Summer Series on the Pastoral Epistles
1st Timothy 3, 4
27 June 2010


Last week we began our summer series on the Pastoral Epistles … 1st and 2nd Timothy and Titus … and, later, the book of James … by jumping headfirst into the first two chapters of 1st Timothy.  And boy, did we get in some deep water!  Those verses … indicating the wish of the author that women would be excluded from any kind of leadership in the church … over the centuries, they have brought discussion, dissension, arguments, hard feelings, church fights, and church splits.  
Those verses … and the author’s wish for the church not to call undue attention to itself … they had value in the infant church of the first century, a time and place in which women did not exercise spiritual leadership except in the most “far-out” of religious sects.   But the influence of those verses has lasted long past their cultural relevance.  They continue to highlight one of the major differences between the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America – the denomination of which Nativity is a part – and all the other Lutheran denominations and configurations in this country.  For, even in this enlightened age of gender equality, we are still the only denomination in which women can exercise leadership completely equally, with men, as lay and ordained members of the church.
The problem is exacerbated because of our uncertainty in who exactly wrote the Pastoral Epistles.  Yes, the beginnings of 1st and 2nd Timothy and Titus all cite the apostle Paul as author … but that’s, in the kindest word, a difficult link to prove … and in the hardest, a baldfaced lie.  Scholars point out to us what even a casual read will reveal … the language of these letters is much different than the others of Paul, like Thessalonians, Corinthians, and Romans … of which we are much more certain that Paul was the actual author.  And, some of the situations discussed in the Pastorals arose at a much later time than Paul’s actual lifetime … they describe an established church with a distinct structure which simply did not exist until the early second century … long after Paul was dead.

Summer 2010 series on the Pastoral Epistles
1st Timothy
Chapters 1 and 2
20 June 2010


They are, of all the books of the New Testament, the ones which are the most consistent source for controversy … division … hard feelings, both within and outside the Church.  They take up very little space in the Bible – but their impact far outweighs their physical volume.  Their words have been used to lend credence to the top-down churchly structure of three-fold ordained ministry … bishop, priest, deacon … and worse … to defend the indefensible practice of American slavery, and to “keep women in their place.”
No less a theologian than Martin Luther called some of their words “straw.”
They are the pastoral epistles … 1 and 2 Timothy, and Titus … and, the book of James.
And they will be our focus during most of our Sundays together this summer … other than the four weeks when you will have other preachers, in my absence … we’ll be digging into these books together.
1 and 2 Timothy, Titus, and James … unlike the sermon series we had a few summers ago, on strange and little known stories from the Bible … we have heard these Scriptures before in worship. We regularly get readings from 1 and 2 Timothy during the year … from Titus, every Christmas Eve … and from James, in the late summer, during August and September.
Ah … but those are the “lectionary selections” we have … with the controversial parts assiduously avoided.
You’ll note from our reading today, of the first two chapters of 1st Timothy, that we didn’t avoid the controversial part … it was right there, toward the end of chapter two, in all its glory.  “I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she is to keep silent.”  

“Forgiveness”
Luke 7:36-8:3
11th Sunday in Ordinary Time C / Season of Pentecost
13 June 2010

