John 18:33-37--What Kind of Kingdom Is This?

The scene in that plays out in John 18:33-37 is as close to the halls of power and influence that Jesus of Nazareth ever came in his lifetime. According to all four gospels in the New Testament, after Jesus was arrested, he was brought before Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Judea, at Pilate’s official residence in Jerusalem. You could say that we cannot overestimate the importance of this encounter between Jesus and Pilate. For one thing, it involves a biblical clash of titans: the religious authorities of Jerusalem, the civil authority of the Roman empire, and a reputed king of the Jews on trial for his life. For another thing, what transpires in Jerusalem after Pilate authorizes the execution of Jesus of Nazareth changes the course of human civilization. If that statement sounds to you like homiletical hyperbole—a preacher’s outrageous exaggeration, then remember that is only after Jesus’ death and the reports of his resurrection that spread among his disciples that the small and mostly Jewish movement that grew up around him in Palestine exploded into the most widely influential religion that the world has ever seen, before or since. So, you could say that we cannot overestimate the importance of this encounter between Jesus and Pilate.

But I think that we often do, and I think we especially are inclined to overestimate it on “Christ the King” Sunday. I confess to you that of all Sundays in the Christian calendar, “Christ the King” Sunday is my least favorite of them all. Since I was called to preach here in 2001, I tried to ignore it, but Glen Adkins won’t let me. I’ve tried to rename it “Global Missions Sunday,” but it comes too late in November to highlight our Global Missions Emphasis. Christ the King Sunday is my least favorite Sunday in the Christian calendar for two reasons. First, it’s not one of the ancient feast days of the Christian church. Unlike Easter and Advent, Pentecost and Lent, Epiphany and All Saints, whose practice in the church’s worship can be traced back for centuries among Christians the world over, Christ the King Sunday was not invented until 1925, when Pope Pius XI instituted it in a papal encyclical. We have members of this congregation who are older than “Christ the King Sunday,” for heaven’s sake! It was Pius the XI’s intent it should be celebrated on the last Sunday in October every year, a Sunday which, by the way, many Protestant churches already celebrated as Reformation Sunday in commemoration of the occasion of Martin Luther’s nailing his famous 95 theses for reform on the door of the church in Wittenberg on October 31, 1517. So, while Pius XI’s pious institution of Christ the King Sunday is championed in the church as targeted at the rise of atheistic communism, secularism and individualism, the timing of the thing suggests that it was equally aimed at Lutherans and Presbyterians and Methodists and Baptists and other purveyors of Protestant heresy.

My second reservation about Christ the King Sunday is more important. It seems to me that this newfound feast of the church encourages exactly the kind of triumphalism and authoritarianism that has crippled the integrity of the church’s witness down through the centuries to a crucified Christ. The church has always been tempted to replace the cross with a throne, in spite of the fact that in the gospel of Mark, Jesus said, “You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. But it is not so among you; whoever wishes to be great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all. For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (10:42-45). “Christ the Servant” Sunday would make more sense to me if the teachings of Jesus were our guide.

When Pilate asks Jesus if he is a king, Jesus replies, “Who says so—you or someone else?” When Pilate says, “So you are a king?” Jesus responds, “You say that I am a king” (John 18:33-37). One thing Jesus did not do in the presence of Pilate is what Pius XI did in his encyclical when he called all other authorities in the world to submit to the authority of Christ (and to the authority of the church as well), and there you have one of the crucial differences between Christ and so many of the viceroys of Christ on earth in every generation. In the end, Christ the King Sunday was instituted not so much for the sake of Christ—after all, every Sunday is already “the Lord’s Day”—but for the sake of the power and influence of the church in the world. Would that Pius XI had called it “Christ the Servant” Sunday and called on the church universal to celebrate annually on that Sunday its commitment to serving the poor, the hungry, the homeless, the outcast, the marginalized and the disenfranchised—including especially those who are disenfranchised, marginalized, and outcast by the church. Then we’d have a festival of the church that would enhance and expand the church’s integrity and its witness in Jesus’ name instead of calling its motives into question. “My kingdom is not from this world,” said Jesus; “my kingdom is not from here” (v 36). Jesus’ kingdom is not about an ideological war against communism, secularism or individualism—or capitalism, spiritualism or collectivism either, for that matter. Our problem with the kingdom is that we want so badly for it to be from this world and from here on our terms in our time that we turn Christ the so-called King into Christ the mascot of our cause and our culture and our ideology.

For example, classical Christian liberalism at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century wanted so badly and worked so hard to build the kingdom of God here and now through social activism on the left and legislation and public education and unionization. They prayed, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven,” full well believing that it was a liberal kingdom that was the kingdom of God that they were building on earth. The successors of classical Christian liberalism in this country are the religious right who at the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century have wanted so badly and worked so hard to build the kingdom of God here and now through social activism on the right and legislation and dismantling public education and anti-unionization. They have prayed, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven,” full well believing that it is a conservative kingdom that is the kingdom of God in the here and now that they are building on earth. But Jesus said, “My kingdom is not from this world; my kingdom is not from here.” “For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice” (v 37).

This is not the first time in the gospel of John that Jesus talked about those who listen to his voice. It was back in chap. 10, when Jesus spoke of himself as the good shepherd, who “calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. . . . and the sheep follow him because they know his voice” (10:3-4). “I am the good shepherd,” Jesus said. “The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep” (v 11). Of his impending death he said, “No one takes [my life] from me, but I lay it down of my own accord” (v 18). Jesus said “No one has greater lover than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (15:12-13). Why not “Christ the Good Shepherd” Sunday, the one who laid down his life for hose who listen to his voice. Then we’d have a festival of the church that would enhance and expand the church’s integrity and its witness in Jesus’ name instead of calling our motives into question.

Again and again we call on Christ the King to play a cosmic Mr. Fix-It. “The world’s in a mess, Lord, fix it,” we pray, instead of praying, “Here am I, send me,” as Isaiah prayed in the temple (Isaiah 6:8). “Make all things right,” we pray—or “make all things left,” depending on our persuasion, instead of praying, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord,” as Mary the mother of Jesus prayed (Luke 1:38). “Make them all serve you as King,” we pray, without noticing that Jesus said, “the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” You see, one of the fascinating things about Jesus of Nazareth in this morning’s gospel lesson is that he never even came close to the halls of power. Pontius Pilate was a pawn—he wasn’t even a knight or rook—in the Roman empire. His governor’s residence in Jerusalem was more than 1,200 miles away from the seat of imperial power in Rome. Neither Pilate nor Jesus was even close to the halls of power and influence. And as for those authorities in Jerusalem, the center of Jewish culture, its highest intellectual and religious expression in Jesus’ day, was not Jerusalem at all but Babylon, more than 600 miles away, where the descendants of the exiles from centuries before were cultivating the best of Jewish tradition that would result in the Babylonian Talmud, the preeminent collection of Jewish learning, law and interpretation of Scripture. Neither the authorities in Jerusalem nor Jesus were even close to the halls of power and influence.

This morning’s gospel lesson reveals that whether we realize it or not, the kind of kingdom we pray for when we pray, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven” never has been a kingdom of “command and control” of political and social and economic power and influence. It is a kingdom where the king is servant of all, where the shepherd lays down his life for the sheep, where the first are last and the greatest are slaves, where lives of repentance are lived, where forgiveness is freely offered, where the mighty are brought low and the lowly are lifted up, where the hungry are fed, strangers are welcomed, the sick are cared for, the imprisoned are visited, the outcasts are taken in and sinners are reconciled to God and to one another. Don’t look for all that to happen any time soon in the halls of influence and power. It’s not that kind of kingdom. Instead, look for it now as it happened then—and become a part of it now as others before us became a part of it then—wherever the voice of Christ the Good Shepherd is heard and followed, wherever Christ the Servant is accepted into hearts and emulated, not in command and control but in service and sacrifice, because that is the kind of kingdom it was and is and ever will be, world without end. Amen.

