Becoming “As a Child”: The Lesson After

Mark 10:17-31

Jesus said, “Whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it” (Mark 10:15). Those are words from Scripture that we would expect to hear in the gospel lesson for this morning’s Children’s Sabbath and Family Dedication. But it turns out that the gospel lesson for this morning in churches all around the world is the passage right after Jesus says those ideal words for Children’s Sabbath. Immediately after that child-friendly saying, the Jesus of Mark’s gospel forges ahead to talk about commandments and wealth and leaving your family. So down through the history of interpretation of Mark 10, we preachers and teachers have created a great divide between verses 13-16 in which Jesus talks about children and the next 15 verses that are this morning’s gospel lesson in the Revised Common Lectionary.

But several weeks ago, as I looked at Mark 10 in frustration that the passage for our observance of Children’s Sabbath did not include the verses before this morning’s lectionary passage, I saw something I had never seen before in verses 17-31. Verse 20: “I have kept all these things since my youth.” Hmm. Verse 24: “Children, how hard it is to enter the kingdom of God.” Hmm. Verse 29: Brothers and sisters and mother and father and children.” Hmm. “Youth . . . children . . . and children.” What if we’ve had it wrong all these years? What if it turns out that the gospel of Mark intends for all those verses to be read together—verses 13-31—without the great divide we have imposed on them in the history of interpretation? “From my youth” . . . “children, how hard it is” . . . “brothers and sisters, mother and father and children.” This morning I want us to consider what we could learn from looking at this morning’s gospel lesson in verses 17-31 as a continuation—an explanation and explication—of the sayings of Jesus in verses 13-16 about how we must become as children to enter the kingdom of God.

One thing we know about children—among many thing that we know about children—is that they grow and they learn. They grow and they learn. And the hard saying of Jesus in Mark 10:17-22 that follows the words about the model that children are for us is a saying about learning and growing. We usually read verses 17-22 as a lesson about wealth and priorities, but what if the wealth and priorities of the man who came to Jesus with a question about eternal life are only the “presenting problem,” only the symptoms or surface issues that disguise the deeper and underlying reason why he just doesn’t get what Jesus is saying about the kingdom of God?

The question of “eternal life” is a question of ultimate value. Among all the things that matter, what matters the very most? Jesus’ answer to the man’s question was not what the man expected to hear or wanted to hear, because it disrupted his understanding and his expectations. It required him to learn and grow into a new perspective, a perspective beyond what he had already learned.

Years ago, I had a friend who was a medical professional, a specialist whose expertise was recognized all over the country. There was a curious thing about him, though. When we sat down and talked about the Bible or theology, he insisted—and he actually put it this way once—that he didn’t want to hear anything from me or anyone else that he hadn’t learned in sixth-grade Sunday school. Well, sixth-grade Sunday school is that important. It is that good. It is that right, but I never could figure out how this man who was an expert in science and medicine was not willing to let his understanding of science be sixth grade stuff or his practice of medicine be sixth grade stuff, but he insisted that he should stop learning and growing beyond the sixth grade when it came to his faith.

In verses 17-22, the man says, “I learned all that stuff when I was a child, Lord!” And Jesus says, “Yes you did, but now you have another thing to learn.” There’s always another thing to learn, isn’t there? There’s always one more thing, have you noticed? How many times in your life have you arrived at to that “one-more-thing moment”? The diagnosis, the police officer at the door, the separation and divorce, the corporate bankruptcy, the job loss. When’s the last time you experienced a one-more-thing moment? Yesterday, last week, today? Regardless of our age or station in life, there is always “one more thing” we have to learn, one more place we have to grow. Jesus said to the man, “Yes, you’re right in all that you learned before, but now there’s another lesson that you need to learn.” But the man went away sad, not only because of his wealth that he could not part with, but because of the underlying issue that he was unable or unwilling to learn and grow, to adapt to a new perspective and a new understanding of his wealth and his faith and his practice. Unless you become as a child, learning and growing over and over again, you will never get the kingdom of God. Become as a child. Keep learning and growing.

In the second episode in the passage in verses 23-27, the “become-as-a-child” lesson builds on the first lesson. Jesus says that it is so very hard for a person who is so heavily invested in what he or she already knows or has acquired to “get it,” the kingdom of God, that is. We are taught from an early age to acquire: to acquire knowledge, to acquire wisdom, to acquire skills, to acquire money, to acquire things. And somewhere along the line in all our acquisitions we become so invested in what we have acquired that we become bloated and engorged. We become big as camels. We become complacent and entrenched in what we have acquired instead of invested in the One who has given it all to us as a gift, even as a gift acquired through our own hard work.

You see, the reason the disciples were perplexed and amazed at Jesus’ words that it is harder for a wealthy person to enter the kingdom of God than for a camel to go through the eye of a needle is that their theology (as often our theology) presupposed that being wealthy meant that you had been blessed by God. They understood the acquisition of knowledge and wisdom and wealth to be a blessing from God. “How can someone who has acquired all of this by the gift of God not be in the kingdom?” the disciples justifiably ask. In other words, “Who can be saved?” they ask. Salvation comes from God alone, says Jesus, not from us or anything we have acquired. In fact, the things that we have acquired, even our theology, our faith and our practice, can incapacitate us when we become more invested in them than in God. We become bloated and big as a camel, unable to pass through, unable to be flexible and graceful as a thread to go through the eye of a needle.

Look at the choir loft this morning. Do you see the flexibility up here among all these children in the choir loft this morning? Have you been noticing all the thread-like motion going on all morning? No camels here. Extraordinary flexibility. Unless you become flexible and graceful . . . you will never enter the kingdom of God. You have to be able to wiggle. Wiggle more! Get unstuck. Be flexible and graceful as a thread that can go through the eye of a needle. You need to learn to wiggle more, because life as God has given it to us takes a great deal of flexibility and adaptability and a great deal of grace and wiggling to make it through. Become as a child. Grow and learn and wiggle as a child does.

And then finally, as a child does, you must move on. You must to move on. Sometimes as we bring our children up, we wish we could hold onto them as children forever. But one thing we know about children is that they learn and grow and up and leave. That's what children do. Children grow into recognizing that the family that nurtured them and in which they grew and learned and loved and were loved is a place from which they must move on. But somewhere along the way in adulthood we forget what we knew as children, and we get stuck. We stop moving on as we learned to do as children. We become complacent and entrenched. But at every age and every station, the kingdom of God is always about moving on, about growing into leaving behind what you have been invested in previously. Jesus says, “Unless you’re willing to move on, you will never enter the kingdom of God.” Unless you are willing to move on, as our children grow and learn to move on.

Let the children come to me, said Jesus, because the kingdom of God belongs to such as these. Unless you become as a child is, you won’t ever get it: always learning and growing, being flexible and graceful, and moving on over and over again. Thanks be to God for children who lead us and teach us to learn and grow and wiggle and move on to enter the kingdom of God!

This material is Copyrighted © 2009 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.

World Communion: One Body, One Spirit, One Hope

Ephesians 4:1-7,11-16

It began hours ago far out in the Pacific in Fiji and Auckland and the Marshall Islands. As the dawn of a new Lord’s Day arrived, it spread west to the Philippines and Australia and the Pacific Rim, across the continent of Asia through successive time zones to Africa and Europe and finally to the Americas so that now it’s our turn, our turn to celebrate with brothers and sisters in Christ all around the world: World Communion Sunday. The first Sunday of every October is set aside on the Christian calendar as a day when we remember and acknowledge and celebrate “one body, one spirit, one hope,” as the book of Ephesians says.

In spite of all our differences, in spite of all our disagreements, in spite of all our divisions, we are one body, one spirit, one hope, says Ephesians. An analogy might be that Pacific Ocean. On the surface of it, there are winds and currents and tides that create massive crashing and foaming waves. But below the surface, deep down below the surface, there is only ocean. An ocean bigger and deeper and wider than whatever may be happening on the surface at any given time and place. The surface features and the deeper reality. One ocean. One body.

We’ve done a pretty good job talking about “one body” in its variety and diversity in local congregations. But we really haven’t done as good a job talking about the terms of those surface features and deeper reality—those varieties of gifts—in the larger church. Consider that with me for a moment: “one body,” one very large and variegated and diverse body. Verses 12 and 13 say that some are called and gifted to be apostles and some to be prophets and some to be evangelists and some to be pastors and teachers. That doesn’t just apply to persons in the church; it applies to churches as well. Some churches and even entire denominations are better at pastoring and teaching than other churches are. But that effectiveness does not make them any more important or any less important than any other part of the body. Some churches and entire denominations are better at evangelizing than other churches and entire denominations are. But that doesn’t make them any more important or less important in the body. Some churches and entire denominations are better at prophetic witness than others are. But that doesn’t make them any more important or less important than any other churches that are part of the body. And some churches and entire denominations do apostolic succession better than other churches do! But that does not make them any more important or any less important than other churches and denominations in the body. Ephesians says that this variety and this diversity is all according to the gifts by the grace of God that various ones of us and various congregations and denominations of us have been given by God. The varieties and the differences and the surface features of the body that are all connected by the deeper reality. One body, one spirit.

