Another Sermon

Well, I'm relieved that today is over. Today was a big day for me; I assisted at worship in the seminary chapel for the first time, and I preached a sermon for my Homiletics class. Assisting worship was nerve wracking, although I've helped with worship many times before—it's a little harder when all your seminary professors are there.

As for the sermon, it seemed to go over pretty well; I'm just happy it's done. I've posted it below, for your reading pleasure. We were supposed to remain under five minutes of time (although I went a bit over), which is why it's quite short. The text I was assigned to preach on was Matthew 14:22-33, Jesus walking on water.

Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
I don’t like scary things. Ghost stories, scary movies, and nowadays even horror video games—they’re not for me. I don’t like being scared. You see, the key to all these scary things is suspense. Someone jumping out and startling you is only scary for a moment; waiting for someone to jump out and startle you—now, that’s fear that can last for hours.
If you’re like me, and you don’t like scary things, then you have probably made the same mistake I have. It’s some windy night, you’re sitting in front of the TV alone, and some horror movie comes on. “How bad can it be?” you think to yourself, and start watching. Half an hour later, you’re curled up in a blanket, looking at the immense distance between you and the nearest light switch, and praying someone will come home and turn off the TV for you—not that that would do any good, because you can’t stop a scary movie halfway through. Either way, you’re going to have nightmares.
The disciples had it way worse than I ever did. They didn’t just get swept up listening to a ghost story; they found themselves in the middle of one. Jesus remains behind, sending them on without him. Night falls. Caught out on the sea, the wind blowing around them, the water getting rougher, unable to get back to land, they see a figure walking across the water toward them. They cry out, “It’s a ghost!”
Now, if this were really a ghost story, the figure would vanish, maybe with a bone-chilling laugh, leaving the disciples awaiting its reappearance with rising panic. Or maybe it would pick them off one by one. But that does not happen. What do we hear in the gospel? Immediately Jesus says, “It is I; do not be afraid.” He turns on the lights, so to speak, banishes the imagined ghosts, and he does so immediately, not leaving the disciples waiting in fear.
The strange events do not end there. Peter speaks up, saying, “Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water.” Jesus calls him out onto the water, and Peter follows; but when Peter notices the wind, he begins to sink. He cries out for help, and again, Jesus responds immediately, reaching out to catch the sinking Peter. The two return to the boat; the wind dies down; and the disciples worship Jesus as the Son of God. Just think of the relief, awe, and wonder the disciples must have felt, seeing Jesus taking care of them in their times of great fear. If only my experiences watching horror movies had ended this way! If only someone had come in the moment I began to be frightened and reassured me, destroying at once that fearful anticipation.
Indeed, in these two instances—verse twenty-seven, when Jesus reassures the disciples, and verse thirty-one, when he catches Peter—the immediacy of Jesus’ response is key. In the Greek, the word translated “immediately” is placed first in each of these verses, emphasizing its importance. Clearly, it was important to the disciples, too—though they have seen Jesus perform many miracles, it is in response to this episode that they worship him as the Son of God. Walking on the water, calling Peter out of the boat, and saving him from sinking are all miraculous, but perhaps it is not the events themselves that inspire the disciples; perhaps it is the immediacy with which Jesus responds to them. It is not merely that Jesus can do miracles; it is that the miracle worker is there and then, immediate to the disciples. The greatest miracle, in fact, is that God became flesh and blood and lived in the world with these people.
Where does that leave us, two thousand years later and on the other side of the world? Are we able to have the same experience as the disciples of an immediate God? Of course, we know that our God was both there and then as well as here and now. Jesus is as immediate and present to us as he was to his disciples. Especially at Advent and Christmas-time, we proclaim Jesus as Emmanuel, God With Us. Our God is incarnate; we do not have to seek God in some distant reality, but we find God here among us. Like the disciples, even when we feel most alone and afraid, we discover that God is there with us. That does not mean that we will never feel frightened, or find ourselves driven across a stormy sea. But we, like the disciples, will always hear that voice in the darkness saying to us, “It is I; do not be afraid.”

Absence Makes the Heart Grow Fonder

It's true. I can't deny it any longer. I made salsa this weekend. I got weepy watching a Travel Channel show about Santa Fe. The most exciting thing I'm looking forward to in December is the prospect of eating posole. Heck, I got excited watching a balloon from the Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta hit power lines and explode on the Discovery Channel. I'm homesick.

People in Pennsylvania do not understand my predicament. I met a woman at Teaching Parish this past Sunday who grew up in Albuquerque, and within fifteen seconds we were exchanging stories about our Christmas Eve traditions and bemoaning the lack of green chile cheeseburgers. New Mexico is a strange place, and outsiders just don't get it. What's the big deal about Santa Fe? Why would you put green chile on everything you eat? Who is this "Zozobra" character? People here don't know what posole is, or who Georgia O'Keeffe was, and they think that "spicy" food is made with onions and garlic. They don't seem to have a word for food made with capsaicin. And they look at you really funny if you try to explain that every restaurant and bar in the state of New Mexico will serve you a burger with green chile on it.

