Ordinary Time Winter 2007
February
4th, 5th Sunday after Epiphany
Title: Walking in the midst of trouble
Worship
Leader: Jonathan
Song
leader: Roger
Speaker: Linda
Texts:
Isaiah 6:1-8; [9-13 optional]; Psalm 138:1-8; 1 Corinthians 15:1-11;
Luke 5:1-11
Isaiah 6:1 In the year that King
Uzziah died, I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lofty; and the hem of
his robe filled the temple. 6:2 Seraphs were in attendance above him; each had
six wings: with two they covered their faces, and with two they covered their
feet, and with two they flew. 6:3 And one called to another and said:
"Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of hosts; the whole earth is full of his
glory." 6:4 The pivots on the thresholds shook at the voices of those who
called, and the house filled with smoke. 6:5 And I said: "Woe is me! I am
lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean
lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts!" 6:6 Then one of
the seraphs flew to me, holding a live coal that had been taken from the altar
with a pair of tongs. 6:7 The seraph touched my mouth with it and said:
"Now that this has touched your lips, your guilt has departed and your sin
is blotted out." 6:8 Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, "Whom
shall I send, and who will go for us?" And I said, "Here am I; send
me!"
[6:9
And he said, "Go and say to this people: 'Keep listening, but do not
comprehend; keep looking, but do not understand.' 6:10 Make the mind of this
people dull, and stop their ears, and shut their eyes, so that they may not
look with their eyes, and listen with their ears, and comprehend with their
minds, and turn and be healed." 6:11 Then I said, "How long, O
Lord?" And he said: "Until cities lie waste without inhabitant, and
houses without people, and the land is utterly desolate; 6:12 until the LORD
sends everyone far away, and vast is the emptiness in the midst of the land.
6:13 Even if a tenth part remain in it, it will be burned again, like a
terebinth or an oak whose stump remains standing when it is felled." The
holy seed is its stump.]
Psalm 138 Call and Response
I give you thanks, O LORD, with my whole
heart;
before
the gods I sing your praise;
I
bow down toward your holy temple
and
give thanks to your name for your steadfast love and your faithfulness;
for
you have exalted your name and your word above everything.
On
the day I called, you answered me,
you
increased my strength of soul.
All
the kings of the earth shall praise you, O LORD,
for
they have heard the words of your mouth.
They
shall sing of the ways of the LORD,
for
great is the glory of the LORD.
For
though the LORD is high, he regards the lowly;
but
the haughty he perceives from far away.
Though
I walk in the midst of trouble,
you
preserve me against the wrath of my enemies;
you
stretch out your hand,
and
your right hand delivers me.
The
LORD will fulfill his purpose for me;
your
steadfast love, O LORD, endures forever.
All: Do not forsake the work of your hands.
1 Corinthians
15:1 Now I would remind you, brothers and sisters, of the good news that I
proclaimed to you, which you in turn received, in which also you stand, 15:2
through which also you are being saved, if you hold firmly to the message that
I proclaimed to you--unless you have come to believe in vain. 15:3 For I handed
on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died
for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, 15:4 and that he was buried,
and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, 15:5
and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. 15:6 Then he appeared to
more than five hundred brothers and sisters at one time, most of whom are still
alive, though some have died. 15:7 Then he appeared to James, then to all the
apostles. 15:8 Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me.
15:9 For I am the least of the apostles, unfit to be called an apostle, because
I persecuted the church of God. 15:10 But by the grace of God I am what I am,
and his grace toward me has not been in vain. On the contrary, I worked harder
than any of them--though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me.
15:11 Whether then it was I or they, so we proclaim and so you have come to
believe.
