What's Tony Thinking

Waiting for God

Thanks to everyone who joined me for the first on-line Advent Vespers yesterday. And here’s my “meditation” from the service. A bit long. In future week’s we’ll aim for something shorter.

Advent I: Waiting for God
Isaiah 64: 1 – 9; I Corinthians 1: 3 – 9
December 3, 2023

Thank you again, friends, for joining me in the little venture, these Advent vespers. Advent is, for me, and perhaps for you, a favorite season, a special season. But it is also an odd season. We might call it a bi-focal season.
Thankfully, for those of us wearing glasses, we no longer have actual bi-focals. Remember those? Where you had to look through one part of the lens, a little box, to see close up and another to see into the distance? Optics and corrective lens have improved.
But there is a bit of the bi-focal to Advent season. On one hand, there are all the delightful things: concerts, parties, lights and the general sense of joyful anticipation. There are the Advent calendars, ever more elaborate. Children open the daily doors to find a little chocolate behind each one. And in a sign of consumerism’s endless, if mad, creativity, there are now adult Advent calendars with a little bottle of whiskey behind each door. So there’s all that fun and festivity — and excess — coming at us through one lens in this season.
But through the other lens, Advent is something different. At least for those of us in the northern hemisphere, Advent is the darkest time of the year. The days are growing even shorter now. And the world too seems full of darkness. Wars are raging. The nation’s politics seem, most days, utterly hopeless. Loneliness and addiction stalk many lives and families. We may rush to the holiday lights and activities to escape all that is, but Advent itself — especially in its Scripture readings — is more honest. It does not ask us to deny the world’s, or our own, darkness.
I like the way the eminent Old Testament scholar, Walter Breuggemann, introduces Advent. “Advent,” he writes, “begins not on a note of joy, but of despair. Humankind has reached the end of its rope. All our schemes for self-improvement, for extricating ourselves from the traps we have set for ourselves, have come to nothing. We have now realized at the deepest level of our being that we cannot save ourselves and that, apart from the intervention of God, we are totally and inextricably lost.”
You hear this in today’s reading from the prophet Isaiah. What begins as a bold call to God to tear open the heavens and come come down, gives way to a desperate lament — “We all fade like a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away . . . All our righteous deeds (note: not our evil deeds) but “our righteous deeds are like a filthy cloth.” The prophet casts us upon God’s mercy, “Yet, O Lord, you are our Father, we are the clay, and you are the potter . . . Now consider, we are all your people.”
It’s the first step in any twelve step program. We admit our lives have become unmanageable. We cry out for help. Welcome to Advent, a season that may be really more for adults than for children.
With that brief introduction to the season, I want to turn now to our second lesson, the epistle reading for the first Sunday of Advent and my text for this reflection. These are the opening verses of Paul’s first letter to the Church at Corinth. Paul had founded that congregation a year or two earlier, then continued on in his missionary journey. Now he writes back to the Corinthians. Let me read it once more.
“Grace to you, and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
“I give thanks to my God always for you, because of the grace of God that has been given you in Christ Jesus, for in every way you have been enriched in him, in speech and knowledge of every kind — just as the testimony of Christ has been strengthened among you — so that you are not lacking in any spiritual gift as you wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ.
He will also strengthen you to the end, so that you may be blameless on the day of our Lord Jesus Christ. God is faithful; by him you were called into the fellowship of his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.”
At first glance, on a quick hearing, it sounds like biblical boilerplate, don’t you think? Theological catch-phrases pile up in run-on sentences. A kind of preface to be hurried through so we can get on to the meat of the letter?
But maybe as it went past we did catch this much . . . Paul here positions the church, positions us, between Advents. The Corinthians have known the presence and blessing of God in Jesus Christ — his first coming. But they live, as do we, this side of the second Advent, awaiting some fuller revealing and completion, what Paul here calls, “the day of the Lord Jesus Christ.”
You hear this now and not yet later in this letter, in its famous chapter on love . . .“For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then we shall see face to face. Now I know only in part, then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known.”
