Two Different Religions in a Single Denomination

Divergent religious views:

GOD IS THE GREAT AUTHORITY
(God Alone)
Headship Theology

Many theologians have taught that the great goal of God is obedient subjects (1 Cor. 15:28). In this view, religion is a hierarchical system for transmitting divine authority. The higher up the pyramid, the greater your authority (i. e., your right and obligation to order the lives of others). The further down the pyramid, the greater your obligation to practice unquestioning obedience. When authority is the great value in a religious system, inevitably inferiors will be sucked into cooperation with evil directives issued by their superiors. (Think priests cooperating in the Inquisition, Christian Americans cooperating with their government in the internment of Japanese Americans or obeying the Fugitive Slave Act. Think of Adventist parents who have exiled their gay children because a minister told them it was obligatory to do so.)

In this view, in paradise every human is finally, immovably settled into placed in the pyramid (or annihilated).



GOD IS LOVE
(God with us)
Immanuel Theology

In this view, God's goal is virtuous partners (Rev. 3:21). Religion is a community created by God to nourish and savor goodness. Members of the community earn respect and honor by incarnating goodness. When goodness is the great value, everyone has standing to challenge any order that appears at variance with moral law. The core of goodness is love, not just "agape love" which is the principled regard for the well-being of others, but also "eros love" which includes affection and desire. God longs for communion with people. God enjoys sharing life and labor with people.

In God's ultimate dream humans are elevated. They are not on their faces before the throne. Rather God welcomes all the saints (men and women, people of every tribe and nation) to participate with him in the divine reign. (Rev. 22:5).


Adventism and classic Christianity have been dominated by excessive attention to God as The Authority and the church as a hierarchy. It is time for us to affirm GOD IS LOVE, and learn to live now in the light that comes from the shared throne.

Earning Respect

Sermon manuscript for Green Lake Church of Seventh-day Adventists for Sabbath, July 18, 2015.

Texts: Psalm 113, Luke 14:7-14.

Late Tuesday afternoon I was navigating the streets of Renton, moving very slowly because of the traffic. I wasn't paying much attention to the radio playing in the background. 94.9 was serving the usual buffet of bad news: Greece. Iran. American political bickering. Yemen. Problems in health care. Yada, yada, blah, blah, blah.

Then a name penetrated the fog. Scott Jurak. Suddenly, the radio had my full attention. Among long distance runners, Scott Jurak is legendary. He won the Western States 100 mile race a record seven consecutive times. The announcer was interviewing Scott Jurak about his recent completion of the Appalachian Trail. Scott had just run 2,189 miles from Georgia to Maine. It takes most people five or six months to hike the full length of the Appalachian Trail. Scott Jurak did it in 47 days.

One of the nice things about sports is that frequently arguments about greatness can be settled directly. We can argue all day long about whether my team or your team is the greatest. Then game day comes and someone wins.

If it is the womens US Soccer Team, they won decisively! They are the greatest.

It's natural for us to rank ourselves. We pay attention to who gets honored, who has the highest status. This human attention to status and rank shows up in the story we heard today in our New Testament reading.

When Jesus noticed that all who had come to the dinner were trying to sit in the seats of honor near the head of the table, he gave them this advice: "When you are invited to a wedding feast, don't sit in the seat of honor. What if someone who is more distinguished than you has also been invited? The host will come and say, 'Give this person your seat.' Then you will be embarrassed, and you will have to take whatever seat is left at the foot of the table! "Instead, take the lowest place at the foot of the table. Then when your host sees you, he will come and say, 'Friend, we have a better place for you!' Then you will be honored in front of all the other guests. Luke 14:7-10 NLT. (Accessed through Blue Letter Bible.com)

At first glance this is simply common sense advice. Don't set yourself up for embarrassment. But as you would expect, Jesus was doing more than giving mere common sense etiquette advice. He highlighted one of the most profound principles of the kingdom of heaven: status is earned, not demanded. In the kingdom of heaven there is no ring to kiss, there is no insignia which requires a salute, there is no title which confers absolute authority.

In this teaching, Jesus echoes passages in the Old Testament which portray even the authority of God as contingent on congruence with moral law. God is to be praised BECAUSE he acts righteously. And the supreme demonstration of righteousness is concern for the poor and oppressed.

