Lead us not into temptation

Yesterday I wrote a post on Quietly Courageous: Leading the Church in a Changing World. You can find that post here.

I wanted to share two stories/metaphors/images that I find very powerful and inspirational: the story of the courage it took to cross the Red Sea and the little boy whose mother told him to follow the light. 

But I perhaps should have added the three temptations Rendle sees that keep us from such quiet courage. The are real - and if we don't name them it's easy to falter. In short, these three are: (1) The Temptation to Play it Safe (Nostalgia); (2) The Temptation of Christian Empathy; and (3) The Temptation of Tiredness. 

A brief word about each of these. 

First, nostalgia. We've know in the mainline denominations for some time that we aren't going back to the Eisenhower administration - back to full Sunday School classes and all that the early years of the Baby Boom meant, for better or worse. But we also know we aren't even going back to 2019. There is only forward. Step into the water. Follow the light. Keep moving forward. 

The third one, next. I keep hearing how tired our clergy are - and I know that's how they feel. I do get it. But the way to resist this temptation isn't about more sleep, is about renewed purpose. I got an email just yesterday from an ordained person I adore who just completed a continuing ed opportunity that has her all jazzed up. It unleashed something real. And when we are following our true purpose the work can be hard but it's also usually energizing. When we are "too tired" we miss those invitations, however. 

I put that one first because since the pandemic began, not a week has gone by when I haven't heard that said to me. I felt a bit of it myself, I will admit - but fortunately a year ago I got a much-needed sabbatical and I did learn (re-learn) for myself that it wasn't more sleep I needed but perspective. I think we overcome the "temptation to tiredness" by learning to pray Neibuhr's famous prayer about the courage to change the things we can change but also acceptance of that which we cannot change; and the wisdom to know the difference. 

I am a natural empath, and in my diocesan work, which includes being a pastor to clergy, I realize that the greatest of the three temptations for me personally has been the temptation to empathy. And empathy sounds so good - especially in a world where there is seemingly so little of it. It's even the kind of thing that makes people like you!

But Rendle says (and I think he's right) that "unchecked empathy favors relationship over purpose." The late Rabbi Ed Friedman addressed this in A Failure of Nerve and Rendle acknowledges his dependence upon Rabbi Friedman in his own work. I'll conclude this post with a quote from Rendle that speaks to me almost directly, as I try to find the quiet courage needed in this time and place - and to resist the temptation to overuse empathy. 

Empathy unchecked, I will argue, can lead to paralysis. Unchecked empathy for the pain that is seen in strained denominational systems and communities can easily become a Christian strength practiced to the point that it becomes a missional weakness. As noted in Chapter 5, strengths overused become weaknesses. Empathy overused, while continually rewarded, will lead to weakness in mission. 

We need, in this time and place, to be reminding one another that God needs for us to be the Church, to do our jobs, to be faithful witnesses to the good news made known in Jesus.  

Courage

I  just finished reading a book called Quietly Courageous: Leading the Church in a Changing World, by Gil Rendle. Several friends whose judgment I trust greatly on these things had recommended it to me, as I now recommend it to you. 

Rendle focuses on the adaptive challenges that face the Church today; this is not a "how-to" on technical fixes. He begins by unpacking a metaphor for the kind of "quiet courage" he seeks, a story that comes from our Jewish cousins by way of midrash. I think we Christians have so much to learn from Jews about how to read Scripture. Too many of us in the Christian tradition have learned to read the Bible dogmatically in order to "prove" what we already believe. But Jews tend to read Scripture as way to generate conversation and questions and cultivate imagination.

So you know the story of the Exodus and the parting of the Red Sea as Moses and a band of slaves escape Egypt. Midrash simply means an oral tradition that emerges in conversation with the text. It’s a bit like the Sunday School curriculum Godly Play, learning to ask questions like: I wonder…

The midrash that Rendle shares in Quietly Courageous goes like this:

When the Hebrews got to the water’s edge they sat down and argued about who would step into the water first. Keep in mind the Egyptian army is in pursuit. Finally Nashon, son of Amminidab gets up. This talking could go on forever – he steps into the water, up to his ankles. Nothing happens. He keeps going, up to his waist. Still, nothing happens. Up to his chin but still the waters don’t part. Finally, when he takes the step that puts his nose under water, the waters part.