That is kind of how human life — and the Christian life — is, isn’t it? We have known the grace of God, Christ has come, born in Bethlehem, crucified and risen; and yet we also, amid the darkness, find ourselves experiencing what feels like God’s absence. The darkness threatens to overwhelm us.
We live between Advents. Christ has come — rejoice! And yet some days, some seasons, we wonder as we wander, in the words of the haunting Advent carol. It seems God is more absent than present, and the fulness of God’s blessing and Christ’s new creation seem distant.
That is where Paul locates the Corinthians, and where he locates us. Between Advents. Seeing, but only in part. Blessed with many gifts of the Spirit — thanks be to God — but also bedeviled and undone by our persisting foibles and foolishness. Overwhelmed by the world’s suffering and evil.
Called of God, surely, but our race far from completed. Our world suffused, some days, with the light of God, and yet also deep in the darkness. Disarray in the church. Disarray in our own lives and those of our families, loved ones and friends.
So there they were, the Corinthians, between Advents. Here, we are, early Christians of the 21st century, between Advents. What has Paul to say to them? What has Paul to say to us?
I suspect most of us are old enough to remember back to the 90’s. If so, you may recall the zinger from Bill Clinton’s brilliant if bombastic advisor, James Carville. During Clinton’s first run for the White House, Carvile famously said, “It’s about the economy, stupid!” Remember that?
Drafting on Carville, a well-known theologian teaching at a well-known divinty school went into the classroom, took up a piece of chalk — an older technology — and scrawled on the board, “It’s about God, stupid!” A message to his eager seminarians.
And that is Paul’s message here in these early, introductory, seemingly boilerplate verses at the beginning of his letter back to a now deeply conflicted congregation in Corinth. “It’s about God.” Over and over again, in these few verses, God is everywhere as Paul reminds the Corinthians what God has done, and what God will do, for them.
The famous British “man of letters,” Dr. Johnson, once said, “Never be afraid to remind people of the obvious; it is what they have most forgot.”
So listen as Paul reminds the church of the obvious.
“Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.”
“I give thanks to my God always for you because of the grace of God that has been given you in Christ Jesus.”
“For in every way, you have been enriched in him,” by God, “in speech and in knowledge.”
“God — will strengthen you to the end, so that you may be found blameless on the day of our Lord Jesus Christ.”
And the final verse, “God is faithful, by him you were called into the fellowship of his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.”
Hear what Paul is doing? Their life together nearly undone by conflict and confusion. Paul reminds them of the forgotten obvious. It’s not all about them. Not all on them. They are God’s work, God’s creation, people who live under the promises of a God who is faithful, who has not forgotten them, who is at work in them even now and who will bring his good work to completion in them. It’s not all on us or on you, not all up to us or to you. There is Another, who is at work in you even in the midst of the chaos we sometimes create.
Now you might think that a church, a Christian community, Christian people, would be all over that. That they, we, would be all about God, God-focused, God-inspired, God-intoxicated. No, no, no.
What were the Corinthians focused on? Well, some of them at least, on themselves. To be more precise, on the spiritual gifts — the gifts of tongues, of prophesy and spiritual knowledge — that at least some of them had experienced. Remember this, it comes from that same letter: “Though I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal”?
Some in the Corinthian community took the gifts they had been given as the sign of their own brilliance, their own enlightenment. “Gee, I’m special.” But, said, Paul, without love, focused only on themselves, they were but noisy gongs, clanging cymbals.
Heard this story recently: a guy goes overboard on a ferry boat. He can’t swim. He’s floundering, thrashing, crying out when a crew member spots him, grabs a life preserver and flings it out to the guy.
It’s a perfect throw. The life preserver lands right by the guy who by then is going under, sucking water. The crew member shouts, “Grab it!” Flailing about, desperate, the guy gets a hold of the ring. The crew member, with help, reels him in. They pull him back on deck, lay him down. Spitting water, the guy sits up, looks around and says, “Did you see how I did that? Did you see the way I took hold of that life-preserver? How I used that rope to reel myself in?”
Well, that was at least some of the Corinthians. Sometimes we need, like the man overboard, to be delivered from thinking too highly of ourselves; as often, if not more often, it may be the other extreme, we need to be delivered from beating up on ourselves, from constantly reminding ourselves of our failures.
