Labels

“Lead me to the rock that is higher than I”
Psalm 61:2

A couple of weeks ago I preached on this text from Psalm 61.  Whenever I read this prayer I am always cowed by its wisdom.  “Lead me to the rock that is higher than I.”  In other words:   Lord, elevate me to a place where I have something more than merely my own power and perspective. Lift me to the place where I can take in a bigger picture.  Help me to see what I cannot see from the narrow and cramped cell where I have only myself and people like me as a point of reference.  Let me experience the liberty that I can know only when I understand myself to be a part of something bigger than myself and the world that I have created.

In this era when the fruits born of our various political, racial, gender, and economic disparities are on full display, it seems to me that this prayer is one that all sides can and ought to pray.   In fact, I might even assert that it is the prayer that is actually the foundation of all our prayers.  Like a stem cell, it is the prayer that gives birth to every other prayer we pray.  For to be lifted to the rock that is higher than ourselves requires us to not only acknowledge a power greater than ourselves who does the lifting, but also the relinquishment of our own power to don and assign the various labels that keep us in those cells of polarity and disparity. 

Assigning labels seems like an appropriate thing to us when we do it.  It helps us to order life.  It suggests a framework of understanding and an organization of society.  We have categories for friend and foe, right and wrong, safe and unsafe.  Labels help us embrace those who will return our embrace and keep away from those who seek our harm.  Labels help us to identify goals and provide a framework for defining priorities.  We land on a worldview, a way of knowing, and a framework for understanding that gives shape to our lives and so creates a space that seems safe.  As a good diagnosis defines the course of treatment for a disease, labels help us to know how we are going to engage life and make decisions.

But here’s the thing, those labels we don for ourselves or assign to others can never tell the whole story.  The full story is always bigger. Always more complex.  Always defying the limits of the label.  While labels have a short term asset of helping us to root out and excoriate the sinners and create and elevate the saints, they ultimately wear thin as we realize that the line between these two groups is not as dark and definitive as we might have thought.  Better societal definitions of the oppressor and the victim, sinners and saints, heroes and villains are not the primary catalyst for real change.  Those labels indeed tell the truth, but not the whole truth and nothing but the truth. 

Why do we think that defining polarities and waging wars based on these polarities can lead us to that higher place where all will be well?  I suppose, history testifies to the wisdom of Hegel’s dialectic.  It’s not hard to make the argument that a succession of battles between various theses and antitheses will gradually produce the synthesis of a new order.  There is some truth in the theory that we will evolve as the factions who have donned conflicting labels battle it out and go through those pendulum swings of gaining or losing power. But history also shows that an endless succession of winners and losers produces an endless succession of attempts by either the defeated to reclaim what they’ve lost or hegemonistic despots to ruthlessly hold onto what they’ve gained.   

It’s only the truth that is bigger than the label that can set us free. That’s why Jesus’ words about attending to the matter of the log in our own eye before we attempt to remove the speck in our neighbor’s eye gets us a step closer to that rock that is higher than ourselves.  Giving attention to that log requires us to use our power to address a thing that we have the power to change.  God has pledged to come alongside us in this work.  The winds of the Spirit can elevate us to the rock that is higher than ourselves.  And what liberty there is when we take in the view of that broad and open space of a life where we belong to One who has delivered all of us out of the tiny world of self.     

David Rohrer
06/26/2020

In Plenty and In Want

“I have learned the secret of being well fed and going hungry, of having plenty and being in need.
I can do all things through him who strengthens me.”
Philippians 4:12-13

I have officiated at hundreds of weddings in my 38 years of pastoral ministry.  It is one of the privileges of playing the role my calling invites me to play.  People invite me into their lives and ask me to sit awhile in their world in order to give witness to God’s presence and pray for God’s blessing.  So for that time, I sit with them and talk with them and pray for them.  Yet when the four weeks of pastoral counselling and the weekend of celebration have passed, my notes from the ceremony and the couple’s results from the Prepare Inventory go into a file; I bless this bride and groom on their way, and for the most part they pass out of my readily accessible memory. 
 
Yet some have found a place closer to the front of my mind.  Their stories and my experience with them make a memorable impression; they become God’s gift to me, the Spirit’s tools in my own spiritual formation.  One such couple came across my path in the early years of my work.  This rather affluent, ok let’s just say it, REALLY WEALTHY, couple asked me to perform their wedding.  Their union was no doubt as much merger as marriage.  They were not a part of the church where I was serving but asked me to perform a ceremony that was to be held at the yacht club.  In the fourth week of our pre-wedding meetings when it came time to plan the ceremony, I went over various examples of wedding vows from which they could choose.  They settled on the traditional vows in the Presbyterian Book of Common Worship.  But one phrase caught the groom’s eyes and pointing to it he said, “I don’t think we need to promise this.”  The phrase was in the list of conditions in which a bride and groom both promise to remain faithful to each other. He was pointing at the line “in plenty and in want.” 
 
