New Life

Romans 12:1-8

When our family moved from Iowa to Pennsylvania, I gave up a career. I worked as a Research Associate at a big testing firm. I had a good salary and great benefits. But we decided this move was the best thing for our family, so we went. When we first got to Pennsylvania I was a stay-at-home mom of three kids – soon to be four. This was something I had to figure out how to do, as I had never done it before.

I joined the women’s coffee group at our church – I joined a number of things people invited me to because they said the magic words: there’s child care. On my first morning, all the women were talking about their craft projects. I learned from listening to them that they had a lot of talents – sewing, knitting, woodworking, and much more.” I was amazed at all the things they were doing. I finally said, “Gosh, I don’t do anything!” They just looked at me for a moment, then rushed to reassure me. “I’m sure there are things you’re good at.” They didn’t know me, so they didn’t know what those things could possibly be. But they had confidence that there was something I could do.

It wasn’t crafts. So it took a little time for us to figure out just what gifts God had given me for the good of Christ’s church.

Paul is turning a page onto a new subject in this 12^th chapter of the letter to the Romans. Having resolved for himself and, he surely hopes, for the church as well, that God has not rejected God’s chosen people. That, in reality, God uses all of us somehow for God’s purposes – plans which extend well beyond our ability to see. And now, he begins exploring a new question: how is God intending to use you? And me? And everyone in Christ’s church?

He urges his readers to present their bodies as a living sacrifice – that is, a sacrifice of the old self, former life, for the sake of something new. He asks them to be renewed and transformed by the grace of God.  We give up the old for the sake of the new life in Christ and as his body in the world. The problem is we don’t like to give things up.

When most of us hear the word sacrifice we think, “not me” or “you go first.”  We hope that someone else is going to be doing the sacrificing because there is nothing we wish to sacrifice.

Now that doesn’t necessarily mean that there is nothing I would like to give up. There are things I might be willing to give up – I have some old junk in the garage I would be happy to have hauled away. But that’s not sacrifice, is it?

There are some bad habits that I would be glad to get rid of. If I could figure out an easy way to do it, I would let them go in a heartbeat. But that’s not sacrifice, is it?

To sacrifice something implies that this “something” is good and valuable. It is inherent in the definition of sacrifice that the thing being sacrificed is loved and wanted.

Now who wants to do that?

The question of how we value things, people, places, and times affects how we regard the notion of sacrifice. If a sacrifice is the giving up of something good for the sake of something better, we need to look carefully at the value we place on everything. When I became a stay at home mother and left my career behind, I wasn’t sure how to value things. And I couldn’t figure out what value I had in the world I was now living in. No one had any use for my skills in running statistical analyses on test data, even though these skills had previously been highly valued and well-compensated.

You see, there are different systems of values – Paul might say there are the values of the world, or the flesh, and then there are the values of the Spirit. It isn’t always easy to figure out where the line of distinction is, because the church exists in the world and participates in the systems of the world

The world values money, but doesn’t ministry take a lot of money too? Clearly, we need money to pay for buildings, utilities, supplies, and salaries.

The world values power, but doesn’t the church use power too? There are some people in the church who have more power than others, by design.

The values of the world infect and affect the church. The theologian Richard Niebuhr wrote a whole book about how we understand Christ, and ourselves as Christian, in relation to culture, the values of the world in which we live. It has been said we are in it but not of it, which comes, perhaps, from Jesus’ words in the Gospel of John. And Paul says here in Romans that we are to be not conformed to the world, but to allow our lives to be transformed by the power of the Spirit into something new.

It is not an easy thing to walk this path, to have one foot in this world and one foot in the other, in a manner of speaking. It calls for continual adjustment as we seek to stay on the path.

There is an interesting film that gets to this very matter: how we value things in this world and the nature of sacrifice.

Babette’s Feast is a Danish film made in 1987. There are numerous reasons why you would not have seen this film. It is very dreary looking – dark and colorless. It is in Danish, so you have to deal with subtitles. Nobody you know is in it, so it has no box office appeal. There is no reason you would have seen it except that someone may have told you it is an absolutely extraordinary film.

The story takes place in an isolated village in Denmark in the 19^th century. It is inhabited by a rigid sect of Christians who try to practice an almost complete separation from those things that are valued by worldly standards. They shun all pleasures of the flesh – in their food, their dress, their furnishings, and all their activities.

Babette comes to them from Paris as a sort of political refugee. They cannot turn her away because it would not be virtuous to do so. But they don’t know what to do with her – she doesn’t fit in to their community. She offers to cook for them, to earn her keep. This is a gift she is happy to share with them.

She has to learn how to accommodate their bland tastes – because good-tasting food is a worldly pleasure of which they do not partake. She lives with them and cooks for them for fourteen years, and suddenly one day Babette receives some extraordinary news.

Since she left Paris, a friend who stayed behind has renewed a lottery ticket for her every year. This year, Babette has won the lottery.

