a good person suffer? Why is there suffering at all?

German theologian and martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer had more than his fair share of suffering and disappointment. By 1942, he’d sought unsuccessfully to resist the rise of Nazism and its anti-Semitic and imperialistic tendencies, first through the German Church and then through the ecumenical movement. Both had failed. He was by this point part of a conspiracy to kill Hitler and overthrow the government, which for him felt like a failure–he’d hoped he could overcome Hitler through nonviolence. Over the years he’d seen his friends and students arrested or killed in a war they were forced to fight. He would soon be arrested and ultimately executed. Bonhoeffer was an introspective man and had a slight tendency for melancholy, and he had every reason for despair. But he wrote his niece Marianne, who was going through confirmation, that,

There are so many experiences and disappointments that can lead to nihilism and despair, especially in a sensitive person. So it is good to learn early enough that suffering and God are not a contradiction, but rather a unity, for the idea that God is suffering is one that has always been one of the most convincing teachings of Christianity. I think God is nearer to suffering than to happiness, and to find God in this way gives peace and rest and a strong and courageous heart.[1]

It was to the suffering God that Philip introduced the Ethiopian eunuch in that richly appointed carriage between Jerusalem and Samaria. “Who is this about?” The man asked, and Philip replied, it’s about Jesus–the son of God who is with us in our suffering, whether it is suffering because of cruelty or social norms or somebody’s definition of deviance or racism or extreme sensitivity to the suffering of others, or grief, or the overwhelming power of temptation.

God meets us on the common ground we all share. We often say that common ground is sin–but that’s the one thing God doesn’t share in common with us humans. What God in Christ shares most in common with all humanity is suffering. We all suffer, ultimately, because we’re so far away from our spiritual homeland, the Kingdom of God. We all sense that we are exiles, far from God. We are all, in that sense, seekers, as lost from our spiritual roots and true home as the Ethiopian Jews of Beta Israel, living far away and unconnected in Africa for hundreds of years, must have felt.

But God’s aliyah seeks us out and welcomes us back. God’s aliyah meets humanity not at the point of reward, or victory, or certainty, but at the point where we are most weak and most vulnerable and feel furthest from God–suffering.

It’s important for the church today to remember this. We live in a world of seekers–a world of Ethiopian eunuchs. They are as diverse and exotic and alien to us churchgoers as the Ethiopian eunuch seemed to the Jews of Jerusalem. They could also to us, appear to be just as unclean.

But we are agents of God’s aliyah. We don’t have the right to discriminate, because God doesn’t discriminate. We tend to want them to be like we think churchgoers ought to be. Part of the game we play with ourselves is to believe that somehow we are exceptional or special and have the answers and are at some level above the suffering of others.

But what the Holy Spirit wants us to remember is that we and the seekers of the world meet god at the same place–the point of suffering. We aren’t a fenced-in enclave for the well, but a hospital for the sick, and that hospital has an open-door policy. We’re servants of the Holy Spirit who sought out the Ethiopian eunuch who was seeking God, and if we’re going to serve Jesus who taught that he came to seek and save the lost, then we’re called to do the same thing–whoever those seekers are, and wherever they may be found.

Actions Speak Louder Than Words

Actions Speak Louder Than Words

Acts 4: 1-10

By Rev. Dr. Fritz Ritsch

St. Stephen Presbyterian Church

April 29, 2012

Recently I think we were all impressed by the mayor of Newark, NJ, Cory Booker, who defied his security detail by running into a burning building to save the life of his next door neighbor. It’s hard not to be impressed by somebody like that. The very fact that he is willing to put his life on the line for somebody else makes you want to take what he says or does as a politician that much more seriously. And a friend on Facebook found something he said worth noting:

“Before you speak to me about your religion, first show it to me in how you treat other people. Before you tell me how much you love your God, show me how much you love all His children; before you preach to me the passion of your faith, teach it to me through your compassion for your neighbors. In the end, I’m not as interested in what you have to tell or sell as in how you choose to live and give.”

It sounds like Mayor Booker lives by the standard he promotes. Actions speak louder than words.

That is the situation the apostles are in in our reading from Acts today. They have demonstrated the power of their faith and compassion through their actions. They’ve gone to the temple and in front of a huge crowd, they have healed a man lame from birth. Now that they’ve done that, the crowd wants to hear what they have to say.

They say they have the power to do this because of Jesus Christ. “This man whom you see was made strong because of faith in Jesus’ name,” Peter tells the crowd.

