An Unfamiliar Christmas

“My peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid” (John 14:27; KJV).

Myers Park Baptist Church 

Charlotte, NC 

It will be an unfamiliar Christmas in the northern Polish city of Olsztyn for the Syrian refugees who have been taken in by a 70-member Baptist church there. The family of four Assyrian Christians, a branch of the Christian faith that is old enough to be mentioned in 1 Peter 5:13 as “your sister church in Babylon,” will be hearing the music and words of unfamiliar carols in an unfamiliar language.

In that regard, they are not so different from most of us here this morning as we listen to Benjamin Britten’s A Ceremony of Carols. Unless you grew up singing in an elite children’s choir, or you are a maven of Middle English poetry, or you are an aficionado of 20th-century choral music, you too are hearing unfamiliar carols in an unfamiliar language. There is much to be said for the comfort and ease of the familiar at this time of year: “Comfort ye my people,” comfort food, Southern Comfort. Easter has eggs, but Christmas has eggnog; it is indeed the most wonderful time of the year. But this morning, instead of wishing you the comfort and ease of a merry little Christmas, I am wishing you an unfamiliar Christmas. I am wishing you at the very least a glimpse or a glimmer, an instant or an insight in which you encounter the surprise, the power, the life-changing and world-changing gift of “This Little Babe,” as the choir will sing next.

It’s a simple title, “This Little Babe.” And the music to which the text is set exhibits a simple compositional technique. It is a round, a canon, a simple form in which successive voices take up the melody echoing each other, as in “1. Row, row, row your boat/ 2. gently down the stream,/ 3. merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily,/ 4. life is but a dream.” That’s pretty familiar, isn’t it?  

Ah, but the boat on which Benjamin Britten was sailing when he set “This Little Babe” to music was a cargo ship headed from the U.S. to England in April of 1942 while German submarines prowled the Atlantic. The month-long ocean passage on which A Ceremony of Carols was composed is a striking metaphor for our own time. The threat of the known—a world at war—and the threat of the unknown—undetectable, lethal assailants lurking just out of sight—are frighteningly familiar to us right now. And the round or canon in “This Little Babe” is a similarly striking metaphor. Britten set the voices in stretto, in close succession, so that the second and third voices enter only one beat after the previous voice. Instead of the familiar, easy pace, “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” would go like this: Row/Row/Row/Row. That’s in stretto, and it wouldn’t sound so “merrily down the stream” at all. Nor does Britten’s setting of this “This Little Babe” sound at all like a merry little Christmas. And the words of “This Little Babe” don’t either.

They were penned in the 1500s by a Jesuit priest named Robert Southwell. Southwell was ordained as a Roman Catholic priest in France in 1584, and in 1586 he returned to his native England as an underground missionary. Six years later, he was arrested by British authorities, imprisoned, and tortured. In 1595, Southwell was publicly executed by hanging, drawing and quartering. Those words fall antiseptically on our ears: hanged, drawn, and quartered. They mean that as he hung from the noose, still alive, he was emasculated, then disemboweled, then beheaded, and his body cut into four pieces. His crime? He was a Roman Catholic priest when being a Roman Catholic priest was against the law in England. If you know much at all about the history of Christianity, you know that today’s Islamic extremists look like relative amateurs at atrocity compared to the historic atrocities of us Christians of Anglo-Saxon and Aryan descent. Don’t fall into the popular trap of comparing the worst of them to the best of us and the best of us to the worst of them and then erroneously concluding that we are any better than they are.

Written in a world in which professing Christians in a Christian nation dismembered and disemboweled dissenters, “This Little Babe” is no “Away in the Manger.” Southwell’s poem depicts a surprise attack on the gates of hell mounted not by an army but by an infant. The battle is fought and won not with arms but with tears and cries and arrows of weeping eyes. The fortress in which safety is found is a cattle stall, a broken wall, a crib, and haystacks. Foes are foiled not by domination or annihilation but by joy. What Robert Southwell understood and wrote of Christmas in “This Little Babe” and what he lived and died of the gospel are entirely unfamiliar to you and me.

