Sermon at St

1. Christianity, like other major religions, is sometimes simplified by some people to a parody. Martin Luther, the German founder of the Protestant reformation, once composed ditty to illustrate how the corrupt Catholic Church had twisted Christianity.

a. He remarked: “When a coin into the church box rings, Another soul into heaven springs.”

b. Referring to the then Catholic practice of selling indulgence, sheets of paper giving forgiveness to sinners.

2. Most of us enter into Christianity as adults with various distortions of the religion coming to us from childhood memories of what the faith is all about.

3. We have all seen cartoons where God is a old man up in the clouds with a long flowing beard, looking down on the world.

a. My favorite was from the 1970s showing God leaning over a cloud and looking down on earth with a slightly disgusted look at the men and women down here and saying, Gee, I thought I created men and women equal!

4. On Thursday evenings at the adult Christian Ed class, we are studying a book of stories from the Bible about women who went astray in some way. The book has a wonderful title, Bad Girls of the Bible. This past Thursday, several questions came up about the relation between sin and divine forgiveness. The author of the Bad Girls book is really into analyzing sin in a big way. Class members were reaching into their memories of what they first learned about Christianity from their days as children, or young adults. As I say, most of us do this, we are often guided by our young, and sometimes distorted impressions as children of what our religion is all about.

5. The primary question that came up on Thursday night was, is it really okay to engage in sin all your life and then beg God’s forgiveness on your death bed and still get into heaven? In other words, is there a kind of “golden pass” given to Christians to engage in sin, because God is always more ready to forgive than to condemn.

6. You know, like buying an annual Golden Eagle Pass to get into the National Parks for a year. You buy a sin pass, you can go into forbidden territory, and then when the sin police come after you, you just show them the pass, and they let you go. Great idea!

7. Is God’s mercy so great, so the questions went, that can people sin and get away with it, because God is going to forgive us anyway?

8. This way of thinking is, I think, a bad parody, of what Christianity teaches.

9. I have never been comfortable with this popularized version of how sin and forgiveness go together in Christianity. I offered a reminder that Paul remarks at one point, “What then, should we sin that grace may abound? By no means”. Paul was quite clear two thousand years ago that the powerful availability of God’s forgiveness was not, perversely, a license for us to sin within the safe harbor of God’s grace.

10. In fact in our lessons just two weeks ago expressed Paul’s understanding that our human nature is so inclined to sin that there was no hope for us, except by God’s grace and forgiveness. Far from Christianity teaching that Christians have some kind of pass to engage in sin, Paul teaches that we cannot avoid engaging in sin. Remember the image of the cat playing with the mouse, until an intervenor, the Holy Spirit, reached in and rescued the mouse of our human nature from the toying cat of sin? There is more to this relationship between sin in this life and forgiveness than a sort of endless access to tickets to stray into forbidden territory, and then be forgiven for doing so.

11. I urge you to consider that Christianity at its best does not reduce God to just a one-dimensional relationship between God and God’s children, like a dog chasing its tail round and round. Instead, Christianity invites Christians into an ever-deepening relationship of co-creation with God.

12. Think of it this way, you and I have three friends to help us relate to the Holy One. The three friends are are three interconnected and really, really basic stories or narratives.

13. These narratives are: the Creation narrative in Genesis, the Exodus narrative, and the story of Jesus’ teachings, death and resurrection in the Gospels and the letters. Studying and reflecting these three narratives invites our hearts and emotions and understanding to open up more and more deeply to co-creation with God in our lives. In other words, we get much closer to God if we interpret what we are doing in light of these three narratives.

14. In fact, unlike the dog chasing its tail approach, where simplistic answers are always at hand, words cannot capture what is going on between us and God. The three narratives, Creation, Exodus and the Jesus story, help guide Christians more deeply into the reality of how it is that God is walking with us through this life. The stories undergird a way of thinking that leads more deeply into the heart of what God has in store for us.

15. The narratives can work this way, because they each express in different ways that: ordinary time, and eternity are always intertwined in the present. The narratives capture in different ways how even when we are living in the present, in ordinary time, we are able to touch eternity and God’s presence.

16. Let’s look briefly at each of the three narratives, these three friends.

17. First, the resurrection of Jesus. The life and rebirth that Jesus speaks of in today’s Gospel passage can be viewed as expressing the process of letting go of ordinary time, in order to be reborn through touching eternity.

18. The core of the Gospel passage we read for today from John is “Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.” Jesus prepares his hearers for this hard saying, by pointing out a fact of nature, that “unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.”

