Refuge.

Psalm 16.

I.

            This Psalm is a kind of confession of faith expressing a profound trust in God.  It begins with an affirmation of God’s  protection; the worshiper takes refuge, finds shelter, flees for protection in God.  We have a classic hymn that refers to God as “Our shelter from the stormy blast and our eternal home.”

            The image here is one of shielding yourself against a hurricane wind… we know what that’s like.  It is retreating to a place of safety where the powers of evil cannot harm you.  When a tornado comes the family runs to the basement; when it is an earthquake you get out of the house, or you stand in a doorframe, I think.  When it is war, you take refuge with the other refugees, and move to someplace far away from the fighting.    

            Where do we take refuge?  Where do we find shelter when the challenges and assaults of life come at us?  We all take refuge in something.  Often it is determined by our personality.  Some take refuge in anger and throw a temper tantrum; that’s the way they deal with the stress of existence.  Others withdraw into themselves, sometimes even disappearing into literal refuges: a safe place.  Some run away.  Others may deal with stress by eating, or drinking, or self-medicating in some other fashion. 

            We may exercise; we may be consumed by sports on TV; we may go into our room and play really loud music to kind of create an aural barrier against whatever is assaulting us.  We may get prescriptions for tranquilizers or anti-depressants.

            Life has always been stressful.  It is particularly stressful today.  We live in a time of tremendous, cataclysmic, tectonic change.  The economy, the climate, the family, the church, our nation, even our history… these are all changing.  Much of the world today is nearly unrecognizable compared with what some of us knew 50 years ago.  My 18 year-old son’s life is almost unintelligibly different from when I was 18.

            I am not saying this is always necessarily a bad thing.  A lot has improved!  People don’t get lynched anymore.  We’re not breathing DDT.  Women have exponentially more opportunities.  We have cable!  We can watch movies on our phones!

            But change itself is often disorienting and uncomfortable.  It is actually painful and it makes us insecure because we don’t have any reliable sense of what tomorrow will bring.

            Sometimes I would like to attach myself to “bedrock,” something solid and weighty that won’t move, that won’t shift with the wind or get swept away by the tide, something even a tsunami won’t budge.  But even that image – bedrock – is somewhat unsteady because, as a geologist will tell you, even bedrock, the crust of the planet itself, is always moving.

            Jesus tells us to build our houses on the solid rock of his teachings; and yet we see that even his teachings and the way we interpret them seem to be as changing and malleable as, well, rock. 

II.

            So what does it mean to “take refuge” in God?  Especially since we know that being a Christian and coming to church and praying doesn’t exempt you from any of these changes.  How is it a “refuge” then?  Where’s the “shelter from the stormy blast”? 

            The Psalm says, “I say to the Lord, ‘You are my Lord;
   

I have no good apart from you.’”  The Lord is our refuge.  The Lord.  God.  Nothing else.    

            Sometimes we automatically make unwarranted assumptions.  The Psalm does not say that God makes the storm go away.  God provides a refuge in the storm, shelter from the storm, protection against the storm.  We do not get to decide how God is going to be that refuge.  If we think that “refuge” means “preserving things just as they were,” well, then I’m not quite sure what god you have in mind.  For if we know anything from Scripture, we know that God does not preserve things just as they were.

            If that were God’s agenda, the Israelites would still be in Egypt.  The universe would still be nothing but the endless waters of chaos.  The Messiah would never have come.

            So we have to be deeply thankful that God is always entering our world to change, to transform, and to renew.  And we have to realize that what God is doing is good.  In truth, it is our only good, as the Psalm says.  When we make the living God our refuge, we are affirming that we are only safe, secure, and protected when we are in tune with and riding along upon the changes God is bringing into the world.  Indeed, we have to become ourselves the change God is bringing into the world.

            Part of this change is a rejection of popular leaders who led the people after gods other than the Lord, and towards goals other than the establishment of God’s holy regime of equality and justice.  These are the forces that want to keep things as they are, because they are benefitting from the present order of injustice and exploitation. 

            The Psalm rejects their blood offerings, which so often require the blood of the people, at least figuratively, and too often literally.  They multiply the sorrows of others; therefore will their sorrows also be multiplied, in the end.  They demand that we make them famous by talking about them… but the Psalm refuses to give them the attention they crave. 

            They need us to maintain their power; when we cease naming them they become irrelevant and powerless.  When we do not let their names and images pervade our perceptions, they lose their hold over us.  They are a distraction from our real work, which is following the Lord of love and living in God’s holy, forward- looking, change-bringing, transforming emancipated community.

