AU United Methodist Community

Rev. Mark Schaefer
Kay Spiritual Life Center
February 6, 2005
Job 17-21; Matthew 17:1-9

Job 7 17 What are human beings, that you make so much of them, that you set your mind on them, 18 visit them every morning, test them every moment? 19 Will you not look away from me for a while, let me alone until I swallow my spittle? 20 If I sin, what do I do to you, you watcher of humanity? Why have you made me your target? Why have I become a burden to you? 21 Why do you not pardon my transgression and take away my iniquity? For now I shall lie in the earth; you will seek me, but I shall not be.”

Matthew 17 1 ¶ Six days later, Jesus took with him Peter and James and his brother John and led them up a high mountain, by themselves. 2 And he was transfigured before them, and his face shone like the sun, and his clothes became dazzling white. 3 Suddenly there appeared to them Moses and Elijah, talking with him. 4 Then Peter said to Jesus, “Lord, it is good for us to be here; if you wish, I will make three dwellings here, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.” 5 While he was still speaking, suddenly a bright cloud overshadowed them, and from the cloud a voice said, “This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased; listen to him!” 6 When the disciples heard this, they fell to the ground and were overcome by fear. 7 But Jesus came and touched them, saying, “Get up and do not be afraid.” 8 And when they looked up, they saw no one except Jesus himself alone.
9 ¶ As they were coming down the mountain, Jesus ordered them, “Tell no one about the vision until after the Son of Man has been raised from the dead.”

Questions were submitted anonymously via e-mail or note card and read by a designated reader during services. The chaplain had to answer the questions without having seen them before. Remarks in brackets are editorial comments that did not occur during the service, but serve to supplement or correct things said in the original answer.

This is something of an annual tradition–our service wherein we answer your questions of faith. But as I have said before, “Faith Questions” is not only the name of the kinds of questions we receive, but is also a statement in and of itself: faith questions. Job asks questions of God. Peter asks questions to try to gain understanding of what he is experiencing. All of us here have questions of faith, we never are wrong to ask them. They are indeed part of a living and vibrant faith. Any faith that can’t stand up to a few questions is no faith worth believing in the first place. So out of recognition that ours is a faith that is free to question and open to questions, we have this service tonight…

Q: What is the background reason for the Methodist church accepting the doctrine of free will, versus that of predestination (e.g., Calvinism)

We came out of the Anglican Church (in America, the Episcopal Church) which itself came out of the Roman Catholic Church directly. Henry VIII broke away from the Roman Catholic Church largely for political reasons, not so much theological ones. After he did that, the Anglican Church was influenced by Reformation theologians from the continent, Lutheran and Calvinist alike. But Reformed Theology (that is, Calvinism) never took hold quite the way it did in the north, in Scotland, where Presbyterianism predominated. John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, was an Anglican priest, and followed in that line. And so, the Methodists have never rejected free will, never rejected the idea that grace was something you could choose to reject if you wanted to. Wesley believed that saving grace was made available to everyone, not just a limited set of people, but that we had the ability to accept or reject that grace. Like anything else, our theology owes itself to historical circumstance–our geneology–as to why Methodists have that belief and not another.

Q: What is Kingdomtide, and why is it a generally unique feature of the United Methodist Church?

Kingdomtide is that time prior to Advent when we celebrate the coming of the Kingdom and celebrate Christ’s kingship. [It ends with the last Sunday of the Christian year: Christ the King Sunday]. I don’t believe it’s specifically a Methodist thing, perhaps the Episcopal church observes it as well. It is a subdivision of one of the times of the Christian year.

There are two main seasons of the year: Christmas and Easter. Each has a prepatory season and each of them has a following season. Christmas is preceded by Advent and followed by Epiphany. Easter is preceded by Lent and is followed by Pentecost. Those six divisions of the year, generally account for the entire Church year. Kingdomtide is at the end of Pentecost and is a subset of that Church season. The significance of all this is that we are members of a religion that is tied in with the seasons of the year, that is connected to the flow of time and of history. We experience our faith in that way.

