Pastor’s Blog

1 John 4:18-21

This morning’s Scripture came to me by way of the new mid-week prayer meeting. Several of us have been gathering on Wednesdays to pray. We were praying for the church a week ago Wednesday when this verse came to mind. “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear.”

It came to mind as someone was praying for this church that we would become more loving of one another, and that we would find a way to do the kind of outreach we have so many times identified as being central to our future. And, simultaneously, I was thinking that perhaps—just perhaps—what is holding us back from being more loving, and what is keeping us from reaching out is fear. What if, after all this time of telling ourselves that we are a declining church, or even a dying church, we are simply afraid to succeed. I wondered, what if…

And then these two things—a prayer to become more loving, and a thought about being fearful—came together in this verse, where as John makes this extraordinary assertion that there is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. Think about that for a minute. Ordinarily, we think of the opposite of love as being hate. But John is telling us that this is not God’s view of things. John is telling us that the opposite of love is not hate: it is fear. I expect that most expressions of hate, and any number of other things: grow out of fear, but fear is at the root of these things.

As one Christian psychologist has said,

…think of the last time you became angry. Go ahead. Think of the last time you felt intense anger. Now inspect the fear behind it. What were you afraid of losing? What were you afraid would be taken from you? Or think of some angry person you know, maybe somebody you are afraid of. Can you see how frightened she or he is? (John Landgraf, 4 Steps to finding the real you)

And unfortunately, in spite of the admonitions of the Scriptures, fear mongering, has been around in the church for a long time. Think of all the church signs you’ve seen that say things like:

“Jesus is coming. Are you ready?”

“Repent before it is too late.”

“Give Satan an inch and he will become your Ruler.” (Ruler with a capital R.)

“If you think it’s hot now, just wait.”

So with this kind of fear-based conversion bringing people into churches, is it any wonder that once you get a lot of fearful people together in one place, you get a kind of paranoid institution, a church that is simply too afraid to reach outside of itself.

I wonder if you’ve ever been in a church meeting when someone has said something that implied that if he or she didn’t get their way, they would take their money and go somewhere else. In fact, I was actually at a meeting not too long ago, where someone did just that, and then got up and left. These kinds of tactics, of course, are based on fear. They are attempts to intimidate: to instill fear—that you cannot survive without me, that the church cannot go on unless it adopts my view or satisfies my demands. But what is really at the root of these kinds of common church tantrums is the fear that perhaps the church may require something of me that I am not willing or able to give.

First Baptist has not, to my knowledge, had a history of recruiting members by fear. But nevertheless, I wonder if fear has become our dominant, pervasive story. It’s not that we have intentionally become this way: these are fearful times, times when we are encouraged to be afraid of many things: terrorism, economic instability, level 3 sex offenders living near our schools, big government, big corporations, environmental degradation. The ads we see on TV teach us to buy everything from breath mints to cars based on the fear that we will somehow be deficient or incomplete without them. We are fearful people, living in a fearful land. It’s natural that when we get together in church we are still fearful; we don’t just leave all that at the door.

But more than our current fearfulness, even as far back as the centennial history of the church, written in 1934, there is a recurring pattern in the story of this church’s struggle for survival. The historian of 1934 writes that several unsuccessful attempts were made to start a church before this one finally got off the ground; of how the congregation was constantly threatened by the loss of pastors to sickness and death, and of the shortage of funds that nearly scuttled building campaigns, it is a story that implies the fear of the ever-impending death of the congregation. That history, that dominant, pervasive story, continues down the line from the centennial to the present. Loss of pastors and insufficient funds were lifted up in our congregational meetings as being the ongoing challenges to this church’s congregational life, even in times that are well-remembered. Right down to the present.

What I am getting at is this: what kind of story do we tell about ourselves and our church? Is it predominantly a story of love or is it predominantly one of fear? Or, as another wise observer of church life put the question not too long ago:

Do we imagine the future primarily in terms of the goods it may bring to us or in terms of the evils we will have to face? While we may all feel some fear and some hope when looking ahead, one of the two will prove more determinative of our actions, one of the two will provide our fundamental orientation toward the future. If…it is fear, then we will all too quickly collapse into a mode of self-preservation. (Scott Bader-Saye, Following Jesus in a Culture of Fear, Brazos Press, 2007)

It’s an essential question to ask, I believe, because the story we tell ourselves and believe about ourselves, about our past and how we arrived at our present situation, will determine the story of our future. Is our story defined by fear or love. Is it the story of love casting out fear: Jesus casting out the demons.

I wonder how our life today might be different if the centennial historian had written the story differently. What if instead of spending the first 5 pages of our history recounting how we almost didn’t make it, there was instead a description lifting up the hopefulness of the people who first gathered to form this place. I wonder what their ambitions were for us? What was said at that first meeting at the red school house at that first meeting about their dreams for Christian ministry in Glens Falls? They certainly must have had these thoughts to inspire them against such great odds. And what if instead of including the episode about how the building nearly didn’t get built, there had been included instead how the congregation was at the center of the movement to win the right for women to vote? What if instead of dwelling at length on the catastrophic illnesses and discontent surrounding the tenures of so many pastors, the centennial historian had left us with more stories of the members of First Baptist reaching out, loving and caring for the sick and bereaved during the pandemic flu of 1918?

Do we tell our story out of love or out of fear? And if we are afraid, why are we afraid? Are we afraid that if we reach out we will be transformed into the likeness God? Are we afraid of the cost in nostalgia to become the beloved community? Is our hesitancy to reach out motivated by love or by fear? Do we view our options for action as disciples, as a congregation, out of love or out of fear? John leaves us no doubt as to which course the Gospel commends. It is up to us to begin to sing a new song. I dare you to start to tell a new story, to abide in love, not as blind optimists or Pollyannas: this is not the story of the band playing on as the Titanic sinks. It is the story of a few souls, called by God with a noble calling that demands a more perfect love, fearless love.

Mark 9:33-37

I have watched the news these past few weeks with a certain sense of personal involvement. In a world where they say there are only at most seven degrees of separation between any two people, I have been keenly aware that between me and Barak Obama there are only two. Which is to say that there is only one person standing in a chain of acquaintance between me and the presidential hopeful, and it just so happens that that one person, who both he and I know personally is the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

When I was the Pastor of the First Baptist Church in Hamilton, I was host to Rev. Wright when he visited Colgate University as the speaker for a lecture series that was sponsored by the church. I spent the better part of three days with him, and we have had some personal correspondence since then. I say this, not simply to name-drop, but to let you all know that, in spite of what you may have seen in the news, I count him as a friend and as someone that I look up to and respect, both professionally and personally.