As we read in our Old Testament scripture (Psalm 113) God lifts the poor from the dung hill. He gives women who have been regarded as cursed by God, the highest honor in their society. We praise God because God does these kinds of things.

In the kingdom of heaven, greatness—high rank, high honor—is the fruit of righteous action. And the most exalted righteous action is lifting others.

11 For those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted." 12 Then he turned to his host. "When you put on a luncheon or a banquet," he said, "don't invite your friends, brothers, relatives, and rich neighbors. For they will invite you back, and that will be your only reward. 13 Instead, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. 14 Then at the resurrection of the righteous, God will reward you for inviting those who could not repay you."

Sometimes in religion, theologians have pictured God as primarily concerned with authority. In this approach to religion, the highest virtue is subservience to God. The highest religious practice is making signs of obeisance to God—bowing, crawling on one's knees, kissing the ring of a clergy person, obeying without question every demand uttered by a preacher.

This view of God has been most dramatically and grotesquely displayed in our day by the Taliban and ISIS. However, even within Christianity, there are movements that attempt to portray the religion of Jesus as a structure of authority. In our own church, people like Doug Bachelor and Steve Bohr have turned Christianity upside down. They have pictured God as a benevolent tyrant demanding unquestioning subservience. They have preached that the religion of Jesus is a power structure that requires a show of obeisance from lay people generally and women specifically. They picture Jesus as an ally of their self-importance. They are wrong.

We are called to something better. We are called to the vision Jesus voiced: to welcome among us those who cannot repay our welcome. To lift those who have no resources.

There is a ranking in the kingdom of heaven. There is greatness and honor among us. The highest rank belongs to those who serve. Especially to those who serve by raising others. When we do that, we have indeed become like God.

At school you will find yourself naturally, easily drawn into circles of students who share your academic focus, your political views, cultural background and economic status. There is nothing wrong with these natural affinities. Still, Jesus calls us to deliberately look beyond them. Let us be deliberate in seeking to include in our circle of privilege others who cannot be there without our welcome.

At the level of society, we are all challenged by this vision of Jesus. We live in the most privileged country in history. We who call ourselves Christian are invited by our Master to ask: how can we include others in our circle of privilege?

The mark of authentic Christianity is how far we reach, how richly we welcome those with no natural claim on us. The evidence that we have taken note of the goodness of Jesus is our own generosity, our own welcome, our own kindness to the least, the lowliest, the farthest from any natural claim on privileges like ours.

If Scott Jurak walks into a room of runners, people will naturally gravitate toward him. They naturally admire someone who embodies our highest ambitions. Aspiring runners will hope that association with Jurak will somehow rub off on them and improve their own performance.

If the Womens Soccer team visited us today, we would rightly honor their achievement. They are champions.

When we mimic the work of Jesus, when we lift the lowly, we, too, will rightly be called champions. God himself will invite us to place of honor at the heavenly table. And there will be great joy.

Jubilee

Sermon manuscript for Green Lake Church

Sabbath, July 11, 2015

Texts:

Leviticus 25:8-17

Luke 13:10-17

Last week was 4^th of July, our national day. We celebrated our freedom. Liberty. Freedom. Independence. These are important words for us as a people. We like to think of ourselves as the people in the world who are most free. We celebrate our freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of the press.

On the other hand, we are also a violent people. We have often imagined that freedom meant holding the gun instead of having the gun pointed at us. We have been infatuated with a vision of cowboy justice in which the wrongdoer is summarily executed. Our love of vengeance and punishment has led us as a nation to incarcerate more people than any other nation on earth. The United States has more people in prison than either China or Russia—nations we have rightly criticized for their human rights record.

This contrast between our love of “my freedom” and our willingness to take away “their freedom” stands in stark contrast to the vision of freedom articulated by the ancient prophets and modeled by Jesus.

Let's consider two pictures of freedom in the Bible.

The Book of Leviticus in the Bible is a potpourri of all kinds of ancient rules and procedures. It is a bit notorious for its mix of strangeness and wisdom. For the modern person, reading through this book can be a difficult exercise. Then you come to the end of the book. And there you come across the passage we read for our Old Testament scripture this morning: the Sabbath rules.

It is an astonishing vision of a perpetual renewal of freedom.

Jewish life was ordered in cycles of Sabbaths.