Luke 5:1 Once while Jesus was
standing beside the lake of Gennesaret, and the crowd was pressing in on him to
hear the word of God, 5:2 he saw two
boats there at the shore of the lake; the fishermen had gone out of them and
were washing their nets. 5:3 He got into one of the boats, the one belonging to
Simon, and asked him to put out a little way from the shore. Then he sat down
and taught the crowds from the boat. 5:4 When he had finished speaking, he said
to Simon, "Put out into the deep water and let down your nets for a
catch." 5:5 Simon answered, "Master, we have worked all night long
but have caught nothing. Yet if you say so, I will let down the nets." 5:6
When they had done this, they caught so many fish that their nets were
beginning to break. 5:7 So they signaled their partners in the other boat to
come and help them. And they came and filled both boats, so that they began to
sink. 5:8 But when Simon Peter saw it, he fell down at Jesus' knees, saying,
"Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!" 5:9 For he and all
who were with him were amazed at the catch of fish that they had taken; 5:10
and so also were James and John, sons of Zebedee, who were partners with Simon.
Then Jesus said to Simon, "Do not be afraid; from now on you will be
catching people." 5:11 When they had brought their boats to shore, they
left everything and followed him.
Contemporary quote:
In a
theatre it happened that a fire started off stage. The clown came out to
tell the audience. They thought it was a joke and applauded. He told them
again, and they became still more hilarious. This is the way, I suppose,
that the world will be destroyed--amid the universal hilarity of wits and wags
who think it is all a joke. –Kierkegaard
Introduction:
It
seems that every age does its own “walking in the midst of trouble” as
the psalm for today puts it. Golden
Ages are usually golden only in retrospect…
And
every age looks back a little aghast
at the ignorance and misguided
energies of the previous age
as distance lends new perspective to
the old….
I
wonder what our great-grandchildren’s generation will have to say
about our generation’s various
walks “in
the midst of the troubles” of our time?
I
wonder what our great-grandchildren’s generation will say
about the outcome of the news report
this week
on
the consensus report by the
Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change
(IPCC).
This
massive project included input
from
more than 2,500 prominent scientists
from over 30 countries
and
it says bluntly that it is clear that human actions
are
contributing significantly to global warming.
It says that the future is ominous
unless major and immediate correctives are taken in
energy use.
And
that was the good news. The tide of
global awareness is turning.
A piece
of bad news this week
was a report on Friday from the UK
Guardian:
the American Enterprise Institute
is
offering a cool 10K dollars each plus travel and other expenses
to scientists willing to voice
opposition or doubt to
the IPCC’s report.
Other
international press reports picking up the story
didn’t hesitate to headline this as
bribery.
An
interesting detail is that the American Enterprise Institute
is
heavily funded by Exxon-Mobil—
the oil company also in the news
this week
for having just made the largest
corporate profit in history.
So,
what will our great-grandchildren think
of our individual,
our national and global responses to
global warming?
Will
they be aghast at the energy
we here today
spent on issues that will come to
seem insignificant
in light of how the world
changes?
How
will the way we walk in the midst of the troubles of our day
affect the troubles through which
they will have to walk?
Hold
that thought as we look back at church history….
Leadership
Team has asked that I spend some time focusing on Mennonite history and
theology; this is the second week that we are spending on this.
Reform movements, continued: Protestant
Reformation
Last week I introduced church history in terms of
reform movements and we talked about the first reform movement, the one that
was instigated in Judaism by Jesus.
We talked briefly about the changes in church
theology
from the early period which was marked
by
Jesus’ strongly ethical and practical spirituality
about
how to live and get along with each other
to the beginning of the medieval period around the
5th century,
when
theology took a much more abstract focus
on
the nature and being of God.
We’ll
skip forward now about a thousand years, and have a quick look at the Western
Christian church at the end of the medieval period,
a time of growing unrest and frustration.
The
Renaissance was already well under way,
spreading out from its origins in
Italy
and a
huge groundswell of change
was taking place on nearly every level throughout Europe.
The
very tightly ordered world view of the medieval period
was beginning to break up due to
several key changes:
growing nationalism
coupled
with a weakening of the Holy Roman Empire,
the rise of the middle classes due to economic changes,
and the growing effects of the Renaissance,
particularly
the work of the new humanist scholars.
It was
a time of tremendous ferment and restlessness;
a time when the old beliefs and structures
were simply no longer adequate to hold the new.