I miss the food, I miss the art, I miss the history, I miss the architecture. I miss the aspens turning yellow at the Santa Fe Ski Basin. I miss Zozobra and the Balloon Fiesta. I miss the food some more. I miss seeing chile ristras hung up as a form of decoration, and I miss luminarias. So Daddy, if you're reading this, make sure there's posole on the stove when I come home for Christmas. And we might not see you right away, because we'll have to stop at our favorite restaurant on the way home, the Flying Tortilla.

In the meantime, I still have a quart and a half of salsa in my refrigerator to eat...

Sermon

Well, you may remember a few weeks ago I said I might post the sermon I wrote for Homiletics, if I liked how it turned out. As my silence on that subject indicated, I was not very happy with the end result. But lo and behold, I had to write another sermon two weeks later, and I turned this one in on Friday. I'm much happier with it than I was with the last one, so I thought I'd post it.

The reading is Matthew 16:21-28, Jesus' infamous "Get behind me, Satan!" rebuke. Enjoy!

In the film Bruce Almighty, God gives a self-centered, down on his luck guy, Bruce, the powers of God. In one scene in the film, Bruce is trying to answer prayers, but there are vastly too many prayers for him to answer. Utterly overwhelmed, he chooses to reply to all the prayers with the same response: YES. In the next scene, we learn that a character who has prayed to win the lottery has finally won: “But get this, there were like 433 thousand other winners, so it only paid out 17 dollars. Can you believe the odds of that?”
What did all these people, the characters in the movie, think of God? Each and every one of them prayed to win the lottery; the joke in the movie is that, since they each got what they wanted, no one really wins. Obviously, each individual expected God to answer his or her specific prayer, instead of the prayers of all the other people who wanted to win the lottery. Each one wanted God to take care of him, to take care of her, without considering all the other people who wanted the same special treatment. In turn, these people were assuming that God was a God interested in solving their particular problems, without considering the needs of all people. Their own selfishness was projected onto their idea of who God is and how he acts.

In our reading for today, Jesus reveals to his disciples that he must go into Jerusalem, suffer, and die, and rise again on the third day. Peter, flush from his success in recognizing Jesus as the Messiah, now tries to scold Jesus: “God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you.” Jesus, however, who just a few verses earlier praised Peter, now sharply rebukes him: “Get behind me, Satan! You are setting your mind not on divine things, but on human things.” Jesus’ words are harsh, and sound even harsher coming on the heels of his praise of Peter and his promise of the keys of the kingdom. Indeed, this rebuke shows Jesus at his most sharp in the whole gospel story; clearly, Peter has made a grave error.
The heart of Peter’s attitude lies in his outburst to Jesus: “This must never happen to you!” Though we may wonder what Peter believes about the promised resurrection, it seems that he is primarily concerned with Jesus’ suffering and death. The disciples all know how volatile the situation is between Jesus and the church leaders; to go to Jerusalem would be to go into the lion’s den. And then: to see Jesus tortured and killed at the hands of the chief priests and scribes. It’s almost too much to imagine. The very idea of it is painful. “This must never happen to you, Lord!” We must never see someone so wise, so good, so truly great, the very Son of God, be treated this way. We can’t allow it. We won’t accept it. Peter cannot even restrain himself from telling Christ what to do, or rather what not to do. We might sympathize with him—Peter wants to protect the person nearest and dearest to him. He wants to save Jesus.

At first glance, Peter’s mistake in the Gospel of Matthew seems very different from the attitude of the people in Bruce Almighty. After all, those characters in the movie are just being selfish! All they want is a big payout in the lottery. Peter’s not like that—Peter is trying to protect the greatest gift God had given him, or any of us, the Messiah. Peter’s concern is truly a worthy one, even a holy one... isn’t it? “You are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.” Peter’s error is to be too human, even in the face of his recognition of the divine. Peter believes he understands what it means for Jesus to be the Messiah, but he is shocked to hear Jesus’ foretelling of his own suffering and death. Peter is trying to force his own understanding of how God ought to work onto Jesus. He is being just as selfish as the people who expect God to help them—and only them—to win the lottery. Peter in the Bible, and the characters in the movie, are setting their minds on human things.
Although the characters in the movie are a caricature, we are often not much different. Of course, we pray for our personal fears, hopes, and concerns, and we are right to do so. But too often, that is all we do. We forget about the bigger picture, about God’s saving work for all creation, instead letting ourselves get stuck on the little personal problems we each face. Like Peter, we try to limit God’s saving work to just us, just the particular sphere we see every day. If Peter had his way, Jesus would never die for the sake of all creation; he would remain a teacher for this particular group of disciples, never truly doing what he came to earth to do. We, too, sometimes believe that God’s scope is the same as our scope. If we limit God to lottery tickets, or limit him to being a teacher, we don’t leave room for God to do God’s work.

