State College Presbyterian Church

Worship Schedule
Sundays
Worship: 9am & 11:15am
Sunday School: 10am
Coffee Hour: 10am

Wednesdays
Taize Service: 5pm

Special Worship
Sunday Bulletin

March 17, 2008

Can it be that there is no one among you wise enough to decide between one believer and another, but a believer goes to court against a believer—and before unbelievers at that? (1 Cor 6:5-6).

Sometimes Paul’s advice can be very impractical. In his first letter to the Corinthians, he complains of something one of his parishioners had done. He writes of a man who had started an immoral relationship with his father’s wife. We don’t know if this was his own mother, or if it was a step-mother. In the notes accompanying this verse in the NRSV, the editors have noted that “father’s wife” was “an idiom used to refer to one’s stepmother.” But either way, Paul is incensed that the congregation has countenanced such actions to continue in their midst. He expected “that he who has done this would have been removed from among” the Corinthian congregation (1 Cor 5:2).

An instance like this is easy to judge. Certainly what the man in this instance has done was wrong, at least by any morality currently in fashion in our country today. But such an instance as Paul describes in 1 Corinthians 5 is rare in our churches. I have never run across such an instance in any church I have attended.  However, other conflicts are certain to arise in any congregation where it’s not so easy to determine what’s right and what’s wrong. Obviously, conflicts had already arisen in the early church. As Paul writes earlier in the same letter, the Corinthian congregation had already split into factions: some aligned themselves with the teaching of Paul while others had apparently been more attracted by Apollos (1 Cor 3:4). If these conflicts had already started to separate the body of believers in Corinth, it is to be expected that other conflicts would arise as well.

We have a tendency to think we all believe the same basic things, since we all belong to the same church. Don’t we all recite the Apostles’ Creed in unison each Sunday morning?  Are we not called to be unified in our belief—to be of one mind, as Paul encourages us in Philippians 2? Certainly we have developed to the point where we can understand diversity within unity, but when it comes to a point of law, and we are called upon to judge another of wrongdoing, most of us would be at least a little hesitant to assume we were indeed of one mind. Who are we to judge another member of our congregation, especially in situations where there is no clear scriptural reference to aid us in a decision about another’s actions?  

In many cases, we can certainly answer Paul’s question with a “no.”  In many of the conflicts that arise in modern day life, there are very few in our congregation “wise enough to decide between one believer and another.” Who would envy someone in the position of having to judge between believers in certain cases, unless they had at least the same training in secular law that many of our official judges have today—and in addition, a sound basis in church doctrine and law? And what authority would a judge set up by the church have? Do we simply drive members away each time such a conflict comes up? Won’t they just appeal to a secular judge in these cases—exactly what Paul warned against?  

It’s very difficult to know exactly how to respond to conflicts within the church, when we are very unsure of our own basis for coming to a decision. One of the last things we desire is to become arrogantly self-righteous. Modern life is too complicated for us to have such a sure confidence in our own abilities to judge. But Paul offers a better solution, though one that may be distasteful to many of us.  He writes, “In fact, to have lawsuits at all with one another is already a defeat for you. Why not rather be wronged? Why not rather be defrauded?” (1 Cor 6:7).  That is tough advice to accept. In our litigious society, we can’t imagine merely turning the other cheek like this. But it is advice which Jesus himself offered in his Sermon on the Mount. In both Paul’s and Jesus’s doctrine, it is better to be defrauded than to take another believer to court. But who has enough faith in God’s work in our lives to accept this?

 

March 16, 2008

He allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live, so that they would search for God and perhaps grope for him and find him—though indeed he is not far from each one of us (Acts 17:26-27).

We Americans don’t like limits. We don’t like being told where to live or that we can’t do certain things. It’s part of the notion of freedom that we grow up with.  But as we see in Paul’s speech to the Athenians in Acts 17, those limits may serve an essential purpose in our lives.

To establish the background for this verse, we find Paul in Athens, debating with various philosophers and thinkers about the nature of God. Paul perceived they were religious, based on his observations of the people. They had erected a statue “To an unknown god” just to cover their bases. Paul wanted them to know about the one true Lord, and the direct access to him which Jesus guaranteed us by his death and resurrection.