In a recent interview with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the Rev. Bill Moyers, (another American Baptist Pastor) was asking this now-controversial preacher what formed his call to ministry. In reply, Rev. Wright told a story about a class he took in seminary from a University of Chicago professor named Martin Marty (whom my wife Brooke also knows personally), and mutual friend of theirs. Rev. Marty impressed upon his class, as Rev. Wright tells it:

“You know, you come into the average church on a Sunday morning and you think you’ve stepped from the real world into a fantasy world. And what do I mean by that?” He said pick up the church bulletin. You leave a world, Vietnam, or today you leave a world, Iraq, over 4,000 dead, American boys and girls, 100,000, 200,000 depending on which count, Iraqi dead. Afghanistan, Darfur, rapes in the Congo, Katrina, Lower Ninth Ward, that’s the world you leave. And you come in; you pick up your church bulletin. It says, there is a ladies tea on second Sunday. The children’s choir will be doing. He said, “How come our bulletins, how come the faith preached in our churches does not relate to the world in which our church members leave at the benediction?”

I remember so vividly December of 2005 as Brooke and I watched the coverage of Katrina and Katrina’s aftermath on television. Brooke was so angry that she screamed at the television more than once. She was angry that our National Guardsmen were in Iraq when they should be here for emergencies such as Katrina. She was angry thinking about all those people penned into that astrodome with no food or water, mothers with babies the same age as ours with no diapers or formula for them. She was angry when Barbara Bush said really stupid things like “well those people were underprivileged before the hurricane so living in the astrodome isn’t any worse than what they’re used to.” She couldn’t sleep and she sobbed and sobbed. She preached about the injustice of it all that Sunday in her church, about how a Micah or a Jeremiah or an Isaiah would be sobbing and ranting too, with a lot to say to us about our failures as a so-called Christian nation.

As you may have already guessed, she was sorely punished by members of her congregation (that would be Ballston Spa) who said she was too liberal and too naïve, that church should be a place where the good about our community and our nation is celebrated, not a place to focus on the negative. Why hadn’t she thought to celebrate that the middle school band had been invited to perform at SPAC that week? That’s what we should be focusing on in church. It was only a couple months later that Pastoral Relations Committee told her they would be asking the Bishop to send her somewhere else, and we asked the Pastoral Relations Committee here to start thinking about making arrangements for us to move to Glens Falls.

The people of Israel treated some of our biblical prophets far worse, of course. If the King didn’t like what the prophet said about the direction of the nation, he had no qualms about throwing the prophet in jail or down a well. All in all, to be fired for being naïve isn’t the worst thing that can happen to a person.

Rev. Wright could certainly chime in at this point. I believe that he, too, could share some stories about being maligned while trying to uphold the biblical tradition of truth telling. I wonder if maybe the reason we’re all so angry at him is that his truth telling hits a little too close to home. He lifts up a mirror to the church as says, that when we walk through the door of the church, we pretend for an hour or so that we’ve stepped back into the 1800s. While 50,000 people have died in China this week and 127,000 people have died in Burma, we open our church bulletin and read on as if the most important things in the world were our rummage sales and ladies basket meetings and teddy bears.

Maybe you or your loved one has had a visit to your physician for your annual check up and the doctor has told you, maybe diplomatically, maybe quite brutally, that you need to lose 40 pounds. Even if the doctor is exceedingly charming and convinces you that the only reason she brings it up is out of love and concern for your longevity and well-being, you leave her office and say, “I can’t believe she even graduated from medical school. That’s all she’s got to say – lose 40 pounds or else? I’m finding a new doctor.” You may even in your heart of hearts know she’s right. Your knees do hurt and you do get out of breath climbing stairs. But by God, she’s got a lot of nerve.

And so, we read from today’s Gospel that Jesus loved the little children. Jesus takes a child in his arms and says, “Whoever receives one such child in my name receives me.” There are certainly harder texts in the Bible, such as, “If your eye leads you to sin, pluck it out,” or “Go, sell all you have and give it to the poor.” But here is a passage of Scripture that strikes us as very understandable, achievable, and likeable: “Whoever receives one such child in my name receives me.” It’s a little sugary-sweet, but nevertheless likeable. “Let the children come to me, and do not hinder them: for to such belongs the kingdom of God.” It’s a likeable text because, after all, who doesn’t receive a little child? I think it was W.C. Fields that said, “Any man who hates dogs and children can’t be all bad.” But nobody I know agrees with that. We all receive little children; we all open our hearts to them. Sometimes it’s hard to receive Jesus - when he comes as the revolutionary Messiah, the harsh prophetic critic of our religion and our lifestyles - but to receive Jesus as a little child - we can do that. We do it every Christmas.

I’ve heard many sermons on this text and you probably have too. We’ve all heard sermons on the virtue of “childlike faith, if we could only become like little children.” But that’s not the point. Be careful with this seemingly harmless, likeable text. If you hear this text as a glorification of childhood or the child, you’re hearing it wrong. That’s not the point. In that part of the world, in that day, children were considered worthless, second-class citizens. A child was of little value. In fact, a child was seen as a burden - dependent, helpless, and nonproductive. For those hearing Jesus’ words, children were so low on the social totem pole they would have thought Jesus was crazy. This text says much more about Jesus than it says about children. For Jesus to even place a little child in the midst of a circle of adult men being taught by their rabbi was an incredible breach of all the social and cultural rules of Jesus’ day. Children were always separated off - part of the realm of women’s work with which men didn’t bother.

But Jesus welcomes a child into the midst of the Twelve men. Wrapping his arms around the child, he proclaims to his astonished disciples, “In my kingdom, even the helpless, dependent, valueless children will be honored, no less than the poor, the outcast, the hungry and the wretched of the earth.” Even the children. Here is the Lord who serves the lowly and exalts the humble - the Lord who receives even children. More than that, he says, “If you receive a child, you receive me.” Jesus’ guy friends must have been totally offended. The plain truth seems to have that affect throughout the ages.