It’s fascinating to me that the New Testament does not insist on “one church,” “one church,” “one church,” as some later theologians and denominations do. The New Testaments says “churches,” “churches,” “churches” created by one spirit, called by one spirit, nurtured by one spirit. The oneness is not in the church; the oneness is in the spirit of God that creates and gifts churches as the spirit of God creates and gifts individuals. One body, one spirit, one hope.

And here’s my hope. My hope is that we would learn to do this well: surface features of difference and variety and giftedness along with deep reality. We could do this so well in the church that the world could learn from us how it is done. For example, in the state of South Carolina, we are not merely Democrats and Republicans and Libertarians and Independents. We are not black and white and Hispanic and Asian alone. We are not ultimately from the Upstate or the Midlands or the Pee Dee or the Low Country. We are in a commonwealth together. People who, “while we breathe, we hope.” Surface features and deep reality. In the United States we are not ultimately our political parties, our regions or our ethnicities. We are “one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” Surface features and deep reality. In North America, we are not ultimately Canadian citizens, U.S. citizens, Mexican citizens. We share a continent, a continent with a geography and a history and an economy that is inseparable. What happens in one directly affects the other. Surface features and deep reality. All around the world. If we can learn to do this in the church around the world, the world in turn can learn from us “one body,” one very large and variegated and diverse body. Around the world, a shared, common humanity, a shared vulnerability to epidemics and recessions and tyranny and terrorism, and shared opportunities to understand our differences as gifts and at the same time to transcend our differences to eat and drink together, to live together, to work together, and to create a better world together, “promoting the body’s growth in building itself up in love” (Ephesians 4:17). Surface features and a deep reality in a common bond: one body, one spirit, one hope. Now that’s a “world” communion.

This material is Copyrighted © 2009 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.

Religion 105 with Professor James: The End of the Course

James 5:13-20

We have arrived at the final session of our course with “Professor James,” as I’ve been calling him. All of us have experience with that feeling of arrival at the end of a course. Sometimes it’s a feeling of “Finally!” because we couldn’t wait for it to end. Other times, we have arrived at the close of a course we were sad to see end because we had enjoyed it. No doubt, there’s a mixed bag of feelings among us as we come to the closing session of this course with Professor James.

As any good course would, we should close with a review. So I want to remind you where we’ve been. In the first session, I suggested that Professor James lays out a definition of genuine religion, “real religion” as Eugene Peterson puts it, grounded in action more than it is in words. The shape of our lives and the practice of our faith is a more compelling indicator, says James, of the authenticity of our relationship with God than are the words that we speak. It is not in a profession of faith but in a practice of faith that religion with integrity lies, says Professor James.

In the second session, he suggested that there are two major obstacles to our living lives of genuine religion or real religion. Those two obstacles are partiality and passiveness. Partiality, James says, is when we welcome into our fellowship persons of wealth and influence who are well dressed and well healed while we look askance at and shuffle off to the side those who look poor and needy, disheveled and dirty. The problem with that partiality, James says, is that it makes hypocrites of us. In God’s eyes, every one of us is poor and needy, disheveled and dirty. None of us is wealthy or well dressed, influential or well heeled, so how could we shuffle someone else off to the side when God did not do that to us? That’s a faulty partiality, James says. The second thing we stumble over in our efforts to be authentic and real in our religion is passiveness. We see the need, but we don’t do anything about it. We speak a kind and encouraging word, but we do nothing. Partiality and passiveness.

In the third session, James pointed to the power of our words: the power of words for good and the power of words for ill. Our words have the power of self-fulfilling prophecies. The words we speak to persons can become the realities in our lives and theirs. What we say has far more influence on others than we would ever think. What we say can actually contribute to creating good and healing and health. And what we say can contribute to creating evil and illness and hatred. The power of words.

In the fourth session, James introduced us to a wisdom community. James says there is a kind of pragmatic and manipulative wisdom in the world that is grounded in envy and ambition, that is grounded in our cravings and in our insatiable need to acquire for ourselves. But James says there is another kind of wisdom: wisdom that “comes from above.” The wisdom that comes from above, the wisdom that characterizes the body of Christ and the people of God, is a wisdom that is pure and peaceable. It is a wisdom that is full of mercy and willing to yield, a wisdom that bears fruit, a wisdom with no trace of partiality or hypocrisy. That’s the wisdom community into which James calls us.

And now at last, our last lesson in the course, which for some of us may be the hardest lesson to hear, at least on the face of it. It is a lesson in the healing power of prayer, the healing power of confession, and the healing power of reconciliation. The healing power of prayer, the healing power of confession, and the healing power of reconciliation.

Many of us have a deep-seated ambivalence—if not outright skepticism—toward talk of the healing power of prayer. The ways we think of prayer and its healing power have been shaped and influenced, perverted in fact, by charlatans and crooks, who have made spectacles of prayer. More than three decades ago now, I came across my best worst example on television. It was the weekly healing service of a well-known televangelist healer. A man came up from the audience onto the stage asking to be healed of his loss of the sense of smell. He was welcomed and encouraged by this television healer who said to him, “You can be healed. We will pray for your healing. Close your eyes, and let’s pray now for God to heal your sense of smell.” And so the evangelist began to pray, and he prayed and he prayed, and then suddenly without warning and entirely unexpectedly he slammed his hand into the nose of the man standing there praying with his eyes closed. The blow knocked him flat on his back on the floor. Two of the televangelist’s assistants helped the man up, and the preacher said to him, “Can you smell?” Without thinking, the poor, shell-shocked man took a few sniffs, and he shook his head. Whereupon before he could so much as flinch, the preacher slammed him in the nose again, and down he went in a heap a second time. The assistants picked him up again, and the preacher asked, “Can you smell now?” And without even testing the air, the man put his hands up in front of his face and nodded his head vigorously and said, “Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!” And he was healed. You see, some of us have seen that or something like it. And it has so deeply offended us and our principles, our theological and religious senses that we’ve become skeptical or ambivalent about the healing power of prayer.

But let me suggest something this morning, especially for those of us who struggle on the face of it with this lesson from James. Let me suggest to you that we not get caught up in a simplistic and literal, physical and material definition of what’s happening in the power that James knows prayer brings in healing. I want to point you to wise words of a French priest and philosopher and geologist and paleontologist who lived at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. His name is Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin said that one of the mistakes that we make in understanding ourselves and who we are in the world is that we think of ourselves as human beings who are seeking a spiritual experience. But you are not a human being seeking a spiritual experience, said Pierre Teilhard. You are a spiritual being immersed in human experience. You are a spiritual being immersed in human experience, not a human being seeking a spiritual experience. Think about it.

In an earlier lesson, James said we should not praise God and speak well of God in our worship and our prayers and then turn around and speak demeaning and derogatory words about other people who are created in the image and likeness of God. James says that’s at the heart of hypocrisy. Those people of whom we speak in a demeaning and derogatory fashion, cursing them, as James says, are created in the very image and likeness of God of whom we speak so well. Before we were even designed and created by God as human beings, God said, “Let us make human kind in our own image and according to our likeness” (Genesis 1:26). We were conceived at the outset by God as spiritual beings before we ever became physical beings, material beings. And at the heart and the core of our greatest need and hurt and anxiety—at the heart of our greatest need—is God-relatedness not body-relatedness, not world-relatedness, not material-relatedness. One of our problems in understanding the healing power of prayer is that we have mistakenly come to think of ourselves as human beings who need a spiritual experience, when from the beginning we are spiritual beings immersed in human experience.

Let me give you two examples of members of this congregation whose words exemplify the healing power of prayer in their recognition of who they are in relation to God as spiritual beings immersed in human experience. The first one was several years ago. This person came to me and informed me that he was facing a catastrophic diagnosis. And he asked for me to pray with him and I did and for him and I did. We prayed together, and then we prayed separately and together for several weeks as he began to get the affairs of his life in order in the face of this pending diagnosis. And then one morning he called me on the phone, out of the blue, and he said, “Jeff, I’ve got to tell you what happened last night when I was praying. When I was praying last night, I came to the realization that even if I’m not going to be okay, I’m going to be okay. I’m in a completely different place now. It’s going to be okay, even if I’m not okay. I wanted you to know that.” “I came to the realization,” he said, “that even if I’m not going to be okay, I’m going to be okay.” His prayer, over weeks, in fear and anxiety and desperation had moved him to a place where he was no longer a human being seeking a spiritual experience but a spiritual being grounded in God-relatedness and able to face with grace and dignity and courage his human experience, whatever it turned out to be. And from that evening of prayer on, he faced that diagnosis without the anxiety and the fear, the fright and the desperation that he had carried with him for weeks. That’s the healing power of prayer that touches us at the place of our deepest need, our God-relatedness in the human bodies and the persons that we are.