Either way, too high or too low, it’s easy to become self-preoccupied. We forget about the God who made us, the God called us and the God who begun a good work in us and who has promised to see it to completion. We forget about Jesus who died for us, who has been raised for us and will surely come again for us. Jesus in whom we are forgiven all our sin, all our failures, in whom there is mercy and grace for us, for you.
In recent years, my ministry has been a little of this and little of that. Some teaching, writing, giving a talk here or there, organizing a conference; and some “consulting” with congregations. Actually, I kind of hate the word “consultant,” and always felt sort of embarassed to have it stuck to me. It was the kind of “Mr. Fix-It” vibe that the word evoked. As if the church had finally decided “Enough! We’ll call a plumber (electrician, roofer) to tell us what’s wrong and get it fixed.” Having been a pastor for 30 years I was pretty skeptical about our prospects for “fixing” any church. Making things a little better? Yes; “fixing?,” no.
A time or two I tagged along with other, more experienced, church consultants. It seemed that their main message to their clients was, “Figure out what’s special about your church!” “What sets you apart?” “What makes your church unique?” “Tell your story!” Basically, they were saying. “You need a brand.” The unspoken was, “if you want to get anywhere, you’ve got to sell your church.”
It remember being the fly on the wall for one of these exercises. The all-pro consultant raised his questions about what was special, unique, etc. about the congregation.
After a pause verging on awkward silence, an older man said, “Well, we’re Presbyterian.” It was pretty clear the consultant didn’t think that was going to cut it. At which point another, also older, member said, “I think this church is the friendliest group of people I know . . . it’s my family.” Several heads nodded.
A few others had a go at the consultant’s questions. “We’re a pretty busy church, an active church . . . they’re always something going on,” said a middle-aged woman with an hopeful smile. Another chimed in, “Our choir, our choir is really top knotch.” The consultant looked as if he was about to shoot himself.
Then Sarah spoke. Sarah was a bred-in-the-bone Presbyterian whose broad forehead and aqualine nose made her look as she could be a descendant of John Calvin. She had been a school principal in town for so long that her current students were the children of her first.
Sarah said, “I love this church. It’s been my church for a long time. There have been great moments — and yes — a fair number of not-so-great ones too. I love our sanctuary, and yes the choir — at least since Cindy took over — is pretty good. But, with respect to our advisor here,” (Sarah nodded toward the consultant), I think we’re barking up the wrong tree.”
The church,” said Sarah, “is not the star of its own show.”
“Sorry, what was that?” said the consultant.
“The church is not the star of its own show,” repeated Sarah. “It’s not about us, not really. It’s about God. If we’re a place where people somehow feel they meet God, where they feel his mercy,” Sarah continued, “that’s what’s special. That’s what matters.”
“We’re busy? So what, who’s not busy? We’re friendly? So are the people at Rotary.” “And though I am a life-long Presbyterian, I’ve come to think this isn’t really all that important. Frankly, I sometimes worry we’re better at making Presbyterians than we are at making Christians. And no,” said Sarah, “we are not changing the name of this church to ‘Rising Spirit Life Center.’ Good Lord!”
“It’s just not about us. It’s God. About Jesus. His grace for sinners. Dying for us, being raised for us. That’s all the special we need. And if we don’t get that right we may as well close up shop right now.”
“Uh, thank you, Sarah,” said the chairman, glancing uncomfortably in the direction of the consultant to his right. “You’ve given us a lot to think about.” The consultant, who was gathering up his papers and stuffing them into his briefcase, said, “Well, good luck with that . . . God . . . I mean isn’t every church about God?”
A younger member spoke up. “Actually, no. Many are social clubs or civic groups. I’m here because I have felt God here, I’ve felt his grace when we pray together, and his love when we sing together. And when Eunice preaches, Jesus is what I hear. That’s why I’m here. And Sarah is right. That is very, very special.”