In Matthew’s Gospel, this story is even bound up with a story of the Judgment Day. On the last day, people ask the Lord, “When was it that we saw you hungry, naked, in prison?” Jesus answers them, “When you did it to the least of these, you did it also to me.” The Greek word translated, “the least of these,” is the same word for children. Jesus proclaims, “I am the least, the little, the lowly, the child.” Jesus scoops up a little child in his arms and places the child in the middle of his entourage as a sign of what he’s talking about.

It’s a nice thought, and a comfortable one, because even if we have a long way to go in our treatment of the poor, the diseased, and the oppressed, at least we can take pride that we have progressed in our regard for children. We honor children, we love children. We receive children—Well, mostly we receive them.

Dr. William Willimon tells about a woman he knew who took a trip to the Holy Land, and like many visitors to that part of the world, she was greatly impressed by the poverty, particularly the poverty among the children. She told him that it was very disconcerting, upon their arrival at some holy place, to have the bus assaulted by throngs of young beggars, calling to the tourists, holding up their baby brother or sister, begging for coins. She said, “Our guides urged us not to give them any money; it would only encourage them.” All the tourists asked their guide, “Can’t something be done about these children? Somebody ought to do something; they’re such a nuisance.” Then their guide, their Muslim guide, replied, “You can see why your Jesus was crucified merely for saying ‘Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them.’”

Jesus depicts a very different kind of kingdom in receiving the little child. Do you see now that this text is a bit tougher than we thought? We so often look for a omnipotent, omniscient God who will make us greater, stronger, bigger, smarter. Instead, in this deceptively comfortable text, we encounter a Lord who says he is small, childlike, weak, trying to get our attention by tugging at our coat. He is begging us to care about the 50,000 dead men, women and children in China, the 172,000 dead in Burma and those who continue to suffer there while desperately needed supplies are withheld by their military dictators.

The American Baptist Churches emailed a news release earlier this week announcing proudly that as a denomination, we have sent has sent the paltry sum of $5000 to international relief efforts in Burma and another $5000 to international relief efforts in China. As I read that in my email inbox this week, I knew the intent was that our denominational offices wanted to celebrate such their impressive acts of generosity on our part. Unfortunately, I could help but think, “My God, that’s a pittance, and we can do better than that.” And so, this morning, I invite us all to consider whether we can’t do better, even when it means grappling with the truths we find hard to swallow. Rev. Wright may well be right in his indictment that the modern church fiddles with teas and picnics and baskets while the world drowns or starves. Jesus may well be right that we will be judged for our failure to act on behalf of the world’s children. Right here at home, our own District Attorney has proven this week that we are culpable for our inactions as well as our actions on behalf of children.

Let us commit ourselves to being passionately concerned for the world’s children and putting our money where our mouths are. I’ll bet that, if we put our minds and hearts into in, we can match the entire denomination’s $5000 to Burma right here at FBC. And if we can do that, then I bet we can make better use of our life together to do real Christ work for children here at home, too.

I’m going to challenge FBC right here, right now, to raise $5000 for Burma and another $5000 for the children of Glens Falls. A requiem for children does no good any of them if when the music fades, they still go hungry. A requiem for children does no good if when we leave this stained-glass palace there they still cry themselves to sleep because they have no mommies and daddies to tuck them in. A requiem for missing children does no good if our hearts are not moved to join with their parents in the overthrow of the oppressors that refused to allow a bag of rice to cross their borders. A requiem for children is of no use to the children whose mothers’ boyfriends beat and abuse them day and night. And if we cannot as a people of faith summon enough backbone and sacrifice our morning coffee money to let the little children, all the little children of the world, know that we and Jesus love them, then we do not deserve to be here.

On Friday, May 16, American Baptists were emailed news updates concerning the denomination’s response to the disasters in Burma (Myanmar) and China. American Baptist International Ministries (IM) had allocated $5000 to aid in each of these places from One Great Hour of Sharing funds, which are contributed annually by American Baptist Churches. Ms. Lisa Rothenberger is the International Ministries World Relief Officer.

Dear Ms. Rothenberger,

I received the IM news updates this week concerning the grants of $5000 for relief efforts in Burma and China.

While I am thankful that American Baptists are doing something, I confess that I am ashamed that the amounts were so small given the dimensions of the catastrophes.

I am putting the challenge before the congregation here at Glens Falls, NY for one church singly to match the IM grant for Burma. I would only ask that IM reconsider increasing the amount released to aid in both Burma and China crises, and encourage other churches to join with us in matching again your original $5000.

Thank you.

First Baptist, like many churches, has what we call an Emergency Care fund. It’s a charity fund to have something on hand for handouts to people who call or stop by because they’re down on their luck. Once a year, or sometimes twice, the mission team designates a month where the mission focus is on these needs, and the congregation is asked to contribute to the fund. On average, a month’s contributions will raise between $300 and $500. Occasionally, when the fund gets low, we mention that the fund is low and a few people will chip in a little more. Still in all, this is precious little when someone comes by to ask for help with rent or paying overdue utility bills or (more and more) needing a tank of gas to get to work. Last week I gave away the last of the funds, and this week, I’ve had four requests for help with rent and one needing to pay off an electric bill, and one man who wanted me to buy him a pair of pants. Had I been able to provide what was asked, it would have come to $1600. As it was, I had to turn them all down.

Yesterday, a pregnant girl pushing a child in a stroller came in asking for $600. It was heartbreaking to say, sorry, I can’t help. But then, after turning her away, her boyfriend (I’m assuming it was her boyfriend), who had been waiting in the hallway, came in to curse me for not helping, to accuse me of “giving thousands of dollars to crack heads and then not helping a poor young mother.” He threatened to take his story to the Post Star and never again to spend any of his money at the Church’s thrift store, and ended his tirade with, “May God strike you dead.” There I was: broke, heartbroken and cursed.

Today another man, who had been in earlier in the week asking for rent help, brought his eviction notice with him, hoping that it might help me see that he really needed the money. But I had to tell him I still don’t have any money. He left crying: “This was my last hope; nobody else has any money.”