They are as unfamiliar as the gift-giving of which Jesus spoke in the gospel of John when he said, “My peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid” (14:27; KJV). Gift-giving as the world giveth is what is familiar to us at Christmas. But this morning, I’m wishing you an unfamiliar Christmas, a Christmas in which the gift you give or receive is not as the world giveth but is as the gift being given this Christmas in that 70-member Baptist church in Olsztyn, Poland, and in other places around the world to persons who have been driven from home and family and country by war and terror and atrocity: it is the gift of the peace of God which passes all understanding (Philippians 4:7); it is the gift of the peace of Christ that hearts may not be troubled and neither may they be afraid.

Choir, it’s all yours: Sing us the gift of “This Little Babe” and an unfamiliar Christmas. 

Copyrighted © 2015 by Jeffrey S. Rogers. This material may be copied or disseminated for non-commercial use, provided this notice is included. The author can be contacted at jrogers3@gardner-webb.edu.

(With gratitude to friends to whom this sermon is indebted: Charles Kimball, When Religion Becomes Evil and When Religion Becomes Lethal, and Marc and Kim Wyatt, Cooperative Baptist Fellowship field personnel)

This little Babe so few days old,

Is come to rifle Satan’s fold;

All hell doth at his presence quake,

Though he himself for cold do shake;

For in this weak unarmèd wise

The gates of hell he will surprise.

With tears he fights and wins the field,

His naked breast stands for a shield;

His battering shot are babish cries,

His arrows looks of weeping eyes,

His martial ensigns Cold and Need,

And feeble Flesh his warrior’s steed.

His camp is pitchèd in a stall,

His bulwark but a broken wall;

The crib his trench, haystalks his stakes;

Of shepherds he his muster makes;

And thus, as sure his foe to wound,

The angels’ trumps alarum sound.

My soul, with Christ join thou in fight;

Stick to the tents that he hath pight.

Within his crib is surest ward:

This little Babe will be thy guard.

If thou wilt foil thy foes with joy,

Then flit not from this heavenly Boy.

--Robert Southwell

Inspiration and Perspiration: Turning What Is into What It Must Become

Hebrews 10:19-25 
Myers Park Baptist Church
Charlotte, NC  
November 15, 2015

 

In June of 1963, the Baptist pastor and preacher the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., addressed an estimated 125,000 people in Detroit, Michigan, in what was at the time the largest civil rights demonstration in our nation’s history. Toward the end of his speech in Detroit, King told the crowd that he had a dream, and he told them what was in it. Without even realizing it, King was warming up in Detroit for what would become a far more famous speech in Washington.

I say “without even realizing it” because the famous “I-have-a-dream” part of the speech in Washington was not in the manuscript that King had prepared to deliver that day. But when he got to the place in his prepared text where he spoke of “great trials and tribulations” and exhorted the crowd, “Let us not wallow in the valley of despair,” the great gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, who was standing near King as he spoke called out him, “Tell them about your dream, Martin! Tell them about your dream!” And so he did. He departed from the manuscript in front of him to talk about the dream he had talked about in Detroit. And when he did, his speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial became the most famous oration by a Baptist preacher in American history.

But I want to take you back to Detroit two months earlier. In Detroit, King spoke of “the inner conviction that there are some things so dear, some things so precious, some things so eternally true, that they are worth dying for.” Fifty-two years and innumerable deaths later, including King’s, there is all too much evidence in our nation and in our world that King’s dream of universal justice through reconciliation, redemption, and the creation of what he called Beloved Community is a dream deferred, not a dream fulfilled.