Dear friends, the darkness around us, and sometimes the darkness in us, can be deep. So remember it isn’t about what you have done or what you must do. It’s about what God has done and is doing. Hear this promise of God to you — “You are not lacking in any spiritual gift as you wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ.” You have all that you need. And the God who has begun a good work in you, continues in this work even now, and will bring it to completion — count on it. God is faithful. God’s grace is at work in you for healing and peace. Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

 

I Corinthians 1: 3 – 9
December 3, 2023

Thank you again, friends, for joining me in the little venture, these Advent vespers. Advent is, for me, and perhaps for you, a favorite season, a special season. But it is also an odd season. We might call it a bi-focal season.
Thankfully, for those of us wearing glasses, we no longer have actual bi-focals. Remember those? Where you had to look through one part of the lens, a little box, to see close up and another to see into the distance? Optics and corrective lens have improved.
But there is a bit of the bi-focal to Advent season. On one hand, there are all the delightful things: concerts, parties, lights and the general sense of joyful anticipation. There are the Advent calendars, ever more elaborate. Children open the daily doors to find a little chocolate behind each one. And in a sign of consumerism’s endless, if mad, creativity, there are now adult Advent calendars with a little bottle of whiskey behind each door. So there’s all that fun and festivity — and excess — coming at us through one lens in this season.
But through the other lens, Advent is something different. At least for those of us in the northern hemisphere, Advent is the darkest time of the year. The days are growing even shorter now. And the world too seems full of darkness. Wars are raging. The nation’s politics seem, most days, utterly hopeless. Loneliness and addiction stalk many lives and families. We may rush to the holiday lights and activities to escape all that is, but Advent itself — especially in its Scripture readings — is more honest. It does not ask us to deny the world’s, or our own, darkness.
I like the way the eminent Old Testament scholar, Walter Breuggemann, introduces Advent. “Advent,” he writes, “begins not on a note of joy, but of despair. Humankind has reached the end of its rope. All our schemes for self-improvement, for extricating ourselves from the traps we have set for ourselves, have come to nothing. We have now realized at the deepest level of our being that we cannot save ourselves and that, apart from the intervention of God, we are totally and inextricably lost.”
You hear this in today’s reading from the prophet Isaiah. What begins as a bold call to God to tear open the heavens and come come down, gives way to a desperate lament — “We all fade like a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away . . . All our righteous deeds (note: not our evil deeds) but “our righteous deeds are like a filthy cloth.” The prophet casts us upon God’s mercy, “Yet, O Lord, you are our Father, we are the clay, and you are the potter . . . Now consider, we are all your people.”
It’s the first step in any twelve step program. We admit our lives have become unmanageable. We cry out for help. Welcome to Advent, a season that may be really more for adults than for children.
With that brief introduction to the season, I want to turn now to our second lesson, the epistle reading for the first Sunday of Advent and my text for this reflection. These are the opening verses of Paul’s first letter to the Church at Corinth. Paul had founded that congregation a year or two earlier, then continued on in his missionary journey. Now he writes back to the Corinthians. Let me read it once more.
“Grace to you, and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
“I give thanks to my God always for you, because of the grace of God that has been given you in Christ Jesus, for in every way you have been enriched in him, in speech and knowledge of every kind — just as the testimony of Christ has been strengthened among you — so that you are not lacking in any spiritual gift as you wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ.
He will also strengthen you to the end, so that you may be blameless on the day of our Lord Jesus Christ. God is faithful; by him you were called into the fellowship of his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.”
At first glance, on a quick hearing, it sounds like biblical boilerplate, don’t you think? Theological catch-phrases pile up in run-on sentences. A kind of preface to be hurried through so we can get on to the meat of the letter?
But maybe as it went past we did catch this much . . . Paul here positions the church, positions us, between Advents. The Corinthians have known the presence and blessing of God in Jesus Christ — his first coming. But they live, as do we, this side of the second Advent, awaiting some fuller revealing and completion, what Paul here calls, “the day of the Lord Jesus Christ.”
You hear this now and not yet later in this letter, in its famous chapter on love . . .“For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then we shall see face to face. Now I know only in part, then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known.”
That is kind of how human life — and the Christian life — is, isn’t it? We have known the grace of God, Christ has come, born in Bethlehem, crucified and risen; and yet we also, amid the darkness, find ourselves experiencing what feels like God’s absence. The darkness threatens to overwhelm us.
