Jesus as Invitation

One of the old hymns I learned as a Southern Baptist child was "Jesus calls us o'er the tumult."  We have two tunes for in our hymnal at #549 and #550.  Neither are the tune I learned to sing.   The words work no matter:

Jesus calls us; o'er the tumult

of our life's wild, restless sea;

day by day His sweet voice soundeth,

saying, "Christian, follow me."

Jesus calls us from the worship

of the vain world's golden store,

from each idol that would keep us,

saying, "Christian, love me more."

In our joys and in our sorrows,

days of toil and hours of ease,

still He calls, in cares and pleasures,

"Christian, love me more than these."

Jesus calls us-- by Thy mercies,

Savior, may we hear Thy call;

give our hearts to Thine obedience,

serve and love Thee best of all.

The image of Jesus calling is a powerful one for me because it has been so much a part of my understanding for years.  It is the one that gets me to be constantly reminding us that following him is as much or more of what we should be doing as worshipping him.

In this Sunday's gospel, the complaint Jesus returns to those who cry about his and his disciples' hygiene is to quote Isaiah's prophetic critique that "in vain do they worship me." (Isaiah 29:13)  He is not at this point issuing an invitation to follow him but he is clearly indicating that worship is not enough.  Indeed because worship may be hijacked by pretence and power we must always check our hearts.

For sure following Jesus can be just as undone by human competition and pettiness.  Remember how the disciples argued over who was greatest.  But seeing Jesus as inviting us to follow, especially over tumults and toil clears a path for our hearts that the concerns for regularity and order in worship may obstruct or misdirect.

Jesus calls us over difficulties he has already confronted.  Jesus calls us through our own struggles.  Jesus calls us even as we create our own stumbling blocks and distractions.   Jesus calls us to give our hearts to love and service.  Jesus calls us saying "Christian, follow me."

Inviting Jesus

Thanks for going with me last week through the difficult news of Dick and Jim and Martha's lives coming to an end.  Our prayers continue for those whom they loved and those who mourn.  Grief is how we send love to those we've lost.  Let's keep sending love.

If you would please add Coy Wallace Carson to your prayers.  He was Papa to my David Wallace Brown and Mary Carson Brown.  Their mom Cindy was with him as his long descent into dementia and physical failing ended while he was sleeping.  Sending more love.

Part of how we can still have love to send is because of how Jesus continues to abide with us.  I characterized our wanting to "rest in Jesus" as kin to making Sabbath.  The rest we take away from the world's troubles is a good place to meet the one who goes before us to death and was raised.   We can trust him to be present.

But we must be cautious about how we allow our expectation of his being with us and protecting a place of sabbath rest and sanctuary for us to develop.  Simply, he wants to be invited and our presumption may not be the best way to call him over the threshold.

Maybe if we think about the character of the one we are inviting it'll help us to ask him in.  In a sermon delivered to Calvary Episcopal in 1999 during Lent Marcus Borg suggested 3 ways to see Jesus at the door.

First is to think of Jesus as a "Jewish mystic, as one who knew God, who knew the Sacred, who knew the Spirit. He was one for whom the Spirit of God was an experiential reality."

Secondly, Borg saw "the historical Jesus as a wisdom teacher of a way or a path,  the road less traveled, the narrow way, a subversive way to an alternative wisdom."

Thirdly Borg saw Jesus as "a social prophet, a radical critic of the domination system in the Jewish homeland in His day. Indeed, it was His passion as a social prophet that counts for Him getting killed.
To put that three-fold summary into three phases, there was to Jesus first, a spirit dimension, secondly, a wisdom dimension, and thirdly, a justice dimension."

These may not be the Jesus you have in heart and mind when you are seeking rest from grief, stress or struggle.  But these pictures of Borg's can inform how we move back into the world from our sabbath sanctuaries, from our grieving.

From Jesus the mystic we can return with a renewed sense of wonder and marvel at how the world continues to hold places and times for joy and celebration.  From Jesus the wisdom teacher we can expect new learning and new truths as we move forward.  With Jesus the social prophet we can be encouraged to find and fashion a better world for others and ourselves.

In each instance God in Christ waits on our invitation.  Ready to grieve, to wonder, to learn, to grow, and to strive again . . . with us.

Resting in Jesus

It is an Advent hymn that comes to mind today.  Following the close watch my friend David and I kept with others for his mother as she lay in hospice and the sad news of the passing of former parishioner and vestry member Dick Hodgetts, just days after hearing from Ellen Warren about the passing of her little brother Jim.

Come, Thou long-expected Jesus

Born to set Thy people free

From our fears and sins release us

Let us find our rest in Thee

So many in this community have been keeping watch and the news is only a little comfort.  We mourn with Pat and family. And Ellen. And David. And we thank God for their release and rest now it has come.

Our need to meet Jesus never diminishes, never ends.  Back when I was writing about the difference between Sunday and Sabbath I perhaps focused too much on the church and our activity in it as a sociological reality.  I don't remember identifying "being with Jesus" as a "sabbath rest."  

