Matthew 23:1-12

Then Jesus said to the crowds and to his disciples, “The scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses’s seat; therefore, do whatever they teach you and follow it, but do not do as they do, for they do not practice what they teach. They tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on the shoulders of others, but they themselves are unwilling to lift a finger to move them. They do all their deeds to be seen by others, for they make their phylacteries broad and their fringes long. They love to have the place of honor at banquets and the best seats in the synagogues and to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces and to have people call them rabbi.

But you are not to be called rabbi, for you have one teacher, and you are all brothers and sisters. And call no one your father on earth, for you have one Father, the one in heaven. Nor are you to be called instructors, for you have one instructor, the Messiah. The greatest among you will be your servant. All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and all who humble themselves will be exalted.

Sermon Text

It is easy to have high expectations. Despite the constant thrum of disappointment that characterizes our mortal lives, there are still ideals that we strive towards at all times. These ideals naturally produce an expectation of how the world should be, and when someone or something fails to meet them, we react accordingly. Last week we looked at how attempts to make the world fairer are thwarted by our acceptance of the status quo. On the other side of our pursuit of ideals is the equally dangerous establishment impossible expectations. The Church falls short when it throws up its hands and says that something is impossible, but it also fails when it sets up impossible expectations for those it meets.

The impossible standards we set are often built off of no writ of scripture or proclamation of God, but standards of our own creation. Jesus describes this sort of standard as The Tradition of the Elders, a collection of teachings – perhaps formal or perhaps colloquial – that were made to help people live out a Godly life. Jesus, and the Church following him, has never been opposed to traditions or standards outside of scripture. In fact, you will never find a Church or a denomination that does not have them. For we Methodists we have the General Rules, often summarized by their three subheadings – Do Good, Do No Evil, and Attend to the Ordinances of God. Beyond that we have the Book of Discipline which accounts for our broader perspectives.

Whether it is the Catholic Catechism or the Book of Discipline that guides a Christian through their life, these traditions are common, and most of the time they serve a person well. The Book of Discipline has many well thought out stances on a variety of issues and our general rules offer insight into how we can live a Godly life in every imaginable way. The danger of any standard, however, is that we can quickly replace the high calling that God has given us with a far lower and more precarious one that we have written for ourselves.

The contradiction of Jesus’s call to all people is that we should be, “Perfect as our Father in Heaven is perfect,” but that this call is such that, “[his] yoke is easy and [his] burden is light.” That contradiction is quickly fixed when we realize what makes the difference between the expectations Jesus sets forth and the one’s that we put on others. Jesus, without fail, helps the people that he calls to action. When someone takes on the yoke of faith, when they bear the burden of the cross, they find that Jesus is strengthening them in their pursuit of what is right. Jesus lived a human life and died a human death so that every step of the way we would have a God who knew what we were dealing with and how to help us.

The problem with the expectations set forward by people and organizations is that they are sometimes made with an outcome in mind without any consideration for process. I think of those who look at those struggling with addiction and say they just need to, “Get their act together.” Easy to say, the destination is clear, but how in the world are they going to get there? Only by people walking alongside them, only by a community working with them through it all, will most individuals make it through recovery. We can apply this dichotomy to many aspects of our life, essentially anytime we say “Why don’t they just…” We can usually turn the conversation back on ourselves. “What have I done to support them in…”

Jesus describes the leaders of his day as being worth listening to when they teach. The specific image of them, “Sitting in the seat of Moses,” connects them as teachers of God’s word. Pharisees especially were the closest thing that the ancient world had to a local pastor, teaching the town or neighborhood they lived in how to live as God calls them to. Despite Jesus’s criticism of these leaders, they were not trouble by default. Like any minister, they had taken on a huge amount of responsibility, and with that responsibility comes a need to strive toward excellence. As ministers, when you fall short… Well, you are gonna get some flak.

