Eighteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, August 4, "The Empire of Heaven as Movement and Institution"

C Proper 13 18 Ord NH BFC 2019

Secret Book of James 6:7-8

August 4, 2019

Jesus said, “Be eager to be saved without being urged. Rather, be fervent on your own and, if possible, outdo even me, for this is how the father will love you.

“Come to hate hypocrisy and evil intention. Intention produces hypocrisy, and hypocrisy is far from truth.

“Do not let the empire of heaven wither away. It is like a palm shoot whose dates dropped around it. It produced buds, and after they grew, its productivity dried up. This is also what happened with fruit that came from this single root. After it was harvested, fruit was obtained by many. It certainly was good. Is it not possible to produce the new growth now, and for you to find it?”

Early Christian scholars often reference the project that Jesus was about, perhaps even the project that pre-dated Jesus, as the empire of God movement.  As in the Secret Book of James text today, intentional Jewish writers would have substituted “heaven” for God, using the name of God a form of idolatry.   The primary way to understand this countercultural movement is that the most widely known cultural reference in the First Century is the Roman Empire and its Caesar.  The Empire of God movement takes Caesar off the throne, with Caesar’s values and priorities, and places God upon the throne, with God’s values and priorities.  Assumed is that Caesar is not god, and God’s values and priorities are wildly different than those of Caesar and Rome.   
That is a thoroughly Jewish notion.  God was the distinct and different Sovereign for the Jewish people over and against every other Sovereign of other nations.  
Movements are driven by their mission and their values.  Decisions and actions align with those values.  
But there is something unique about a term like the Empire of God.  It references not only a movement but there is also a sense that it is institutional.  Institutions are about holding something, providing longevity that holds content.  Rev. Courtney Stange-Treager, Minister for Church Vitality in the Pacific Northwest Conference, shared with us at a continuing education event that United Church of Christ churches often flinch at being known as institutions.  UCC churches are often like a beautifully, artistic vase that is dynamic and creative but has holes that do not allow the vase to hold much water, much content.  Rev. Stange-Treager thinks the church can perform important roles as institutions.  Good institutions may not be much on verve or creative design but they know how to hold water, hold content.  
As followers of Christ, the Church is to be about the Empire of God project—the project that is both movement and institution.  The teaching in the Secret Book of James reminds us that hypocrisy and evil intention are the great killers of the empire of heaven, the Empire of God.  The teaching also lets us know that the Empire of God can be fragile, requires our care, nurture, and watchful eye, lest it wither away.  
So I’ve been beating around the bush, providing the empty cup or vase in talking about the Empire of God as movement or institution without defining it.  That’s what I want you to do.  In a couple minutes I’m going to ask all of you what the content and character of the Empire of God is . . . either by discerning that from the life and mission and ministry of Christ.  Or by discerning that in our common life together.  What are the values and mission of this church?  Or what should be the values and mission of this church?
And then to ask, how do we tend to the institution so that it can hold that content?  How can we make the movement sustainable as an institution?  
I ask those questions because I believe, in discerning their answers, we decide who we shall be as church, invested in the project of the Empire of God.
Let’s take a minute to lean back into the Spirit of God I believe functions in each one of you and collectively as a community to ask, “What are the values and mission of this church?  Or what should be the values and mission of this church?”  And then to ask, how do we tend to the institution so that it can hold that content?  How can we make the movement sustainable as an institution?  
 (A minute of silence.  Ask for answers.)
We live in a time where much of the Christian church is unwilling to define its values because we know to do so would show us to be hypocritical people of evil intent.  So then . . . does Christianity deserve to survive when its sole values are survival and power over others . . . willing to bend and break any other value to attend to those two, carrying forward hypocrisy and evil intent?  Perhaps it does not.  But true Christianity has always existed authentically as a minority movement.  Are there people who are willing to live with and by deep values, as a minority tradition, seeking to hold that content in a way that might infuse its wider culture?  May we be those people.  Amen.  

