Nathan attended the Presbytery of Northern Waters meeting in Rice Lake, WI on Friday and Saturday, October 23 and 24. Our presbytery gathers three times a year for worship and business, including this two-day meeting. Here are some highlights:

• The education segment focused on communal discernment, a model for exploring options and reaching decisions without a debate over win/lose positions.
• The 2010 PNW budget was approved. The presbytery chose to pass an unbalanced budget, rather than raise the per capita apportionment by an additional $2.52 (the increase this year is $0.25). Our executive presbyter and treasurer chose to decline pay increases for the year in light of this budget situation.
• The Committee on Ministry invited three congregations to share about changes in their approaches to ministry. These included restructuring the session, reorienting discipleship ministries, and partnering with other local congregations. All three congregations are seeing new vitality in their lives together.

This represents only a little of the business that came before our presbytery at this meeting. For more details, feel free to ask Nathan, or come along to our next presbytery meeting!

Hebrews 7:23-28

Mark 10:46-52

The book of Hebrews has this great high Christology, this description of Jesus as our eternal high priest who transcends all other priests. This reading is just part of several chapters where the author goes through point by point, showing how Jesus is greater than any human priests (especially, in this context, compared to the Jewish priesthood). It seems fitting to read some of this on Reformation Sunday, when we celebrate our Protestant heritage, among which is the idea of the priesthood of all believers. We value this idea, that you must work out your sense of God for yourself, and I don’t define your belief. Because Christ fulfills that priestly role, we don’t need another priest. We can stand before God on our own, with Christ to stand for us.

Luther, Calvin, and Knox were all clear on this: no one can stand between you and God, and you can – you should – pray directly for yourself. There was much else to Reformation, but the general idea was to get the church out of the way between the people and God. Spiritually speaking, there should be no hierarchy, no spiritual experts. We should all struggle and search together, and Christ is with us all. So we celebrate that Reformation boldness today, that of Luther standing before the bishops for the sake of faith.

Bartimaeus does it right: he boldly stands before God, in the face of powers that could stop him. He makes a bold declaration. To name Jesus as the “Son of David” is dangerous, and the crowd tries to silence him. This is a messianic name: the “Son of David” was expected to be a military leader who would drive out the Romans and reestablish the nation of Israel. Like elsewhere in Mark, outsiders like this blind beggar know Jesus’ status and say it. Unlike elsewhere, Jesus doesn’t silence Bartimaeus. Instead, he acknowledges that there is something deeply true in that name.

At the same time, Bartimaeus doesn’t get to God on his own. He doesn’t even get to Jesus on his own. He called out on his own, spoke to Jesus on his own, and named his own need (there’s an important truth about Jesus there), but he didn’t hear Jesus speaking. He didn’t know Jesus was there to call on without help. The crowd must have said Jesus was there, and then Bartimaeus knew to call on him. The crowd told him to get up. Just imagine if he’d never heard that; he’d still be sitting there blind.

So on this day we celebrate the Reformation, standing before God without an intercessor other than the Christ, we see Bartimaeus in need of an intercessor. He needed people to go between him and Christ, or he wouldn’t have heard. That’s always been the upper bound on the Reformation – we cherish the priesthood of all, but we still need priests. Sometimes, we or others can’t see all the way to God. We can’t stand for ourselves. Big moments like birth, death, marriage, or transition, and less intense times of darkness and distance. Sometimes (often?), we need someone else to hold God’s presence for us.

The Reformation was not wrong. This is our need for priests, not God’s. We can assume that Jesus would have found Bartimaeus without the crowd’s help. It’s hard for us to imagine Christ not going out of his way, and we often feel found as if Christ had gone out of the way to get to us. More often, we can name the people who called to us: “Cheer up! Get up! Christ is calling you.” We even make the appropriate connection and see these human calls or invitations as divine. We know it’s God calling. Christ goes out of the way to reach Bartimaeus through the crowd, just as Christ has gone out of the way to find us through others.