Every week, the seventh day was a park in time, a social/spiritual space protected from the demands of ordinary life. Every Sabbath people were set free from the tyranny of employers, even the tyranny of existence. For one day, the people were to quit working, quit striving, quit chasing an adequate retirement, quit chasing an advancement, quit chasing wealth. Every week, for one day, every person was to live perfectly free. On Sabbath there were no slaves, no employees. Astonishingly, there were not even any beasts of burden. There were no bosses, no employers, no kings, no tyrants. Every week the nation luxuriated in this experience of freedom.

Every seventh year came a sabbatical year. Israel was an agrarian society. Everything was based on agriculture. Against this background, the entire community was commanded to interrupt the cycles of planting, cultivating and harvesting. For a year, the fields were to be allowed to go fallow. It was an agrarian sabbatical.

Then there was the super Sabbath, the Jubilee. At the end of the seventh cycle of seven years there was a grand Jubilee. In this year the land was redistributed. Since land was the basis for wealth, this was a grand wealth redistribution project.

The Books of Moses tell of the distribution of the land after the conquest of Palestine. It was like the Homesteader Act in the United States offering free land to anyone who would go and work it. The entire nation started off with an a golden opportunity. Land was the source of wealth and everyone one was given property.

In the natural course of life, if you give everyone equal opportunity, some are going to thrive and prosper. Some are going to struggle. Over time, the natural trend is for the sources of wealth to become concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. This is not an evil process. It is the fruit of hard work, luck, and family culture. The people at the bottom have less and less. The same amount of effort on their part will produce less and less economic benefit. While for those at the top, the same amount of effort will produce greater and greater wealth.

When one becomes wealthy enough, passive income will completely supply one's needs. You don't have to work, unless you want to. Nice!!!

This disparity in wealth ends up creating a profound disparity in freedom. Those at the bottom are free to work. And work and work some more. Or starve. They have no margin. A single bit of bad luck will throw them into the tender clutches of payday loan providers and ruthless creditors. While those at the top are increasingly free to spend their time studying philosophy and music, climbing mountains and pursuing education.

Then comes the Jubilee. The poor are made free again. They or their children or grandchildren are given another shot at acquiring wealth through hard work. The playing field is somewhat leveled. Hope comes alive again.

In the practice of Jubilee, the entire society participates in creating Sabbath freedom. The entire community is transformed and renewed. Freedom touches every person, every family, every household.

This vision of glorious freedom, this vision of a society in which freedom for the lowly is renewed over and over—this vision was picked up by the prophets and used as a metaphor for Grand Goal of all history. This persistent renewal of freedom provided a concrete example of the overarching purpose of God.

People struggling at the bottom, people born in poor families, people born without connections, without a family history of hard work, people born without keen intellects or without healthy bodies were promised a new birth of freedom. There would be a better world where their efforts or their children's efforts would produce good success. A world where they, too, could make music and voice ideas and ideals and hopes.

This was the pattern of history mapped out by the Sabbath cycles of Israel. This was the pattern of life God dreamed of for his people.

Let's leap forward hundreds of years. Let's go from the primitive world of Leviticus, a time when the people of Israel were nomads living in tents or an agrarian people scattered in tiny hamlets in a wild and dangerous country. Let's come to the time of Jesus. The Jewish people were now a civilization. They had a deep, rich theological and religious heritage.

By the time of Jesus, the notion of Jubilee had become deeply embedded in Jewish theology (though it had disappeared from their civil society). The weekly Sabbath so thoroughly permeated Jewish society it had become a central definition of who they were as a people. They were Sabbath keepers.

Which brings us to our New Testament reading.

One Sabbath, Jesus went to synagogue, as usual. And as usual, he preached. At some point in the service, he noticed a woman with severe scoliosis. The way I imagine it, she was bent over so far she walked with two sticks to hold up her torso as she shuffled about the village.

If you watched her for more than a few minutes, you would feel in your own gut the compression, the pressure on your stomach and lungs. You would begin to hurt.

Jesus was preaching, saying beautiful and inspiring things. People loved it, like they usually did. But he interrupted the sermon. He noticed this woman and stopped talking. He invited her to the front of the synagogue. I imagine she came with great timidity. She felt her deformity, her ugliness. She was used to lurking at the edge of social events, hiding in the shadows at weddings and funerals. She was weird. She was cursed. Still, the preacher, the famous preacher, had summoned her. So she planted her sticks and heaved herself to her feet and shuffled forward.