The teaching which Jesus gives his disciples is focused mainly on the status of people in leadership, but I think any lesson from leaders is a lesson for all people. Jesus here asks that we never hold an expectation for someone that we are not willing to contribute toward. If we want someone to treat us well, we better treat them well too! If we want someone to act a certain way then we better meet our own standards of conduct! If the Church was given a quarter for every time that someone said they wanted something to change in the world and then turned around and did the thing they claim to hate, then there would never be a ministry that wasn’t funded in full.

The digital age has given a wonderful window into the innate hypocrisy of our expectations. So many people talking about how the world is full of people who are disrespectful and do not know how to conduct themselves, and then comment every chance they can to trash talk their supposed enemies. They talk about how those people are so divisive and causing so much trouble and then do nothing with their free time but talk about all those people and how the world would be better if they would just disappear. The simple fact is that high expectations have to be met with equally high willingness to help people succeed – and genuine help, not just snide comments!

I once preached a sermon, in the aftermath of the El Paso shooting of August 2019, in which I said that there was a need for all people to actively work against the racism that motivated the shooting. That in a world where hate is so common, we cannot be neutral in the face of it. A man from my congregation came to the parsonage to meet with me and told me how he was not at all racist, but… That was the loudest “But,” ever spoken. He told me how he thought everyone should know English if they lived here, that blacks in the city were the real problem in this world, and so many other things that he firmly believed were ideas about what was right and wrong.

I listened intently and then asked him a question. “How are you going to help them?” He was confused, because he thought I was going to start a fight with him or something, but I was earnestly interested. You want people to learn English, so how are you going to help programs that teach immigrants English? You think that blacks in the intercity have problems unique to their context, so how are you going to help programs in those cities that work to strengthen neighborhoods and alleviate poverty? Point by point, I took each expectation he held up about those people and asked him to apply it to himself. You want all this to happen, how are you going to do anything to make it possible?

In our day to day it is not usually anything so dramatic. We want our spouse to listen more attentively to us, but do we listen to them? We want our children and young people to respect us, but do we treat them like people or objects? Our coworkers who can be difficult or the neighbor who always seems to be doing everything they can to annoy us, how are we working to love them even in the midst of their difficult personalities? The list can go on and on, but at the end of it all we are people striving to do the right thing, no matter when and how that presents itself.

The high call of the Christian life necessitates that we work our hardest to walk the walk as much as we talk the talk. That can be hard, but it is infinitely preferable to a life lived half-way between virtue and vice. When we say we care about a person or a cause, we need to follow that up with action of some kind. Sometimes we cannot donate money, but we probably have a bit of time. If we do not have time or ability, then we can at least offer our prayers. The thing that should be true of us all is that with every passing day we grow more compassionate, more grace-filled, and more like Christ. We do that through practice, and the best thing to start practicing are the things we preach everyday. Let us walk the narrow path of goodness together. – Amen.

Leviticus 19:15-18

“You shall not render an unjust judgment; you shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great: with justice you shall judge your neighbor. You shall not go around as a slanderer among your people, and you shall not stand idly by when the blood of your neighbor is at stake: I am the Lord.

“You shall not hate in your heart anyone of your kin; you shall reprove your neighbor, or you will incur guilt yourself. You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord.

Sermon Text

Fairness is a word that gets thrown around a lot. We simultaneously strive to be people who are fair, while acknowledging that life is often unfair in its application of good things and bad. When we strive to do what is right, to be even-handed in all that we do, we are often fighting what seems to be a losing battle. In striving to do what is right, we feel like Sisyphus rolling his boulder – every step seems to be toward something that will eventually be washed away all at once. The work of the Church, of every Christian, for a fairer world, is never ending.