Last week in their faith presentations several of our confirmands cited the retreats as one of their most memorable parts of the Faith Thinking confirmation experience.
Certainly our last retreat – on the Lord’s Prayer – stuck with me, in my thinking about our Gospel text for this morning.
The part – in particular – was looking at the petition “forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.”  Pastor Jane and I do almost all of Faith Thinking on PowerPoint now … the visuals really help reinforce what we’re discussing … and the image which I settled on for forgiveness was one which had been seared into my mind nearly 30 years ago.
You may remember it … It was a picture of Pope John Paul II, meeting with his would-be assassin, Mohammed Ali Agca, in a prison cell in Italy … talking with him, and forgiving him for what he had done.  That image, on the cover of Newsweek magazine, was the one I used to illustrate the kind of forgiveness which the Lord’s Prayer calls forth from us.
It’s a strong, powerful image.  But the action behind it … forgiveness … is one which comes to us with increasing difficulty these days.
For most of the time, the action which comes easier to us, is pointing the accusatory finger at others, to point out their sinful behavior.  We do a lot of finger pointing, away from us and towards others, sometimes each other.  We like to rank each other according to sinful behavior, all the while making sure that we come in well toward the bottom of the rankings.  “Well, sure,” we might say if we’re caught doing something we shouldn’t, “sure, I did do that, but I didn’t intend to do it … or I only did it one time … or I didn’t do it meaning any harm to anyone.  Not like him or her over there … and what they did … now that is really wrong, really something bad, and here’s why.”  We are very good at pointing the finger of blame at others, and moving them far up on the “worst sin” list, while our own misdeeds consistently come in near the bottom, as we constantly try to justify ourselves and our own behavior at the expense of others … trying to prove how much more righteous and closer to God’s gold standard we are than that sinner or those kind of people over there.
So our Gospel text for this morning is very current, very appropriate for us, in our day and time.  What may be very surprising about it is that that same kind of sin-ranking, finger-pointing behavior is as present in this story from two thousand years ago as it is today.
Jesus had accepted an invitation from a Pharisee to eat with him.  As he sat down to eat, something strange began to happen.  A woman, known to the people of that city as a sinner … one they pointed their fingers at and said, “there she goes …. that woman again” … that woman came in among Jesus and the Pharisee and his other table guests, and began crying and wiping Jesus’ feet with her hair, and rubbing the ointment she had brought with her onto Jesus’ feet.
Now, putting our cultural differences aside … people came and went from others’ homes, even those of strangers, with much more ease in that time than today … but, putting that aside, how does the Pharisee reactsto this?
He was not happy – big surprise – but not because of the woman being there.  Rather, it’s because Jesus didn’t dismiss her, tell her to go away, stop doing what she was doing.  “If this man were a prophet,” the Pharisee, whose name we soon learn is Simon, said, “If this man were a prophet, he would have known who and what kind of woman this is who is touching him – that she is a sinner.”  
But Jesus didn’t send the woman away.  Instead, he called Simon to task for his thoughts.  He told a little parable about canceled debt that is really a thinly veiled story about forgiveness.  
This woman, Jesus said, indeed is a sinner; but she knows she is forgiven of all her sins and is therefore acting out her thankfulness and love here before you.  You, Simon, on the other hand, you are also forgiven of your sins – not as many as this woman, but you are still forgiven – but you have done nothing to show your thankfulness and praise.
And then … then Jesus did an amazing thing … maybe not so much to us, but certainly amazing to those seated around him.  “Your sins are forgiven,” he said to the woman washing his feet, and he set the dinner party on end.  
For only God can forgive sins, those “righteous ones” around the table with Jesus thought when they heard his words.  Who is this Jesus, then, thinking that he can do something that is only reserved for God? they thought.  And speaking these words to this, this woman, this sinner, one of those kind of people we have no business associating with, because we are religious and they obviously are not … well, this is just plain wrong!  they surely said among themselves.
But in their anger, their frustration at having their “sin scorecards,” their tiny-brained concept of what and how sins are to be ranked, totally thrown out by Jesus … they failed to notice that this woman, once lost in a hellish downhill spiral … maybe some of her own bad choices; maybe, placed on her by others for being who she was, nothing more … and being labeled as the community outcast … this woman was now doing that which God had called her to with her life … that which God was calling each of these at the table to do, except they were too blind to notice … she, forgiven of her sins and healed from her past, was worshipping her Lord, and now going in peace to live a new life.