Sermon for the Second Sunday of Easter, April 3, 2016, "Thomas knows too much and sees too little"

C Easter 2 BFC 2016

John 20:19-31

April 3, 2016

We can imagine the disciples all huddled together in the upper room, wondering what might befall them next.  Fear holds them and dictates every action.  Their leader and teacher has been killed, some of them watching from a safe distance as the spikes were driven through his hands and feet.  All of the excitement and energy surrounding their movement now swept away without any sense that there was a future on the horizon.  They grieve so much loss, choke back the dread that they may be next on the cross, wonder out loud whether the lofty dreams of Galilee are always swept away in the realities of Jerusalem. 

Some of the oldest Christian churches in the world are found in the southern part of India, Kerala, an area said to be evangelized by the apostle Thomas in the early 50s C.E., a time that may pre-date the witness, ministry, and evangelization of the apostle Paul.  In the Nag Hammadi find in 1945[1] was discovered The Gospel of Thomas, a collection of Jesus sayings that some people believe has material that pre-dates the canonical gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.  That gospel was supposedly entrusted to Jesus’ twin, the title given to Thomas in the Gospel of John.  And in another Nag Hammadi text, the Book of Thomas the Contender, Jesus addresses the apostle Thomas as his twin.[2]  I know, right?  You can tell all of your friends having gone to different churches today that you think your pastor may have read from The DaVinci Code today. 

But if Thomas is the twin of Jesus, it might make his doubting a little more understandable. You have been with Jesus his whole life long, you know him backwards and forwards, and now you are supposed to believe bone of your bone, flesh of your flesh has somehow returned from what the Romans did to him?  You would have to see that to believe it.  You wouldn’t believe that there was anything new you could learn, any new life that could be known.

I would think it would have to be like, with no advanced warning, “Wait a minute, you are saying that my twin sister was just elected President of the United States?  You mean today?  With no previous political experience?   Whaaaaaaat?”

And Jesus appears to them and Thomas wants to know if this is some kind of dream or some kind of transcendence with no basis in reality.  He doubts that it is possible.  His critical eye tells him that this is not Jesus or Jesus somehow escaped the torture, cruelty, and death of the cross.  When you think you know something backward and forward, hard to imagine any new life out of that.  Jesus wants Thomas to think bigger.  The teaching, life, and ministry of Galilee is not destroyed in the torture, cruelty, and death of Jerusalem.  Christianity, and in particular resurrection, contemplates not only the grief and pain we experience but that there might be two somethings deeper in life and meaning.  Galilee and Jerusalem are a “both and” for Christian life and not, as Thomas thought, an “either or.”

Many of you have probably read about the great work that has been done by the Community Innovations in the downtown area.  And most of you know that I work with the Native American Coalition that is part of the Community Innovations project aimed at speaking life into the struggles of people who are chronically inebriated.  As that project moved from a law enforcement only model to a treatment model, downtown Billings has had great success in helping people move to recovery and off the streets.  Particularly because the Native American community is so strongly represented among this population, it has been critical to have strong Native American leadership and understanding in working with this issue. 

I ran in the Purple 5K  race today because the money from the Purple 5K goes to Spare Change for Real Change which funded Joel Simpson’s job as a Resource Outreach Coordinator to tune of $15,000 last year.  Joel is not only Native American but also a Licensed Addictions Counselor who now travels with the two police officers downtown, Matt Lennick and Tony Nichols. 

In just a year, the statistics are staggering for what Joel, Matt, and Tony have been able to do.  In the first year of policing downtown, Matt and Tony had written 618 open container citations and arrested 474 people.  In 2014, Matt and Tony were writing 20 tickets a day. And they kept on seeing the same people and dealing with the same issues—over and over again.  Matt referred to the summer of 2014 as “a rough summer.”  That’s when Joel Simpson came along.

o  The chronic inebriate population cost the city 8.5 million dollars in 2014. 

o  From Jan. 1 through Sept. 1, 2014, calls regarding public inebriation, including alcohol-related trespass, numbered 832 within the Downtown area.  During the same period [in 2015], 566 calls came in.

o  Open container citations plunged during the same period from 1,050 in 2014 to 567 in 2015. Alcohol-related trespass, dropped from 466 to 357.[3]

Matt told me he loves what he does now because he gets to do what he set out to do when he became a police officer—to help people.  If Matt and Tony believed that they knew this policing gig thing, knew it backwards and forwards, such that there was never anything they could learn, or no new life could be breathed into what they do, the whole downtown would feel much different right now.

