Matthew 25:14-30, David Orendorff

Behind me are two sheets of paper. Terri and Sara have agreed to take notes on what you say. On the first sheet are written the words “I experience grace when ________________.” There are a variety of ways we experience grace. It may be in a talent we possess, such as teaching or listening. It may be an internal sense of God’s presence when we need peace in the midst of chaos. It might be an experience of the great of God’s creation while hiking in the Cascades or sailing in the San Juan’s. Grace is any experience of God’s gifts.

So when I say, “I experience God’s grace when _____________” what is the first thing that comes to your mind? (Take answers and help recorders.)

We know that the world is not always and in all places, graceful. There are people and places that need more grace. On the second sheet are the words “My world needs more grace ______________.” The need for grace may be either in your soul or in your world. It may be personal or it may be a world situation. Where or for whom does your world need grace? (Take answers and help recorders.)

Both of these sheets are our world. Our world is a mixture of abundant grace and a need for grace. There is a longing within us to make all times and all places graceful. Made in the image of God’s love we want the needy place as full as this graceful place. We want to move grace from one sheet to the other.

Many of us have tried to make that movement by our own resources and power. And many of us have discovered we cannot do it by ourselves. Sometimes we feel the pain but don’t know what to do. Sometimes we try our best to do some good but there are unintended. And sometimes we just run out of gas and we become soul weary, closing our eyes and then our hearts. To gracefully move from sheet A to sheet B we need the help of both others and of God. With that admission we are ready to let the Holy Spirit helps us do what we cannot do by ourselves.

This promise of God to send the Holy Spirit to guide and empower us is written into our baptism: Brothers and sisters in Christ through the Sacrament of Baptism we are initiated into Christ’s holy church. We are incorporated into God’s might acts of salvation.” In the baptismal vows we pledge to “accept the freedom and power God gives (us).”

We are the church (the ecclesia - the ones called out to serve); we are the living body of Christ (incorporated - made a body - into God’s might acts of salvation). In baptism and then by our own confirmation of faith, we are the ones who move grace from one page to the next. It is God that makes this graceful movement possible.

In today’s parable the “talent” is a unit of money. By the power of this parable “talent” has also come to mean the abilities and passions God has given to each of us to be used for the master, for God. Two of the stewards use their talents and increase the master’s wealth. One of stewards, because he is afraid, buries his money to keep it safe. The burying of the talents makes the master angry and he curses the frightened steward.

God did not give us talents to protect or to bury. We are given talents to use and even risk for grace. As stewards our work is not finished until there are no more wounded souls, no more alcoholic families and every child has a lap to sit in until they can read rhymes and poetry not only for themselves but also to the next generation. Our work is done when the cups of all the people and all the places that need grace are spilling into song and dance.

A first step then in bringing grace to the world is the identification our talents. I am reading a book for business folks called “Strengths Finder 2.0.”¹ The author, Tom Rath worked with the Gallup research folks to identify a variety of strengths we possess. It turns out they could have studied the Bible for the same info, but it is nice when the social sciences verify what Bible students have already discovered.

Rath says that too often we focus on improving our weaknesses, trying to get better at something we are not good at, rather than working from our strength. By working from our strengths he means that we must first identify our talents and passions, our natural way of thinking, feeling or behaving. He encourages the reader to know their strengths (which also means we know our weaknesses). He even (surprise/surprise) provides an online tool from his company to the reader’s strengths. He says that our natural talents and passions - the things we truly love to do - last for a lifetime and are where we can be most effective.

At Bear Creek we want to help you know your talents. In the past we offered a class on Spiritual Gifts. Saying “spiritual gifts” is just another way of asking what talents God has given you. The class fell by the way with changes in leadership and lives. Ron Large is now working on a spiritual gifts class that I hope we can offer in the spring. This gifts class is a ministry that has been calling to Ron for more than a year. It is our belief that God has given us talents to use.

A second step in graceful movement is to practice our God given gifts so we might be both proficient and efficient in our work. Like any naturally gifted person we must practice our gifts for them to be perfected and grow in power. Rath talks about investing our talents. I am not making this up. He really is repeating the parable. By investing he means that we must spend time practicing our talents, developing our skills, and building our knowledge base.

If my name is Bill or Dewey then God gave me a talent for playing the piano. If I do not practice the piano, develop my skills and build my knowledge of the piano and music then I have buried my God given gift and the world is poorer and less graceful than it might be.