[Additional information from Laurence H. Stookey's Calendar: Christ's Time for the Church: "The Methodist Church in the Book of Worship of 1945 designated the last Sunday of August as the "Festival of Christ the King," a day which inaugurated "Kingdomtide," a season stretching to the beginning of Advent; this Sunday was given its distinctive color (white) in contrast to the red Sundays after Pentecost and the green Sundays of the balance of Kingdomtide. However, the later liturgical books of The Methodists Church and its successor, The United Methodist Church, retained "Kingdomtide" without an inaugural Sunday appointed."]

Q: What advice do you have for those of us who are searching for our calling, our life’s work?

This is something that doesn’t always get worked out that quickly. For some of us, you think you’ve found your calling, and then five years later, you discover you’ve got another one. All I can say, for those of us looking for a calling inside the church–or even outside the church–we understand that we’re not individuals apart from one another. And generally, the things to which we are called will be affirmed by other people. If we have gifts and graces that we have to bear, we are feeling called toward something, generally other people will have recognized that too, and others will affirm a decision or a choice. That’s not to say that you need to be beholdent to what other people think about your calling. but if you’re struggling with something–as I did very, very seriously when I felt the call to ministry–others can often provide insight. What I found was that I would talk with my friends, hoping they would talk me out of it. I’d say “people aretrying to talk me into going to seminary”, and I’d hope that they’d say “That’s so stupid.” And instead, they all said, “That’s what you should do.”

So for me, I know that I experienced a good deal of my calling through the affirmation of others. Of people who were able to recognize something and say that it was in accord with what I had to offer. For each of us, though, it’s a very personal thing. And if we’re seeking to discern any kind of calling, either within the church or without, you have to listen strongly to what your heart is telling you. You have to listen to the voices around you. I think God speaks to us all the time, through our friends, our communities, our churches. We can discern the will of God and the words of God by listening carefully, both on the inside and the outside.

Q: According to Methodist theology, what happens when one dies? Are the only options heaven and hell? If so, how is it determined where one goes?

I’ll take the last part first. God determines that, and we don’t. Nor do we know how God determines it. God is free to save whom God will.

As far as United Methodist theology, we are part of the broad stream of orthodox thought on this one. Interestingly, the orthodox position is not necessarily the same as the position encountered most commonly in popular theology. Most people would say that the choice is between heaven or hell. Traditionally, the church has taught that when we die, we die and in the last day we are all raised in the Resurrection of the Dead to new life, and that’s something that happens here, as opposed to some spiritual plane somewhere else. [See, e.g., John 11:23-24; 1 Thessalonians 4:14-16] So, what we Methodists believe is consonant with the church’s tradition, that, however it is–by Resurrection of the Dead or by a spiritual afterlife in Heaven–there is the promise of eternal life that awaits us after death. This is not the end of the story, what we experience here. This is not irrelevant–our lives here. Some people view life as a dress rehearsal and it’s really not–this is the real thing. But we are not bound by the limitation of this life.

As far as what the options are, people have interpreted heaven and hell in a variety of ways. People have interpreted hell from everything from the popular idea of a fiery place of eternal torment to another option that I prefer: a condition of annihilation and oblivion. [See, e.g., Revelation 20:13-15]. The righteous are raised to new life in the Resurrection, the wicked remain dead. I think a lot of people have a version of hell based on where they’d like to see other people go, so they imagine for them the worst possible destination.

Ultimately our fate is in God’s hands and the message that we proclaim is that if we trust in God and believe in God’s saving grace, then we have a share in the world to come, a share in life beyond this life. And that is a liberating message. We’re not meant to worry about these things. We’re ment to accept that God loves us and that God reconciles Godself to us through the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. And then we can get on to the hard work of being a Christian and worry a little less about what happens to us when that work is at long last completed.

Q: What does the Bible have to say about capital punishment?

The Bible has a lot to say about capital punishment. It tells you how to kill them, when, what crimes are capital crimes. There are instances of capital punishment in the Bible. How does that inform our Christian understanding of capital punishment is a different question. There are kinds of things that are permissible in scripture that we don’t do any more. Marriages within the family, [animal sacrifice]. We also don’t punish people for various crimes and transgressions either: wearing clothing of mixed fabric, [the death penalty for a truculent child]. A lot of our attitude about capital punishment in the Christian tradition comes to us through Jesus’ own example in scripture. Particulary in the story about the woman caught in the act of adultery. He does not come out and say, “The Torah was wrong when it told you to stone an adulteress to death.” What he says is, “Let the one among you who is without sin, cast the first stone.” He forces us to reinterpret something that is allowed through the lens of what ought to be. That is, he is forcing us to see ourselves in the place of the woman caught and ask ourselves whether we could stand up to that kind of judgment.

