Posts
(I Samuel 8:1-22; The Gospel of John 20:19-31; The Gospel of Thomas 1-3)
I have two of everything today.
I have two short sermons. Which make a long sermon!
When I go for months without preaching, I accumulate much to say.
The first sermon is an overview of all of human history and the Bible, all in just a few minutes!
The second is a more personal and pastoral sermon.
This is for those who live in their heads and those who live in their hearts.
Most of us live in both places.
The first pair:
There have been two ways that people have lived in human history.
Many people lived in families and tribes, hunted and herded animals, and raised crops.
They traded with each other and lived in relative peace with each other.
But everywhere in some places and in all times there was change, which led to differences,
followed by conflict and violence.
All conflict arises from change: we either want change or we oppose it.
Leaders came forward; some good and some bad, but always some who love power
or who come to love power when in a position of authority.
Many who love power accumulate great wealth, and for some reason oppress the poor.
Wealth is power because it can buy almost anything and almost anyone.
Wealth is the power to compel and control.
Most of us have been greatly blessed.
A professor in seminary impressed me with this thought:
If you and I had been born anywhere else at any other time,
we would have been peasants, serfs, or perhaps slaves, poor and needy, possibly sick and weak.
Life was brutish and short for the 99%.
If measured by all who have ever lived, we are in the upper 1% or .1% in wealth.
Those of us here today have lived in what may have been the longest period
of peace and prosperity in the history of the world.
We did not know this in our lifetimes, as we lived through it,
and we are mostly less than grateful having taken it all for granted.
To teach us what we need to know, there have been wise story tellers,
who wrote wisdom to last through the ages for our benefit.
So we have the Bible as such a repository of wisdom, but not everything in it is wisdom
and some of it is easily misused to our detriment.
My point is this:
If you are concerned and worried about the times in which we live,
rest assured that there have been worse times and events,
worse leaders, worse economic turmoil, greater reason to fear war, famine, and plague.
Most people have worried about all these things forever.
And there are always the few who have wealth sufficient to avoid everything except death and taxes
(but they have found many ways to avoid taxes and even to prolong life beyond what is natural).
There is nothing new under the sun.
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The Second Pair:
There are two major stories in the Bible.
Most of us are so overwhelmed by the size and variety in the Bible, that we do not see them.
The Hebrew scriptures tell of the Exodus, led by Moses, and
the Greek scriptures tell us of the Resurrection of Jesus.
The Bible is constructed around those two stories.
What we need to know is that both stories are about freedom.
But what came before freedom?
For the Jews it was slavery in Egypt.
They were oppressed by Pharoah, a dictator whose rule was law.
As a matter of interest, there was no written law in ancient Egypt,
so later the Jews made sure that they had written laws.
In Egypt the Pharoah or king was the ruler; the king was law.
With a rule of law the law is king, as Thomas Paine taught us.
The Hebrews said this law was given and enforced by the true king, who is God.
Ancient Israel had a terrible controversy about government and leadership:
Here we have A third pair:
There are two different histories of ancient Israel, woven together into what seems like one.
As you read it you can see that some verses favor a king,
and the next verses tell how terrible they are.
Usually the winners write history, but the ancient Levites wanted to preserve this dispute.
These Levites warned the people of all the terrible things that would happen
if they had a king like all their neighboring countries.
They knew that they had to proclaim the unseen God as the true and only King,
and the rule of law in order to maintain freedom of the people.
[That would be another sermon on how the law gives us freedom.]
So in these two competing narratives about kings, we have stories of great kings
who were heros to be praised, like David,
and stories of kings who were corrupt, even mentally deficient,
and who led the people into unnecessary wars, like Saul.
The ancient Hebrews fell into slavery again and again.
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Before the resurrection of Jesus there was the Roman Empire,
just as before the Exodus there was Pharoah.
The Jews in the time of Jesus, ruled by the Romans, were again in a kind of slavery.
Jesus addressed this slavery by telling people to live by God’s values and rules,
to live in God’s Empire (or Kingdom)
as if the Romans were irrelevant because Caesar was not God.
When Jesus was killed his followers were able to hold on to and hold up the values of God
and God’s Empire that Jesus had taught them.
So powerful was this experience of Jesus, their loss of him,
his teachings and his healings, that he lived on for them, in them.
I think that their experience of their loss of Jesus, and their response to it,
they called all this his resurrection.