A final step in a graceful movement is to employ God’s gifts with a servant heart. Far too many of us try to do what we were never meant to do, and fail to do what we were made to do. As such we have not identified our talents or passion and miss the mighty act of salvation God has made us to be.

It is a wasted investment if I try to be like Bill or Dewey. To best serve God and others, to know the full joy of a servant heart, I must use the gifts I have been given for the purposes for which God has designed them. If I am not using my gift of loving children then my movement of grace from chart A to chart B will at best be inefficient and at worst harmful.

In his nonreligious way Rath makes this point by telling a Mark Twain story: A man died and met Saint Peter at the Pearly Gates. Knowing that Saint Peter was very wise, the man asked a question that he had wondered about throughout his life.

He said, “Saint Peter, I have been interested in military history for many years. Who was the greatest general of all time?”

Saint Peter quickly responded, “Oh that’s a simple question. It’s that man right over there.”

“You must be mistaken,” responded the man, now very perplexed. “I knew that man on earth, and he was just a common laborer.”

“That’s right my friend,” assured Saint Peter. “He would have been the greatest general of all time, if he had been a general.”

Tom Rath’s formula says that talent times investment equals strength, “the ability to consistently provide near-perfect performance.” And strength is what we desire in our passion for to be and give grace. With the best and deepest part of our heart and soul we want to maximize the love of Christ in gracing the world.

Our talents to invest come from the master, from God. We are designed so our talents might make a difference for the good of all. We are designed to use our strengths for lovingkindness, for justice, for peace and understanding. The meaning of our lives is in serving God and neighbor as we serve ourselves. Again and again Jesus reminds us that we are made to be servants fulfilling the greatest commandment - loivng God with all our heart, mind, soul and strength and loving our neighbor as love ourselves.

More than money is at stake in today’s parable. We have been gifted (graced) by God with talents. We are to invest those talents for God. And we are to use those talents with servant love so that chart B might be filled with grace.

Amen and Shalom.

1. Tom Rath, Strengths Finder 2.0, Gallup Press, 2007 [↩]

David Orendorff, Psalm 78:1-7 

It is Bible Sunday and we have with pleasure given Bibles to our children. But what have we given them? What is this book? What is its purpose? What is its value?

Much of what follows is academic. I apologize to folks for whom this kind of sermon is lacking. I am going to paint with a very broad brush and my definitions are admittedly arguable. You can argue with me later at the scripture class.

Like all things religious or spiritual, the Bible is controversial. What is called the fundamentalist/modernist controversy over the Bible began in the late 19th century and heated up in the 1940s. Hard line fundamentalists believe the Bible is written by God and is thus the literal word of God dictated to various scribes who were no more than a pre-modern recording device. As such the Bible is inerrant, its history and science are fact since God could never make a mistake. If our world view, our understanding of history and science deviate from the Bible then we must be wrong.

The function of this viewpoint is to argue for the absolute authority of the Bible in life. As the literal and inerrant word of God every sentence and every word in every sentence is the very voice of God speaking directly to us and so we must listen intently and obey completely its directives.
The hard line modernist believes the Bible was written by humans; by those who thought they knew what God was saying and wanted. Therefore it has errors of history, science and even theology. The writers were shaped by current events, childhood, prejudices, and the current states of science and history. They made mistakes.

The hard line modernist thus argues that the Bible has no more authority than any other piece of literature. Everything within the Bible is debatable and individually we must decide what is true and what we should do.

For most of us the Bible is something in between these two extremes. I won’t and can’t speak for what you think of the Bible. I will share my understanding and pray that it is helpful to you. But be warned, how I tell the story of the Bible will betray my opinion. I cannot speak without revealing my bias.

I believe both humans and God wrote the Bible. I believe that it was humans, wonder and wart together, that wrote the words. But I believe that it was God who moved their souls with the desire to write. Thus the Bible is a creation of the relationship between God and humanity, another one of those both/and things. Here is my reasoning for why it has the genius and idiocy of humans in it.

The Bible is not one book but a collection of books gathered over 2000 years. The Hebrew or Old Testament portion has roots in a preliterate oral tradition that may goes 3000-4000 years. The materials of the gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John) also come from oral tradition. It was between 30 and 50 years before they were written down. The letters of the NT are just that, letters.