Another one happened just last week. I was standing by the bedside of a member and longtime friend who was still in considerable discomfort and still recuperating from serious injuries he had received in an accident. I prayed with him and for him. After I finished praying, he looked up at me and said, “Your prayer reminds me of something.” He said, “You know, I have never in my life prayed to God to change my circumstances.” “I’ve never prayed to God to change my circumstances.” He said, “What I always pray to God is for God to be with me and to help me through my circumstances.” My prayer has always been that God will be with me and help me through my circumstances. That’s the healing power of prayer, the prayer of a spiritual being immersed in human experience. Prayer can touch us where we need and hurt the most, at our core. And that is in our God-relatedness even more than it is in our body-relatedness, in our world-relatedness, our material-relatedness.

The healing power of confession of which James speaks works just like the healing power of prayer. Confession is one of the lost arts in the Protestant tradition. Now, to tell you the truth I do not want to sit in a dark little booth all week long and listen to you tell me the things that you did last week that you shouldn’t have. I don’t want to go there. But we Protestants threw the baby out with the bath water when we decided that the sacrament of confession is not something that we needed or wanted. You may have noticed that once a month in worship we engage in the prayer of confession together in this place. Once a month is probably not enough, but once a month is better than not at all. You see, that prayer of confession, either publicly together or privately alone or with someone else, gets right to the core of who we are in our God-relatedness, created in the image and likeness of God. Sin is a rupture in our God-relatedness, and when we are alienated and separated from God by whatever means—our shame, our guilt, our disappointment in ourselves, we cannot be healed until we confess. “Thanks for listening to me,” she said. “I couldn’t carry this around with me any more. I had to find somebody to talk to, but there’s nobody else I could tell this to. Please don’t tell anybody, but I needed to get this off my chest. Thanks. I actually feel better now,” she said. That’s the healing power of confession that restores the God-relatedness of a spiritual being immersed in human experience.

And so also the healing power of reconciliation. The healing power of reconciliation. It just takes one person, James says. One person who reaches out across the separation and alienation and divide of time and space to say, “Hey, I’ve missed you!” Not I’ve missed you as in, “Where were you? I haven’t seen you in a long time!” But “I’ve missed you—we’ve all missed you. It’s not the same without you. Why don’t you come back?” The healing power of reconciliation is like this. If you’ve never been in on the inside, you really don’t know what you’re missing. But when you’ve been on the inside and you feel booted out, or you’ve been on the inside and you slip out the door when no one is noticing, or you’ve been on the inside and you go out with a flourish and slam it behind you, after a while you miss it; but it sure is hard to come back. That’s something else someone told me two weeks ago. Two weeks ago, late in the evening he said, “You know, I thought I could never come back here. But this church amazes me. I don’t deserve to be here, and I don’t understand why people are being so welcoming to me, but I can’t tell you how much it means to me because I need to be back here right now.” James speaks of the healing power of reconciliation when one person reaches out across time and space and alienation and re-connects someone with the body of Christ, the people of God, the gift of an opportunity to draw nearer to God who is drawing near to them. But they need that hand to reach out and help draw them back in.

The healing power of reconciliation. The healing power of confession. The healing power of prayer. That’s the end of the course. The expression “the end of the course” could simply mean it’s over, it’s done, “The End.” Or it could be that “the end of the course” means “the goal of the course,” the telos, the point of consummation toward which it was reaching from the beginning: the healing power of prayer, the healing power of confession, and the healing power of reconciliation addressing our deepest human need for God-relatedness as spiritual beings immersed in human experience. Thanks be to God!


This material is Copyrighted © 2009 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.

Religion 104 with Professor James: The Wisdom Community

James 3:13-4:3,7-8a

We live in an “information society.” Since the 1970s at least, our society has experienced an explosion of information and an expansion of access to information that has been positively mind-boggling. We live in an information society. I carry around on my hip more computer memory than existed in the entire mainframe computer of the old Computation Center at UNC-Chapel Hill where I worked as a work-study student in the mid-1970s. I’ve got more memory on my hip than that giant thing had in the whole room, and I have access at my fingertips to information that only a few decades ago was available only in libraries and corporate offices and private collections. But here it all is in my hand: 24/7/365(or 6) access to information and misinformation galore. We live in an information society.

With the rise of an information society, we have entered into what is called a “knowledge economy.” Depending on your definition of the knowledge economy, it either means that knowledge is the preeminent output of our economy now, or it means that knowledge is the indispensable tool and the economic driver of economies the world over. Both are correct. Not just in major academic centers or in large corporate offices but in cities and towns and rural areas all over the country and all over the world, knowledge is a power that has gone out from a relatively few select centers to places and people far-flung. “Know-how” is no longer the private property of a select few. We live in an information society, and we work in a knowledge economy.

But this morning, I’d like to suggest that “Professor James,” as I’ve been calling him for the last several weeks, presents to us in today’s Epistle Lesson in the Revised Common Lectionary a “third order.” In addition to the information society and the knowledge economy in which we live and work, James calls our attention to the necessity of a wisdom community. A wisdom community.

You see, the information society is amazing. But one of its shortcomings is that in and of itself, the information society does not provide us with any criteria on the basis of which to decide which information of all the information that is out there we should use to shape our lives and form our souls and inform our perspective on the world. The information available to us is so expansive that it cannot be calculated, but there are no criteria provided by the information society to guide us in discerning which information should shape us and form us and feed us. That requires a wisdom community. In the knowledge economy, the know-how available to us, the know-how that we have—or that we have available to us through the capability of others—is astonishing and astounding. We have no shortage of know-how, but we stumble again and again over know-why. We have plenty of know-how, but we trip and fall down over know-when and know-when-not. Know-how comes with the knowledge economy. But know-why and know-when and know-when-not can only be cultivated in a wisdom community.

“Professor James” lived on the cusp of a revolution in information and knowledge. Shortly after his lifetime there was a revolution in the dissemination of information and the expansion of knowledge. This far removed from it, we don’t even think about it. We’re accustomed to saying “the book” of James without realizing that by speaking of “the book,” we’re revealing that we’re on the other side of the information and knowledge revolution on the cusp of which James lived. We don’t say “the scroll” of James, do we? We say “the book” of James. That shift from scroll-making and scroll-reading to book-making and book-reading was a revolution in human civilization. Instead of producing enormously expensive and tediously prepared material to write on made from goatskin or sheepskin tanned and cut and sewn together at the edges so that you would “scroll” your way into the text and scroll your way back out, it was becoming possible to produce books sewn on one edge with writing on both sides of the page. One of the many advantages of this new information technology was the ability to open it and scan through it. You could leaf through it, and you could find what you wanted and needed far more quickly and easily than in a scroll. Why, it was positively Google-ish, this new information technology called “books.” “Professor James” lived on the cusp of a revolution in civilization and information and knowledge, but he understood very well that no matter how good your information is and no matter how extensive your knowledge is, without wisdom you have no criteria, no principles, no grounding for negotiating your way through the information you have access to and the knowledge you acquire.

A wisdom community is what James points us to at the end of chapter three and the beginning of chapter four. James acknowledges in 3:15 that there is a kind of wisdom that is all about our own ambition, our own self-absorption, our own self-interest and capacity to acquire and gain for ourselves at the expense of others. He says that that kind of wisdom does not create community. That kind of wisdom creates disorder and conflict, wickedness and disputes. It is driven by envy and selfish ambition. But James says there is an alternative wisdom that must be cultivated in community, and that alternative wisdom is “from above.” Wisdom “from above” is the kind of wisdom that comes to us individually and together when we make an effort to draw near to God who draws near to us, as James 4:8 puts it. The wisdom from above, said James, is the wisdom that should form our lives and shape our behaviors and our perspectives on the world. It’s not driven by envy or selfish ambition or cravings. Instead, it is pure and peaceable, gentle and willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits without even a trace of partiality or hypocrisy.

This morning I want to offer two examples of individuals whom I would like to hold up as persons who were fully engaged in the emergence of our information society and our knowledge economy, but neither one of them forgot the importance of the wisdom community. Both of them died this week, and that put them on my radar screen.

Chances are, you have never heard of Horace Carter. In North Carolina journalism circles in which I had my fair share of selfish ambition for a time when I was younger, Horace Carter was a living legend. In 1947, Horace Carter founded the Tabor City Tribune. And at the ripe old age of 33, he won a Pulitzer Prize. Now for those who aren’t familiar with it, the Pulitzer Prize is like an Emmy or a Grammy. It’s the biggest award in the business; it’s the highest prize a journalist or newspaper can win. Horace Carter won the Pulitzer Prize at the age of 33 because between 1950 and 1952 there was an enormous uprising of the Ku Klux Klan in Columbus County, North Carolina, and Horry County, South Carolina, the two counties which Horace Carter had decided his newspaper, the Tabor City Tribune, would serve.

This is what he wrote in the first editorial in the first edition of that newspaper. The editorial began, “‘In the beginning, God created’—and so goes the Bible. And this is the beginning of a newspaper designed to serve peoples of all races and colors who live in Columbus County, North Carolina, and Horry County, South Carolina” (emphasis added). That was the mission statement that he wrote in the first editorial of the first edition of the Tabor City Tribune. So in 1950, when the uprising of the KKK began in those two counties, Horace Carter had to decide between his mission and his popularity, between his mission and his personal safety. And during those three years he engaged in investigation after investigation, wrote article after article, wrote editorial after editorial confronting and condemning the Klan and refusing to stand down or be intimidated by the Klan’s violence and vigilantism and its domestic terrorism. There were threats on his life, threats on his family’s life, threats on the lives of his pets. He was threatened that he would be run out of business and run out of town, but he did not stand down, and with him stood advertisers and merchants and others in Tabor City who also refused to back down to the threats.