Bartimaeus needed priests – go-betweens – just as we often need others to stand for us before God. That’s as scandalous to say now as Hebrews’ rejection of the priesthood was then. It’s Reformation Sunday, and we need a priest?! But notice who these priests are: people from crowd, or even the crowd all together. Jesus asks no questions of purity, nothing about proper ordination, not even anything about academic preparations! He just says, “call him.” We don’t know who called. No one in particular did, but it’s as if the whole crowd together did it.

The whole crowd called to Bartimaeus. An intermediary was needed, and the Spirit called it forth from that group. Christ called it forth from some particular person in the crowd – the Spirit of love heard and spoke a reply. That’s how it is for us. The world calls out, “have mercy,” and the Spirit calls us to respond. Not because God can’t serve the world without us, but because the world longs to see God in us. And when we turn, respond, and call on Christ’s behalf, we are members of Christ’s eternal priesthood.

When we serve the poor, visit the sick, or speak out for the powerless, we – the whole church – embody Christ. When this building welcomes those outside it, we embody Christ’s great love. When we pray, lifting the world and its needs before a merciful God, we embody Christ’s mercy. When we meet to worship, when we go out to serve, we embody Christ – each of us and all as this community. We’re priests with Christ in the grace of God, now and forever.

Amen.

Psalm 104:1-9, 24, 35c

Mark 10:35-45

Jesus must have cringed whenever he heard someone say, “Teacher.” There was always a bad question on the way, especially when Jesus had just talked about his impending death and resurrection. That idea just seems to bring out something lousy in the disciples. James and John want to be great, the second and third in command when Jesus rises in glory, and Jesus tells them how to do it. First, they have to go through his trial – to “drink the cup” of suffering and rejection we remember in the Lord’s Supper, and to “be baptized” into the death he faces, just as we think of Baptism as death and rebirth – and only then can they share in his resurrection.

Second, they must be servants and slaves of all, just as Jesus gave up his status to come among us as a servant. There’s a profound theology in this, the kind of idea you could build a great church tradition around, and that’s exactly what we did. Jesus’ statement gets at something we (and many others) have made part of our church structure. He gets at what real leadership means in a sinful world where humans take power over each other and use it for their own purposes. The leadership God wants is different. It’s based on service to each other, because that’s how Christ came into the world. It’s how the sinful world is remade.

It’s a little troublesome to talk about sin. That’s a part of our heritage that many people dislike, that maybe we’ve been too focused on human sinfulness. But Jesus was talking about sin. He identifies it in how people in authority set themselves above others, so they can control other people. He sees this tendency at work in the disciples, just as it has been at work in all of us, and he rejects that selfish model of leadership. He offers a new way to be great. He turns leadership on its head, inviting us to give up our desires for power and status, to become servants.

We built this idea into our way of being the church, in a way that Jesus might have been proud of. We call on our leaders to serve first. Our church system doesn’t trust leaders with too much authority, and we put as many people in charge as we can. First Presbyterian Church in Virginia, one of our predecessor congregations, had 29 committees in 1917! This reminds me of the other version of our light-bulb joke: How many Presbyterians does it take to change a light bulb?

300. 12 to sit on the Board which appoints the Nominating and Personnel Committee. 5 will sit on the Nominating and Personnel Committee, which appoints the Property Committee. 8 will sit on the Property Committee, which appoints the Light Bulb changing committee. 4 to sit on the Light Bulb Changing Committee, which chooses who will screw in the Light Bulb–those 4 then give their own opinion of “screwing in methods” while the one actually does the installation. After completion it takes 100 individuals to complain about the method of installation and another 177 to debate the ecological impact of using the light bulb at all. (thanks to North Decatur Presbyterian Church)

Our system is designed to keep any one of us from doing too much, to remind us that we depend on each other. We can lead only as we serve. It was important to John Calvin, John Knox, and John Witherspoon to resist letting clergy (like me) make all the rules. It’s important to most of us to affirm and value people’s insights, ideas, and needs. We know that to lead a group is to serve its members.

Our church structure is a particular Scottish/Calvinist approach to undermining the authority of “the one in charge,” but here – especially today on Heritage Sunday – there are many traditions represented (most with unique Iron Range surnames), and most of them include their own ways of keeping big-shots in line. There’s something about living together, in a place where 50 degrees in October feels balmy, that reminds us that we depend on each other. Because we depend on each other, we find great value in having our leaders know they depend on us too.