III.

            The Psalm proclaims, against these principalities and powers, that: “The Lord is my chosen portion and my cup.”  Choosing the follow the Lord is not an arbitrary decision.  It is not a matter of mere taste or sensibility.  It is not just an intellectual, or aesthetic decision.  Neither is it simply adherence to the traditions of our ancestors.  We don’t choose our family… but we do have to choose which god we will follow.

            That is, in choosing a god, we choose which world we will live in.  Will we live in the world that is shaped by these other powers, invented by human beings, who serve to reinforce regimes of inequality, bondage, injustice, exploitation, and violence?  Will we adhere to the values and practices and habits and relationships defined by Pharaoh, under whom the people were slaves in Egypt?  Will we continue to have the many work to enrich the few? 

            Or will we participate in the values, practices, habits, and relationships of the Promised Land?  That’s what the Psalm means when it talks about “boundary lines.”  When the land was portioned out under Joshua, each tribe and each clan was given a fair share.  These were gifts from God; they were not doled out by a king to his favorites.  Neither did the people have to work for and earn their share in the open market.  They each got a share, liberated from the grip of petty Canaanite tyrants, just for being a part of the people of God. 

            God’s intention is that the boundaries, that is to say, the portion given to each family or nation of the earth, be fair in the sense of adequate to support all the people living there.  This is God’s will, the desire of the Creator: that we all have a goodly heritage, a delightful inheritance.  The other gods were concocted and propped up to support hierarchies and social classes, with a few rich at the top, and everyone else down below.  In the Lord’s plan, resources are distributed equitably.  And when the distribution ever gets out of balance, they were to stop and redistribute it, according to Leviticus 25.

            The planet as God made it can sustain all of us in abundance.  What it can’t sustain is a small minority hoarding most of the resources, leaving the rest to subsist on what’s left, or starve.  Taking refuge in the Lord means relying on God’s will, as we see it in Jesus Christ, that everyone have what they need.  Those will little are given more; those with too much are strongly advised to share what they have taken.

  

IV.

            To take refuge in the Lord, therefore, means to participate in changes like these.  It means to be an agent of the transformation the God is bringing to life.  It means choosing to live in God’s world, God’s Kingdom, God’s commonwealth of equality, and rejecting the inequalities and injustices inherent in the following of other, invented gods, gods who are just mascots for the ones calling the shots.           

            Taking refuge in God means witnessing to God’s revolutionary truth and living in a community where this truth is embodied in practices of sharing, healing, acceptance, joy, and service.  To the rest of the world that looks like too much change too soon.  The world prefers the illusions, fairy tales, and lies it has come to depend on to cope with or avoid uncomfortable change.  The world would rather be sick and secure, than take the risks of transformation.

            But those who love and bless the Lord, the God of love and liberation, find wisdom and knowledge.  We find real security in participating in God’s changes.  When we keep the Lord at the center of our attention, when we rely on the Lord Jesus and put his teachings to work at every opportunity, then, the Psalm says, we “shall not be moved.”

            It means we shall not be diverted from our true direction and orientation.  Our purpose and resolve will not be shaken because we know that what we follow is the true essence and trajectory of the universe.  Justice, liberation, and equality are the nature of things; these values have been embedded into God’s creation from the beginning.

            And if it has been embedded into creation, that means it has been embedded into us, into our bodies, which are parts of creation.  It is interesting the way the Psalm recognizes this by mentioning body parts.  We don’t get it in English because it’s been cleaned up.  But in Hebrew, in verse 7, it literally says, “in the night also my kidneys instruct me.”  English replaces kidneys with heart, because I guess the translators couldn’t imagine being instructed by their kidneys.  (I know there have been times when my kidneys gave me very direct instructions… but that’s probably not what the text means.)

            In verse 9, the word translated “soul” could even mean “liver”!  My point here is to show that for this Psalm discipleship is far from being just a matter having to do with your head, your mind, your intellect, your opinions, what you think.  God is with us in our very guts; God is part of our material makeup; God works through the cells and sinews of our bodies. 

            This is important because the Psalm proceeds to address the central threat and fear of death.  If God animates and works through your physical body, then not even that dimension of us is separated from God in death.  If God’s love reigns in our very organs, we can’t die. 

V.