But Peter then says, “You handed Jesus over to be killed,” he says. He tries to take the edge off a little. “My friends, I know you didn’t realize what you were doing. Neither did your leaders.”

At this point, Peter’s words, never mind the healing of the lame man, have drawn the attention of the very leaders Peter just mentioned. The headquarters of the Sanhedrin, the Jewish ruling council, were located right there on the Temple grounds. Several of the very men Peter is referring to, the ones responsible for the death of Jesus, are hearing what Peter is saying. They are nonplussed, and for a number of reasons, and not just because Peter is preaching the resurrection, which they don’t believe.

But Peter is also making what could be viewed as veiled accusations about their complicity in the death of Jesus. If Peter gets the crowd to believe that Jesus was a prophet sent by God, that puts the people who had him killed in a pretty awkward position. They decide they need to shut him up.

But the problem is, that the reason Peter’s words carry so much weight is that everyone has seen his actions. The Sanhedrin can’t just announce: these people are lying and can’t be trusted. People will say, well, what about the healed man?

So what to do?

They take Peter and John into the chambers of the Sanhedrin in private. Acts tells us who is there, and we need to pay attention to the list. “Annas, the high priest, was there. So were Caiaphas, john, Alexander and others of the high priests family.”

There’s a history problem here in that Caiaphas should still have been high priest, not Annas, but I’m betting the mistake was made because Annas, Caiaphas’ father-in-law, was the real head of the family. He’d been high priest 20 years before, and it was he who’d turned the high priesthood into a family-run crime cartel.

The author of Acts, Luke, wants us quite clear who Peter and John are dealing with: cold, vicious men who somehow think they have God’s sanction for criminality. To these the people Peter says, “You nailed Jesus Christ to the cross, but God raised him from the dead.” Peter challenges them, and they, these powerful people, don’t really know what to do. They try to order them not to preach about Jesus, but Peter and John say, “we’ll preach what God calls us to preach.”

And these powerful, cold blooded men can do nothing, because the healed man is standing right there with them.

Actions speak louder than words, but actions also give the words that we say power. Peter’s preaching wouldn’t have been a threat if the lame man hadn’t been healed first.

But the healing changed everything. It gave these unlearned preachers’ words power that they wouldn’t have otherwise. People were more likely to listen to what they said because of what they did.

Never underestimate the power of doing good.

But we do. We so rarely believe that doing good has any power at all, that it makes any difference at all. Whereas we tend to believe that evil has all sorts of power, and is extremely effective.

Let me suggest that our tendency sometimes to believe that evil is bound to be more successful than good is a kind of faith—a terrible, cynical, negative faith that buys into the power of death and denies the power of resurrection. I don’t mean to sound harsh here, but that’s what it is. Every time we say, that good thing won’t make a difference; every time we say, I better not try to help my neighbor, there’s too many risks; every time we think that helping the poor or the weak or loving our neighbor or our enemy is fruitless and a way for them to exploit us—we’re falling into a cynical faith in the power of death and the meaninglessness of the resurrection of Christ.

I’m not saying, don’t be realistic or practical. I’m not saying, run into every burning building because that’s what Cory Booker did. What I am saying, though, is that from the Christian perspective, buildings are burning all around us; people need saving right and left. And God calls us to do what we can, and to believe it makes a difference. Maybe it’s something we do by ourselves. But more likely, we form a bucket brigade with fellow church members. We do what we can, and sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t. But we cant just thro words at it: the building is burning, somebody needs to do something! We are called to act in compassion, trusting the power of the resurrectin.

the one thing Christians can’t do is believe that the fire of evil is undefeatable, so let’s hide away and protect ourselves. The world tempts us to believe in this negative faith, that good will never overcome evil in order to stop us doing what’s right. But we’re called by God, by the life and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, to practice a different sort of power, the power of good. The Biblical witness is always that doing good is hard and risky—there could even be a cross at the end. But if doing good was easy, it wouldn’t be so necessary. The people of the resurrection are called to have faith in the power of doing Good in the name of Christ.

Some friends of mine had that faith sorely tested recently. I did, too. When I was on the board of Presbyterian night shelter, we hired as an assistant executive director a man who had a criminal record but who, once out of prison, had reformed, been to grad school, and become a leading expert on homelessness in the state. We thought Dwayne would set a good example. I thought of Dwayne as a friend.

About a month ago, Toby Owen, the executive director of PNS, called to warn me that they’d initiated a criminal investigation against Dwayne. Turned out he’d been using two dummy corporations he’d invented to steal money from the shelter and from our vendors.

