"Unchained"

Rev. Matthew Miller

FROM THE LETTERS 2 Timothy 2:8-15 click here to watch the sermon "Unchained"

What brings you to church today? It’s a question I wonder quite a bit. Not just about all of you. But anyone on any given Sunday, or Wednesday night in some places. Daily mass for very committed Roman Catholics. What brings any of us to church? Over the years I’ve heard a variety of answers: habit, community, music, inspiration, solace, peace. For some folks it’s relatively easy. They’ve just always gone to church, so they just keep coming. For others it’s a struggle. Maybe it’s a struggle to get the kids going, or a struggle to get the body going. Sometimes it’s a struggle against doubt, or guilt, or weariness. I can’t tell you the number of people I’ve met who find out I’m a pastor, ask which church, indicate an interest and never show up. Often, they’ve experienced some kind of religious trauma. They’ve been condemned, or abused, or dismissed by faithful people who claimed to love them until they no longer fit whatever mold they were expected to fit. Like anyone who has experienced that kind of hurt or rejection, they’re cautious of people and places that put on a good show until someone steps out of line, or voices a different view. Our reading this morning comes from a letter sent to the next generation of leadership in the church with instructions on how to live into that role faithfully. But it’s also a letter that’s been made canon and called scripture, so it’s just as much an instruction to the church in how to be led by this next generation. And the next. And the next. And over the next two thousand years what church is, and how it is constituted, how it is led, what it looks like and sounds like and operates within histories and cultures, dark ages and renaissance and reform will continually change. Likewise, what has brought people to church over those centuries has also changed. Refuge, belonging, obligation, peer pressure, familial duty and the promise of pie in the sky in the great by and by. Also, the gospel in all its many forms and expressions. In all that change, through the many iterations of the church, the constant remains the same. It is found in the three words that open our reading: Remember Jesus Christ. When the very first followers of Jesus ventured out into the gentile world of imperial Rome, they fell into disagreement about whether and how the gentiles they were encountering could become Christians. Did they have to follow their Jewish covenant practice of circumcision, what about dietary law? Remember Jesus Christ. Jesus understood the difference between the letter and the Spirit of the law. The letter kills, but the Spirit gives life. And when the church faced the question of leaders who had betrayed them during Roman persecution and whether their sin nullified the means of grace in the sacraments they performed. They remembered Jesus Christ and his ministry and words of forgiveness and reconciliation, the immeasurable riches of his grace. When the church lost its way and waged murderous crusades against non-Christians. It was called back by mystics and monastics who remembered Jesus Christ and sought to welcome every stranger they encountered as though they were Christ himself. Remember Jesus Christ, raised from the dead, a descendant of David. That is the gospel for Paul. The good news of remembering Jesus Christ with such a gospel comes in two parts.  First, raised from the dead. I attended a Jesuit High School that required all graduates to have three years, six semesters, of theology credits to graduate. At times I might have leaned a little too hard into my protestant background as a response to the teaching of Jesuit priests and scholastics. During my Junior year, I obnoxiously declared to the scholastic teaching our course about Jesus that we didn’t have crucifixes in our church because we focused on Jesus raised from the dead. A week or so later he asked me to stay after class and presented me with a simple brass plated cross. What I have since come to learn since my days as a know-it-all teenager is that there is no resurrection without crucifixion. To remember Jesus raised from the dead is to remember first that he died. That he was sentenced to die by the preferred state violence of the Roman Empire- public execution in the form of crucifixion- and that in rising from the dead, he overcame not only the power of an oppressive imperial regime, but even death itself. To remember Jesus Christ raised from the dead is to remember that our faith rests on the promise that the worst the world can do is no match for the power of God’s love to raise us up with Christ to live with him. 

Second, remember that Jesus Christ is a descendent of David. Meaning, though he is raised from the dead, he is not a supernatural being. He may be God in the flesh, but that flesh is absolutely human in fullest sense of the word. He is descended from a people in a place who have a long history as God’s own people. He is not a concept, or an abstract, or an archetype, he is a human male born of a woman. That’s important to remember when we’re tempted to simply look at his divinity and not his humanity and keep him at arm’s length, or pretend that he didn’t experience all the limits of the flesh that any one of us experiences. It’s important in remembering Jesus Christ raised from the dead that we hold this piece of it alongside that, even as he is raised from the dead, he knows what it is to be human. He knows what it is to have parents who don’t always understand you, siblings who think you may have lost your mind, friends who can share a meal with you one minute and turn around and betray you and deny they even know you the next. He knows how it feels to be up against worldly powers that wield deadly force and religious powers that are anything but life-giving.  This is the gospel. Not religious rites (though they may point us in that directions). Not imperfect leadership (though they may try to point us that way too). Not Crusades and campaigns, and culture wars. Not carpet or tile or which color to paint the building. Not all the things that we needlessly subject ourselves to for no good reason. None of these are the gospel. None of these are good news worth enduring hardship for. Jesus Christ raised from the dead, a descendent of David cannot be contained or constrained by any of it. Not by scandals, or skeptics. Not by seasons of success or decline. Not by the powers of imperial Rome, or Byzantium. Not by Czars or Monarchs, church councils or conclaves. We remember Jesus Christ raised from the dead, a descendent of David, God’s anointed precisely because all those who can chain us like criminals. All those who can shoot us with pepper balls and fill our eyes with pepper spray as they did in Chicago to our brother, David Black, the pastor of First Presbyterian Church there. All those who can make us suffer for standing up for the poor, the marginalized, the targets of an ethnic cleansing. They are no match for the Word of God made flesh in Jesus Christ, raised from the dead, a descendent of David.  A hundred years ago, Benito Mussolini coined the term fascism from the Latin word faces, which was a bundle of rods tied around an axe, a symbol of ancient Rome’s strength and absolute state power. The idea gained popularity throughout the European continent in the wake of the devastation caused by the first world war. In Germany, the Reich government of the National Socialists used symbols of the Christian church there to advance its own version of fascism. But a group of theologians and church leaders opposed such appropriation for state use and drafted what has become one of the confessions of our church: the theological declaration at Barmen. Barmen contains a litany of challenges to the attempts to conflate God with country. But at its heart is a sentence that sounds very much like the instruction here to Timothy and those called to be Christ’s church. “Jesus Christ, as he is attested for us in Holy Scripture, is the one Word of God which we have to hear and which we have to trust and obey in life and in death.” Everyone has their own reasons for coming to church. But in all that we do as church, in our mission work toward the hungry, the homeless, the hurting here and around the world; in the love we share as a community with our neighbors through trunk or treats and easter egg hunts and support for our local schools, in the music that we make and the music that we host in our sanctuary, in classrooms and zoom discussions and committee meetings, in concerns over budgets and resource and our ongoing viability as a congregation, in our pre-school and our grace space and all the ways we seek to welcome the children in our midst, in the many expressions of caring compassion undertaken by our Deacons, in all of it we remember Jesus Christ, the one Word of God which we have to hear and which we have to trust and obey in life and in death. In the end that is why we are here. Because all the rest can be fought and contended over, but the Word of God in Jesus Christ cannot and never will be chained. Raised from the dead, a descendent of David. What good news.