From Ferguson, MO, to Charleston, SC; on Staten Island, in Baltimore and Charlotte; in Sinjar Syria, and in the streets of Israel and the Occupied Territories; in the air over Sinai, and on the ground in Paris, the deaths—and the conflicting currents of causation, incrimination, and recrimination are more than enough to drive us into the valley of despair. And that’s why King’s words in Detroit are important for us to hear. At the end of his speech in Detroit, King said this: “With this faith, I will go out and carve a tunnel of hope through a mountain of despair.” “With this faith, I will go out and carve a tunnel of hope through a mountain of despair.” King’s dream words are inspirational. King’s tunnel-of-hope words are perspirational. And it takes both Inspiration and Perspiration to turn what is into what it must become.

And that brings me to this morning’s epistle lesson from the book of Hebrews. I want to suggest this morning that Hebrews 10:19-25 provides us with a working model for turning what is into what it must become. It is a universal model for what is often called “change agency.” The model in Hebrews 10:19-25 is not a spiritual warm fuzzy; it’s not a dose of homiletical Prozac or Xanax. It’s a working model of the Inspiration and the Perspiration that are necessary to turn what is into what it must become in any and every walk of life: business, education, politics, community, church, family, individual existence. There are five moving parts to this working model.

The first moving part is Deep Conviction. Deep Conviction is King’s something so dear, something so precious, something so eternally true, that it is worth dying for. The great twentieth-century theologian Paul Tillich spoke of Ultimate Reality—capital “U,” capital “R”—Ultimate Reality, what is Really Real, what is Truly True of God and the world and human existence in the world. Every human being’s understanding of the world and of human existence is grounded in some Deep Conviction, some understanding of Ultimate Reality, what is Really Real and Truly True. Deep Conviction about Ultimate Reality is an intellectual and psychological and spiritual common denominator among Christians and Jews and Muslims and Hindus and Buddhists and Baha’is and Native Americans and atheists and everybody else: Deep Conviction about what is Really Real and Truly True.

The writer of the book of Hebrews frames living in alignment with Ultimate Reality—or “right relationship with God,” to use more familiar language—as participating in the ritual activity that is commanded in the law of Moses; and in Hebrews 10:19-21 the person and work of Jesus Christ are presented as serving the same function as the ritual actions and the ritual personnel prescribed in Exodus and Leviticus. In v 19, the blood of Jesus is analogous to the blood of animal sacrifices. In v 20, the body of Jesus is compared to the curtain of the sanctuary. In v 21, Jesus is characterized as “the great high priest over the house of God.” The writer of Hebrews 10 says that because of the structural similarity of the person and work of Jesus Christ with the ritual system commanded in the Torah, we can draw near to God in “full assurance of faith.” That’s a Deep Conviction, and Deep Conviction about Ultimate Reality is Part 1 in turning what is into what it must become.

The second moving part in the model is Energizing Exhortation. King’s “I have a dream!” was Energizing Exhortation. Roosevelt’s “This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny” was Energizing Exhortation. Kennedy’s “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country” was Energizing Exhortation. Reagan’s “Mr. Gorbachev, Tear down this wall!” was Energizing Exhortation. The Energizing Exhortation in Hebrews 10:20-23 calls its audience into a “new and living way” and to “hold fast to the confession of our hope without wavering.” I’m convinced that these very verses are the biblical reservoir from which King the preacher drew his words in Detroit: a vision of a new way of living together grounded in the fullness of faith and impelled by unwavering hope. Part 2 is the Energizing Exhortation that it takes to turn what is into what it must become.