            This doesn’t mean we physically live forever, of course.  But our mortal death doesn’t separate us from God or from our true selves in God.  We are not given up to Sheol, the vague, shadowy Hebrew realm of the dead, much less a place of condemnation and extinction like hell.  But our death is just another part of our transformation.  It’s another change in God’s plan of renewal.  It brings us closer to the truth, to God, to reality. 

            Our time here on earth is all about life!  God is all about life!  God shows us the path of life, the Psalm says.  In God’s presence there is joy and even pleasure!         

            The Psalm realizes that it is the fear of death that is so powerful in our experience that it drives us to invent false securities.  Fear is how the principalities and powers maintain their hold over us.  Fear of death is what moves us to concoct gods and prop up leaders and do violence to each other, in a vain attempt to stave off death or substitute someone else’s death for our own.  Fear is how empires keep their grip on us.

            The fear of death makes death our master here and now.  But the Lord is the God of life who reveals to us the path of life in Christ Jesus.  And the path of life in this world has to be the path of change.  It has to be the path of transformation.  It has to have to do with the old world perishing while the new one, which is really the original, created world, is being born.

            In our gospel reading Jesus talks about various cataclysms leading up to the fulfillment of time.  But these do not represent the destruction of the earth.  Jesus refers to them as “birth pangs.”  Birth is the coming of new life!  The emergence of new life is the point.

            The reign of death has to be ended.  But that’s just a side effect of a larger, more profound and powerful movement in which God’s new heaven and new earth, which is to say, heaven and earth liberated from the gravitational pull of extinction, emerge.

            The God who is our refuge is the God of that movement from death to life.  When God calls us to be disciples, God calls us to be this movement.  God calls on us to be people who have turned their backs on the empire of death, and who are being reshaped, changed, transformed into participants in God’s kingdom of life.  That is a kingdom characterized by equality, peace, healing, justice, welcoming, compassion, love, and joy.

+++++++ 

Who Owns It?

            The PCUSA General Assembly Permanent Judicial Commission has rendered a ruling on a case originating from the Presbytery of San Francisco, about the terms under which a congregation was, at its request, dismissed from the denomination with its property.  The GAPJC was apparently unhappy that the presbytery took so little account of the value of the congregation’s property, and urged presbyteries to do a better job of assessing the financial impact on the denomination of a church’s departure with its property.  In fact, the decision appears to take issue with the idea that it is the congregation’s property at all, agreeing with the statement that “the church property in question was in fact unequivocally owned by the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).”

            The GAPJC does not repeat this affirmation in its own words in the decision, but they don’t contradict it either.  So, does the PCUSA “own” all the property of local churches? 

            On the one hand, if they do, they are not functioning like any other landlord I ever heard of.  It is the people of the local church, not the landlord/denomination, that pays for everything, from utilities, improvements, and maintenance/repairs, to the salaries of pastor and staff, to the mortgage. 

            On the other hand, I suppose, the congregation is permitted to use the denomination’s property “rent free,” as it were.  The denomination does ask for congregations to support its administration and mission, but this is voluntary. 

            I could understand the logic here if the denomination started out with all the property and then graciously allowed churches to manage it for missional purposes.  But if a congregation has title to some property which it has purchased, and then pays 100% of the expenses in acquiring and keeping up that property, in what sense can a larger body of which that congregation is a constituent part claim to “own” it? 

            (I have interpreted the denomination’s interest in a local church’s property as more like a “lien” than outright ownership.)

            Of course, agreeing to the “Trust Clause” is part of being a Presbyterian Church (USA) congregation.  To some, and apparently the GAPJC is among this group, this is a sign of our connectionalism.  We are not, after all, Congregationalists.  Our congregations are not independent.  We are all part of a larger body, and we express that mutual commitment by voluntarily adopting this language about all property being held “in trust for the denomination.”  It’s like the congregations choose to relinquish some of their own sovereignty for the sake of this witness to our unity.

            Or it’s just a somewhat cynical way for a denomination to bind congregations to it by claiming some right to their property, holding the threat of legal action over their heads.  I’m just saying.

            The church of Jesus Christ is not properly held together by either fear of litigation or a desire to retain real estate.  It is joyful faithfulness to a common mission in discipleship to a common Lord that ought to bind us.  Christianity existed for its first three centuries without owning property at all, and grew like kudzu the whole time.  It was the idea of the Roman Empire that we should worship in large buildings… held, no doubt, in trust for the Empire…. 