As you might guess we don’t have any of the original books. What we have is a multitude of variant copies made by scribes. To show the complexity of getting a text to translate I have included in your bulletin a copy of a quick reference guide to the various papyri and manuscripts used to form the New Testament. On one side of the sheet is a list of possible texts with their estimated dates and general content. The earliest possible texts are papyri from around 200 CE. The earliest papyri are not a collection of gospel and letters, but parts of single books (see papyrus 1 for example¹ ). At this early stage we don’t see a collected set of New Testament writings. It is not until the 4th or 5th century that the books are brought together and the Bible as we now know it begins to emerge. Between 1946 and 1957 the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered and many portions of the Hebrew Scriptures are still being rewritten. 

The process of gathering the books together into one book is pretty cloudy and is still going on. The gathering of the Hebrew Scriptures happened mostly in Judaism and started earnestly in the 4th century CE. For the Christian Scriptures a combination of scholars, conferences and popular usage largely determine which books became our Bible. The Catholics, Orthodox and Protestants currently all have somewhat different Bibles. Even today we are continually making revisions in the text of the Bible as we find new documents, archeological evidence, or language shifts are clarified.

On the other side of the a sheet in your bulletin is what would have been today’s gospel lesson (Matthew 25:1-13 - The Parable of the Ten Maidens) in both Greek and English. Notice the footnotes which list the source texts and variant readings. Deciding which reading is the original is an ongoing source of debate among Christians. Some don’t matter but some are significant.

Once we have settled on a text the challenge of translation begins. The Hebrew Scriptures were originally written as a pneumonic tool for the one who was to speak the text aloud. As such it was simply a string of consonants without vowels, punctuation, sentences or paragraphs, to remind the reader of what was in the oral tradition.

Debbie Brown reminded me of one of the more interesting translation debates. If you have seen Michelangelo’s Moses you will notice he has horns on his head. This is from one of the early translations describing Moses coming down the mountain after talking with God. We have since gained a better text and translation and the horns have disappeared.

The New Testament gospels were probably first told and then written in the common language of Aramaic. We have no Aramaic copies of these originals. From the late second century we do have a Syriac translation, the Peshitta, of the Aramaic which is somewhat controversial but very helpful. Everything else we have that tell us the stories of Jesus come to us as translations into Greek. And so when we then render an English translation it is at least two languages away from the original.

Because of this cloudy process of receiving individual texts, the collection of books, deciding on a most original text, the challenges of translation and the unavoidable process of personal interpretation I do not believe that what we hold in our hands is the literal word of God, even if it had originally been so.

All this leads me to believe the Bible we have in our hands has human hands and minds all over it. But it doesn’t mean that God is not in the Bible as well.

Now, why do I believe it is inspired by God? I believe the mistake in fundamentalism is not in the authority it assigns to the Bible but its limited view of how language works. Some language is in fact literal (e.g. - It is raining). Some language is symbolic or metaphorical (e.g. - It is raining in my soul.) Some of the Bible is literal (e.g. much of the Law of Moses, Paul’s greetings to specific people, many historical events) but most of the Bible is metaphorical (prophetic poetry and psalms, wisdom sayings, parables, the meaning of miracles). Even much of what is told as history (David killing Goliath) has meaning and purpose beyond the simple facts (God is with David and guides David’s stone and our stones when we face the enemy). Much of what we would read as the literal language of science (the creation stories in Genesis and John) is not meant to be good science, but is about our relationship with God who is our creator, sustainer and redeemer, and about our relationships with each other.

It is in the symbol and metaphor that God speaks and operates in our lives. When I read and live Psalm 23 my understanding of life is moved toward God’s gift of grace. When I hear Jesus tell about the Good Samaritan or the Lost Son in a parable I think of how I treat the wounded around me and how I receive those who have betrayed and deserted me, and I am changed by the voice of God in the story.

More and more the Bible has great authority for my faith and my life. I have given my life to its study. I very seldom read any book more than once but this one book of books I have read over and over, some passages a hundred times. I am not only a preacher with one sermon; I am like John Wesley, a man of one book. I have learned enough Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek to kind of read it in its original script. I have learned the disciplines of text, redaction, form and narrative criticism to better read and understand. I read word studies and commentaries, history and sociology to broaden my view and deepen my appreciation. And every time I pick up the Bible to read I pray for right understanding.

From this book, vastly more than any other book, God speaks to me. And when I pray both before and after reading the Bible, God’s presence often increases. God speaks to my mind as I wrestle with the earliest of questions beginning in the book of Genesis. God speaks to my heart as I am moved by the love of the prophets and Jesus. God speaks to my hands as I am guided by the Holy Spirit to right (I pray) action. It is from the Bible that I take my directions for life.