This is the same kind of value we find in our relationship with the rest of the world. We know we depend on it all, human and non-human. Nature itself keeps the human species’ authority in line – we’re “in charge” of ecosystems and resources, but we depend on them. We must learn from them how best to live, and this awareness helps us lead rather than exploiting the world until it gives out on us. This respect for and interest in the natural world is a deep, quiet current in our heritage. God made the natural world too, and it’s best to learn about it. Calvin and Knox were radicals about universal education, and we have only rarely had trouble with science. More recently, this congregation has read nature especially well. Many of us find God as clearly in nature as in scripture, as if they are two pages of the same book.

That’s the truth, that we study nature because God is there, not because we want to avoid using nature poorly only to have it give out on us. The second part true too, just as it’s true that leaders who forget to serve will get their comeuppance from their followers. But the real point is that we know the world because God is in it. We serve the people we lead because service brings us closer to God in the flesh. Jesus came to us as a servant, so our highest way of being is at the bottom of the ladder with Christ. The greatest among us serve.

Like every church, we have to learn this time and again. We don’t always trust the path of service to lead to greatness, but we always find that it does. From the beginning, we’ve taught, we’ve opened our arms to those outside our community, and we’ve made room for the least among us at Christ’s table. We’ve lived by the simple story that God came from greatness to be among us, and so our greatness is with God. Our greatness is with God who lives as a servant, who invites us to serve each other, supported by God’s love in the church.

Amen.

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Job 23:1-9, 16-17

Mark 10:17-31

I owe thanks to Bonnie for introducing me to Thomas Merton’s prayer, which I love. We read it today as our Prayer of the Church. I only knew Merton by name before I came to Hope, and now I hope we will eventually get to call him “St Thomas” (not that we do that sort of thing). Merton captured the uncertainty of faith. He knew that God was mysterious, and that really we can’t even be certain about ourselves. Writing in the middle of the twentieth century, he brought Zen to Christian life. He made clear that the goal of faith is not to find an image of God. We’re here to enter a mystery, not to comprehend concepts. “Faith” is not a state of mind, as if we controlled the states of our minds anyway. God is a reality too deep for our simple confidence.

We know to be wary of confidence in ourselves. We don’t go looking for the kind of self-confidence that Job has in this reading. Job wants to seek God and make his case before the Judge of the universe. We tend to justify Job’s story as being about “pride,” that sin we love to hate. We suspect that God allowed Job’s suffering just so he didn’t get too cocky. There’s sure plenty of confidence in this passage: Job says, “Lemme at him! I’ll show him who’s just!” Job knows he’s good. But then again, so does God. This whole story started with God bragging about Job, who “doesn’t do anything evil.” Job is not punished for being bad, or even for being proud. The force of the story comes from Job’s goodness, his worthiness.

This is an ongoing problem in religion: why doesn’t God make more sense? Good and bad things happen regardless of our virtues. Life is manifestly unfair, and Job knows it, and he desperately wants to find God and set the record straight. But God is not interested in being found here. If you read on in the story, when Job does find God, he still gets no good answer to his complaint. Maybe Job would have gotten the same answer regardless of how he went looking, but his disappointment comes from approaching God looking to be proved right.

The man in Mark’s story seeks Jesus like Job sought for God – with an eye toward proving himself – and he’s just as disappointed with the answer he gets. This man does things right. He tells Jesus that he’s kept all the commandments and then some, and we know he’s right because God has rewarded him with wealth (as we knew God did for those who did right). Now he finds himself a good teacher, as if he could just follow Jesus’ goodness all the way to God, but Jesus says that’s not the point either. This man has a way (the commandments) and a guide (a Good Teacher named Jesus), but he still lacks one thing, and that thing devastates him.

