“Where
Do You Gather?”
Luke
13:31-35
First
Presbyterian
The
Reverend Thomas A. Sweet
February
28, 2010
Lent
2
The gospels in our Bible often have
been read as biographies of Jesus, mistakenly I now believe.
I have been as guilty as anyone across the years.
We have read the gospels to find out what Jesus said, what Jesus did, how
Jesus lived, and what happened to Jesus as if, by knowing these things alone, it
will turn us into Christians. The
last century or so featured a quest for the “historical Jesus” to try to
ascertain what precisely are the authentic words and works of Jesus.
As a result, at least two things have
happened. The first is that churches
have tended to lapse into Jesusolatry. While
giving lip-service to God and the Holy Spirit, many Christian churches are
functionally Unitarian with their worship of Jesus.
One’s veracity as a Christian is determined by the dogmas and doctrines
one holds about Jesus. “Jesus
wars” are fought among believers and between churches over whose theology
about Jesus is right.
The other thing that happens when we
read the gospels as biographies of Jesus is that our faith points us backward to
the past and loses its relevance and immediacy for our lives.
Biography and history are fascinating, but the point of our faith is not
simply to remember what Jesus did “in those days.”
It is to live ourselves as a God-infused, God-informed, God-encouraged
community in our day, our time, our circumstances or, to use the language of St.
Paul, to live as the body of Christ in the world today in similar spirit to how
Jesus the Christ lived in his. Jesus
per se is not the point of the gospels but encouraging and enabling the
faithfulness of Christian communities today.
So the gospels were written by their
authors as practicums of the faith. They
originally were written to help particular communities face their particular
challenges. When some years later it
was decided to compile a Christian Bible of inspired and influential writings,
Matthew, Mark, John, and Luke were chosen from among the fifty or so available
because, collectively, they were seen best to guide and instruct the Christian
community’s practice of its faith in God.
The first century community to whom
Matthew wrote just had experienced the destruction of their hallowed temple and
the massacre of many of their priests. They
had assumed that their temple always would stand in the center of their lives,
that it was impenetrable, impregnable, and impermeable.
But as even mountain rock eventually crumbles into dust, nothing is
permanent. Loss intrudes.
Change comes. So Matthew
writes to help his community and its members to navigate the trail and travail
of change.
The community to whom Mark wrote was
under siege from Emperor Nero who, in order to deflect blame from himself,
charged the fledgling Christians with responsibility for setting the great fire
that consumed so much of Rome and, so, ordered their execution.
It was a time rife for them with fear and persecution.
Mark wrote to his community that felt as if it was a tiny boat being
tossed and turned on a big, stormy sea, helping it to move through its time of
anxiety and suffering.
The people to whom John wrote were
those for whom joy had broken into their lives, those for whom the crises of
change and struggle were giving way to a fresh reality and a new day and a
deeper sense of oneness with God and life. Capturing
the sense of a Johannine community being reborn, where hope is blooming, in
which God feels close and a charitable spirit is creating unity out of division
are these beautiful lines from the Old Testament’s Song of Solomon:
My beloved speaks and says to me: “Arise, my love, my fair one,
and come away; for, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone.
The flowers
appear on the earth; the time of singing has come,
and the voice of the turtledove is heard in our land.
The fig tree
puts forth its figs, and the vines are in blossom;
they give forth fragrance.
Arise, my love, my
fair one, and come away” (Song
of Solomon 2:10-13).
Because human nature is such that
embracing joy is often as difficult in its own way as going through suffering
(because we do not really trust the joy or because we are waiting for the other
shoe to drop or because we become a little arrogant and judgmental in our
newfound bliss), John’s gospel teaches us how to receive and share joy in a
healthy, respectful, constructive way that extends the realm and reach of
God’s love.
The thing is, though, that not everyone
is going to applaud and cheer our deepening discipleship and our growing grasp
of what it really means to live as faithful members of Christ’s body.
It would be nice to think that as we mature in our Christian service that
life would always salute us for it and the wind always would blow at our backs. But
that is not how it happens. It did
not happen that way for Jesus and it will not happen that way for us.
The gospel often threatens dominant values and clashes with the world’s
ways of doing things. Sometimes the
antagonism even occurs within the church itself.
The danger is that when we encounter hostility or turbulence that we
shall flinch and begin to hold back and to retreat and retrench from the Larger
Life we had begun to live back into small life.
Luke wrote to a people who had been
ex-communicated from the Jewish community that once had held them in its bosom
and who now engendered the displeasure of the state, of
That is what the passage from Luke’s
gospel is about today. Whether the
Pharisees’ warning to Jesus to “get
away from here, for Herod wants to kill
you” was genuine concern about a legitimate threat or a ruse to try to
scare Jesus away, Luke’s community was disavowed of any notion that following
“the Way,” the path of Christian service would be easy.
By having Jesus respond to the Pharisees by saying, “Go
and tell that fox for me, ‘Listen, I am casting out demons and performing
cures today and tomorrow, and on the third day I finish my work,’” Luke
was encouraging the members of his community by the example of Jesus not to let
any principality or power, no obstacle or obstruction, no privilege or price,
not even the threat of death, keep them from faithfully salting the world with
their works of love.
Perhaps it helps for us to see the
church in these days as a Lukan community. We
are facing changes all around both within and outside of the church.
It is no longer the 1950s and 60s when the church occupied an advantaged
place at the center of society and pews were filled with families and fervor.
Post-war expansion and unremitting prosperity have ended and recession
troubles threaten our lives and lifestyles as we have known them.
In an era of overload, superficiality is becoming the curse of the age in
religion, relationships, politics, and virtually every area of our common life.
Will there be sufficient commitment
among us in the church to continue to serve others with the goodness of God and
the compassion of Christ, or will we scatter and in our fear run for whatever
cover we can find?
Or, as God has promised her brood the
cover of her wings beneath which we may find refuge and from which we may fly
into a world that needs a church worthy of the name, shall we gather there?
Amen.
Copyright
© 2010 by First Presbyterian Church