Start Over From Scratch

A Sermon for the 12^th Sunday after Pentecost (RCL A – Proper 18) 9-4-2011

Offered by Nathan Ferrell for Trinity Episcopal Shared Ministry

Texts:              Exodus 12:1-14; Psalm 149; Matthew 18:15-20

Themes:         the Passover, the beloved community
Title:               Start Over From Scratch

Beloved in the Lord: how do we build the beloved community of grace? How do we go about intentionally constructing a community that is united in love and care for one another in a way that is clearly visible for all to see?

Over the course of the centuries, congregations have attempted two primary, and divergent, methods of achieving this end.

The first is, quite simply, to lower the standards. We know that everyone makes mistakes. In theological terms, we know that everyone sins, because no one is perfect, except for Jesus our Lord.

Therefore, in order to create a harmonious and united community, we lower the standards so that everyone fits, everyone is accepted no matter what. Basically, in this method, if we don’t care too much about sin and the struggles that we have in living virtuous lives, then we won’t be bothered much when we struggle and sin, because the bar has been set low at the outset.

The other primary path is to set the standards high and to enforce those standards rigorously. If the sinner will not repent, then that one is thrown out of the community. In this way, a harmonious and united Christian community is formed, because everyone on the inside agrees to abide by the same strict code of conduct.

I’m sure that you can think of communities such as this. It is a common strategy that many Christian leaders have taken.

And those who have advocated this path have used for their argument biblical passages such as the one we heard just now in the Gospel, and particularly this climax: “if the offender refuses to listen even to the church, let such a one be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector” (Matthew 18:17).

The way the high-standard folks have understood this verse is quite simple: when confronted by church leaders about their transgression, if a member of the church refuses to confess and apologize and repent, then that member must be thrown out. The official legal word, of course, is to be ex-communicated. 

Some of you may remember my experience of ex-communication nearly two years ago in the Monday night basketball league in which I participate in Moorestown. On the typical Monday night, people wander in and once ten people are there, then a pick-up game is started on one of the courts while we wait for everyone else to arrive. 

At 7 o’clock, that game stops and everyone gathers to be split into teams of equal size and the games truly begin.

Well, on this particular night, right at 7 o’clock, just as we were gathering to form teams, about 6 guys – the size of one of our four teams – just walked right out the door. As one of the regular guys was leaving, I asked him: “Jeff, what’s going on?” He pointed to a new guy who had just walked in, and he said: “We can’t play with him here.”

After the rest of us played for a few hours, we stopped for the night and I walked over to that new guy and introduced myself. His name is Ben and I asked if he knew why the others had left when he came in. Ben proceeded to explain to me that he had been raised as part of the local Kingdom Hall of Jehovah’s Witnesses. But now, Ben has a son of his own and he has decided that he does not want to raise his son in that faith system.

Ben felt that the Witnesses were too narrow and fundamentalist, and he did not want his young son indoctrinated in this way. So he wrote the requisite letter to the church elders explaining his decision. This is all fine and good. The problem is that the elders then instructed the other Witnesses to shun Ben. That is, they must now treat him like an outsider, like “a Gentile and a tax collector.”

The shunning is so severe that they are not allowed even to play basketball with him! I had no idea that there were so many basketball-playing Jehovah’s Witnesses in Moorestown, but apparently there are! And that is why they walked out that night, and most of them have never returned.

This is an example of how many Bible-based communities have interpreted teachings such as this one from the mouth of Jesus by setting the community standards very high and demanding obedience to those standards or else be expelled.

But, do you know what? They are wrong!

I believe strongly that neither one of these two strategies for creating a unified community of faith

Is the method that Jesus has intended for us. I believe strongly, in fact, that there is a third way, a middle way that is both disciplined and compassionate.

Look again at this key verse that seems to justify this practice of excommunication: “Let such a one be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.”

For the Jewish followers of Jesus, the Gentiles and tax collectors were those who were outside of the covenant relationship with God, either by birth or through hateful abuse of their own people by collaboration with Rome.

So it is right, in fact, to view those who persist stubbornly in sin as outside of the covenant. This much seems clear in the intent of this teaching.

But then consider how our Lord himself acted toward those on the outside and toward the tax collectors. One of the very disciples to whom he was speaking, the one whose community recorded these very words, was himself a tax collector. Matthew was called from his tax booth to come and follow after Christ.

As usual, The Message translation of the Bible offers an excellent interpretation when Eugene Peterson translates this verse in this way: “If [the fellow believer] won’t listen to the church, you’ll have to start over from scratch, confront him with the need for repentance, and offer again God’s forgiving love.”