The God that Paul preaches is a powerful God, setting not only the place where we live, but the time as well.  (And we think we move freely about!) We have each been born into a specific time in our world’s history, and into a specific geographic location. And why? As Paul explains it, for one purpose only—so that we would attempt to find God. Our Lord knows us intimately. As the Psalmist says, “For it was you who formed my inward parts; you knit me together in my mother’s womb” (Psalm 139:13). He knows exactly what circumstances will cause us most efficiently to seek him.

Yet we constantly try to transcend those circumstances. We are not satisfied where we are, and want to see other lands and meet other peoples. Some of us think we were born before or after our time. When limited, we moan and groan, the limit itself seeming to tempt us with enough reason to try to overcome it. 

But those limits have their purpose, as Paul explains. It is exactly the circumstances of our lives that gives rise to a yearning to know God. It’s a wonderful opportunity we have, many of us, to be able to see other countries, and to learn of the customs of other people. But our own home is a blessing.  God has put us in a particular place, and caused us to be born at a particular time, only so we would seek him—grope for him is the word Paul uses—not an easy task! The Lord’s concern is that we do not get lost in this valley of the shadow of death, but that we use every opportunity he has provided us, limited and limiting though it seems, to begin—and stick to—the eternal path that leads most surely back home to him. 

March 3, 2008
You see that a person is justified by works and not by faith alone.  (James 2:24)

James can be a difficult book. One of the main tenets of our faith is that we are saved by faith rather than works.  Most of Paul’s letter to the Romans supports the notion that we are saved by faith, and not by works.  He writes, “For we hold that a person is justified by faith apart from works prescribed by the law” (Rom 3:28).  And yet we can also find the opposite in Paul’s letters.  Earlier in Romans, we read “For it is not the hearers of the law who are righteous in God’s sight, but the doers of the law who will be justified” (Rom 2:13).  And we have the words of Christ himself, who said in his Sermon on the Mount, “For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter, not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the law until all is accomplished” (Matt 5:18).  How are we to deal with this riddle? 

It is not easy to understand just how we are to respond to the law as it has been handed down to us—either in the Old Testament or the much more difficult law in the New Testament.  Most of us hold the Ten Commandments to be the core of our ethical belief system.  But what about all those other laws we read of in books like Leviticus?  The New Testament hardly lets us off the hook.  In their book, Invitation to the New Testament, authors David deSilva and Emerson Powery state that “Jesus actually deepens and extends the application of two of the Ten Commandments, teaching that the righteousness for which God calls extends to speech, attitude, and even how we perceive other people.”  Can we really be held accountable if we merely perceive someone in unflattering terms?  According to the New Testament, we can indeed. 

This is a dilemma that has been presented to the church for centuries, and we can certainly not outline a definitive answer in a short space.  But there are some hints in Scripture that help us understand why James emphasized the law so much, and why even Paul often refers to the importance of obedience to the law.  When some Pharisees approached Jesus regarding laws concerning divorce, they were confused by his answer.  The Pharisees wanted to know if it was legal for a man to divorce his wife for any cause (Matt 19:3).  Jesus answered that it was not.  But then, responded the Pharisees, “Why did Moses command us to give a certificate of dismissal and to divorce her?” (19:7).  Jesus’s answer is illuminating.  It is “because you were so hard-hearted.”  If we truly loved each other as God would have us do, we would not need such laws.  But to the extent that refuse to act out of love for others, such laws will continue to exist to govern our behavior.

This gives us an idea of why writers such as James would focus on the role of the law—our works of righteousness—rather than God’s grace for both our salvation, and for our continuing walk with our Lord.  Consider for a moment James’s audience—the people he is writing to.  What else does he have to say about them?  They favored the rich, giving them the best places while telling the poor to accept a humiliating position “at my feet” (2:2-4).  He complains that some members of his church are willing to kill to get something they want, or to enter into disputes and conflicts because they covet something someone else has (4:2).  They are adulterers (4:4).  They hire employees to work for them, but then withhold their wages (5:4).  This is certainly a hard-hearted bunch in need of some legal correction! 

And we can find the same types of problems in churches Paul wrote to.  “It is reported that there is sexual immorality among you, and of a kind that is not found even among pagans” (2 Cor 5:1).  And apparently others approved of this.  We also learn that they were very litigious, pursuing lawsuits against one another (2 Cor 6:7).  In his letter to the Thessalonians, we read that some of the believers apparently thought their inclusion in the body of Christ was enough to supply all their needs, and had merely become busybodies, doing no work but expecting to be cared for by the other members of the Thessalonian congregation (2 Thess 3:10-12).  Hardly a response of love. 