She tells the community that she wants to celebrate by making them a real French dinner. She makes arrangements for all the necessary supplies to be sent from Paris, and as these items begin to arrive, the members of the community grow more and more worried: exotic birds, strange vegetables, crates of wine. This is going to be extravagant, they see. They don’t want to refuse Babette’s offer, but they are very uncomfortable being the recipients of such an excessive, sensual pleasure.

They decide among themselves that this is a temptation being put to them and they will respond to it by refusing to enjoy it. They will eat it because they have to but, with God as their witness, they will not enjoy it.

On the day of the feast they sit down and partake of one course after another. The rich food and excellent wines are forced into their mouths in small measure. They speak little and try to think about other things.

However, there is one guest at the table, Lorens, a visitor who is not a part of this community. He isn’t aware of their plan, so he does what any normal person would do. He exclaims over the wonders of each taste, praising the talents of the chef. He reminisces about a meal he enjoyed many years earlier at a famous café in Paris. Each sip of the wine makes Lorens more voluble in his praise, more sentimental in his remembrances.

At the same time, the others at the table can’t help but mellow a bit as they too have been drinking the wine. Gradually, as they sit at table together and share course after course of this splendid feast, words are spoken that have been withheld for years. Old wrongs are forgiven, love that has become stale is renewed, there is redemption and a general renewal of the human spirit at this table. They had feared that this sensory pleasure would awaken a wickedness in them. Instead it has awakened their hearts to love.

Babette, it turns out, was the chef at this famous Paris café Lorens remembered so fondly. Later that night, someone speaks to Babette about how much she must be looking forward to returning to her life in Paris, now that she has won the lottery. But Babette tells them she spent all of her winnings on this meal for them.

You see, the people of this community have been somewhat confused about what is valued. They thought that if they turned their back on all pleasures they would become a more Christlike people. As it turns out, in denying themselves so many things they had also denied themselves a great deal of love and forgiveness. Transformation had taken place at that dinner table.

They thought that Babette, and others like her, put value on the wrong things. Her life in Paris had been about creating earthly pleasures for people to enjoy, and no higher purpose than that, something they thought to be sinful. How shocked they were to discover that she had put all her worldly treasure into creating just such a feast for them to enjoy. Babette valued the wondrous things that could be done with the gifts of the earth, food and wine. And, perhaps without even knowing it, in this little village her gifts had been put to a higher purpose. Her life had been transformed by the gifts she had received in this simple community who gave her shelter.

What are we to say about such things? Perhaps only what Paul says: God gives us all the gifts God chooses for us, for the purposes of God alone. And God takes the offerings of each one of us as they are presented, doing amazing things beyond our expectations. In the giving and the receiving we are, and the world is, transformed.

Photo Credit: from the film, "Babette's Feast." 

Broken, Part 6: Bearing Witness

Romans 11:1-2a, 29-32

Fifty-some years ago my mother and her beloved younger sister, had a falling out. Her sister became engaged to be married and the man she was marrying was Jewish. And – not without careful and prayerful consideration – she decided that she would convert to Judaism, so their children could be raised Jewish. And my mother thought this was completely and unequivocally wrong.

My mother was a lifelong member of the Lutheran church; she raised me and my sisters in the Lutheran church. I discovered later, in my own relationship to my mother, that for her being Lutheran was an inherited part of her identity. To turn your back on it was practically sacrilegious. I know it hurt her deeply to see her sister turn away from this faith tradition, but I also know her response to it was guided by prejudice. There is a strain of antisemitism that has run through Lutheranism since its beginning.

The unfortunate truth is that Martin Luther, the father of the Protestant Reformation, and the Lutheran Church in particular, held some appallingly bigoted views toward the Jews. “Set fire to their synagogues,” he advised, and “toss out these lazy rogues by the seat of their pants.” I hate to think how Luther, a German, would have behaved had he been alive during the Third Reich – I am afraid he would have joined the Nazis.

This year when we celebrate the 500-year anniversary of the Reformation, which began when Luther nailed his 95 Theses on the church door, we would like to forget about this side of the man. This is a part of our history we don’t speak about and many don’t even know about. Yet, we need to acknowledge it, and that this kind of bigotry is very, very hard to snuff out. We know that it has never gone away. It has smoldered for centuries, occasionally being fanned into flames – as it has been this year in our nation. Neo-Nazi White Supremacist groups have proudly stepped out into the open, as they did recently in Charlottesville, to demand what they think are their rights.

A horrific amount of violence has been perpetrated because of bigotry like this. Luther was certainly not the only one to blame. The truth we need to acknowledge is that there is a sordid history of cruel bigotry in Christianity. The crusades, in which many thousands of Jews and Muslims were killed by Christian soldiers. The Inquisition, in which thousands more were tortured and killed. The strains of bigotry that drove these institutions has never completely died.

Today, when we see Nazis, KKK, and all their fellow white supremacy groups promoting their cause, we see their Christian roots.