So the message of this text for us today, is that we are all in need of forgiveness, and God through Jesus calls each of us to turn around, repent, and follow him.  God keeps no “sin ranking,” except in those words about the sin against the Holy Spirit … which will separate us from him … as well it should … as we by our behavior, our words and our actions, say that someone or a group of people is beyond God’s forgiveness … even thinking that of ourselves … raising up walls between ourselves, trying to destroy the work of the Holy Spirit as God’s Spirit works among us to build us into Jesus’ body in the world.  For God’s forgiveness indeed is for all, equally, freely … and God’s forgiveness will bring us to healing, just as it healed the unnamed woman in this story … bringing us to healing of ourselves, healing of relationships with others, and healing of our relationship with God.
Forgiveness is a big deal.  It certainly was for Jesus, as it got him into trouble, perhaps more than anything else he ever did.  For forgiving sins in the Judaism of his time, was something reserved only for God.  And by forgiving sins, Jesus was seen as putting himself into the place of God …something we know is true, but something those religious leaders of his time either refused to see, or denied.
And Jesus forgave because he knew what a healing thing it is to be forgiven of your sins, to have that burden lifted from your shoulders.  A story from a little earlier in Luke points this out so clearly … in chapter five, as Jesus heals a paralyzed man.  
While Jesus was in a house teaching, a paralyzed man was lowered on a board, through the roof … the size of the crowd prevented carrying him to Jesus.  Jesus saw the man – but didn’t do what we would think he would do first … that is, tell him he’s healed.  No, instead … he said, “Friend, your sins are forgiven you.”  Which gets the same reaction from the religious leaders present:  “Blasphemy!  Who does this guy think he is … God?”  And Jesus, knowing their disgust, asked them which is easier, to forgive or pronounce healing … and then, proving that he has the power to forgive because he is God, Jesus healed the man physically anyway.
Jesus forgave the paralyzed man first because he knows how much our sin and guilt can paralyze us, keep us from living as the people he would have us be.  Forgiveness loosens the bonds that years of guilt and shame may have placed around us … guilt over the way we’ve lived, or haven’t lived … things we’ve done or said that keep us up at night, keep us from relationships with others.  Forgiveness brings healing to years of physical sickness, or sick hearts and spirits.
Now, I don’t believe that Jesus believed that the paralyzed man had behaved in such a way as to bring on his paralysis, and that he especially needed forgiving because of how rotten a life he had lived … like we may struggle and try to find reasons for a person’s sickness or death … well, he or she drank too much, or smoked too much, or drove too fast, or lived recklessly, or so on.  Certainly our behaviors can contribute to illness and death, but pinning down blame can do little to promote healing, or comfort us after our loss.  It’s the old finger pointing routine again.  And Jesus doesn’t get into this “pin the blame on the paralytic” routine either.  He just forgives him his sins, and then heals him.  Forgiveness brings healing.
Forgiveness brings healing.  It did for the paralyzed man.  It did for the woman in our story today, as she went on to live a new life.  It does for others.  Maybe you have seen it in others.  Maybe you have seen it in yourself.
Jesus knows us.  Jesus knows the burdens we carry around with us … the guilt, the shame, the brooding over past events, the “could woulda shouldas” … anger at others, anger at ourselves … he knows how these can eat at us, can paralyze us, can sicken and even kill, kill our relationships with others, kill our relationship with him, even kill us, spiritually, or physically.  And so he gives us the gift of forgiveness … having our burdens lifted … picking us up like the once paralyzed man and freeing us from our pasts like the unnamed woman … allowing us to show him our purest praise, pouring our ointment on his feet, being saved, going in peace, living in freedom and love with each other.
It all sounds too good to believe … to us in our finger-pointing, sin-ranking way of life, justifying ourselves at the expense of others … or locked in our rooms of guilt and shame over what we’ve done, how we’ve treated others, how we’ve lived our lives.  Who would care that much about them… him … her … those kind of people … you and me?  
For the pointed fingers always come back around to us in the end.  Who will care … who will heal … who will save?
In Jesus’ name, and for his sake, your sins … and my sins … are forgiven.  And so we go forth … not to rank, not to point, not to raise the walls of separation … but to take them down, and live that forgiveness with each other … the ointment of forgiveness which will heal us, which smells so sweetly to God, the way we best show him our thanks and praise … living lives of forgiveness and reconciliation.  Amen.