We live between Advents. Christ has come — rejoice! And yet some days, some seasons, we wonder as we wander, in the words of the haunting Advent carol. It seems God is more absent than present, and the fulness of God’s blessing and Christ’s new creation seem distant.
That is where Paul locates the Corinthians, and where he locates us. Between Advents. Seeing, but only in part. Blessed with many gifts of the Spirit — thanks be to God — but also bedeviled and undone by our persisting foibles and foolishness. Overwhelmed by the world’s suffering and evil.
Called of God, surely, but our race far from completed. Our world suffused, some days, with the light of God, and yet also deep in the darkness. Disarray in the church. Disarray in our own lives and those of our families, loved ones and friends.
So there they were, the Corinthians, between Advents. Here, we are, early Christians of the 21st century, between Advents. What has Paul to say to them? What has Paul to say to us?
I suspect most of us are old enough to remember back to the 90’s. If so, you may recall the zinger from Bill Clinton’s brilliant if bombastic advisor, James Carville. During Clinton’s first run for the White House, Carvile famously said, “It’s about the economy, stupid!” Remember that?
Drafting on Carville, a well-known theologian teaching at a well-known divinty school went into the classroom, took up a piece of chalk — an older technology — and scrawled on the board, “It’s about God, stupid!” A message to his eager seminarians.
And that is Paul’s message here in these early, introductory, seemingly boilerplate verses at the beginning of his letter back to a now deeply conflicted congregation in Corinth. “It’s about God.” Over and over again, in these few verses, God is everywhere as Paul reminds the Corinthians what God has done, and what God will do, for them.
The famous British “man of letters,” Dr. Johnson, once said, “Never be afraid to remind people of the obvious; it is what they have most forgot.”
So listen as Paul reminds the church of the obvious.
“Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.”
“I give thanks to my God always for you because of the grace of God that has been given you in Christ Jesus.”
“For in every way, you have been enriched in him,” by God, “in speech and in knowledge.”
“God — will strengthen you to the end, so that you may be found blameless on the day of our Lord Jesus Christ.”
And the final verse, “God is faithful, by him you were called into the fellowship of his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.”
Hear what Paul is doing? Their life together nearly undone by conflict and confusion. Paul reminds them of the forgotten obvious. It’s not all about them. Not all on them. They are God’s work, God’s creation, people who live under the promises of a God who is faithful, who has not forgotten them, who is at work in them even now and who will bring his good work to completion in them. It’s not all on us or on you, not all up to us or to you. There is Another, who is at work in you even in the midst of the chaos we sometimes create.
Now you might think that a church, a Christian community, Christian people, would be all over that. That they, we, would be all about God, God-focused, God-inspired, God-intoxicated. No, no, no.
What were the Corinthians focused on? Well, some of them at least, on themselves. To be more precise, on the spiritual gifts — the gifts of tongues, of prophesy and spiritual knowledge — that at least some of them had experienced. Remember this, it comes from that same letter: “Though I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal”?
Some in the Corinthian community took the gifts they had been given as the sign of their own brilliance, their own enlightenment. “Gee, I’m special.” But, said, Paul, without love, focused only on themselves, they were but noisy gongs, clanging cymbals.
Heard this story recently: a guy goes overboard on a ferry boat. He can’t swim. He’s floundering, thrashing, crying out when a crew member spots him, grabs a life preserver and flings it out to the guy.
It’s a perfect throw. The life preserver lands right by the guy who by then is going under, sucking water. The crew member shouts, “Grab it!” Flailing about, desperate, the guy gets a hold of the ring. The crew member, with help, reels him in. They pull him back on deck, lay him down. Spitting water, the guy sits up, looks around and says, “Did you see how I did that? Did you see the way I took hold of that life-preserver? How I used that rope to reel myself in?”
Well, that was at least some of the Corinthians. Sometimes we need, like the man overboard, to be delivered from thinking too highly of ourselves; as often, if not more often, it may be the other extreme, we need to be delivered from beating up on ourselves, from constantly reminding ourselves of our failures.