Christians have come to look at capital punishment as something that is not in harmony with the Gospel. The United Methodist Church is opposed to the death penalty and other churches are also. Even in the Jewish tradition, the rabbis so interpreted the rules for the death penalty, that it became a logical impossibility. The requirements for witnesses, testimony, and so on, were so strict that it was almost impossible to execute someone. They could still point to the law and say that they had not changed the commands of Torah, but that it became far less likely. The stated opinion was that any sanhedrin–any Jewish court–that executed one person in 100 years would be viewed as oppressive and tyrannical. That was the way that they understood a tradition–which we share–that God is a God of love and mercy and forgiveness. It is a reflection of the fact that we do not sit in judgment of life and death–only God does.

Q: Why do United Methodists have communion only once a month?

You know, I thought I might get this question. In other churches, they have communion every single time. If you went to Catholic or Episcopal services, they have communion as part of every service. Other churches, what are called “low churches”, have communion maybe once a quarter, or maybe only twice a year. I think that it is the result of history. Mr. Wesley was an Anglican priest and believed that Methodists should take the Lord’s Supper often. Methodists in the Methodist Societies (as they were then called) in England, were expected to participate in the class meetings and in the prayer meetings, but then were expected to go down to the Anglican Church down the road for communion.

When Methodism began to grow in America and became a frontier religion, the ordained ministers were circuit riders who might only show up in your church every six weeks or so. They were the only ones authorized to perform the sacraments, unlike the lay leaders and lay preachers who would lead the congregation the other weeks. Then it likely became a question of possibility–you could only take communion once a month or so. That probably quickly achieved the status of tradition. In our community here, we offer communion every week at the healing service. We still follow the tradition of the majority of United Methodist churches by having communion in Sunday worship on the first Sunday of the month. I don’t know that there’s any hard and fast rule about that–if we here all decided to have communion every week, we could certainly do that.

Q: Is the use of the drug marijuana from time to time (once a week) to relieve stressful situations without getting “really stoned” seen as a sin? If I know that I do not have a “problem” and it does not affect my schedule, is it seen as a sin in God’s eyes? Maybe only he has the answer to this, but I am asking it in earnest, and I am curious about your opinion.

I can only give my opinion on this, which is that anything which can detract from a relationship with God can be a sin. Anything. Anything can become an idol for us–that can be things that are legal and things that are illegal. Things like television, a relationship with someone–sex is certainly quite an idol for us in this culture–money, a job. I don’t know if marijuana itself can be seen as sinful–it’s illegal, but that’s often a different question.

What I think can be sinful is if you are abusing your own body. This is a God given temple. The reason we proclaim the Resurrection of the Dead and the Incarnation, is that we believe that bodily existence is important and the body is important. I don’t have an answer as to whether taking of marijuana is or is not a sin. Anything taken to excess–this individual states that they are not taking it to excess–can be sinful. There are things that might be immoral or problematic for some people, that aren’t for others. I am not going to say that in every instance someone smoking pot is a sin. We tolerate other drugs in our culture that we would not consider ‘sins’. We tolerate alcohol and tobacco. We tolerate all these new pharmaceuticals that we see advertised perpetually on television. We’re a very drugged up culture.

To the extent that such drugs can detract from our relationship with God and one another, they can become idolatrous and sinful. I think like everything, it’s all in the process–in what we do with it. God has given us a creation that is to be enjoyed. That can still be abused and misused, certainly, and that’s where sin comes in. But I don’t know that it’s in the individual act itself until it becomes an abuse of our own well-being, the well-being of others, or of our relationships with God and one another.

Q: Does President Bush need to pray for forgiveness for killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqis?

As tempted as I am, I am not going to stand in judgment of the President [a fellow United Methodist]. It’s not my place. What I would say, though, is that those of us who live in the world’s most powerful nation ought to be stricken with a sense of humility every day. Unlike other nations in the world, we actually have a voice in how this nation is run. We actually have a voice in what shape our nation takes. In many ways, we are all collectively responsible for our nation–there are few countries where you can hold the populace of the nation responsible for the actions of its government the way you can for us.