It was a shock to those of us who’d trusted and believed in Dwayne. It was tough on people like Toby, who is a strong Christian who truly believes in the mission of the shelter and believes that they are doing God’s work.

It was awful to see the headlines in the paper: “Former Shelter Executive Arrested.” Those words hurt. This is the sort of thing that other people notice and they say, see? That’s what’s wrong with the whole system.

They don’t notice that the Shelter has been placing clients in housing and in job training and in real actual jobs, that the Shelter is providing real hope and opportunity for vets and recovering addicts, that the lives of real people are being changed. Ironically, some of the most effective programs were designed by Dwayne himself. In spite of the evil he’s done, the good he has done is also making a difference.

No doubt there are people who think that the whole mission of the shelter is undermined by this. But not Toby. Not the other folks who work there. They’ve been shaken, by evil, but evil hasn’t derailed them, and it hasn’t overcome their faith in the good that God is doing through them. They still believe.

And because they believe, more and more lives will be changed. Quietly, without any headlines. But that’s okay.

Because actions speak louder than words.

Good Religion

Good Religion

 Rev. Dr. Fritz Ritsch

 Acts 3: 1-10

April 22, 2012

Political and cultural columnist Russ Douthat of the New York Times has written a book called “Bad Religion,” about the decline of Christianity as an influence on American culture. Douthat is a devout Roman Catholic and his thesis is that the fact that Christians no longer share some core beliefs that transcend “conservative” or “liberal” labels has contributed to the splintering of the nation as a whole.  

One of his points is that today American religion emphasizes doing good works but at the cost of relating it to worship. It’s as if we are good at “doing justice and loving mercy” but have lost track of “walking humbly with our God.”  

The story of the healing of the lame man in Acts 3 ties directly to this problem. The Bible says John and Peter meet him at the Beautiful Gate.  Problem is, nowhere else in the Bible or in history is there a Beautiful Gate mentioned in Jerusalem or the Temple grounds. So there are all kinds of theories. One popular one is that the Beautiful Gate was really the Nicanor Gate, which was located past the Court of the Women and near the altar where sacrifices were made. That would put it right at the holy center of the Temple Mount.

But that’s really unlikely. For one thing, the whole purpose of “unclean” laws was to separate the sick, the disabled, and the imperfect away from God and the community of God. The Nicanor Gate is almost right at the Holy of Holies—it would mean the lame man was actually closer to God than even the most reverent woman was allowed.  

For another thing, the scripture itself says the man followed Peter and John into the temple courtyards. If he was at the Nicanor Gate, he’d already be in the temple courtyards.  

The more likely candidate is what’s known as the Shushan Gate, located on the east side of the Temple grounds. There’s plenty of evidence that the lame, the sick, the “unclean” would gather on steps near gates directly outside of the Temple Grounds to beg.  There they could take advantage of the generosity of religious people, without actually polluting the Temple grounds with their imperfections. 

The normal routine, of course, would have been for the lame man to beg, and for people to give him money. Then those generous church-goers would enter the Temple grounds, feeling really good about their relationship to God, and the lame man would be carried home with his money. 

But Peter and John change that. First of all, they heal the man—that’s a bit more than a handout. But then, they and the newly healed man enter the Temple grounds together. Justice and good works lead naturally and joyfully to entering into the worshiping community and into God’s presence.  

This biblical story makes Douthat’s point: we shouldn’t separate worship and good works. It isn’t enough to do good or to be good. If that’s all there was to being Christian, what we’d be is a sanctified social agency. But as most of us know, there’s this church-going thing we do, too, where we gather and worship God. 

In fact, that particular thing is what makes religious institutions most different, and most unlike, anything else that goes on in the world. Religious people not only emphasize the horizontal relationship between human and human, but the vertical relationship between human beings and God.  

We don’t only talk about what’s earthly that needs to be fixed and made right, we talk about what’s otherworldly.  We talk about and seek mystery. We deal with humanity’s deep-seated longing to be bound up in something larger than ourselves. We pursue union with God. 

Douthat sees a larger problem for Americans today:  we emphasize “the God within” and forget that God is also outside of us. God is larger than you and me and all of us together. God is larger than our normal experience. If we just believe in the God within, then we can pretty much justify anything we do or believe and say that it is of God. We have to believe in a God that is larger than ourselves—and not just of us as individuals, but larger than all humanity, larger than all that is, with the potential to unify us to all that is.  