The point I wish to make is that the church bears much responsibility for racist institutions that exist. The church bears responsibility for its historic role in racist violence. And, if we denounce that history today, which I believe we do, then we bear responsibility for standing against it. We must acknowledge the evil that is committed, too often in the name of white Christianity, and we must loudly and clearly condemn it.

From where I’m standing now, it is hard to imagine how a serious student of scripture could read Paul’s letter to the Romans and find cause to hate the Jews. Yet I know that it has been put to that use by many pastors from many pulpits. Granted, Paul’s arguments are difficult to follow, but not because he was trying to obfuscate or mislead. The difficulty is certainly due to the fact that he was winding his way through what was, for him, some extremely complex and challenging terrain.

If Paul’s world was divided into the Christians and the Jews then he had a stake in both these tribes. From his birth, through his training and his vocation, Paul was a Jew, a member of the tribe of Benjamin. But when he encountered Jesus on the road to Damascus, he became a Christian – an apostle for Christ. From that point on, he began to forge a path through this uncharted territory, seeking to understand what new thing God was doing in the world. We see his struggle in the words of this epistle.

In this section we read from today, Paul is clear on one thing: that God has not rejected God’s people; that God’s gifts and calling are irrevocable. And he theorizes that it was, perhaps, necessary for the Jews to reject Jesus so that there would be an opportunity for the Gentiles to receive the gospel. This does not, by any means, suggest that there is a finite amount of room, a limited number of tickets, to heaven. The Jews did not have to vacate so the Gentiles could enter the fold. What Paul’s argument suggests is that when we look back at the events that unfolded we see that the resistance Paul encountered in the synagogues happened alongside the tremendous success he found among the Gentiles. Is it possible, Paul wonders, that there is a connection? Or I might put it this way: would the young church have been so accepting of the Gentiles if the Jews had not rejected them?

Perhaps things had to shift in this way, for the sake of the salvation of the world, Paul thinks. But if so, this is only temporary, he argues. God has not forsaken the Jews. God does not renege on God’s promises.

Ultimately, Paul admits, it is a mystery. It is well beyond our gifts and capabilities to comprehend God’s plans for the world God created. We simply trust in God’s word and God’s inherent goodness, seeking to be always faithful in our words and actions. Which brings us back to the events in Charlottesville. How do faithful people respond to this white supremacy movement?

I have heard many people suggest that it is best to ignore it; that acknowledging it only makes it worse. This is not a new argument.

When I was a high school student in the suburbs of Chicago during the 70’s, Nazis fought a court battle to march in Skokie, only a few miles away from where I lived. Skokie was the home of many holocaust survivors; there was no doubt that the Nazis chose Skokie for that very reason. The residents fought hard against it, although, I can remember, there were some in the surrounding communities who argued against fighting it. These voices said that the best thing to do would be to deprive these Nazis of the attention they craved. Just ignore them. Let them have their silly march and pretend nothing is happening. Nothing bad will happen if you just ignore them.

Those who had seen the effects of Nazi ideology up close and personally simply could not do that. Because they bore witness, and history bears witness, to what can happen when the world chooses to just ignore them.

We simply cannot remain indifferent. When evil is exposed to the light of day, as it was in Charlottesville last weekend, we cannot turn away and say just ignore those fools. It is wrong to make excuses for them when they commit acts of violence, suggesting that they might have been provoked by their opponents. We cannot fail to condemn their ideology and actions.  Please let me be very clear about this: I don’t say to condemn them as evil people, but to condemn the evil ideologies and systems that they have chosen to affiliate with. We must not fail to do so; we must take them seriously, because it is quite likely that the next Dylann Roof is among their ranks. And, in case you don’t remember, Dylann Roof was the young man who walked into Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, joined a group of nine members in prayer, and then shot and killed each one of them.

Our land is riddled with the scars of these acts of hate. But we are not without hope. God’s mercy rains down. I believe the Apostle Paul, in his trials and tribulations, came to understand that God’s love covers everything; God’s love is greater than we can imagine. He came to see that, while we are, all of us, broken human beings, God will use us for God’s divine purposes. God will use us broken creatures to bring about wholeness. And so it is our calling to name and condemn evil wherever we see it, and we may see it in surprising places.

For the world is not divide into good people and evil people; as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote, “the dividing line between good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.” Once again, understanding our own brokenness is the first step. We are at our best when we acknowledge our own fault lines, our own brokenness, our own need for forgiveness. As Paul wrote, “God has imprisoned all in disobedience so that he may be merciful to all.”

In the end, it is good to remember the words of the prophet Micah, who spelled it out nice and simple: this is what the Lord requires of you: to do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with your God. Let us never be afraid to stand up for what is right, and let us strive to do it with kindness and humility.

photo credit: from USA Today (https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2017/07/08/kkk-holds-rally-virginia-and-met-protesters/462146001/)