And so, I think that as a nation we ought to be more penitent about that. I can’t lay that all at the feet of President Bush. He couldn’t do this thing alone without help. If he just showed up in the White House with an idea to start a war, he couldn’t do it on his own. But for Congress, but for the military, but for us, it would no be possible. I am not going to single him out any more than I am going to single myself out for that. I do know that as a great and powerful nation, we are responsible for a lot as a people. Part of our problem in this country is that we have stopped seeing ourselves as a people, and have started seeing each other as differently colored states. Perhaps if we got back to viewing our problems and responsibilities collectively, we’d be closer to solving a lot of our other problems too.

Q: As a minister, are you allowed to express opinions to your congregation that are different than those of The United Methodist Church as a whole?

Yes, I am. But I have to be very clear that I express what the church’s opinion is first. I can tell you that I disagree with the Church’s opinion, but I have to tell you what that opinion is and explain how the church got there, and then explain how I got to my opinion. I can’t use this pulpit for myself–to use it to tell you things that occurred to Mark on the way over here. It’s tempting, don’t get me wrong. I am not sent here by my Bishop who hold me accountable to preach the Gospel of Mark–well, you know what I mean. I am here to teach the message of the church. And if I in good conscience disagree with that, I have an obligation to say that I disagree, but to explain what the position of the church is, too.

Q: Does God have any control over our actions? How about control over the weather? If there is a devil or evil, does it have control?

This is actually next week’s sermon, but let me give you a sneak preview. Having control and exercising control are two different things. If you’ve ever been in a relationship with someone you really, really loved, you had no control in that relationship. You let go. You open your arms and you give them the power to hurt you. You hope they don’t, but you make yourself vulnerable to their choosing to accept or reject you. God is love in its perfect form. That love can only exist when you give up control. If God were to control each of us, God would not be inviting us into relationship–that’s just SimCity or some kind of puppet show. We are free. God does not control us. God does not control the weather, God set things in motion and the consequences of our choices–and our choices themselves become where we encounter God. I am not one of those who believes that God is pulling strings or that God is hurling tsunamis as people who deserve them. I believe that in order to encounter us in love, God has relinquished control–that doesn’t mean authority, sovereignty, or the right to control–but that God is consciously holding back from making us do the right thing, and waiting for us to do it. And with some degree of heartbreak, I think, as a result.

Q: Why was Job tormented? Did it actually happen or was it just a fictional story?

We don’t know a lot about the Book of Job. We don’t know how old it is. Job and his friends are not Israelites, their names are not Hebrew names so we don’t know where the story comes from, or how old it might be. Whether it’s myth, or mythico-historical.

Even in the story, we don’t know why Job was tormented except as part of a wager between God and The Satan. The whole story of Job is meant to contradict the common belief at the time that good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people. It was a Biblical notion that we encounter in what is called ‘wisdom literature’–the kind of thing found in places like Proverbs and other books of the Bible. Job is a counter-argument to that belief that says, no, it doesn’t always work that way and we won’t always know why. God answers Job out of the whirlwind but leaves us with as many questions.

We don’t ultimately know why Job suffers. We don’t know why anyone suffers. I don’t know that it’s our place to know ultimately. I think our place is to find out how to respond to that suffering. We can’t know why Job suffered, why the hundreds of thousands in Southeast Asia suffer. All we can know is what we’re going to do about it. We’re going to show what love compassion and concern is.

Q: What is God’s position on skipping church worship to watch the Super Bowl?

As much as I would like to think so–especially since the Red Sox won this year–I don’t think God cares very much about sporting events. Again, this comes back to the other question–acts are not wrong in and of themselves, they are wrong in how they affect our relationship with God and with one another. I don’t know that everyone who has skipped here today, hasn’t gone to church this morning. I don’t know that they haven’t spent meaningful time with God today, or hasn’t done meaningful relationship work with another human being. I am not sure it’s as simple a case as picking church versus picking the Super Bowl.

You who are here have made that choice–you know what you were weighing to be here or to not be here. Those are the choices we all make. God wants us to be able to choose and it’s more about how we choose sometimes than what we choose. I suppose I’m punting on that question–appropriately enough–but that’s as close as I can get.