The lame man’s problem was that he was cut off from God, from mystery, from the holiest of holies. And he was cut off for any number of reasons.  

For one thing, society, even religious people, said he was inadequate. He was unworthy, not because of anything he had done, but simply because of who he was. In that sense, he was like any number of us who feel that somehow we have some innate disability that keeps us from being acceptable. Most of us struggle with that feeling deep inside anyway, but when you add to that that everybody else is looking down on you, then it seems the weight of the world is dragging you down. Somebody like that often benefits from claiming “the God within”—that in God’s eyes they are just as beautiful, just as loved, as anybody. 

If “the God within” was all any of us need, then Peter and John could have healed him and he could have thanked them and been on his merry way. He was good enough, he was whole enough, and he could probably figure out ways to worship God on his own, far away from all the religious people who’d told him his whole life that he wasn’t good enough.  He could go off to an ashram, or go to exotic restaurants and find joy in food, or find love in a faraway country. He could be as happy as anybody, and then write a self-help book about it.

Likewise, Peter and John could have congratulated him and moved on, happy that they’d done their good deed for the day. Like a lot of us have said over the years: Jesus wants us to do good for others, but let’s not try to force religion down anybody’s throat. That’s their personal choice.

But Peter and John knew that wasn’t enough. They weren’t about to force the formerly lame man to go into the Temple. They wouldn’t have handcuffed and dragged him in. But they knew that no one’s wholeness is complete unless they’ve also entered into the presence of God.

 Fortunately, John and Peter don’t have to convince the lame man. He goes into the Temple courtyard willingly, jumping for joy. I suspect that technically, he still wasn’t supposed to go into the courtyard. He probably needed to be officially pronounced clean by a priest and to take a ceremonial bath. But those were details that neither he nor the Apostles saw much need for.  As far as God was concerned, the man was ready. The question was, would all those religious people be ready to receive him?

 The formerly lame man had now experienced something that all those religious people in the Temple desperately were searching for: he’d experienced mystery. He’d experienced wonder. He’d experienced the healing love of God. It was completely outside himself. He was surprised by joy, as CS Lewis described it—he’d experienced the unexpected and unearned grace and love of God through Jesus Christ. That’s so often true of people who’ve been through the hard knocks of life—of addicts, or of those who’ve struggled with life-threatening illnesses or loss, or abuse or deep personal pain, and have found their way to the other side. They know that they didn’t do that by their own strength, or by the God within. There was a God outside, a God larger than their own personal resources, who pulled them up when they were cast down.  This God larger than human understanding has called them into the deep mystery and wonder of God’s presence.  

But sometimes the church has a hard time seeing that.  

The formerly lame man dancing and skipping into the crowds in the Temple grounds is a messenger sent by the God who is larger than the God of the church. He represents God who is larger than our limited perception—the God of mystery, the God who bedevils us because God never fits into our neatly diagramed theological or cultural definitions of God.  The American church over the past few decades has been deeply troubled by this God who is outside of us. She danced out of the segregated court of the women and demanded that God’s people treat Her as an equal. He marched up the sidewalk and banged on the door of our segregated white churches and demanded we stop treating Him as a second-class citizen. He showed up with his partner and asked to be able to worship God as a couple the same way a married couple can come worship God. She showed up in her wheelchair and challenged us to make it easy for her to come to church and worship God like people who can walk on two normal legs.  

And our sense of who God is and where God is and just exactly how large God is has expanded every time this has happened. The mystery of God has been deepened for us because we’ve found that mystery in our own community, in our differences, in our distinctiveness, in the ways we’ve helped broaden one another.  We, you and I, are God to one another, the God outside, challenging each other to grow and to change.

By expanding our worshipping community, we’ve made our worship more meaningful. We’ve delved more deeply into the mystery of God.  

Ultimately I think Douthat is right that we have made a mistake in segregating social justice and worship. We need both. But I’m not convinced yet that our splintering and differences is completely bad. I think God is challenging us from the outside, through massive societal change, through people we have always been able to ignore, through threats and opportunities undreamt of in our former philosophy.

 The church today is in a process of discovering in new and exciting ways, through challenging ideas and people, the height and depth and breadth of the love and mercy and grace and mystery of the God we know through Jesus Christ. And if we trust the guidance of the Holy Spirit, we know that ultimately, that can only be a good thing.