I have always struggled with the problem of this kind of charity. It seems to be expected of churches, not just here, but in every place I’ve been: Maine, New Jersey, Virginia, New York. We hear it from politicians all the time, how churches are part of the network communities turn to. But more and more, it seems that people are viewing church hand-outs as another entitlement. (After all, there is an office of faith-based initiatives in the White House now.) In times of growing economic hardship for everyone but the extremely well-to-do, people make the mistake of thinking that churches have a divine cash pipeline to the Federal Reserve.

After yesterday’s incident, and again this morning, I am closing down the hand-out wagon completely. It’s clearly not effective, even when I do have a little cash on hand, to hand it out as Band-Aids for cases that require major life surgery. Sad to turn away an expectant mother with a 1 year old in tow, sadder still that she’s bringing yet another child into a world of overwhelming poverty, dysfunction and abuse. Sad to turn away a man who’s going to lose his house and whose family may end up on the street. But sadder still that the eviction notice was only a symptom of a larger system of debt that confines more and more people’s prospects in modern America to a lifetime of indentured servitude.

The church does have an obligation to the downtrodden. Jesus, over and over again, identified with the needs of the poor and urges his disciples to share that concern and ministry. But Jesus was not about Band Aids. Jesus was about transforming lives. And, since God has neither stricken me dead nor given me a free ticket on the US Treasury gravy train, I am left with a Christian responsibility to do something other than useless handouts. Over the next few weeks, I’ll be prayerfully discerning what that is.

Philippians 2:12-18

I’m not sure who it was that first said, “Don’t complain and talk about all your problems - 80% of people don’t care; the other 20% will think you deserve them.” It seems like pretty good advice. And it’s good advice for churches and church people especially. “Do all things without murmuring and arguing,” Paul writes to his friends. That is the core of his message in this passage. It doesn’t do any good to work like crazy, even on church work, if your attitude is argumentative and bitter.

Why? Because an arguing and complaining disposition is not compatible with the alternative kind of community the church is meant to be. In the midst of a crooked and perverse generation, Paul says, you are to be blameless, innocent, and you are to shine like stars. Becoming the children of God, holding onto the word of life, working out your salvation with fear and trembling, desiring and working for God’s good pleasure, is not supposed to be drudgery. Doing God’s work is hard, yes, but it is supposed to be joyful. Giving yourself as an offering to God, “being poured out as a libation” as Paul calls it, is not a stoic resolve; it’s a toast to celebrate being filled with a higher purpose and calling. “I am glad and rejoice with all of you,” Paul says, “and you must also rejoice and be glad with me.

In the past, in our life together at First Baptist, I have said that nobody wants to bet on a losing horse, nobody wants to invest in a company that is going down the tubes; therefore we need to lift up those winning things that we are able to do. But there is another side to that coin, too. In spite of the saying that “misery loves company,” nobody wants to be depressed; what people are searching for is a community in which their problems are taken seriously, and in which there is a deep joy that offers hope for the future.

This is hard, especially when the future prospects look grim. And yet, just as Jesus was at his most powerful when he faced the future of the cross, the children of God can be a more powerful witness at the moment they realistically face the future, bleak as it may be, and take joy that in that very future lies the promise of redemption, not just for their own lives, but for the community around them.

I have had the opportunity in the course of my years of ministry to be close to many people as their time of death has approached. Nearly all of them approached that time with some apprehension—some more than others. And while some of them remained apprehensive and angry, bitterly complaining that they were being robbed of life, there have been a few that have stood out in that they, right up to the end, remained joyful. Even in great pain, a few died with blessing on their lips.

Fear and trembling, yes. And there is also sacrifice and joy. These, strangely enough, are not mutually exclusive emotions. As Paul wrote to these new Christians, people he dearly loved, from his prison cell with his own death looming near, he knew that they would also suffer. He wanted them to know when suffering came their way, that they were not alone, so that they would not allow their suffering to turn to bitterness.

So, as we go about our work here at First Baptist Church, and as we live our lives at home where people are watching to see what difference our profession of Christian faith really makes, we would do well not to complain: to do all things without murmuring and arguing. As people watch to see what kind of witness First Baptist people will be in our community as we face the difficult times that certainly lie ahead, we, like the Philippian church might keep in mind this encouragement: that even if we are being poured out as a libation over the sacrifice and offering of our faith, we are glad and rejoice.

Galatians 5:13-26

On the one hand, we are all familiar with the kind of Christian who seems to sit on high, and look down on all the rest of us with an air of superiority. You know, the person whose church is better than yours, who has all the right answers to all the questions and can probably quote chapter and verse. They are walking close to the Lord, and have a way of making you keenly aware that you are not. They have a lot of rules, generally, these kind of folk. They’ll quote you Paul’s list from here in Galatians 5 – it’s really a very famous sin list with a lot of doosies: “fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissentions, factions, envy, drunkenness and carousing.” Fifteen in all, and you get extra points if you remember that it’s verses 19-21. Legalistic Christians, you will sometimes hear them called. And they will be quick to tell you, if you have the gumption to get them started, that Christianity and the New Testament is a religion of grace, whereas Judaism and the Old Testament are a religion of laws.

Many times I have found myself in conversation with one or another of these law-bound Christians and, after telling me how wonderful life in the Kingdom is, they will ask me, “So what do you do?” I don’t know about your case, but I hate that question, because when I tell people what I do there is either an awkward attempt to end the conversation and get away, or else they want to tell me their life story and assume that I can give them the answers to their secret troubles. But with law-bound Christians there is almost always a third response which is: “Oh! So, where did you find Jesus?” To which my answer is: “I wasn’t aware that Jesus was lost.”

On the other hand, we all know another kind of Christian who seems hardly to be identifiable as Christian at all. When I was a pastor starting out in Maine, they were called “Home Baptists” because on Sunday morning they believed in staying home. “I don’t have to go to church,” they say. “I can worship God anywhere and I’m more suited to worshiping in my pajamas in bed, since it’s the one day I have to sleep in.” These Christians live their lives in a manner indistinguishable from any other citizen. They can do whatever they want: if Jesus died for their sins, then God will forgive them in the end. Why not just do as we please?

