A Sermon by Sydney V. (Skip) Jackson — July 24, 2011
Indianola Presbyterian Church, Columbus, Ohio
Texts:  Ephesians 6:10-20;  Matthew 5:38-48

Put on the whole armor of God, so that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil.  — Ephesians 6:11

“But I say to you, Do not resist an evildoer.” — Matthew 5:39a

The author of Ephesians—Paul or more likely some later follower of Paul—says to “put on the whole armor of God” while in Matthew’s gospel Jesus says, “Do not resist the evildoer.”  Two such different teachings!  Commands that seem to stand in sharp contradiction to one another.  My first reaction is that they appear to reflect those two different but deeply instinctual responses that evolution has provided for us human beings when we are threatened—fight or flight.  “Put on the whole armor of God” and get ready to charge into battle.  Or “do not resist an evildoer… turn the other cheek” and get ready to run away.  Fight or flight.

I generally avoid the Ephesians text whenever it shows up in the lectionary.  It’s definitely not one of my favorite passages.  I recall a Bible story comic book from when I was a child that showed a knight in shining armor headed off to war—an image I’ve set aside as an adult.  I’ve seen teachers dress little kids in play armor for Sunday School or Vacation Bible School lessons, making little soldiers out of them.  A particularly horrible Children’s Sermon sticks in my mind, where the person giving it had fashioned cardboard and aluminum foil pieces of armor and put them on the kids and then glorified all those militaristic images at a time our nation was fighting in the first Persian Gulf war.  Too often texts like this are dragged out whenever people want to see our nation as fighting “God’s battle” in the world.

The second text from Matthew is one that is often ignored or ridiculed for being totally impractical and more than a bit “wimpy.”  Doesn’t it simply invite ever more abuse from bullies?  Yet after all Jesus’ advice about turning the other cheek, handing over your cloak, going the extra mile, and actually loving and praying for your enemies—and it’s way more than advice, for Jesus keeps saying, “You have heard… but I say to you…”—after all this seemingly impossible stuff we are to do, Jesus turns to an image from nature to remind us of the amazingly inclusive grace of God that touches on us all whether we deserve it or not.  And we are to do this stuff not because Jesus says so but so we may be “children of [our] Father in heaven, [who] makes the sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.”  We children are to take after “our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.”

 

A Sermon by Sydney V. (Skip) Jackson — July 17, 2011
Indianola Presbyterian Church, Columbus, Ohio
Texts:  Isaiah 65:17-25;  Zephaniah 3:14-20 [from NJB]

I will… delight in my people. — Isaiah 65:19  [NRSV]

Yahweh, your God… will rejoice over you with a happy song, he will renew you by his love, he will dance with shouts of joy. — Zephaniah 3:17 [NJB -- see at end of sermon)

Have any of you seen or read the play J.B. by Archibald MacLeish?  If you have, then you know that it is a contemporary retelling of the story of Job.  Early in the play, two characters named Mr. Zuss and Nickles assume the roles of God and Satan and argue about whether or not they need to wear masks.  At one point Nickles spouts a bit of doggerel that begins, “if God should laugh.”  And Mr. Zuss responds with shock, “God never laughs!  In the whole Bible!”  This is precisely Nickles’ point.   A God mask is needed, because human beings laugh but God does not.

Many church people would agree with Mr. Zuss.  God is far too awesome and majestic to laugh.  Conventional piety has left little room for humor.  Faith and hilarity don’t mix because faith is serious business.  But Mr. Zuss is wrong.  God does laugh in the Bible in Psalm 2:4: “He who sits in the heavens laughs.”  Psalm 59:8 also has God laughing.  In both cases, God laughs in derision at the nations and rulers of this world who see themselves as so powerful they can ignore or even conspire against God.  This is akin to the divine laughter Woody Allen had in mind when he said, “If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.”

Still, surely God also laughs in joy in the Bible.  Both Isaiah and Zephaniah speak of God rejoicing and taking delight in people.  Yet can we imagine God (as the New Jerusalem Bible puts it) singing a happy song over us while dancing with shouts of joy?  It’s hard.  Religion takes itself so very seriously—with lots of “thou shalt nots,” and all those “important” issues about salvation, and what the Bible says, and who’s in charge, and what color the church carpet ought to be.  We rarely picture Jesus laughing, let alone God?  Every so often I put an image on our bulletin cover of Jesus laughing, and invariably someone will express surprise.