It’s a remarkable story, really, that a young man born to uneducated parents in a mill village in Albemarle, North Carolina, who graduated from a high school from which no male student had ever completed college won a Pulitzer Prize. Why? Not because he had better information than anyone else. Not because he had more knowledge than anyone else. But because he was committed to a community of wisdom in which he had been nurtured. He received a biblical grounding and principled rearing in a strict Southern Baptist family and a Southern Baptist church. And he had a profoundly influential mentoring experience his senior year in college when he was the editor of The Daily Tar Heel, and he sat on Sunday evenings with Frank Porter Graham, the president of UNC-Chapel Hill, as they talked about the problems that the university faced and the state faced and the world faced. Horace Carter was nurtured in a wisdom community, and that’s why he was prepared to do amazing and courageous things in a small town in North Carolina in a troubled and troubling era of that state’s history.

But you don’t have to start out poor or without means in order to cultivate and create and live out the kind of wisdom James espouses. Unless you’re a Virginian, you probably don’t know the name Frank Batten, Sr. Frank Batten, Sr., was born in Virgina seven years after Horace Carter was born in North Carolina. He was born a child of privilege, an heir of a family fortune. But he worked himself up from the bottom of a newspaper in Norfolk, Virginia, the Virginian-Pilot. He worked himself up from the bottom of the paper to become its publisher. In 1958, the governor of Virginia ordered the secondary schools in Norfolk to close rather than to comply with a court order to integrate. Alone among Virginia’s major papers, Frank Batten, Sr.’s Virginian-Pilot stood against the governor and against the prevailing winds of the “Massive Resistance,” as it was called in Virginia. He stood against it editorially, and he stood against it personally. He helped to mobilize business people and socialites of Norfolk to support re-opening the schools—re-opening them peaceably and re-opening them integrated—which happened in 1959. And for his efforts, Frank Batten won a Pulitzer Prize and became a legend in Virginia journalism circles. He had no different information at his disposal or no special knowledge that other publishers at other newspapers in the state of Virginia did not have. What he had was wisdom without partiality or hypocrisy. And he parlayed that wisdom into becoming one of the most important media moguls of the twentieth century in the United States, acquiring newspapers and television stations and then launching what some people said would surely be one of the greatest follies in the new cable television business. When he came out with the business plan, people told him it would never work. No one would ever watch it, they said. Nobody would watch a 24-hour “Weather Channel”! He believed in it, and he kept working on it, and the rest, as they say, is history. A part of that history is that Frank Batten, Sr., became one of the foremost philanthropists of higher education in the United States, especially in Virginia.

But what I like best about the story of Frank Batten, Sr.’s life is that a few years ago, when someone asked him in an interview how he would like to be remembered, he didn’t talk about the Virginian-Pilot; he didn’t talk about his media exploits or his corporate venture on cable; and he didn’t talk about his breath-taking philanthropy. This is what he said: “I’d like to be remembered as someone who did some worthwhile things.” “I’d like to be remembered as someone who did some worthwhile things,” he said, and Professor James smiled. Doing “some worthwhile things,” pure and peaceable, gentle and willing to yield, full of mercy and bearing fruits without a trace of partiality or hypocrisy is what James is calling us all to do. You don’t have to be born poor, and you don’t have to be born with a silver spoon in your mouth. It’s not about how much information you have or how much knowledge you acquire. It’s about being a part of a community of wisdom that cultivates discernment and values and principles that inform the decisions we make and the lives we lead as we make our own effort to draw near to God who draws near to us.

Information society? You bet. Knowledge economy? You better believe it. Wisdom community. May it be so. May it be so.

This material is Copyrighted © 2009 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.

Religion 103 with Professor James: The Power of Words

James 3:1-12

A curious aside: After I delivered this sermon in the 9:00 a.m. service at First Baptist Greenville on September 13, 2009, I went back to my office and pulled a 50-year-old commentary on the book of James off my shelf just to stay "in the spirit of James" before I preached again at 11:00. What I read was astonishing--and bit frightening to someone trained in the academic disciplines of research and citation. The writer of that commentary used four illustrations that I had just used in my sermon. Things that I was pleased with myself for coming up with during the week before, he had written more than 50 years ago. Now, I don't for a minute think that I'm all that original. Ecclesiastes said it: "There is nothing new under the sun." And it's no surprise that the interpretation of the Word of God across the ages involves criteria and principles that sometimes carry a common content from one century to the next, entirely independently of printed and published works.

But it turns out that the connection here is a little more unsettling--or more deeply gratifying--than that. When I saw the convergence of this writer's exposition to my own, I flipped to the front of the commentary to see who it was. His name was Gordon Poteat. If I had been a teenager texting at that moment, I would have keyed in "OMG!" Gordon Poteat was the son of Edwin McNeill Poteat, President of Furman University from 1903-1918 and a member of First Baptist Greenville, as every President of Furman has been since 1850 when the school moved to Greenville. Gordon Poteat was twelve years old when his family moved to Greenville and to First Baptist Greenville, and he was part of this congregation until he went to college. The connection was eerie.

But there's more. In 1938, Gordon Poteat returned to Greenville to deliver a series of sermons for "Religious Emphasis Week" at Furman. By then, Poteat was a professor of social ethics at Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania. In his series of sermons, Poteat claimed that the practice of the Christian faith was more important than the mere profession of it. That message so fired up certain Furman students and certain Baptist clergy in the Greenville area in anger and hostility against what he preached that the Furman Trustees fired a religion professor who defended Poteat's preaching. His name was Herbert Gezork, and he was a member of this congregation. He was fired for defending Gordon Poteat who preached sermons along the lines of what I had been preaching for several weeks.

There's one more piece to this. I pulled the bound copy of orders of worship from 1938 off the shelf and turned to February. On February 13, 1938, at the beginning of his famously controversial Religious Emphasis Week at Furman, Gordon Poteat was the preacher in the Sunday evening service at First Baptist Greenville. I know better than to say, "He's ba-a-a-a-a-ck!" But it sure felt that way. It felt as though old Gordon Poteat had just walked right off the pages of his commentary and back into the life of First Baptist Greenville seventy years later. OMG!

“Talk is cheap,” we like to say. “Talk is cheap.” “Sticks and stones can break my bones but words will never hurt me,” we teach our children to say. Talk is cheap, and if any biblical writer was going to endorse the statements that talk is cheap and that sticks and stones can break our bones but words can never hurt us, you would think it would be Professor James, as I have been calling him for the last several weeks. It’s James who insists that it’s not just what you profess; it’s not just what you say with your mouth; it’s what you practice with your life that counts. So you would expect that when we got around to the talk part, James would agree that talk is cheap and that sticks and stones could break our bones but words would never hurt us. But in James 3:1-12, he moves in exactly the opposite direction. Talk is powerful, expensive, and can even be destructive, he says.

Ask Howard Dean. Just to remind some of you (or for those of you who are too young to know), it was 2004. Howard Dean was the leading candidate to become the Democratic nominee for President of the United States until the night of January 19, 2004. Dean finished a disappointing third in the Iowa caucuses. Late that night, in an effort to rev up his supporters, he delivered a speech that will forever be known in the history of American political campaign rhetoric as the “I have a scream” speech. Howard Dean went off in an extraordinary rant that so befuddled and unsettled the American public, at least the Democratic portion of the American public, that he went from a 30 point lead in New Hampshire, the first primary after the caucuses, to losing that primary and out of the race for President. Intemperate speech can be expensive. Ask Joe Biden. For decades, Joe Biden was a wise and effective Senator. No one on either side of the aisle disagrees with that. But every time he ran for President he managed to shoot himself in the foot with his mouth. Talk can be expensive. And now we have a fellow South Carolinian who has won a national foot-in-mouth award. Joe Wilson’s outburst at Barack Obama’s address to a joint session of Congress has reminded us all that something we might say spontaneously turns out to be a case of really bad judgment in retrospect. It’s not the first thing Joe Wilson has said that he has had to apologize for publicly, but it’s his most notorious gaff, for sure. And then there’s Steve Anderson, a Baptist pastor in Tempe, Arizona, who won a previous national foot-in-mouth award for preaching a sermon titled “Why I hate Barack Obama,” and for leading his congregation in praying for the President of the United States to die. Words can be costly and destructive and detrimental not just to the person who speaks them but to the congregation and the community and the world in which they are spoken.

That’s why Professor James, as I call him, says that not many of us should aspire to be teachers and public speakers because all of us make many mistakes. And the problem with that is that there is a double standard when it comes to speaking--and it is an appropriate double standard. Teachers and public persons are appropriately held to a higher standard of judgment than everyone else because words can hurt and destroy. When private individuals in private conversation in their home or family or circle of friends say hurtful, destructive or ignorant things, the damage is not all that widespread. But when teachers in the church, when leaders in the world turn loose words that turn on themselves and on others, James says, they are—we are—rightfully judged more harshly than anyone else. Now what I want you to see about James 3:1-12 as we work through this passage is that there is a double standard and justifiably so, but the principle applies to all of us. Leaders and teachers are held to a higher standard, but the principle of the power of speech for good and for ill applies to all of us.

