In the name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
This fall, I’m going to
take my sermons in a different direction. My focus will be a bit more inward
than outward. Of the 19 sermons I’ve preached this year, 3 have had what you
might call a prophetic edge; they have challenged our relationship of
complicity with our flawed economic and political systems. And while I firmly
believe that sometimes preaching a challenging sermon is called for, I realize
that it can create an “us versus them” mentality.
And I’ve heard a bit of grumbling about those three sermons. To be
honest, I’m fine with that. If our faith in Jesus Christ doesn’t shake us to
the core and make us uncomfortable, then we’re probably wearing blinders. I know
that a collar is a target as much as it is a sign of my ordination. What pains
me about it is that no one has come to me to continue the conversation began in
the sermon. Not a single person came to me to say that I angered or frustrated
them. And I really wish that this was a community that could speak directly to
each other instead of speaking about each other in the parking lot.
That being said, I realize that for some, Sunday
worship is a shelter from the storms of the world, a place to get away from
conflict. Now I’m not going to start preaching the heresy of the prosperity
gospel; I will always preach the transforming and redeeming love of God. It’s
not that we all need to agree on every single issue, but we do need to come
together on common priorities. We can debate about the best way to protect the
poor; but as a nation, we’re not doing the work of the Gospel. The priorities
of the Gospel aren’t Democrat, Tea Party, or Republican. And we need to get
away from this “straight-ticket” nonsense where we pledge more allegiance to
Obama or Boehner than we do Jesus.
My preaching has never had anything to do with the
politics of the United States, but rather the politic of God. But God’s politic
is about ethics, and ethics starts with us. So I’m going to have an inward
focus this fall, I’ll leave discussions about Supreme Court or Congress to the
pundits for a while. And I hope that this shift allows everyone to hear me, to
be with me, but more importantly, to be with God.
And there is one other shift I’m going to make this
fall. I’ll be focusing my preaching on the epistles. A few months ago, I had a
conversation with a clergy colleague and discussed the reality that most
liberal-Protestant sermons tend to focus on the Gospel, or occasionally on the Hebrew
Bible. And Evangelical churches tend to place more emphasis on the epistles
found in the New Testament. And no one really preaches the Psalms. In all my
time at St. Francis, I don’t think a sermon has ever been preached that took
the epistle reading as the foundation.
There is a good reason for this. Epistle is a Greek
word that means “letter.” We are a people of the story. We read fiction, go to
plays, and watch movies because we enjoy the narrative and the plot. But letters
don’t have a plot. Letters are written in a very specific situation for a very
clear purpose. And sometimes it’s difficult to figure out how a 2,000 year old
letter applies to us. Stories we can relate to, but a treatise is different.
Furthermore, the epistles tend to dive into very complex theological arguments,
such as sanctification, justification, and atonement. Because there is so
little preaching done that focuses on the epistles, those words have dropped
out of our common religious language; and I want to reclaim that language. So
my focus this fall, in addition to being inward, will be on the epistles. And
each time we start a new letter, it will be helpful to consider some of its
background information.
So we’ll begin this new direction with 1 Timothy. Though
this letter purports to be written by Paul to Timothy, the vast majority of
scholars believe that is pseudo-Pauline, being written not by Paul, but one of
his loyal followers, perhaps sometime between 90-110. Timothy lived in
southeast Asia Minor and likely met Paul around the year 46 when Paul came
through on his missionary journey. When Paul again passed through the region a
few years later, tradition says that Timothy joined Paul in his work of
ministry and evangelization.
Paul’s authorship is in doubt because 1 Timothy seems
to contradict some of the timeline established in the book of Acts for the
activities of the early church, has some clear differences in vocabulary and
grammar from other letters of Paul, and suggests a fairly organized church,
which would not have existed during Paul’s lifetime.
1 Timothy is, along with 2 Timothy and Titus, called a
pastoral epistle. These letters were likely written a bit later than some
others, as their focus is not missional or concerned with the establishing of a
church. But rather, these letters express ongoing care for already evangelized communities
after the missionaries have left. So there is a lot of focus on staying strong
in the faith and resisting false teachers and heretics. They were living in a
time not all that unlike ours. They were asking questions such as “how do we
relate to the world?” Centuries later, St. Augustine would write about two
cities, the heavenly city and the earthly city. Each person struggles to live
in the earthly city while remaining a citizen of the heavenly city. It’s really
what Jesus is getting at in today’s gospel reading when he says “you cannot
serve God and wealth.”
It’s a question of priorities, of allegiance. In John,
Jesus says “If you belonged to the world, the world would love you as its own.
Because you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world.”
Do we put our stock in governments, or in businesses, or communities, or in
God? The early church struggled with the question, and it hasn’t been
definitively answered ever since then.
And part of the solution that is being offered is “First
of all, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be
made for everyone, for kings and all who are in high positions, so that we may
lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and dignity.” It is important
to note that there is never a “second of all” mentioned in this letter. So this
point about praying for all sorts of people, including those in power, means
that prayer is the way we exist in this world as citizens of another.