The followers of Jesus experienced his resurrection as a new freedom
that transcended and overcame all of the problems of life, even death.
This is my reading of the Bible. It may be shocking to some.
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But there are two ways to read the Bible, a fourth pair:
In an odd, mystical way, as we read the bible, the bible reads us.
We can look at a single story within the larger story and feel ourselves written into that story.
It becomes real to us in our experience on a psychological level.
The words and metaphors used in that story suddenly apply to us,
and the story becomes not a story of what happened to others, but our own story.
It becomes a story of our experience in our time and place,
and so a power rises from the story as it becomes greater than the words with which it is written.
We hear the Bible story of Thomas and Jesus and realize that even after Easter,
when we are supposed to be joyous at the news of resurrection,
we are afraid like those first disciples:
“When it was evening the doors were locked because they were afraid.”
The text says “for fear of the Jews,” a phrase repeated many times in the gospel of John.
This is one of those places where scripture is misunderstood and misused.
The gospel of John is often read as a tirade against the Jews, blaming them for his death,
but it is about conflict among the Jews and all of them in conflict with the Romans.
What is meant is “the authorities,” “in fear of the authorities,”
both Romans and other Jews who worked for them.
That is how I read it. Remember, they were ALL Jews.
So the question now for us is What are we afraid of? What are you afraid of?
Are we afraid of “the authorities?”
If you are Brown, or the head of an institution receiving Federal money,
a teacher, a librarian? Maybe so.
Most likely we fear shrinking retirement savings, or shortages of goods in the stores, or online.
How are we locking the doors in our lives these days, physically, emotionally, or spiritually ?
Some have reason to fear their neighbors.
Many are afraid to listen to the news.
When we let the Bible read us, we can see that A LOCKED DOOR
represents whatever it is that PREVENTS US FROM LIVING more freely and more fully.
Jesus then is our own power to overcome what prevents us from living.
Jesus doesn’t tell the disciples they were wrong to lock the door; he just walks right through the door.
I read from two gospels, yet another pair; one of them not in the Bible.
I am convinced that the “doubting Thomas” title of this story is wrong.
The writer of the gospel of Thomas, and the writer of the gospel of John,
unknown to us, were in a dispute with each other.
John won the fight. The church went with John over Thomas.
John got in the Bible; Thomas did not.
Their argument was this: John taught in his gospel that we must “believe” or accept
some things about Jesus in order to belong to him.
We are told to believe that Jesus was divine,
that he said and did many things that are not attested to by other witnesses,
such as the writers of Matthew, Mark, and Luke.
Most of all we are told to believe that the resurrection of Jesus was a physical, objective reality.
John’s gospel says “Do not doubt but believe.”
But we don’t have to believe these things to be Christian.
These things are not taught explicitly by the other gospels or by Paul.
This shows us that there are many ways to be Christian.
I want to protect that, because we are not all the same.
Here is what Thomas taught:
Believing is about seeking the truth in Jesus.
The seeking is of value because it disturbs us.
Being disturbed will save us because it will lead us
to discover that the rule of God and “the living Jesus”
are within us and indeed all around us, everywhere.
We tend to think that all the gospels are telling the same story but they are not.
We tend to think that all the stories about Jesus can be “harmonized,” but they cannot.
There are many stories about Jesus and what he said and did.
They are meant not to convince us of certain facts;
they are meant to open our hearts and change our minds.
“Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”
Yes, each of us, whatever we believe, has come to believe it without seeing, without proof.
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What sticks with me this week, after Easter, is that we in the United States are living in a spiritual crisis.
We either deny it, run from it, or are eaten up by it.
Our crisis is something we cannot see, but we feel it.
Things are happening beyond our control. We feel threatened.
Who we are, and what our country has been and what it is about,
are suddenly in doubt as never before.
That is our spiritual crisis.
Some of you may think that our situation is not so bad,
or maybe even that the direction we now are moving is the right one.
I do not think so.
Things are happening that grate against our core beliefs, our deepest values,
so many of us fear where we might be going, and we don’t see yet any effective way to respond.
Each of us must find the rule of God within us.
The prophet Micah helps by asking, “What does the Lord require of you
but to do justice and to love kindness
and to walk humbly with your God?”
Jesus helps by tellling us, “Seek first his kingdom and his righteousness,
and all the things you need will be given to you as well.”