Corruption
in the Roman Catholic church was at appalling levels
with cries for reform coming from many directions.
Like
Jesus’ reform movement which ultimately split Judaism,
forming a new religion,
Christianity,
Martin
Luther probably didn’t intend to have his reform movement
split the Roman Catholic church,
forming a new family of
denominations.
But
that is what happened;
we call this time of tumult the
Protestant Reformation
and it is used to define the end of
the Medieval period
and the beginning of the
Modern Period.
Luther’s
reforms took on a life of their own.
European peasants breathed in deeply of the exhilarating air of the times
and especially took to heart his idea of “the priesthood of all believers”.
As the
availability of printed material grew these dangerous ideas were propagated and
sent all over Europe, fueling not only reforms but also the revolts of the
Peasants’ War.
Not far enough: The Radical Reformers
The
religious loyalties of Europe changed tremendously
with large territories becoming Protestant—
but
politically much of the prior structures remained intact.
Radical
Reformers emerged,
charging that the earlier Reformers
had kept far too much of the merged
church-state left over
from the Holy Roman
Empire,
for
example, the first Protestants retained infant baptism,
and
they kept theology “spiritual”,
refusing to draw out the political,
social, and economic
implications of the gospel.
They
also continued state selection of religious leaders—
I could
have been appointed as your pastor by Butch Otter!
This
state intervention in religious leadership was seriously annoying to the
Radical Reformers and the peasants…
These
Radical Reformers, including the first Anabaptists,
insisted that everything not
supported
by direct witness in the
New Testament needed to go
and the
focus of their theology was again drawn from
the ethical teachings of Jesus in right
behavior
rather than the more abstract
concepts of right belief.
As
things began to heat up,
intolerance
lead to outright persecution and in a bizarre twist,
the ethical behavior demanded by the
early Anabaptists
put them at risk….
in fact, “a 16th century man who did not drink to
excess, curse, or abuse his workmen or family could be suspected of being an
Anabaptist and thus persecuted.” (quoted
from Christianity Today library.com: Did You Know? January 1, 1985; see below)
Baptism
as the breaking point:
The
flashpoint for confrontation became infant baptism.
So,
what on earth is the big deal about baptism?
It doesn’t seem to be anymore.
Right here in this congregation, we accept people with adult baptism, and people with childhood or infant baptism. In a few minutes, you will all be invited forward to participate in communion and I will not ask anyone to disclose their baptismal status!
Baptism is certainly not an issue that we feel is worth a serious fight about, and most certainly it is not a life and death matter for us!
But in the 16th century, it was.
Think
back to my earlier questions:
So,
what will our great-grandchildren’s generation think
of our national and global
priorities?
Will
they be aghast at the energy we spend
on issues that will seem to them
as insignificant as our forebears’
issues around baptism?
Will
they be able to understand the ethos of our time?
And
perhaps the most important for us to engage is:
How
will the way we walk in the midst of the troubles of our day
affect the troubles through which
they will have to walk?
So,
what on earth was the big deal about
baptism?
In the late medieval period, church and state were tightly tied together—precisely through the use of infant baptism.
All people living within a given church’s territory
were baptized as infants into that one church
and were also then identified from cradle to grave
as members of that political unit as well.
If you didn’t obey the civil law,
religious
law would literally damn you.
If you didn’t obey religious law,
civil
law could—and did—
lock
you up, fine you, or even resort to
capital punishment.
Whether a local parish was Catholic or Protestant
simply depended upon the current civil rulers
and their decision to embrace reform
or to stay with the church of Rome.
The
Radical Reformers and the early Anabaptists defined the “real” church very
differently; rather than a territory and all who happened to live in it,
they
understood the church as a community of people
who gathered freely and voluntarily
to serve and follow Christ.
Baptism,
then, was an outward sign of their confession of faith in Christ;
it was a symbol of what separated
them from the “world”
and
united them with other believers in the body of Christ, the church.
As this
was a serious decision—
and soon, even a life threatening
decision--,
no infant or child could
make it;
it was an adult decision made with
integrity only by adults.