 

A Sermon by Sydney V. (Skip) Jackson — July 10, 2011
Indianola Presbyterian Church, Columbus, Ohio
Texts:  Psalm 119:105-112;  Genesis 28:10-19

Your decrees… are the joy of my heart. — Psalm 119:111

Surely the Lord is in this place—and I did not know it! — Genesis 28:16

“Jacob left Beersheba and went toward Haran.”  That sounds tame, like he set off on a vacation trip.  In reality, Jacob is fleeing for his life.  He has swindled his brother Esau out of his birthright and has just now deceived their father to claim the first-born blessing that should have gone to Esau.  Jacob is not a nice guy.  Now Esau means to kill him, and Jacob has lit out for the hills to get away.  Night falls as he comes to a deserted place in the middle of nowhere, so he beds down with nothing but some stones for a pillow.  He dreams about angels and God making amazing promises about his future.  When he wakes he bursts out, “Surely the Lord is in this place—and I did not know it!”  So he names the place Bethel, which in Hebrew means “House of God.”

I wonder if his outburst wasn’t partly from waking up alive.  Esau hadn’t come to slit his throat in the night.  Guilt and fear and darkness are so powerful.  Have you ever struggled to sleep while listening for strange noises of “things that go bump in the night”?  How natural that he’d think of God when he wakes up at dawn.  The Hebrew people knew God best in experiences of salvation, survival, and rescue.  Throughout the Hebrew Scriptures—what we call the Old Testament—God is the One who hears people’s needs.  The Scriptures continually remind the Hebrew people and us that God redeems people from bondage, brings them out of Egypt and home from exile, saving them over and over again. 

I don’t know why we Christians are so ready to see the “Old Testament God” as a God of rigid commands and wrathful judgment.  Again and again, scripture views God’s law as a joyous blessing, a light to one’s path, guidance freely given for the journey of life.  God’s law is grace in action.  The most common statement about God is that God’s steadfast love and mercy endure forever.  I don’t know, maybe we feel a need for Christianity to be better than and to supplant Judaism.  But we forget Jesus himself was a rabbi, a Jew who worshipped the God of the Hebrew Scriptures.  Oh, he challenged Jewish leaders who misinterpreted and misused the law, but what he said and did could apply equally to all those Christians who make laws for their own gain instead of the common good, who insist on putting the letter of the law ahead of the needs of people, and who reject mercy and grace and demand retribution because it protects those who benefit most from the status quo.

 

A Sermon by Sydney V. (Skip) Jackson — July 3, 2011
Indianola Presbyterian Church, Columbus, Ohio
Texts:  Leviticus 16:5-11, 15, 20-22;  Matthew 9:9-13 — COMMUNION

The goat chosen by lot as the scapegoat shall be…used for making atonement by sending it  into the wilderness as a scapegoat. — Leviticus 16:10 [NIV]

Go and learn what this means, “I desire mercy, not sacrifice.”  For I have come to call not the righteous but sinners. — Matthew 9:13

Last Sunday I preached on Matthew 12 where Jesus quoted the prophet Hosea to remind the Pharisees that God desires mercy, not sacrifice.  Here in Chapter 9 is where Jesus said the same thing earlier, telling them,  “Go learn this.”  Last week I reflected on how Hosea’s and Jesus’ words speak against our unfortunate human tendency to be fundamentalists about all sorts of things, that end up putting principles and rules before human needs.  This morning, I want to take that idea that God desires mercy and not sacrifice and go in a little different direction.

First, sacrifice.  The annual Day of Atonement in ancient Israel was definitely not a good day to be a goat—especially an Ohio-State-Fair-quality, blue-ribbon, best-of-show goat.  The priests comb through all the herds of the people of Israel and select two special goats, each without blemish, to be offered to restore the people from their state of sin.  The priest sets the two goats before the holy place and in solemnly casts lots over them to symbolize God choosing one of the two.  But don’t go thinking this goat is the winner.  The chosen goat is slaughtered and its blood used to ritually cleanse the holy place and the priests.  Then the “losing” goat, the one God didn’t select, is made ready.  Laying hands on this goat, the priest offers a prayer of confession to ritually transfer to this one small goat all the sins and wrongdoings of the nation.  Then this goat is released to make its way unprotected in the barren wilderness.  This is the scapegoat, sent off to die alone carrying all the people’s sin away.  Then everybody feels better—except, I would think, the goats.