This material is Copyrighted © 2006 by Jeffrey S. Rogers. It may be copied or disseminated for non-commercial use, provided this notice is included. The author can be contacted at jeffrogers110@bellsouth.net.

2 Samuel 18:33 - 19:8a--David Wept

When I posted the sermon “Suspicion, Trust and Good News” on my internet blog (October 16, 2006), an anonymous comment on it quickly challenged me to address “trust on the next level”: “Trust as it concerns the lives of your spouse, your children, your parents. . . . I too feel like I can [trust] when it involves just me,” the person wrote. But “When it involves my wife [or] child, placing my trust in God is harder to do and living with a bad result even harder to bear. How does the trust in God you just spoke about apply as it extends beyond just me?” I resonated immediately with the comment and with the question, and I thought first of a friend who has been through hell and back (and some days still only barely back) after the sudden death of her husband and the tragic death of her daughter. The particulars of her personal life are no one’s business but her own, but those are only two of the icebergs that have struck the Titanic of her life, and somehow still she floats.

Her struggle to trust God, which she has shared with me, has been nothing less than a Sisyphean challenge—after the character in Greek mythology named Sisyphus who was fated forever to roll a rock up a steep hill, only to have it roll back down to the bottom to begin all over again. For years now, about the time she reaches the top of the hill, a demoralizing development intervenes and down rolls her rock. Another time, her foot may slip or her determination may weaken, or the wind blows or the ground trembles, and down rolls the rock and with it her trust in God. At least some others of us understand that challenge, even if the shape and content—the particulars of our struggle—differ from hers. Most of us have at least one rock with which we struggle up the hill, “and living with a bad result” is indeed “even harder to bear” when it involves the life and well-being of someone we love, a spouse, a child, a parent, a longtime friend.

Whatever else it is, “living with a bad result” requires of us grief work: the work that grieving is. One of the great grief passages in all of Scripture is found in 2 Samuel 18, when after the death of Absalom his son, we are told in v 33, David the king “was deeply moved, and went up to the chamber over the gate, and wept; and as he went, he said, “O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! Would that I had died instead of you, O Absalom, my son, my son!” Sometimes grief comes on us as it did on David as a result of the literal death of someone we love. Sometimes the death is not literal but it is no less real, as when we lose someone we love to addiction or to depression, to divorce or to dementia. Grief comes on us every time we experience what the anonymous commenter on my sermon called “the most anxious, terrifying, lack of control: . . . . When you are truly invested in someone else’s life pattern and doing everything in your power to move the results into the realm of acceptability. But other than trying to strike the right chord or provide a different vision you have no control over the result or their actions.” That’s when “living with a bad result is even harder to bear,” whether it is a literal death that grieves us or a death that is not literal but no less real. So when we pray “for those who are grieving,” we are praying especially for those whose loved ones have died, but it turns out that we are praying at the very same time for those who have experienced profound losses in many different ways.

Years later now, I still cannot forget the grief of a mother I know and admire whose teenage son drove one night while intoxicated, lost control of his speeding car and crossed the median of I-385 into the oncoming lane of traffic where his car struck another car head-on, killing its driver. It was his first offense ever, of any kind whatsoever, and it resulted in a felony DUI conviction that put him in prison for 15 years, where every Sunday morning she visits him faithfully. She would have gladly gone to jail for the rest of her life in his place, if the judge would have allowed it. But instead she was left to weep like David, unable to change or control the outcome, forced to “live with a bad result” that was even harder to bear because it was her child who had done an unthinkable thing that brought unthinkable grief to another family, and who in turn was suffering an unthinkable consequence for his actions. I could multiply the examples of which I am aware, and still I couldn’t begin to touch on all the griefs and sorrows that are borne by people I know. But there are several lessons we can learn from David in 2 Samuel 18:33 – 19:8a about “living with a bad result.” Let’s look at the process that David goes through in the aftermath of Absalom’s death.

First, David wept. David wept unashamedly. David poured out the pain and the loss, the anger and the hurt in his tears, no matter who else heard or saw or what they said or thought. He didn’t concern himself with the pretense of keeping up appearances or hiding the pain. He didn’t concern himself with what others would think or say. David did not bottle up his grief and hold it inside where it would corrode his heart and his soul. He embraced his grief, and he turned it loose in his words and in his tears. Grief that goes unembraced can never be turned loose. It gets dragged around like a ball and chain, worn like an albatross around the neck. It becomes a perpetually open wound that never heals. The “bad result that is even harder to bear” becomes incapacitating when we refuse to recognize and accept it for what it is, embrace it and turn it loose by naming it and crying it out. A hit song by country music artist Gary Allan that still gets radio time three years after its release is titled “Tough Little Boys.” In it Allan sings in the refrain, “When tough little boys grow up to be dads, they turn into big babies again.” It’s true, isn’t it, for many of us, at least. It’s true because “living with a bad result” is “even harder to bear” when something hurtful happens to your daughter or your son, your granddaughter or your grandson. When David wept, he named his grief, and he cried it out.

The second thing David did that we can learn from was to take the counsel of someone he trusted. When Joab, David’s most trusted advisor, came to him in his grief, David listened to Joab’s counsel. As an aside, I wish I had a month of Sundays just to treat this relationship between David and his general Joab. If you’ve read the book of 2 Samuel recently, you may recall that it was none other than Joab who struck the first blows against Absalom, and it was Joab’s own armor-bearers who killed David’s son (18:14-15), in spite of David’s order to “Deal gently for my sake with the young man Absalom” (v 5) in spite of the fact he had rebelled against his father by leading an attempted coup that if it had succeeded would certainly have resulted in David’s death, among many others. Still, Joab was David’s most trusted advisor, and 2 Samuel 19:5 tells us that Joab came to David to tell him that it was time to move on. It was time to move on from embracing his grief and crying it out. And David listened.

The truth is, most of what well-meaning people say to us when we are grieving is unhelpful at best and downright destructive at worst. When the Old Testament character Job was grieving the loss of his family and his home and everything he had, three friends of his “met together to go and console and comfort him,” Job 2:12 says. According to v 13, “They sat with him on the ground seven days and seven nights, and no one spoke a word to him, for they saw that his suffering was very great.” And his friends were a consolation and comfort to Job—until they made the mistake of opening their mouths. When they broke their silence, the things they said only added to his grief and his suffering. But there are persons whom we can trust to tell us what we need to hear when we need to hear it, and Joab was just that sort of person to David. Joab said, in effect, you have responsibilities to attend to. You have people who are depending on you. It’s time to let it go, Joab said. On one of my visits with the late Jack Dennis, a long-time member of this congregation, I asked him to tell me, father-to-father, how in the world he had made it through the drowning death of one of his young sons. His answer was simple and direct. “I had other children depending on me,” Jack said. “I had to be a father to my children who were living.” Jack Dennis was broken-hearted and he grieved. And then he saw to it that he didn’t let his grief over his son who died destroy the lives of his children who were still alive. Unfortunately, some people spend so much time and energy lighting candles for the dead that they leave the living in the darkness. There comes a time to let it go and move on. You may indeed be scarred for life, but you don’t keep picking at the scab so that the wound bleeds every day. You rub the scar and you remember the pain, and then you move on because you have responsibilities to attend to, you have living to do.