This kind of Christian is like the story of how two police officers stopped a car in downtown Glens Falls and ordered the driver to get out from behind the wheel. The man was obviously drunk, so drunk he had a hard time standing up, much less completing the field sobriety test. As the police were trying to get the man to turn around, lean over and put his hands on the hood of his car, the man started screaming, “Hey! I’m an American and I live in America. This is a free country, and that means nobody can tell me what to do!” One of the officers replied, “Oh yea, sure buddy. If you can spell American, I’ll let you go.” The drunk yelled back, “Don’t make fun of me sir. I can spell it borwards and fackwards!” (adapted from John Jewell, “Freedom for Maximum Living,” 1998)

On the one hand there are those who live according to the law, even if they have replaced the Old Testament law with New Testament law. On the other hand there are those who live according to a law of their own, following whatever impulses strike them at the moment. And this was exactly the same situation when Paul wrote this letter to the Galatians. Some said you had to do as they said and follow their rules in order to “really” be a Christian. Others said, “Hey, I’m a Christian, and Christ has set me free, so I can do whatever I want.”

It was tearing the church apart. It was a poor witness to those who, looking at Christians from the outside, could say, “if that is what Christianity is about, no thanks.” There was in the Galatian church breakdown of the love and unity of the community that was a symptom of a deeper problem: namely that between making faith in Jesus another moral ladder to climb, and making Jesus an excuse for bad behavior, the church had stopped living by the life of the Spirit of Christ.

In fact, the first sign that Christians are not living the life of the spirit is the breakdown of the love and unity of the community. (Joan Brown Campbell, “Bearing the Fruits of the Spirit,” 1994). As Paul puts it to the Galatians, “If you bite and devour one another, take care that you are not consumed by one another.” And, “Let us not become conceited, competing against one another, envying one another.” Or one might translate it, “do not convert your freedom into an excuse for selfishness.”

To live the life of the spirit, to live in the Spirit of Christ, to be a Christian means, at its most elementary level, to be compassionate as Jesus was compassionate (Marcus Borg, Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time, 1994). Or as Paul puts it, “the whole law is summed up in a single commandment, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’” Or as Jesus himself put it, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” (Matt. 7:12). What the Christian message is all about is proclaiming that in Christ we are free to live in this way, no longer bound to social or legal or religious conventions of any kind. And yet that very freedom defines a way of life that precludes the kinds of selfish behavior Paul names and compels participation in community, because it is a freedom directed always toward the well-being of others. In other words, you cannot truly love your neighbor by sleeping in on Sunday morning. Neither can you truly love your neighbor by requiring adherence to any set of religious rules, even if you draw those rules from scripture.

So what does this mean for you and me, if we are to live by and be guided by the Spirit? For starters, it means that we can stop worrying about what the rules are, and whether we have measured up, and we can start paying attention to the people that are around us. We can start to see people, regardless of their condition, as children of God, loved by God.

A preacher by the name of Timothy Downs tells this story:

Several years ago I was staying in a motel in downtown Nashville, Tennessee, the kind of motel you want to keep the lights on low because the level of cleanliness is not particularly high. I had been invited to speak to a panel of leaders concerning Christian unity in this time and this place. Now I worked very hard sitting in that motel room reading, studying, writing, trying to prepare for as constructive a presence on that panel as I could bring. I then showered and dressed, and as I stepped out of the motel room, there sitting on a low wall right outside my room was a man. A man, who was clearly disheveled, clearly in the midst of a morning after, and although I tried to step around him, he said, “Excuse me sir, excuse me, are you with the music industry?” Now here I am in Nashville, Tennessee, I had on a suit and tie, what else would I be doing in Nashville? “No,” I responded, “I am not with the music industry.” And then he asked me that question that I dread, “Then what do you do?”

So here I am-standing before this disheveled man feeling like a glass of water too full, and I’d rather be able to say to him, “Well, I’m the CEO of a small firm or I’m an administrator in Human Services,” but I chose in that moment to take a risk, and I said to him, “I’m a preacher.”

“Okay, then”, says the man, “Okay, preacher, I have one question for you.” My heart sank; usually that one question is the one that opens up to too many others. “And here’s my one question preacher”, he said, “Is it possible to lose your salvation?” Now I want to tell you that if it is possible to lose your salvation, the evidence was pretty clear before me that this man may have the night before lost his salvation. I gave him a one–word answer. I wished him well, I blessed him, and I went on to my panel discussion about the state of Christian unity in the United States. (”Jesus Means Freedom,” 2004)

Rev. Downs never does say what his one word answer was. Can a Christian loose his salvation? Yes or no. The division of these two one word answers as a matter of doctrine, as a matter of what one must believe and agree to in order to be properly Christian, has divided the church for nearly 2000 years, since the time of the Galatians. But none of that matters when you are living in the Spirit. All that matters is the disheveled man sitting there waiting to hear what you will say, this man who according to the rules has lost his salvation, but whom God still loves with an everlasting love.

And what does living by the Spirit mean for us as a community of faith? For starters it means that we are not competing against one another. It’s all one community. It’s not the store’s stuff, or the fellowship team’s stuff, or the harvest stuff, or the preschool’s stuff or the worship team’s stuff or the trustee’s stuff. It’s all one church, one community. And to prove the point, I’m going to suggest an experiment to begin over the summer. I’m going to suggest that all the coffee used in the church for any purpose should be handled by the Mission Team. Right now, I’m embarrassed to say, we’ve got fellowship coffee, store coffee, office coffee, and private stash coffee, all kept in separate coffee accounts, some of it even under lock and key, and we have a mission team that’s been drifting, looking for something significant to do for nearly a year, So the mission team’s first mission is to find a way to bring First Baptist together in such a way that we can consume coffee rather than each other, and to make coffee into an outreach ministry. No rules, just the Spirit. Let’s start there.

Live by the Spirit. Be guided by the Spirit. Enjoy the fruits of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self control. Be free. Through love become servants of one another. Love your neighbor as yourself. This is the original free love concept.