As you might guess, there are things in the Bible that I don’t agree with. I long ago decided that if I disagree I had better know why. Not liking what it says is not a good enough reason to disagree. To think or act contrary to the Bible is to rebel against my family and its history and its faith. I use Wesley’s quadrilateral principles looking at scripture with tradition (what have others over time thought) reason (what makes logical sense), and experience (my life). I speak with other Bible lovers by reading and in conversation to seek understanding.

I am concerned that our culture is being less and less literate in the Bible. I am even more concerned that many good church folk don’t know the Bible, its history or its messages. Without knowing the Bible we do not know our roots, our triumphs or defeats, and we are a shallow people of current whimsy. Without knowing the Bible we are easy prey for religious shysters of all kinds and fall into the same old traps known to Abraham and Sarah but a surprise to us. It is like not ever looking at the family album and hearing the family stories that shape us.

We try at Bear Creek to help folks be Biblically literate. The Upper Room and other daily devotionals encourage a daily reading and praying of scripture. We offer small groups which can choose Bible study. We have, in the past, offered a remarkable class on the Bible called Discipleship and I pray we offer this again. Every Sunday Robert does a very good job of researching the scripture of the morning in the scripture discussion group. I know some of you belong to Bible study groups with friends or in your neighborhood. The Cokesbury store on 123th has all kind of wonderful resources to aid the Bible student. If you are not studying the Bible it is because you have chosen not to do so, I pray you will change your mind.

It is Bible Sunday and today we have given our children a most precious and powerful gift for life, if they choose to use it. And they are most likely to use it if we do, if we make the Bible authoritative and meaningful for our life.

Shalom and amen.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papyrus_1 [↩]

David Orendorff, Matthew 23:1-12

It was early one morning when the Pastor heard a noise outside his door. When he opened it, he found a donkey standing outside, which immediately fell over dead. Not exactly knowing what to do about the situation, he called the local sheriff and told him about what was laying before him.

The sheriff couldn’t resist jabbing at the Minister and said, “Pastor, I thought the first duty of the Minister was to bury the dead.”

Without hesitation, the Pastor said, “No the first duty of the Minister is to notify the next of kin.”

Sometimes we need more information before we understand what God would have us be about. Or do we?

Today’s scripture opens with shorthand remarks that would make sense to Jews but almost no sense Christians in the twenty-first century. In the first verse Jesus refers to the Pharisees who sit on “Moses seat.” Who are these Pharisees? And what is Moses seat?

The Pharisees are a sub-division of Judaism, just as Methodism is a sub-division of Christianity. No faith community is exempt from the human tendency to fragment; not Buddhism, Islam, Taoism or even new comers like the Ba Há’í or Mormonism. And the older a religion gets the more diverse it becomes until Hinduism and Judaism, certainly the oldest religions of all, are so diffuse that it is often hard to tell various adherents come from the same root. United Methodists, Al Qaeda, Hamas, the Church of God and Hasidic Judaism all have the same root in Abraham but emphasize different parts of the tradition.

The Pharisees emphasized keeping the law of Yahweh. They reasoned God would be pleased and bless the people if they kept the rules. They found the basis for the law in the first five books of the Bible, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Deuteronomy and Numbers. Tradition says they were written by Moses and hence are the “seat of Moses.”

So Moses’ seat is not a chair Moses owned. It is inherited responsibility of teaching the people of God the law of God as it first was given to Moses in the ten commandments and then to the family of Levi and all the generations of priests following.

There is nothing wrong with learning and teaching God’s law. It would do all of us and the world well to heed what Moses taught. What has gone wrong is that many of the Pharisees taught the law but did not keep the law. They talked the talk but did not walk the walk.

And further, some of the Pharisees evidently put on religious garb for its appearance, for looking good. They made their phylacteries big so they could be seen by everyone. Phylacteries are boxes holding scripture which are worn above the forehead and on the upper left arm.¹ They are worn to remind the wearer to bind the law of God to both the mind (forehead) and the body (arm). But the Pharisees wore them not to be reminded of God’s law, but for show.

Jesus also mentions the wearing of fringes. Fringes worn on the four corners of a garment were to remind the wearer to obey the commandments of God.² But like the phylacteries, many of the Pharisees turned what was to be a matter of personal holiness into a public show. They wore long fringes not to remind themselves of God, but to display themselves as very religious.

Jesus points out their hypocrisy. For though they pretend to desire above all to be faithful to God they are in fact most concerned with having seats of honor at banquets, with being greeted with respect and deference in the marketplaces, and with having people call them the reverent titles of “rabbi,” “father” or instructor/guide.