This young man could not conceive of the contingency that would necessitate making this promise.  He had plenty, he had never not had plenty, and the thought that he might one day not have plenty was not accessible to him.  It was a dumbfounding experience for me.  I knew in my heart he needed to be challenged on this but I also knew that this was not an arguable point with him.  So in the inexperience of my early years of pastoral ministry, I had neither the confidence nor the categories by which to express my dismay.  I silently acquiesced to his wishes and we left this line out of the ceremony. 
 
As I periodically ponder this exchange I always feel sad and Jesus’ words about rich men and the camel passing through the eye of the needle come to mind.  For what I know now beyond any doubt is that the state of wanting, the experience of poverty, is essential if we are ever going to follow Jesus and walk on the way of faith.  The gnawing emptiness of want is the gateway to abundant life.  We need only go to the first words in Matthew’s rendering of Jesus’ stump speech, the Beatitudes in the Sermon on the Mount.  Blessed are the poor. . . , blessed are those who mourn. . . , blessed are the meek. . . , blessed are those who hunger and thirst. . . .  In short: Happy are those in touch with their emptiness because they are ready to be filled.
 
Poverty and the discomfort of want are not the normative experience for most middle and upper class North Americans.  We might at times compare ourselves with those who are more “well-heeled” than we are and feel a bit disadvantaged; but for the most part our relative degree of affluence in comparison with the rest of the world keeps us in a sort of steady state of not thinking that much about wealth or poverty.  I know I didn’t ever feel economically privileged until I spent two weeks at a theological seminary in Pune, India in 1985.  On that trip I spent one night in the Centaur Hotel near the airport in Mumbai (Bombay) before I flew out to Pune the next day.  The cost of the room was 700 rupees, about $55 at the time.  In talking with other pastors at the seminary a week later, I discovered that for a one night stay I had spent the equivalent of the average monthly salary of a pastor.
 
Hunger, poverty, grief and meekness, are not our norm.  So when they encounter us we find ourselves ill-prepared for the work of mining them for the blessing hidden in this ore.  Covid-19 and the racial unrest of these days are presenting us with the invitation to engage in this work of excavation.  The poverty of isolation from one another, the weight of a deeply rooted and seemingly insoluble problem,  the threat to our peace that we feel, the loss of freedoms that we had taken for granted, or the fear that comes with facing into the truth of an uncertain future all have embedded within the them the severe mercy of facing into our hunger.  They give us a vehicle by which to identify with the deer longing for flowing streams (Ps. 42), the prisoner sitting in darkness and gloom (Ps. 107) and the famished longing of a soul wandering aimlessly in dry and weary land (Ps. 63).
 
When we know we are in want, when we feel hunger, when we are consumed by the truth that we have nothing to consume, we are ready to be filled.  We are invited beyond that vague sense of restlessness that otherwise occupies the waking hours of most of our days.  That restlessness is not hunger so much as it is a fear of hunger.  It is this fear that fuels our consumer economy and sends us on that futile quest for the thing that will bring us peace because it holds out the false promise of ending our waiting for the unknown thing we are wanting.   
 
There is no better feeling than eating when one is deeply hungry and drinking when one is truly thirsty.  Awareness of deprivation is the gateway to joyous fulfillment.  Thank God for the opportunity of these days to recognize just how hungry our world is.  And more importantly, thank God that God is ready and waiting to feed us.                      

David Rohrer
06/12/2020

Paradox and Praise

“There seems to be ample evidence to suggest that singing creates a quantity of fine aerosols
that can stay suspended in the air for long periods of time, move with air currents,
and stay infectious for many hours, exposing virtually everyone in a building.
Our sources strongly recommend against singing indoors in public until a vaccine is widely available and widely used. For similar reasons, the use of wind instruments should also be avoided.”
(from “Church Music in the Age of Covid-19”, Wisconsin Council of Churches)

Reading this caution issued by the Wisconsin Council of Churches was one of the more memorable low points for me in the journey through the Covid-19 crisis.  It has been matched only by a list of alternatives to singing that I also saw printed in a similar piece of ecclesiastical policy.  But that said, I also cannot deny the truth behind this admonition.  We need only recall the cautionary tale of the Skagit Valley Chorale’s rehearsal earlier this year.  60 people gathered for a 90 minute choir rehearsal and within days, 45 people in the choir were sick with Covid-19 and I believe four of those people died as a result of the disease. 

The notion of singing being a vehicle for the spread of a potentially lethal contagion was never something I thought about before now.  While I have thought about it as a way of spreading something contagious, those contagions were always life giving rather than death dealing.  It has always been a vehicle to disseminate truth and beauty.  It has the power to help us express our joy and our pain.  It invites us to join the groan that is too deep for words and the shout that resounds above the heavens.  Singing fosters hope in us when we are down in the pit of despair and leads us to that rock that is higher than ourselves.  Singing together helps us to transcend the limits of our mortal condition and at least approach, if not pierce, the veil between heaven and earth.   