A few weeks ago someone left a book on my desk: Can our Church Live? by Alice Mann (Alban Institute, 1999). I tossed it into my briefcase and in moments between other activities, I have been reading it. The first couple chapters are all about what we already know: the world has changed over the last half century. The old ways of doing church simply don’t work anymore. On and on. All of this is related to studies about institutional life cycles, and linked to congregational self-assessment tools. Chapter 4 begins to lay out options for congregations in need of renewal. They are as follows:

1. Relocation to a new site.
2. Planting a new church on a new site as a satellite congregation.
3. Merger with one or more surrounding congregations
4. Dramatic transformation in:
   1. Style or schedule of worship to reach a broader population
   2. Intentionally shifting from one size category to another
   3. Intentionally shifting the make-up of both the membership and leadership in
      1. Economic level
      2. Race
      3. Ethnicity
      4. Language
      5. Culture
      6. Sexual orientation
      7. Age
      8. Place of residence
   4. Adopting a model of ministry that does not involve a resident, seminary-trained pastor
   5. Parallel development: launching a new congregation while maintaining a separate chaplaincy to the old one

Mann also suggests that if these seem like too much, other non-renewal options might be:

1. Part-time clergy relieved of any expectation that they are going to “make the church grow.”
2. Yoked or cluster ministry, sharing clergy with other congregations to continue a modest but sustainable ministry on site
3. Hospice: planning a holy death that will honor the past and bestow a legacy on another ministry

As I reflect on where we have been over the past several years, I am aware that with regard to the above options we have several times considered and rejected option 1. Several times folks have suggested to me, though the congregation has never formally considered option 3. We have dabbled in option 4a, but not to the extent that it could be called dramatic transformation. We have waxed nostalgic for a return to a 300 member congregation (option 4b) but have not implemented any real outreach/evangelism program to do so.

So, where are we now? Which of these options are you open to? Which ones are out of the question? Or maybe you can think of some other possibilities that Mann hasn’t included. Take a moment to vote your favorite in the poll box to the right, and drop a comment below.

Isaiah 58:6-12

Before I can speak directly to the application of the scripture we have heard this morning, I need to do a little bit of background about this passage from Isaiah. So if you will be so kind as to indulge me for a moment, I would ask you to keep these words: “to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, to share your bread with the hungry and bring the homeless poor into your house, to cover the naked…” –I would ask you to hold these words for a moment in the back of your mind as we examine the context from which they are speaking to us.

I expect that most of us don’t very often read Isaiah. So to begin, you need to know that Isaiah is one of those books of the Bible that actually dates from three different historical periods. The first part of Isaiah, which includes the first 39 chapters, comes from the prophet of the 8^th century before Christ, from the year that King Uzziah died, 738 BCE. It is primarily the voice of the prophet Isaiah, son of Amoz, for whom the whole work is named. This first part has to do primarily with events leading up to the invasion of Israel by the Assyrians and the deportation and exile that followed that invasion. The perspective of this first Isaiah is that of warning. Isaiah is warning the rulers of Israel in its last dark and declining days of empire that the consequences of their faithlessness will be disaster for their nation. That is the First Isaiah: chapters 1-39.

Then in chapter 40 there is a significant break. The usage of language shifts, the vocabulary shifts, the perspective of the writing shifts so dramatically, that for close to 200 years now Bible scholars have known that what we have is the work of a second Isaiah, writing from a completely different time, near the end of the time of Babylonian exile, approaching 539 BCE. First Isaiah: 738; Second Isaiah: 538. Two hundred years difference. Language changes a lot over 200 years, like comparing the writing of someone named Benjamin Franklin who wrote in 1798 to someone named Benjamin Franklin in 1998. The differences in language would be immediately apparent, and the different events to which they speak would also be immediately apparent. So with Isaiah, beginning in chapter 40 we have another Isaiah who speaks the same language much differently and who is now writing to people who are living far from Jerusalem—in fact, Second Isaiah writes from Bagdad. He writes to people who have grown comfortable living far from home and speaks to them not about the consequences of national pride and sin, but about God’s comfort and the promise of going home again. And this perspective, Second Isaiah, continues up through chapter 55.

Then again in chapter 56 there is another shift. Not so significantly in language, but in both time and location. Now we are again back in Judah in about the year 520 BCE; so, twenty years after Second Isaiah. The promised return home has taken place, and from Third Isaiah’s point of view, the exile is in the past. These last ten chapters are concerned with rebuilding the temple and dealing with a reality that has now set in: namely, that home is not what a lot of people expected, and that even though they have returned to the place of the past, times are still much different now.

Historically, this last period is covered in our Bibles in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah. And just to give you an idea what the homecoming was like, if you turn to Ezra, chapter 3, you will find there an account of when they had returned to lay a new foundation to rebuild the ancient temple in Jerusalem.

And all the people responded with a great shout when they praised the Lord, because the foundation of the house of the Lord was laid. But many of the priests and Levites and heads of families, old people who had seen the first house on its foundations, wept with a loud voice when they saw this house… (Ezra 3:11c-12a)

It was a time of celebrating, being back home, yes. But the older people, who had lived here years before and knew what the first temple was like, still cried because this new temple wasn’t really very impressive compared with the old one. It wasn’t going to be as big. It was going to be cheap paneling instead of hand-carved teak and cedar. It was like having plastic cups and utensils instead of silver and gold. It just didn’t look or feel like the church they remembered when they were young.

So they had their moments of celebration. But on top of the temple not being the same as it used to be, there were lots of arguments and troubles getting the work done, too. And many people, if you look at the larger scope of Ezra and Nehemiah, were of the opinion that if they could just get the old rituals right, then God would answer and everything would be better again. If they could just get back to the way things had been done 70 years before. If they could just get all the people who had come back to Jerusalem and all their lapsed neighbors to come back to worship, to fill the sanctuary like they remembered it from their younger years then God would be pleased. And this is where we pick up with Isaiah in the 58^th chapter, verse 2: “Day after day they seek me,” God says. Verse 3: they ask God, “Why do we fast but do not see? Why humble ourselves but you do not notice?” People are asking why God seems not to care about them, when they are trying so hard to keep the temple doors open, and God’s answer is in verses 3-5, to summarize: “You’re not really doing it for me; you’re doing it for yourselves, to serve your own interests You fast only to quarrel and fight about who is right so you can say you’re better than your neighbors. For all your pretentions to being humble and pious, your worship is nothing but a holier-than-thou charade.” Third Isaiah.

I wonder, now that we have taken this tour of the book of Isaiah, if you can see any similarities to the situation of Third Isaiah here at First Baptist Church in 2008. I can’t count the number of times I have heard the elders of the church, the heads of families, the Deacons of our senior generation lamenting that these days are not so grand as the former days. With Ezra and Nehemiah I want to recognize that grief. We have our moments of celebration, but for those who lived through the former eras, it just isn’t like it was. Those feelings of loss are natural. They are good. They are a part of who we are now.