There, in front of the congregation, Jesus placed his hands on her and announced, “Lady, you are released from your bondage. You are free.” Immediately, she was healed. She straightened her back. She turned her head back and forth. Then she turned her torso back and forth. Then she dropped her sticks. She stepped in a circle to the right, then to the left.

The crowd gasped. “Glory be!” the woman exclaimed. “Hallelujah!” She started laughing, then covered her mouth in embarrassment. This was church, after all.

She walked gingerly back to her place in the synagogue, wondering every second if it was real, if it would last.

The synagogue became a bee hive of murmuring and whispering. Who had ever seen such a thing?

The synagogue ruler stood and demanded people come to order. This was church not a clinic.

“Look,” he said. “God gave us six days to do our work, six days to do the ordinary stuff of life, to take care of ordinary business. Come on those days for healing. Sabbath is for worship and for study. Let's keep Sabbath special.”

Jesus spoke up. “Come on. Don't be hypocritical. Every person here unties his ox or donkey twice or three times every Sabbath and leads it to the watering trough. Four times, if it's hot. If you would do that for a donkey or a cow, surely it is right that I should untie this woman, this daughter of God who has been bound by Satan these eighteen years.”

All the people were delighted, the Gospel says. And all dignitaries who were opposed to Jesus adversaries were confounded.

God wants us to be free. The point of religion is to be a mechanism for setting people free. But sometimes it gets turned into an instrument of bondage.

Like many of the older members in this congregation, I grew up in constant fear of condemnation. I imagined God was constantly watching to see if I screwed up, to see if I, at every moment, was putting out one hundred percent effort in the pursuit of holiness. I lived in perpetual dread of the judgment. Then I received a new vision of the compassion and affection of God. I knew that God was pleased with me.

I was set free. The inner change was so profound that all my friends noticed. My behavior didn't change, but I changed.

People asked, “John what happened to you?” They rejoiced with me.

But a few people were like the synagogue ruler. They were terrified. They could see I was no longer leashed and bound and they were afraid for me because I as no longer afraid. I guess they feared that if I wasn't afraid, if I was happy, I would race off into a wild and stupidly wicked life.

They, too, asked, “John, what has happened to you?” But asked in worried tones.

I had been in bondage for over eighteen years and now I was free.

Some of you have experienced that kind of bondage. You have been told by parents or teachers or preachers or siblings or someone else that you are defective, unworthy, hopelessly broken. You are ugly, wicked, lazy, stubborn, hopeless. Those words have defined your existence. They have formed a cage. You have been trapped.

Jesus says to you this Sabbath and every Sabbath: You are free. Those words of bondage are false. They come from the enemy. God's word is you are free.

This story also addresses directly the issue currently being debated in the Adventist Church. This past Wednesday, the General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists voted not to approve the ordination of women. Those who opposed women's ordination are committed to keeping women “in their place.” They imagine that exercising this kind of domination is doing the work of God. They imagine that God's goal for his people is subjugation and subordination. They join the synagogue synagogue ruler in urging people to leave freedom for the secular world. Women can be doctors and judges and presidents and professors, but inside the church women must remain cloistered, subservient, second. Religiously women must not be free.

They are wrong. They are violating the spirit of Sabbath. They are contradicting the message of the prophets and the mission of Jesus.

I stand with Jesus in proclaiming freedom. I invite us as a congregation to stand with Jesus.

We are a Sabbath keeping church, a Sabbath keeping congregation. The essence of Sabbath is the proclamation of freedom. On Sabbath, we are set free from the ordinary human patterns of subordination. According to the commandment, even the ranking of humans above animals is set aside. On Sabbath, we may not even order our animals to work. They are free to luxuriate in divinely-appointed freedom. How much more our daughters and wives and mothers and aunts and lovers and friends.

As a Sabbath keeping church, we are committed to the radical message of freedom. We oppose systems of control and subordination. On Sabbath all of us together savor the freedom which is ours as members of the family of God. And on Sabbath we pledge ourselves to doing all we can to shape our world in the direction of Jubilee—the world of perpetual liberation, the dream of God.