To be very frank, I don’t know what corporate public worship is if it does not include congregational singing. 

Yet here we are, encountering yet another Covid-19 oxymoron borne of the paradox that it daily invites us to engage.  We can now add worship without singing to the list which includes phrases like social distancing and sheltering in place. As a congregation we are confronted by the paradox of working to preserve and build community when it is dangerous to gather in close proximity to one another.  We can neither deny the validity of the warning to keep our distance nor turn away from the truth that isolation itself is a danger to us.  So as I wrote last week, it’s time to get creative.  The severe mercy of engaging this paradox is that it invites us to pursue and rest in the bigger Truth who is allowing those two competing realities to exist in the same world.

The severe mercy of this paradox is that it invites us to pray, “Lord, how are you at work here, and how can I be a part of that work?” It invites us to look for and then strive to be a part of what God is up to.  It is to seek to live in awareness, as two great catechisms in our tradition remind us, that our only comfort in life is that we belong to God and our chief end in life is to glorify God and enjoy God forever.  In short, it is to dedicate our lives to the praise of God.

Often when we think about praising God we think first about the actions associated with praise.  We confuse the big reality of praise with the ways we express it.  Praise is more than thanksgiving and adoration.  Praise is about more than singing or spoken acclamations.  Praise is not merely the attitude of falling to our knees or lifting our hands to the heavens.  Praise is a way of being.  It is the awareness that every moment has everything to do with the living God.  It is a heart that beats because of God.  It is the awareness of God’s presence and the longing for that awareness when we are experiencing what feels like God’s absence.  Praise or the act of glorifying God is what we are and what we do when we sense the heaviness that elevates us.  The Hebrew word for this glorious presence is kabod¸ which also means heavy.  Praise is being overwhelmed by the weight of God’s glory. 

There are infinite ways we can express our awareness of the presence of this infinite God.  Singing is certainly among them.  But it by no means exhausts them.  During his triumphal entry into Jerusalem Jesus reminded the Pharisees of this fact.  When they complained about the song the adoring crowd was singing and told Jesus to silence them, he replied: “If these were silenced even the rocks would cry out.”

So even if we are silenced with respect to indoor singing, how can we listen for the song the rocks are singing?  How can we participate in those songs that are more than songs, those songs that never stop singing? A line from the hymn “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing” came to me as I was thinking about singing and the potential temporary loss of it in our indoor worship.  As I was complaining to God, and whoever else would listen, about the sheer stupidity and incomprehensibility of this ban on indoor singing I heard this prayer:

Come Thou Fount of every blessing, tune my heart to sing Thy grace;
streams of mercy never ceasing, call for songs of loudest praise.
Teach me some melodious sonnet, sung by flaming tongues above;
praise the Mount, I’m fixed upon it, Mount of Thy redeeming love.

How ironic! A song reminded me that there are infinite means of expressing praise.  Hearts do not necessarily need a diaphragm, lungs and a larynx to sing the songs that issue forth from their depths.  When my feet are planted firmly on the rock of the Mount of God’s redeeming love, I have unlimited means of reveling in that gift.  For that love is broad and long and high and deep and we will never arrive at the place where we completely comprehend it.  We will always be growing in our awareness of it and thus always learning ways to express our sheer joy in the gift of being surrounded by it.

David Rohrer
05/29/2020

Crisis and Creativity

These things I remember as I pour out my soul:
how I went with the throng and led them in procession to the house of God
with glad shouts and songs of thanksgiving, a multitude keeping festival.
Psalm 42:4

I have heard it said that crisis is often the best soil for creativity.  The crisis that delivers us into places of isolation, dislocation, deprivation and desolation can foster a resourcefulness that helps us to find new ways to fulfill the desires of our hearts.  What initially is nothing more than a source for our lament over loss, can actually teach us to sing a new song of hope.  This was certainly the case for Israel during its exile in Babylon.  In this time when their last memories of Jerusalem were a broken down wall and the burned out rubble of the temple, they sat at first by the waters in Babylon weeping and refusing to sing the songs of Zion (Ps. 137).  They were furious; and paralyzed by rage all they could think about was the injustice done to them and how long it would be before they could go back to Jerusalem and reclaim what was rightfully theirs.

Yet 70 years of lamentation was not a sustainable means of managing their grief and rage.  Nor was simply waiting to go back to what was.  So for whatever reason, they began to allow the light of God into the cracks in their hard shell of bitterness.  That light warmed the seeds of hope and creativity lying dormant within them, and the plants that grew from these seeds changed them forever.  What was born during this era where they were deprived of their normal ways of worship and fellowship were new ways to gather and new songs to sing.  They built “highways to Zion in their hearts” (Ps. 84) and the dry, lifeless world of exile (Ps 42:1-3) became a well-watered and verdant field giving witness to their ongoing covenant relationship with God (Isaiah35:1).  Most of the Psalms were written and the institution of the synagogue was born during the exile.  In a time where they could not worship as they had, when they were grieving the loss of “leading the throng” into the temple, the Holy Spirit was working overtime, blowing the creative breath of life into the lungs of people who thought they would never sing again.