And that’s the third thing David did. He let it go, and he moved on. He turned to invest himself in the life that he was called by God to live, even though someone he loved, who meant the world to him, was no longer living. 1 Samuel 19: 8 tells us, “Then the king got up and took his seat in the gate.” David reinvested himself in the living. It’s not that he forgot about Absalom; he didn’t. It’s not that he no longer loved the son he had lost; he did. But he embraced his grief by naming it and crying it out. He listened to someone he trusted. And then he let it go and moved on by reinvesting himself in the living. When “a bad result that is even harder to bear” comes on someone you love, whether that bad result is a literal death or a figurative death that is no less real, the first work to be done is grief work.

You will recall that I began with a friend of mine of whom I said that the sudden death of her husband and the tragic death of her daughter are only two of the icebergs that have struck the Titanic of her life—and still she floats. Whenever she must, she returns to the bottom of the hill and begins to push her rock again. What she has been through and still goes through would have broken a stronger person than I into a million pieces. I would have sunk beneath the waves long ago, I am sure. But she still floats because she continues to do her grief work diligently and even daily, when necessary: embracing it by naming it and crying it out, listening to persons she knows she can trust and ignoring all the rest, and letting it go to move on to the living. It’s then and only then, in the words of hymn writer Brian Wren, that hope and sorrow unite and we begin to discover new and solid ground for trusting God, not because things turn out the way we want them to, the way we wish they would, or even the way we prayed for them to be, but because even in our grief and loss we come to hear God calling us to life and to living. And so we listen attentively for God even in our struggle to trust on our journey toward that place where hope and sorrow unite.

(My predecessor at First Baptist Greenville, Dr. Hardy Clemons, has written an excellent book on grief work titled Saying Hello to Your Life After Grief. It is available from your local bookseller or from Smyth & Helwys Publishing at http://www.helwys.com/ and also at http://www.amazon.com/, where unfortunately they have misspelled his name, so search under the title rather than the author!)

This material is Copyrighted © 2006 by Jeffrey S. Rogers. It may be copied or disseminated for non-commercial use, provided this notice is included. The author can be contacted at jeffrogers110@bellsouth.net.

Matthew 7:12-14—The Narrow Gate and the Golden Rule

The origin of Thanksgiving in 1621 is a fascinating moment in American religious history. You know the popular picture: “Pilgrims” wearing black hats and shoes with big buckles and carrying blunderbusses gathered around a table with “Indians” wearing feathered headdresses and deerskin and carrying bows and arrows. It’s a cartoon image, of course, a caricature. But the obvious diversity of the people gathered around the table in that cartoon calls our attention to that first Thanksgiving as an object lesson of the best—and of the worst—of which we Christians on this continent are capable.

In the winter of 1620-21, a non-Christian majority—native Americans—acted compassionately and hospitably to save a struggling immigrant Christian minority from starving to death. The following autumn, the surviving Europeans invited the locals to participate in the Europeans’ traditional harvest festival. The invitation was a gesture of thanks by the Christians for the non-Christians’ compassionate action and hospitality to strangers that had saved the Christians’ lives the previous winter. When the locals accepted the invitation, that harvest festival in 1621 became a cross-cultural and interfaith moment for the history books—and the history-of-religion books in particular. But in the centuries since then, the story of that harvest festival has left a decidedly ambiguous legacy. In return for having been saved from starvation, the Christian minority, when it became the majority, drove the locals from the land of their living, farming, hunting and burying.

So the origin of Thanksgiving stands as a reminder of the principles of compassionate action and hospitality to strangers that are ingrained in nearly all the world’s enduring religions, but its aftermath stands as a monument to the insidious temptations that ethnocentrism and totalitarianism are for religious majorities, even those who once were a minority. That makes our Thanksgiving Day a reminder of the best of which we are capable and the worst.

One Wednesday evening two years ago, I was talking with a friend who was bemoaning the outcome of our national elections the day before. I recognized immediately that I was in the presence of an endangered species in the state of South Carolina, the rarely sighted and frequently depressed Democrat. But he said something that made me realize that his malaise ran deeper than merely being on the losing side of an election. “Whatever happened to the squishy middle?” he lamented. “Where has the squishy middle gone?” I bit my tongue, and I did not point to his waistline and say, “I believe it has settled about your belt.” I didn’t say that. You had to be careful what you said to a depressed Democrat in those days. They were fragile creatures then. But what he said made immediate sense to me as a commentary on the religious climate in our nation, in our world, and in our churches.

In the current religious climate we are at a loss to identify a center. Among our own Baptists, among my mother’s and my middle brother’s Lutherans, among my younger brother’s Episcopalians, among my late grandmother’s Roman Catholics, among my alma mater’s Presbyterians and among my publisher’s Methodists, there are no “centers” of any size or substance that we can recognize. And Christians are not alone in that dilemma. Other religions in our world are facing the same challenge. The political and religious polarization we see within Christianity has its parallels in Judaism, Islam, Hinduism and even Buddhism. In all the enduring religions around the world, in the words of William Butler Yeats’ poem “The Second Coming,” “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold . . . The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.” So the time has come to acknowledge that there is no longer a place in our world and nation and churches for a “squishy middle.” The only middle that is possible now is what the eminent observer of the American religious landscape Martin Marty has called the “hard middle.”

There is a wide and easy road of partisanship, polemics and polarization on the religious right and on the religious left, and there is a narrow and difficult road of conversation and collaboration in “the hard middle.” The challenge of Thanksgiving past, present and future is to issue a new call to enter through “the narrow gate” of which Jesus of Nazareth speaks in Matthew 7:13-14. For wide and easy is the road that leads to death, to partisanship, polemics and polarization, but “the gate is narrow and the road is hard” hat leads to life, to compassion and hospitality, to conversation and collaboration between the best in our world to counteract the passionate intensity of the worst in our world.

“The gate is narrow and the road is hard, and there are few who find it” (Matthew 7:14). Now, if that take on the narrow gate and the hard road sounds off the beaten track of biblical interpretation to you, you might be no less surprised to notice that in the gospel according to Matthew, the saying of Jesus about the easy road that leads to destruction and the hard road that leads to life is attached to another well-known saying of Jesus that in one form or another is attested nearly universally in the enduring religions of our world: “In everything do to others as you would have them do to you” (v 12). Set side by side in the gospel tradition, the “golden rule” and “narrow gate” interpret each other.

In the winter of 1620 and 1621, a non-Christian majority living in this land stepped through the narrow gate and onto the hard road to provide for a starving, Christian minority by doing to others as they would have had them do if the deer-skin moccasin had been on the other foot. And in the autumn of 1621, a Christian minority living in this land stepped through the narrow gate and onto the hard road to invite the non-Christian majority to dinner as a gesture of gratitude, doing to others as they would have had them do if the big-buckled shoe had been on the other foot. It’s a wonderful image, this act of coming to the table together around the golden rule.

But the sad truth is that the compassionate and hospitable encounter of these diverse folk did not lead to conversation and collaboration. In the end, these historic cartoon characters were unable to cultivate the sustained and habitual behavior that builds strong and lasting relationships between people with fundamentally different perspectives and deeply divergent convictions. So the first great American interfaith encounter became a dead end that has left an ambiguous legacy. Today, the national holiday that commemorates that first American interfaith harvest festival has become a platform for a new breed of Christian totalitarianism that willfully denies or ignorantly overlooks the interfaith origins of Thanksgiving. To counteract this ethnocentric version of the history of religion in this land, Americans practitioners of all the enduring religions of our world must come to the table together not only at Thanksgiving but often enough during the year to ensure that we move from the co-dependency of hosts and guests to the healthy interdependence equal partners at the table. We must cultivate each other’s company frequently enough to see to it that those who once were strangers become friends and those who once were needy become compatriots in the common good. We have much to learn from each other and much to teach each other.