There it is: to treat someone as a Gentile and a tax collector does not mean to shun them. It means to conclude that here is one for whom Christ died and yet who has not yet truly understood or embraced the Gospel. If they had, then their heart would not allow them to be so cavalier about hurting other believers. A Gentile and a tax collector is one who needs to be loved into the kingdom of grace, not one who needs to be pushed out into the darkness.

A proper understanding of this teaching by Jesus introduces us to the middle way of life together in the church. What we do does matter. How we live our everyday lives is important. The ethics and morals and the lifestyle of each one of us is important for all of us.

In this community called the church, we do care to see that each one of us is growing in grace and virtue, and we work together toward that end. That means that we are bold and willing to hold each other accountable.

But we do so always in a framework of compassion, understanding that each one of us is in a process of growth, that we will all make mistakes and hurt one another at times, but that the journey in Christ together as a community is worth our labors.

After all, we have the promise that never fails: “Where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.” Thanks be to God. Amen.  

Give to everyone

A Sermon for the 7th Sunday after the Epiphany (RCL A) 2-20-2011

Offered by Nathan Ferrell for Trinity Episcopal Shared Ministry
Texts: Leviticus 19:1-2,9-18; Psalm 119:33-40; 1 Corin. 3:10-11,16-23; Matt 5:38-48
Title: Give to everyone

Many of you already know this fact, and I’m sorry that I have to admit it now. But, I’m a little odd. I’m a bit different.I think differently than many others. I can’t help it. I’m a nature guy.

So, when I had the chance to spend a few days this past week up in the snowy mountains of New Hampshire, I was thinking a lot about porcupines. There is a cliff on the hillside behind our little cabin, and among the rocks at the base of this cliff lives a family of porcupines. In the winter, it is very easy to see what they’re up to, and in the summer I sometimes pick up quills that they drop.

With me today, I have some of the quills that I’ve found up at the base of this cliff. I’ll pass them around for everyone to see. (Sorry all of you internet folk - all I can offer you here is a picture!) 

Do you know how porcupine quills work? They are found on the back side of porcupines, but the quills do not shoot out and off of their bodies. The end of each quill has tiny barbs, like microscopic fish hooks. They can easily grab the fur or the flesh of an attacker and they are designed to easily disconnect from the porcupine’s body. When they are stuck in the flesh of an attacker, these little barbs swell up from body heat. This makes them even more difficult to remove and thus more painful.

This is how a porcupine treats its enemies. Why does the animal do this? Because of the real possibility of loss. The porcupine has to protect itself against losing its life, or losing the life of its offspring, and so against the end of its family.

And so as I was snowshoeing through the forest this week, I was thinking about our Lord’s revolutionary teaching that loving our enemies is the best way to live, and also thinking about porcupines and how they react to their enemies.

There is no doubt about the fact that we human beings are animals. We are part of the animal world. The animals of this planet are our relatives, our cousins. We share many things in common with them. And yet, it is also true that we are different from them, that we are heavenly, spiritual beings who have been blessed by God with consciousness, soul, a different kind of intelligence.

And so when Jesus gives us this powerful call to “be perfect, therefore, as [our] heavenly Father is perfect” (Matt. 5:48), he is calling us to live our daily lives in accordance with the spiritual aspect of our natures.

This is a difficult passage for us to understand. What does it mean to be perfect? I think a better translation of this passage is the one supplied by Eugene Peterson in The Message. This is how he words it in contemporary colloquial language:

Jesus said: "In a word, what I'm saying is, Grow up. You're kingdom subjects. Now live like it. Live out your God-created identity. Live generously and graciously toward others, the way God lives toward you."

How is it, after all, that God is able to give the blessing of the sun and the rain to all people, even to the nastiest people of all? How is it that God is able to live generously and graciously even toward people who hate God? Because, unlike the animals, God has no need to fear the possibility of loss. There is nothing that any human being can do to harm God, to cause God loss or pain or suffering. Beside the extraordinary situation of the passion and crucifixion of Jesus, there is no way for human beings to truly harm God.

This is how I understand what Jesus is trying to communicate to us in this phenomenal teaching. We each have the choice to respond to the actions of others either according to our animal instincts, or else according to our soul force.

It is easy to see other people as threats to our lives. And so it is easy to treat our enemies the way that porcupines treat their enemies.

But we have another option. It’s a bit crazy, a little radical, I know. Jesus invites us to see humanity in the same exact way that God sees them. Because our lives are now “hidden with Christ in God”, we can in fact respond to others, even our mortal enemies, with generosity and grace. We can live without the fear of loss, because our lives are in the hands of God.