We’re in a very different kind of crisis these days.  Our oppressor does not manifest itself with the concreteness of a conquering army or a voracious, narcissistic emperor.  Our captor is silent and unseen.  So it is harder to oppose and, at this moment at least, impervious to any rebellion we might mount to overthrow it.  So perhaps our despair is even greater than that of the exiles, because it is so unclear as to where we should focus our rage.  Yet even so, the songs the exiles wrote and the means of gathering they developed have something to teach us about how we can manage our anger and sorrow.  They call us to summon the same spirit of creativity and explore how God might be inviting us to a new thing (Is. 43:18-19).

My biggest frustration these days is that the very act of meeting together indoors, in close proximity to one another for an hour or more is apparently one of the best ways to spread Covid-19.  Get us all singing in that space and you create an even more fertile environment for the disease.  I’d call that a crisis.  And I spend many of my waking hours longing to go back to a time when we did not have to worry about this or spend our waking hours trying to devise ways of maintaining our current means of worship in our sanctuary while avoiding this threat.  It will surprise no one to learn that in spite of all my fretting I have yet to come up with the time machine that would take us back to the way we used to be or the work-around that would neutralize the threat of this contagion. 

So what can we do?  We can focus on what we know we need and work to develop new ways of meeting that need.  One of the most important items of business we need to attend to in these days of restriction and isolation is the work of “not neglecting to meet together” in order to “encourage one another”(Heb. 10:25).  I believe there are some creative ways we can heed this admonition to meet together while also respecting the limits placed upon us by Covid-19.

We have already settled into one example of this creative adjustment by gathering for our weekly worship service on Zoom.  And we will continue to offer this into the foreseeable future, and so accommodate those who will not initially be able to come back into the sanctuary even when we open that up.  But there are other ways to use this tool that we have not yet fully explored.  Bible studies, prayer groups, lectio divina groups, and fellowship events (aka- happy hours) are all things we can do using a video conference platform.  In this time when we cannot just drive to the church and all attend the same service and then chat with one another in the narthex after the service, we can still be talking with one another about our faith.  We can be encouraging one another to persevere.  If you need some help with making use of the tool that facilitates these discussions, there are folks in the congregation who are making it their mission to help people get set up.  Don’t just defer this necessity of meeting together until the time when the church building opens up again.  Do it now. 

Another thing we can do to attend to this admonition to meet together is to explore outdoor options for gathering in smaller groups.  We might not be able to gather 120 people in the sanctuary to sing and celebrate the Lord’s Supper, but we can gather groups of ten to do those things outside.  Granted this significantly diminishes the number that we would normally think of when we think of a “throng”, but a circle of 10 spaced at a safe distance from one another more than meets Jesus’ suggested quorum of two or three who come together in his name. 

In short, we need to think beyond merely restoring our indoor once a week gathering for all.  The initial work of opening things up will not be about getting everybody back into the sanctuary and getting back to the way things were.  Instead it might mean multiplying the number of gatherings we have and spreading these out over the week.  Will you please join me in praying and dreaming about this?  God’s steadfast love has not ceased, Jesus is still Lord and we are his disciples.  As St. Paul says in 2 Corinthians “now is the acceptable time, now is the day of salvation.”  So let us both accept the unhappy circumstances of the now that we cannot change, and cling to the truth about God in this now that will not change.  Let us act in the assurance and confidence that nothing will separate us from God’s love.  

Why are you cast down O my soul and why are you disquieted within me,
hope in God, for I shall again praise him, my King and my God.
(Ps. 42:11)

Dave Rohrer
5/22/20202

Return to Normalcy?

One of my best friends during this time of crisis in our world has been the study of history.  When I look back and see that there have been other times in history when we have walked a similar path, I tend to turn down the volume on what I am feeling in the present.  I step back from the tendency to catastrophize and stop using words like unprecedented.  I have heard it said that those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it.  Frankly, I think the better way to state this maxim is that those who study history know when we are repeating it.

With all the talk these days about “opening things up” and “getting back to normal” I’ve been thinking about an obscure detail concerning the 1920 presidential campaign. 100 years ago Warren G. Harding and James M. Cox were running against each other for president.  Their running mates were two future presidents, Calvin Coolidge and Franklin Roosevelt.  In 1920 the nation had just emerged from two major crises, World War I and the 1918 flu pandemic, and Harding’s campaign slogan was “Return to Normalcy.”

Sound familiar?