For many of us, we come here week after week. We are seeking out God, longing to know God’s ways, trying our best to get it right. And God seems silent. We try hard to keep the doors open, trying desperately to keep things the way they were, but we keep slipping. The Finance Committee has done the projections: despite all our efforts, and even though we have several good ministry programs, if nothing changes, we close these doors in three years. Many of us, like the people of Third Isaiah’s temple, are holding out for God’s miraculous intervention—an intervention that seems slower and slower to come. We may be in the same location as we were 70 years ago, but times have changed, and even hometown Glens Falls can seem like a foreign land.

In times like these Third Isaiah suggests that God’s response to our predicament may be to ask us what this church thing is really all about. I mean, who are we really doing this for, anyway? I wonder how much of our hanging on to this building, how much of our hanging onto this organ and these pews and this kind of worship format is about God, and how much it is about us. How much of it is about serving God’s purposes, and how much of it is preserving for ourselves those glory days instead of grieving them in a healthy way and letting them go. I’m not saying that all of it is: but the prophetic voice coming through this morning’s scriptures says we owe it to ourselves to consider that question.

So what are we to do? Fortunately Isaiah doesn’t leave us with only pessimistic questions. God, in Isaiah’s prophesy provides a few answers, and they are what Shane has read to us this morning. How shall you rebuild your ancient ruins? The foundations are not really the bricks and mortar at all. Isaiah’s God says that the foundations of the community of faith, the foundations of the church, are these:

To loose the bonds of injustice; to undo the thongs of the yoke
To let the oppressed go free and to break every yoke.
To share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house;
when you see the naked to cover them, and not to hide yourself from your own kin.

When you remove the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil
When you offer your food to the hungry and satisfy the need of the afflicted,
Then shall your light shine in the darkness
and your gloom shall be like the noonday.

Your ancient ruins shall be rebuilt;
you shall raise up the foundations of many generations.

I’m not sure about you, but to me these ancient words seem contemporary, too. Relevant, even. What if God is not primarily interested in maintaining a building, but is more concerned with a base of operations to provide a safer place for drifters to stay than the Madden Hotel? What if God is not primarily interested in the thrift store’s profitability, but is more concerned about handing out blankets to the folks who are sleeping on park benches? What if God is not primarily interested in waiting in a sanctuary for someone to stop by and talk, but is concerned with whether some of us will stop by the hospital, or hang out with the guys at Labor Ready, or come by on Sunday evenings this summer to get to know the kids who skateboard in our parking lot?1 What if God is not primarily interested in preserving our investment portfolio, but is concerned with whether we will use our talents or bury them?

The implication of Isaiah is that if we get with the things that God is primarily concerned about, then and only then will God make rebuilding possible. Without the foundations, the rest, the walls and stained glass, just won’t be around very long. Without the connection to what God is doing in the community, the worship in the sanctuary remains an empty ritual. And, if we are honest with ourselves, that is what made the glory days so glorious: not that we were doing it for ourselves, but that we knew then that we were a part of God’s program and we were doing it for God. What made this building great was that it was a place for people of all kinds and colors to find a community of God’s acceptance. What made this worship great was that it constantly moved people to care for the downtrodden of our city. What made this congregation great was not that it had great people building it up, but that it produced great people who built up the work of God. And, Isaiah is reminding us that what makes for greatness is the one thing in all of this that has not changed in seventy years: it always has been and still is the capacity to give up our selves and give ourselves over to God’s love for others.

This Thursday at 7 pm, Jon Hildreth will give a historical talk about First Baptist Church as a part of the Glens Falls centennial celebration program. Jon’s talk will actually cover the period from our first beginning in 1839 leading up to the city’s charter in 1908. But as you look through the historical record, you will find there that every thirty years or so, give or take a decade, First Baptist has undergone a major shift in its life. On one occasion it was relocation, from as near as I can tell, a spot over by where the Madden is now, to this place. We have bought and then sold neighboring lots. Often these shifts are recorded in new building projects, or significant remodeling. The last time it happened was with the addition of the education wing in the early 1960’s. On a 30 year schedule, today in 2008 we are past due for a major shift.

These shifts in our congregation’s life were not change for the sake of change. They have been intentional, because through many generations we have been faithful to the unchanging calling of God to a constantly changing world. Why it has not happened this time around, in the last forty years, I hesitate to say: Isaiah cautions us against “the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil.” It does no good to accuse one another, or those who were once among us and are no longer, or to wallow in blame and recrimination. What I do know is that God is calling us to do something about it now. Let us only start again, as Ezra, Nehemiah and Isaiah’s people did, with the celebration of a new beginning, the appropriate mourning and letting go of the ruins of yesterday and the laying of God’s new foundations upon those of many generations.

1 Several of these questions courtesy of Barbara Brown Taylor, “The Silence of God,” in Gospel Medicine (Cowley, 1995).

Genesis 12:1-5b

If you go looking for famous paintings of Bible scenes, you will not find many that depict the sudden call of God to Abraham. In fact, with all the resources of the internet at hand, I could only come up with four.

First there is this pen and ink drawing from about 100 years ago. (See Fig. 1) Abraham rides along on a donkey at the head of a large crowd, palm trees waving in the background, child-like cherubs heralding his approach. Sarah and Lot stand to either side, and a great angel hovers above urging him onward toward his triumphal entry into Canaan. Is it Abraham? Or is it Jesus on Palm Sunday riding into Jerusalem?

Turn the clock back another fifty years to 1850, eastern Europe, and you find this painting by Josef Molnar. (See Fig. 2) Here, Abraham emerges from the mists of time, women, children and animals in tow. You look at the expressions on these faces and it is clear that things are much less triumphant here. No one is smiling. They look tired. Even Abraham himself looks uncertain which fork in the road to take: like maybe he should have stopped to ask for better directions after all.

Then as you go back, you have to wait almost 300 years to the late 1500’s before you find another painting of Abraham’s leaving home. Out of 16^th century Italy comes this dark scene by Jacopo Bassano. (See Fig. 3) God appears out of the dark storm clouds, summoning Abraham out of his home, Sarah hoisting up baby Lot, servants scrambling to get everything packed up even as the caravan is already setting out on the dark road. There is light on the horizon, but the journey begins in darkness, with a sense of urgency and chaos, or even danger.