But whether we succeed or fail on the narrow road that is epitomized in the golden rule will not depend in the end on how well we get along with each other in the “hard middle.” Instead, it will depend on how effectively we build bridges of compassion and hospitality, of conversation and collaboration to our partisan, polemical and polarizing co-religionists (and anti-religionists) on the wide roads to the right and to the left of us. If we don’t succeed in that bridge-building, then if we are remembered at all, it will be at best as one more cartoon, another cautionary tale of oddly diverse folk who came together once upon a historical time but who could not sustain the journey together.

What I am saying here is every bit as true of the congregation of First Baptist Greenville as it is of our community, our nation and our world. We are congregation of the hard middle, a people of God that calls those on the left and the right alike to the center of God’s love for all God’s children, not just for some. We are a congregation of the hard middle that insists that partisanship, polemics and polarization have no place in the kingdom of God. We are a congregation of people who stand with each other and stand up for each other even as we stand by our own deeply held convictions on which we sometimes disagree with each other.

So this Thanksgiving, when we are finished giving thanks for the hospitality and compassion we have experienced in one another’s company and for the kindred spirits and soul mates we have discovered in this place, we must set out on the hard road ahead of us to build as many bridges as we can. The gate is narrow, the road is hard, and we have bridges to build—in our church, in our nation, and in our world.

This material is Copyrighted © 2006 by Jeffrey S. Rogers. It may be copied or disseminated for non-commercial use, provided this notice is included. The author can be contacted at jeffrogers110@bellsouth.net.

A shorter version of this sermon appeared on the “Faith and Values” page of the Charlotte (N.C.) Observer on Saturday, November 18, 2006, as "Build bridges from the middle: History of Thanksgiving shows need for conversation, collaboration" (http://www.charlotte.com/).

175th Anniversary Prayer Breakfast

On Thursday, November 2, 2006, members of Greenville’s First Baptist Church gathered for a prayer breakfast on the 175th anniversary of the founding of the church. I was asked to introduce the after-breakfast speaker and to offer a prayer of hope for the future of First Baptist.

Introduction of Bob Dannals
On Sunday morning, May 22, 2001, the Rev. Dr. Robert S. Dannals, Rector of Christ Church Episcopal in Greenville, was the guest proclaimer in worship at First Baptist Church. Somehow in the wisdom of God and the foolishness of humankind, it happened to be the Sunday on which the congregation of First Baptist voted to call me to serve as its senior minister. Bob, I confess that in the anxiety and tension of that day, I do not remember a word you said. But until the time comes that I begin to forget everything I have ever known, I will always remember your presence here that morning, and I will always be grateful to God for the friendship and collegiality, the mutual support and pastoral care that we have offered each other since then as we have sought from God and from each other courage and encouragement for the living of these days.

I heard that someone asked at Wednesday evening at supper at First Baptist, “Why is the rector of Christ Church Episcopal speaking on the anniversary of the founding of First Baptist Church?” The answer is simple. Christ Church Episcopal is First Baptist Greenville’s slightly older sister church. I think that a case can be made that over the last century and three quarters, no two of Greenville’s five original “land-grant churches” have had more or closer ties, as for example, when Baptists "married up" and Episcopalians "married down." Our congregations have been sisters in support of each other even in those times when we have been intimate rivals of a sort, as sisters can sometimes be.

One of my favorite stories in A.V. Huff’s history of Greenville recounts a chance meeting between Ellison Capers, who was rector of Christ Church from 1867 to 1887, and James Pettigru Boyce, a distinguished member of First Baptist and a professor in the Theology Department of Furman University.

For twenty years Ellison Capers lived and served in Greenville. Early in his tenure he decided to appeal to a number of wealthy parishes in the North for financial aid. One day in New York City Capers met James Pettigru Boyce, his Greenville neighbor, on the street. When Boyce inquired about Capers's success, Capers replied that after his last sermon only one five-dollar bill appeared in the collection plate. To which Boyce replied: "And I your neighbor put that in" (A.V. Huff, Greenville: The History of the City and County in the South Carolina Piedmont [Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1995], p. 207).

Christ Church and First Baptist have a long history of contributing to each other’s ministries by mutual support and encouragement, and Bob, we are grateful to you for your presence here this morning as sign, symbol and substance of great relationships past, present and future.

Prayer of Hope for the Future
All loving and everlasting God, creator of all that was and is and yet will be, the first movement of our heart and soul and mind and strength toward you in love is in praise and gratitude, honor and glory to you and you alone.
L: Lord, in our hope for the future,
R: Hear our prayer.

O risen and living Christ, in whose promise to be with your church always, even to the end of the age, we trust, grant in the days and decades to come the blessings of your presence, your guidance, your direction and your correction to your people called First Baptist Church.
L: Lord, in our hope for the future,
R: Hear our prayer.

O Spirit of the living God, fall fresh on the fellowship of those who are called by your name in this place to unsettle and nudge and set hearts ablaze in faithful worship and education, missions and ministries in this and every generation.
L: Lord, in our hope for the future,
R: Hear our prayer.

Holy, Holy, Holy, merciful and mighty, forgive, we pray you, this congregation when in times to come as in times past individually and collectively we fail you, we fail ourselves, and we fail those to whom we are be called to minister.
L: Lord, in our hope for the future,
R: Hear our prayer.

Maker, Redeemer and Sustainer, cultivate ever anew in this congregation the Christ-like compassion to take children in and bless them, to welcome prodigal sons and daughters home, to offer loaves and fishes to those who hunger, to extend a cup of cold water in Christ’s name to those who thirst, to shelter the homeless, to care for the sick, to clothe the naked, to visit the imprisoned, to befriend the lonely and to comfort the grieving.
L: Lord, in our hope for the future,
R: Hear our prayer.

Creator, Christ and Holy Spirit, call forth in this place both now and in the years to come courageous teachers and preachers, prophets and servants, visionaries and builders, stewards and ministers one and all, for whom to know you and to serve you and your church is their greatest joy and enduring passion.
L: Lord, in our hope for the future,
R: Hear our prayer.

All loving and everlasting God, creator of all that was and is and yet will be, the first and last movement of our heart and soul and mind and strength toward you in love is in praise and gratitude, honor and glory to you and you alone.
L: Lord, in our hope for the future,
R: Hear our prayer.
Amen.

Psalm 40:1-10--"Suspicion, Trust and Good News"

Trust. It may be one of the hardest things in the world to come by. And it’s no wonder. We have to teach our children not to trust. You know the litany. Don’t trust a stranger who offers you candy. Don’t trust a stranger who asks you to help find a lost dog. Don’t trust a stranger who offers you a ride. Don’t trust a stranger who asks you for directions. We have to teach them not to trust their friends—which is what it means to resist peer pressure when drugs or alcohol or sex or other risky behavior is involved. We have to teach our children not to trust their priest or minister, their coach or teacher and even their parents when a line is crossed from affectionate touching to sexual exploitation. We have a moral responsibility to teach our children not to trust, so it’s no wonder that trust is becoming so hard to come by anymore.