Easter Sunday: Go and Tell

Isaiah 25: 6-10

Mark 16: 1-8

By Rev. Dr. Fritz Ritsch, Pastor

April 8, 2012

St. Stephen Presbyterian Church

Fort Worth, TX

 “And the disciples all deserted him,” Mark tells us. First, Jesus told them to watch and pray with him, but they didn’t know how, so they fell asleep. Then the soldiers came and Jesus told them they couldn’t defend him with swords, and they didn’t know what to do, so they ran. The other gospels bear out that the disciples were so frightened that they were hidden away in a locked room. They left their Lord to die on a cross, alone. Read more →

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 →

Maundy Thursday 2012: Handle With Care

by Rev. Dr. Warner Bailey, Parish Associate

1 Corinthians 11.17-34

April 5, 2012

             They didn’t celebrate communion in the Greek city of Corinth like we do today.  For one thing, they always came to church in the evening, and the worship service was like a supper we have from time to time in parish hall.  Everybody brought their own crock-pot full of a soup or stew, or a picnic basket filled with fruit or bread or cheese.  Everybody, that is, who could afford to buy and cook food, brought it.  For the church at Corinth contained both people who had money to use and people who did not.  Both people who had leisure time and could come at the regular supper time and people whose jobs forced them to come later.  Both people who were free citizens and people who were slaves.   The people who were forced to work long hours for little or no pay could not get to church on time.  They were always late.

You might ask how the Corinthian congregation came to have in it such a wide variety of people: rich and poor, slave and free, the “upstairs” people who had lots of time and the “downstairs” people, those who were always at the beck and call of someone else.  Well, the Corinthian church had such a variety due to Paul’s way of being a minister.

Paul did not spend every day as a minister seeing people in a church office or visiting the hospitals or calling on homebound or meeting with community leaders.  The Corinthian congregation could not afford that kind of a minister.  Paul had to take on a day-job to earn money to cover his expenses.  That day-job was tent-making, and Paul used his skills as a tent-maker to support himself and his work.

Everybody needed the skills and products of the tent-maker, so Paul would come into contact with many people from all walks of life as they came through the tent-maker’s shop.  It was there, as a tent-maker, that Paul made contacts with rich and poor, slave and free, salaried and hourly wage earner.  As Paul talked with them, he was able to issue the invitation to come to the Christian church he was leading in the evening.  And so, that’s how rich and poor, slave and free, those who worked nine-to-five and those who punched the clock came to make up the congregation.

This congregation would gather on a Sunday evening for worship around a pot-luck supper.  And this supper of whatever people brought became the time and the place to celebrate the Lord’s Supper, our Holy Communion.  Now here’s how it was supposed to work.  Everyone had to wait until all arrived and found a seat.  Everyone: rich and poor, slave and free, those who worked nine-to-five and those who punched the clock, the “upstairs” and the “downstairs” folk.  Then a loaf of bread would be broken and thanks spoken to God.  But right at that moment the minister would also add these words, “Jesus said, ‘This is my body broken for you.  Do this in remembrance of me.’”  After that, the supper would begin with everybody getting a share in what was brought.  When all had eaten enough, then the minister would lift up a cup and say, “Jesus said, ‘This cup is the new covenant in my blood.  Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.’”  They began with the first part of the Lord’s Supper, then ate a pot-luck supper, then finished with the last half of the Lord’s Supper. The worship continued with singing, prophesying, and speaking in tongues.  And so, feeding upon the Body of Christ and feeding as the Body of Christ were folded seamlessly into each other.

Now that’s how it is supposed to have been.  Trouble was, things were terrible.  People were simply ugly to each other.  There was class warfare inside the Corinthian Christian community.  The rich people, the free people, those who worked nine-to-five—they could get to church on time, and they would begin right on time to eat.  They would begin with Jesus’ words, “This is my body broken for you.” and would promptly dive in to what they had brought.  By the time the poor people, the slaves, and those who punched the clock got there, all the food would have been eaten, all the wine would have been drunk, all the places at the table would have been taken, and they would be forced to sit on the outside, tired, unfed, humiliated, watching fellow Christians behave in drunken ways.

These “Johnny’s come lately” had neither time nor money to prepare their own food to contribute.  In fact, some of them may have prepared the very food for their masters to take to find that it was all eaten before they got there.  The folk who arrived late were counting on the patience and generosity of others who lived in more fortunate circumstances than they.  After all, Paul had told them that counting on the patience and generosity of others was what living as part of the body of Christ was all about.  They were sadly disappointed to find only crumbs and spilled wine left on the table.  And to be looked down upon through the bleary eyes of drunks.