It is only when we let go of our fear and when we allow ourselves to be overwhelmed by the grace of God that we are able to love our enemies.

Because the truth, my dear friends, is this: if you live as part of the body of Christ, then there is truly nothing that anyone can do to harm you. If God truly and honestly is in charge of this mess which we call life on planet earth, then we have nothing at all to fear.

Dallas Willard talks about the Christ-like attitude toward our enemies in this way:

“We are not passive, but we act always with clear-eyed and resolute love. We know what is really happening, seeing it from the point of view of eternity. And we know that we will be taken care of, no matter what. We can be vulnerable because we are, in the end, simply invulnerable. And once we have broken the power of anger and desire over our lives, we know that the way of Christ in response to personal injury [and imposition] is always the easier way. It is [in fact] the only way that allows us to move serenely in the midst of harm and beyond it” (The Divine Conspiracy, p. 181).

However true this may be – and it is true! – we all know just how easy it is to fall back into our old animal ways: to go about getting revenge on others, gossiping about people behind their backs, wishing ill toward people that we don’t like, being afraid of what others might do to us. Unfortunately, it is very easy to sink back into this old pattern of thinking.

We need help in making our new life a reality where we live and work every day. And so we are reminded again of our peculiar vocation as the church of God. We are called to be a soul-force boot camp, a spiritual university where we learn and study together all of the practical ways by which we can transform our minds from those animal instincts and into a pattern of thinking and living which reflects the reality of God in our lives.

That is why God has given us to each other in community: for practical training in true inner goodness. Thankfully, we don’t have to invent the curriculum. It’s all right here!

For instance, when our Master teaches us to pray for those who persecute you, he is giving us a practical way to change our lives.

Have you ever actually tried this with intention and discipline? Tried to pray regularly for someone who was troubling you, for your nemesis? Whenever I have done so, I find it impossible to wish them harm, or to think ill of them. If I am praying for them, praying that God blesses them and fills their lives with joy and peace and guides them in the ways of truth, then I find that I am not able to wish them any different!

Here is just one of the many practical ways given to us by our Lord Jesus by which we can change our habitual ways of thinking through intentional practice. There are countless more.

It is my prayer and my hope that we can truly become this kind of community where we study and practice together in the ways and methods of changing our lives, as we all grow together in our ability to live out our God-created identities. May it be so. Amen.

Rejoice with Me!

Sermon for Proper 19 C RCL 9/12/2010, Offered by Nathan Ferrell for Trinity Episcopal Shared Ministry


Texts: Jeremiah 4:11-12, 22-28; Psalm 14; 1 Timothy 1:12-17; Luke 15:1-10

O God, make us masters of ourselves so that we might become the servants of others. Take our minds and think through them; take our lips and speak through them; take our hearts and set them on fire. Amen.

My dear friends in Christ: What does it mean to be saved? What does it mean to be found? “I once was lost, but now am found.” What is it that you think of, that you imagine, when you consider that God has saved you? Saved you from what?

Here in the Gospel of Luke, we have this fantastic collection of parables that speak of God going out and finding that which was lost. Here, Jesus asks us to consider that God is a shepherd seeking after a lost sheep; that God is a woman who sweeps the house in search of her lost coin. This series of parables ends with the prodigal son and the patiently waiting father, but this is saved for another Sunday.

Let us give thanks that God is the one who seeks after us with such diligence and persistence. But what do these parables say about us as the lost sheep and the lost coin?

What does it mean for me to admit to myself that I am lost? Do you know the first of the 12 Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous? If you don’t know it now, I suggest that you learn it. It goes like this:

“We admitted we were powerless over alcohol – that our lives had become unmanageable.”

If you were to visit a group of Overeaters Anonymous, you would hear the group admit that they “were powerless over food.”

Whatever it is that is your particular stumbling block, whatever it is that keeps you from experiencing life as God intended it, you can insert that right in. “I admit that I am powerless over ___X___ - and that my life has become unmanageable.”

It is true that we have to recognize that we are “lost”, before we will accept that God has found us. God is not an enhancement for our lives, something we add to make our lives better. We must admit it: without God, our lives are unmanageable and we are lost.

But even then, even after we can admit this fact, and when we are found and recovered and restored to our rightful place, when we become conscious of God in our everyday lives, that sensation of being lost never completely fades away. Look at the testimony of the apostle Paul in his letter today. Even at this stage when he is an older man giving guidance to his younger protégé.