But that is exactly what the hymn expresses and it is echoed in the Collect for Saturdays in Morning Prayer:

Almighty God, who after the creation of the world rested from all your works and sanctified a day of rest for all your creatures: Grant that we, putting away all earthly anxieties, may be duly prepared for the service of your sanctuary, and that our rest here upon earth may be a preparation for the eternal rest promised to your people in heaven; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Christian version of Sabbath is not just absence from labor, stress, struggle, or pain.  It is to be caught up in the abiding presence of Jesus.  We understand that rest as provided or gifted to us and not as something we've earned or gained.  

Yes there are things we do to move ourselves into place, much like all our sacramental "regulars."  Dimmed lights, reduced noise, comfortable seating, empty schedules, rise to the level of liturgy.  They are our first part in what is finally fulfilled by God's blessing, God's effecting the very shalom/peace in which and for which God created us.  

Sabbath is encountered by God's grace not accomplished.  A grace that God knows and has experienced in the very first Sabbath.  Dick and Martha and before them Jim are in that grace -- a gift of Sabbath from God in the presence of their "long-expected Jesus."  

Meeting Jesus, Again

Marcus Borg died in January of 2015.  He was an important apologist for Christianity because he shared his recovery of faith by remembering how it felt to believe when he was young and allowing himself to feel that way again about stories and explanations that academic criticism and challenge had deconstructed and dismissed.  

Remember when we all were fascinated by the power and magnitude of Jesus' miracles or those Cecile B. deMile-ian moments from the Old Testament?  Like last Sunday's story of Mose's shining face after his encounter with God on the mountain, the stories are so big our wonder keeps us remembering until some challenge rises up out of textual variance or historical contradiction.  

Borg, who introduced himself to a wider audience with his charming and comforting "Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time"  helped more than those whose nostalgia was darkened.  He helped the same scholars who had frightened away a generation of believers.  

Thanks to Phillip Clayton, PhD,  Ingraham Professor, Claremont School of Theology for his development of these four aspects of Borg's impact so worth our attention, especially as we work through these Sundays informed by John's "I am the bread" gospel readings.

• Borg was hopelessly Jesus-centric. Nothing in the history of Christianity or its present-day institutions could turn him away from this Jesus — not the great ideas and theologies of intellectuals, not the debates over the historicity of the New Testament, not the frustrating trivialities of bureaucratic functionaries. If the entire institutional side of the Christian church should go down in flames — and many think that it is — Borg’s faith would be untouched. Borg was unwaveringly drawn to the Jesus of the gospels; he couldn’t imagine building his life around anyone else. I’d like to think that Emergence Christianity at its best does precisely this.


• Borg described a God worth believing in. Borg’s writings (and his person) consistently convey belief in a loving and compassionate God. He wasted little ink on theological disputes. The only thing he consistently wrote about God was that he was a panentheist: God is immanent in the world, as the world is immanent in God. The rest of the metaphysical debates about the divine went into the “optional” category for him. So did the battles over Christian orthodoxy, from substitutionary atonement to pre-incarnate Logos to pre-millennial eschatology.


• Borg’s unencumbered Christianity didn’t negate other religions and spiritual paths. It didn’t tell you that you have to hate gays or proselytize Buddhists or be wary of your neighbor’s doctrine of Scripture. Love is not a zero-sum game. Following Jesus is not first about propositions, stacking up true ones on your side and attacking the false propositions of your enemies. Borg’s humility, which so many of us experienced, was the natural expression of a Christian faith built around Jesus’ radical way of compassion first, with everything else a distant second. Isn’t it fair to say that what has drawn so many to the emergence movement is this same message: a Christianity without exclusion or intolerance?


• Borg knew that we have to pare Christianity back down to the basics... or else. The age of Christian Empire has passed (thank God). The Church is no longer the center of American society, as the Harvard Pluralism Project has so clearly shown. The fastest growing religious group in America are the non-affiliated. As the famous process theologian John Cobb said in a talk recently, “The more progressive denominations on the whole have been losing members and resources. There are many reasons. But I think the deepest one may be that what we do and say does not seem to be terribly important.”

We can use these highlights to help us read and understand the Gospel this month and maybe meet Jesus again for the first time ourselves. 

Long Roads and Two-way Streets: Part 4

Part of how we navigate these streets we share is to pray for God's blessing for those who travel and find their places along the way.  In Madison in particular those place often have intense historical significance.  Our own property is exactly one of those both historic and intensely so places.

On Tuesday I visited the Foster-Thomason-Miller house, now in the care of Madison-Morgan Conservancy.

The work being done both professionally and mostly by volunteers is another example of what I am calling intense and historic.  Washing away the soot to expose ornate wall coverings, finding an 8-point compass star aligned with Madison's northeast to southwest orientation, and clearing the heavy brush each trigger an intense response of wonder, curiosity, and surprise.

Hardly a minute passed during my brief visit that was not peppered with Look! Look here! Look at this!

The blessing prayers were for the property but more for those doing the work to restore and the hope they have for tomorrow.  Thanks to Christine McCauley and to all who through this effort have made the long intense road of history turn toward a future of hope.