Now I have been to ancient Corinth, and I have seen the house that is reputed to have been the location of the Corinthian church.  It is a modest home affording but a crowded space for a gathering such as this.  If the “downstairs” folk were lucky, they might arrive, all out of breath, to stand outside the main dining room just in time to hear the minister say—to hear but not to see—to hear the minister say, “Jesus said, ‘This cup is the new covenant in my blood.  Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.’”  They would get there for half a sacrament and go home un-fed, unwanted, and shut-out.  In the congregation at Corinth they practiced class warfare at communion.

And this is why Jesus died on the cross and established this meal as a memorial of his death?  And is this what Jesus means when he says, “This is my body broken for you.”?  And is this what Jesus means when he says, “This cup is the new covenant, the new arrangement between humanity and God and among humanity itself, the new community with God and humans, in my blood.”?  Does Jesus mean for us to take his sacrifice for us and to be so out for ourselves, for our personal walk with the Lord, for our personal salvation and comfort, for our very own intense spiritual experience, that we blindly see ourselves separate from the rest of the world, not having to adjust our own behavior to take into consideration the lives of others who are different than we are?

Now we can appreciate the full thunder of Paul’s anger at the Corinthians.

What!  Do you not have homes to eat and drink it?  Or do you show contempt for the church of God and humiliate those who have nothing?…Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be answerable for the body and blood of the Lord.  Examine yourselves…For all who eat and drink without discerning the body, eat and drink judgment against themselves.  For this reason many of you are weak and ill, and some have died….But when we are judged by the Lord, we are disciplined so that we may not be condemned along with the world.

This sacrament comes to us in a package stamped “Handle with Care.”

“Were you there when they crucified my Lord?” sings the spiritual.  “Sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble.”

• God entered into the pain and poverty of the world to remake us from the inside-out through the power of suffering, unconditional love!   Such a God who loves us so much ought to make you tremble, tremble.
• The penalty of God’s verdict on our gross selfishness and greed is death!  Because God loves us so much, God took upon God’s self that penalty.  Such a God ought to make you tremble, tremble.

This sacrament makes plain before you the cost God shelled out in love to create a new covenant.  The holiness of God’s new covenant is rooted in the blood and gore of God’s Son.

Consequently, God will do whatever it takes to preserve God’s new covenant so that it blesses the poor as equally as is does the rich, the slave as much as it does the free, the wage-roll as much as it does the salaried.   And when it comes to the Lord’s Supper, God insists that we do something as simple as waiting on each other, feeding each other, including each other.

“Here, O our Lord, we see You face to face,” so begins a familiar communion hymn.  “Here would we touch and handle things unseen,”—but Handle With Care.  Don’t live as a pig and pretend to call it communion.

I once heard the Anglican liturgical theologian Massey Shepherd relate a story of an Episcopal congregation in California who in the early days of the civil rights struggle decided that while blacks would be welcome at the communion rail, they would not be invited to the coffee hour.  Massey Shepherd commented, “They were not welcomed at the sacrament that really mattered.”  When we practice class warfare in the church, God’s judgment says, “Shape up!  Shape up to the sacrament!  Be the Body of Christ broken and poured out for the world.”

Are we in the West the ones who are eating before all the rest and thinking of ourselves as so religious?   Is our religiosity actually the source of judgment upon us?   In the light of the judgment that is attached to this sacrament, perhaps our famous “American paradox” becomes more understandable—the richest, most powerful, most religious nation suffering from higher rates of poverty, infant mortality, homicide and HIV infection, and from greater income inequality, than other advanced democracies.[i]  Listen to the pain of our own citizens; listen to your own pain.  This sacrament tells us that Jesus is in our pain to comfort, to console, to heal.  But he is also saying to us in our pain, “Shape up.  Shape up to be the body that I died for.”

Discerning the body.  The sacrament of the Lord’s Supper comes in a package stamped, “Handle with care.”  Here are the expectations that come with discerning the body.

• That body was also broken for poorer Christians whose needs cannot be ignored by richer.
• That broken body was Christ’s self-denial for the benefit of others which we are to imitate.
• Eating and drinking in remembrance of Christ’s death obliges us to die with Christ to our sinful selves so that we can be set free to love others actively.