Years of experience on college campuses has taught me to teach collegians not to trust a date. Date rape is now a regular feature of college social life. It happens every weekend and weeknights too. And for God’s sake, never trust an alum for drinks at a homecoming event. Colleges are careful not to advertise that homecoming on campuses all over the country is prime time for sexual predators. But there is another aspect of not trusting that is being taught in college. The practical, pragmatic, safety-conscious parental advice to our children not to trust is being transformed by their professors into an academic and intellectual worldview. In one form or another, it has crept across the curriculum, so that even where it has no place in the subject matter, it has infected the profession and the professor. It is still all the rage after decades of dominating the academic and intellectual landscape. It is a worldview driven by suspicion. In a nutshell it says, “Nothing can be trusted.” Nothing that is written, said or done can be trusted because the motives of the doer, speaker or writer are always suspect. It is a perspective on the world that you and I have come to breathe and eat and drink and sleep: a worldview of suspicion that leads to skepticism and cynicism.

The French philosopher Paul Ricouer, a favorite of mine, for what it’s worth, coined the term that has become all the rage. “The hermeneutics of suspicion,” Ricouer said, and the academic study of literature, philosophy, political theory, and religion have never been the same since. The practical, pragmatic parental advice not to trust that we give our children in our concern for their safety and well-being has become an intellectual fetish among academics and intellectuals the world over. Don’t blame Ricouer. What he actually said was this. Careful reading and responsible interpretation require what he called a “double motivation.” The “double motivation” was this. In careful reading and responsible interpretation, you must engage in a “willingness to suspect” on the one hand and a “willingness to listen” on the other. Hear the “double motivation”? Suspect and listen. You must take what he called the “vow of rigor” on the one hand and the “vow of obedience” on the other. Hear the “double motivation”? Be rigorous and be obedient. Scrutinize the text rigorously and subject yourself to it obediently. But a not-so-funny thing happened as Ricouer’s suggestion began to circulate among academics and intellectuals. In literature, philosophy, political theory, religion, and a number of other fields, scholars and their hangers-on raced to champion the “willingness to suspect” while rejecting the “willingness to listen.” They swore their allegiance to the “vow of rigor” while refusing to take the “vow of obedience.” By reducing Ricouer’s “double motivation” to the single-mindedness of suspicion alone, not trusting has been elevated to an overriding principle and an intellectual obsession that shapes one’s every interaction and every interpretation. So it should come as no surprise that trust is one of the hardest things in the world to come by any more.

All of which leaves diligent readers of the Bible in something of a predicament. Over and over again, the Bible and the Christian tradition call us to trust. “Trust in the LORD with all your heart,” says Proverbs 3:5. “Trust in the LORD forever,” says Isaiah 26:4.” And “Happy are those who make the LORD their trust,” says Psalm 40:4. I can already hear the suspicion floating around in the gray matter of some of us. It has become second nature for so many of us. “Happiness through trusting?” we ask. “What about the times I trusted and got burned for it? I trusted, and I got cheated. I trusted, and I got used. I trusted, and I got hurt. And now this Mary-sunshine psalmist and this naïve ninny preacher say, ‘Happy are those who make the Lord their trust.’ Yeah, well. It didn’t quite work out that way for me. Thanks, but no thanks.”

Let me tell you about someone in the congregation I serve, a friend who a couple years ago or so came to me to tell me of his struggle with a potentially devastating diagnosis for which he was undergoing testing. “I have prayed long and hard,” he said, “that everything will be all right. But I’m scared. I’m really scared. This could kill me. This could be the end, right here,” he said. We talked for a while about the plans he was making for his family—the conversations he had already had with his wife and the conversations he was planning to have with his children, and we prayed together. A week or so later, he came back to see me. The test results weren’t in yet, and he still didn’t know what he was up against, but he said that the most remarkable thing had happened since we had talked. He had continued to pray, he said, and one night while he lay in bed awake unable to sleep because he was too scared, it came to him, he said. “I had this overwhelming sense that even if everything is not going to be all right, I will be all right,” he told me. “Even if the diagnosis turns out to be devastating, even if this kills me,” he said, “I’ll be all right.” He went on to say, “I said two years ago when I was baptized that I was giving my life to God. Now it’s time for me to believe my own words and live by them. I just wanted you to know that I’m okay, and I’m going to be okay, no matter how this turns out.” We hugged each other, and he left. Now, I’m grateful to tell you that the tests turned out “all right,” but that’s not the point. The point is that in a terrifying encounter with his own mortality, while staring the prospect of his own death straight in the eye, he gave his life over to God—he trusted God, so that even before he knew how it would turn out, for good or for ill, he could say with the psalmist, “I waited patiently for the LORD; [and God] inclined to me and heard my cry. [The LORD] drew me up from the desolate pit, out of the miry bog, and set my feet upon a rock. . . . [God] put a new song in my mouth, a song of praise to our God” (Psalm 40:1-2).

In the end, the trust of which the Psalms and the Proverbs, the gospels and the epistles and the apocalypse speak, is not the trust of a Mary-sunshine naïve ninny. It is the trust of someone who in the deepest, darkest hour of her existence and his encounter with the end of existence has found that even if no one else or nothing else in all creation can be trusted, God can. It’s not as though we don’t go through our times of suspicion, skepticism and cynicism, even where God is concerned. We do. But the testimony of our lives—and even the testimony of our deaths—is that God can be trusted, so that even when it is not all right, we discover that it will be all right. “I said when I was baptized that I was giving my life to God. It’s time to believe my own words and live by them.”

My friend’s terrifying encounter with his own mortality has resulted in a confession of his trust in God much like the confession of the psalmist in Psalm 40: “I have told the glad news of deliverance in the great congregation; see, I have not restrained my lips, as you know, O LORD. I have not hidden your saving help within my heart, I have spoken of your faithfulness and your salvation; I have not concealed your steadfast love, and your faithfulness from the great congregation” (vv 1-3,9-10). Now let me tell you what typically happens in me when I hear that kind of confession. Remember, I’m an offspring of Paul Ricouer; I’m a child of my time, a student of my teachers and teacher of my students on whom I have pressed the willingness to suspect and the vow of rigor. When I hear a confession like the one in Psalm 40, I say, “Well, I’m happy for you. But I happen to be aware of thousands of other people, millions even, tens of millions, for whom it did not turn out so well.” I am infected and affected like all the rest by suspicion and skepticism. But if I pause long enough to listen after I have been suspicious, if I linger long enough to take the vow of obedience as well as the vow of rigor, I hear the psalmist say that this confession of trust did not arise out of sunshine and light—it rose from a cry, it came up from “the desolate pit, out of the miry bog” of suffering, disappointment, pain, addiction, misery. It was there in the desolate pit, while still in the miry bog, lying awake at night too scared to sleep that the psalmist discovered the deliverance, the saving help, the faithfulness and salvation, the steadfast love of God so real and so present that that even if it didn’t turn out all right, it would be all right.

That’s the Good News that we are called to share with each other “in the great congregation” and with our world outside the walls of the church. Our testimony will inevitably fall on mostly suspicious minds, skeptical ears and cynical hearts. But the testimony of our words and of our lives will be genuine because it will have passed the test of the “double motivation”: the willingness to suspect and the willingness to listen, the vow of rigor and the vow of obedience. We will have learned who not to trust and who to trust. And we will have learned that even if it is not all right, it will be all right. Then we can sing with the great congregation the words of an Irish psalmist, “Be thou my vision, O Lord of my heart; naught be all else to me, save that thou art. . . . Heart of my own heart, whatever befall, still be my vision, O Ruler of all.” That’s trust.

This material is Copyrighted © 2006 by Jeffrey S. Rogers. It may be copied or disseminated for non-commercial use, provided this notice is included. The author can be contacted at jeffrogers110@bellsouth.net.