Do you
begin to see why adult baptism was such a threatening thing in that time and
place?
It
completely upset the medieval applecart:
it threatened the whole
established order
of rule and authority on earth—
which
was thought to mirror rule and authority in heaven.
This
demand for freedom of faith
from state interference or
regulation—
which we now see today as the
perfectly normal
separation of church and
state—
was
thus seen then as rebellion,
as inciting anarchy,
even as treason against the
legitimate rule of law.
The way
our spiritual forbears walked through the troubles of their time,
saw the essential elements
tucked within the issue of baptism
has changed
the world ever since….
it
brought in the revolutionary notion of the separation of church and state
and the possibility of religious
liberty.
It came
at a significant cost;
in the
16th century alone
there were twice as many martyrs
among Anabaptists
as there were among the early
Christians
in the first 300 years of the Christian
church.
(I’d
thought I’d get to Menno Simons and why we’re called Mennonites, but I’ll save
that for a later time….)
Wrapping up:
So what
in all this is useful for us today?
What
kind of connection is there between our late medieval forbears and the world we
live in now? Don’t we have a completely
different set of issues and questions?
It
seems to me that there is a lot for us modern Anabaptists here.
We too
are living in a time when the old beliefs and structures
are simply no longer adequate to hold the new.
The
paradigm is shifting from modern to postmodern,
and there are serious challenges
to the continued viability of our
lifestyle and belief systems.
Corporate
rule and influence is taking on a global mantle similar to the old Holy Roman
Empire and its stranglehold on medieval Europe;
we live
with a dizzying array
of conflicting interests, spin
doctors, and clashing cultures.
So,
again, I offer this question and challenge:
how is
God calling us to walk in the midst of the troubles of our day?
How
will we affect the troubles through which
our great-grandchildren’s generation
will have to walk?
________________
Sources:
Ian Sample, science correspondent; Friday February
2, 2007; The Guardian, UK:
Scientists and economists have been offered $10,000
each by a lobby group funded by one of the world's largest oil companies to
undermine a major climate change report due to be published today.
Letters sent by the American Enterprise Institute
(AEI), an ExxonMobil-funded thinktank with close links to the Bush
administration, offered the payments for articles that emphasise the
shortcomings of a report from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC). Travel expenses and
additional payments were also offered.
The UN report was written by international experts
and is widely regarded as the most comprehensive review yet of climate change
science. It will underpin international negotiations on new emissions targets
to succeed the Kyoto agreement, the first phase of which expires in 2012. World
governments were given a draft last year and invited to comment.
The AEI has received more than $1.6m from
ExxonMobil and more than 20 of its staff have worked as consultants to the Bush
administration. Lee Raymond, a former head of ExxonMobil, is the vice-chairman
of AEI's board of trustees.
The letters, sent to scientists in Britain, the US
and elsewhere, attack the UN's panel as "resistant to reasonable criticism
and dissent and prone to summary conclusions that are poorly supported by the
analytical work" and ask for essays that "thoughtfully explore the
limitations of climate model outputs".
Climate scientists described the move yesterday as
an attempt to cast doubt over the "overwhelming scientific evidence"
on global warming. "It's a desperate attempt by an organisation who wants
to distort science for their own political aims," said David Viner of the
Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.
"The IPCC process is probably the most
thorough and open review undertaken in any discipline. This undermines the
confidence of the public in the scientific community and the ability of governments
to take on sound scientific advice," he said….
The
contents of the IPCC report have been an open secret since the Bush
administration posted its draft copy on the internet in April. It says there is
a 90% chance that human activity is warming the planet, and that global average
temperatures will rise by another 1.5 to 5.8C this century, depending on
emissions.
Lord
Rees of Ludlow, the president of the Royal Society, Britain's most prestigious
scientific institute, said: "The IPCC is the world's leading authority on
climate change and its latest report will provide a comprehensive picture of
the latest scientific understanding on the issue. It is expected to stress,
more convincingly than ever before, that our planet is already warming due to
human actions, and that 'business as usual' would lead to unacceptable risks,
underscoring the urgent need for concerted international action to reduce the
worst impacts of climate change. However, yet again, there will be a vocal
minority with their own agendas who will try to suggest otherwise."