            I am not saying the denomination should relinquish all interest in the property of its congregations.  And some kind of due process is beneficial.  There are cases where people have joined unsuspecting churches with the purpose of gaining a majority and voting to take the church out of the denomination, thus acquiring the assets for their own purposes.  We need to protect against such shenanigans.  But that does not require an assertion of ownership on the part of the denomination.  The procedures we are now developing at the presbytery level, based on the understanding that the presbytery has a kind of lien, should suffice.  After all, if we can trust presbyteries to administer ordination standards locally, then why not trust them to make decisions about property locally?    

            We slew one sacred cow of Presbyterianism when we ditched the denominational ordination standards of the old G-6.0106b.  It is time to slay the other one: the “Trust Clause” has to be reimagined so it is clear that the denomination does not “own” the property of local congregations.  Rather, we are bound together in love to advise each other in how best to use our property in witnessing to Jesus Christ.  In the end, that’s who the real owner is!  (Psalm 24:1)

            Either that or Louisville can tell me where to mail my bill for 30 years of mowing “their” lawns and shoveling “their” driveways….

Graduate It!

                  “Faced with an imminent $28.6 million deficit in its healthcare plan, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)’s Board of Pensions unveiled at its Oct. 27 meeting here [in Hilton Head, SC] a new dues structure that for the first time could result in plan members sharing the dues cost of their healthcare coverage.”

                  “Under the proposal, member dues beginning in 2014 will be 19 percent of effective salary. Those mandatory dues would also cover 65 percent of dependent coverage, which would be optional. (Dues for 2013, which include family coverage, are 21 percent.)

                  “A fixed premium/flat dollar amount would be added to cover the remaining 35 percent for dependent coverage. Members may choose from among differing levels of coverage for dependents: member plus partner, member plus child(ren), and member plus family (partner and children) . Dependent coverage would be paid by the employing organization, the plan member or a combination of the two.”

--Presbyterian News Service, November 2, 2012 

            Ok, when did Paul Ryan get on the Board of Pensions?  Because his basic approach, which is that if there is a deficit anywhere it is poor people who should be made to pay it off, is precisely what it sounds like the Board is currently contemplating.

            The dues system itself, because it is “flat” (that is, every church pays the same percentage of a pastor’s Total Effective Salary into the plan), is regressive.  The people and churches who are least able to afford it have to pay the same percentage into the system as churches and pastors who make considerably more money.

            Of course, we are told, the richer churches pay more, which is technically true in terms of actual dollars: eg. 32% of $100,000 is more than 32% of 50,000.  But these are the same kinds of arguments we hear from secular “flat tax” advocates.  A flat tax would be a windfall for the wealthy, as it would hammer everyone else.  To pay 10% of a $25,000 income in taxes would mean having to live on even less: $22,500.  But someone who makes $250,000 a year can pay 10% ($25,000) in taxes and still have $225,000 to squeak by on.

            This is not Jesus’ kind of math.  In Jesus’ way of counting, a poor widow’s single penny is “more” than the larger amounts donated out of the excess of the wealthy (Mark 12:41-44).  It’s not quantitatively more; but it is morally more.

            So the flatness of the Board of Pensions premium was always unfair.  (It was even more unfair when there was a cap, of all things, on premiums, giving high salaries a break.  The point to that is beyond me.)  The proposal to lower the premium will force lower paid members to pick up the slack themselves because their churches won’t be able to afford it.  But ministers making higher salaries will be in a better position to make up the difference, but it is more likely that their rich churches will simply do it for them.

            We already have a growing crisis of compensation inequality in our denomination.  This proposal will only exacerbate it.

            Instead of solving this deficit in the medical side by sticking it to young, poor ministers, especially those with children, we need to preserve and improve the community nature of the plan.  Why not simply graduate the premium.  If you make a higher salary, you should pay a higher percentage than someone making a lower salary.  Ministers making the minimum, especially in small churches, can pay the proposed 19%, and retain full coverage.  But the percentage would increase with a pastor’s salary, so that the top rate might be like 23%.  Thus we will have retained fair benefits, and increased the income to the plan from the people who can most afford it.

            (This would also make up for those years when there was that idiotic cap.)

            Some will not like this.  We will get into ugly arguments about the “viability” of small churches versus large ones, and the need to pay high salaries “to attract the best talent,” or some other such anti-biblical, self-serving, corporate-minded “reasoning.”  Some will threaten to reduce their per capita and/or mission giving, or whatever.

            But to ask young and poor ministers, and those with families, to bear the brunt of making up this deficit is wrong.  If more has to be paid, why not ask those who have more to give more?