This last painting is the one that speaks to me most deeply as I consider the story of Abraham this morning. Perhaps this is because my own life tends to be somewhat chaotic. But I think that it reflects our situation at First Baptist, too, in this way: we have sensed that God is calling us, I believe. I have a sense that we live in a time and place of great darkness, and out of that darkness, God has sounded a call of command. In my conversations with many of you, I hear the clear recognition among us that the calling is urgent. And I hear at the same time the discordant noises of confusion, and the stressful glances of anxiety over where this journey might lead.

Consider, too, that in verse 4 we read that “Abraham was seventy-five years old when he departed from Haran,” and you have a pretty close correlation with our generational reality as well. Age seventy-five is not the time most people plan on uprooting their whole lives and starting over. Sixty-five, maybe; but not seventy-five. So here we are, many of us in our seventies if not beyond, having heard a call of God in the night, out of the twilight years of a generation, and we know that we cannot stay where we are and remain always as we were. The dim light on the horizon seems so very far away, and we are not at all sure we have the strength for such a perilous journey. And yet, we know that we cannot remain here in the dark of night, and even against our protests, the next generation, baby Lot, is being hoisted tenuously up to us.

Amid all this chaos and in the midst of such times of uncertainty, it is sometimes hard to remember that all of this commotion comes about because God has something bigger than our comfortable retirement in mind. The calling comes, the noise and chaos comes, the great migration comes because God’s plan is to make it possible for Abraham to be the means of blessing for the whole world. The world is in the midnight of the soul. People are living in darkness. The powers of sin and death are strong here in Glens Falls. Every day in the Post Star’s morning briefing, someone is being picked up for DWI, or there has been a drug bust at a crack house on Bay Street, or there has been someone who’s stabbed his girlfriend:

Saturday, April 12: “A dispute over a woman prompted a Whitehall man to attack an acquaintance Thursday night and break the man’s jaw, police said.” (Post Star, Police: Whitehall man charged with felony assault.)

Sunday, April 13: “A Schenectady teen who was arrested with a loaded gun during a drug investigation in Glens Falls earlier this year will serve 10 years in state prison on a weapons charge. Brown, 16, was arrested Jan. 21 along with three other people in a drug sweep. Police said he had 20 grams of crack cocaine that was to be sold in Glens Falls, but also was carrying a loaded, unregistered .22-caliber handgun.” (Post Star, Man to serve 10 years for gun charge.)

Sunday, April 13: “A Rutland, Vt., man was charged with drunken driving Saturday night after he was pulled over downtown, police said. Glens Falls Police Officer Seth French pulled him over after observing him fail to yield the right of way to another vehicle and veer into the wrong lane.” (Post Star, Glens Falls Police make DWI arrest overnight.)

The Scriptures are clear that Abraham is called and receives his blessing because God wants to provide a blessing to “all the families of the earth.” So, we can also say that God is not moving in our midst and in our city to provide a nice place with pretty stained glass for us to enjoy for ourselves. God is not calling us out of our retirements and out of our nostalgia just for the sake of making us uncomfortable and inconvenienced; God is agitating us, calling us out of our comfortable complacency in order to make a sanctuary where those who have been beaten down by their addictions or by their husbands and boyfriends or by the tragedies and uncertainties of disease and recession can find sanctuary and safety. God is not asking us to uproot our lives at this late hour just to shuffle off this mortal coil into the night; God is shouting from the heavens to light a fire in us that will draw the disconsolate into hope and guide and the lost into safe harbor. We are not recipients of the resources, the blessings, of this place in the center of a city full of darkness in order to come here only one hour of one day each week to indulge our wistful longings for an unreachable past; we are given this place, this building, this sanctuary, these blessings for the express purpose that God may bless the all the families of the Glens Falls.

After 1900, for nearly a hundred years the story of Abraham’s calling goes largely unpainted. It’s almost as if the picture of the triumphal entry of Abraham, the ascendancy of imperial power, the vision of human ability to forge its own promethean utopia had spoken the last word. Most of us have lived through that silent interlude, through brutal world wars, through the failure of the triumphant power of human technology to forge a lasting peace, through cultural currents that built and then swept away institutions of faith. Then in 1998, a Ukrainian artist in exile in Israel broke the silence. (See Fig. 4) “Get Thee Out of Thy Country” doesn’t show Abraham at all, or Sarah or Lot, or the animals and servants following along. It shows the road forward as Abraham must have seen it: swirling and chaotic, the pathway undefined, but the place that God has shown him clearly in view: the tree of life—blessing for all the families of the earth who share God’s gift of life.

It is time for us at First Baptist to break the silence, too. To keep our vision firmly fixed in the chaos and uncertainty, to the place that God has shown us. It is time to be a blessing in which God blesses all the families of the earth.

Last weekend I received an email that got me thinking:

Hello, my name is ______ and I’m doing some research on the first baptist church for my Christianity course at ______ College and I was just wondering if you could give me some information on your church. I have a few questions about the specifics of the service. Do you say the creed in a typical service or ever? Do you have communion every week? If not, how often do you, and why are you on this schedule? Do you read scripture every week? And finally do you preach a sermon every week?

I know this is a lot of questions and i hope you find time to answer them it would really help a lot! I hope you have a nice day an i hope to hear back from you soon!

They are basic questions. But as I thought about what to write back, I wondered how people who worship at First Baptist would answer them. Most of our regular worshippers would be able to say that we observe the Lord’s Supper on the first Sunday of each month. But why do we do that? It got me wondering how many of our regulars could say what a creed is and that we do not use them in our worship. And why don’t we? They would know that we always read scripture and that most weeks there is some kind of sermon. But why do we do that? What would our members say?

I appreciate that someone was interested enough to ask the questions. I wish that that Post Star reporter who did the front page article on Easter Sunday had bothered to ask what we were doing instead of captioning the photo, “First Baptist Church hosts Palm Sunday Mass.” But, misprints in the Post Star aside, the larger issue is that we cannot assume that people (and not just “young people”) know even the basics about what we do and why. We have to tell them. And to tell them we have to know ourselves.

So, those of you who regularly worship at FBC: how would you answer these basic questions? What would you say to this college student?