I do, all the same, have a fundamental problem with people who claim that life is unfair. Life is currently unfair, that much I am willing to agree with, but it does not have to be unfair. If you think of the way that “unfairness,” manifests, only some things come about because of intrinsic aspects of life. We cannot account for droughts or storms, for an illness that strikes when we would never expect it, nor can we know what specific things will come about in the days, weeks, or years ahead of us. However, these are ultimately aspects of natural life, they are neither fair nor unfair, they simply are. Though they complicate our life, they cannot be given the same weight of “fairness,” that we inject into other aspects of life.

The real source of any unfairness in our world requires us to look no further than the mirror. Human beings are the only thing capable of being unfair in all of creation. We are the ones who set up the systems of this world and we are the ones who tirelessly work to weigh the scales in our favor. In our modern democracy, it is easier than ever to work and bend the world to our will, casting a ballot that allows us to elect people who will make sure that what we want for ourselves becomes the law of the land, oftentimes without a second thought for what impact is made on other people. When we all have a hand in who rules, we all become little rulers ourselves.

The mechanics of electoral politics are, however, set up unfairly as well. The funding that is permitted for candidates allows those with the most money to skew public perception of their platform and personal character. It would be very hard, pretty much impossible, for even a moderately wealthy person with perfect morals and platforms to take office anywhere in government when their opposition is funded by personal and political accounts with billions to leverage against them. The wider system then becomes a horrendously unbalanced leviathan – the powerful hold the very keys to their accountability on a golden chain that leads straight into their bank accounts.

No society has existed on earth that was free of this kind of trouble, this prolific corruption rooted in human sin and greed. We often like to imagine that the era we live in is the worst of all time, but we can find the same sorts of issues stretching back to the creation of hierarchical societies ten thousand years ago. We are the inheritors of problems, some of them as old as human civilization, some specific to our own nation, and some to the past fifty years or so of global capitalism and American democracy. We are stuck in a system where the scales are weighed by many powerful hands, pushing down always toward their own interests, employing social media and advertising to maintain their power and promote their wishes.

In the past year, there has been an uptick in advertisements from one group in particular that I find fascinating. I will refrain from mentioning their name specifically but “let the one with ears to hear,” understand. Their advertisements proclaim that the American people are tired of political theatre that fails to get work done. They say that they are a coalition of people pushing for real change and that by working with regular everyday people they have come up with a list of things that will fix this country. Sounds good, right? Until you look at their founders and where they get their funding, and find that it is rich businessmen and politicians that set their agenda – the everyday needs of the people is just a smokescreen to cover AstroTurfed advocacy.

In a world that is stacked against authenticity, where it seems impossible to make real change when the people working against the good of all people are so well-equipped and so well-funded, what is the average person to do? The answer is seemingly antithetical to the idea of fairness. In a world where so much is stacked against people in need, the only way to establish fairness is to work tirelessly to elevate the poor, oppressed, and marginalized. Liberation Theology calls this, “God’s preferential option for the poor,” and it is foundational to our work in our communities and our world.

Our scripture tells us to be impartial toward the rich and the poor, and to judge with justice. This is the foundation of a fair society, and we cannot abandon that. However, when the rich have lawyers to argue them out of anything, and the homeless who are arrested for living in an inconvenient place must hope they have a good public defender, then we must see that this imbalance requires more attention to one than the other. When we are trying to help people get into housing, we have to acknowledge that we will pour infinitely more time and energy into equipping the poor to live in a world that wants to crush them in the wheels of industry, than we ever would to help a wealthy person.

For too long, the Church had enough money and influence that it could pretend it was part of the world around it. For fifteen hundred of our two thousand years, we were seated alongside the powerful and bringing in money and selling our influence. Church was where well-dressed people, put together as much as they could be, came and showed the world that they were model citizens just like everyone else. We pushed those who were not like us away, whether we acknowledged it or not, we made our sanctuaries into private rooms, for us alone.