Mark’s words, that the man is sad because he’s very rich, suggest that he’s unwilling to give up his money for God, that he loves money more than God. I’m not sure that’s case (but ask me again the next time this text comes up). Jesus doesn’t call this person a money-grubber. As he said, he’s kept all the commandments, presumably even #2, which prohibits us from making idols of anything, even money. Money was not a sign of unfaithfulness, it was was his reward for doing what’s right. Just as in Job’s time, the culture said that God rewarded faithfulness with prosperity, and this person’s riches proved his goodness. (Our time is not so different, really. We like to think people should get what’s coming to them, and it feels unfair when nasty people win.) I think that’s what makes this person sad – not the loss of the wealth itself, because that came from God anyway – but the loss of his symbol of divine favor. It makes him sad to give up his assurance God loves him, the sign of his reward (as Jesus suggests his followers will get as well).

We’re maybe one or steps beyond this. We know that money is not the only way God tells us we’re doing right (or some of us would be worried!), but we look to health, comfort, or “peace of mind” as concrete signs that we’re on the right track. We count the people showing up for our Sunday worship service, we weigh our faults against our good works, we inventory our friends and blessings. When seeking feels like it’s too much, we try to be convinced that we’ve found it, we’ve gotten to God.

That’s what disheartens this man: he has to give up his assurance that he’s got it figured out and learn how to live without confidence in his own understanding. Jesus invites him to give up something deeper than wealth: the sense that he knows where he’s going. Jesus invites this man to follow him all the way to the cross – to ultimate rejection, to the greatest distance from God you can imagine. He invites us to give up worldly things, but also to give up the self-assurance that we’re doing what’s right to begin with. It’s impossible to enter the Reign of God if we know what it is. The Reign of God is bigger than what we know (or what we feel, for that matter).

The Reign of God is huge, but its door is so small that if we were big enough to hold God’s Reign ourselves, we’d never fit through. Forget camels, try to fit a ball of yarn through the eye of a needle. You can’t do it all at once, just one piece at a time. So we have to go through the gate of God’s Domain empty, then be filled up – not vice versa. Even so, we can’t empty ourselves. Even a very small camel is too big for the eye of needle. This is impossible for us.

What the rich man lacked was something he already had. He didn’t lack money, he lacked freedom from it, from the self-judgment it means. Often our deepest wants are what we have: control, safety, or certainty of what God wants from us. Christ may ask us to give up our certainty – our control, our knowledge of what God calls us to. Christ may ask us to become something different. Christ may invite us to be free from the ways that the world measures our goodness, so we can live in God’s reality instead.

So this passage may invite you to give up your wealth, and we know we’re far richer than the majority of the world’s people. If that’s your call today, good. That’s part of why we put the offering immediately after the sermon, to give you a time to respond to God’s call by giving of yourself. But that’s the real point, money aside: to give of yourself, to give what God calls you to give, to be free to answer God’s invitation. Some people give money because God calls them to be free from their excess. Some give time in order to purify and structure their week. Some give energy and prayer. And some feel that they have nothing to give in the face of budgets, stresses, or pain.

I worry that we tend to turn this offering time into an obligation, that we ask you to give your money (and preferably more of it than you did last year) so the church doesn’t go belly up. Well, the Church is not going anywhere. I can’t say anything for certain about the CE building, or the sanctuary, or my salary, but the Church is here and you aren’t going anywhere. So give what you’re called to give. Let yourself be free of what you’re called to be free of. In these next minutes, let yourself release control over that part of your life. Pause and hold the plate as it comes to you. In prayer, respond to Christ’s invitation: come and follow. You may put a symbol or token of your wealth in the plate, dedicating your gifts to God’s service. You may reclaim yourself for your home, your family, or yourself. What you give may feel like much, or like nothing, but it’s plenty when you give it with your desire that this be your best intention.

Amen.

Psalm 8 – with quotes from the Metta Sutta by Thich Nhat Hanh

Mark 10:2-16

There’s a lot in the Mark passage I wish I had time to go through with you, but I’m going to try to keep this short and focused (shorter and more focused in the worship service than in this text). Kids, you’re up front to help us celebrate World Communion Sunday, and that’s what this is about. It’s tricky because it sounds like Jesus is talking about something very different. Some of the religious leaders asked him a question about divorce, about whether people who are married should be allowed to end their marriage.