The third moving part in the model is Mutual Provocation. Mutual Provocation. It’s in Hebrews 10:24: “Let us consider how to provoke one another.” As if there weren’t enough provocation in the world and in the church already, “Let us consider how to provoke one another.” I don’t have to be from around here to know that some of us are experts at provocation. Mutual Provocation is where Inspiration and Perspiration intersect. In words and in deeds, by exhortation and by example, we must encourage, support, challenge, instigate, and agitate one other to turn what is into what it must become. The pledge walk in worship this morning is an act of personal devotion; it is also a demonstration of Mutual Provocation. Individually and collectively, the act of walking your pledges forward is a sermon without words that says without saying, “C’mon, ya’ll! Hitch yourselves to this wagon and pull with us!” That’s provoking one another by example, and Hebrews 10:24 says to do exactly that inside these walls and outside them as well: encourage, support, challenge, instigate, agitate, and demonstrate to turn what is into what it must become. Part 3: Mutual Provocation.

The fourth moving part of the model is Prevailing Disposition. Prevailing Disposition. In the academic study of personality and personal and professional effectiveness, research has demonstrated that what a person believes makes a difference in his or her behavior. Those beliefs are called dispositions: They are values and commitments that influence behavior. In Hebrews 10:24, the prevailing disposition that influences behavior is love: “Provoke one another to love,” it says. It should come as no surprise that Hebrews 10:24 posits love as the Prevailing Disposition. After all, according to Jesus, the Great Commandment is “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind and all your strength” (Mark 12:30) and the second is like unto the first: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Mark 12:31). And Jesus said, “This my commandment that you love one another as I have loved you” (John 15:12). And to bring us back to the first moving part in the working model, Deep Conviction, 1 John 4:8 and 16 say that “God is love.” So according to 1 John 4, God, Ultimate Reality, what is Really Real and Truly True is Love. It’s no wonder, then, that the apostle Paul wrote, “Faith, hope, and love, these three abide. And the greatest of these is love.” Because “God is love.” This Deep Conviction—God is love—and this Prevailing Disposition—love—are fully aligned with each other.

And that’s important, because failing to align Deep Conviction and Prevailing Disposition is a root cause of the intellectual and psychological and spiritual dis-order and dis-ease that plagues so many individuals and religious communities the world over. My friend and former colleague Charles Kimball, an expert in Christian-Muslim relations who also happens to be a Baptist minister, has described the root causes of religious disorder and disease in his books When Religion Becomes Evil and When Religion Becomes Lethal. A religious system—or any other kind of system: a family, a business, a school, a church—in which Deep Conviction and Prevailing Disposition are misaligned leads to evil, not good; illness and injury, not health; hate, not love; death, not life. Kimball gives dozens of examples in his books, and the last two weeks of news coverage have added yet more.

I’ll give two. The oppressive and murderous American apartheid of race-based slavery and Jim Crow segregation was perpetrated by deeply religious people whose Deep Conviction and Prevailing Dispositions were misaligned. The horrific atrocities of the so-called Islamic State and Al Qaeda and Al-Shabaab are perpetrated by deeply religious people whose Deep Conviction and Prevailing Dispositions are misaligned.

But in the working model in Hebrews 10, Prevailing Disposition—Part 4—is rightly aligned with Deep Conviction, and so it leads to the fifth part, Effective Action, which is characterized in Hebrews 10:24 as “doing good deeds”: deeds that are good, not evil; deeds that promote health, not injury and illness; deeds of love, not hate; life-giving, not death-dealing deeds. Good deeds flow from the right alignment of Deep Conviction, Energizing Exhortation, Mutual Provocation, and Prevailing Disposition.

Arriving there takes Inspiration, and it takes Perspiration. It takes lining it up—that’s the Inspiration, and it takes living it out—that’s the Perspiration. So think of it this way. The invitation to the pledge walk that will be extended in a few minutes is an invitation to a path of alignment. Whether you carry a commitment of your finances in your hand, or whether you write another sort of commitment to God on the card and carry it forward, or whether the commitment you make is written on your heart or in your soul, I invite you to participate in the pledge walk as a pledge of yourself: a pledge to align or realign your Deep Conviction, your Energizing Exhortation, your Mutual Provocation, your Prevailing Disposition, and your Effective Action so that what you experience inside these four walls forms and transforms who you are and what you do outside these four walls. Lining it up is the Inspiration. Living it out is the Perspiration: “With this faith, I will go out and carve a tunnel of hope through a mountain of despair” to turn what is into what it must become.