Rendle suggests that quiet courage is like this and the Church could use a double portion these days. He says that what Nashon remembered was why they were there in the first place. He remembers purpose and promise and knows that what is required is to trust in that and keep moving. How are we going to be the church in a changing world? Likely it won’t be something that the Bishop or a Canon or a General Convention does. It’ll take lots of Nashons with quiet courage. 

We are at the Red Sea, and the only way to go is forward, through it. And we may have to walk beyond our ankles, beyond our waists, up to our noses before the waters part and we move into the wilderness for forty years or so, in search of the Promised Land. The journey ahead will be a long one. It’ll require quiet courage, not just from Moses but from the Nashons who may or may not be ordained leaders. 

I take heart in remembering the Wizard of Oz and Dorothy’s traveling companions. This post is about courage, the gift the cowardly lion was seeking. We also need heart, and brains, for the journey that lies ahead but those are posts for other days.

I think what the lion learns in The Wizard of Oz (or at least what we learn as readers) is that courage is not the absence of fear. That’s not possible. Those who studied French will remember that the French word for heart is coer and that’s the root in courage which is not about the absence of fear but about facing our fears and doing it anyway – doing what we need to do like that lion, like Nashon. We may need some outward and visible signs – as the lion does – to remind us but in truth it’s inner work, it’s quiet work. It’s not about negating fear, it’s about facing it head on.

If we spend all of our energy trying to keep things the same, trying to save our lives or the life of what we value and know, it’ll be a losing cause. What Jesus says is that those who follow him by way of the cross may lose their lives, lose their bearings, even get lost – but in so doing they will find new life. That is the mystery of cross and empty tomb, of death and resurrection.

At the end of this book Rendle tells another story - this one about a young boy who lived on a farm. He was instructed by his mother to go out on a pitch-dark night to make sure the barn door was closed and locked. He left through the back door but immediately returned, telling his mom it was too dark. She handed him a flashlight and told him to try again but again he came back pretty quickly. He said the flashlight was too weak and he couldn’t see the barn. His mother said, “you don’t need to see the barn…you just need to walk to the end of the light.”

So it is with us as well. We may not yet see the Promised Land. We may not even yet be across the raging waters of the Red Sea. But we can walk to the end of the light. We can take the next steps, with God’s help. As followers of Jesus we keep our eyes on him, who illumines the path for us to grow as we go.  

Paul's Letter to the Church in Rome

 The past two weeks I have been a bit more in "lecture mode" in my preaching - and began with some apologies for doing so. I was at Christ Church, Fitchburg on Trinity Sunday and basically "preached" on the Nicene Creed - since the Trinity is not a Biblical idea. And then this past week I did an overview of Romans at Church of the Atonement in Westfield.

In both cases I got a lot of "compliments" at the door. Now some of this is attributable to kindness and hospitality, I realize. But I also have long wondered whether we could do with more "teaching sermons" at a time when people are hungry for something beyond what they got in Sunday School. While this won't become my "go to" style soon, perhaps this overview of Romans will help preachers and parishioners alike to hear the epistle in new ways over the next fourteen Sundays. 

One of my favorite collects in The Book of Common Prayer will come at the very end of this long season after Pentecost, twenty-three weeks from now. It goes like this:

Blessed Lord, who caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning: Grant us so to hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them, that we may embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life, which you have given us in our Savior Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen

This is a core-value for Episcopalians – a part of our DNA. We don’t tend to say things like “The Bible Says.” Rather, although more cumbersome, we believe that we approach meaning when we hear and read and mark and learn and digest – AND also that Scripture points us toward the living Word of God, Jesus.

Over the course of a year we read a lot of Scripture in our worship. And we do so with a sense of purpose, with a plan. We are in the midst of Year A, when the focus is on Matthew’s Gospel. Over these summer months, however, we also will be reading from Genesis for a while and from Paul’s Letter to the Romans for even longer. In fact, today marks the first of fourteen weeks in a row – that takes us well into the fall – of reading from Romans. This sermon will be a little bit different than most I preach and probably from most you are used to hearing. It’s a kind of preview on how to read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest those epistle readings in the weeks ahead, regardless of whether or not Sandi chooses to preach on them. My hope is that as you hear this letter unfold, today’s sermon will give you some help in hearing “good news” from this first-century document and maybe even, by God’s grace, to encounter St. Paul again as if for the first time. That begins, for me in seeing Paul in his context: as a faithful Jew, of the tribe of Benjamin, from Tarsus.