So I need to talk about that really quickly, but it’s not the real point. The point I’m going to talk about is Communion. Here’s the really short version: Jesus says that it’s not a good thing for people to get divorced. It’s very painful for everyone involved. Some of you know this because your parents are divorced. I know this myself because my parents have been divorced since I was 12. Several of the adults in the congregation know it because they’ve been through divorce, or their parents or children or siblings have been through it. We know that it’s a very sad thing to end a marriage, even though sometimes it’s the best thing two people can do.

Jesus knows how sad divorce is, but he also says something else more important. He says that our responsibility to each other doesn’t end just because we need to end a relationship. My parents made that very clear to me: they promised that even though they couldn’t be married to each other, they would both still be my parents. They worked as hard as they could to be kind to each other during and after the divorce. They weren’t always able to do that, but I know they were trying very hard.

That’s the point Jesus makes. Even when our relationships break down, we’re still responsible for each other. Even though we sometimes hurt the people close to us, we still belong to each other. Jesus doesn’t say that we can’t get divorced because he gets mad at people for being unable to keep their relationships together. He tells us that asking about divorce is the wrong approach if you want to talk about marriage. It’s like asking a doctor if she’s in favor of amputation; she may be, but she’s going to make that decision on a much more focused scale than that!

What Jesus wants us to focus on is covenant. A covenant is a relationship based on promises and responsibilities for each other. Marriage is a covenant; so is the baptism that identifies us as members of the church. When they bring up the end of a covenant, the religious leaders are asking the kind of question religious leaders have tended to ask from the beginning of religion: “how might we judge people unfit to be part of our religious group?” Jesus wants to tell us that the real deal is to be open to receiving others into your relationship, into covenant with you. God is a relationship-making God.

That’s what this all has to do with World Communion Sunday. Ever since Paul’s time, we’ve insisted that people have to be “worthy” to receive Communion. Ever since Jesus’ time, people have been judged in part based on the table company they keep. Ever since Moses, people have looked for ways to cut the circle of God’s love down to something they find appetizing. Presbyterian churches used to keep their Communion Table up behind a wall or a railing, to indicate that people couldn’t join us at the table unless they were the right kind of people. We used to tell people they couldn’t come to the Table unless they had checked with the pastor first and gotten his okay that they were the right kind of Christian to share this meal with us.

I mean that we used to do the kinds of things that the religious leaders want to do. We used to do the kinds of things that even Jesus’ disciples do in this story. In the second part of the story, people are bringing children – kids no older than you guys – to be with Jesus and to let him bless them. Well, the disciples try to send these kids away, as if they were not big enough or important enough for Jesus. But Jesus said, “no, let the children be here too. You learn how to be faithful to our covenant with God by welcoming these children.” Kids, you know that you’re often the first ones left out of the serious conversations and the important rituals. Jesus says that’s not how it’s supposed to be. Everyone we’re responsible for belongs at God’s table, and we’re responsible for everyone!

In 1936, the Presbyterian Church learned a new way to remember this. We realized that there were millions of Christians all over the world. There have been billions of Christians throughout the years. They don’t all speak the same language we do, and they don’t all worship the same way we do. They don’t even all believe the same things we believe, and some of these Christians might tell others of these Christians that they aren’t really Christian at all. But we realized that we are all Christian anyway, no matter what we might disagree about or what we might think about each other. We realized that we’re all Christian because God’s love in Christ is big enough to wrap us all up, to welcome us all at this table.

So we decided to have a Sunday about that. We decided that whatever else we think, we should have one day when we say out loud that we’re all one great big church. We decided that even though we’ve spent many years keeping each other away from the Communion Tables in “our own” churches, we would remind ourselves at least once a year that this table isn’t so different from the other tables other people use. This food isn’t so different from the food other people share. When we come down to it, the invitation Christ gives us is way bigger than the differences between us. We’re all invited – all of us here, everyone everywhere. We’re all invited to join at Christ’s table, to receive God’s goodness in a form we can see and smell and touch and taste, to share what we have with all the rest of the world.

So we’re going to ask you to lead us in singing our Preparation Hymn. Then we’ll start sharing with our offering, then share the same Communion meal that billions of Christians share. Let’s all stand and sing together: # 514 Let Us Talents and Tongues Employ