“… but some things are better left unsaid.”
Festival of the Holy Trinity
Psalm 8 / Romans 5:1-5 / John 16:12-15
30 May 2010


Today – this Festival of the Holy Trinity – is a unique day in the life of those of God’s people the Church who recognize it within Word and worship.  For this is the only day in the calendar year of the Church that we commemorate and recognize … not an event in the life of Jesus, not a happening in the history of the apostles or the early church, not a birthday or martyrdom day of a particular saint … no, the Festival of the Holy Trinity is the only time when we gather in worship and recognize … a theological concept.
Specifically, the Christian theological concept of the Holy Trinity … God the Father, God the Son – Jesus, and God the Holy Spirit.
And that … seems, well, at the least, strange, doesn’t it?
I mean, we do have a Holy Cross Day but we don’t have a “Theology of the Cross day.”  Or a “Forgiveness of Sins Sunday.”  And we Lutherans … wow … we don’t even recognize a “Festival of Justification by Grace through Faith.”  
What’s up with that?  Why is this Holy Trinity business so important anyway?
Well, it all has to do with … sssh … heresy.
And a 3rd century bishop named Arius.
Now Arius served as pastor and leader of the church in Alexandria, Egypt.  He spent a lot of time thinking … specifically, about the nature of the Godhead … Father, Son, Spirit.  He saw hierarchy all around him … in the Roman government, in the military; even in the young Christian church.  He concluded that this hierarchy must be part of God’s natural order in all things, including within the very workings of God.  
And so the theological concept Arius came up with was that, in contradiction to the Word being proclaimed in the early Church, there was no way that Jesus could be equal with God the Father.  Jesus had to be subordinate—below, reporting to and under the command of… the Father … since he did the Father’s will … Jesus was the firstborn of God’s creation, to be sure, but to Arius there was no way Jesus could be co-equal with God.  Arius had a phrase that he coined, which summed it all up for him:  “There was a time when he (Jesus) was not.”  
And there was a time when it looked like Arian Christianity would be the majority voice in the church  … ah, but then came the Church Council of Nicea in 325 … a gathering of the leaders of the entire Christian church at that time, brought together by Emperor Constantine, to “regularize” in decree and doctrine the newly official religion of the Roman Empire.  
Arius and his followers … including emperor Constantine … soon enough found themselves in the minority.  One bishop … Nicholas of Myra … the one who we lovingly call “Santa Claus” today … did the not so loving act of hitting Arius upside the head during a particularly heated moment in the discussions and meetings.
The result of the Council of Nicea was the Nicene Creed … and Arius and his followers was roundly criticized and condemned, labeled as heretics  and “there was a time when he was not,” named as heresy.  The big foot of orthodox catholic Christianity came down hard on Arius and his followers.
Did you ever wonder why the Second Article of the Creed … the part about Jesus … was so intricate and involved?  Well, it was written to condemn Arius.  “God from God … true God from true God … begotten, not made, of one being with the Father; through him all things were made.”  STOMP.  Out goes Arianism.  Or, at least that was the hope.
So over the centuries as the Church grew and grew, and the Word about Jesus spread across the world, Church leaders decided that the Nicene Creed … and its longer, even more intricately involved companion, the Athanasian Creed (which we’ve sometimes used on Holy Trinity Sunday) weren’t enough to combat the plague of Arianism.  So they developed this Festival of the Holy Trinity, one Sunday after the Festival of the Holy Spirit … Pentecost … as a way of emphasizing what is true and right theology … thinking, writing, speaking about God … and condemning what is wrong.
And Arius and Arian Christianity became a footnote to the history of the Church.  There are no “Arian” churches anymore; so we might wonder “what’s the big deal” anyway?  
Ah, but that’s looking back through modern eyes.  Put on our 4th century specs and we’ll see how condemning Arius was crucial to the growth and spread of the Church.  If Jesus didn’t, doesn’t fully represent God in all he does and says … then, why did he have to come anyway?  Be born, live, be tempted, suffer, die, and be raised?  Send the Holy Spirit, the Advocate, the Comforter, the Guide to keep and grow the Church after he went away, back, ascended to the Father?  
What, indeed, would have been the point to all of that?  If God didn’t, doesn’t live in relationship within God, then, why should people live in relationship with each other?  
Why should we not instead just strive to be Godlike all by ourselves, without needing Jesus, and without the messy intrusion into our lives of other people, their needs and wants and problems just making it more difficult for us to “get to God?”
Ah.  So now I hope you see the point … and why Arius is on the outside of orthodoxy … the outside of our “what we believe” circle.
Condemning Arius, Arian Christianity and “there was a time when Jesus was not” was precisely the right thing to do.  