The reason why we should pray, the reason why “This is
right and is acceptable in the sight of God our Savior, who desires everyone to
be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth,” is because “there is one
God; there is also one mediator between God and humankind, Christ Jesus,
himself human, who gave himself a ransom for all.”
As I mentioned earlier, often in the epistles we run into
theological constructs that can be a challenge to understand. This morning I’d like
to pay special attention to the idea that Jesus is our mediator. Now often when
we think of Jesus, we come up with titles such as Prince of Peace, Lord,
Savior, Good Shepherd, but mediator, though less common, is still a good and valid
title. A mediator represents the interests of both parties and works toward reconciliation;
they usher in peace between those who are estranged. So the concept at work
here is that humanity is living in the earthly city, and we’re becoming quite
comfortable here. And as we become comfortable, we start to adopt some of the
norms of the earthly city. So pride, selfishness, and violence become part of
our lives. But these are not the ways of the heavenly kingdom. The sin of the
earthly city has alienated us from the heavenly city. In effect, we have come
to renounce our heavenly citizenship. So we need a mediator, or an ambassador,
who can help to reconnect us to God, to show us the way back to God. And that
mediator is Jesus.
In Hebrews we read that “For if the blood of goats and
bulls…sanctifies those who have been defiled so that their flesh is purified, how
much more will the blood of Christ…purify our conscience from dead works to
worship the living God! For this reason he is the mediator of a new covenant.” Now
I realize that for some of us, it seems rather barbaric and antiquated to
believe that it took the slaughter of an innocent man to satisfy God’s rage;
that Jesus had to die for us to be made right with God. But I think that his
metaphor of Jesus as mediator is a helpful one.
Genesis begins with God saying “let us make anthropos in our image.” Anthropos is a Greek word that means “man
or humanity.” Though we, as anthropos,
are made in the image of God, we are not God, and so we need a mediator. We
need someone who is both like God and like us to mediate the conversation.
Previously, the Law of the Torah was a means of mediation, but our sinfulness and
inability to remain steadfast to the Law strained the relationship. And so as
Paul writes in Colossians “[Jesus] is the image of the invisible God, the
firstborn of all creation.” In other
words, Jesus is also anthropos, and
more than that, the very first of the anthropos.
1 Timothy uses the word anthropos twice
in once verse. First, it notes that there is one mediator between God and anthropos, and then makes it very clear
that Jesus himself is a part of this anthropos.
This is what Emmanuel, God with us, is all about. This
is why God came to earth to be incarnate in the person of Jesus of Nazareth.
The only way to know God is to have some form of mediation, and so God offers
the best possible mediation, Godself. Now I don’t know why it is, but there is
a chasm between the city of earth and the city of God, and that chasm is death.
As Jesus says in John, “I am the gate. Whoever enters by me will be saved, and
will come in and go out and find pasture.”
Though he never says it, I think Jesus might also be
seen at the bridge that spans that chasm across death. Since Jesus is anthropos, he can be our ambassador. And
since he is also God, he is God’s ambassador. Jesus can mediate for both sides.
But as an anthropos, the only way
across the chasm is to die. And so through the blood of Christ, Jesus, the
first anthropos, has gone before the
throne of God as our mediator, to reconcile us to God. As John Calvin said, “Since
he entered heaven in our flesh, as if in our name, it follows that in a sense,
we are already sitting with God in the heavenly places.” The blood of Christ
isn’t about Jesus dying in our place; it is rather Jesus being our bridge to
God, our mediator, to reconcile the strained relationship between humanity and
God; it is about Jesus taking us to God.
Now I realize that this is rather dense and is getting
into some of the finer points of theology; I warned you that the epistles can
be a bit of a challenge. Perhaps you’ve learned something about faith, maybe
you see Jesus in a new light now, that of a mediator. But you might be
wondering, what differences does it make to me?
Having Jesus as our mediator gives us freedom. It
gives us the freedom to throw ourselves fully into living for God’s present and
continually coming Kingdom on earth as it is in heaven. Jesus speaks the truth
that we all know is true, but sometimes wishthat it wasn’t- we cannot serve two
masters. As special as we think we are, we can’t really multi-task that well.
But because we have a mediator, because we are reconciled to God, we can trust that
God knows what it means to be anthropos.
We don’t have to worry about serving the slave-masters of power, prestige,
wealth, judgment, closed mindedness, revenge, violence, hatred, anxiety, fear,
or even death. And to be clear, they are slave-masters. Those things will put
us in shackles and demand our blood, sweat, and tears. And when death does come
calling for us, what will any of those things have to say in our defense? Not a
thing.
But Jesus, as our mediator, has reconciled us to God. Having
Jesus as our mediator frees us to live for God and gives us freedom from all
that enslaves us. Thanks be to God!