Our church participates in this story not only through me, but also because we now host two with the possibility of three Talking Circles in our church building as a way of helping Native American people on the road to recovery.  Our church is loved for hosting these Talking Circles.  Lita Pepion leads out a peer to peer group and Josiah Hugs leads out a Wellbriety group on Thursday nights.  Joel Simpson looks like he might very well move his group to our church because they need to find a space downtown.

Here is the struggle though.  As people enter into recovery in these groups, what we are hearing is that they are beginning to unearth the incredible trauma found in these people’s lives.  Sometimes that trauma spans generations.  And as my good friend and colleague, Rev. Paula Bidle, told me, trauma care has changed over the years.  It used to be that what was done is get the person to talk about and process the trauma.  But all that seemed to do was hardwire the trauma into a person’s brain, heart, and soul.  Now the treatment prescribed is to find a story, a narrative in the person’s life that goes two somethings deeper than the trauma.  It is to find something that transcends Galilee and Jerusalem.

People of faith should be the very people who, through a transcendent faith, find meaning even in the midst of trial, trauma, and tribulation.  Andrew Zolli’s reasons why people of faith are resilient:

So, people who are psychologically hardy it turns out believe very prevalently some things about the world. So if you believe that the world is a meaningful place, if you see yourself as having agency within that world, and if you see successes and failures as being placed in your path to teach you things, you are more likely to be psychologically hardy and therefore more resilient in the face of trauma. This is one reason why some researchers postulate that systems of faith have been so resilient themselves in human history, and so prevalent, so sticky. Not because the individual content of the beliefs or any particular belief about, within those cosmologies is strictly true or not. But because believing in those kinds of things are the very kinds of things that confer psychological resilience upon us.[4]

Our transcendent sensibilities, as people of faith, make us a transcendent people.  There is a certain sense of transcendence in no matter what tragedies might befall us.  But if we are glumly walking toward death with no possibility for anything else, thinking we know things backwards and forwards, with no possibility of new life, we lose that sense of transcendence.  In the end, that’s basically what resurrection is—a belief in transcendence.  Resurrection is the understanding that God has a story that is two somethings deeper than the grief, death, and pain that we experience in the world.  Resurrection is the idea that there is something bigger and greater than ourselves, that there might be things yet to learn, that God may be speaking new life into something we thought we knew backwards and forwards. 

          The message of the gospel is that we do not have to stay locked up in fear in some upper room waiting for the world to do its worst to us.  God is working out new life, even for those who thought they knew Jesus their whole lives long.   And we are the people of God, the disciples of Christ.  So let us find ways to blow open the doors, expecting new life, a story that is two somethings deeper to help us find a way that transcends our fear.  Do not be afraid.  Amen. 

---

[1] Pre-dating the finding of The Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947 found near the Upper Egyptian town of Nag Hammadi.

[2] Herbert Christian Merillat, “’Twin’” of Jesus?” The Gnostic Apostle Thomas, 1997.  http://gnosis.org/thomasbook/intro.html.

[3] Mike Ferguson, “Downtown seeing results with serial inebriate initiative,” Billings Gazette, October 8, 2015.

[4] Andrew Zolli, “A Shift to Humility:  Reslience and Expanding the Edge of Change,”  On Being with Krista Tippett, May 16, 2013,  http://www.onbeing.org/program/a-shift-to-humility-andrew-zolli-on-resilience-and-expanding-the-edge-of-change/transcript-0#main_content.