Take a look at James 3:1-12. If you have your own Bible or the Bible in the pew rack on page 981, I’d like you to take a look at it because what I think Professor James does in these 12 short verses has a fascinating structure and contains a message about the power--and the danger--of speech that we should all be reminded of. In verse one, he points out that teachers are held to a higher standard. In verses 2 through 4 he talks about the powerful positive effect of the tongue or of speech. The first image he uses is that of a horse. With something as small and simple as a bit in the mouth of the horse, the rider can effect a direction of an animal far larger and stronger than the rider. The positive direction and force of the horse can be channeled by the mouth. It’s a positive image of the power of speech. The next image he uses in verses 2 through 4 is also positive. He says, consider a ship. The direction of the entire ship is changed and determined by something as small as the rudder. And he compares that to speech. The tongue, so small a part of the body, and speech, so small an act, is like the rudder that determines the direction of a large ship. Powerful images, positive images for speech.

Then verse 5 becomes a hinge. It’s a hinge on which the imagery swings from positive to negative. He says in verse five, the hinge expression, that the tongue can boast of great exploits. He’s just given positive examples by analogy, but in verse 6 he turns to give negative examples of the power of speech by using the image of the tongue as a forest fire. Fire can consume you. Fire can destroy. Something as small as a spark of words can set off a mob. Something as small as a spark of words can destroy a lifetime of a person’s reputation. A small spark can start a fire that consumes hundreds of thousands of acres. That’s the danger of speech, he says. The second negative image is of how the tongue seems less controllable than wild animals. There is a poisonous power in the tongue that can be deadly. Powerful, negative images for speech.

The positive power of the tongue, of words that are spoken, might best be illustrated, say, in the speeches of Winston Churchill. Churchill’s speeches, his addresses to the people of England, carried them through Britain’s darkest hours, night-long bombardments and day long struggles to make do through the consequences of what had happened overnight. Again and again, Churchill spoke power and inspiration that unified a people and carried them through. Now flip the hinge. All we have to do is cross the English Channel into Europe and Germany at the very same time to see and hear and (for some of us) remember the negative power of speech. Adolf Hitler’s words succeeded in inspiring good people to do unthinkable things. Hitler succeeded in inspiring people just like you and me to do things that they or we would swear on a stack of Bibles we would never do, things contrary to our nature, contrary to our ideals, contrary to our culture and our confession, and yet Hitler’s words had the power to inspire murder and mayhem, death and destruction on an unthinkable scale among cultured, civilized people. Those are the two sides of the hinge in verses 2 through 8. Now, none of us here is a Winston Churchill, and none of us is an Adolf Hitler. We are somewhere in between. And it’s in verses 9 through 12 that James brings the negative and the positive together in a way that applies to most of us.

We're in verses 9 through 12. We arrive in this room to lift up praises to God, to give glory to God, to say wonderful things about God. And then how often we leave this place to say hurtful, destructive, and demeaning things about persons created in the image and likeness of God. James says, my brothers and sisters, this makes no sense. You cannot come into worship and praise and glorify God, and then speak hatefully and destructively of those whom God has created in God’s own image. You are speaking hatefully and destructively of God when you speak that way of God’s image.

We are capable of speaking words that are like fresh water to thirsty people, words of kindness and sometimes correction, words of comfort and encouragement and sometimes redirection. We are capable of those life-giving words. And we are capable also of brackish water, salty, muddy, nasty stuff that gives life to no one but only infects and agitates. James says it ought not be so, my brothers and sisters.

Words have a power to become self-fulfilling prophecies. We know this in education; it’s well documented in study after study after study. If you say to a child, “You are stupid!” “You are stupid!” “You are stupid!” she will come to believe it, and she will live as though she were stupid. If you say to a child, “You are ugly and worthless!” "You are ugly and worthless!" he will come to think of himself and live as ugly and worthless. But if you say to a person, “My, you did that well. Thank you, you should do more of that.” Or “You know, something you said the other day has really meant a lot to me. Thank you.” If we encourage, if we find the things that are good and speak the good again and again and again, the good becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. That’s what James knows. That which is spoken for hurt has the capacity to hurt. That which is spoken for good has the capacity to nurture and encourage and create good in itself. The power of words.

Let us not speak highly of God and speak destructively and hatefully of the likeness and image of God, my brothers and sisters. Let it not be so. Let it not be so.


This material is Copyrighted © 2009 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.

Religion 102 with Professor James: Principal Errors

James 2:1-10,14-17

Last week I suggested it was time to begin a new course that I called “Religion 101” with “Professor James,” an expert in the field. He is familiar with Greek philosophy, and he knows Roman religion. He’s an expert in Judaism, and he’s a specialist in Christianity. So James can teach us a lot about religion. His definition of religion that is “pure and undefiled before God” is this, we learned last week: “to care for orphans and widows in their distress and to keep one’s self unstained by the world.” Eugene Peterson paraphrased that as “real religion.” Real religion, Peterson said, is “to reach out to the homeless and the loveless in their plight to guard against corruption by the godless world.” Genuine religion, then, involves ministry to those who are ignored and forgotten rather than embracing the self-absorption, callousness and indifference of society at large. That was the first lecture in Religion 101.

In his second lecture, James says there are two principal errors that keep us from genuine religion, real religion, religion that is pure and undefiled by God. According to James, they are partiality and passiveness. I should be ashamed, really. I should be embarrassed. I shouldn’t dare stand up here like this in this ratty old t-shirt, dirty discount store shorts and shoes the dog ate. I should be embarrassed. You’re probably embarrassed for me, some of you, because I look so bad. Would it be any different if I’d walked up to the front door, the middle door or the back door this morning looking like this? Would I be welcomed any differently for wearing this than the blazer from a fashionable maker of men’s clothing, the slacks from a major brand, the button-down shirt from a regional department store, and the tie from a downtown clothier? James says our partiality gets us in trouble because I should be ashamed and embarrassed, and you would be ashamed and embarrassed to greet me at the door and shake my hand and say, “Welcome, I’m glad you’re here. Can I help you find a Sunday school class?” or “Come sit with me this morning.” Where am I going to take this guy? Where could he sit that he won’t be seen? This is embarrassing.

James says that partiality is unacceptable, and the reason he gives is quite remarkable. James doesn’t say what you’d expect him to say. He doesn’t say, “Don’t show partiality because God doesn’t show partiality.” That’s the high road. That’s what you’d expect, but that’s not what James says. Instead, he says don’t show partiality for the influential looking and the rich looking and the powerful looking over against the poor and the needy and the dirty and the disheveled because God has chosen the poor and the needy and the dirty and the disheveled. And you know what happens when James does that? James levels the playing field. By telling the gathered body of Christ, the Christian community at worship that God has chosen the poor and the needy and the dirty and the disheveled, James says that every one of us is poor and needy and disheveled and dirty. No matter how well we clean up and dress up on the outside, the error in our judgment, the faulty standard of our judgment is that we choose to look at this other person based on their outside rather than looking at this other person based on our own inside. In relation to God, none of us is wealthy. None of us is well-dressed. None of us is powerful or influential. God knows that. God sees that. But James says we engage in a faulty standard of judgment because we don’t see that about ourselves while we are quick to see it about others. We look at the tattered rags and the embarrassing clothing, and we say, “How about you stay over here? There is someone better suited for the kingdom coming right behind you. They need to come to the front and center.” James gives us a real-life example of one of the two great threats to real religion, genuine religion, religion that is pure and undefiled before God: our faulty standard of partiality when we judge others by their outside without looking at our own inside. Partiality.

And then there’s the problem of passiveness. We don’t do anything about it even when see it, James says. That’s the trap we fall into. He’s not trying to make us feel guilty. He’s not trying to beat us up. He’s just saying, look, authentic faith, real religion, genuine relationship with God has these two things that we’re likely to stumble over: partiality and passiveness. You have to do something about it, James says. So here I am shamefully dressed, embarrassing myself. (By the way, you’ll notice that I chose to do this on a Sunday when none of my three sons would be here. There are some things that children should never have to see about their parents.) It’s November, and it’s cold. And I’m still dressed in this ratty shirt, these old shorts and these literally dog eaten shoes. It’s cold, and I’m alone, and some good, well-meaning person walks by and says, “God bless you. Be warm. Eat your fill.” That’s a good word, except that they keep walking, and I’m left here cold and alone in ratty clothing and dog eaten shoes. They walk away feeling good because they just said something encouraging and kind but I’m left here.