Return to normalcy.  It certainly expresses our heart’s desire these days.  We’re tired of being cooped up in our homes.  We’re oppressed by the loneliness of it all.  We’re fearful about the economy.  We desperately want to get back to the way things were before we shut ourselves in as a result of this worldwide outbreak of Covid-19.  Our souls are sated with the bad tasting food of crisis and we want the sustenance of something more savory.  So let’s get back to the way things were.  Let’s return to normalcy.

Of course the problem with this desire is that we can’t fulfill it.  It’s as difficult to go back to what was as it is to predict what is ahead.  We can only be where we are.  We can only live faithful lives in the present that are  fueled by gratitude for and wisdom born of past experience and hopeful anticipation and educated guesses of what might be best for the future. Nostalgia about the past and fear about the future have not proven to be the best foundations for decisions we have to make in the present.   

A big part of the Biblical narrative grows out of the theme of what happens when we human beings emerge from a crisis.  The expulsion from the Garden, the release from slavery in Egypt, 40 years of wilderness wandering and the entry into the new land, the destruction of Jerusalem in 587 BC, the end of 70 years spent in exile in Babylon and a return to the rubble that was once a great city, the crucifixion and the resurrection of the one who turned out to be a very different Messiah than the one who was anticipated, all give witness to this theme.  At each of these moments of transition the story tells both of the longings and sadness the people have as they look back to what was, as well as the fear and the hope they experience as they anticipate something new.  And at each of these moments the Bible acknowledges our feelings and gives us songs to sing that put words to them: Wailing laments that long for the restoration of what was and hopeful hymns as we search the horizon for the signs of God’s presence.

Yet there is another song that we are given as well.  It is the song that sings of the one constant that endures even in the face of uncertainty and change.  There are many versions of it in the Bible but one of my favorites is Jeremiah’s song in Lamentations 3.  It faces into the loss and embraces hope.  It does not deny the pain and yet sings of something that transcends it.  It offers no rosy promise of a return to what was, only a celebration of what remains true.  In the wake of destruction and the throes of exile Jeremiah gives us a word for today:

The thought of my affliction and my homelessness
    is wormwood and gall!
My soul continually thinks of it
    and is bowed down within me.
But this I call to mind,
    and therefore I have hope:

The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases,
    his mercies never come to an end;
they are new every morning;
    great is your faithfulness.
“The Lord is my portion,” says my soul,
    “therefore I will hope in him.”
(Lamentations 3:19-24)

David Rohrer
05/06/2020

Shameless Nakedness

“And the man and his wife were both naked,
and were not ashamed.”
Genesis 2:25

Sometime in either my freshman or sophomore year of college I took a class called Human Ecology.  It fulfilled one of the two biological science general education course requirements for a bachelor’s degree and was essentially a course that explored the inter-relatedness of human society and the natural world.  Early in the class to make the point that human beings share things in common with the other animals in this world, the professor identified what he considered to be the two major biological traits that distinguish us from other animals. Pointing to his head with one hand and repeatedly demonstrating the grasping function of his thumb and his other four fingers he said: “These are the only two things that make us different: our brains and an opposable thumb.”

I suppose if you look at this question from the perspective of evolutionary biology it is not far from the truth.  At the very least, it is a helpful perspective in that it mitigates some of the arrogance brought on by that big brain and maybe helps us to think twice about how to live in a state of respectful humility with the rest of the natural world.  And this was certainly part of my professor’s point.  But it is not the whole story.  And it is not the only perspective from which one can look at this question of how we are different from the animals. For what that big brain also does is give us the ability to admit what we do not know and therefore also postulate the existence of a being other than ourselves who might know what we don’t.

If we see ourselves as creatures made by the thoughtful and intentional actions of a Creator, then there is another short list of similarities and differences we can compile when we compare ourselves with the other animals God has created.  The story of creation in Genesis 1 and 2 is a helpful source in constructing this list.  What makes us similar can be summarized in words like dust and death, and what distinguishes us is identified in the words like image and dominion. 

The Psalms are a helpful commentary on Genesis.  For on the one hand these poets lead us into the stark awareness that we return to the dust from which we come (Ps 90) and that we cannot “abide in our pomp” because like the beasts we perish (Ps 49).  On the other hand they celebrate our special status in creation as ones who are on God’s mind in a different way: That God made us “a little lower than God” and has given us “dominion over the works of [his] hands” (Ps. 8).

But irrespective of which of these two sets of lenses we use to explore this question of our similarities to and our dissimilarities from the other animals, we are delivered into a place where we must face the same question. We have to decide what we will do with this information.  We have to ask: “So what?”  How will we make use of our privilege and what will we do with the truth that we have limits?  We are brought to a place where we must consider our moral choices in how we will relate to this world. 

And when I come to this point I am glad for my theological lens.  For it gives me direction in how to deploy my big brain and it gives me compassion for a world that comes from the loving thoughts of a benevolent creator who looked at it all when it was finished and said: “This is very good.”