It must be admitted that none of our churches is perfect.  We do not have to look far to find abuses of power within churches today.  We can also find plenty of acts of wrongdoing.  But we court difficulties when we attempt to see these issues merely in terms of black and white.  We may have our problems, but are we really as bad as the churches James and Paul were writing to?  Would anyone write a letter to our own congregation and accuse us all of being adulterers and murderers, as James did?  How many of us hire others and withhold their wages, as James complained of?  Do we have many members who circulate among us, expecting to be fed, clothed and housed as seems to have been the case in Thessalonia?  The point is that both Paul and James seem to be writing to churches that were just getting off the ground, and whose members were still acting as though God’s love and Christ’s example meant nothing to them.  And we should not be surprised at this.  We have the Scriptures to guide us, but the early churches had no such body of text.  There must have been a few letters that circulated among them, but at the time Paul and James were writing, none of the gospels would have been as widely available as they are now to us.  They had no body of tradition that dictated what Christianity should mean for them.  There were no Sunday Schools to guide their children into an understanding of what Christ meant to the world and to them personally.  Christianity, and any ethics based on Jesus’s words were all quite new.  In the environment of the early church, when quite a few hearts were still hardened toward the message of Christ, it is no wonder that Paul and James had to be so strict with their congregations.

Certainly we cannot relax.  We are surrounded by temptations of all different kinds, and we need to be vigilant lest we take too many steps down a path that would lead us far from the grace and mercy which God intends us to enjoy.  But on the other hand, most of our churches today have come far from the days of the early church.  Our ethical systems have changed a bit, and few of us look at the church or of God’s saving grace as a free ticket to do whatever we want, no matter how degraded and harmful to ourselves and to others.  And perhaps this gives us a hint why James and Paul demanded such strict obedience and concentrated at times on adherence to the ethical works we have all come to expect of our collective congregations.  They were dealing with a slightly different situation than exists in the church today.  This has to be taken into account whenever we attempt to understand the messages the early apostles attempted to spread among their churches.  And even today, as long as we are tempted to act in a way not consistent with God’s perfect love, and until we fully realize God’s infinite grace in every act of our lives, we will occasionally need to refer to the body of law that has developed through the ages in order to keep us from going too far astray. 

December 27, 2007

But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name,
will teach you everything, and remind you of all that I have said to you. (John 14:26)

Imagine what it must have been like to be one of Jesus’s disciples. To actually walk in his physical presence. If they wanted to know something, all they had to do was ask him, and he would give them an answer. How many times have we prayed, hoping for an answer, to be met only with an impenetrable silence!

But is that really the case? As Jesus was preparing to return to the Father, he spoke of the Holy Spirit which he would send. “But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything, and remind you of all that I have said to you” (John 14:26). If we look closely at the conversations the disciples had with their teacher, we see that Jesus’s remarks were often confusing to them. They often could not understand what he was talking about. In many cases, his answers to them were no clearer than the answers we get to our prayers.

Perhaps we are actually in a better position to understand the things of heaven than the disciples were. From the time that Jesus returned to the Father, and sent the Holy Spirit to us, we are all able to learn directly from the Father. The Spirit reminds us of the things Christ had once said, even though 2000 years later. The Spirit “will teach us everything.” Perhaps it is we who have the advantage over the original twelve when it comes to understanding spiritual things. But how can we hear and understand what Christ would say to us through the Holy Spirit?

When the disciples misunderstood what Christ was saying, it was often because they tried to put his words into their own worldly context. In the same way, we often do not hear the voice of the Holy Spirit because we are trying to understand the things of the Spirit based upon our understanding of the things of this world. As Jesus said to Pilate, “My kingdom is not of this world.” To listen to the voice of the Spirit, we, too, must realize that we are not of this world. We are called out of the world (while yet remaining here) to be members of a Spiritual community, of which Christ is the head. To hear the voice of the Spirit, we must claim this heritage, and put aside the things of this world. We need to be more like Paul, who wrote to the Philippians, “I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ” (Phil 3:8-9).