Copyrighted © 2015 by Jeffrey S. Rogers. This material may be copied or disseminated for non-commercial use, provided this notice is included. It is available online at www.pulpitbytes.blogspot.com. The author can be contacted at jrogers3@gardner-webb.edu.

What Lies Beneath

Michelle Pfeiffer and Harrison Ford in What Lies Beneath (2000)

Mark 10:17-31

October 11, 2015

Myers Park Baptist Church 

Charlotte, NC

Inner-life questions are the kind everyone asks, with or without benefit of God-talk: “Does my life have meaning and purpose?” “Do I have gifts that the world wants and needs?” “Whom and what shall I serve?” “Whom and what can I trust?” “How can I rise above my fears?”
—Parker Palmer

If you are a fan of Hollywood movies, you may remember the pyscho-thriller “What Lies Beneath.” To even mention it 15 years after it was in theaters is to give it far too much credit. Its only redeeming quality was that its co-stars Harrison Ford and Michelle Pfeiffer were very easy to look at. The couple that Ford and Pfeiffer played, Dr. Norman Spencer and his wife Claire had a perfect marriage and a perfect life, at least on the surface, until the stories they told themselves and others began to unravel as what lay beneath bubbled up and broke the surface. This morning’s gospel lesson from Mark 10 is no psycho-thriller, but it is no less unsettling for what lies beneath in it.

On my first day of seminary, I walked across campus to the cafeteria with several of my new classmates. We chatted about where we were from and about our current and previous work in churches. Kirby was quieter than the rest of us and a decade or more older. He had never served a church in a paid capacity, he said. He was a businessman who two years earlier decided that God was telling him to sell everything he had and give the money to the poor. When he informed his pastor of what God was telling him, his pastor was not as fond of the idea as Kirby and God were. “If you do that,” his pastor asked, “who will provide for your wife and your two daughters? How will you survive?” Kirby quoted Genesis 22:14: “The Lord will provide,” and his pastor said they should talk again. The eventual outcome of many conversations was that Kirby’s pastor convinced him that what God was really saying was that he should sell his possessions and go to seminary. So he quit his job and sold his family’s house, and the four of them moved from Florida to North Carolina for Kirby to attend seminary. When we reached the end of the cafeteria serving line, Kirby headed off to join our classmates at a table, and I made a beeline to the opposite side of the room because I had no interest in eating lunch with someone who was obviously crazy. I had spent my whole life in church, and I had never met anyone who actually believed that God wanted her or him to sell everything she or he had.

As I sat eating my lunch alone, it dawned on me that what really disturbed me was not that Kirby might be playing with several cards short of a full deck. What really disturbed me was that his faith story called into question the authenticity and integrity of my faith story. I also believed that I was doing what God was telling me to do, but of course I was sane and he was crazy. Says who? And then there were my underlying assumptions and expectations. I assumed and expected that going to seminary would lead to a job and home ownership and providing for my family. But this guy had all that and gave it up to go to seminary. Suddenly, it didn’t look as though I was following Jesus at all. I was just one more Baby Boomer chasing the American dream conveniently covered with a thin gospel veneer.

So tell me this: What do you do when the story you are telling yourself and others about your life becomes hollow, inauthentic, fraudulent even? What happens when the “inner-life questions,” as Parker Palmer calls them, bubble up and break the surface? That’s what happens in this morning’s gospel lesson. The characters who hear Jesus’ words are forced to face what lies beneath:  those inner-life questions that call into question our assumptions and our expectations.