There is a strange little detail at the end of Genesis 2 that brings this together for me.  We’re told that the man and the woman were “naked and not ashamed.”  Another way to say this is: They knew who they were, they saw themselves clearly and they were ok with that.  Naked and not ashamed: vulnerable and undefended, yet confident and empowered. 

When we know who we are, people created in the image of God, made by God for relationship with God, one another and the rest of creation, we are not anxious about what we are not.  We shrug our shoulders at the fact of our nakedness because we know that our vulnerability is not the only truth that defines us.  We can humbly make use of those big, yet limited, brains because we receive them as a gift from God and use them in gratitude to him and for his glory.

The way Eugene Peterson renders the third Beatitude concerning the blessedness of the meek provides us with a good summary and an apt conclusion:

You’re blessed when you’re content with just who you are—
no more, no less.
That’s the moment you find yourselves proud owners of everything that can’t be bought.
Matthew 5:5

David Rohrer
April 27, 2020

Old, But Far From Irrelevant

One night during my first year of seminary my classmate and housemate, Keith, came into my room looking haggard, carrying a big thick commentary on some book of the Bible and announced: “Had God known what we were going to do with the Bible, he never would have given it to us.”  I remember this night fondly because it was such an incredibly funny and yet ironically cogent observation.  As is the case with some other good things that God has given us, we who are a part of the Judeo/Christian tradition have come up with a myriad of ways to misuse the Bible.

We have ignored matters of context and used pieces of Scripture as a religious weapon to beat people into submission or as a justification for bad behavior.  We have tried to make it into a modern science or history book or criticized it because of it’s failure to be either one of those things.  We have assumed this collection of many books written over thousands of years is one book and then either derided it for inconsistency or tried to explain away its apparent contradictions.  We have done things with it that are probably not within the Divine intention for it, and as a result when reading it we often find ourselves missing the beauty of the forest while we are lost in the examination of the bark on specific trees.

So what are we to do with this ancient collection of religious texts?  Just what is it?  What assumptions should we make about it and how should we read it?  Why should we bother with it at all?  These are all what we call hermeneutical questions. They are among the questions that help us to define the lenses through which we will read the Bible.  Whenever we read any book we come to it with a set of expectations that order how we read it, and the hermeneutic we apply to reading the Bible will say a great deal about what we bring to it and, more importantly, what we take from it.

For me the foundational answer to this hermeneutical question is to start with the assumption that the Bible is the word of God. However, I don’t mean by this that God dictated every word and people wrote it down word for word as he spoke.  I mean that we hear God’s voice in it because it is the report of his interaction with his creation.  So when I sit down to read the Bible, I assume that, first and foremost, it is going to tell me something about God: about who God is and what God has done.  And second, I assume it is going to tell me something about the people who have related to God: about who they are, how they have prayed to God and how they have been both challenged and changed by God.  In other words, when I read the Bible I don’t expect to find an answer to all of life’s questions, I go looking for direction in who God is and how I can relate to God. 

In worship we periodically sing a hymn that gives us some direction in this matter of Biblical hermeneutics.  It’s called “Ancient Words” and its chorus is especially instructive:

Ancient words, ever true, changing me, changing you. 
We have come with open hearts;
O let the ancient words impart.

The words of the Bible are well tested and have shown a kind of resilience that not all human literature can claim.  They speak with an unmistakable veracity that grabs and holds our attention.  We see ourselves in these words.  They tell us something about God and about ourselves as God’s creation.   In these words we hear something that we want to preserve and pass on because they challenge us and change us. They are old words that remain relevant even in new times.

For the next six weeks our sermons will be about listening to this old message in a new time.  We’ll look at some of the oldest stories in the Bible in the first eleven chapters of the Book of Genesis, and explore their applicability to our day and time.  These stories are some of the biggest targets of those who want denigrate the Bible and at the same time some of the texts most abused by those who claim to order their lives by the Bible. But what can be heard above the din of this atheistic and religious rancor is the crystal clear song of love that God has been singing to his creation since the dawn of time. 

David Rohrer
04/17/2020

Easter Sunday 2020

“Simon, son of John do you love me?” 
Peter said to Jesus, “Yes, Lord; you know that I love you.” 
Jesus said to him, “Feed my sheep.”
John 21:16

A commonly used exaggeration we often deploy in the midst of some discomfort we are enduring is the phrase, “This is killing me.”  After the long hike we say “My feet are killing me.”  After a hard day at the office, “This job is killing me.”  Or at the end of an afternoon spent bending over to tend the garden, “My back is killing me.”  When we use it in this way, the phrase is rarely accurate.  But in these days of our isolation due to Covid-19 it seems appropriate.  We are daily aware of something that is killing us.  And it’s hard to get our minds off of it. This novel corona virus is making many of us very sick.  It is easy to catch and hard to fight, and our response to it is causing all sorts of collateral damage.  So maybe in this case it’s not so much of an exaggeration to say, “This is killing me.”