You see, we don’t leave everybody behind. We take people in. We do things for people. This is a wonderful congregation of loving and doing and caring. I know because before most of you even knew who I was almost twenty years ago, Bev and I and our young son and eventually two and then three, were taken in and we were cared for. It was like Christmas in July when members of this congregation, friends of ours, would bring two big black plastic bags of clothing that their son had outgrown to our house, and they would give them to us, and we were thrilled to get them because we needed them. And it was nicer stuff than we would have ever bought for Marshall. I’d pull out a nice pullover shirt, a golf shirt that had a little horse on it. I don’t know what kind of implement that guy on the horse is holding up. That’s outside my league. I don’t play that game. I’d pull it out, and we’d wash it up and shake it out, and I’d give it to Marshall and say, “Marshall, look at this nice new shirt.” He’d say, “I know, it was Elliott’s.” And I’d say, “Yeah, isn’t that cool? It was Elliott’s, and now it’s yours, and you’re going to look great in it.” See, we do that for each other. I know we do that. James is saying that we can’t ever fall into the trap of just thinking that it’s enough for us to take care of our own and pass others by with a good word but don’t do anything about it.

Faith without works is dead, James says. You can have all the right thinking in the world about your doctrine, and it’s lifeless if it doesn’t translate into action. You can feel so good about how close you are to God, and it’s meaningless if that person is sitting over there in the cold and you walk by and speak a blessing without being a blessing. We can have everything we need physically, spiritually, emotionally, but James says when we leave others out our faith is dead. Our religion is not real. Our relationship with God is not complete until we have put it into action in relation to the needy and the poor and the dirty and the disheveled.

That’s what this Table is about. Among the many other things this Table is about, this Table is about action. We celebrate the ordinance of the Lord’s Supper this morning not because of what Jesus thought or what Jesus felt or even because of what Jesus said. This table is here because of what Jesus did in his life and his ministry, in his death and his resurrection. Jesus translated what he believed into action for the needy and the poor, the disheveled and the dirty, and that means for you and for me. And Jesus calls us to remember that, to celebrate it with one another, and then to go out and do something about it. That’s Jesus; that’s James; that’s the gospel. And every one of us is called to reach out to the embarrassed, the ashamed, the needy, the poor, the dirty and the disheveled in the recognition that that’s how and when God has reached out to every one of us. Every one of us is invited this morning to share in this bread and share in this cup, and then to share in faith that is alive and vibrant and in action welcoming in and reaching out.

Let’s pray. Gracious and loving God, for the gift that you have given us in Jesus Christ, in remembrance of whom we eat this bread and drink this cup, we give you thanks. We thank you for welcoming each one of us in, in spite of our inside. Forgive us, O God, for the times that we have failed you and others, and strengthen and encourage us that we may show no partiality other the partiality that you have shown when you reached out to us. Give us the strength and courage not to be passive, so that just as Jesus did, we also will do. In Jesus’ name we pray, Amen.

This material is Copyrighted © 2009 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.

Religion 101 with Professor James: It's in the Practice

James 1:17-27

All over the country, students have returned to school. From preschool to graduate school there are new teachers, new classes, new courses. So I thought it would be appropriate for us to start a new course too. It’s Religion 101 with Professor James. Professor James is well qualified to teach Religion 101. He is knowledgeable of Greek philosophy. He knows Roman religion. He is an expert in Judaism. And his specialty is a brand new religion called Christianity, brand new, that is, at the time he wrote his book on Religion 101.

Professor James is not only a professor of this religion, he’s a practitioner of it as well. For James, religion is not a conceptual and intellectual exercise learned from books and academic discussions and debates. Expertise in religion is about the practice of it, not the mere profession. That’s one of the things that sets him apart from so many religion professors in leading colleges and universities in the United States these days who are professors of religion without being practitioners of it. They are, somehow, experts in a field in which they are embarrassingly inexperienced. It’s a curious new status quo among religion professors that has developed in the last 50 years or so in the U.S. Can you imagine someone wanting to be a law professor but insisting that he had no need of actually engaging in the practice of law to understand it? “I don’t accept any of the premises that the law is based on, and I don’t approve of legal practices, but I am a scholar of the law qualified to teach others about it,” he would say. Most people would think he was a fool. Imagine the would-be professor of medicine who never practiced medicine and who routinely ridiculed and belittled those who do, but who says she wants to teach medicine. Not likely. An expert in something you refuse to actually do? Most people would call her naïve. But professors of religion who do not practice what they profess and who ridicule and belittle those who do are more and more common in leading American colleges and universities, just as more and more people in American churches are professors of their faith but not practitioners of it. Not so Professor James. Being a practitioner of what one professes is at the heart of his understanding of religion.

In his Religion 101, Professor James says, “Religion that religion that is pure and undefiled before God is this—to care for the orphans and the widows in their distress and to keep oneself unstained by the world” (James 1:27). Religion is in the practice, not in the profession. Eugene Peterson, in his paraphrase of the Bible called The Message, puts it this way: “Real religion is caring for the homeless and the loveless and guarding yourselves against the corruption of the world.” Real religion is in the practice, not just in the profession. James Moffett, a 20th century New Testament interpreter put it this way in his commentary on James: “When the sermon is done, it is not done; something remains to be done by the hearers in life” (General Epistles, p. 26). When the sermon is done, the sermon is not done until something is done by the hearers in life.

Religion is not in the hearing; it’s in the doing. It is in the practice, not just the profession. If all we do here is “hear” and “profess,” then what we are doing is an exercise in self deception. Our worship of God is an exercise in self deception unless we take the word that we have heard inside this room outside this room into life. That’s the point of the image of the mirror that James uses in verses 23-25. He says self deception is like when people look in the mirror, see themselves there, walk away, and can’t remember what they look like. Worship is a mirror. It’s a mirror in which we see who we are and whose we are and who we are called to become. And if we look in that mirror and see who we are and see whose we are and see who we are called to become and then put it down, walk out, and forget what that image looked like, we engage in self deception. Our religion is worthless, James says.

There is a word that has been planted in us, says James (v 21). That word is planted inside us, and that word must grow in us until that growth and development show on the outside, out there, not just on the inside in here. Some people say that religion is a private and personal matter between a believer and God. Religion is a private and personal matter between a believer and God, but that’s not all religion is. If all that religion is is a private and personal matter, then it is self-deception and worthless, according to James. James Moffett says that you and I come to church to enjoy an “emotional or mental treat.” It’s what we come for. What we want out of our experience in worship is a mental or emotional treat, a spiritual or musical treat. A little morsel that makes us feel good while we are here, while outside this room people hunger and thirst and need. Our religion is worthless, says Professor James, if all we come here for is a personal and private mental or emotional or spiritual or musical treat.

Professor James’s understanding of religion would turn the American church and this church upside down if every one of us adopted it. It would shake us out of our sleeping bags. It would shake us out of our sleeping bags in church if we adopted the definition Professor James puts forward in Religion 101. The point of being in this room is to leave this room. Notice something fascinating James says about the “blessing.” It’s in verse 25. “Being not hearers who forget but doers who act—they will be blessed in their doing.” “They will be blessed in their doing.” We (and not we alone—it’s typical of American Christians) come to church to receive “a blessing.” We come here to be blessed, and we love to leave this place feeling as though we’ve been blessed by our worship here. But look what Professor James says about religion that is pure and undefiled by God, what Eugene Peterson says is real religion. The blessing is not in here. It’s out there. In our doing we will be blessed. If you are satisfied with the blessing that you get in this room, then according to Professor James you are participating in self deception because the real blessing comes, says James, in your doing. That’s why religion can never be only a private and personal matter between a believer and God. Real religion, as Peterson puts it, is observable and public. It is an empirical phenomenon. It is observable and measurable. You can see it because the word that is implanted in us grows from the inside to the outside when we are not merely hearers of that word but doers. If we were to adopt Professor James’s definition of religion, it would turn the American church upside down. It would turn this church upside down. It would shake us all out of our spiritual sleeping bags to do at least as much as we hear, and in that doing we would hear, feel, receive, experience the blessing that James says is there.

Forty-five years ago my predecessor and our pastor, Hardy Clemons, wrote a hymn text that expresses Professor James’s definition of religion. We’ve been singing it for 15 or 20 years around here. Hardy’s hymn reminds us that we are not here for a treat. We are here to hear a word that we go from this place to do. “The Call to Minister Is Heard,” Hardy wrote, “to go wherever needs exist.” “We cannot serve God just in church! . . . He calls us here to send us there.” That’s real religion, and that’s what we are all invited to this morning as we stand and sing together “The Call to Minister Is Heard.”

This material is Copyrighted © 2009 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.

Opening New Doors: Keys and Key Stories (A Dedication Sermon)

(Photo by Henry Mitchell)

Opening New Doors (Sheep Gate 2)
Wood, Keys, Construction Detritus, Micaceous Oxides, Acrylic
48 x 50 x 5 in.
Henry Mitchell, 2009

Commissioned for the dedication of the Activities and Youth Ministry Center of First Baptist Church, Greenville, S.C., on August 23, 2009,this construction by Greenville area artist Henry Mitchell contains the three New Testament Scripture passages for the morning's sermon. It is exhibited prominently at the "bridge entrance" to the new facility. The dedication sermon was a collaborative effort of FBC staff members Jeff Rogers and Kyle Matthews. Audio can be accessed at http://www.firstbaptistgreenville.com/media/sermonaudio.html.