Now as the Church has experienced a decline, now as the cry of the needy that has been building up outside our doors is leaking in through the cracks in the perfect persona of American Christianity, we cannot help but come to an inflection point. Will we stand for the plight of the needy, for the people who are pushed out again and again and again, or will we side with the powerful people telling us that they are our enemies? Those who would have us question people of other races, who were born in other countries, of other sexualities and gender expression than us – do you not think that they are benefiting by making us fear one another? People on both sides of the political aisle will accept such a truth, but only if it confirms their own beliefs. We doubt the pain others feel if we may have had a part in it, and we support anyone who absolves us of culpability for the many problems that face our neighbors.

The call of our scripture is clear – love your neighbor, rich or poor, gay or straight, trans or cis-gendered, immigrant or national. Our unfairness adds another layer, sometimes that means fighting hard for the people who are unlike you, against a world that would gladly see them erased from the surface of the earth. Yet, we are not to lose our compassion even for those who have proven themselves to be enemies of the downtrodden. Our command goes on to not hold a grudge and to not seek vengeance. More than that, we are to correct our neighbors when they fall into the world’s trap, the cycle of fear and loathing that only can lead to death. We who are so intent on bringing others to faith and to the foot of the cross, can we accept that we all must repent of power and pride and this world’s unfairness if we are to find ourselves truly at home there?

I leave us today with more of a heavy task than I usually try to pack into a Sunday. We have all the world against people being treated fairly, we have talking heads constantly trying to pull us to a mutual mistrust of each other. How can we ever overcome the immensity of it all?! Together, people of God, together we can do it. We have God with us, why would we not be able to do it? We have the Church, the people in this room and in our charge, in this parish and this conference. We may only be able to make a difference locally, maybe only in the life of a single person, but sometimes that is all it takes to change the world. Can we, through our work here, make one person look out and see, “The World is unfair, but God is not.” I hope we can because Heaven is an abundantly fair place, and if we are going to do God’s will here on Earth, then we need a whole lot more people to see with their own eyes and feel with their own hands, just how good God is to the people of this Earth. – Amen.

Exodus 33:12-23

Moses said to the Lord, “See, you have said to me, ‘Bring up this people,’ but you have not let me know whom you will send with me. Yet you have said, ‘I know you by name, and you have also found favor in my sight.’ Now if I have found favor in your sight, please show me your ways, so that I may know you and find favor in your sight. Consider, too, that this nation is your people.” He said, “My presence will go with you, and I will give you rest.” And he said to him, “If your presence will not go, do not bring us up from here. For how shall it be known that I have found favor in your sight, I and your people, unless you go with us? In this way, we shall be distinct, I and your people, from every people on the face of the earth.”

The Lord said to Moses, “I will also do this thing that you have asked, for you have found favor in my sight, and I know you by name.” Moses said, “Please show me your glory.” And he said, “I will make all my goodness pass before you and will proclaim before you the name, ‘The Lord,’ and I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious and will show mercy on whom I will show mercy. But,” he said, “you cannot see my face, for no one shall see me and live.” And the Lord continued, “See, there is a place by me where you shall stand on the rock, and while my glory passes by I will put you in a cleft of the rock, and I will cover you with my hand until I have passed by; then I will take away my hand, and you shall see my back, but my face shall not be seen.”

Sermon Text

Have you ever seen something so amazing, you just cannot find words to describe it? There was a particular sunset I saw once, when I was taking a trip to Maine, that I have never been able to find words for. Seated on an island near Bar Harbor, looking out as the sun dipped into the ocean, it was as if nothing existed but the burning globe ahead me, and the sea around me. Theoretically, I had seen all those pieces before, the sun and the water and the sandstone beneath me – together they had become something new though, something I can only begin to grasp in my memory.

All around us are reasons to be in awe. God has invested majesty in all of creation. The leaves that have started to color the ground and the forests, the rivers that carve their way through the earth, and the stars that shine above us – all are part of the wonders we see every day. I want to highlight the moon for a minute, because it has its own special glory. Besides just being beautiful, our moon is one of the largest in our solar system. When you look up at it, you see a unique gift of God – allowing for tides, lighting the night, reflecting sunlight upon our earthly bodies. Our moon is unlike any other, and chief among its many gifts is just how beautiful it is.