A college development officer tells the story of working with one of the school’s major donors to cultivate a large gift to the college from a friend of the donor. The donor had committed $2 million to the college’s capital campaign, and the plan was to ask a friend of his for a gift of $1 million. The friend’s net assets were in excess of $110 million, so the gift he would be asked to give was about nine tenths of one percent of his net assets. The donor and his friend each flew their private jets into a regional airport in a nearby state. Over dinner, the donor and the development officer talked about the college’s vision and its mission and its capital campaign and the gift the donor had made. Finally, the donor popped the question: “We want to ask you to consider giving the college a $1 million gift.” The friend was quiet for a moment; and then he responded, “O my, no. I couldn’t possibly afford to give a gift that large.” On the flight home, the disappointed development officer asked the donor, “How can he possibly think that he can’t afford to give a million dollars?” “I see it all the time,” the donor replied. “No matter how much some people have, they are insecure and anxious and afraid they will lose control of it.”

In that development officer’s story and in this morning’s gospel lesson what people have is on the surface; but insecurity, anxiety, and fear of losing control lie beneath. When the man who came to Jesus heard the words Jesus spoke to him, “he was shocked” and grieved. But it’s important for us to see that what Jesus said in Mark 10 was no less disturbing to the disciples: After the man left, Jesus said, “How hard it will be for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God!” and the disciples were immediately “perplexed at these words,” because these words violated their assumptions and expectations as well as those of the man who left. And when Jesus went on to say, “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God” (Mark 10:25), the disciples were “greatly astounded.”

In the fall of 2003 when I was preparing to preach this passage from Year B in the lectionary cycle, I came to the realization that one reason being the pastor of a tall-steeple church is exhausting is that you expend an enormous amount of energy trying to shove camels’ behinds through needles’ eyes, and both the needle and the camel are resistant to the enterprise. The resistance of the needle is grounded in the laws of physics. But the resistance of the camel is grounded in insecurity, anxiety, and fear of losing control.

Jesus knew that. That’s why Mark 10:21 says that Jesus, looking at the man with many possessions, “loved him.” Jesus “loved him.” Jesus looked at him and loved him because Jesus saw right through the veneer to what lies beneath. Jesus saw what the man with many possessions had not yet realized: The very things on which he was relying for security, contentment, and control—in his case, rules-based righteousness and possession-based contentment—were actually increasing his insecurity, compounding his anxiety, and exacerbating his fear of losing control. The story he was telling himself about his life was a fraud.

So what do you do when you awaken one day to realize that your dream job is a nightmare; that the home of your dreams is a haunted house; that your confidence in your own righteousness or your faithfulness or your talent or your good looks or your good health or your friends or your spouse or your parents or your children or anyone or anything else has been misplaced? When the story you have been telling yourself about your life becomes hollow, inauthentic, fraudulent even? What do you do when that happens?

First, like the characters in Mark 10, you are shocked, perplexed, and greatly astounded because your expectations and assumptions have been violated, destroyed. Second, you grieve because what you have lost is enormous. Whatever else you have lost, you have lost your understanding of yourself and your faith story and your relationship with God and with others and with the world. And then, third, if you are wise, you stop and strip off the veneer; you dispossess and divest yourself of the hollow, inauthentic, and fraudulent story you have been telling yourself and others.

Here’s what I know: If you will strip off the veneer to expose your insecurity, anxiety, and fear to the light of day, you will discover beneath them the solid mahogany, the genuine ebony, the cherry through and through that Jesus sees and loves in you. Looking on you in all your insecurity, anxiety, and fear of losing control, Jesus loves you. And here’s what else I know: When you discover that kind of love, accept that kind of love, and are embraced by that kind of love, you will discover meaning and purpose in your life; you will accept whom and what you shall serve; you will embrace whom and what you can trust; and you will rise above your fears. You will.

And one last thing I know: Doing that is experiencing the kingdom of God; and when you do, the needle, the camel, and the tall-steeple preacher will all breathe a giant sigh of relief. 

Copyrighted © 2015 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 02tlsjeff@gmail.com.