19. This statement of Jesus is usually heard by some people to mean that life on this earth is to be hated, and life should be about waiting for the eternal afterlife in heaven. So to some the passage is a license to hate this world. And to the unchurched, the passage is read to mean that the Christianity is anti-life, and other- worldly. In this crabbed reading, life really only takes on any meaning after we die, after we achieve eternal life, by hating this life we are currently living in.

20. Maybe you are comfortable with one of those readings of this passage, but consider a third alternative, namely, imagine encountering the Sacred Presence in the here and now, and letting go of our everyday view of the world, letting the five senses, we are born with, hearing, seeing, smelling, and so on, being opened up in a new way to something out of ordinary time.

21. Participants in the Quiet Day retreat yesterday were invited to go for a gentle walk in the out of doors to let their ordinary sense of time and space be opened up to being alert to God’s presence in the moments of, for example, very attentive walking in the out of doors, in nature.

22. Even if you were unable to be at the retreat, I suspect you know what I am talking about. Imagine you are out in the wilderness surrounding Dubois, whether out hiking in the back country up to Lake Louise, or nature walking in the Badlands. Have you ever had the experience of being stopped for a few moments and suddenly the walk you were on is somehow suspended, and all is very quiet and still and your senses were on full alert, but all is total silence? The world is empty of people and things, and yet it feels very alive with the presence of God. You are sensing the eternal in the present life.

23. What does this have to do with a grain of wheat falling to the earth and dying? With losing one’s life and hating one’s life in this world and keeping it for eternal life?

24. Releasing the very human everyday way of holding on to the world in our minds, and opening the mind up to sensing fully with all the senses, and opening to the presence of the Holy One in the present moment, is a kind of dying to the present world, even a kind of hating the everyday world, and giving that world up for the sake of opening up to the Sacred.

25. I am suggesting that this friend, this narrative of Jesus’ death and resurrection, can guide our understanding to new possibilities of a deeper relationship with the Holy even as we live in the present.

26. The second narrative, the second friend, is that of the Exodus history of Israel being led from slavery in Egypt through the desert and into the promised land. Jeremiah in today’s lesson is saying that the old covenant that Yahweh made with Israel during the Exodus story was not complied with by the Israelites, and so Yahweh is making a new covenant with Israel by which every member of Israel will know Yahweh directly, rather than through following the Torah.

27. Notice how Jeremiah, makes his point seem more real, by grounding his prophecy on the original Exodus story. The original Exodus story is like a friend giving Jeremiah a way to say that God is going to try again to renew and deepen his relationship with Israel.

28. Are there ways that you can look at your own history, your own situation today, as an escape from slavery, perhaps slavery to sin? Can you see them as being like the Exodus experience, a moving from slavery in a foreign land, passing through a long period of wandering in the desert, being guided by God along the way with a loving form of law, including the Ten Commandments, until you reach a promised land.

29. Which is a more appealing way of thinking about your relationship with God? Having God hand you a golden pass for whenever you engage in sin, or having an active, loving God who is guiding with you along a dangerous and difficult path through life to a promised land?

30. Finally, the third narrative, or really the first in time, the Creation story. What a friend this story is! Many people mistake the Creation story in the Book of Genesis as hard science, or as describing the way the world really began in physical terms. They want to read the Genesis account of creation as if God set things up, left humans to sin a lot, and then saved them with the death of Jesus. The creation story is not so mechanical and one dimensional.

31. One important message of the Creation narrative is that everything in our physical world of nature around us today is sacred, because it was created by God. It is eternally created by God in the present moment. Not created in the sense of the physical laws of nature, but in the sense that whatever we touch, whatever we see, has a profoundly sacred aspect to it, because it was created by God and, so the story goes, God saw that it was good. Genesis shows readers a quality of the world, its sacredness, because eternally created by God.

32. Which approach leads your understanding into a deeper relationship with the Holy One? Reading the Book of Genesis like a oversimplified biology textbook, in which God plays the role of a physical force? Or thinking of everything in our world as essentially maintained in a deeply sacred state? Which approach leads you more deeply into God’s love for us, his creatures?

33. I began by criticizing oversimplifications of our religion, including in some questions that came up on Thursday night about the supposed cycle of sin and God’s forgiveness that some of us heard about as children. I said that this cycle seems to me like a dog chasing its own tail, with no way out, no way to go more deeply into the mystery of our loving relationship with the Holy One. I suggest you let go of the idea of reducing God to the role of an intervening parent overseeing a spoiled and misbehaving child.

34. Instead, let our three friends, the three core narratives of the Bible, Creation, Exodus, and Jesus resurrection, be guides for your understanding of how to move into a deeper relationship with God as your co-Creator.

35. Of course, comparing these three infinitely profound stories three friends, is itself an oversimplification, my effort to reduce Christianity to a simple formula.........Oh Well..

36. In Jesus name, Amen.