Think about the impact of place on your own life, especially during your most formative years. It makes a difference whether you grew up in a small town in northeast Pennsylvania or the south-side of Chicago! How has that particular place shaped the person you are today, and left its mark on you? How does it continue to shape the way you see the world?

Tarsus no doubt left its mark on Paul. It was at the crossroads between the eastern and western worlds, making it pretty cosmopolitan. Located near the Mediterranean, it was a thriving place where hard work was rewarded. And it was a kind of college town: think Northampton or Amherst. We might say that you can take the boy out of Tarsus, but you can’t take Tarsus out of the boy; and it seems clear that Paul remained pretty comfortable with multiculturalism, was extremely hard working, and was also highly educated. [1]

Paul alludes in some of his letters to a recurring problem; what he calls a “thorn in his side” that stayed with him his whole life. Scholars have long speculated about what that might have been, often telling us much more about themselves in the process than about Paul. Most of us deal with our own “thorns,” so projection is easy enough to understand. But it seems to me that a theory at least as credible as any I’ve read is that perhaps Paul suffered from chronic malaria, since malaria was rampant in Tarsus. The recurring symptoms would have included profuse sweating and fevers and vomiting and severe headaches that would have come and gone over the course of Paul’s entire lifetime. We can’t know for sure, but as a theory it reveals a “shadow side” of being from Tarsus.[2]

If I were to give you a quiz today, and ask you about Paul’s “conversion,” my bet is that most of you would tell me something about the story we get second-hand from Luke in Acts: Paul became a changed man on the Road to Damascus. Right? He had been persecuting the Church, but then he had this dramatic encounter with the risen Christ. He was blinded, but then he saw. He repented, and then became a Christian; going on to then write all those letters, including Romans.

But when Paul tells us about his faith journey in his own words, in a first-person narrative in the eleventh chapter of Galatians (1-17) —his autobiographical version turns out to be a lot less dramatic than Luke’s story. After his encounter with the risen Christ, he tells us that he went away to think and ponder and pray about what had happened to him for three years. He then emerged to have a heart-to-heart with Peter and James in Jerusalem, and then he goes away for another fourteen years before beginning his public ministry. My point here is not that you can’t integrate these stories, but rather that Luke tends to focus on the dramatic event (and we do too) while Paul’s own story seems to focus on the lengthy period of discernment and trying to sort it all out and live into it.[3]  Even if there was a sudden, dramatic turning—an “epiphany” that occurred at a datable moment in time—conversion happens over a much more extended period of time.

Paul was a “church planter.” He would go and start a new congregation in a place like Corinth or Thessalonica and then organize them into house churches, educate them for ministry for a year or so, and then move on to the next city where he would do the same thing all over again. From time to time he’d correspond with these communities and send along his greetings and pastoral advice, especially when things started to get out of hand. Paul had a lot of experience with church conflict. All of his other letters in the New Testament were written to congregations that he knew, and that knew him; and you see this in the informal parts of his letters when he says things like, “tell Chloe I said hey!”

Romans is different, though. This letter was probably written from Corinth, but it’s addressed to people that Paul has not yet met, although he does tell them he would like to get there someday and thinks about doing so often. (See 1:11-15) Clearly, Paul knew something about the Church in Rome and they knew something about him. Even so, Romans is a kind of letter of introduction; some scholars have even described chapters 1-8 as Paul’s “theological last will and testament.” Paul is telling them how the gospel has changed his life and changed the way he sees the world; and he is suggesting some ways that it might change them also. 