Beauty, majesty, and awe as a whole are approximations of what scripture describes as “glory.” Abraham Joshua Heschel, Jewish Philosopher of Religion and generally amazing writer, described God’s Glory as a unique physical presence of God. Specifically, “glory reflects abundance of good and truth, the power that acts in nature and history.”[1] In other words, when meet God and see God’s glory, you encounter something specific about God being with you. Glory is that feeling that comes from seeing God and knowing that God is capable of changing the world we live in, and that the changes made are for good.

What does that look like? It can take many forms. For some of us it will sometimes be something really transcendent. A moment when we feel, hot as a fire or heavy as the sea, something overwhelming surround us. We call on the name of God and we find an answer, but more than that we find something beyond explanation. Other times it may be something far softer that speaks to God’s glory, a moment of peace in the midst of trouble, a quiet falling over a person as they come close to death. As broad and as many as God’s gifts are, so does God’s glory appear to us. Sometimes that glory is like a fire that burns brightly, and sometimes like the silence that comes through cessation.

The most common way that we open ourself up to experiencing God’s glory is in prayer. Whether it is the prayer we offer in this sanctuary, at the altar, or in our homes, God comes to us and hears what we offer up. The words are not nearly as important as the simple act of opening our hearts to what God will do. We’ve have just finished our group reading, “Dynamite Prayer,” and the focus of that book was on understanding how God’s power is manifested in our decision to pray. When we pray, when we open ourselves up to God and we find that there is more to God than we could ever imagine. Fears, trouble, all obstacles, seem to melt away in the presence of God. Not as though life is suddenly without its struggles, but as if they fade away in comparison to God’s overwhelming light.

When Moses went to Sinai, and he went up that mountain more thana few times, he did so to speak with God. The relationship that Moses and God had was something that had not been seen since Abraham before him. Like Abraham, Moses sat and talked to God, speaking as friends do. Moses ate in God’s presence multiple times, sharing in the kind of talk only meals allow.

Despite all this closeness, our scripture shows that Moses had not seen God’s face. The divine presence was always obscured in some way. Moses wanted more of God, wanted to be closer than even their present relationship has allowed. God warns Moses that direct exposure to his face would kill him, but that Moses would be allowed to see God’s glory indirectly. All the presence of God that earth could contain was concentrated on Sinai, and Moses’s eyes were covered as it passed. Only once the fullness of God had passed by could Moses look at God’s “back.” The result was a blessing of light upon Moses, a reflection, like the moon of the sun, of God’s goodness.

A teaching I come back to often is from Saint Irenaeus, “The Glory of God is a living person, and the life of a person is in beholding God.” As Moses found God’s glory on the mountain we too can find God’s glory in our own life. We begin to resemble God, to shine out with God’s goodness, when we spend our time looking at God. This we do in prayer, in study of scripture, in the sacraments, and in living a Christian life together. When we gather here, when we love one another, we all look at God’s glory in action. God’s glory is the promise that God is good, God is true, and God has the power to affect change in this world, we must be a testimony to all these things.

Take time this week, however you do it best, to connect with God. If you do that while you work on something, then work intently and pray fervently. If you prefer silence, then find a quiet place and focus on God’s presence in that silence with you. If it is in service that you hear God the most loudly, take some time to serve your siblings in our community. We all can see the grace of God, and even the slightest glimpse can change us for the better. Open your eyes, open your heart, and let God’s presence lead you to a better tomorrow. – Amen.

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[1] Abraham Heschel. “The Glory is the Presence of God,” in God Seeking Man. (Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 1976) 82

Psalm 23 (NKJV)

The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He makes me to lie down in green pastures; He leads me beside the still waters. He restores my soul; He leads me in the paths of righteousness For His name’s sake.