1 Kings 8:22-30,41-43
Revelation 3:8
Colossians 4:3

Revelation 3:20

Verse 1: “The Door That Christ Has Opened,” Kyle Matthews

“Look, I have set before you an open door,” says the Lord (Revelation 3:8). It is Christ who opens doors. Whenever and wherever a door opens on faith, hope and love; on forgiveness and reconciliation; on justice and on mercy, it is Christ who opens the door. “Look, I have set before you an open door,” says the Lord. There are 20 new external doors on the Activities and Youth Ministry Center we dedicate today. There are glass doors and metal doors, doors for coming in and doors for going out. Doors that swing open and a door that rolls up. And every one of them is a reminder to us that Christ opens doors. All kinds of doors.

Christ opens doors for some of us through music, and Christ opens doors for some of us through silence. Christ opens doors for some of us through prayer, and Christ opens doors for some of us through mission-action. Christ opens doors for some of us through suffering, and Christ opens doors for some of us through healing. Christ opens doors for some of us through preaching and teaching, and Christ opens doors for some of us through creation. Christ opens doors for some of us through our success, and Christ opens doors for some of us through our failure. Christ opens doors for some of us through fellowship and recreation, and Christ opens doors for some of us through solitude and reflection. Christ opens doors for some of us through art and literature, and Christ opens doors for some of us through science and mathematics. We open new doors at First Baptist Greenville because doors are for opening, welcoming, admitting, including: “The door that Christ has opened Is not for me to close. It is not mine to know The limits grace can reach” (Kyle Matthews, “The Door That Christ Has Opened,” v. 1). “Look, I have set before you an open door,” says the Lord.

Verse 2: “The Door That Christ Has Opened,” Kyle Matthews

“Pray for us, that God will open to us a door for the word” (Colossians 4:3). The Scripture that Gina Brock read this morning from 1 Kings 8 is an excerpt from the prayer of Solomon on the dedication of the temple in Jerusalem. I’m going to leave it to God to answer how it happened that on the day we scheduled the dedication of the Activities and Youth Ministry Center (AYMC) at First Baptist Greenville, the Old Testament Lesson in the Revised Common Lectionary being read in churches all over the world this morning just happened to be a prayer of dedication for a building. I’ll leave that to God to explain.

To be sure, the AYMC is not a temple. It is one of the great errors of our time and culture that we spend more money to build athletic arenas than we spend to build hospitals; we spend more to build stadiums than we spend to build shelters for the homeless and abused persons; we spend more to build coliseums than we spend to build affordable housing. We entertain ourselves to death, while others are dying of hunger, illness, and exposure. There are those who would say that we have simply repeated a great and condemnable error of our time in the construction of so beautiful and expensive a structure. And I will agree with them—if the building we dedicate today turns out to be dedicated to mere entertainment, to mere religiosity, to distractions, barriers and impediments to the gospel of Jesus Christ instead of to the ministry and mission of Christian hospitality and inclusion; the cultivation of healthy bodies, minds and spirits formed in Jesus Christ; and the preparation for sending out in mission and ministry, not just drawing in.

Solomon’s prayer of dedication reminds us that God cannot be contained in a building that we have built (1 Kings 8:27). But Solomon’s prayer also reminds us that a building we have built can be a witness to God’s steadfast love and faithfulness (1 Kings 8:23), as long as we do not let our buildings become closed so that the poor and the needy are kept out, so that strangers and foreigners are turned away. Instead, every building that is built and every door that is opened and every mission and ministry of this congregation must have as its dedicated purpose, as Solomon prayed, “that all the peoples of the earth may know your name and [worship] you, so that they may know that your name”—not ours—is spoken in this place (1 Kings 8:43). It is to the purpose of a witness to God in Jesus Christ that all that we do and all that we have and all that we are is dedicated to the word that is the gospel of Jesus Christ which is always and everywhere a word of faith, hope and love; a word of forgiveness and reconciliation; a word of justice and of mercy. “Pray for us, that God will open to us a door for the word.”

Verse 3: “The Door That Christ Has Opened,” Kyle Matthews

“Listen! I am standing at the door knocking; if you hear my voice and open the door, I will come in to you and eat with you, and you with me,” says the Lord (Revelation 3:20). In this place, all that we do and all that we have and all that we are is dedicated to Christ Jesus who comes beside each one of us and says, “It was for this one I gave my earthly life” (Kyle Matthews, “The Door That Christ Has Opened,” v. 3). What that means is that the story of every life that is touched by Christ is the story of the gospel. Every story of a door opened by Christ and opening to Christ is the story of the gospel. When Opening New Doors began in 2005, we were all invited to bring a key as a sign and symbol of our congregation’s efforts to open new doors for the gospel. Hundreds of keys came in.

We don’t know the stories of all those keys, but we know some of them. One of them was the key to the front door of the home of Emma and Leon Latimer, given by their granddaughter and grandson-in-law. Leon Latimer was the pastor of First Baptist Greenville from 1934-1952. Emma and Leon Latimer’s story is the story of hearing the Lord’s voice and opening the door. Another key was given “in honor and memory of the 14 Baptist churches” where a couple in this congregation and their family were members through 58 years of marriage. The husband wrote, “All of these churches accepted us and made us an essential part of the church. These experiences allowed us to serve the Lord and it became an important part of our life. Each church opened new doors and nurtured us through our journey of faith.”

Another key was from a clock and accompanied by this note: “At 77, I know how quickly time is passing, and I cherish the time I have spent at FBC.” There is a key to an apartment “where I moved at the of a ‘chapter,’ a marriage that fell apart. God used that time for me to be available to my parents during my mother’s terminal cancer and my father’s transition to living alone. It is a symbol to me of how God provides and [how] God uses even the most disappointing periods of our lives to minster to others and bring [God’s] good from it.” A couple wrote, “The key for us coming into the fellowship of First Baptist was through our precious Grandchildren. Attending many church activities with them [. . .] allowed us to meet many friends at the church. This has been a Blessing for us and opened many opportunities.”

For the final story, I just can’t remove the names and the story be the same. “Our key belonged to our old Ford station wagon that Shirley drove back and forth to work at East Greer Elementary when Edgar was driving his ’57 Volkswagen to Furman. The key is memorable because it had an uncanny capacity for hiding. It was seldom where it was supposed to be except on those several occasions when it would be in the car, but alone, with all the doors locked. Once or twice, in fact, it even managed to be in the ignition, with the motor running, with all the doors locked. Luckily, Edgar had a well behaved sister key with a similar shape that would come to the rescue. . . . Shirley says this key symbolizes ultimate, unmerited love, the kind one often finds at First Baptist.” Ultimate, unmerited love. To that end, we open new doors today and every day. “Listen! I am standing at the door knocking; if you hear my voice and open the door, I will come in to you and eat with you, and you with me,” says the Lord.

Verse 4: “The Door That Christ Has Opened,” Kyle Matthews

This material is Copyrighted © 2009 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.

Welcome to the Well!

Genesis 24:42-49,57-67
Matthew 10:40-42

Years ago, when I was no more than six or seven, my father took me on a walk through the small town in western Pennsylvania where my great-grandparents had lived. As we walked, he told me stories that his grandfather, my great-grandfather, had told him as they had walked many years before. We walked to a place near the center of town where a metal pipe came out of the ground, and out of that pipe flowed a constant stream of cold, fresh water from a spring in the mountains above the town. That pipe was called “the spout,” my father said, and in my great-grandfather’s day, nearly everyone in that little town would come to the spout at one time or another during the day. Some would stop by for a drink. Others would fill a jug or two to carry home. Still others simply stopped to talk—it was the town’s version of Headline News Network.

Everyone was welcome at the spout. The mine owner and the mine workers alike made their trips for water early in the morning before the whistle blew to signal the start of the working day. Protestants and Catholics met together and talked at the spout, even though they were not welcome in each other’s churches. Even the prisoners in the town jail were represented, because each morning a trusty with a big galvanized bucket would come to carry the day’s water back to the jail. The wealthy who could afford membership in the country club and the poor who could barely afford shoes met and drank and talked at the spout, with its cold, fresh mountain water bubbling free for everyone. The ground around that pipe was the most democratic place in town. It was the one place where everyone came and mingled and talked and dropped their pretenses and their prejudices, even if for only a few minutes in the day. People of every walk and station in life enjoyed together the goodness of God in the form of a drink of cold water.

It was to just such a place that the servant of Abraham is said to have come in Genesis 24. He had journeyed from Canaan, the land to which Abraham had moved at the call of God in Genesis 12. He came, we are told, “to the well of water” outside “the city of Nahor.” Thousands of years removed from the origin of this story, we can’t be sure of some of its particulars. For example, we can’t be certain of the location of this particular city. Ancient texts from the city of Mari in Mesopotamia mention a city of na-hur in northern Syria, located east of Haran, where Abraham is said in Genesis 11 to have lived before he set out for Canaan. It is possible that the narrator is referring to that ancient city. But it is also possible, since this is a family story, that “the city of Nahor,” is not the actual name of a place at all, but simply refers to a city in which Abraham’s brother, whose name was Nahor, resided. “The city of Nahor,” then, might mean simply, “the city where Nahor lived.” Thousands of years removed from the origin of the story, it impossible for us to know for sure what city the narrator had in mind.