PLANNED BEFORE TIME BEGAN; LIBERATED IN THIS PRESENT AGE; IMMEASURABLY LOVED IN AGES TO COME (i)

Numbers 21.4-9   Psalm 107   Ephesians 2.1-10   John 3.14-21

 The Rev. Dr. Warner Bailey, Preacher

March 18, 2012  

To preach from the epistle to the Ephesians is a daunting challenge both for the preacher and for you, who must listen.  Paul’s language is high-flying, abounding in multiple meanings, and frankly just a bit weird.  So I have organized this sermon into three parts as you can see from the title: Planned before Time Began; Liberated in this Present Age; Immeasurably Loved in Ages to Come.  You see the progression goes chronologically from past to present to future.  But that’s not how I’m going to proceed.  I will begin with the middle phrase, Liberated in this Present Age, then move to the first phrase before ending with the third. Read more →

The Next Church and the Others–Mark 8: 31-38

March 4, 2012

Rev. Fritz Ritsch, D. Min., Preacher

St. Stephen Presbyterian Church

Fort Worth, TX

Six St. Stephen members and I dared the trek to Dallas this week for the second Next Church Conference, which was at First Pres. It’s always good to go to these things for me. I get to see old friends, make new ones, and get new ideas. The purpose of this conference is to envision what God is planning for the future of the PCUSA. It was inspiring and challenging.

But there was a moment at the NEXT Church Conference in Dallas that made my jaw set and my stomach clench.

The director of the Ecclesia Project, the Rev. Judd Hendrix, was speaking. The Ecclesia Project intentionally cultivates bi-vocational pastorships–pastors with “real” jobs who are pursuing alternative ways of creating churches. It sounds kind of fun, out of the box, the kind of thing Presbyterians don’t normally do–a guy starting a running ministry, a French-speaking African fellowship, that kind of thing. Way to go, I’m thinking.

Then Hendrix starts on me. 

What’s standing in the way of more creative, exciting ways of doing church?

Hendrix tells me that I am.

Me, because I am professional clergy and my salary and pension and all my future and  my family’s future and even my congregation’s self-understanding are tied up in the fact that I am a professional, full-time clergy person. I am standing in the way of my congregation doing ministry because they count on me to do it for them. I am standing in the way of creative, out-of-the-box ways of doing church because churches that can’t afford a teaching elder are called “dying churches.” I’m standing in the way of non-traditional ways of developing and installing clergy because I’ve got a very strong investment in the present job description.

Hendrix asked, “How many of you are ruling elders here today?” Half the hands went up.

“You–don’t–need–us,” Rev. Hendrix said.

And my jaw set and my stomach clenched because he was right.

And a quote from Bonhoeffer’s letters from prison kept running through my head:

“The church is the church only when it exists for others. To make a start, it should give away all its property to those in need. The clergy must live solely on the freewill offerings of their congregation, or possibly engage in some secular calling. The church must share in the secular problems of ordinary human life, not dominating, but helping and serving. It must tell people of every calling what it means to live in Christ, to exist for others. … It will have to speak of moderation, purity, trust, loyalty, constancy, patience, discipline, humility, contentment, and modesty.  It must not under-estimate the importance of the human example…; it is not abstract argument, but example, that gives its word emphasis and power.” (Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, New York: Macmillan (SCM Press), 1971. P. 383)

Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote this as a prisoner of the Nazis in 1944. It was the thesis of a projected book, his response to “humankind come of age.” Bonhoeffer believed that the modern world had outgrown traditional Christianity. God had become unnecessary to the human equation, replaced by science and humanism. Some in the church complained bitterly about the change, about “the unreasonable costumer” like a lot of businesses do when the public no longer wants their product.

But Bonhoeffer was proposing adaptive change. Change to meet a changing world, he said. The church must abandon its paternalistic approach to ministry and allow the capable, independent faithful to be the body of Christ. The church must shed itself of its conservatism–by which Bonhoeffer meant its investment in keeping things the way they are–by ridding itself of property and special status in the state. Clergy must be bi-vocational, taking “real” jobs and subsisting on “goodwill offerings.”

Most important, he says, we need to shed ourselves of arguing about belief and dogma and focus instead on what we do. “It is not abstract argument, but example, that gives [the church's] word emphasis and power.” He even pushes that further, proposing “revising the creeds (the Apostles’ Creed); revision of Christian apologetics; reform of the training for the ministry and the pattern of clerical life.”

I think that some seventy years after his death, the time may finally have come for Bonhoeffer’s vision to become reality.