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; For You are with me; Your rod and Your staff, they comfort me.

You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies; You anoint my head with oil; My cup runs over. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me All the days of my life; And I will dwell in the house of the Lord Forever.

Sermon Text

In some ways, preaching on the twenty-third Psalm is one of the easiest things that a minister can do. Imprinted in the hearts of so many faithful people are the words of hope it gives us, In the midst of disaster, of fear, of trouble, there is a brilliant truth – God is with us. Easy to say, brilliant to sing, but is it something we really believe and hold to be true within our hearts. Can we, in the midst of disaster, proclaim that God is alongside us? Depending on the timing, I would say that we are more or well willing to accept something like that. The most difficult time to accept God’s presence can be in the deep valleys of life, and if our eyes are not trained to find God in the day-to-day, our Savior may seem scarce.

Today I want us to focus on the idea expressed toward the middle of the Psalm. We are told that, “Though I walk through the Valley of the Shadow Death,” we can be secure in the fact that God is with us. The term used here, “Valley of the Shadow of Death,” is a construct of a construct. What I mean is that the valley is being described here as “צַלְמָ֡וֶת” (Tselmawet,) a compound word simple made up of “Shadow,” and “Death.” This Death Shadow is invoked only a few times in scripture, and usually with cosmically bad situations. The people of God, suffering and in need of a savior, are described as living under the Death Shadow.[1] God’s wrath is described as descending on people like a Death Shadow.[2] Most prolifically, Job described his view of death, a world deep beneath creation that is dark as dark can be, a world made up of one large Death Shadow. He even goes so far, in the lowest moment of his life, to ask God that the day of his birth become like that world – an empty place, forgotten by everyone who once knew it.[3]

            My point in highlighting these uses of the world is to show that when the Psalmist describes us walking through the “Valley of the Shadow of Death,” it is not just the mundane problems we face that make up the chthonic darkness around us. The worst things imaginable do not separate us from God, even if they can obscure a great deal of God’s light in their midst. Christ, for all his radiance in this world, is described as a light that the darkness nearly snuffed out, but could not quench. God does not always appear as the fire atop Sinai, or the light of the Mount of Transfiguration, sometimes God is as to us as a dim light glimpsed through the deepest fog and the darkest shadows.

            The most consistent reason that people leave the faith is hardship. Many years of evangelists will tell you that it is the allure of this world, and I will agree that sometimes people decide they’d rather have a life free from religion so they can do whatever they like, but I do not believe these people are anywhere near the majority. The fact is that many people leave the faith because something happens that pushes them beyond a place of comfort and they are forced to look on the world as it is. A scary place, a place where disaster is often more common than goodness, and where disease and struggle lurk in the midst of even the most blessed of lives.

            When we are knocked loose from our mooring, when we experience real hardship, we can do one of two things. The first is to dig our roots deeper into our faith, the second is to let go of that faith and hope we can make it well enough on our own. The first is obviously the preferable decision, but it isn’t an easy one. In the midst of hardship, when the light seems to dim from the world around us, it is easy to fall into despair. It is easy for us, in a season of plenty, to say that those who are struggling should just have more faith, but it just isn’t that easy. When a storm comes and wipes away plants from a rocky cliff face, one flower cannot just tell another in that moment to grow roots deep enough to keep them in place.

            The truth is, it is the duty of the Church to support those who hurt, and not be afraid of suffering. We have spent so long equivocating happiness with blessings, that when we see someone suffering, we just want them to get better so we can be done with the whole thing. This isn’t only a selfish impulse, not just discomfort, it is also just a misunderstanding of grief. We see something wrong, we want to fix it, but sometimes that is not enough. Job, famously, was unsettled by his pain. He yelled to God that he would win any court case with an impartial jury. God regarded this lashing out by Job as good, as a Godly way of addressing his grief. Meanwhile, Job’s friends who wanted their old friend back immediately were chastised, and God accused them of blaspheme for their idle words.