“The saying is sure and worthy of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners – of whom I am the foremost” (1 Timothy 1:15).

I appreciate the way that this passage is translated by Eugene Peterson in The Message. Listen to this colloquial translation:

“Here's a word you can take to heart and depend on: Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners. I'm proof—Public Sinner Number One—of someone who could never have made it apart from sheer mercy. And now he shows me off—evidence of his endless patience—to those who are right on the edge of trusting him forever” (1 Timothy 1:15-16, The Message).

In order to be found, we have to realize deep within that we are lost. And this is a process that never completely ends. In a real sense, God is always finding us, over and over again throughout our lives.

But, back to our original question: From what are we saved? What happens when we are found? What change happens when we are saved by Christ?

Brian McLaren tells the story of friends of his who came across a snapping turtle crossing the road somewhere in South Jersey. You know snapping turtles? Big, ugly things that look like the cousins of dinosaurs! Slimy, with powerful jaws that snap your finger off if you’re not careful! They can grow up to 30 pounds in ideal conditions. Well, this turtle they found had a problem. It seems that, when it was a hatchling, the turtle came across a plastic ring from the top of a milk jug or some other plastic container. Someone must have littered and thrown this into the water, and now this ring became lodged around the center of the turtle’s body. It wasn’t a big problem when the turtle was young, but when these folks found it, the turtle was likely around 9 pounds and about a foot long. About one-third of the way to its full size potential. This plastic ring has seriously deformed it, so that now the turtle was shaped like a figure eight!


McLaren’s friends astutely realized that the turtle could never continue to grow and survive if this plastic ring was left in place. So (very, very carefully of course!) they snipped that ring and took it off.

And what happened then? Nothing! Nothing at all happened. The turtle continued crossing the road. It still looked like a bizarre figure eight. It didn’t suddenly, magically, revert back to the normal shape for snapping turtles.

What changed then when these folks cut that ring off of the turtle? One crucial thing changed. At that very moment, suddenly, that turtle had a future! It was lost, on its way to a painful death, but now it was found by someone who saw its predicament and who cared enough to do something! Now it was saved. Now it was rescued.

St. Paul frames the truth of our situation with absolute clarity today: “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners” (1 Timothy 1:15).

What does it mean to be a sinner saved by grace? What does it mean for you to place your trust in Christ, to be found by him?

It means that we have been set free from “a ring of selfishness, greed, injustice, fear, prejudice, arrogance, apathy, chauvinism, and ignorance” (McLaren, A Generous Orthodoxy, P.98). You know, it probably took months, or perhaps even years, for that turtle to regain its true and natural shape once again. The same is typically true of us as well. Once we recognize that we are lost on our own, once we allow Christ to find us, it may take months or even years for our hearts and our souls to regain their true and natural shapes once again. But now we have the chance! Because of the mercy and patience and grace and love of God in Jesus, now we have a future in which we can grow and become the radiantly full and free human being that God has created us to be!

About 1900 years ago, St. Irenaeus wrote that “The glory of God is a human being who is fully alive.” Yes! Yes! Yes! God has cut the ring around you that has held you back. You picked it up somewhere when you were just a hatchling. We all pick up garbage and litter and baggage along the way. But God saw our predicament and cared enough to do something! Of course, the struggle is not over. It will take our full attention and effort to stretch back into our natural, God-given shape.

But now, praise be to God, we have the chance!

This work of seeking and saving and finding and restoring is God’s work. God is the shepherd who goes searching for the lost sheep. God is the woman who seeks after her lost coin. And what does God do after finding the lost sheep and the lost coin? God throws a party, of course! “Rejoice with me!” That is God’s invitation to join in the party and celebrate that we have been found. Will you join in the celebration?

The Whole Fullness of Deity

Sermon for Proper 12 C RCL 7-25-2010

Offered by Nathan Ferrell for Trinity Episcopal Shared Ministry

Texts:             Hosea 1:2-10; Psalm 85; Colossians 2:6-19; Luke 11:1-13

Recently, I heard a story from someone who attended a church summer camp a number of years ago. During one of the large group gatherings, a group of men dressed all in black rushed into the chapel. They were carrying machine guns and they immediately went up to the front and tied up the four pastors who were there, and they held a gun to the head of the main pastor. And one of the masked men yelled out over the noise to the hundreds of camp kids and counselors who were there that anyone who is a Christian needs to stand up.