Bonhoeffer would have appreciated the theme of theologian Stacey Johnson’s presentation at the Next church con. Johnson called us back to the “logic of the cross.” The logic of the cross is that death leads to resurrection. “Our future is with God,” Johnson said. But we’ve been operating on the logic of survival–the fear of “perishing,” of death. Instead of daring the new, we’re invested in protecting the old. Faith calls us to risk and to dare, to try adaptive change, and to trust God with the future. Survival thinking makes us focus on technical change–how to get more people in the pews, whether to use traditional or contemporary music, that sort of thing. But what’s needed is nothing less than death and resurrection.

That’s what Jesus means when he tells his disciples, in our passage for today, that “If anyone would come after me, let them take up their cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it; and whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel will find it. For what will it profit anyone to gain the whole world and forfeit her life?”

“The church is the church only when it exists for others,” Bonhoeffer said.

That became one of Bonhoeffer’s most important definitions of the church. The church is called to exist for Jesus Christ, first of all; and second of all, in its concrete form, to exist for others. This was the source of his personal outrage at the way the German church had failed to stand against Nazism. The church had tried so hard to survive that they’d lost the heart of the Gospel. They’d gotten wrapped up in themselves and forgot the Other. So the church didn’t speak out when the Jews, who Bonhoeffer called Christ’s brothers and sisters, had been horribly persecuted; the church hadn’t stood against the unjustified horrors of a war Germany had started. They’d been afraid of dying, so they did not live for Christ.

“The church is only the church when it exists for others.” Jesus calls us, individually and corporately as the church, to put others ahead of ourselves, to actively seek Christ in the neighbor, the stranger, and the enemy. But too often all of us get wrapped up in, what is my church doing for me? What am I getting out of church?

And we pastors get caught up in that, too. We get a lot of perks from being pastors, not just the obvious ones. One psychological one is that it’s so nice to feel needed. That’s why a lot of us got into the ministry in the first place, after all—we wanted to feel needed. And so we often unconsciously create an atmosphere where a church can’t seem to be a church without us. Hendrix, of the Ecclesia Project, pointed out that the way we define a “dying church” is that it’s a church that can’t afford a pastor. But why is that?  he asked. It’s not the pastor who is supposed to be Christ’s presence in the world—it’s the church!

At the risk of my own job security, I say again: You don’t need us. You are the church of Jesus Christ.

My job as your pastor, our job as your staff, is to enable you to fulfill your calling to be Christ’s presence in the world. Bizarrely, that means that I need to be working to put myself out of a job.

But your job, as the church, is to be the church. Our job as Christians is not to look for the perks and benefits of being Christians, of being on God’s good side, but to put our needs and wants on the backburner, and to put Christ and neighbor and stranger and enemy first.

St. Stephen is quite gifted at reaching out to the Other. It’s one of the things people remark on when they join the church—they like our mission outreach, our intentional inclusiveness, our focus on the community. For instance, after church today the Mission Committee will have a meeting to discuss plans for a summer mission trip to replace the Mexico mission trip we used to make. What’s wonderful about that is that we aren’t allowing adverse circumstances to sideline our focus on mission. Can’t go to Mexico? Go someplace else instead. No matter what, focus on the Other. The church is the church only when it exists for others.

The challenge to all of us is to remember, the gospel isn’t about ourselves, about our survival as a church, about our personal salvation or how God can make us rich and happy, or God and the church helping me when I’m in trouble. “The church is the church only when it exists for others.” Who are the others that God is calling us to exist for? How can your pastoral staff support you and enable you to minister to those others—to reach out to others in need and welcome others into the church?

When we are thinking about others, and not about ourselves, then we’re the church of Jesus Christ. If we lose ourselves for Christ’s sake and for the Gospel, we will surely find out who it is that Christ is calling us to be. Only when we lose ourselves in Christ do we find ourselves.

Covenant: Genesis 9: 8-17

By Rev. Dr. Fritz Ritsch

St. Stephen Presbyterian Church

Fort Worth, TX

February 26, 2012

You probably remember the discussions between Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell after Hurricane Katrina about their belief that this natural disaster had hit New Orleans because of the city’s acceptance of gays and lesbians but also because of their sexual immorality in general. Their perspective was of course offensive at many levels, but it also reflects some pretty commonly-held notions about how God has ordered the universe. Basically the notion is that God has ordered things on a reward-and-punishment system. Bad natural occurrences, like earthquakes or famines or hurricanes, are sent as punishment by God for our moral misbehavior; likewise good things like a successful crop or a child born healthy and whole are the results of good behavior. 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 →