            In my own life, as someone with depression, my mind likes to invent low points. Everything can be perfect as can be, and I will descend into a valley created by a lack of certain neurotransmitters in my brain. Lights dim, sounds become less interesting, foods blander. I lose the ability to discern even the most basic of good things. For me I know the trouble is chemical more than it is real of spiritual. Yet, those same neurotransmitters that are lacking in my brain chronically are the ones that a person in the midst of trouble and trauma will be missing. I once, in an attempt to explain my depression to people came up with an image of what it feels like to be suddenly covered in the deep darkness it brings. A creature latched to your brain, encircling everything and corrupting everything it touches.

            There are two things to keep in mind as Christians in times of trouble. Firstly, a thing for those who struggle, and secondly a thing for those who walk alongside those who struggle. For those who struggle, whether it be the most world shaking of disasters or a consistent problem that cannot be shaken. Know that God is with you. That is sufficient for  you to hold in your faith. You do not need to be happy with God in the moment you are suffering, you do not need to respond to the world around you like you had before. Faith is not always singing praises loudly, sometimes it is the simple acknowledgement that God is there, distant and hard to understand, but God is there. If you hold onto that, then the rest will follow, bit by bit.

            For those are not presently suffering, but care for people who are, the duty becomes being the roots that hold another person in place. Show such love and support, listening rather than speaking and allowing people to experience grief in their own time and turns. You know why trees are able to stand as long as they do in forests? Because their roots are wrapped around each other. Why the largest organism on Earth is a mycelium colony? Because they long ago decided it was advantageous to live as one rather than live alone. The Church becomes a place where people can sustain their faith when the people of God become the visible presence of God in hard times.

            There will be many dark nights in life. Some of them will seem to stretch on indefinitely. Yet, God is always just a ways off. The stronger our faith is, the easier it can be to see God in the midst of things, but it is not always necessary to see. Sometimes it is more than enough to know. Did Peter, as he sunk into the waves, see Jesus or did he simply know that someone was there to grab his outstretched hand? Did Job understand why God allowed such disasters in his life, or did he trust that when he cried out in anguish someone heard his cry? When we suffer and we feel like nothing will every be ok, do we do so alone or do we do so with a God who has known life and death, joy and pain, disaster and resurrection?

            People of God. The world can be a dark place, but God is always with us in the darkness. No matter how dark the Death Shadow may be that rests on the world around us, no matter how lose we may feel, we can rest knowing that our God is never lost in the midst of it all. – Amen.

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[1] Isaiah 9:2

[2] Psalms 44, 107, and Jeremiah 2 and 13.

[3] Job 3:5

Philippians 3:4b-14

If anyone else has reason to be confident in the flesh, I have more: circumcised on the eighth day, a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless.

Yet whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ. More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law but one that comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God based on faith. I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death, if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead.

Not that I have already obtained this or have already reached the goal, but I press on to lay hold of that for which Christ has laid hold of me. Brothers and sisters, I do not consider that I have laid hold of it, but one thing I have laid hold of: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal, toward the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus.

Sermon Text

What are you proud of? Think on it for a few moments. What do you think about and find your heart swelling with joy, with a sense of accomplishment – well-earned pride for something in your life. For some of us that may be our achievements, something we have done of note. For others it will be raising up a family we can be part of. Whatever the thing we are proud of is, we feel this way because we are deeply rooted in the source of our pride. Children, family, careers, all of these take work to produce results and we carry the weight of that work and turn it into a sense of accomplishment that settles deep in our hearts.

