Sermon Series, Responding to the Religious Right 4, "Jesus Is Not an Empty Cup"

Responses to Violent Christendom 4 BFC 2017

Mark 5:1-9; Luke 4:16b-19; Matthew 5:2-10

October 8, 2017

          When you are married to a pastor, you develop a code all of your own to talk about worship and sermons.  The hyper-critical lens you turn on yourself is downright dangerous when focused on someone else.  When I retire, I dread the thought of coming to worship services because I doubt that I will be able to turn my brain off just to enjoy a brilliant and beautifully done sermon.  I had Dan Cohn laughing last week because I told him I was listening to sermons on my Bluetooth device while I was doing yard work.  “Of course,” Dan said, half-smiling.  “What’s that supposed to mean, Dan?  Maybe I’m a little too immersed in this church thing?  Is that what you mean?  Maybe I’m a church nerd?  Huh?  Huh?  It’s not like the pocket protector defends my honor here.”

          Tracy and I will actually end up in tears when we hear a beautiful sermon.  Not surprisingly, both Tracy and Sophia talked about the sermon Rev. Traci Blackmon, the UCC Minister for Justice and Witness, gave at General Synod as one that blew them away.  I consistently am blown away by the courage and candor of Rabbi Sharon Brous, think the best sermon I ever heard was given by Rev. James Forbes, and believe this congregation is blessed to have so many different voices that have spoken with passion and eloquence from this pulpit.  But there are many bad sermons out there.  And I have given my share, most of the time trying to combine two to four sermons into one. 

          For those sermons, the sermon that should have been four different ones and is excruciating in trying to wind all the threads into one, Tracy and I use the old Certs commercial, “That’s four sermons, *click* four sermons in one.”  There is the sermon that really doesn’t have a point or follow a theme, but darn it, it had a couple good stories or some great quotes.  We refer to that as the “nugget” sermon.  Nothing really there, but some good nuggets along the way.  Tracy quotes one of her seminary professors who references those who will use big words or pepper in some sophisticated theological language while saying absolutely nothing.  If you see Tracy move her arms back and forth like this, you know she is saying, “I have nothing to say.  I have absolutely nothing to say.”  Finally, there is what I think to be the most dangerous sermon.  I fear I use it too often.  Theological terms are used and talked about with absolutely no content whatsoever given to those terms.  And we give these kinds of sermons with a wink and a nod. 

          For we don’t want you to think about the meaning of these sermons.  What we want you to do is contemplate God and the Christ, coming on clouds of glory to greet us in our faithfulness, Jesus softly smiling and leading us as a good shepherd into eternal bliss and salvation.  Do you believe me, sisters and brothers, siblings and cousins?  Can I get an amen?  This language is code, insider language, to say that if you’re part of the in crowd and the true faithful, you know what it means.  The highfalutin language is used to punish those who don’t get it, making them assume that they are just too stupid, are just a baby Christian, or perhaps not prayed enough to understand.  Because really.  I have no idea what that means.  It’s an empty cup.  Empty cup sermons.  We describe the outside of the cup but never its content.  When, in reality, it is the content of a cup that is to give us nourishment. 

          In this sermon series of responding to the Religious Right, what I reference as Violent Christendom, I have tried to come up with talking points for those family get-togethers or holidays, difficult plane rides when the person next to you wants to share their faith, or those hometown friends who wonder what your problem is on Facebook.  Really.  Jesus loves you.  Why can’t you love Jesus?  In the first sermon, I asked us to come up with frames outside the Dr. James Dobson’s “Focus on the Family” strict disciplinarian Father.  I then talked about a progressive faith that seeks to live out the right questions, to live critically and socratically as listeners who don’t even pretend to have the answers but are seekers for the answers and go undeterred when they find more questions.  And, finally, I wanted all of us to recognize the grace of a faith that does not dwell in certainty and is more faithfully lived outside of certainty. 

            This week I want to talk about the biggest empty cup in the Christian faith:  Jesus.  There is a popular Gloria and Bill Gaither song, “There’s something about that name” with lyrics that go like this, “Jesus Jesus Jesus; There's something about that name; Master savior Jesus; It's like the fragrance after rain; Jesus Jesus Jesus; Let Heaven and Earth proclaim; Kings and kingdoms will all pass away; There is something about that name.”  And there is a popular praise song from Hillsong Worship that has the words, “What a powerful Name it is; What a powerful Name it is; The Name of Jesus Christ my King; What a powerful Name it is; Nothing can stand against; What a powerful Name it is; The Name of Jesus.”  All of that power and sovereignty language in the song as if someone is trying to take Jesus from those beautiful young, white folks singing that song.  But whatever does it mean?

          This is a Sunday where I think we can fully engage family members, plane ride acquaintances, and hometown Facebook friends.  For I think one of the things that Violent Christendom does is that they take Jesus and turn him into an empty cup so that he can be whatever they need him to be in pursuit of violent power, wealth, and insider wisdom.  This is why progressive Christianity has to engage Scripture.  Because while Fundamentalist and evangelical Christians often invoke the name of Jesus, they don’t spend a great deal of time talking about what is in those four gospels.  My experience is that they spend a great deal of time in Proverbs and Paul’s letters, selecting out-of-context passages and extrapolating in ways that never allow the Bible to get in the way of defining Jesus.       