Yet even so, even if it is true that Covid-19 is killing us, perseverating on this fact is also something that will rob us of life.  To survive this scourge and thrive we’ll need to do something more than work to avoid contracting this disease.  We’ll need to adjust our perspective and widen our angle to take in a bigger picture.  We’ll need to set this disease in a broader context.  And I propose a question posed by Barbara Brown Taylor in one of her books to help us do this.  She asks her readers the question: “What’s saving your life right now.” 

Easter Sunday is a good day to contemplate Taylor’s question to us.  On this day when we celebrate the truth that evil will not have the last word, it is good for us to contemplate what is saving our lives rather than what is killing us.  On the day when the ugliness of that Roman cross is fading into the background, it is good to look forward in hope and contemplate the life and light that flies in the face of death and darkness.  How is Covid-19 failing to get the last word even though it is still raging among us?  Truly living is not just about not dying.  So what is helping us to live?

At one level the post-resurrection encounter of Jesus and Peter in John 21 is an example of this work of reframing life’s central question.   While lounging on the shore of the lake after a big breakfast, Jesus asks Peter to think about what will foster life.  He asks the question three times.  Each time Peter answers the question in the affirmative.  Each time he responds to Jesus, Peter becomes a bit more irritated.  But Jesus is calmly persistent and offers the same rejoinder to each of Peter’s answers.  “Do you love me, Peter.  Yes, Lord; you know that I love you.  Then feed my lambs. . . , tend my sheep . . ., feed my sheep.”  In essence, Jesus says to Peter: “If you love me, then love as you have been loved.  Pass on what you have been given.  Reflect the light that has been poured out on you.” 

The contradiction to the finality of the Cross that occurs on Easter morning initially brings the disciples up short.  In all of the stories of encounters between the resurrected Christ and the disciples, they are rubbing their eyes and pinching themselves wondering if they are just having a dream.  Once they figure out he is alive and that they can believe their eyes, there is great joy and relief.  The snare of the fowler was broken (Ps 124) and death didn’t have the last word.  What they all knew was the exhilaration of being saved from the crushing grip of an oppressive opponent.  Yet once the adrenalin secreted by this awareness began to subside, there on the shore of the lake with full stomachs and the comforting presence of Jesus there was space to ask another question.  Just beyond the relief of being saved, the question that presented itself was, “Now what?” What does this mean?  What does it tell us?  What impact will this have on the way we live our lives?  Now that we know we’ve been saved from evil, what’s next?  What have we been saved for?

Notice that Jesus’ encounter with Peter in John 21 doesn’t answer this question with the command to develop strategy for a worldwide movement or to begin work on a theology that explains it all.  Jesus simply calls Peter to continue to do what he had already called him to do.  Follow me, Peter.  Abide with me.  Let me love you.  Then go in the strength of that love and love others.  Feed my sheep. 

Now what?  Basically it boils down to a one word answer: Relationship.  Love as you have been loved.
Many years later St. Paul effectively said the same thing in his letter to the Colossians:

As God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved,
clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience. 
Bear with one another and, if anyone has a complaint against another, forgive each other;
just as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive.
Above all, clothe yourselves with love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony.
And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in the one body.
And be thankful. Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly;
teach and admonish one another in all wisdom; and with gratitude in your hearts
sing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs to God. And whatever you do, in word or deed,
do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.
(Colossians 3:12-17)

David Rohrer
4/12/2020

Good Friday 2020

So Joseph [of Arimathea] took the body [of Jesus] and wrapped it in a clean linen cloth and laid it in his own new tomb, which he had hewn in the rock. He then rolled a great stone to the door of the tomb and went away. (Matthew 27:59-60)

Anyone who has ever been through the death of a loved one knows that strange and sometimes horrible awareness that crashes in immediately following the death.  Something is going to need to be done with the now lifeless body of our beloved.  In our day we refer to it as making arrangements, and it is largely about brokering the connection between the hospital and the mortuary.  Much of the transition from death to grave happens out of our sight.  It is not common for us to have the opportunity to do what Joseph of Arimathea did with the body of Jesus.  We do not personally carry the newly lifeless body of our loved one to the place where he or she will be entombed.  We do not experience the physical strain of leaning down to place them on a surface even more lifeless than their body. We do not struggle to roll a stone door over the mouth of the tomb.

Yet whether we have this more intimate experience of death or not, we all know, or will know, what it feels like to experience the overwhelming presence of our loved one’s absence.  The one who was alive and with us, is now dead and gone.  The tomb that awaited an occupant, is no longer waiting.  And once that space is filled, we have nothing to do but back out of the crypt, or fill in the grave with dirt, or watch the waves wash away the ashes, and then walk away.  Alone.