Mark 12:28-34--"The Stewardship of Love"

Not so long ago, when I was a still professor of religion instead of a mere practitioner of it, I would tell my students at Furman University that the two great frontiers for theology in our time are astrophysics and neuroscience. No other field of study in our time gets any closer to reading the mind of God, in Stephen Hawking’s wonderful turn of phrase, than astrophysics does. But in addition to reading the mind of God, theology must plumb the depths of the human psyche as well, so the other frontier for theology in our time is the study of the structures that underlie the human mind. Brain science takes us closer to the roots of theology than any other field of study in our time. Exploring the mind of God in astrophysics and the underlying structures of the human mind in neuroscience are the great frontiers for theology. In the meantime, however, what most of us feel that we need most in our lives is something we can carry away from this place that will help us recover from the week that we just had and get through the week that lies ahead. So come with me for a few minutes to the grocery store. That’s where we usually go to get the things we ran out of last week and need for next week, isn’t it?

I did a double take as I walked down the aisle. I was passing the magazines when one particular cover caught my eye. It was a dark-haired couple in a romantic embrace, eyes closed, face to face, very nearly—but not quite—lips to lips. The photo was slightly grainy, sultry, steamy looking. In the bottom right corner superimposed in red letters on a field of black was the word “Love.” Maybe Time would run this cover or The National Enquirer. But there was no mistaking the fact that this blissfully sensuous and romantic moment was framed by a bold yellow border that communicated as clearly and as incongruously as the white capital letters across the top: National Geographic. National Geographic? What kind of geography is this? Sign me up! I’ll become a geography major first thing tomorrow. I did a double take and walked on by. After all, it wasn’t love that brought me out to the grocery store at 10:00 on a weeknight after having been up since 4 a.m. It was children’s Tylenol, a gallon of milk, and 0.7 mm lead for a middle-schooler’s mechanical pencil. Only to have my attention distracted by a grainy photograph in a yellow border. “What is it I’m here for?” I had to ask myself. “Keep moving,” I said. “You’re not here for ‘Love’—or National Geographic either.” So I waited until the next time I was in the grocery store—about three days later. A gallon of milk, a loaf of bread, and National Geographic, the February issue just in time for Valentine’s Day.

“Love: The Chemical Reaction” was the cover story. This is National Geographic for a new generation of reader. Lauren Slater’s article was a blend of Cosmopolitan, Anthropology Today, and Scientific American. And Jodi Cobb’s photographs from Argentina, Cancun, Italy, Las Vegas, Pennsylvania and Ohio were vintage Geographic with a Generation Next edge. The article introduced the reader to anthropologist Helen Fisher of Rutgers University who studies “the biochemical pathways of love in all its manifestations: lust, romance, attachment, the way they wax and wane” (p. 35). It turns out that the chemical pathways in the brain that light up when you are “madly in love” are those that are associated with a chemical neurotransmitter called dopamine. “Dopamine [is a chemical in the brain that] creates intense energy, exhilaration, focused attention, and motivation to win rewards. [Dopamine] is why,” writes Slater, “when you are newly in love, you can stay up all night, watch the sun rise, run a race, ski fast down a slope ordinarily too steep for your skill. Love makes you bold, makes you bright, makes you run real risks, which you sometimes survive, and sometimes you don’t” (ibid.).

Donatella Marazziti is a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pisa, in Italy. She studies another chemical pathway of love. Her studies of people who could be identified as “passionately in love” have shown that their blood levels of the chemical serotonin are 40% lower than normal, which corresponds to level of serotonin exhibited by people who have been diagnosed with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. In the best one-liner in the article Slater writes, “Love and mental illness may be difficult to tell apart” (p. 38). “More seriously,” she writes, “if the chemically altered state induced by romantic love is akin to a mental illness or a drug-induced euphoria, exposing yourself for too long could result in psychological damage” (p. 44). In fact, “Studies around the world confirm that indeed passion usually ends. Its conclusion is as common as its initial flare. No wonder some cultures think selecting a lifelong mate based on something so fleeting is folly” (pp. 43-44).

I still remember the day last year that our pastoral staff sat looking at each other in shock when we heard the news that a well-respected young colleague of ours at another church was separated from his wife of five years because they just didn’t have “the same chemistry” any more. Duh. The chemistry of courtship is an unsustainable imbalance in the brain more akin to mental illness than to any other human condition. The “chemistry” of a couple is literally different after four or five years of intimacy. Sustainable loving relationships inevitably move “from the dopamine-drenched state of romantic love to the relative quiet of an oxytocin-induced attachment,” writes Slater. “Oxytocin is a hormone that promotes a feeling of connectedness, bonding. It is released when we hug our long-term spouses, or our children. It is released when a mother nurses her infant” (p. 45). We tend to speak of the “chemistry” of love in a metaphorical sense, but it turns out that the literal chemistry of a long-term relationship is different from the heady brew of a romantic chase. There is less dopamine in play. There is more serotonin and oxytocin in use. It’s no wonder that our concept of love is sometimes so confused. The chemistry of our love changes over time.

Now lest you think that it was my intent this morning to do a dull imitation of Bill Nye the science guy, let’s take a look at the love that Jesus of Nazareth commends in Mark 12:28-34 as “not far from the kingdom of God.” Love for God—with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength—sounds almost serotonin-starved obsessive-compulsive, doesn’t it?—and love for neighbor as yourself—sounds oxytocin rich, producing attachment, connectedness, bonding with others, doesn’t it? The gospels offer us powerful images, mental pictures, of this bi-focal love—love for God and love for neighbor—as it is defined in the person and work of Jesus Christ.

Loving God with heart and soul and mind and strength was defined and modeled by Jesus in the gospel of John when our Lord prayed,

I ask not only on behalf of these, but also on behalf of those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us. . . . so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me (John 17:20-23).

Loving God with heart and soul and mind and strength was defined and modeled by Jesus in Gethsemane when our Lord prayed, “Father, let this cup pass from me. Nevertheless not my will but yours be done” (Matthew 26:39). Loving God with heart and soul and mind and strength was defined and modeled by Jesus on Golgotha when from the cross he cried, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit” (Luke 23:46). Loving one’s neighbor as oneself was defined and modeled by Jesus in Galilee when he provided for the poor and for the poor in spirit. Whether they were penniless lepers or wealthy tax collectors, a promiscuous Samaritan woman or a commanding Roman centurion, rich or poor, powerless or powerful they were neighbors one and all, as Jesus modeled and defined love.

The Jewish scribe in this morning’s gospel lesson got the point. “You are right, Teacher. . . . ‘to love [God] with all the heart, and with all the understanding, and with all the strength,’ and ‘to love one’s neighbor as oneself,’—this is much more important than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices.” As defined and modeled by Jesus of Nazareth, it is the stewardship of love that is “much more important than all” other offerings. If all that you and I offer God is money, then we have missed the mark and missed it badly, because what God wants from each of us much more than money is heart and soul and mind and strength and neighborliness before selfishness. Chemically speaking, this means we must be even more careful with our dopamine than we are with our dollars. We must be even more sensible with our serotonin than we are with our cents. And above all, we must be overflowing with our oxytocin.

You see, it turns out that love is exactly what I went to the grocery store at 10:00 that night after having been up since 4 a.m. It wasn’t the dopamine-drenched, serotonin-suppressed love of the first four years or so of Bev’s and my romance. Instead, it was the love of 28 years of marriage and three children and all the joy and anguish, all the anger and tenderness, all the heartache and happiness, that comes with the chemistry and the commitment that we call love. So the next time you ask yourself, “What is it I’m here for?” let me suggest that you consider answering this way: I’m here for love in all its manifestations, and above all love for God with heart and soul and mind and strength and love for my neighbor as myself.