Either way, too high or too low, it’s easy to become self-preoccupied. We forget about the God who made us, the God called us and the God who begun a good work in us and who has promised to see it to completion. We forget about Jesus who died for us, who has been raised for us and will surely come again for us. Jesus in whom we are forgiven all our sin, all our failures, in whom there is mercy and grace for us, for you.
In recent years, my ministry has been a little of this and little of that. Some teaching, writing, giving a talk here or there, organizing a conference; and some “consulting” with congregations. Actually, I kind of hate the word “consultant,” and always felt sort of embarassed to have it stuck to me. It was the kind of “Mr. Fix-It” vibe that the word evoked. As if the church had finally decided “Enough! We’ll call a plumber (electrician, roofer) to tell us what’s wrong and get it fixed.” Having been a pastor for 30 years I was pretty skeptical about our prospects for “fixing” any church. Making things a little better? Yes; “fixing?,” no.
A time or two I tagged along with other, more experienced, church consultants. It seemed that their main message to their clients was, “Figure out what’s special about your church!” “What sets you apart?” “What makes your church unique?” “Tell your story!” Basically, they were saying. “You need a brand.” The unspoken was, “if you want to get anywhere, you’ve got to sell your church.”
It remember being the fly on the wall for one of these exercises. The all-pro consultant raised his questions about what was special, unique, etc. about the congregation.
After a pause verging on awkward silence, an older man said, “Well, we’re Presbyterian.” It was pretty clear the consultant didn’t think that was going to cut it. At which point another, also older, member said, “I think this church is the friendliest group of people I know . . . it’s my family.” Several heads nodded.
A few others had a go at the consultant’s questions. “We’re a pretty busy church, an active church . . . they’re always something going on,” said a middle-aged woman with an hopeful smile. Another chimed in, “Our choir, our choir is really top knotch.” The consultant looked as if he was about to shoot himself.
Then Sarah spoke. Sarah was a bred-in-the-bone Presbyterian whose broad forehead and aqualine nose made her look as she could be a descendant of John Calvin. She had been a school principal in town for so long that her current students were the children of her first.
Sarah said, “I love this church. It’s been my church for a long time. There have been great moments — and yes — a fair number of not-so-great ones too. I love our sanctuary, and yes the choir — at least since Cindy took over — is pretty good. But, with respect to our advisor here,” (Sarah nodded toward the consultant), I think we’re barking up the wrong tree.”
The church,” said Sarah, “is not the star of its own show.”
“Sorry, what was that?” said the consultant.
“The church is not the star of its own show,” repeated Sarah. “It’s not about us, not really. It’s about God. If we’re a place where people somehow feel they meet God, where they feel his mercy,” Sarah continued, “that’s what’s special. That’s what matters.”
“We’re busy? So what, who’s not busy? We’re friendly? So are the people at Rotary.” “And though I am a life-long Presbyterian, I’ve come to think this isn’t really all that important. Frankly, I sometimes worry we’re better at making Presbyterians than we are at making Christians. And no,” said Sarah, “we are not changing the name of this church to ‘Rising Spirit Life Center.’ Good Lord!”
“It’s just not about us. It’s God. About Jesus. His grace for sinners. Dying for us, being raised for us. That’s all the special we need. And if we don’t get that right we may as well close up shop right now.”
“Uh, thank you, Sarah,” said the chairman, glancing uncomfortably in the direction of the consultant to his right. “You’ve given us a lot to think about.” The consultant, who was gathering up his papers and stuffing them into his briefcase, said, “Well, good luck with that . . . God . . . I mean isn’t every church about God?”
A younger member spoke up. “Actually, no. Many are social clubs or civic groups. I’m here because I have felt God here, I’ve felt his grace when we pray together, and his love when we sing together. And when Eunice preaches, Jesus is what I hear. That’s why I’m here. And Sarah is right. That is very, very special.”
Dear friends, the darkness around us, and sometimes the darkness in us, can be deep. So remember it isn’t about what you have done or what you must do. It’s about what God has done and is doing. Hear this promise of God to you — “You are not lacking in any spiritual gift as you wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ.” You have all that you need. And the God who has begun a good work in you, continues in this work even now, and will bring it to completion — count on it. God is faithful. God’s grace is at work in you for healing and peace. Thanks be to God. Amen.