But have we gone too far in our pursuit of orthodoxy … right praise, right doctrine, right practice of our faith?
On this Holy Trinity Sunday, this is a good question for us to ask ourselves.
Especially we who tend toward considering and calling ourselves the “thinking” or “educated” churches …  denominations, church bodies with educated clergy with degrees behind our names … having creedal, confessional and doctrinal statements which we used to organize and delineate our differences from each other.
Remember that the whole point behind this day, this Holy Trinity Sunday, and the theological concept behind it … God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit … was not to advance and proclaim a dust-dry theological concept … no, Holy Trinity Sunday serves as a reminder to us, that even as God is in relationship within God … a relationship, a dance of love if you will between Father, Son, and Spirit … so, too, we who are followers of this God – as we have seen and experienced him in Jesus Christ, God in the flesh … we are called to live in relationship with each other, and others, in this world God has created.
This is a peculiarly Christian concept of God.
Islam, Judaism, even Buddhism … they all advocate for their believers, followers, disciples to become Godlike themselves … having a full and complete relationship with God … but where they can fall short is in engaging in the messiness of creation … getting “down and dirty” in the lives of others.  
Living, suffering, losing our lives … figuratively, or perhaps, actually, for the sake of others … living in the shadow of the cross, walking in the footsteps of Jesus.  True strength through suffering.  Victory through what the world calls defeat.  God’s success in what the world calls failure.  And abundant life through what the world sees as quite the opposite … serving, giving, proclaiming the Word about Jesus.
Holy Trinity Sunday serves to remind us that even as our God is messy … because life lived in relationship is inherently messy … so we too are called to live in the mess and grey-ness, the ambiguity of life … this life given to us by God, to live and share with each other.
So how well do we do that?  
Holy Trinity Sunday gives us a great opportunity to take stock, as I did this past week.
And it seems to me that we who call ourselves “Church” have our own error-prone tendencies … denying the love-relationship within God, denying the necessary humanness of the birth, life, suffering and death of Jesus, failing to live into the words of our own creeds, even today.