(An excerpt from this sermon appeared in "Letters," National Geographic 209:6 [June 2006], p. 7)

This material is Copyrighted © 2006 by Jeffrey S. Rogers. It may be copied or disseminated for non-commercial use, provided this notice is included. The author can be contacted at jeffrogers110@bellsouth.net.

Matthew 26:47-56--"The Trouble with Judas"

Few characters in the Bible have been subjected to any more scathing criticism than the disciple of Jesus whose name was “Judas, the one called Judas Iscariot” (Matt 26:14). “He was a thief,” says the gospel of John. He was the treasurer of the disciples—“he kept the common purse,” says John 12:6, and he would “steal what was put into it.” But most of us don’t remember Judas as a simple thief, an embezzler, a perpetrator of white-collar crime. Instead, we remember him for being “the betrayer” as Matthew 26:48 is translated, the disciple who handed Jesus over to the authorities who arrested him in the garden of Gethsemane.

The gospel of Luke says that while Jesus and the disciples were in Jerusalem together just before the Passover, “Satan entered into Judas” who then “went away” from Jesus to confer with the chief priests and officers of the temple police about how he might betray him to them.”(22:3-4). To explain how a member of Jesus’ own hand-picked inner circle could have turned him over to those who “were looking for a way to put him to death” (v 2), the gospel of Luke gives us the old “the-devil-made-him-do-it” explanation. The gospel of John also invokes the devil, but with a very different take. “Did I not choose you, the twelve?” Jesus asks in John 6:70, “Yet one of you is a devil.” From accusation—“he was a thief”—to demonization—“one of you is a devil,” few characters in the Bible come off any worse than Judas in Scripture and in tradition alike.

One of the fascinating things about Scripture and tradition alike is that this prevailing opinion of Judas is not unanimous. Carefully timed and orchestrated to coincide with Holy Week and Easter, the National Geographic Society announced the release last April of a long-lost early Christian document referred to as “The Gospel of Judas.” The society has brought this ancient but non-canonical gospel to light with a television special on the National Geographic channel, with a feature article in the May 2006 issue of the National Geographic magazine, two books about it, and a website on which you can view photographs of it as well as a Coptic transcription and English translation (http://www.nationalgeographic.com/index.html). This “Gospel of Judas” is a third-century copy of a document that has been known about since the second century when Irenaus, the bishop of Lyon, mentioned it and described some of its content in about the year 180. This only known surviving copy of the Gospel of Judas, was discovered in the 1970s in Egypt and finally came into scholars’ hands through the black market in antiquities five years ago.

In this gospel, Judas, instead of being vilified as a thief and demonized as a betrayer, is the only one of the twelve apostles who gets it. “I know who you are and where you have come from,” says Judas to Jesus, in response to which Jesus draws Judas aside with the invitation, “Step away from the others and I shall tell you the mysteries of the kingdom.” Jesus says to Judas, “[Come], that I may teach you about [secrets] that no person [has] ever seen.” And so Jesus instructs his intrepid follower concerning a great invisible spirit—the angelic Self-generated, about the divine luminaries—first 72 of them and then 360, about the cosmos, chaos, and the underworld and about the creation and destiny of humanity. Judas’ destiny is this, according to the Jesus of the gospel of Judas: “You will exceed all of them. For you will sacrifice the man that clothes me.” And with that commission from Jesus, Judas went out and “handed him over.” And so ends the gospel of Judas.

Now, let’s be very clear about the value of this copy of the Gospel of Judas. It’s priceless. It once was lost, but now it’s found. But this gospel offers no new information about the historical Judas or the historical Jesus either one. What it transmits is the way of thinking and believing of a stream of the Christian tradition that thrived in the second and third centuries that is commonly known as Gnosticism, from the Greek word gnosis, "knowledge," because of the gnostics’ emphasis on the secret knowledge, “the mysteries of the kingdom,” “the secrets that no person has ever seen”—except the Gnostics, of course. Like Judas in this second-century gospel, they got it right, and everyone else has missed it. That doesn’t tell us a thing about Judas or Jesus either one, but it reinforces what we already know about second- and third-century Christian Gnosticism. And it also reminds us that in Scripture and tradition alike, not everyone has vilified or demonized Judas.

In the gospel of Matthew, even as Jesus is being handed over to the authorities, he says to Judas, “Friend, do what you are here to do” (26:50). Do you hear that? “Friend.” “Do what you are here to do.” Let me very candid with you. This Jesus in Matthew 26:50 is the Jesus to whom I have given my life over. This Jesus who said to Judas, “Friend,” is the Jesus I have chosen to trust with my very life both now and forever. “Friend,” he said. Matthew 26:50 is the best illustration in Scripture that no truer words have ever been spoken of Jesus than those in Matthew 11:19, where he is disparagingly described as “a friend of tax collectors and sinners.” I don’t need the Jesus of the Gospel of Judas, who will be my friend when I get it right. It’s the Jesus of the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, who stands by even those who fail to stand by him. That’s a Jesus worth following; that’s a Jesus you can trust with your life—and with your death as well. A friend of tax collectors and sinners—and devils. I trust in a Jesus who stands by those who fail to stand by him, a Jesus whom I can count on to say “friend” to me even when I am at my most devilish worst.

The sad thing about Judas is not that he handed Jesus over to the authorities. The Jesus of Matthew’s gospel suggests that it could not have happened any other way. In vv 56-57 Jesus says, “Do you think that I cannot appeal to my Father, and he will at once send me more than twelve legions of angels? But how then would the scriptures be fulfilled, which say it must happen this way?” That’s why Jesus says to Judas, “Do what you must do.” It is as though Jesus says to Judas, “The time has come. This is no longer in my hands or your hands, Judas, but in the hands of God.” How much it is in the hands of God rather than Judas becomes clear when you consider that the very same verb that our English translations usually render “betray” when it is used of Judas is used of God in Romans 8:32, when Paul writes, God “who did not withhold his own Son, but gave him up for all of us”? You wouldn’t say, “God betrayed him,” now would you? But God handed him over, gave him up, as Judas did. The verb that English translations usually render as “betray” when it is used of Judas is used of Jesus himself in Galatians 2:20, when Paul writes, “I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me.” You wouldn’t say, “Jesus betrayed himself,” now would you? But Jesus gave himself over, gave himself up, as Judas did. That’s why Jesus said to Judas, “Friend, do what you must do, and I will do what I must do.”

Jesus did not play the blame game with Judas or with anyone else. Later layers of Scripture and tradition alike will blame, vilify and demonize Judas. If blame is your game, then have at Judas with all the self-righteous indignation you can muster. Because the funny thing is, the worse that you and all the others for centuries before you make Judas out to be, all the more amazing is the love of God in Jesus Christ who in the middle of it all looked Judas in the eye and called him “friend.” And that’s the saddest thing about Judas. Overcome by remorse, eaten up by guilt, undone by his inability to trust Jesus at his word, “Friend,” Judas went out and hanged himself, the gospel of Matthew tells us. But it didn’t have to end that way. It never does. Judas was not alone in his failure. Matthew 26:56 makes that very clear when it says, “Then all the disciples deserted him and fled.” They all failed to stand by Jesus that night, not just Judas. And yet, on resurrection morning, according Matthew 28:10, the Risen Lord said to the two Mary’s “Do not be afraid; go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee; there they will see me.” The Risen Christ calls those who had deserted him in his agony “his brothers.” Had Judas but trusted Jesus at his word, “Friend,” it would not have been eleven but a band of twelve brothers who “went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them.” The trouble with Judas is not that he betrayed Jesus. The trouble with Judas is that he just could not bring himself to trust Jesus enough to believe that Jesus would still call him a “friend” and a “brother” after they both had done what they both must do.