Death is an undeniable “full stop.”  It ends something.  Yet for those of us who are contemplating Jesus’ death on this Good Friday, we see death as a gateway as well.  Unlike Joseph of Arimathea, or Mary Magdalene, or Mary the mother of Jesus, or his disciples, we know the rest of the story.  We know that Sunday is coming.  We know the promise of resurrection.  So the breathless body on the stone slab in the crypt is not the only image we carry as we close the door of the tomb on Good Friday.  We hear the echo of his teaching about the grain of wheat needing to fall into the ground and die in order to bear fruit (John 12:24).  We remember the stories of his post resurrection appearances to his disciples.  We believe that he is alive and with us in a brand new way. 

But none of this counters the truth that he died.  And Good Friday and Holy Saturday are the days to sit with that truth for a while and ask ourselves what this death means.  What new life popped out of this seed that fell into the ground and died.  What new doors were opened when it broke the soil and opened itself to light?  What died with it?  And what part of it could that Roman cross not kill?

Once again Wendell Berry has been God’s gift to me in the contemplation of these Lenten questions.  He gives me a picture of the amazing work God does for us in death, how God’s experience of the grave is our gateway to life. 

What hard travail God does in death!
He strives in sleep, in our despair,
And all flesh shudders underneath
The nightmare of His sepulcher.

The earth shakes, grinding its deep stone;
All night the cold wind heaves and pries;
Creation strains sinew and bone
Against the dark door where He lies.

The stem bent, pent in seed, grows straight
And stands. Pain breaks in song. Surprising
The merely dead, graves fill with light
Like opened eyes. He rests in rising.

(1980 --  I  This Day p.25)

Our God in Christ participates in “creation’s groan” (Romans 8:22).  He enters into our bondage and decay in order to free us from it.  He descends into the ultimate pit and lets us know in no uncertain terms that not even death can stop his pursuit of us.  Not even death can separate us from his love.

David Rohrer

4/10/2020

A Welcoming Room of Song

A typical, pastor speak, opening line for this essay might be: “This Lent I have been daily thanking God for the black Labrador who was delivered to us in late January via the Guide Dogs for the Blind Puppy Truck.”  But to begin with an expression of what I actually feel, it's more accurate to simply say: “I am hopelessly in love with Tifah.” 
 
It’s hard not to love a puppy.  But I would have to say that my relationship with this puppy is markedly different than with any of the six previous Guide Dog puppies our family has raised.  I imagine this is a combination of my awareness and Tifah’s uniqueness, and to be sure, she does remind me of Pilaf, dog number three.  But she has one trait that is especially endearing and affirming.  She is a contemplative.  She loves to pay attention, watch and listen.  When we head down to the bottom of the driveway before and after her breakfast, she almost always pauses, sits and listens.  The birds are out in force, singing away; Tifah clearly notices and seems to enjoy their song.
 
Projection? Perhaps.  But if you saw her do this, I think you would agree with me.  She seems to understand that she has a job to do so that we can return to the house, but in her choice to sit and wait, I also hear her saying: “Don’t rush me.  I’ll get around to it.  But do you hear that? Take a moment to take it in.  You won’t be sorry.”  I do.  And I’m never sorry I did.
 
In this world of goal setting and to do lists, it is so easy to turn life into nothing more than the accomplishment of the tasks that we have carefully laid out the day before.  Success is gauged in terms how good we are at management by objective.  Wake up, review the list, attack each bullet point, and at the end of the day make tomorrow’s list.  But here’s the thing about these lists: they aren’t simply an end in themselves; they can take us to places where we discover things that we had not expected or imagined.  There at the end of the driveway I get a gift as I wait and listen with Tifah.  I hear an invitation to life that I would not have heard but for her choice and my willingness to join her in it. 
 
As I have previously mentioned, Wendell Berry’s poetry has been another thing that has been saving my life this Lent.  In one poem in particular he paints a picture of the lesson Tifah has been teaching me:

Off in the woods in the quiet
morning a redbird is singing
and his song around him
greater than its purpose,
a welcoming room of song
in which the trees stand,
through which the creek runs.
(This Day, 2011 --- VII)

 Like Tifah, the redbird is involved in a work he does not know about.  He is creating a “welcoming room of song,” and so inviting all in his hearing to listen and perhaps join in the song.  When I pay attention to and accept those invitations, my life is fuller.   Suddenly I am about much more than my goals.  I am a participant in something that I could not have created by myself or achieved merely through the accomplishment of my stated objectives.  And that’s a lot of fun.
 
In Luke’s telling of the Palm Sunday story (Luke 19), the Pharisees are uncomfortable with all the adulation Jesus is receiving and tell him to tell the crowds to be quiet.  Jesus’ reply to them is priceless: “I tell you if these were silent, the stones would shout out.”  The invitation to that room of song is sounding.  In fact, it can’t be silenced.  The question before us is whether or not we pause long enough to hear it and then take the step of entering the room to join in the song.  It means the sacrifice of laying aside some of our urgency and humbly recognizing the limits of our lists.  But it’s a heck of a lot more fulfilling than coming to the end of the day with nothing more than the anticipation of tomorrow’s list.
 
Dave Rohrer
4/3/2020