Jesus has different ideas. And he doesn’t just leave Peter, or us, with a rebuke. In fact, as soon as he has spoken his harsh words to Peter, he immediately begins to answer the question that must have been on the minds of all the disciples: “Well, if Peter just got it wrong, what are we supposed to be doing? How can we follow a master who is walking into his own grave?” Jesus answers his disciples and speaks to us at the same time: “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.” It is not enough to acknowledge that Jesus is the Son of God; true disciples must accept what that means and follow him, even as far as taking up a cross. It seems like madness, to fall into step behind a troublemaker on his way to execution; but it is only madness in the human way of thinking. For God, lowliness, humiliation, and death are the way of true greatness. Indeed, we must act in this way; because attending to the self, focusing on our personal problems, and expecting God to follow us causes us to lose our lives. It is only when we give up the self to Christ, and become part of his greater work, that we truly find life.
To make that sacrifice, to give up ourselves to follow Christ, necessitates that we also give up our ideas of who God is and how he works. We can no longer force God into a mold of our choosing; instead, we must accept that we are created and recreated in his image. When we allow ourselves to see God’s new and unexpected ways of working, we truly see Christ, the Son of Man, in all his glory. To do so, we must get behind him, letting him be the leader, following whatever path he might choose.

That's All, Folks

Did you know that there are only three cognates between ancient Hebrew and English?

Alleluia, Amen, and sack. The bag, not the verb.

Yup.

Highlights

This week has been long, as always, but also quite interesting. I thought I would treat you all to the highlights, since there's no single thing I thought was most suitable for this post.

Our first sermon is due tomorrow for Homiletics. We were allowed to choose any of the Matthew texts in the lectionary, with a few exceptions. I pulled up the lectionary readings and picked one at random. Perhaps not the wisest decision I've ever made; the text I chose was Matthew 10:24-39. If you don't want to look it up, I'll just tell you: this is the passage in which Jesus says, "Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother" etc. Not the most cheerful or easy passages to preach. Still, I've decided to stick with it and write the sermon anyway. We'll see how it turns out. If I'm happy with the end result, I'll post it here. That's the advantage of writing a sermon to turn it to a professor; no one else ever has to see or hear it.

In our Old Testament class this week, we covered Genesis. Actually, we spent almost the whole class on the first eleven chapters of Genesis and then ran out of time to cover the rest. One very interesting idea that came up was about the passage in the second creation story (Genesis 2 and 3), regarding the creation of woman out of Adam's side, or rib. The translation "rib" here is a Christian one; Jewish translations always use the word "side". Dr. Stevens indicated that there is an interpretation of this passage in Jewish thought that suggests that the first human, 'adam (the term is gender inclusive, like the Greek 'anthropos'), might actually be a conjoined male-female figure, and the two halves are separated into man (ish) and woman (ishah). Sound familiar? Readers of Plato's Symposium will understand my reaction: holy crap, Aristophanes was right! That's right... the Hebrew tradition suggests an origin of the sexes surprisingly similar to that of Aristophanes' speech in the Symposium. Cool, huh?

In Early Church, our lecture this week was on baptism. As you might imagine, the questions quickly turned to baptism and salvation: is it necessary? Why would it be necessary? What about people who never have the opportunity to be baptized, or who are baptized but then commit terrible sins? Dr. Christianson gave the best explanation I have ever heard, which was simply to say, "Baptism may or may not be necessary for salvation, but it is necessary for the assurance of salvation." I'm sure he's not the first person to come up with this formulation, but it's the first time I have heard it, and it makes far more sense to me than any other explanation I've been offered. It solves so many issues, and clears up so much confusion I've had about baptism in the past. Now, it's not a perfect explanation, of course, and I still have unanswered questions, but it helped a lot.

In Integrative Seminar, we talked about religious illiteracy, which is a scary, scary subject. For a country that thumps its Bible so prodigiously, and that allows religion to influence so many aspects of our society and politics, Americans know shockingly little about their own religion, and even less about other religions. A few years ago, a book was published titled "Religious Literacy"; it sharply pointed out the problem. The author, Stephen Prothero, administers a basic quiz on religion to his undergraduate students. They fail consistently. Check it out to see how you do. I passed, but not with flying colors—I don't know the four noble truths of Buddhism, and I can never remember all seven sacraments (good thing Lutherans only have two!). The answers are at the end of the article, so you can score yourself.

So that's the week in review. Stay tuned for a sermon (maybe) and more news from the Ridge, as they say.