This material is Copyrighted © 2006 by Jeffrey S. Rogers. It may be copied or disseminated for non-commercial use, provided this notice is included. The author can be contacted at jeffrogers110@bellsouth.net.

Genesis 22--"The Sacrific of Isaac" or "Finding the Way Out"

Let me introduce you to a piece of Baptist biblical interpretation to which First Baptist Greenville is oddly and tangentially connected. Gwynne Henton Davies was a Welsh Baptist minister who became Principal of Regent’s Park College of Oxford University from 1958 to 1972, and he was President of the Baptist Union of Great Britain in 1971-72. Henton Davies is one of my intellectual “grandfathers” in Old Testament studies. He was the favorite teacher and mentor of my favorite teacher and mentor, John Durham. John Durham introduced me to Dr. Davies in the late 1970s on what turned out to be his last visit to the United States before his health began to fail him and he died in 1998. In 1969, G. Henton Davies published a commentary on the book of Genesis that appeared as volume one of the “Broadman Commentary.” “Broadman Press,” the publisher of Dr. Davies’ commentary, is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Southern Baptist Convention. But the press is named for two famous former members of this congregation whose influence on Baptist life in the South in the 1800s was so great that when Baptists decided to name the Southern Baptist press in the 1930s, they named it after John A. Broadus, from whose last name comes the “broad” in Broadman, and Basil Manly, Jr., from whose name comes the “man” in Broadman. Broadus and Manly taught in the Theology Department or the seminary of Furman University, and they were active and influential members of this congregation until the seminary moved to Louisville, KY, after the Civil War.

When Dr. Davies’ commentary on Genesis was published in a commentary series named after two luminous former members of this congregation, a firestorm of controversy broke out, and it happened because of what Dr. Henton Davies wrote about Abraham in Genesis 22. The firestorm spread so fast and grew so hot that in 1970, the messengers to the Southern Baptist Convention meeting that year in Denver, Colorado, adopted a resolution that required Broadman Press to withdraw the volume. In other words, the convention banned the book. In the aftermath of the ban, no more copies were to be sold, the copies that existed were to be destroyed, and another Old Testament professor was enlisted to produce “revised” volume that to this day is sold as volume 1 of the Broadman commentary. When the controversy occurred, I was too young and far too Lutheran to be concerned with it at the time; but I have a copy of the original volume, thanks to Baxter Wynn who gave me this copy that Don Rose gave him when Don retired. It’s a famous piece of Baptist biblical interpretation, not the least of which because to this day, as far as I know, it is the only book by a Baptist ever banned on the floor of the Southern Baptist Convention.

In his treatment of Genesis 22, Dr. Davies acknowledged that there are people who interpret quite literally God’s command to Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac. But at the end of a careful examination of the variety of interpretations of the passage, Dr. Davies asked this question: “Did God make, would God in fact have made, such a demand upon Abraham or anybody else, except himself?” (p. 198). He asked, “what Christian or humane conscience could regard such a command as coming from God?” (ibid.). Rather than deriving from God, said Henton Davies, Abraham’s conviction that Isaac must be sacrificed “is the climax of the psychology of [Abraham’s] life,” not God’s. Abraham cannot imagine life without Isaac who is his long-awaited future, you see, and Abraham comes to believe that his own desperate clinging to his son who is his future has clouded his trust in God. He concludes that he must give up Isaac for the sake of his relationship with God. And so he prepares to offer him to God as a sacrifice. But according to Henton Daves, the ram in the thicket became “the solvent of [Abraham’s] own mistaken conviction” (p. 198). What happened on Mt. Moriah, then, was not that God provided Abraham with a way out of God’s evil design on Isaac’s life, but that God provided Abraham with a way out of Abraham’s own obsession, illness and mistaken conviction about God.

Now let me tell you why I think Henton Davies' reading of Genesis 22 is very important for us to consider. First, there are already far too many people in our world who are willing to sacrifice the lives of others—and sometimes their own lives as well—under the banner of a perverted vision of the will of God. Parents who victimize their own children. Ministers and priests who prey on children or other vulnerable persons in their flock. Suicide bombers who immolate themselves and others under the cry, “God is great.” Whether we are willing to admit it or not, the mistaken Abraham is all around us and among us and in us. And second, who among us, after all, is capable of being such a hero of faith and a champion of trust in God? I’m not. You know that. You’re not. I know that. The gospel story in Genesis 22 that you and I need to hear is not the one that says “God provides” for the heroes and the champions like Abraham as he is customarily preached: "Be like Abe, and God will provide!" No, the gospel word is that God provides not only for the heroes and champions like the famous Abraham, but also just as surely God provides for misguided, cowardly, sinful, sometimes even pathological failures like you and like me and like the infamous Abraham. The gospel word is that there is a ram in the thicket even for us if we will but stop what we are doing that is harming ourselves and harming others and look and listen and wait and act when the ram is provided. Finding the way out of whatever discouraged or depressed or diseased or dysfunctional or dangerous circumstance we are in does not depend on our heroism at all but on God’s amazing provision for us and grace given to us in spite of—perhaps because of—our failings.

Finding the way out that God provides takes its own kind of courage because it requires us to acknowledge to ourselves, to God, and to others how terribly mistaken we have been and how badly we have failed them. Abraham could have been so convinced of his plan that in his tunnel-vision he never saw the ram in the thicket, or he saw it and ignored it because he was so committed to his course of action that he could consider no other possibility. Coming to terms with ourselves, coming to terms with the worst of ourselves, and reaching out for the help that is available to us outside ourselves is seeing the ram in the thicket, and it is the first step toward the way out. The second step toward the way out is recognizing that what God provides for us is not always what we want but it is what we need. Sometimes the reason we don’t see the way out is that we are so desperately fixated on what we want that we can’t see what we need that God has provided for us.

Fred Goff was a member of this congregation for more than 30 years. Fred died late Thursday afternoon during surgery for an abdominal aneurism, a time bomb in his belly that he had been carrying around for the last four years or so. Thursday morning his surgeon advised him against having the surgery, but Fred insisted. Here was Fred’s thinking. If the surgery was a success, he would likely have another two or three good years to live. If, on the other hand, the surgery was a success, he would die a quiet and peaceful death under general anesthesia instead of a painful and terrifying death when the bomb in his belly went off. So he told the doctor to go for it. And as he was wheeled into surgery he told the nurse by his side that he was ready to die. For Fred, the surgery was a no-lose proposition. It was a win-win. Fred had no “death-wish” going into surgery, but he also understood that hanging on desperately to life was no way to live. To the doctor he said, “Go for it.” To his son Mike he said, “Kiss P.J. for me.” (P.J. is Fred’s dog.) To his daughter Jennifer he said, “Don’t take any wooden nickels.” To his wife Janelle, he said, “Don’t worry.” And he reached out for the ram in the thicket that God had provided for him.

I was reminded this week of something that Theron Price was fond of saying. For those of you who never met him, Price was another one of the legendary Baptist theologians who was once a member of this congregation. Price would say, “Work as though it all depends on you. Trust as though it all depends on God.” Another way to put it might be this: when you get to the end of your rope, tie a knot and hang on for all you are worth. And while you are hanging on for all you are worth, look around for the ram in the thicket.

1 Corinthians 10:13: "No testing has ever overtaken you that is not common to everyone. God is faithful and will not let you be tested beyond your strength, but with the testing God will also provide the way out so that you may be able to endure it" (NRSV, alt.; emphasis added).

This material is Copyrighted © 2006 by Jeffrey S. Rogers. It may be copied or disseminated for non-commercial use, provided this notice is included. The author can be contacted at jeffrogers110@bellsouth.net.