Christianity Today library.com: Did You Know?
January 1, 1985
Anabaptists are the originators of the “free
church.” Separation of church and state was an unthinkable and radical notion
when it was introduced by the Anabaptists. Likewise their defense of
religious liberty was regarded as an invitation to anarchy.
In the court records of 16th century South and
Central Germany, Switzerland, and Austria, only 12,522 Anabaptists can
be counted. Their numbers were never very large, yet they managed to populate
2088 towns and villages of that region!
Protestantism did not make inroads without the
backing of princes and powers of state. From the beginning Anabaptism was an underground
movement that lost virtually all its leaders in the first two years.
It was partly because of Anabaptism that Protestant
churches adopted the confirmation service, and baptismal registers
(the boon of genealogists) came into being.
A 16th century man who did not drink to excess,
curse, or abuse his workmen or family could be suspected of being an
Anabaptist and thus persecuted.
Anabaptists were the first reformers to practice
church discipline. Under their influence the Reformer Martin Bucer
attempted without success to introduce discipline into the church in
Strassburg. He succeeded in convincing John Calvin, who was able to establish
church discipline in Geneva. Without knowing when the Anabaptist Schleitheim
Confession was formulated, Calvin read it in 1544 and concluded
“these unfortunate and ungrateful people have learned this teaching and some
other correct views from us.” Calvin was an 18-year-old Catholic at the
time of Schleitheim.
Today in
response to post-modernism, what some theologians are calling 'the end of
Christendom' and the global ecological crisis, some churches and theologians
are drawing upon Anabaptist traditions as a paradigm for Christian spirituality
in the 21st century. This movement, sometimes referred to as 'neo-anabaptism',
includes theologians and communities who are from Christian denominations not
part of the historic Peace Churches but who see in the 16th century
radical reformers an authentic witness of early Christianity and of the life
and teachings of Christ. Some such thinkers include Stanley
Hauerwas, Nancey Murphy, Lee Camp, Richard Hays, Craig A. Carter, James
McClendon, and Michael Cartwright.
Sojourners magazine editor Jim Wallis has said that Mennonite Theologian John H.
Yoder "inspired a whole generation of Christians to follow the way of
Jesus into social action and peacemaking." The neo-Anabaptist communities
and theologians are also a direct result of this legacy. Neo-Anabaptist communities
are often identifiable by their desire to live as a prophetic alternative to
larger society through their commitment to Christ’s Sermon on the Mount as normative for the
Christian life when empowered by the Holy Spirit.
Outworkings of this spirituality include simple yet joyful lifestyle, peace and
justice making, the practice of nonviolence,
communal living and the voluntary sharing of goods, particularly with those in
need.
In
addition, it may be argued that one of the historical Anabaptist doctrines,
specifically that one must volitionally, consciously, and personally
relate to God, is a likewise found among much of Evangelical Protestantism,
even though these churches may not be historically linked to the Anabaptists.
·
Bible as the sole rule of faith and practice
·
Pacifism
All
those who hold the idea of a free church and freedom of religion (sometimes
called separation of church and state) are
greatly indebted to the Anabaptists. When it was introduced[3]
by the Anabaptists in the 15th and 16th centuries, religious freedom
independent of the state was a radical idea, and unthinkable to both clerical
and governmental leaders. Religious liberty was equated with anarchy; Kropotkin[4]
traces the birth of anarchist thought in Europe to these early Anabaptist
communities.
According
to Estep,[5]
"Where men believe in the freedom of religion,
supported by a guarantee of separation of church and state, they have entered
into that heritage. Where men have caught the Anabaptist vision of
discipleship, they have become worthy of that heritage. Where corporate
discipleship submits itself to the New Testament pattern of the church, the
heir has then entered full possession of his legacy."