          So that is what I want all of us to do in these discussions where we engage.  We don’t have to be mean.  We don’t have to be bitter.  But we should be the ones invoking not only the name of Jesus but the content of his life and ministry.  The high point of the Gospel of Mark is when Jesus exorcises the demon named “Legion” from a man cutting himself at the grave site and throwing “Legion” into an unkosher animal, pigs, and having the pigs run into the sea, the symbol for primordial chaos in Jewish mythology.  “Legion” was a reference to a Roman military detachment.  Jesus was throwing the Roman military into the sea.  Throughout the gospels, Jesus uses confrontational non-violence and interrogation to make his point and live out his ministry, a mythological story, the high point of the gospel, illustrating just who Jesus’s enemies are. 

Jesus pushes and provokes.  But the only time he is the least bit violent is when he throws the moneychangers out of the Temple in Jerusalem for the ways they have denied access to the economically poor.  One cannot talk about Jesus and somehow suggest that the use of brutal or violent force is permissible.  Jesus talked about loving one’s enemies and claimed that he did not operate in the same dominating, violent system or way that the Roman system operated.  And Jesus did so, used soul force, when he had no government office, no Roman status, no wealthy privilege.  To counsel deadly, brutal, and violent force accompanied with government office, cultural status, or wealthy privilege and invoke the name of Jesus as one does so is not only anathema, it is evil. 

Secondly, in both the mission statement Jesus read from the book of Isaiah at the start of his public ministry in Luke and at the beginning of the Beatitudes which define the reversal of fortune and the honor and shame code in ancient Israel, Jesus begins with the economically poor.  Jesus talks about bringing good news to the poor, honoring the poor.  One of the gospels has Joseph, Jesus’s father, as a carpenter.  Carpenters were not middle-class tradespeople in ancient Rome.  Carpenters were farmers who had lost their land to incredible taxation and debt that Rome would leverage.  Jesus was dirt poor.  He was not an entrepreneur.  He was not independently wealthy.  Best bet is that he was illiterate as most of the society around him was. 

Jesus dined with, ministered to, and spent his time around the economically poor.  And he told a rich young ruler, when the ruler had told Jesus he had kept all the commandments, to sell all that he had and give it to the poor.  Because Jesus knew the Jewish assumption was that if you were somehow wealthy, it was probably because you broke commandments, received your wealth from ill-gotten means, and oppressed the poor.  Within the Jewish prophetic tradition, there was no such thing as independently wealthy.  Wealth was a sign that you had taken advantage of the system, made your money off the backs of others, and gained the world at the price of your soul. 

Jesus is not an empty cup.  If we are serious about the gospels, Jesus had a particular content that is diametrically opposed to the prosperity gospel.  There is no self-help scheme or get rich formula Jesus offers.  Rather, Jesus counsels solidarity with the economically poor and oppressed, sick and dying, outcast and sinner.  While disciples may have encouraged and Rome appropriated a Christendom that justified violence, brutality, and the slaughter of others, Jesus told stories of violent landowners and of a nonviolent God who did not take part in the bloodshed of Jewish enemies.  Jesus was the lens through which we might come to know a nonviolent God. 

But that’s the rub, right?  That makes this Jesus guy radical.  If you want to follow in this guy’s footsteps, be his disciples, violence must be engaged and confronted with nonviolence and we must share in solidarity with the economically poor.  That is what is inside the Jesus cup.  And just with those two forms of liquid refreshment, we know that faith is hard and difficult. 

We just want our Jesus to be not so mean and not so wealth-obsessed.  Kind of like . . .  us.  Because if we are going to engage our fundamentalist and evangelical family and acquaintances and friends around Jesus, we might have to start living that Jesus out a little more. 

Today we baptized Grace Crist.  As a congregation, we said that we would surround her with all kinds of examples of what it means to be Christian so that Grace knows what it means to be a follower of Jesus as 3^rd grader, as a Junior in high school, as a young adult, and as a senior member of a congregation.  We say that if you take Jesus as your friend there is a particular content and character to his life but a way that life, teaching, and ministry gives us the courage to live out those values.  As Christians, in a violent and wealth-obsessed world, we are called to not only engage people who use the word “Jesus” as an empty cup, we are to make sure Grace knows the content of the cup we offer her.  We want Grace to challenge authority even from a young age (sorry Cindy and John), speak with a strong voice, and join hands with us in community.  Because then we want her to teach us what it means to be a Christian at her age so that she might teach us courage and the cost and joy of discipleship.  We want her to know what is on the inside of that cup so that she might be a lens by which we can all see God. 

Today Grace Crist was baptized into this community of Christ.  We take her hand, for we know the road is hard, and we want her to be bold and strong and accompanied by this divinely absurd group of disciples. Jesus walked that hard road in joy and so we fully expect to teach Grace that as well.  So that when Grace Crist invokes the name of “Jesus” in courage and truth at a later age, she will know what means.  Because this faithful congregation, taught her, lived it out, and loved her into it.   May it be so.  Amen.