To be overly simplistic, I see two extremes or “ditches” into which we can easily fall, as church, God’s people, the body of Christ, here and now.
This first … has to do with how much room we leave for ambiguity in our faith communities.
Do we believe … show, by our actions … that church is only for “a certain kind of person?”  
How well do we welcome … the seeker?  The doubter?  Those who are struggling, going through hard times in life, problems in school or job, home or family; or simply having what Luther called “a crisis of faith?”
Are we welcoming to those whose lives or lifestyles don’t fit into the neat little “church box” we have created?  Pristine, clean, Jesus for some but not for all?
It’s like that commercial that’s been airing on the radio lately about mental illness … two friends, discussing and deciding where to have lunch, when the one confides in the other that she’s just been diagnosed with bipolar disorder … and the other one just goes on talking about different lunch choices, ignoring her friend completely.
How much of a “friend” is that being, anyway?
We recall, rehear and remember that Jesus didn’t avoid the messiness of life.  He engaged it, head on … not just hanging out with, no, seeking out those who were on the “outside” of the “nice religion” of their time … the poor, the sick, the widowed and orphaned, the depressed, the mourning, the questioning, those who had made poor choices in their past.
As Paul writes in today’s word to the Romans, “We also boast in our sufferings … suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.”
That’s because … the Holy Trinity …. God, Father, Son, Spirit … means that God is all about relationship.  In the very heart of God … and pouring out of that heart, to encompass and envelope all of creation.  Even us.  Even us.
And Jesus … fully God, fully human … feeling in his body everything which we feel … joy, doubt, pain, suffering, dying … yet fully God, conquering death forever … Jesus, the way we know this Triune God, the way God – Father, Son, Spirit – puts flesh and bones on God’s love for us … Jesus reminds us that, even as God is all about living in relationship, so we, too, claimed by that same love, forgiven and given full, abundant life in that love … we are called to live in that kind of relationship with others, too.  
Yes, it’s messy … not neat and boxed in, controlled and controlling … but it is the way of our God.  Our Triune God … Father, Son, Spirit.  The love-dancers who call us into their dance of love, to and for the sake of the world.

There is a second ditch … and it’s just as prevalent as the first.  And this one may cut some of us a little too close for comfort.
We don’t have to look far to find it -- right there in our Psalm for today, Psalm 8.
That’s a wonderful hymn to creation … to God’s making it, and declaring it good … and then, our call to honor the Creator in our wonder and worship.
And of course, that’s all well and good.  We are “duty bound” as Luther puts it in the Catechism, to honor God for giving us all these good things, for making the universe and all that is in it, for our benefit.
But … there can be a tendency to elevate our care for creation to a new law … and to believe, somehow, that in treating creation with the utmost care and respect, we are somehow ascending the ladder higher and higher to God … much higher, much faster, say, than those awful bad people out there who don’t “do as we do.”
Somehow, as we religiously recycle and drive our Priuses and condemn the big bad polluting corporations, we can feel like we’re drawing closer to God through all of that.  One could say that a religion of political correctness has arisen among us.
Ah, but where’s Jesus in that?  Where’s the place of human sinfulness?  Where is the realization that, once you seek salvation through the Law of God, there is no stopping the demands of the law?  I mean, many are condemning and boycotting a Certain Large Oil Company, but I don’t see very many, if any of us, cutting out our use of petrochemicals cold turkey … leaving our cars on the side of the road … quitting jobs at Boeing or Microsoft … eating only the stuff they, we can grow in our own yards … and taking up residence in grass covered yurts in the forest.
All have sinned and fall short of the Glory of God.  
And that very sentence, it draws us back into relationship.  Relationship with others who sin and fall short of God’s desire for us, just as we do, each and every one of us, each and every day of our lives.  We are all called back into a posture, a lifestyle of repentance, where we leave the judging and condemning alone and instead focus on living lives of love and service to one another which are the result of the freedom Christ gives us in his complete and total forgiveness of our sins, speaking fully and completely as God, God For Us, as he says in our Gospel reading from John, “All that the Father has is mine.”

The Holy Trinity.  Yes, it may be a complex theological concept … yes, it may have gotten Arius and his followers condemned for being “outside the circle of what we believe” … but we don’t need to be like Nicholas of Myra and keep hitting people upside the head with the backhand of orthodoxy and Law … right belief, and right practice.
All we need to remember … is that the Holy Trinity means God in relationship.  God in relationship … in God … with us … and in us.  Calling us to live lives which reflect God … in the world … through our service to others … in a posture of humility and repentance … confessing, being forgiven, going forth.  
Coming together … hearing God’s Word … eating Christ’s meal … being sent in the Spirit to serve once again.
For our sake … for the sake of God’s creation … and for the sake of God … Father, Son, Spirit, God, Three-In-One, living and loving in that eternal love-dance which spills out into all of creation … into each of us.
Come … join the dance of Trinity.
Amen.