Enough, for now, about Paul. Let’s talk a bit about the people at the receiving end of this letter, living in first-century Rome: the imperial, administrative, and economic capital of the world. Think Washington, DC and New York wrapped up into one. The people who came to be followers of Jesus there, setting up small house churches composed of both Jewish and Gentile Christians, still lived and worked and were educated in this Roman context. They were shaped by Rome—not Tarsus, not Westfield. The Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians there coexisted in a rather uneasy relationship that often involved misunderstanding and stereotyping of the other group. First-century Jews had been taught to divide the world into basically two groups: Israel, i.e. God’s chosen people, and everybody else—the nations, the goyim. Usually the “everybody else” tended to be bigger and stronger nations like Egypt, Babylon, Persia, and most recently, Rome. When you tend to divide the world into “us” and “them” and when you are weak and they are strong, that brings with it a whole worldview that is hard to let go of. Gentiles also tended to divide the world into “us” and “them” but the lines were drawn very differently. For Gentiles, the world was divided into civilized people, who were cultured and educated, and barbarians (which literally means ‘bearded’) who were not. That latter group included, but was not limited to, Jews.[4]

So imagine for just a moment what it would be like to be a member of one of those first-century house churches in Rome: a congregation consisting of people shaped by each of these competing worldviews. Imagine Darius, a “civilized” Gentile- Christian who has been raised to look down his Roman nose at those uncultured barbarians, sitting at a brown-bag lunch and eating his totally un-kosher prosciutto on ciabbata bread sandwich. Next to him sits Moshe, whose grandmother would be turning over in her grave if she knew he was sitting next to a goyim. Imagine them and their family members trying to plan the menu for the annual parish picnic, make decisions together on vestry, or choose music for worship, and you are quickly relieved of any naïve sense that the early Church was free of conflict where everyone sat around holding hands and singing “kumbaya!

Diversity (in the first and twenty-first centuries) holds within it the seeds of radical transformation, to be sure. But working through old prejudices is difficult and challenging work and we should never underestimate the very real challenges that these Christians in Rome faced. When Paul tells the Church in Rome that there is no longer Jew or Greek, he means it; but he’s talking to people who know just how hard it is to live into that reality. Paul’s theology is not the abstract systematic theology of a tenured religion professor—not that there is anything wrong with that! Paul’s theology is always contextual: scripture, reason and tradition intersect with a particular context, in this case those house churches in first-century Rome. He is a pastoral theologian; his theology is more like “theological reflection” that is rooted in the everyday challenges of congregational life, of trying to live into the call to be “in Christ.” The language and metaphors for this reflection are rooted in Paul’s life as a faithful Jew, trained as a Pharisee. (Remember that for Paul, “the Bible” means the Old Testament, period; not the gospels which would be written later and not these letters of his which it would be hard to imagine he saw as on the same level as “the Law and the Prophets.”)

“Romans was written to be heard by an actual congregation made up of particular people with specific problems.”[5]  Over the course of these fourteen weeks, see if you can find the time to simply sit down and read the whole letter in one sitting. And then as these readings that come to us from Romans, over time, try to see our way beneath the texts to those real people. Paul reminds them, and us, of the love of God and that nothing in all of creation can separate us from that love. He challenged them, and us, to confess that “Jesus is Lord” and then to live that way.

For today, that is likely more than enough. Let me conclude just by re-reading a portion of today’s epistle reading again, and let it sit. A normal sermon would have started here but as promised this isn’t exactly a normal sermon and I’m out of time. But maybe you can close your eyes and see Paul, and see that house church a little bit, and imagine them listening to these words for the first time:

Hoping against hope, [Abraham] believed that he would become “the father of many nations,” according to what was said, “So numerous shall your descendants be.” He did not weaken in faith when he considered his own body, which was already as good as dead (for he was about a hundred years old), or when he considered the barrenness of Sarah’s womb. No distrust made him waver concerning the promise of God, but he grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God, being fully convinced that God was able to do what [God] had promised. Therefore [Abraham’s] faith “was reckoned to him as righteousness.” 

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[1] See here, too, Borg and Crossan.

[2] Borg and Crossan.

[3] See Brother Kevin Hackett’s sermon at: http://ssje.org/sermons/?p=856

[4] See A. Katherine Grieb’s The Story of Romans: A Narrative Defense of God’s Righteousness. I am profoundly indebted to Dr. Grieb for many of the thoughts and ideas of this sermon.

[5] Grieb.