Excessive pride can be destructive. Proverbs tell us, “Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.”[1] However, I would say that our modern word. “pride,” is too broad to describe the sort of issues that scripture is specifically dressing in its critique of “pride.” In the Hebrew Bible, two words are used for general categories of “pride.” Both are derived from words meaning, “to lift up or exalt.” In other words, pride in Hebrew is focused on self-importance and self-righteousness. In Greek the word “Hubris,” exists in the same way it does in English – pride that leads to a persons destruction. The other word, used by Jesus, means to “shine out too much,” like a fire that burns too quickly and fizzles itself out.[2]

Our modern sense of being, “proud of something,” does not always translate to burning ourselves out in self-righteous fervor. Sometimes it just means a rightful acknowledgement of what we have done in life. When we say, “I am proud of my children,” we have not committed any sin. When we say, “I am the best at what I do and I won’t hear otherwise,” then we tread into pride in the Biblical sense of the word.

Our scripture today captures several elements of “pride,” both good and bad. Paul writes from prison, awaiting his execution by Roman authorities. In his cell, Paul recounts the way that his life demonstrates what most people would think of as an ideal. He was born to the right family, taught by the right people, and lived a life that was as blameless as a person could reasonably expect someone to be. Listing his work of persecuting the Church seems strange in this list, but I think it makes a point. We all are proud of plenty of things in life, but sometimes in the midst of legitimate things we should celebrate about ourselves, we disguise our worst habits as something worthwhile.

Sometimes our judgmental attitudes are lumped in with our virtues, because it allows us to “see through people.” Cruelty of speech can be translated into a belief that we just, “tell it like it is.” Willingness to give in to temptations of all kind we celebrate as being easy going, and so on and so forth. We very easily place vice alongside virtue within our heart, and we fall into a trap that has always been endemic to the Church – calling, “evil good, and good evil, [putting] darkness for light and light for darkness.”[3] We have to be careful not to celebrate the worst impulses of our heart, simply because they are authentic.

Paul lists all these things he could be proud of, even a particularly evil thing, only to throw them all away. All of these things, Paul is certain, are less impactful than knowing God and being “found in [Christ.]” More than anything he could do or be, more than anything he could say or think, Paul saw being part of Christ’s kingdom as the highest joy in his life. More than a sentimental feeling of faith, Paul saw this as a complete transformation of who he was into something new, something that was a part of Christ’s presence in this world.

Today we celebrate World Communion Sunday, a day that we acknowledge that the body of Christ is much larger than any one congregation, people, or place. When we come to this table, we join with people we agree with and people we do not. We share bread with people who, if we are honest, we would curse in private throughout the week. People of all politics, gender, sexuality, and status come to a table to ask for God’s grace, and all of them find on plates of bread and cups of juice and wine. This table is a place we take all the things we are proud of, the good and the bad, and we elevate Christ above them all.

This meal that we participate in, is not just a memorial meal of what Christ once did, but what Christ’s enduring work in this world looks like. While we have bread and juice in our hands, we spiritually meet with Christ when we take them. We see the cross in its bloody reality, a weapon of oppression that was meant to silence God’s work forever. We see that it became a tool for redemption open to anyone who was willing to take part in its call. A call to come and love Christ, to repent, and to love those around us. Like Paul says in our scripture, only in chasing after this high calling – of Christ dying for those who killed him – can we begin to grow as we are called to. Growing in love, in virtue, in faith in Christ alone.

So take up the things that you are proud of and see them for what they are. Some of them are evils we choose to love out of convenience – cruelty and rage and conceit – throw these things away as you come to the table. Others are legitimate good – a family we love, the goodness we have learned to show to others, the peace we find in our faith – hold these close as you come to the table. Hold them close, so that when you open your arms to take the sacrament, you can fully realize why they are with you. Not for any reason but God’s goodness, given time and time again, by a God who only knows how to be exalted in lowliness. Today we ask God to remove all wrongful pride, and instill in us the one proper pride – pride in all of God’s gifts.

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[1] Proverbs 16:18

[2] גָּאוֹן, גֹּבַהּ, and ὑπερηφανία respectively

[3] Isaiah 5:20