Many of the particulars of this story are lost to us, and some others, no doubt, have been added in, as happens to family stories as they are passed along. For example, the servant is said to have brought with him ten camels, a truly impressive entourage. But these camels pose a problem in the particulars. Everything we know about camels in the ancient Near East indicates that the camel was not domesticated until centuries after the time that Abraham is said in the Bible to have lived. So, either Abraham lived a lot later than the Bible suggests, or those camels trotted their way back into the story a lot later than Abraham. Several years ago I came across a sermon in which I had told that story of my walk with my father in the small town in western Pennsylvania where my great-grandparents had lived. And much to my surprise, in that particular sermon, as I had told the story, the “mill owner” and the “mill workers” came to the spout to draw water. But there were no mills in that little town. There were mines, but there were no mills. In the North Carolina town of my upbringing, there were no mines, there were mills. And so it happened that as I passed along this family story of mine, I inadvertently altered its particulars in relation to my own experience and the experience of the people to whom I was speaking. Genesis 24 is one of those family stories that was embellished and elaborated on as it was passed along. Thousands of years removed from its origin, many of the particulars are open to uncertainty and dispute, but there are universal lessons in the story that we can learn from, whatever we might make of its particulars.

One of those universals is the well, the most democratic place in town, a place where people can come and mingle and talk and drop their pretenses and prejudices, even if for only a few minutes in the day. Our physical need for water that the well satisfies is a sign and a symbol of social and spiritual needs that we all share as well. The well outside the city of Nahor is a free, unbounded space where friends and strangers, women and men, young and old, residents and travelers, rich and poor, lowly and powerful, meet and interact on the common ground of their shared human need. When people meet in the city square (or at a town hall, if I dare to mention such a thing these days!), their interactions are encumbered by social and political and economic protocols. But when they meet at the well, their shared need for water “levels the playing field” and alters the landscape of their interactions.

Wells are important places in the Bible’s stories. In Genesis 24, the young woman Rebekah provides water from the well for the stranger and his camels. In Genesis 29, it is the traveler Jacob who draws water from a well when he meets and falls in love the young woman Rachel there. In Exodus 2, it is the stranger named Moses who waters the flock of the daughters of the priest of Midian. And in the gospel of John in chapter 4, it is the stranger Jesus who asks a Samaritan woman for a drink at a well. The well that satisfies the physical reality of the shared human need for water is a sign and symbol of our mutual dependence on forces we cannot control. It is a sign and a symbol of our interdependence on each other for safe access to those essential things that we need most in life to survive. And it is a sign and symbol of the profoundly spiritual need for free, unbounded spaces where people of every walk and station in life can meet and interact, can extend hospitality like Rebekah, can fall in love like Jacob, or discover that they are loved like the Samaritan woman.

If I had to choose one and only one image from the Bible for the Christian church, I just might choose the image of the well, where everyone is welcome on the level playing field of human need, where pretenses and prejudices are set aside, the most democratic place in town, where hospitality is extended and received, and where to love and to be loved are the community rules. That would by my image of the church. Isaiah 12:3 says, “With joy you will draw water from the wells of salvation,” and in John 4:14, Jesus says, “Those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will given them will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.” Welcome to the well!

A second universal in this story of uncertain particulars is that matriarchs matter. Matriarchs matter. For a long, long time, Old Testament scholars and teachers called the stories in Genesis 12-50 the “patriarchal narratives,” the stories of the fathers. But the truth of the matter is, as the book of Genesis tells it, the matriarchs of ancient Israel were at least as interesting and influential as the patriarchs. Genesis 24 is Rebekah’s story, not Abraham’s or Isaac’s. In Genesis 24, it is Rebekah on whom the blessing of innumerable offspring—and powerful ones capable of overcoming their foes—is pronounced (verse 60). When the servant of Abraham asks Rebekah’s family “to obtain the daughter of my master’s kinsman for his son,” look at what her family says: “We will call the girl, and ask her” (verse 57). It is Rebekah who decides how her life will turn at this crucial juncture of her story and the Bible’s the story. She is no shrinking violet, this woman. If you are looking for “the weaker sex,” don’t bother looking at Rebekah and her cohort, the matriarchs of Genesis.

In traditionalist preaching and teaching we hear plenty about Abraham and his faithfulness to answer God’s call to set out on a journey to an unknown destination. But his wife Sarah must have chosen to answer that call every bit as much as Abraham did because she went too! Sarah, in her own time and in her own way, must have answered the very same question that was put to Rebekah in Genesis 24:58, “Will you go with this man?” Rebekah answered, “I will.” It is the very same question that that the sisters Rachel and Leah must answer in chapter 31 after their scheming husband Jacob and their conniving father Laban have a falling out. Traditionalist preaching and teaching champion the patriarchs, but in the book of Genesis it is the matriarchs who answer in every generation the so-called “call of Abraham”: Sarah leaves her country and her kindred and her father’s house, and Rebekah leaves her country and her kindred and her father’s house, and Rachel leaves her country and her kindred and her father’s house. Abraham moves one time and gets all the attention, but if you look closely at the stories in the book of Genesis it is the women who every bit as much as the men exemplify Abraham’s faith in each successive generation.

Rebekah’s story in Genesis 24 reminds us that we must constantly be on guard against the selective and prejudicial memory of those authorities in the church, both ancient and modern, who continue to perpetuate the lie of subordination and domination and exploitation of women. I would call your attention to a curious rhetorical twist in this chapter that comes a little earlier in the chapter than the excerpts we heard read this morning. The stranger at the well asks of Rebekah, “Is there room in your father’s house for us to spend the night?” She answers, “We have plenty of straw and fodder and a place to spend the night.” Then, we are told, “the girl ran and told her mother’s household about these things” (verses 23,25,28). The old man asks about her “father’s house,” but the narrator is quite clear that it is her “mother’s household” in which the story plays out. That doesn’t leave too much question about who “wears the pants” in Rebekah’s family, does it? And lest you think this curious twist on things is an anomaly, notice that at the end of this story, when Isaac and Rebekah finally meet, we are told that Isaac brought Rebekah “into his mother Sarah’s tent. . . . she became his wife; and he loved her. So Isaac was comforted after his mother’s death” (verse 67). It is not Abraham’s tent or Isaac’s tent but Sarah’s tent where the two became as one, and he loved her. Matriarchs matter. Welcome to the well!

A third universal lesson in this story of uncertain particulars is that everyday human activity shapes the future (Fretheim, NIB I.512). Every day of our lives in the everyday things we say and do we shape how the future will unfold. A young woman named Rebekah extended the simplest hospitality—a drink of water—to an old man, and by doing so she shaped his future and her future and the futures of innumerable others whom she would never meet, including us thousands of years later. She extended to him the hospitality of lodging, and she changed the unfolding future of the world. She said, “I will,” and she created the future of countless families to come. And the most remarkable thing about it is that there is nothing remarkable about it at all! A drink of water, overnight lodging, a decision to marry—it’s the stuff that happens every day in our world, and people’s lives are changed and their futures are altered and shaped.

Rebekah’s story in Genesis 24 reminds us that we must never underestimate the power and the importance of the everyday and ordinary things we say and do. Our words and our actions, even the everyday ones, have real power because they affect the way our lives and other people’s lives will play out. Bankers, realtors, retailers, physicians, accountants, attorneys, sales reps, retirees, teachers, secretaries, homemakers, college students, youth and children, people of every walk and station in life, all of us, create and limit futures every day. At work and at home and at school and at church and at play, even the routine things we say and do shape our own future and the futures of people we know and love and the futures of untold numbers of people we will never meet. Genesis 24 makes it very clear that God is present and active in the everyday of our lives and that the everyday activity of our lives makes a difference not only here and now but for the future also. Welcome to the well!

A fourth and final universal in this story of uncertain particulars is the importance of family stories. Genesis 24 shows us that the story of the gospel from its origin in the Old Testament to its birth in the New Testament all the way to its present expression in our worship this morning is a succession of one family story after another. Stories of children and parents, sons and daughters, mothers and fathers, grandparents, great-grandparents, aunts, uncles, nieces and nephews, our family stories are the stories of God present and active in the everyday of our lives. Not all our family stories are happy ones or healthy ones, to be sure. Not all of them narrate triumph and success. But still we need to tell them, because beyond the particulars, all of them proclaim the universal of God’s constant care and provision for us in this life and in the life to come. Tell them, retell them, laugh at them, cry at them, embellish them, elaborate them, get them wrong, even (remember those camels in Genesis 24 and the mill owners and mill workers in my story!). Because even when the particulars are uncertain or in error, the universals will carry the day. The story of the gospel of Jesus Christ is the story of family after family after family who met God and each other on the common ground of shared human need and who shaped and continue to shape the future in the everyday and the ordinary of faithful living and faithful worship. Welcome to the well!


This material is Copyrighted © 2009 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.