A few brave souls stood up – the faithful few, but the rest ran out all of the doors in a chaotic scramble. There were kids running all through the woods, scared and crying, with girls screaming, older kids cursing. And as this one particular camper tells the story, she and her friends were running back to their cabin to find a safe place to hide when they saw camp counselors going along all of the paths with flashlights and bullhorns. And the counselors were proclaiming to everyone with their bullhorns: “Don’t be afraid. It’s not real; it’s only a play!” You see, it all was just a skit designed to be part of the chapel lesson that night!

Some zealous, probably well-intentioned, but very inexperienced young person must have planned that skit, because they thought that it was a great way to teach a lesson about the boldness of Christians, that we ought to be brave to stand up for our faith in the face of any kind of danger.

This lesson is very much like the one intended by those who have often posed this question: “If you were arrested for being a Christian, would they have enough evidence to convict you?”

I don’t often think about my potential response to this kind of challenge to my faith, but I thought about it this past week in response to our reading today from the Letter to the Colossians.

Here in our passage today, we are given a litany of different forces at work in the milieu of the first century which had the potential to distract or subvert the faith of these Christians. Philosophy, empty deceit, human tradition, the elemental spirits of the universe (whatever these might be, nobody seems to know!), matters of food and drink, festivals, new moons, Sabbaths, self-abasement, the worship of angels, visions, human ways of thinking.

We, of course, cannot relate necessarily to this particular list, because we have our own forces at work in our society that have the potential to de-rail our life with Christ.

And as I thought about these challenges to my faith, it seems clear that the greatest danger, for me at least, is what I will call the general malaise of secularism. That is, it is so easy to fall into an easy pattern of busyness, to go about life doing what we do, trusting in our abilities and our technologies to keep life moving along. And before we know it, a day, a week, a month passes before we really give God much of a thought.

It’s really all about time. When the question is asked if they would have enough evidence to convict me as a Christian, I think that the most important measure of this is the amount of time that I intentionally spend on my relationship with God.

There is no deep and healthy relationship without a noticeable, measurable amount of time spent together by two people with the intention of knowing each other more deeply.

As most of you know, we men tend to be very good at being able to pick up a friendship right where we left off, even if we haven’t seen each other in a year or more. That’s how it is for me and my friends. We see each other once or twice a year. It’s really no big deal to most of us men, and I have a hunch that a lot of men feel this same way about God. “It’s no big deal,” they think, “when I get back to church eventually, God and I will pick up right where we left off!”

But it doesn’t work that way with deeper relationships. You can’t do that with your spouse, your partner, your girlfriend!

When we are talking about our relationship with God, what we are talking about is the intentional time that we spend in prayer. When you boil it all down, our regular daily practice of prayer IS the measure of our closeness, and our bond of connection, with God.

Jesus himself spent regular time in prayer abiding in that close connection with the one he called “Abba”. When the disciples ask about his prayer practice, so that they might learn from his experience, he begins with this signature note of his teaching about the nature of God: Abba.

Of course, we say “Our Father, who art in heaven.” We say it so much that it is likely that we forget how tremendous a gift that this represents. To call God our Abba, our Daddy, our Papa, means that we have now been brought into the same intimate connection with God as Jesus himself experienced. The same. Brothers and sisters together in the same family!

The mystery of the Incarnation allows pulls us in this direction: God became what we are in Christ – God took up our human nature – in order that we might become what God is – that we might take up the divine nature.

St. Paul sums it up very clearly for us in our reading today. “For in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily” (Colossians  2:9). That’s mind-blowing, and to be honest, we humans still haven’t quite figured out all the implications of that.

Eugene Peterson, in his free-form contemporary translation called  The Message, puts that verse in this way: “Everything of God gets expressed in him, so you can see and hear him clearly. You don't need a telescope, a microscope, or a horoscope to realize the fullness of Christ, and the emptiness of the universe without him” (emphasis added).  

The fullness of God’s nature is seen clearly in Jesus Christ, because he is the Incarnation of God. But this verse continues, and here we find the kicker: “AND YOU have come to fullness in him” (Colossians 2:10).

You and I have come to fullness in Christ. What more can we ask for, then, but to actually and tangibly experience this fullness, this completeness in our daily lives because of our close relationship with God.

This week, my friends, as you go about your busy lives, spend a few minutes each day thinking about the Lord’s Prayer. Don’t rush through it, as usual. Pause on each phrase, each distinctive word, and let the Spirit guide you into new and creative ways to understand these familiar words. Meditate on them, my friends. Chew on them mentally.

And remember that it is a gift of the fullness of Christ that we are privileged to call God our Abba, our Father. Amen.