In truth, none of us escape Jesus’ clear vision of hypocrisy in our attempts to look good and claim respectability. Since we are ending our annual financial stewardship campaign today I found a couple of examples of how strong this hypocrisy can be in our faith lives.

In seventh grade I attended a Methodist church in which every family’s name and pledge was listed on a poster board in the entry way to the sanctuary. Everyone who entered could see who had pledged and how much. And if this wasn’t pressure enough to look good, every three months the list was again posted in the entry indicating how well each families was (or wasn’t) doing in meeting their pledges. Giving, as you might imagine, went up dramatically that year.

In looking at ways to promote stewardship a friend told me of a study indicating that when the offering was taken directly by an usher, even if it is a plate on the end of a pole, the offering went up 10%. It seems that looking good to the usher is a great motivation for giving.

It seems it is all too easy to motivate us by shaming us into being good. Sometimes we are no better than a bunch of Pharisees with their big phylacteries and long fringes.

But Jesus asks more of us than for us to look good, he wants us to be good. Specifically he says, “The greatest among you will be your servant.” This is so contrary to the honor code of his time which placed the servant someplace around the donkey at the front door. And it is contrary to the ways we culturally seek honor and respectability. And to simply underline this inversion of value he says, “All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and all who humble themselves will be exalted.” Jesus calls us to listen and to practice, to the best of God’s grace given to us, the teachings of Moses.

And should if it all seem too confusing with too many rules, then remember the one great commandment which Jesus, our true Rabbi, taught us, “‘Love God with all your heart, soul and mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”³

Jesus reminds us of the prophet Micah who spoke for God saying:

And what does the Lord require of you
But to do justice, and to love kindness,
And to walk humbly with your God?”⁴

If, for some foolish reason, should we again put on our oversized phylacteries and long fringe, should we forget to walk humbly with our God, then our God will remind us. Sometime back mom gave me this article from the Powell, Wyoming Tribune in which my father (who also tells this story on himself) was reminded to be humble:

The crusty guy in workman’s clothes came into the rear of the Northwest College cafeteria snack bar area one morning last week. He was looking for directions.

It was the first day of the health fair for participants in the Wyoming Retirement System. He paused to ask the snack bar attendant if she knew where on campus the blood draw was being conducted. She replied politely that she didn’t know.

A young man, newly hired as recruiter for the college, was waiting in line and overheard. He volunteered the needed information.

“It’s in the Orendorff Building,” he said. “Do you know where that is?”

Without a word, the gentleman shuffled off, musing to no one in particular: “How soon they forget.”

It was SinClair Orendorff, for whom the NWC administration building was named when he retired three presidents and 13 years ago, after 22 distinguished years at the helm.”⁵

When I forget to be humble, and I do because there is a part of me that is insecure and wants to look good and be praised, God has a way, as with my father, of reminding me.

We are never too old or too far gone to relearn that it is the humble serving of God and each other that God desires. Our Christ like way of life is to never be about what others think of us but always about our relationship with God. Whatever particular package of talents and wealth is our, God asks that we use them for justice and compassion. It is in humble service, that we find the life we want and were meant to have.

Kent Keith gives the rules in such a way that Mother Teresa hung them on her wall:

• People are often unreasonable, illogical,
  and self-centered:
  forgive them anyway.
• If you are kind, people may accuse you
  of selfish, ulterior motives;
  be kind anyway.
• If you are successful, you will win some
  false friends and some true enemies;
  succeed anyway.
• If you are honest and frank,
  people may cheat you;
  be honest anyway.
• What you spend years building,
  someone could destroy overnight;
  build anyway.
• If you find serenity and happiness,
  they may be jealous;
  be happy anyway.
• The good you do today,
  people will often forget tomorrow;
  do good anyway.
• Give the world the best you have,
  and it may never be enough;
  give the world the best you’ve got anyway.
• You see, in the final analysis,
  it is between you and God;
  it was never between you and them anyway.⁶

Shalom and Amen.

1. Exodus 13:9, 17; Deuteronomy 6:8; 11:18 [↩]
2. Deuteronomy 22:12; Numbers 15:38-40 [↩]
3. Matthew 22:37-40; Mark 12:28-34; Luke 10:25-28 [↩]
4. Micah 6:6-8 [↩]
5. Editor Dave Bonner, Powell Tribune, October 30, 2001 [↩]
6. Kent Keith, fromDo It Anyway: The Handbook for Finding Personal Meaning and Deep Happiness in a Crazy World. [↩]